Authors: Chris Weitz
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction / Action & Adventure / General, Juvenile Fiction / Action & Adventure / Survival Stories, Juvenile Fiction / Dystopian
The Revival (12 page)
I OBSERVE JEFFERSON AND KATH
in the white gloom of the winter day, their shadows occasionally merging as they walk, touching but not touching. The moisture of their breath mingles. I wonder if they're talking about old times.
While I was away.
Can I blame them? For whatever happened? Sometimes I feel like my perspective has zoomed out, like God put his thumb and forefinger on the screen and widened the view.
Because, after all, if you had asked me a year ago if there could ever be anyone for me other than Jefferson, I would have said hell no, and thought that you were a dick for even asking.
And then along came Rab. And did Rab being in my life mean that I was wrong about Jefferson? No. I might have thought that for a moment or two, in my bedroom in Cambridge, in Rab's arms. And I felt so guilty that I cried.
But I don't blame myself now. I was so alone. I used what I had to. I used
who
I had to.
I look over at Rab, walking with his long strides, craning his head this way and that, still not used to the sheer ruin of it all. Seeing him like this, it's hard to keep my anger intact.
In a way, we all use each other. Because we can never really know each other. No matter what you do, everything that happens, everything you think and feel about someone, is filtered through your own perceptionsâyour
youness
. Maybe you can feel what it's
like
to be other people, but you never
are
them.
So when somebody says,
I love you
, you can never really know what they mean by it, even if you think you know what you mean when you say it to them. You can't even know if
they
think they mean it. All that you can know for sure is that they said those words. So what, eventually, do you have to go on? Only what's in your head.
Once, in school, these Indonesian puppeteers came in to do an assembly. Their puppets were flat, controlled by sticks from below, not strings from above. And the puppets were these amazing works of art, like gorgeously painted leather cutouts. But when you watched, you didn't look at the puppets, you looked at the
shadows
that the puppets cast on a screen because they did the performance in the dark, by the light of an oil lamp.
The way I figure it, most of the time, that's all we seeâthe image of other people's thoughts and actions, like the shadows on the screen. And because of the way the world works, we don't see the real color of things, and the shapes can be distorted. Maybe every once in a while we see the truth of things, the beauty of the puppets. But most of the time, we just see the screen. And the screen
isn't
the world. It's only how we see the world.
Is it too much to want to stop seeing the shadows, and see the puppets? To see the beautiful painted figures rather than the negative space?
Rab slows down to walk next to me, stumbling for a moment on the bloated corpse of a dog.
Rab: “Well, this is another fine mess.”
I'm not in the mood for the shadows he's throwing.
Me: “What do you want?”
Rab walks along, turning over the question with a bemused smile on his face.
Rab: “A whole lot of things. Getting out of this alive, for one. But mostly, I'd like you to talk to me.”
He looks at me with a frankness that almost doesn't seem fabricated.
Me: “I just did. Satisfied?”
Rab: “No. Of course, by saying âtalk to me,' what I really meant was, âEngage with me as though I were a person worth talking to, someone whose care and attention you value.'”
Me: “
Care and attention?
Is that what they called it back at headquarters? When they were giving you your orders?”
Rab: “No. All they said is that I should befriend you.”
I manage a scornful “Hah!” while inside, I am feeling even worse about our relationship, if you can call it that, than ever. Somehow I find it more acceptable that Rab would have been assigned to
seduce
me than to become my friend.
That
just makes me feel like a loser. Be
friend
. Jeez.
Me: “Wow. So I guess that by having
sex
with me, you were just going the extra mile for your bosses, huh? You're a regular employee of the month.”
Rab: “Good one. No. That was for me. I wanted to. I couldn't help myself.”
We've been through this before. Rab claiming that he fell for me as a side effect of insinuating himself into my company. It's an old chestnut, as they'd say back in England. The whole I-started-out-pretending-but-before-I-knew-it-I-wasn't-pretending routine.
Rab: “Why do you think I'm here, Donna?”
Me: “I think you're here because Welsh told you to go. I don't know, maybe you're supposed to trick some other poor ditz into being your
friend
.”
I hope he catches hold of the extra mustard I put onto that word.
