The Revival (5 page)

I WATCH THE FREAK, WHO HAS
been MacGyvering the satellite phone with laptop batteries, wheezing and twitching with his mad scientist energy. Probably that's what's keeping him alive. Maybe he can make himself genuinely useful, fix one of these Macs and fire up an old download of the
Kardashians
or something. May as well pass the time before my old posse gets through the gate and the end comes.

Jefferson looks on, smiling and nodding and occasionally offering a low, practically hummed word of encouragement. He looks up from his perch by Brainbox's feet and smiles at him like everything's gonna be okay, the eternal optimist.

Maybe this is why I saved him from the crowd. They would have torn him to pieces, sooner or later.

Call it love if you like, but really it's a sort of addiction—and I've seen enough junkies to know. Or simply call it a need. I'd save a sandwich from danger if I was hungry. Which I am.

But starving would beat what's gonna happen if I fall into the hands of Uptown.

As if summoned, as if to say,
Think of the devil
, I hear his voice:

“Sis. Hey, Sis.”

It's coming from under the gate. I look around—everyone else is nursing their wounds, preoccupied with their own shit. The twins are messing around with some ergonomic rubber-ball seat. Peter is lying under a table someplace feeling sorry for himself. Nobody to follow what's going on.

I don't say anything. I just creep toward the voice, trying to see if it can really be him.

“Sis,” says Evan. “I know you're there.”

It's him. I take the snub-nosed little Mauser from my belt. If I can figure out where he is, and I press the muzzle up close against the gate, maybe it will penetrate and get him.

“Sis, it hasn't been the same since you left,” he says. “I miss you.”

His voice sends me back to the breakfast table, long ago. A burble of traffic from twenty floors below, and Dad was using a newspaper to shield himself from human contact as he ate his paleo pancakes and rolled phone calls, murmuring to his assistant.

Evan looked up from his iPhone and saw the front page of the
New York Times
. I knew right away what he was looking at—an article about how the Islamic State was using captured women from some religious minority as sex slaves.

Evan asked for the newspaper, and Dad lowered it, looking at him.

“Since when do you read the paper?” asked Dad.

“I read it online,” said Evan, which was bullshit. Evan never
read
; he
watched
, he
played
.

“Oh? Who's the vice president?” said Dad.

“Um, let me see… Oh, I remember. The vice president is Fuck You. Am I right?”

Now, usually Dad would have just hauled off and smacked Evan one across the teeth, but lately he'd been tailing off on the domestic violence, since Evan had been getting bigger. Instead, he'd begun cutting down on Evan's inheritance, like he was assessing penalty yards.

“That'll cost you another ten thousand, sport.” He made a point of writing it down with his fountain pen on the creamy card-stock notepad he kept, bound in leather.

Evan wanted to say something back, escalate the contempt, but he didn't want to cost himself any more money, so he shut up. To reward his silence—silence had been, for years, what we kids bought things with—Dad gave him the paper when he was done. Call it behavioral conditioning.

Later, I saw Evan clip the sex slave article carefully, using one of his favorite knives to slit the edges. He put it in the file folder marked
cool shit
that he'd stolen from his internship at the hedge fund before he got shitcanned for selling coke to the analysts.

“Jerk-off material for those lonely nights?” I said.

“Go to hell, whore,” he answered, always ready with a witty retort. Then, as though he hadn't just insulted me, he confided, “Hey, did you know you can tweet at the Islamic State dudes?”

“Are you insane?” I said. “The government will track you.”

“I'm not using my real name, moron,” he said. “I pretend I'm a seeker after truth, disillusioned with our materialistic way of life, thinking of converting to Islam. They
love
that shit.”

“What the hell would you want to tweet terrorists for?”

“It's fucked up,” he said, as if that were a good enough reason. “I mean, obviously we've got to eradicate them and shit. But they do have some good ideas.”

And I thought,
I know the kind of ideas you like
. And again I repeated the magical, beautiful word to myself:
eighteen
. That's when the trust fund was going to kick in and I could get out, and the law and my parents and Evan couldn't stop me. And until then, I thought, please God keep Evan from getting the power to do what he wants.

Well, shit, God. Now you've done it. So I've decided to do something myself.

I say, “I'm here, Evan.”

He sounds genuinely touched. “I knew it. I knew it. I knew you'd never leave me for good.”

I can feel him near. I reach out the Mauser.

