The Revival (15 page)

There's a silence on the other end. Then,
What do you want?
Kind of weirdly personal, weirdly peevish, when I was expecting something official-sounding, or at least threatening.

I want a line through to the Reconstruction Committee,
Chapel says.
And I want you to facilitate contact with the Resistance. I'll give you the necessary IP address in my next transmission. In the meantime, so that you know this is important, your man Wakefield here will confirm that I am in possession of the football and the biscuit. Stand by.

And Chapel gets up and fetches the briefcase, opens its maw, riffles through some laminated pages of numerical codes. Then he holds up the biscuit, which is like a bigger version of what we're talking on.

Wakefield looks at it, stifles a gasp, and says,
I can confirm that.

There's more silence on the other end. You can actually hear people
whispering
to each other. Pathetic.

Let me lay it out for you,
says Chapel.
You're going to get the prime minister's office and the US embassy on the line. I'll wait one hour. I'll be in touch. If I don't get a response, I'll start warming up the missiles.

Then he presses the Off button. Boop. Nuclear threat made.

It's not going to work,
says Wakefield.

What's not going to work?
says Chapel.

Whatever it is you have in mind
.

Well, you'd better hope for your own sake it does. And for everyone's sake.
He waggles the biscuit in his hand.

My boys take Wakefield away. He can chill at the bar next door. With his ankle manacled to the footrest.

Okay, so you boosted his cell phone. Why are we keeping him alive?
I ask.

Because he's useful. He can validate what we say to the Reconstruction Committee.

He's like a—what do you call it—a certificate of authenticity
.

Unless they think we've been torturing him.
Chapel gives me a look.

If you can manage that. So don't mess him up, is what you're saying
.

Like I'm some kind of sadist.

I go quiet for a while. Who does this guy think he is? He wouldn't be alive if I hadn't vouched for him. And here he is giving
me
orders. But
I'm
the one in charge here.

Okay,
I say,
What now? I mean, what
is
your plan? Other than getting to meet famous people?

The plan,
he says,
is to begin negotiations with the Reconstruction Committee. That's a joint US-British authority that effectively runs the world. A little hard to explain the ins and outs to you, but I'm guessing you wouldn't go too far wrong if you just thought of a big version of parents.

I say,
I didn't get along very well with my parents, in the end.
He looks like he kind of wants to know what I mean, but kind of doesn't.
Why negotiate?

Because, for one, they have a lot of my people in prison. They have to release them. Then they have to release the rest of the world
.

My bros are watching the conversation like a tennis match, but if they didn't know the rules of tennis. Probably they're trying to figure out what's in it for them.

Sounds pretty communist to me,
I say. In point of fact, I don't really know what
communist
means, but anything that sounds sort of namby-pamby seems to work.
And what does the Rest of the World do when it's released?

In theory, whatever it wants. Opinions vary. Some of my associates think that a new era of peace and harmony will begin once the one percent are forced to reckon with their crimes. Myself, I think it'll be a global clusterfuck.

So why are you making it happen?

Chapel looks away, thinking. His expression is kind of hard to read. Like, maybe sad. But why is he doing it if it's such a bummer?

I suppose because something has to give, Evan.

I don't like being Mr. Question-Asking Guy, but I do have one more that I want answered. It's what the bros are thinking, and I'd prefer to stop them from thinking at all.

So where do we fit in?
I say.
I mean to say, I don't really give a crap about your global justice or whatever
.

No. You are about the here and now.

That's all there is
.

You're very Zen.

Never thought of it that way.

Well, Evan, the way you fit in is, you do what you do. I have the biscuit. I know how to use it. You have the men to guard it. From people like Wakefield. I don't think he'll be the last
.

Let them come,
I say.
But look, bro, I'm not exactly stoked to be the captain of the guards, you get me? Like you sitting on the throne and
me
…
What did they call it in Dad's office?
Reporting to you. I think
you
should report to
me
.
To emphasize the importance of this, I take my pistol out and twirl it around.

