The Revival (13 page)
Authors: Chris Weitz
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction / Action & Adventure / General, Juvenile Fiction / Action & Adventure / Survival Stories, Juvenile Fiction / Dystopian
“You will not have New Life unless you touch the blood of
Jefferson
!”
And his companions shout,
“Jefferson!”
There's this part in this movie I saw called
Jaws
. When the cop guy has just opened the beach, and he suddenly realizes there's a shark cruising around in the water selecting its next meal, and it looks like Roy Scheider is hurtling toward us, even though he's in the same place. Anyhow, that is how I feel right nowâlike I'm rushing toward this realization.
The
J
on the banner is for Jefferson.
Our
Jefferson. And the guy on the drawing with his quadruple legs and arms stretched out like that Leonardo drawing? That's him, too. Somebody has made a religion out of Jefferson. Or at least, they've taken factsâthat we manufactured the Cure out of his blood, and that it worksâand turned them into some kind of crazy-ass magical thinking.
That's where the rope comes in. And where it gets even stranger.
Because I realize it's the Ghosts. Or at least, they
were
the Ghosts, the insane cannibalistic cultists who we found living in the public library when we were searching for the Cure.
Back then, they were into a twisted version of the sacramentâwine turning to blood, bread turning to flesh. It was the way they justified eating people. They tried to convert us by forcing us to eat a meal with them. We wouldn't. They insisted. People died.
And on our way out, some of Jefferson's blood must have gotten onto the ropes they tied us with. Or maybe it's not even his blood. It could have been anybody's. Really, it doesn't matter. Anyway, that's what they're displaying to the crowd, like it's magic or something.
The Ghost continues, “I speak to you not as one of the elect but as a sinner, a sinner among sinners!” he shouts. “For he walked among us! But we did not understand! He came to bring us life! But we offered him death! We deserve nothing of him! But I have touched his holy bloodâand so I
live
!”
He thrusts the nylon rope with the old blood on it into the air once again. I doubt the crowd knows what it all means, but something about the certitude of the gesture seems to convince them. They start to walk toward it, like metal filings drawn to a magnet.
Meanwhile, me? I'm backing away, with Gooj at my side. Butâtrue confession? There's a little, eensy bit of me that is envious of Jefferson. I mean, brother never seemed to
care
about being famous. Me? I always wanted to be. And now
he's
the one with the profile.
But that doesn't last long. As the people rush the stage, me and Guja resist the push, becoming a sort of boulder blocking the stream of the crowd. It draws the attention of the dude with the rope. He turns to look at usâand sees me.
Now I guess if Jefferson is their new Big J, that makes
me
Saint Peter, which is to say, to them I'm Kind of a Big Deal, too.
I back away as the Ghost's face starts to wear a look that is maybe religious ecstasy but also a lot like a thirteen-year-old girl who just found herself in the presence of a member of One Direction. For a moment, he looks too surprised to do or say anything. Then he rushes to the edge of the ring, strains his body over the ropes, and thrusts the nylon cord toward me.
“Peter!” he shouts. “Peter! We have kept the faith! Save us! Take us to Jefferson!” The other Ghosts around him are starting to get wind of what's happening and floating toward the edge of the ring.
I don't know, in normal circumstancesâif “normal circumstances” could ever be said to be the case up in this mofoâhow I would react to being proclaimed the apostle of a new religion. I'd like to think that I'd take it pretty well. I'd let them down gently, at least. But this is probably the worst imaginable time to be recognized, even if the context is kinda flattering.
“I think we should go,” I say to Guja.
“Copy that,” he says. We turn and start to leave, but the cultists are not done with me.
“Peter!” they cry. “Stay! Stop him! Stop him!”
Now the faces of people in the crowd are turning toward us; I'm breathing fame on them like an airborne virus. Hands reach out to grab me.
It is at that moment that the Uptowner soldiers appear, rushing down from the ramps of the upper level, rifles up.
