The Revival (16 page)
Authors: Chris Weitz
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction / Action & Adventure / General, Juvenile Fiction / Action & Adventure / Survival Stories, Juvenile Fiction / Dystopian
WE'RE AROUND THE SIDE OF the front façade of the Museum of Natural History when the flare goes up, and Imani and half her team open fire on the front steps. The three guards at the entry are down in seconds. Half of Imani's Slayer Queens scramble across the street to flank the doorway, while the rest stay behind the park wall.
Bitchin'.
More guards issue from the front, beneath the weird-ass giant scorpion thing perched over the entryway. They fire back at the girls in the park, failing to see the girls to the side. More go down. The ones following them learn from their friends' mistake, duck back inside, and fire from the cover of the doorway.
Imani's team is doing its job, occupying the attention of the slavers. I have to admit I thought Imani, who seems kind of a bookish type, was going to leave the fighting to her all-female muscle, but she's leading the charge at the entrance, purple gun in one hand, loudspeaker gripped in the other.
She issues commands to the girls taking cover behind the parked cars across the street. The cars get riddled with little holes as someone in the recesses of the lobby opens up with a machine gun. Imani fetches a glitter-deco'ed hand grenade from her belt, pulls the pin with her teeth, and chucks it through the doorway. There's a blast, and smoke, and then Imani and her girls charge in.
That's our cue to sprint to the side door, about halfway down the block.
There's a chain and padlock threaded through the door handles, but Theo makes short work of it with a massive pair of bolt cutters. The chain pops and slithers to the ground.
The twins are in first, running ahead of us like it's a game. They won't even listen to Kath. Theo follows Kath, and then me, Jeff, and finally Rab, who does not look happy to be here. His pistol is clutched in his hands, his eyes darting around.
Me: “Watch it with that thing. I don't want any of us to get shot in the back.”
He gives me a funny look, like I've caught him in something, then nods.
The lights are off in this part of the building, and Theo's headlight carves an angle into the blackness. The twins have climbed up the narrow stairs, and their voices bounce loudly back to us, giving us away to anybody who might be watching the entrance. We discover them twisting and turning a big metal doorknob with no success.
“I got this,” says Theo, and slaps the C-4 onto the doorframe, the clay-like block resting above the lock. Then he jabs an end of wire fuse into it and starts spooling it backward, making us turn and shuffle back the way we came. Down and around the corner of the stairs.
“Cover your ears,” he says. “And scream when I tell you. Don't want the air pressure exploding your eyeballs or something.”
This sounds bad, so we do as he says, and the boom of the explosive is preceded by a fearful caterwauling. Still, the abused air slaps down the stairwell and hits me like a full-body punch.
We get up from the ground, where we've been toppled onto each other, an awkward mingling of various love triangles that would take some working out if there weren't more important things to do.
We scamper as fast as we can in the darkness, along the cool marble corridor toward the Whale Room. Our footfalls echo in snaps and pings off unseen vaulting. Then, far ahead of us, a portico vomits light into the blackness.
There's a crowd of bearded slavers in the middle of the room, guns up, alerted by the attack on the front steps and our C-4 blast.
Behind them, girls are up at the windows of their enclosures, smacking their hands against the glass.
We back off, and I fire blind through the doorway, hoping I don't hit any of the display cases. We have to keep the slavers in the center of the room.
Perched at my shoulder, Jefferson slides a telescoping metal rod with a mirror on the end past the threshold of the portico. He's able to take a good look before a bullet smashes the mirror and sends the rod spinning along the floor, where it hits Rab, huddled against the wall with his hands over his ears.
It doesn't make me think less of him. If anything, seeing his usual above-it-allness brought low floods my heart with sympathy. No time for that.
Jefferson looks at the broken mirror.
Jefferson: “Bad luck for them.”
He nods to Kath, who fires up the flare and tosses it into the room. It's NYPD traffic-division standard issue, glowing fuchsia, a nice touch.
That's the signal for the third team, up top.
Jefferson is muttering:
Namu amida butsu, namu amida butsu
, over and over again. His Buddhist stuff.
Then I hear a crack of distant thunder. A groan of metal, and a closer smashing, like a great wave crashing on a seawall. Dust sprays through the doorway.
Now's our chance. We rush in, guns raised, to see the famous blue whale, now fallen to the floor from where it hovered fifty feet above. A ninety-foot-long monster of fiberglass and polyurethane, it's smashed into two jagged pieces by the fall, like a great ship broken upon the rocks. Right on top of the slavers.