Chapel looks at me.

Fine,
he says.
By the powers vested in me by the International Resistance, I hereby give you the rank of general and confer on you the political command of the plague zone. I humbly submit my résumé as advisor to Your Excellency
.

He thinks he's playing me, but I find these things end up counting for something. Your Excellency. I like the sound of that.

You're hired,
I say.

But I think to myself,
Soon as I figure out how to work this biscuit thing, you're fired. I'ma go Trump on your ass.

IT'S STRANGE TO BE IN a motor vehicle again. The Harlemite pickups move at impossible speed, hours of distance flying past in minutes. We approach the future too fast, a bloodbath sucking us toward itself before I can think my way around it.

This isn't the first time, of course, that presentiments of death have come up, and like before, I try to think of other things to keep my mind from shorting out. I look at the passing scenery, trying to identify things from their ruins. Pet groomer. Hair salon. Vitamin store. They seem to vibrate tinnily, echoes of life from long ago.

But among the reminders of the past, there are flashes of now. A kid turns the key of an opener on a can of dog food. A random runs after our trucks, asking us to take him along, but the girls bat him back. Dogs chase cats chase rats.

I have a new long gun, a boxy version of an AR-15 in fluorescent-pink plastic. It's from a special run made out of scrounged girl-focused LEGO kits. Imani's tribe melts them down and extrudes them into a fine plastic thread, which their MakerBot 3-D printers turn into gun housings. A separate crew fabricates the high-impact innards of the lower receiver from aluminum; yet another turns metal tubing into rifle barrels.

Yet another crew puts colorful stickers on. Unicorns vomiting rainbows, kittens giving thumbs-up.

We pull the trucks into a big, flat snow-covered space in a park on Seventy-Seventh and Amsterdam. We'll use the playground, whose structures look like wintry little castles in their mantles of snow and ice, for a staging area before the raid.

Imani sweeps the snow off the deck of a play structure and sets down the map. The residual snowmelt bleeds into the paper.

They found the blueprint at the public library, a while back when they were preparing to take over the entire island. That was before I brought the news of the Cure. When everyone realized that they could live for decades longer, their calculations of risk were thrown, and suddenly a Harlem blitzkrieg didn't seem worth it. But they had already, under Solon's diligent command, compiled an intelligence trove worthy of a proper invasion, including schematics of all the major tribal headquarters. One of those being, as it happens, the Museum of Natural History.

I wonder where Solon is now. Imani says he ran but not where. It sounds like he escaped, if she's telling the truth. I'm relieved, but I'm also afraid of having to explain myself to him someday. I thought it would be best that the tribes of New York would learn the truth like a frog in slowly heated water, but obviously that plan didn't work. And by the time the truth came out, in a single blast, Solon had staked his office and reputation and maybe his life to back me. I hope he's someplace peaceful, a stoic in retirement, like he wanted to be.

“There,” says Theo, planting down his thick finger on the map. “That's the best way in.”

He's pointing out a side door around the corner from the ornamental entrance portico. A narrow staircase to the first floor.

I say, “If this interior door is shut, we'll be stuck in this corridor.”

“If the interior door is shut, I'm gonna make it Not Shut.” He holds up a piece of gray putty—plastic explosive. “'Sides, it's not up to you.”

Theo has been giving me a fairly frosty vibe all the way down. Not that I can blame him. The way he sees it, I left him in the hands of Resistance fighters on the east end of Long Island and took off for Manhattan. I didn't realize that they were about to kill him, though—luckily, Kath and the Thrill Kill Twins were there to spring him loose.

And I wonder if there isn't something else that makes him like me even less. Something about the way he looks at Kath. Something about the time they spent together. I remember that when they met, the first time we were in Harlem, she was convinced Theo was some kind of thug. But I guess they got to know each other pretty well, bushwhacking their way from the Hamptons back to the city with the twins, because she doesn't talk about him that way anymore.