Rab: “I'm here because I care about you. I wanted to⦠I don't know, to protect you.”
This is a laugh. The last time Rab tried to “protect” me, he nearly got the shit beaten out of him. I had to cripple a couple of townies to get his fat out of the fire. Still. Just because he
can't
protect me, it doesn't follow that he doesn't
want
to. Boys think that way sometimes.
Rab: “Donna, if you really don't feel anything⦠if everything you felt for me is gone, then I'll leave you alone.”
Me: “It's gone.”
Rab falls silent for a moment. Then: “I don't believe you.”
I make a show of being annoyed but, really,
are
they all gone? Them feels? Because if Rab ended up feeling more than he had expected, so did I. The thing is, part of me
knew
that Rab couldn't be for real. But there was another part that didn't care because it wanted him. And I went into it thinking that I would get some comfort, some attention, some warmth, some pleasure. So I told myself I could wall off my heart. Let in the physical, keep out the emotional.
But it didn't work that way. And when I found out he'd been sent to spy on me, it ripped up all sorts of things, like most of the wires that connected us⦠but all of them? No. Pulses of feeling are coming through the lines, little signals and codes and transmissions.
I look ahead to where I can vaguely see the outlines of Jefferson and Kath as they walk and talk. Are they hashing things over the way Rab and I are? Have we gone beyond love triangle to love parallelogram? It
is
a fine mess.
Rab: “He isn't what I thought he'd be.”
I look to him for explanation even though I know who he's talking about.
Rab: “I thought he'd be⦠I don't know, a paragon of virtue. The way you talked about him. Seven feet tall, radiating light.”
Now this pisses me off. It's one thing trying to get back into my, you know,
good graces
. It's another thing entirely to take a shot at Jeff.
Me: “He's a better man than you'll ever be.”
Rab smiles, pivots, does a bit of his conversational judo.
Rab: “Oh, that's probably true. Look, you think I'm being unkind because I'm jealous. But I like him
better
this way. Nobody deserves to be idolized. It's a terrible fate.”
I make a face, like I'm onto his tricks, like I disagree, but of course he has to be right; it
is
terrible to feel that you have to face up to expectations that you can't possibly meet. I suppose that's why it took me so long to come around to Jefferson in the first place. I mean, not to loving him, but to
his
loving
me
. Like by thinking so highly of me, loving me so much,
he
was somehow lesser. Like maybe he didn't see me because he saw me differently from the way I saw myself. Of course, I was assuming that I saw myself accurately, instead of in the funhouse mirror of my own fuckedupness.
And now that I consider it,
was
Jefferson even who I thought? How could he have left our people to rotâor
worse
than thatâwhile he tried to jury-rig some kind of half-assed Utopia?
But actually, that's
exactly
Jefferson. He
would
hope for the best, and he
would
try to chart the most optimistic course through this sea of blood.
And that's exactly why he really needed me aroundâto slap some sense into him. An idealist can be every bit as dangerous to, like, the common good as a predator.
I realize that Rab is looking at me, maybe assessing the effect of his words, like a chef inhaling the aroma of an ingredient he's just added to the dish. And he
has
done something, I admit. He shifted Jefferson somehow in my perceptions.
I used to think feelings were just feelings and nothing could change them, least of all words. But words, even though they're light as air, thicken into ideas, add up into actions, and actions
do
move things.
Me: “Stop.”
Rab takes it as a rebuff, but that's not what I mean. What I actually mean is, like, stop
walking
.
There's a barely visible wire extended across the street, from the corner of the park to the junked car on the other side.
I hold up my hands, and everybody stops in a line, before hitting the trip wire.
I hear the staticky cough of a walkie-talkie. I look up and around, and see telltale little gleams of plastic and metal. I turn to the others.
Me: “I think now would be a good time to put our guns on the ground and get on our knees.”
Kath: “The hell are you talking about?” She doesn't see what I'm noticing.
Then they appear, five of them from behind the park wall, five popping up from their perches in the buildings to the north, another five from straight ahead out of a box truck they're using as a checkpoint. Rifle barrels all focused on us.
I put my gun down and kneel, and the others do accordingly. I shout to the approaching Harlemites.