Some are still struggling to get out from under it, their legs shattered, screaming. Others are dead, impaled in bizarre poses by huge shards of fiberglass. Anyone left standing is covered in dust and particles, stunned and docile. They drop their guns to the floor, choke, raise their hands in surprise and submission.
A lot of the displays are broken, and girls burst from their pens, some of them seizing guns from the dead and wounded. I try to find Carolyn and the others, wandering through the clouds of dust.
Above, the Slayer Queens make their way to the upper balconies from the roof, which has been blown open by the explosive charge that brought down the whale.
In front of me, a familiar face. A rotund, pleasant-looking boy, his fake beard hanging from one ear, frozen in shock.
“Do you remember me?” I say to him. He looks like a statue, white with dust.
The boy says nothing at first, but then a look comes to his face. Recognition. And panic.
I put my gun to his chest and shoot him. He collapses to the floor.
I'm about to shoot another one of the slavers when Jefferson grabs me. We struggle, then fall to the ground. I look him in the eyes, and for a moment, I feel nothing but defiance, a challenge:
Tell me what I did was wrong
. Then I burst into tears, and Jefferson holds me and hushes me like a child.
When I look up, I see Rab, standing near, a thin little dagger in his hand. He's looking at meâor is it Jefferson?
He's saying, “I can't. I can't.”
I want to tell him it's okayâhe can leave all the killing to us. That it's not a natural thing to do. That, anyway, these slavers are nothing to him. But the fact is, here, he'll have to get his mind around it. I hope that if it comes down to it, he'll do what he needs to do.
TITCH'S BLOOD HAS CONGEALED;
his eyes have milked over. It's a mysteryâthe breath stops and then you're not you. I can't help but watch as he turns from a person to a thing, a body without a soul. Where's it gone? Maybe no place. That's what Brainbox said anyway.
Me, I was brought up differently: I believe that Titch is in the loving arms of Jesus. Of course, that image is just a metaphor, right? I mean, I can see him right here, so I don't imagine that there's also someplace where his real body is in the real hands of JC; that's just language messing things up, turning ideas into pictures. I can't help but look at Titch and shudder.
The other choice would be to look at Chapel, but I can't bring myself to do it. He's been making eyes at me for a while, like he could explain his betrayal away with sufficiently active eyebrows.
It's funny because at times I would have given anything to see him again. Now here we are, tied up in the center of the room, and I can't for the life of me think of anything to say. Maybe it's hate. Maybe it's love. Maybe it's the concussion.
“Peter.” It's Chapel, who's finally managed to spit the rag out of his mouth.
I don't say anything.
“Peter. Look at me.”
No dice. “You betrayed me. You betrayed all of us.”
“You don't know the whole story.”
Great. So next I'm supposed to say,
Then tell me the whole story
, all skeptical-sounding. But I don't feel like it. Even though I
want
to hear his voice.
“No more stories,” I say. He knows what I mean. The story he had me believing in, where he loved me, and me and him were going to ride into the post-apocalyptic sunset.
But he starts telling his story anyway, and I don't have my hands free to block my ears, and it seems silly to drown him out by humming or whatever.
“Remember something,” he says. “It wasn't me who screwed up Jefferson's Gathering.”
“It was
your
Gathering. Your idea.”
“No. I just knew what Jefferson wanted. That's all.”
I can't disagree. It was Jefferson who always dreamed of Utopia. Like you could make lemonade out of apocalypse lemons, or a new society out of the secondhand pieces of what was left after What Happened. So he went hook, line, and sinker for Chapel's suggestion of a Gathering of the Tribes.
“I was right about the Gathering,” he says. “Look what's happened. What little social cohesion there was in this godforsaken place is going out the window.”
“Don't pretend you care about that. All you care about is the nukes.”
“They're the only way anybody here is going to live out the year. Trust me.”
I look away from him, at the smashed mirror above the bar. Try to keep from crying. His body is warm against mine.
“That's funny,” I say. “Trust you.”
“Listen to me. This is all part of a plan. But if you don't help me get free,
everyone
is going to die. The Reconstruction is going to invade and liquidate the population.”
“You're full of shit,” I say. “Before, you said that they were going to leave us alone to die.”
“Yes,
before
. Now they have a reason to come. Oh, they'll spare a few hundred, use them for medical stock. The rest of you they'll kill before you can do any more harm.”
“What harm are we doing?”
I say. I've had about enough of this bullshit from Chapel. Had about enough of the adults and what they want. Not for the first time, I wish we had never left Washington Square, hadn't gotten mixed up in this whole story.
I struggle against the bonds; the metal chairs creak but don't give.
“Do you know how the Reconstruction kept from getting infected, Peter?”
I don't. I figured they had a Cure, like us. But maybe that's not it.