But they haven't come for me; they've come for the Ghosts who interfered in their sale of the fake Cure. The salesman points out the offenders, and the guards fire into the ring. A cultist to the right of the leader falls, and then the crowd finally recoils as bullets fly. It's like a shaken snow globe, a stampede, a gyrating mosh, and the distinction of being a saint is wiped away in the panic. When kids look at me now, it's only as another animal in their way as everyone tries to escape from the cross fire.
A figure falls to the ground in front of me. I make to step over it, but then I realize it's Guja. As he looks at me, wild-eyed, I pull him up and start dragging him toward the side ramp that leads up to the station's main concourse, away from the riptides of fleeing kids. He gets his feet under him, and we make it to the ramp heading up.
Gunfire and bloodshed are everyday here, and the crowd's panic simmers down the higher we go. The shouts and screams get hushed by the twists and turns of the granite corridors.
“What do those people want?” says Guja, once it feels safe enough to talk again.
“Who, them?” I say, kind of playing it off.
“They see you, and they go crazy.”
“Oh, you know, it's just my personal magnetism. Ain't no thing.”
I remind myself to stay Down to Earth.
Back before What Happened, when there was such a thing as celebrity, we used to joke about the phrase
down to earth
. People who met celebrities always called them that.
They're
so
down to earth
. I felt like this was due entirely to efforts on the part of the famous person to
seem
like it. And if you knew them in real life, you'd realize how fame had totally warped their personalities. You know. Your Kardashians. Your Trumps.
At least, that's how it felt back at the UN, when we were dispensing the Cure. Everyone was aware that, on some level, they couldn't live without Jefferson. After all, their lives were saved by a vaccine made from his blood. So they treated him with exaggerated respect and attention. Everything he said seemed to be in a larger font than everybody else's words, and everyplace he went seemed to be more interesting to them than it had been a moment before. It was messed up, and so is being idolized by a bunch of recovering cannibals, but still.
I'll admit it: There's a kind of skip in my step.
As we hit the main floor of the terminal, with its high, latticed windows and star-dappled ceiling, we dissolve into a new crowd, unaware of the shitstorm below. Up here, there's more businesses selling the Cure in every formâfrom pills to powders to injections. It's all got to be fake. The only real Cure I know is a batch they whipped up on the
Ronald Reagan
according to Brainbox's recipe and put in little sealed plastic packets that looked like doses of fast-food ketchup.
There was enough to treat the attendees of the Gathering at the UN, but that was it. For the rest, the plan was to fire up a labâsomething that couldn't be done without a whole heap of resources and logistics and whatnot. Brainbox said he'd need a location, a staff, and, like, resources to make the stuff, and New York had been stripped clean of anything useful. I'm guessing that when everything went south at the Gathering, somebody made off with the remaining doses of the Cureâthat, or it was lying scattered on the floor of the Security Council chamber.
Anyway, it's pretty unlikely that somebody has taken up the plan to manufacture more. Brainbox was probably the singularly most qualified kid to do it, and he's dead. And Chapel seems pretty uninterested in anything other than the biscuit.
He certainly doesn't seem interested in me.
“Hey, Guja,” I say.
“Yes, Peter.”
“When they were gearing you guys up for this mission, did they mention bringing any medicine? For the kids?”
Guja looks confused. Then he just smiles and shrugs, sort of like he's saying
Above my pay grade
or whatever. But I figure he'd know if they were gonna help us out, right? It's not exactly like they're distributing infected blankets, but this is no mercy mission, either.
Under the circumstances, I guess it's not surprising that there's a huge demand. Or that the market is meeting that demand with snake oil.
They're still selling other stuff, too, still issuing authorized money at the old ornately grilled ticket windows. But I can tell the camo-wearing Uptowner soldiers are spread thin. Here and there, you can see an item exchanged for another without the intervention of cash, which never would've been allowed before. Now handshakes and private understandings get around the rules of the Uptowners.
