The Ten Thousand

by Doug Felton

  The crowd in the coffee shop stirred the news. “He’s an entertainer,” someone said. “What does he know about crisis management or government?”

  “More than Queen Raisa,” another patron countered. “He has good business sense. You can’t succeed like he has without it, even as an entertainer. What’d Raisa ever do except get picked for the job by a psychopath?”

  That should have hurt, but it didn’t. Maybe because Raisa knew it was true, or maybe because she had no place left in her heart to hurt.

  Barrymore held up his hands, silencing the reporters who were hurling questions at him like knives. “I know this is unexpected, but Mr. Wellington has proven himself a capable leader in his own industry and is intimately familiar with the issues surrounding the Ten Thousand. And, in recent days he has gained Queen Raisa’s confidence, even helping to save her life in Pittsburgh.

  “The New World Constitution gives the President of the Council sole discretion to name a provisional authority and to define the scope of that authority if the ruling monarch cannot fulfill his or her duties. I am exercising that right today.”

  Barrymore motioned to Zeke, who stepped up to the mic and said, “With a heavy heart, I accept this role today. My greatest hope is that Queen Raisa will be rescued and returned to her rightful place, leading our nation. Nothing would give me more pleasure than to welcome her back to the Palace and step aside. I know Council President Barrymore is doing everything within his power to see that that happens.”

  “Is it just me, or is he having a hard time keeping a smile off his face?” Penly asked. It wasn’t just her. Someone who didn’t know him wouldn’t have noticed his glee, but Raisa could see it. It was the way his eyes darted back and forth as he talked. He was excited, even if his face told another story.

  Zeke continued. “Be that as it may, we have a serious situation with the Ten Thousand. So, let me say this clearly; the New World will not deport the Ten Thousand, nor can they stay at Raven Rock. Holding them like criminals is not just wrong, but will create a dangerous environment, I am afraid. I know how concerned many of you are about how they . . . how we can integrate into society. That’s a hard question, and there are more hard questions, but we must try to come up with answers.” Zeke paused as if searching for the right words. “We must think carefully about how this moment, right now, will shape the legacy of the New World. The founders of America didn’t see how their choices planted seeds of division that haunted the United States for three hundred years. Let us not make the same mistake.”

  Standing there in front of the microphones in a suit and tie, Zeke looked the part of a young, dynamic leader. Even the critics in the crowd gave him his moment.

  He continued. “For just a moment, put yourself in their shoes. They should have been told about their condition months ago, and discreetly. I don’t know why Her Majesty, Queen Raisa, didn’t do that, but I am sure she had her reasons. Regardless, they were told in the most unfair and inhumane way, by being arrested and locked up. We then shipped them to an overcrowded facility and told them to wait. All because some terrorist was calling the shots in our government.”

  “He’s blaming you for not standing up to Cruise,” Josh said.

  “We cannot go back and undo what has been done, so there’s no reason to dwell on it. It’s time for us to move forward with a solution before this crisis becomes a conflict that threatens the peace of the New World.”

  “Oh, crap,” Raisa said.

  “What?” Penly asked.

  “That’s why I am the best choice to address this crisis,” Zeke continued. “I can relate to what they are experiencing and work with the Ten Thousand to bring about a peaceful solution.”

  “That,” Raisa said, pointing to the screen. “I’ve been so stupid. Everything that has happened has been for that; to get him in power. He’s the one who’s backing the Ten Thousand into a corner, hoping that they’ll come out swinging. He needed the crisis, and he needed me out of the way. Kidnapping me helped him ratchet up the pressure on the Ten Thousand and created a vacancy in the Palace.”

  “And once you turn up dead,” Josh said, “he’ll be the natural choice for the council to appoint King of the New World.”

  One reporter called out, “Why did you leave Raven Rock? Aren’t you concerned that the Tom Cruise terrorist will retaliate?”

  Penly snorted a laugh.