“Sis,” he says, “listen to me. I've been doing a lot of thinking.”

Probably not a record-breaking amount,
I say to myself.

“Yeah?”

“Let's start again,” he says. “I'm sorry for all the stuff I did. If you just open the gate, nobody's going to hurt you.”

“Keep talking,” I say. I want to get the aim right.

“Do you really want to do this?” he says. “Get hunted down like a rat, die in a hole with a bunch of losers? C'mon, open up. I can make you Queen of America.”

I pull the trigger.
BAM!
The sound is deafening; my ears crackle with aftershock. As the others try to figure out what's happening, I pull the trigger again, unload the gun. Not even a bullet left for me.

Quiet and the smell of gunshots. Jefferson and Peter look up at me, astonished. Abel and Anna run over and cling to me.

Then through the metal gate comes his laughter. Bubbling up from the silence like swamp gas.

“Wow,” he says. “I'll take that as a no, huh? Shit, you killed Mack. You remember him?”

I do.

“Couldn't happen to a nicer guy,” I say.

“Well, Sis, now you really did it. You're gonna get the full treatment now. Don't say I didn't warn you.”

And at that, I hear the
THUMP
of something igniting, and a tongue of brightness pokes through the gate.

“Shit,” says Peter. “That's a welding torch.”

The point of flame spits sparks onto the floor, where they dance around before dying.

Meanwhile, something is up with the freak.

“BB? BB?” says Jefferson, his voice unhinging. He's got the kid's face in his hands. I go over and look.

Kid's dead.

LOOKY-LOOS KEEP PEEPING
from the
trees and the long grass, but they flee as the squaddies fire warning shots. I'm trying to talk Wakefield into cutting me loose from the handcuffs, when he turns to speak to Corporal Ayers.

Wakefield: “What have you got?”

Corporal Ayers: “It was on our frequency, sir. Just a short burst of Morse code.” The way he says it makes it seem like that's extremely strange. Wakefield nods, and the squaddie continues.

Corporal Ayers: “It was a
terrible
fist, sir. All slurred innit. It's nothing but long and short bursts of static like. He's making the signal by interrupting the device's resting state. Like using static to communicate. It's actually rather clever.”

Me: “What's a ‘fist'?”

Corporal Ayers: “It's the way you do the Morse code signals, miss. Everybody's different. Dots and dashes longer or shorter than usual, spacing, that sort of thing.”

Wakefield: “What's the message?”

Corporal Ayers: “I missed the first couple of signals, but what I've got is ‘11-AppleSt-FAO-WS.'”

Wakefield (turns to me): “I've never heard of an Apple Street. Have you?”

Me: “Oh, am I out of the doghouse?”

Wakefield: “Kindly answer.”

Me: “There is no Apple Street. At least, not in Manhattan.”

Wakefield: “Does any of the rest of it make sense to you?”

I look at Ayers, who consults his notepad and repeats the message. I turn the letters over in my mind. FAO. Then I know.

Me: “It's the Apple Store. FAO is FAO Schwarz. It was a toy store. There was an Apple Store near FAO Schwarz, like right down the street from it. It's
really
close, Colonel. We've got to go.”

Wakefield: “Why do we have to go?”

My entire body is pounding.

Me: “Because it's my tribe. My friends. WS is Washington Square. And 11—it's the end of 911 and you didn't catch the beginning.”

I can tell from Wakefield's face that he's hooked. But I doubt it's out of concern for my friends.

Titch: “That frequency is only military.”

Wakefield looks up at him and nods. “Could be it.”

I think he means the signal has to have been sent from the biscuit.

Me, I know the only member of our tribe who'd be likely to know Morse code. And he happens to be the guy smart enough to figure out how to send a radio message using a doomsday device.

Brainbox is calling. Which means so is Jefferson.

JEFFERSON CRADLES HIM LIKE A BABY,
tears running down his face. I sure hope he got this worked up when
I
died.

Brainbox's eyes are closed. But he doesn't look like he's asleep. He looks like he's an
it
. A corpse.

Whatever was inside is gone and it isn't coming back, so this is no time to get sentimental.

“Jeff,” I say. “I know you feel bad, but we've got to figure something out, like, now. They're cutting their way in.”

Before he can respond, the biscuit starts beeping. I kneel down and pick it up. There's a shitty little screen, like on an old calculator from the seventies or something, and it reads
COMMAND INITIATED
.

