The Revival (6 page)

THERE'S A MOMENT, AFTER THE BRITS
and the little guys have arrived, when I have a bead on him. I'm on my back, but I pull myself up and hold out the pistol. And there, over the gun sight, I see Chapel prying the biscuit from Brainbox's hands.

He looks up and sees me but says nothing—or if he does say anything, it's whirled up in the echoes and screams and reports around us.

And I can't pull the trigger.

Why? Not because I love him. I hate him just as much.

Can it be because I'm still hoping we'll get back together? Pathetic. Maybe if I had time to think rationally, I
would
shoot him. But in a moment, I lose him in the traffic of bodies, and then the chance is gone.

I just lie back down, letting the party go on for a little bit without me. The twins rouse themselves and help Kath back into consciousness. Soldiers search the store. Jeff and Donna sit by Brainbox's body, crying.

Later, when I have gathered up a few shards of my self-respect, I sidle up to Donna.

“It's been like
forever
, girl. How you been?” I say it like we've been on different vacations or something.

Donna laughs. It's a charity laugh. “You know, this and that.” She takes a breath. “Are we gonna talk about Brainbox?”

“Not yet.” She understands. We do this. Put it aside, let it cool down. And speaking of cooling down… “Who's the hot guy?”

“Oh,
him
,” she says. “That's Rab.”

“Hmm.” I look at her face. “How long you been hitting that?”

She stares daggers. She knifes me with her eyes. “Sonofabitch. Don't tell Jefferson.”

“
Girrrl
…” This is some juicy stuff.

“I mean, I'm going to tell him myself. Anyway, that's over. It was a mistake.”

“If
that's
a mistake, I'd love to see you get it right.”

So Donna fills me in on the last few months: imprisonment, transport to England, a new identity, a few months at this fancy-pants university, all the time getting pumped for information by the Brits. It sounds all tragic the way she tells it, but I'm like, I wish
I
coulda been seduced and betrayed if it's like
that
.

I tell her about the trip from the island back to Manhattan, Brainbox building a bomb out of pigeon poop gathered by yours truly, retaking Washington Square from the Uptowners, the Gathering at the UN, and, finally, Chapel.

“I'm really sorry, Petra.”

“I thought he was the one.”

“Maybe there isn't a
one
,” says Donna. “Maybe you get to decide.”

“Yeah, I don't really have much time to date at the moment. And not
everybody
meets a soul mate every two minutes.” I look at Rab, who is looking over at us, trying, I guess, to figure out what Donna is saying about him.

“Shut up.” Then, “I really am sorry about Chapel. Not just for the, you know, geopolitical consequences.”

I want to say something like
It's okay
, but it isn't. Nothing is okay about that. It's pretty much the opposite of okay. It's
yako
.

“He used me, Donna,” I say.

“I know them feels,” she says.

I should have shot him. But I couldn't. Maybe it was that lingering sense of love and affection that, for all its outrageousness, I can still somehow hear over the crazy-making tinnitus of heartbreak and anger. I'm not proud of myself. Chapel killed Brainbox. And I hate him for it. But some part of my brain is still running his app in the background, figuring
somehow
we might work it all out. And naturally, the first and most vital step in that sequence was my demurring vis-à-vis blowing his brains out.

Surely that counted for something? My doing him a solid like that?

Outside the store, it's like a video game kill screen, with bodies splayed this way and that, looking that uncool narcoleptic way they do. The British invasion went all
Downton Abbey
on these fools, and the Uptowners didn't take a one of 'em along to the big sleep. I feel like it'd be a different story if the fighting weren't all in the open like this. In the catacombs of the Bazaar, or the mazes of SoHo, the Brits would lose the advantage. But here, the soldiers cleaned house.

One of the gherkins—I think that's what Donna called them—hefts poor Brainbox in a fireman's carry, and we hustle behind him in a parade to Central Park. It seems quiet on the street, but I know that the Uptowners are watching, peeping from their high windows, figuring what to do. Homeboys don't take defeat lightly.

About half a mile into the park, there's a little encampment around two nasty-looking black helicopters. We stop within a rough circle that's been hacked into the high grass. A few gherkins are expanding the circle, whacking away with their crazy elbowed knives. The guy in charge, Wakefield, tells them to stop and get ready to move out.