Me: “We want to speak to Solon.”
After a pause, a familiar voice, deep and rumbly, comes back:
Theo: “So do I.”
He emerges from behind a parked car and strolls up to the wire.
Me: “Theo.”
Theo: “Donna. Long time.”
I want to give him a hug, but two things prevent me. One, the trip wire. Two, Theo's manner, which is, like, Switzerland at best. Leaning toward Venezuela. The guns are still up and pointed at us.
Theo: “Solon's gone. Nobody knows where.” He looks at Jefferson. “I see you're still hanging out with some ratched-ass company.”
Kath: “Is that any way to welcome me back?”
Theo sees Kath for the first time. He cracks a smile.
Theo: “What's up, girl? Glad you're alive. And the twins.”
Anna and Abel: “Hi, Theo!”
Theo waves at the twins, then composes his face into a studied neutrality again. His soldiers, whose hostility had slackened in the exchange of greetings, tighten their grips on the plastic guns they're sporting.
Theo: “Gotta take you in, y'all. You know the drill. Hands behind your backs. You're gonna meet the new president.”
“SO WHAT'S YOUR STORY?” I ASK
GUJA.
He's stumping along the ashy-dark tunnel next to me.
“Story?”
“Yes. Where are you from, how did you get here, favorite band, so on and so forth.”
He looks at me blankly at first, and I figure he doesn't know what I'm talking about, but he says, “Nepal.”
“Oh,” I say. Haven't really thought much about Nepal. “I thought you were from Britain.”
He laughs. “No, we
fight
for Britain.”
“Why's that? What did they ever do for you?”
He laughs again, a bright sound, almost a giggle, which seems out of keeping with his whole kill-on-command thing.
“They pay me,” he says.
“So when this is all done, you going to move back to Nepal?”
“Maybe. Maybe I bring my family to England.”
“Family?”
Another laugh, as though it were stupid to think anyone
wouldn't
have a family. “Wife, two girls, two boys.”
“So⦠they're probably kind of worried about you.”
He shrugs.
We walk on a bit farther. Then he says, “Coldplay.”
“Excuse me?”
“Favorite band. Coldplay.”
A chest-high platform opens up in front of us, and I realize that we're at the edge of the number 6 line, just a couple of levels down from Grand Central and the Bazaar. We've made it this far without seeing anybody, not even Mole People. Guess word of the massacre got around, and nobody thinks to hide down here anymore.
I turn to Titch. “It's best if I take a look-see first. No way can you pass for a kid up there. Sorry, gorgeous.” I smile at Titch's beautifully battered heavyweight's face.
“Can't let you go alone, Peter,” says Titch. “Can't risk the possibility of you scarpering, begging your pardon.”
“Okay, I don't know what
scarpering
means, but I'm gonna guess that it's something like ârunning away.'”
“That's about the size of it. If you're anything like Miss Zimmerman, you'll have a talent for buggering off without anybody's say-so.”
“But we're gonna get about ten feet if I have a gigantic grown-up in tow.”
“Take 'im, then.” He means Guja. “He's got a baby face, in'e?”
I take a long look at Guja, and I decide that he could just about pass muster, given his height challenges.
“Fine. It's a deal. But he's got to lose some of the whole military look.”
Guja removes his outer camo tunic, revealing a cute little undershirt. Now the rest of his equipment looks more like a fashion statement and less like professional gear. He keeps his weird knife, which frankly isn't much stranger than half the weapons you see kids carrying around anyhow.
“You go in, find out where the biscuit is, then come down and we figure out how to get it back. That, of course, will probably involve our skill set.” He means himself and Guja. And he means killing.
“How many times have you been in the Bazaar?” asks Guja.
“Once or twice,” I say breezily. Then, “Okay, once.”
“Lovely,” says Titch.
“It is,” I say. “Nobody will recognize me.” Though I'm not too sure even of that.
“All right,” says Titch. “No faffin' about, right?”
“Yes. Whatever that means.”