And though I may have my own difficulties with Theo—he did, after all, nearly get me killed at the UN—I've always thought of him as solid, pensive, self-contained. Dangerous, but not to his friends. To tell the truth, I'm glad to have him in the fight. Imani didn't want him along, saying it was
a woman thing
, but Theo wouldn't have it.

“Theo's right,” I say. I turn to Imani. “It's your show.”

“All right, then,” says Imani. “Three teams. One in front. You from the side. And the final team does their thing from above. We good?”

“We good,” say the girls in one voice. The Slayer Queens (their term, not mine) are a formidable bunch, even with their Day-Glo equipment. Done up in everything from skirts to flak jackets, helmets and berets.

“Listen up,” says Imani, and the girls go quiet. Steam trails up from fifty mouths.

“We go in strong. Anything got a beard, kill it. Anyone female, you get them out of there alive.”

She looks around at her troops, her face set in a scowl.

“Now make 'em
feel you
.”

We leave the pickups under guard and head to our rallying points. Me, Kath, the twins, Theo, Donna, and Rab pass a bodega, restaurants, a pharmacy, a liquor store, and then cut over to Columbus, aiming to slip along the side of the museum out of view of the front.

Rab is looking down at a strange little letter-opener-looking thing in his hands.

“What's that?” I ask.

“Oh, this,” he says. “A gift from my employers. It's a special sort of knife.”

“Show me,” I say. He hesitates, then hands it over.

It's a wickedly sharp little thing, triangular in cross section.

“Nice,” I say. “But hopefully you won't get close enough to use it.”

“You never know,” he says.

“Better to use the pistol. Trust me.”

“I haven't… This must make me seem
terribly
innocent to you, but I've never killed anyone. Never even tried.”

“You'll manage,” I say, “if you have to.”

“I suppose,” he says. The look in his eye is hard to read. “But how will I know if I have to?”

“Depends,” I say. “Depends what you want.”

“Yes,” he says. Then, a little shyly, “Are you afraid? To die?”

The honest answer would be
Not as much as I used to be
. Because I have been in the middle realm, I have let go of my body, I have faced the
bardos
that test the soul's attachment. And the only thing that really tied me to the earth was Donna.

But that's too much of a mouthful, and besides, saying no might just sound like bragging.

So I say, “Yes. Of course. Who isn't?” And I give him back his knife.

“SO WHAT'S 'APPENING UP THERE?”
asks Titch when Guja and I get out of the crawl space and meet up with him again underground. He's pacing back and forth like a bear in a zoo, occasionally thumping his meaty hands against the white tiles of the station walls. I figure he must be real tired of waiting in the subway.

“It's pretty nuts up in that bitch, I won't lie,” I say. “Fortunately, that made it easy for us to get back. It's not like we're that much out of the ordinary because there is no ordinary.”

The truth is, I don't know what to make of everything, except that things are looking pretty unpromising vis-à-vis world peace, if such a thing exists. We've tangled with Evan plenty, and he is my candidate for Person Least Likely to Be Responsible with a Nuclear Arsenal at His Command. So some Shit Definitely Has to Get Done. The question is, what shit exactly?

I have a sort of sinking feeling, like I'm in a scary new school or something. I realize how much I've been sustained by my friends, as if I only knew how to locate myself relative to other people—school, tribe, friendship, relationship. Now I'm on my own.

Well, that's not quite true. I have a killer giant and a lethal shrimp on my side. And, in a manner of speaking, I
am
still defined relative to another, which is to say, Chapel. I'm still in his gravitational pull.

Titch, however, seems a lot more positive than me.

“Right, then, Peter!” he says, clapping his massive hands together. I think he's trying to impress upon me a certain need for vigor. “Tell me what you know, and we'll see what we can do.”

So we make our plan to defeat the Uptowners.

It's weird that everything seems to have conspired to make the Uptowners even
more
what they were. That is to say, these were the kids of the bankers, the lawyers, the hedge funders, the money people. The people everyone used to call the Masters of the Universe, way back in the day. They were raised to go to the best schools, get into the best colleges, get the best jobs at the best firms. They probably assumed they'd run things. And now it looks like they will.