Up the staircase under the cracked Apple Store altar, a boy with a hoarse voice shouts a speech about the treachery of barter and credit. And below, in the horseshoe-shaped whirlpool of stalls, Uptowner soldiers pull violators away and summarily execute them, staining the marble walls with blood.
“Crazy,” says Guja. “Crazy people.” His hand reaches to touch his knife for reassurance.
“Yeah,” I say. “They're slippin'.”
In theory, I ought to be happy, since it looks like Evan and his thugs are losing their hold. But all it means for now is that things are more dangerous than they ever were. Like, if there's one thing worse than a police state, it's a failing police state, with the rulers grabbing desperately at their power and strivers rushing in to pick up the pieces. That dude Evan must be trippin'. I mean, more than usual.
The Gathering was supposed to stop all this from happening. The Bazaar was going to be peaceful, a neutral territory, maintained by a multitribe security force. At least, that's what Chapel and Jefferson said.
“Look,” says Guja. He points with his chin toward the opposite end of the Grand Concourse, where a squad of camo'ed Uptowners is forcing its way through the crowd.
They have Wakefield and one of the other Gurkhas on rope leads, urging them forward with blows. Wakefield looks around, dazed, too battered to orient himself. The Gurkha keeps his head down, absorbing the punches and slaps stoically.
“Kulbir,” says Guja to himself, or something that sounds like it anyway.
“Chill,” I say to Guja, who looks like he's fixing to take some heads. “We follow.”
THEY'RE BACK AGAIN.
Those white kids.
Now, before you get all offended, let me explain. I'm not a racist. See, racism is a matter of a
system
. To be a racist, you have to be the party in control, and we are not. Yes, we have control over our own little dominion from 110th up to 135th, Saint Nicholas East to the FDR. But we are an island in a sea of the Other. And though the structures of power have been toppled, the ruins are still clogging shit up.
When I say I am not happy to see these kids walk into my office in the old brownstone on MLK, understand then that it is because they in general and
they
in particular have never had our best interests in mind and have done
nothing
on our behalf.
Spider? Dead. Captain? Gone. Theo says it was by his own choosing, and may Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, watch over him. As for Theo, those fools kept him chained up so he couldn't reveal the truthâthat we weren't alone in the world.
You're gonna say that blond bitch saved Theo's life. Yes, but that was a side effect, not her intention. And I know Theo has a soft spot for her. But brothers have been falling for milky-skinned, yellow-haired hos for four hundred years now, on account of the poison that has been poured into their brains by the media. Doesn't mean she's worth the DNA she's encoded in.
But here she is, with two other little blond kids, straight-up little Aryan crackers, and that boy Jefferson, who last time I saw him was debating me at the Apollo, right before he broke his word to us and spread the Cure around to anybody who asked, like it was Halloween candy. Well, I was here in this very room when he told Solon that only Harlem and their tribe would get the Cure, if we would help him get to Plum Island. Solon was sitting where I am now. Me, I was in the corner, doing my Dick Cheney shit.
So we sent Spider and Captain and Theo in the ship, all the way to the end of Strong Island, and two of them didn't come back. And at his “Gathering,” our enemiesâotherwise known as everybody elseâgot rewarded just the same as us.
Well, Solon is gone, and I'm in charge of Harlem now. And Jefferson doesn't look so high-and-mighty, not like when he was selling his line about peace and love and life, bullshitting the brothers and sisters, telling them we all, in the words of the old secular hymn, could get along. We have heard this again and again. It is our nature to fall for this because we are a loving people, because we are a generous people.
No, Jefferson looks hollow, he looks beat, and I'm glad. He lied and turned my peeps against me, and now he can barely look me in the eye. It's a strange thing that the eye, just an organ of perception after all, should have a moral force, a repulsive charge like a magnet pointed the wrong way, when you've done wrong. That's how Mama always knew I was lying: when I couldn't meet the power of her gaze. And when she knew, she beat me. And her beatings gave me strength in time, when I understood that she did it to save me from an even worse fate, if I were not constantly aware of every crosscurrent of danger pulsing through a white man's world.