“Quarantine⦔
“No,” says Chapel. “That was just a tiny part of it. Only for those who'd made it once everyone else had been taken care of.”
I don't like the sound of “taken care of.” It tends to mean the exact opposite.
“They shot them out of the sky, Peter. The airliners.”
“How many?”
“
All of them.
Anything from the US. Then they blew up the shipsâall the long-haul freighters. They missed things, here and there. There was an outbreak in Muscat, in Oman. A freighter had gotten through in error. Cases reported at local clinics.”
His face twitches before he regathers his composure and tells me, “They nuked it, Peter. They cauterized it. Six hundred thousand people. A human firebreak.”
I look at him. Try to find out if he's telling me the truth. Was this how he looked when he told me he loved me?
“I just want you to know the kind of people we're dealing with, so you'll understand what we've done.”
God.
“What do you mean? What have you done?
What?
”
“We've had to even the playing field, Peter. If we didn't, they'd do the same here. Blow this city up, just to make sure that your Cure couldn't spread.”
God.
“You're
insane
. Why wouldn't they want the Cure to
spread
?” He's said this kind of thing before, but I never bothered to question it because I was in love, which makes you stupid, I guess.
“Two reasons,” says Chapel. “One, you're all incredible pains in the ass. Nobody wants to deal with a whole country full of teens. Two, you're all little breeding grounds for the virus.”
“But the Cureâ”
“It works for a while, Peter. But there's a phenomenon called antigenic shift.”
I remember that phrase from the
Ronald Reagan
. Every time they took blood from us, they explained it was because of
antigenic shift
. But if you asked what
that
was, they said it was classified.
“Antigenic shift. When a virus mutates in the wild through genetic recombination. Usually, it's due to a leap from one species to another. But
this
one⦔ He means the Sickness. “We were able to tease a few new strains into existence. All it takes is a couple of people with the virus. If you've already had it and been cured, you're safe. If not, and you have last year's Cure, you're a sitting duck.”
It takes me a while to figure this out. “You mean⦔
“We needed to level the playing field, Peter.”
I feel sick to my stomach.
“You didn't do it,” I said.
“It wasn't just me doing it, Peter,” he says. “Something like this takes a whole network of people. Hundreds. Thousands. And understand, these people are risking their lives.”
“You infected the whole world.” I can barely contain the idea.
“We did. Over a hundred agents, in over a hundred cities. By now, there's no way to quarantine it.”
I can't breathe.
“It was the
only
way. The only way to save people. You understand? There are millions of kids left. Here, the rest of the country, all the way down south to Tierra del Fuego. The only way to save everyone is for everyone to be in the same boat.”
“Everyone's infected⦔ I say to myself. I remember the chaos. The electricity going down. The food running out. Society rupturing.
“Nobody needs to die, Peter. The symptoms are only
starting
to show now. And they can develop cures for each of the strains. But to do that, they'll need your blood.”
“
My
blood?”
“Who do you think we got it from? You and your friends. That'll be our export, Peter. The genetic information they need to make cures. In return, the rest of the world keeps us supplied, until we can set the country on its feet again. But none of this works unless we have the means to defend ourselves. That's why we need the football.”
I understand. I'm not saying I agree. I'm saying I understand the idea. We have the Cure. We have the nukes. We need something to trade. And it's us. Part of us, anyway.
“Brainbox,” I say. “You killed Brainbox.”
“I
shot
Brainbox. I didn't mean to kill him. But he was trying to stop me from doing what I had to do, for the good of everyone else. I regret it. I wish that I had had time to explain. He wasn't well, Peter. He wasn't in his right mind. You know that yourself. And he had his hands on the nuclear codes and the football. I had to stop him.”
I do remember how strange Brainbox was in the last days, how withdrawn and cold he had been since SeeThrough died. I wasn't there, to know if Chapel was telling the truth. But I do know that, with his last breaths, Brainbox didn't use the biscuit to hurt anyone. He used it to get help for his friends.
What can I do now, though? Now that I know. If the rest of the world is infected⦠If Evan still has the nukes⦠What can I do but help Chapel?
“Peter,” he continues, “I'm sorry I couldn't tell you this before. I swore an oath. And nothing could make me break it, not even how I feel about you.”
I push that thought from my mind. A last question occurs to me.
“Why?” I say. “Why do this for us?”
“Not just you,” says Chapel. “All of us. Everybody who never had a chance. âYour tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.' Do you know that poem? It was written by an American, Emma Lazarus. It's inscribed inside the Statue of Liberty. There are plenty of people who need land, and space, and resources, and they're willing to help a young countryâa
literally
young countryâget on its feet.”