  “It is risky, but I cannot ask the Ten Thousand to trust me if I am not willing to take a risk for them. Of course, I would never jeopardize Queen Raisa’s life.” He looked at Barrymore as if he were reluctant to continue. “I didn’t want to share this now, but we have reliable intel that Queen Raisa is no longer in the custody of Tom Cruise. Our New World soldiers are closing in on him and should have some news soon. The whereabouts of the queen are unknown, but we are still looking for her, praying she’s—” he broke it off before finishing, gaining his composure.

  “Is he making this up as he goes?” Penly asked.

  Zeke continued, “I know we are all concerned about the queen, but Council President Barrymore has given me a job to do, a job she would want me to do to the best of my ability. I am here in Pittsburgh to meet with Mayor Reeves and make arrangements for the Ten Thousand to come home. The Mayor and I have had a productive first conversation. We will keep talking to work out the details.” Reporters hurled a flurry of new questions in response to the announcement. “Look,” Zeke said above their voices, “the Ten Thousand will need a place to call their own,” he flashed his signature smile, “and what better place than Pittsburgh.”

  Voices erupted in the coffee shop as the broadcast ended.

  “Better there than here,” one woman said.

  Another asked, “Can he do that? I mean, it’s not like he’s the king or anything.”

  “Not yet,” someone else said.

  “The queen is probably dead, anyway,” a guy in the corner offered as he stirred cream into his cup.

  People sipped their coffee and chatted about Raisa’s fate as her face flushed red. Since when had her life and death become the fodder for such casual speculation? People were talking about her as if she were a character in a movie, evaluating it like theater critics. Raisa listened until she couldn’t take it anymore. She stood and said in a loud voice, “Maybe she’s not dead, and you ought to give a damn about what happens to her. She didn’t ask to be a queen, you know.”

  Faces with quizzical expressions turned toward Raisa as Penly took her by the arm. “And it’s time to go,” she said, leading her out.

  At the Loop station, Raisa sat with her head in her hands. Ten days. In ten days, she’d lost her brother, her husband, and now, maybe her throne. She knew that with Barrymore and Zeke controlling the capital, she’d never find her way back. Raisa wasn’t sure she had the will to do it, even if she could.

  The Loop station was a small building in downtown Baltimore. It was little more than a large room that needed to be renovated, several vendors selling their wares, some chairs, and a couple of bathrooms. It looked like something out of the 2050s, needing a fresh coat of paint and new furniture, and smelled like something Raisa didn’t want to think about. They sat in a corner away from other waiting passengers. The seats were worn, most of the stuffing was gone or just flattened from years of use.

  Josh activated his comm, sending a ping to Kaufman on the other end. After exchanging the predetermined code words, he then listened for several minutes before relaying the information. “He says things at Raven Rock are tense. People are scared. As far as he can tell, most of them are ready to do something.”

  “What changed their minds?” Raisa asked.

  “You name it; your kidnapping, rumors about an impending attack, Zeke’s press conference. Bottom line; they want out. They’ve even voted for someone to lead them.”

  “A Zeke loyalist, I’m sure,” Penly said.

  “Looks that way. When the last Tom Cruise video was posted demanding their deportation, they showed
it over and over again.”

  “This guy is a freaking genius,” Raisa said. “He gets them together where they’ll start thinking as a group, all the while cranking up the pressure to make them desperate, and then practically invites them to Pittsburgh.”

  “And most of them are from that area,” Josh added. “So, it’s an easy place for them to go.”

  “But what happens in Pittsburgh?”

  No one had an answer for Raisa, but she knew Zeke wouldn’t stop there. Pittsburgh was the staging ground for something bigger. Something she had to stop.

  “I need my team,” Raisa said, “My whole team.” She realized that she would never have her whole team again, not without Alexander by her side. But she needed the people she trusted most with her. “Penly, I need you to go to the capital and find Alora, Raven, Deeson, and Spikes and get them to Pittsburgh. Do whatever it takes.”