So Jefferson is quiet now, his head down, his body still, like if he didn't exert any energy he'd be invisible. Like I'm a T. rex that only sees motion. Instead, it's Donna, the little raggedy-ass one, giving the line this time.
It goes like this: They're selling slaves down at the museum on the west side of the park. Your people were in bondage once. So you should help us free
our
people.
And I say to her, “Oh,
now
you're against slavery.”
And she says, “Of course. I've
always
been against slavery. I'm against murder, too.”
So I say to her, “Well, if that's the case, what did you ever do about it?”
And she says, “What do you mean? Slavery was over by the time I was born.”
“Actually,” says the fine-ass Indian-but-English-sounding dude who's new to the whole scenario, and a welcome addition, I may add, “that's not true. We still have slavery down in the Subcontinent; they just don't call it that.”
“Well, not
here
,” Donna says.
“And you think you have nothing to do with slavery?” I say. “You have nothing to do with the past? You don't have to have committed a crime to be
part
of it.”
Pretty much blank stares.
I pick up an apple from the bowl on my desk, one of the good ones we get from the farmers up in Strong Island. I push the bowl their way, as if to say, even though you're out of line, I still maintain certain standards of hospitality. They don't bite. They're not hungry, on account of they probably think I'm gonna have them executed.
I say, “Let me put it to you this way. If something's been stolen, and you end up with it, what should you do? I mean, if you didn't do anything to get it, it just fell in your lap? Let's say⦠okay. Let's say your great-grandma had a gold ring stolen by the Nazis. Right?”
Donna is following so far.
I continue, “Well, it passes on down the line, until sixty years later some girl who didn't have anything to do with World War Two, never gave the Nazi salute, wouldn't hurt a fly, gets that ring for a present. Now, when she finds out it belonged to your grandma. What should she do?”
Donna thinks. I'll give her creditâshe's already almost there. She says, “She should give me the ring back. It wasn't hers in the first place. It wasn't her family's to give.”
“That's right,” I say. “So.
Where is the labor of my ancestors?
”
I pause because they don't have an answer; then I continue, “The fortunes they built. The houses. The roads. The mills. The industry. The
country
my ancestors built. The one you got to live it up in, with police to protect you from all the great-great-great-grandchildren like me nobody knew what to do with. When do you give us back what we made and you took from us? And you know what? We weren't even asking for all of it. Just a little piece of God's green earth where we could live and get treated like human beings. See?”
She's nodding, like either she understands or she's just pretending to, trying to get my help. But Blondie, not so much.
“Well,” says Blondie, “it's all over now. All that's in the past. We're all in the same boat now.”
“That's right,” I say. “It's a clean slate. Nobody owes anybody anything. Nome sane?”
“Imani,” says Jefferson. He's staring down at the pattern on the Indian carpet.
Now, I don't really like that he can just say my name like that, like I was the same as anybody he knows, like any of my friends would say it.
“You can call me Madam President,” I say.
“Okay. Madam President. If it's because of me⦠well, please don't keep from doing the right thing just because of me.”
If I didn't think I was doing the right thing, I wouldn't be doing it. It's not like I'm refusing to help these fools just to spite them. But I let him go on. I'm a good listener. It helps me figure out how to beat people.
“I'm sorry,” he says, “for everything. Maybe you were right. Maybe you should have just kept the Cure and killed everybody else. Maybe you had the right.”
Then he goes quiet. I don't see why I have to finish his thoughts for him.
“But?” I say.
He shrugs. Says nothing. Then, like that kind of thing probably doesn't matter anymore, he says, “Saving those girls is the right thing to do.” Which he's already basically said.