I turn and heave myself up onto the platform, and Guja follows. I realize, suddenly, that I'm in charge, instead of letting somebody else lead by default. It's weird because I've kind of gotten used to playing a secondary role. Like I believed all those movies in which it's always a white straight dude who's the hero. But now, it's, like, once you're past hierarchy, past perceived notions of who's supposed to do what, you get to lead by the power of your ideas.
But what
are
my ideas? Other than a vague notion of seeing Chapel again and either shooting him in the head or falling into his arms, I'm not sure. I guess saving the world from nuclear destruction ought to fit in there somewhere.
We travel up the stairways and corridors we fled down long ago, the scent of fresh air billowing from above, the armpit closeness of the underground giving way. The sound of humans gets louder and louder, like the garbled stew of words at a party when the speakers have blown out and the talk surges.
I'm remembering the first timeâthe only timeâwe came to the Bazaar. We were hoping to restock on ammunition and food. It was a full-on entrepreneurial jamboree occupying several levels of the old Grand Central train terminal, with hundreds of stalls and stores and bars and restaurants. That might imply something clean and orderly and hygienic, but it was more your teenage Mad Max gallows-humor riff on all of those things, with establishments like Slay Mart and Snack Food Glory Hole.
I
loved
it.
Didn't feel like leaving. The place seemed perfect. But there was a hitch. The place was controlled by the bank. And the bank was controlled by the Uptowners.
Anyway, the one good thing you could say about
them
, I mean if you were inclined to do that sort of thing, is that they were pretty big on law and order. So I'm surprised when we climb to the lower level of the Bazaar. There's no skinhead in camouflage guarding the subway exit like I remember from before. Maybe all available ex-lacrosse-player rapists are off fighting Wakefield and his squad.
But then I see the dead bodies, just sort of abandoned there on the tiles of the food court. Now, the Uptowners weren't sentimental or reverential of human life or anything, but they knew that rotting corpses weren't good for business. Moving around the bodies, there's a manic, gyrating crowd. Something's definitely up.
Stallkeepers scan the crowd warily. A kid grabs something, runs, and gets a crossbow bolt in the back. A necklace of Mardi Gras beads spills out of his hand, and he wheezes out his last breath. People just walk past him, over him.
You wouldn't have said it was exactly
civilized
the last time we were here, but it all made a kind of sense. It was all about
getting and spending
, as my homeboy Willy Wordsworth put it.
Now, though, it feels like there's a tumult beyond immediate desires. A buzzing restlessness, aimlessness, madness in the eyes of the people around us.
Beside me, Guja coughs from the diesel-scented air, and I turn to see him gawking at the high arched ceiling. He takes in Kentucky Fried Rat, International House of Handjobs, the Junkie Monkey. Rent boys and rent girls and armed pimps cruise the crowd; hundreds of household lamps, half of them dead, hang from the walls and from ropes strung along the ceiling. Eateries and bars spill out of the bounds of the old doughnut concessions and coffee chains. The stench of diesel and rotting flesh, the avid, predatory roaches, the braying teens. A look of deep unrest suffuses his face and grips his body, like I once saw on this kid who took too many mushrooms.
Me: “Hey.
Hey.
Keep it together.” I figure his brain is reaching full culture shock and he needs a bit of a reminder. “Think of Coldplay or some shit.”
He nods, seems to regather his identity.
But the crowd is getting more out of control, and it sweeps us up in its mass, threatening to disperse us like grains of sugar in hot water. We're dragged toward the makeshift boxing ring at the center of the echoing hall, where back in the day, poor SeeThrough and Jefferson fought a pair of crazy white boys for money.
No sign of Chapel, Wakefield, or the football. There's some sort of sales pitch going on. A kid wears a kind of parody of mid-level-salesguy clothesâcollared shirt, khakis, lace-ups, all spattered with old grime and blood. At his side, a couple of Uptowner goons glower down on the crowd. The guy has a battery-powered loudspeaker that he's using to deliver his pitch.
“Now you may be asking yourself,
Self, how can we know that this is the real deal? The real, US Grade A Fancy, top-of-the-line, uncut Cure?
Well, I can vouch for it myself!”
He pats a big glass jug propped on a barstool, and the dark liquid inside sloshes back and forth a little. Kids in the crowd, worried that it'll tip over, gasp, and some of them try to make their way inside the ring. The guards in camouflage kick them off the ropes and wave guns around, promising death to the next person who climbs up uninvited.