  “You sure?” Penly asked.

  “Yeah, go.”

  Penly nodded and left to change her ticket.

  “You okay?” Josh asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re all over the place, emotionally; sad, despondent, angry, focused. I need to know if you’ll be okay out there.”

  “You need to know if I’m going to be okay? No, Josh, I’m not. I’ll never be okay again.” Raisa tried to hold his gaze with one of her own. But his hazel eyes were honest and penetrating, more than she could bear at the moment. Turning her attention to the station from their perch in the corner, she added, “I don’t have the luxury of waiting until I’m okay, and neither do you.”

  As she spoke, Raisa noticed a woman watching them from across the room. There was no way she could hear them, but she seemed interested. Too interested. When Raisa looked at her, the woman shifted her eyes.

  “What is it?” Josh asked, glancing over his shoulder.

  “Nothing,” Raisa said. She retrieved a medical mask from the bag she’d brought with her. After the virus, nearly everyone wore them. It wasn’t as common anymore, but not unheard of. She slipped it over her face, further concealing her identity. When she looked up again, the woman had left.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The Loop ride to Pittsburgh was dreary. As an enclosed tube, the passenger cars had no windows. To compensate, the transit system projected images of passing countryside and cityscapes on window-like screens, daytime images for the day, and nighttime for the night. When they worked, the effect was pleasant, but the windows in Raisa’s car weren’t working and probably hadn’t for a long time. Glitching pictures blinked in and out, inciting motion sickness more than tranquility.

  Not unlike my reign, Raisa thought.

  Around her and Josh, passengers buried themselves in books or newsfeeds on their tablets. No one seemed to pay them any attention, which suited Raisa fine. She didn’t see the girl in the station who had been watching her before they left. Even with the haircut and new eye color, Raisa still resembled the queen. Maybe that resemblance drew a curious look from the girl, nothing more. Raisa sighed. It was hard not to get paranoid when you’re hiding in plain sight.

  “My mother died when I was eight,” Josh said, cutting into Raisa’s thoughts.

  “What?”

  “I lost my mother when I was eight,” he repeated.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because it was my fault, so I know what it’s like to feel responsible for someone’s death.”

  He looked hard into Raisa’s eyes, and she felt his empathy. She was responsible for Alexander’s death, and her brother, and her father. It was a heavy burden to bear. “What happened?”

  “When I was eight, my family went to the beach. It was fun. My mom and dad were happy, and I was an eight-year-old kid at the beach. It doesn’t get any better than that. I was too young to go swimming by myself, but my parents let me wade out into the water. They told me not to let the water get above my knees.”

  Josh paused, and Raisa had a sickening feeling she knew where this was going. Her own memories of drowning touched her mind before she pushed them away.

  “I was a kid,” Josh said, “so I just kept inching farther out, waiting to see what they’d do. My mother came out into the water, probably to get me since I wasn’t obeying her. That’s when a wave hit me in the back and pulled me under. It was like I had a board on top of me, pushing me down. I thought I was going to die, but my mom grabbed me, pulled me out of the water, and threw me toward the beach. I coughed up what seemed like a gallon of seawater, and when I stood up and looked out at the ocean, she was gone.”

  Part of Raisa hated Josh for exposing her raw emotions to yet another heartache. But part of her felt connected, the way people do when they experience the same kind of trauma. Raisa wanted to offer something profound or comforting, but all she could say was, “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks. Me too,” Josh said. “She was a good mom.”

  They dropped the conversation after that, and that was okay. Raisa wondered why he’d told her. Josh didn’t look upset, having relived the memory. He seemed to have made peace with his past, so she took him at his word; maybe he had told her so she’d know she wasn’t alone.