But not if a black queen, a pint-size assassin, and the Cockney Mountain That Rides (the subway) have anything to do about it!

Fifteen minutes on, we're perched in the shadows near a line of chugging diesel generators. They're guarded by two Uptowners in camo, smoking up. Big cables run from the gennies along the ramp to the vaulted lower levels, where there's a chaos of junction boxes and extension cords and lamps that light the labyrinth. Kids are always stealing power without regard for the consequences to the rest of the grid, hence the technicians running to and fro trying to tweak the electrical flow.

I don't actually understand this stuff. Brainbox explained it to me when we escaped from here the first time, after the gladiatorial combat and the arms deal and cocktails at the Campbell Apartment. I miss those cocktails. I could have gotten used to the Bazaar, if it wasn't run by fascists.

I pat the sheet of paper in my pocket, where I wrote down Brainbox's final message. The launch codes. A farewell to the world, if one had the football and wanted to use it.

I walk over to the Uptowners. They eye me with suspicion and a soupçon of contempt, on account of I'm black and also because of their sophisticated gaydar, which is ever powerful in latent-homosexual private-school white boys.

“You boys know you shouldn't be smoking around these things,” I say, walking past them and running my hand along the cowling of the foremost genny.

“Get your hands off that,” says one.

“Diesel's not flammable, bitch,” says the other.

“Oh, it's not
flammable
,” I say, “but it is
combustible
. Which is almost the same thing. People think that diesel can't catch on fire. They're wrong.” More science from poor Brainbox, to baffle these fools.

I'm doing a fairly good job of drawing attention my way, and I decide to amp it up a little by doing a spin and flourish, as if I were demo'ing the genny for a game show.

“What do you want, fag?” says the beefier of the two Uptowners.

I was almost feeling sorry for these chumps. So it's good that he said that because it makes it easier to live with what Guja does next. There's a tinny little hiss as his knife comes out of its scabbard, then a blur as he brings it down on the neck of the first guard. His head actually comes off, bounces on the shoulder of the other as he turns, which is worse for him, since he actually sees the blade as it sweeps through his neck in Guja's backhand cut. I half expect him to keep going and chop me apart, too—the look in his eyes is of somebody doing exactly what he always wanted to do—but instead, he whips the blade to the side, spattering a fine line of blood against the sandstone wall, which sucks it up like a wood stain.

“Jesus,” I say. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

“Very good, sir!” says Guja, and snaps to a sharp salute, his boots crashing together.

Titch emerges from hiding, hands out the goggles from his kit bag. They're the same kind we used long ago, back in the library. Hope it goes better this time.

“Right, then.” Titch shuts down the first genny, and the lights start to go out. “Do the honors, Guja.”

Guja goes down the rest of the line, and I can barely make out the figure of the Gurkha, bringing his blade down again and again, this time on the cables leading from the gennies, chopping off power for good. As they go offline, a localized quiet sets in.

I fire up the night-vision goggles, see Titch and Guja in their green irradiance as they do the same.

Shouts and cursing from below, down the length of the ramp. Some techs are already making their way to the first genny, flashlights in hand.

Guja strides down the corridor toward them, and I grab his arm. It's like a gnarled hardwood tree stump.

“They're just civilians, Guja,” I say. “Get it? Just like you and me. Well. Just like me. Only the ones in camo are soldiers.” I'm worried Guja is going to go buck-wild, take mad revenge for his homeboy he saw get shot.

“Them's the rules of engagement, Private,” says Titch. “Let's not wear out our welcome, right?”

“I will be the best of guests,
sah
!” says Guja.

Titch and I slip past the techs, who are preoccupied with the generator anyway. It's pretty unlikely they'll be able to fix it, unless they have replacement cables, and Guja's role in the plan is to keep the lights out should that or anything else unforeseen happen. He'll monitor the lower-level floor and create enough havoc with the guards to take the heat off us, at least in theory.