“That's right!” shouts the salesguy. “Want to know how old I am, kiddos? I'll tell you. I'm twenty years old next week! And I've never felt better!”
Maybe he's telling the truth. It's hard to judge from his appearance, since the rigors of surviving in this place can make anybody look a little haggard. But what he's selling sure doesn't look like the stuff Brainbox and the Old Man cooked up.
The guy in the ring continues, “So you're probably wondering what kind of price we put on this Cure. What kind of price can you put on life itself? How about
twenty dollars
? Is that a good enough deal for you? They used to say that life was cheap to the UptownersâI guess it's true!”
The salesguy basks in the rapture of the crowd. He's suddenly the center of a sea anemone of hands holding bank-approved twenty-dollar bills. The guards start helping kids up one by one, and the salesguy takes their money, still working the crowd.
He starts going all Oprah. “
You
get a life! And
you
get a life! And YOU get a life!”
“Life” comes in the form of a swig of the “Cure,” administered from a dirty plastic Hello Kitty cup dipped into the jug. They drink, they faint in relief, they scream in exultation.
And the name Bugs Meany suddenly jumps into my head. You remember? In the Encyclopedia Brown books? Bugs Meany and his gang of older kids, the Tigers, were always ripping off the younger kids with bogus schemes. Then Encyclopedia would catch them in a lie and they'd have to confess.
This is kind of like that, except if you caught these boys in a lie, they'd just shoot you in the head.
All of a sudden, there's a commotion from the far side of the hall. I can see a handmade banner mounted on a pole above a mosh-pit-like disturbance in the crowd. Pictured on the banner is what at first looks like some kind of mutated human with extra limbs, or maybe a Hindu deity. But when the jostling under the banner stops for a moment, I see that it's a home-brew version of that Leonardo drawing, the one with the naked dude stretching his limbs out inside a circle. The banner jounces along as whoever is carrying it shoves their way through the crowd toward the boxing ring.
“Peter, what this is?” asks Guja, looking nervous.
“Hell if I know, G.”
The man on the banner, like the Leonardo drawing, reminds me of pictures of Jesus on the cross, at least because his arms are spread out, and as the banner drifts closer, I can make out the drawing of the face more clearly. It's stylized, with almond-shaped eyes and black hair, and the man's expression is remarkably calm. At the top of the banner, someone's painted a big red
J
. Maybe the
J
does mean Jesus?
Turns out, it doesn't.
Things get weird fast.
“Repent! Repent!” a voice calls from beneath the weird square banner.
The huckster selling the fake Cure turns to look, confused, and the Uptowner guards point their guns. But I notice a couple of kids in ragged robes slip under the bottom ropes of the ring and sneak up behind the guards, who I guess don't hear them because of all the noise. Before the guards can fire, the robed kids pull knives out of their belts and, without warning, stab the guards and take their weapons.
Now others boil up over the edges, their faces wild, their heads stubbled and scabby. They carefully pass the banner hand over hand to the ring and set it up in the middle of the canvas floor. Then they smash the jug of “Cure” to the floor.
The suit-coated salesman, meanwhile, has melted into the crowd, making a run for it. The crowd turns uglyâthey're furious that the promise of life has been taken away from them. A dude jostles me as he heads toward the boxing ring, shouting for blood.
“Repent!” says the leader of this strange new clique, which now definitely has the attention of the crowd.
In another place, at another time, two people being knifed to death would produce a panicked stampede, but here it's nothing new. The guards' blood flows toward the edge of the ring, where a little of the liquid dribbles down to the tile floor. Some kids open their mouths then lick up the Cure, or what they think is the Cure.
“Repent!” says the leader again, whose cray-looking face, with its mottled skin, stubble, and spiky eyebrows, looks weirdly familiar. “There is only one Cure!”
He holds up a yellow nylon rope, dark and discolored at the center of its length. “There is only one way out of the wilderness of the Sickness and into the paradise of New Life!” He says it like that, like some of the words are capitalized.
The kid parades around with his relic, holding it up for the crowd.