  Raisa wanted to let Josh’s words comfort her, but she needed the anger and guilt to keep her focused on the goal. Destroying Zeke Wellington and saving the Ten Thousand. She couldn’t allow the empathy in Josh’s voice to soften her. She closed her eyes and pushed his kindness away. A growing buzz among the passengers helped to distract her. Something had captured their attention.

  Craning her neck to get a glimpse of what the lady next to her was watching, Raisa saw an aerial shot of Raven Rock. Pouring out of the tunnel entrance where the Ten Thousand. Like oil spilling out a tanker, they spread down the side of the mountain, their mass growing by the second. And they weren’t just meandering out, they were running like . . . what? Like an angry mob. Like an advancing army. The headline at the bottom of the screen read, “Heading to Pittsburgh?”

  The quiet pod became a hotbed of speculation and opinions. If the people in the Loop pod were any indicator, the Ten Thousand would not be welcomed in Pittsburgh.

  “Ah, hell no,” one man said, getting “uh-huh” and “that’s right” throughout the pod.

  “We don’t need their kind in our city,” another passenger said. “Why don’t they just go back to where ever they came from?”

  Raisa shook her head at that; most of them came from Pittsburgh. But people didn’t concern themselves with details. Most people knew only what they got in ten-second sound bites and six-word headlines. For the last ten days, the media had fed the public a steady diet of fear about the Ten Thousand. So it was no wonder that they’d react that way. And these were the people who were barely paying attention. Raisa’s real fear was the people following the conspiracy nuts online. They’d frame this as an invasion of Pittsburgh. Raisa thought about Zeke’s plan and wondered if that wasn’t close to the truth.

  Josh had sneaked a peek at the video from the man next to him. He turned to Raisa and said in a low voice, “I guess it’s all going down in Pittsburgh.”

  A half-hour after they took their seats, Raisa and Josh stepped off the Loop in the Pittsburgh station. It was nicer than the station in Baltimore. No surprise there. Pittsburgh was a city with a bad self-image. They often overcompensated to erase the stigma of being ground-zero of the virus that killed nearly sixty-million people. They had no control over what the Loop pods looked like, they were trashy, but they could control what people saw when they got off in Pittsburgh.

  Foliage added color to the two-story station while high-end shops offered everything from fine cigars to jewelry to clothing. Food vendors, tables for sitting and eating, and a beautifully tiled fountain made it a place to hang out with friends. In another life, Raisa could see herself getting lunch here and reading a good book.

  But not then. The gravity of the moment kept her from doing what any normal person w
ould do, enjoying herself. That and the heavy concentration of New World soldiers examining passengers as they made their way through the station. The tension in the air was palpable. At first, Raisa thought it was because the Ten Thousand were heading that way, but a look at the news feed on the station monitors told her she and Josh were the main attraction. They displayed a picture of them from a security camera with the caption, “Wanted in connection with Queen Raisa’s disappearance.”

  Raisa wondered how Zeke had convinced law enforcement to keep their eyes open for her, and now she knew. She’d actually helped him out by changing her appearance. With no ID, how would she prove who she was? And her story was too fantastic to be taken seriously by any run-of-the-mill law enforcement officer. If she got caught, she’d be finished. Zeke would make sure she was never seen again.

  Raisa pulled a cheap cap she’d bought in Baltimore over her brow and put the medical mask over her nose and mouth. It wasn’t much, but hopefully, it was enough to throw off any facial recognition software being run at the station.

  She and Josh ducked their heads, looking for a way out of the station that didn’t take them past the probing eyes of New World soldiers. Instinctively, she took his hand and began angling away from the closest cluster of soldiers.

  There were four main exits leading out of the station onto the streets of downtown Pittsburgh. Thankfully, people crowded the station, moving at a frenetic pace. Raisa and Josh slipped into the flow of human congestion and headed for the exit to their right. The main floor of the station was lower than the street level, so they ascended the steps toward the row of glass exit doors. At the top, New World soldiers scanned the crowd making their way up. They ignored most of the people leaving.