In the ghost light of the goggles, the crowd at the lower level looks like the souls of the dead in Hades or something. Or that big poem where the Italian guy Dante goes through hell. Jefferson would know what I'm talking about. Which I guess makes me Virgil or whatever, and Titch is the guy who has to cross the river of hell in that Chris de Burgh song.

Flashlights are popping up here and there, but mostly it's people wandering around and bumping into each other. I slink between them, but Titch just barrels right through, knocking them on their butts.

We make our way through the lower level of the Bazaar to the far side, where two guards are waiting at the entrance to the Oyster Bar. Though the guards can't see better than anyone else, they're between us and the door, so we have to deal with them.

Behind us, we hear shouts and gunshots, which must mean that Guja is doing his thing. I say a little prayer for whoever is on the wrong end of that curved knife.

The guards start to drift toward the sound, which is bad news for them, since it gives Titch the chance to seize their heads, one face enveloped in each gigantic hand, lift them up, and slam them to the ground. He mashes them repeatedly into the tiles, and other than the cracking of their skulls, they don't make a sound.

We're through the doors and in the vaulted main chamber of the restaurant when we see the body hanging there. It's upside down, hanging from its ankles, a steady drip-drip from the top of its head. Titch gets hold of it and spins him round to face us. It's Wakefield.

Or it
was
Wakefield.

“Who's there?” someone hisses from the doorway to the barroom nearby.

We turn, and Titch puts his finger to his lips. Then, with surprising agility, he slides over to the Uptowner making his way from the bar and brings his elbow down on the top of his head. The guy falls to the ground like the proverbial sack of potatoes. Actually, he seems to accordion downward rather than topple over. It's an uncanny, weirdly Slinky motion that reminds me of how the towers fell that day.

If Titch is sentimental about Wakefield, he definitely isn't letting it slow him down. He makes his way over to the glass porthole of the bar door and peeks through. Then he gestures to me to cover him. At least, I think that's what he does. He's using those cool hand gestures that people used to do in old movies about SEAL Team Six and whatnot. I figure it can mean only a few things, and the most likely is
Cover me
. So I raise my rifle and try to look like I know what I'm doing.

Titch abandons the quiet approach and slams through the door, his bulk taking it off the hinges.

There's only one person in the room, though. It's Chapel. He's tied to a chair, his hands behind his back. Next to him sits the football. Chapel is making silly trying-to-speak-through-a-gag noises, like he really wants to tell us something.

I rush over to him—and then stop.

Something's wrong.

He looks up at me and shakes his head, as far as the rope will allow him to. His mouth is stuffed with rags secured with twisted wire.

Titch leans over the football and picks it up.

He turns the briefcase upside down, and more rags fall out.

Something's
very
wrong.

I've fallen for the whole blinded-by-the-light thing before, a million years ago at the public library. So I rip off my goggles before they come on.

But Titch isn't so lucky. I can hear him grunt as the goggles overload and his eyeballs get clouded with information. He rips the goggles from his head and blinks as the Uptowner guards pop up from behind the bar and fire.

They've clearly been told to take out the biggest threat first. Titch staggers backward as the bullets pock his body. Then, as the Uptowners leap over the counter, he actually gets up and charges them, even though he's been hit maybe a dozen times. Titch seizes the first Uptowner to reach him and slams the guy against the bar, sending his gun flying. Someone swings a bat at him, but he catches it in his hands and yanks it away. But then he's stabbed from behind.

I shoot the kid who did it and try to run to Titch, but I'm tackled by a guard I hadn't seen come through the bar door. Another arrives and cracks me over the head with something unpleasantly hard.

As my head hits the ground, I see Titch among a crowd of Uptowners. They're bashing him with rifle butts and baseball bats, hacking at him with machetes. Like dogs around a bear, until finally he falls to his knees. Then they push him over and keep hitting him when he's on the ground, past the rattling of his breath, until he is quiet for good.