So I say, “I don't see why nobody else has to do the âright' thing and
I
do. Who are those girls to me? Somebody else's tribe, people I never met. And besides. Nobody ever knows what the right thing is until it's too late to decide, do they?”
So I start thinking. I mean, I'm always thinking; Mama said I was thinking since the moment I came into the world. But now I'm thinking. Deep, deep down inside me, trying to get to what the right thing really is.
The white kids don't know what to make of that. They look around at each other like they think I'm just done. It's all right. I've gotten used to how people react to me, when I go away for a little bit like this. If people actually took any time to just sit and
think
when they needed to, they wouldn't be surprised when they see me doing it.
“Well,” says Jefferson, “I guess we better go.”
“No,” I say, “that's cool.”
They shoot glances at each other. Look at their hands. They don't know what I mean.
I say, “I'm not going to do it because it's the âright thing.' I'm going to do it because it feels good.”
What I mean is, I'm going to help them. I'm going to get my girls together and send them to rain hell on those slavers. I won't do it because it's right, or for Washington Square, or because of the past.
I'll do it to see those little fuckers piss in their pants. I'll do it to make the Uptowners' hair stand up on their necks because they know we're coming for them next. I'll do it to see the looks in the girls' eyes when they realize they've been freed.
I'll do it for me.
We're taking five of the pickups to the slave market. My girls are in the beds, fifty in all, each with a 3-Dâprinted AR-15 in her hands. We come prepared.
“So what do you call them?” asks Rabâthat's his name. He means my girls.
“What, are you still talking to me?” I say. I can feel his arm rub up against mine as the truck jounces this way and that. I like it, but it makes me feel nervous. “You got what you wanted, didn't you?”
“Can't I talk to you?” says Rab, his head bouncing off the ceiling as I turn a corner.
The suspension is jarring, and there's not much room in the cab, but I don't mind. I'm not in the mood for a long walk, especially since I can imagine a
few
situations in which we will want to get out quickly.
“Why don't you talk to your skinny little girlfriend?” I say. I've clocked the way he looks at Donna. They're not together but they have been, is my opinion. She's hiding it from Jefferson, who is starting to get it. But what do I know? I'm not exactly the mistress of romance or anything. I decide to answer his question anyway. “My girls call themselves the Slayer Queens,” I say. “Now let me concentrate on driving.”
But actually, I kind of like the way he talks, all fancy and British and everything. Outside, I'm mean-mugging, but inside, I'm like,
Say more things!
I ask him, “You ever hear of Rojava?”
He shakes his head.
I tell him about how the Kurdsâthat's these people up in the Middle East that never had a homeâlike, they're beefing with the Turks, they're beefing with the Syrians, they're beefing with the Iraqis, nobody wants to let them have their own little piece of the earth. Everyone tells them to just shut up and move along.
“I've heard about the Kurds,” says Rab, only he pronounces it “kuuuuuuuds.” “But I'm not sure how they fit in here.”
“If you let me finish, you'd know,” I say, and I can't help but feel like I'm flirting maybe just a little bit. I say, “They started this tiny country called Rojava, in a sliver of land up in the north of Syria, when everything started going to shit there, Assad and ISIS and all. They based their government on these books some old dude who everybody had forgot about wroteâthis old professor who thought he was finished, just lying on the couch all day nursing his joints in some run-down cottage in Maine. Well, one day old dude gets an e-mail from somebody who says he's the imprisoned Kurdish leader, who tells him, we've decided to adopt your political ideas for this new country we're starting. Imagine that. Folks halfway around the world who think he's the best thing since Karl Marx.”
“Intriguing,” says Rab.
“Anyway,” I say, “the idea is total equality, between races, between religions, between genders. Every government position has one man and one woman in it. Every cop has to go to two weeks of feminist training before he can put on the badge. They even have a brigade of female fighters, and the ISIS
Kuffars
are shit scared of them because they think that they can't go to heaven if they're killed by a woman.