Uh-oh.

“Uh, Jeff?” I say. “I think whatshisface might've just started World War Three.”

Jefferson glares at me. “He wouldn't do that. You're crazy.”

“Crazy is as crazy does,” I say. I feel like I'm a better judge than most. And frankly, not to throw shade on the dead and whatnot, but the kid always struck me as two sandwiches short of a picnic—especially after his waify little girlfriend got her ticket punched by that polar bear. I would absolutely not put it past him to torch the world in, like, the ultimate mad scientist mic drop.

And Jefferson feels it, too. He doesn't want to say so, I can tell, but in his mind's eye I bet he's seeing the missiles launch, starting the long loops toward Moscow and Beijing.

As if on cue, we hear a combustible whooshing.

But it's not the bombs flying overhead. It's the sound of the arc welder as the gate is finally breached, a semicircle of pleated metal crashing to the floor, leaving a giant mouse hole. The welding flame sucks up the open air, hissing with satisfaction.

I have to laugh, because what's the worst that can happen? No matter how bad things get, the end is near; I figure we have maybe a half hour before the Russians return fire and their nukes dip back into the atmosphere to fry New York.

As the Uptowners start to push in, the twins get to it, cracking heads, but they're soon tackled. I see Peter swarmed by a couple of camouflaged bros, and then Jefferson gets up and holds my hand. In his other, a pistol.

I kiss him, hard. He kisses back. Then I look at the gun. “End it,” I say.

Jefferson puts the pistol to my head. And I figure, why not? Why not by his hand? I laugh, because we could have saved a lot of time if he had just killed me the first time we met, on the subway platform.

I look into his eyes. Let it come.

Suddenly, we hear a hullabaloo from outside—“Look! Holy shit!”—and Jefferson lowers the gun. I figure,
Ah, somebody's seen the white tails of our ICBMs off to do their business of eliminating humanity
.

But that's not it, either. I hear an English accent, amplified.

“Attention. Vacate the area immediately, or we will fire. Vacate the area.”

I have no time to figure this out before Evan appears in front of us, smiling. There's another guy with him, whose name must be Chapel, because that's what Jefferson shouts—

—at just about the same time that Evan clocks me with a right cross and I tumble backward.

It's not the first time he's hit me, but it's one of the hardest, and I feel the cotton wool filling up my brain as I taste blood in my mouth.

The rest is a little hazy. I hear some shots and then the
brrrrap
of some kind of gun that I'm not familiar with. Kids are falling and running and screaming, and then the store fills with smoke pouring out of a little black canister.

An Uptowner dude stands over me and raises a big aluminum bat. And, in the old slowing-down-of-time thing that would appear, actually, to be what happens before you die, I can read the brand, Mikasa, in angular blue lettering along the side as it hangs in the air…

But before he's got a chance to bludgeon me, a strange little guy appears out of the smoke, brandishing a kind of curvy machete thing, and chops the dude's hand off. The bat clangs on the ground with the disembodied fist still gripping the handle.

Well, that's odd.

The Uptowner dude is screaming about his hand until another, much bigger guy—like, professional-wrestling size—steps up and bashes him in the face, and he goes unconscious.

“You awright, miss?” the big guy asks.

Now the thing about this guy? He's not just big. He's
old
. Like, thirty years old.

“Where is it?” says the voice I heard over the loudspeaker, only this time it's coming from the source, a square-jawed English guy in what, judging from the gray blocky print, appears to be urban-warfare camo.

Then I guess I start hallucinating, because who should I see but Donna, same shitty haircut but with a few extra pounds. Like, not quite as teenage boyish as before. Like she's been living it up someplace.

She's got a bunch of soldiers with her, some of whom are little sparkpluggy guys with sickles, like the one who just saved my bacon. The other half are more big, pasty white dudes.

Lastly, there's a copper-skinned guy with a less military air than the rest. Jeez, I thought
I
was pretty. Dude is hot.

At about this point, the events of the past few weeks—bushwhacking my way back from the island, escaping from the UN, going to ground in Midtown, trying to murder my brother—start to take their toll on me. I'm not usually the fainting type, but can you blame me? Days of ditch water and expired protein bars. Fortunately, I get that swimmy feeling before it happens, so I have a moment before the dissolve sets in. Quick, think of something pithy.

“Welcome to New York,” I say, and crumble.