“Not yet. We're burying our friend,” says Donna.

“No time for that,” says Wakefield.

“So shoot me,” says Donna.

Wakefield looks like he's thinking about it.

“Have a heart,” says the Cracker Shaq, who seems to have a soft spot for Donna.

Wakefield thinks, says, “I need to debrief the…” He's about to say
prisoners
, I think, but he stops himself and says “contacts.”

It's a standoff until I say, “Don't worry. I'll talk. You start with Brainbox, Donna.”

That seems to be a fair compromise, so Jefferson and Donna and the huge guy carry Brainbox over a ways and I stay with the troops.

I'm clearing off some snow from beneath a tree when the Beautiful Bronze One steps up to me.

“Hello,” he says. “My name is Rab. You'll be Peter.”

Yes I will. I offer him a seat next to me, out of the wind.

“Hi, Rab. You gonna take my briefs off?”

“It's ‘debrief,' but I think you know that,” he says.

To be honest, I thought this would throw him, like, the full-on Nelly. I wanted to see how he'd react. He's smiling. A natural flirt, happy to roll both ways up to a certain point, at least that's what my gaydar, autobooting out of dormancy, tells me.

I read about this a long time back, when there was this thing called the Internet. Some of these high-class British boys are that way. Like, it's traditional to be a little gay for each other in boarding school, and then later, when you're a captain of industry or whatever, you conveniently forget about it.

And a guy like this would've had
opportunities
. But it's strange; he doesn't seem like Donna's type. Then again, when you're
that
good-looking, you're kind of like O-negative blood—universal. I would definitely swipe right on the brother, if you know what I mean.

Okay,
actually
, I've only got eyes for Chapel. I mean I know I'm a guy and all? Like with a broken sex-drive override switch? But I already did the thing where you make up for hurt with sex, what seems like long ago. For now, I'm happy to play the dizzy lovestruck queen with Rab, if it'll give me an angle on what's going down.

This is all about the football, of course. The biscuit. The button. The bomb. That's what they came for, even if they're pretending to give a shit about the Cure and all of us imperiled young'uns.
They
being the Brits plus the various lucky and/or rich folks who made it out of the US, backed up by our navy, which more or less runs this bitch vis-à-vis world trade.
They
could give two shits about us apocalescents. That much I
do
believe about what Chapel said.

What they
can
spare some feces for is the Doomsday Car Phone, which was moments ago snatched out of Brainbox's hands and out of their reach by Chapel and the nastiest bunch of white boys you'd ever want to run screaming from. Seeing Chapel with the Uptowners is pretty much the worst possible version of when your ex starts running with a new crowd.

I give Rab more or less the straight scoop, neglecting to mention the fact that Brainbox had the launch codes memorized. Brother's dead, why go into it—besides, if they knew that, they'd probably wonder if he had time to write them down. Which he did, or at least, I wrote them down for him. Brother was going in and out of consciousness, though, so who knows how reliable his memory was at that point. I wasn't about to double-check it on the biscuit, know what I'm saying? I may be a troublemaker on occasion, but I'm not down to start World War III.

Be that as it may, I don't tell Rab about the folded piece of paper in my back pocket with all those strings of letters.

Chapel has the biscuit now, of course, which means that my ex is the most dangerous man on the planet. Funny thing is, that sort of makes it worse. I know there should be some point where the jealousy kind of shorts out in the face of this evil that is obviously much bigger than just breaking up with me.

But it's more like if somebody I dated was suddenly starring in a big movie that everybody wanted to go see. Yeah, it makes it hella worse that he's moved on to bigger and better things like blowing up the planet.

Least, I guess that's what he might do. Or maybe Chapel wants to use the threat of the bombs to change things, like bring down the government or make things more equal or stuff. Back in the day, when he was recruiting us to help the Resistance, he was all about—if memory serves—“redressing injustice and shattering the hold of the oligarchy on the levers of power” and whatnot. Maybe he really wants to make the world a better place.

Or maybe he just wants to launch everything, fuck things up for real, and clean the slate.

Who knows? One way or another, he shouldn't have done me like that.

The truth? Just between you and me? Part of me doesn't even care. I don't care about the nukes and I don't care about the politics. All I care is that he's gone and he doesn't want me. But whatever he
does
want, he is definitely holding a big stick.