The Revival (14 page)

WHEN THEY DRAG WAKEFIELD AND THE
other Gurkha dude in, my homey Guja and me are watching from a sort of crawl space above a big disused restaurant set in the vaulted guts of the station. Gooj scoped it out—behind an access door marked
MAINTENANCE ONLY
. Turns out he's an infrastructure geek, has plans to be a building inspector once he's finished decapitating people. Below us, through a metal grating with little holes that look like stylized flower petals, I can see a U-shaped counter topped with white Formica, strangely cafeteria-like amid the churchy formality of the oily redbrick walls. It's some kind of board meeting of the Uptown Confederacy. These boys are nasty pieces of work from the various private schools that dotted the Upper East Side.

Among them, I recognize Evan immediately, his hair as blond and his cheekbones as high as ever. Observing him unnoticed from up here, without the distraction of his trying to kill me or vice versa, I consider him abstractly for the first time.
Abstractly
, he's every bit as good-looking as his sister. They both have that Nordic, WASPy thing going on.

But he's strangely unsexy. Oh, it's not just that he's a psychopath and murderer. I mean, when has that ever stopped anybody from finding somebody hot? All those serial killers who got girlfriends through the mail?

There's something about Evan, though—it's like your libido just bounces off the surface of his handsomeness. The Bad Boy appeal goes only so far until it curdles into something off-putting. In fact, his classical features are part of what makes him downright repulsive. The contrast between appearance and reality is too perverse; he's a flower growing out of shit.

And then in walks Chapel.

When we first met, I was in the brig of the
Ronald Reagan
, slowly going crazy from isolation. He appeared like a dream in the middle of the night and laid out the state of the world, at least as he wanted me to understand it. I learned that the rest of the globe had survived the Sickness and was held together with spit and glue and constant surveillance and the United States Navy. Chapel said he was from a group that called themselves the Resistance, which aimed to free humanity from the yoke of global tyranny and stuff.

But there was more. Or at least, I thought so. An affinity… an attraction. After a while, Chapel visited me for reasons other than political instruction.

I thought I was in love. I was ready to follow him anyplace.

And I guess I did follow him anyplace, given that I'm bent over in a crawl space in Grand Central. Rats be going by like,
What are you doing here?
Guja backs away, like he might have signed up for combat but not
rodents
.

While I fell for Chapel, Jefferson, of course, fell for Chapel's con. He told us about the Reconstruction Committee's plot to let all the surviving kids in the US die off before moving in to, as Chapel vividly put it,
scrape off the goo and restart the factories
.

So when he claimed he wanted to Save the Children, we were all on board, and we worked to get back to the last place I wanted to go—New York.

As for what Chapel wants
now
, or what he really wanted in the first place, who knows. Maybe he actually does want to Fight the Power. Maybe he just wants to Be the Power. Either way, since he's got the biscuit, in theory he can pretty much do what he likes, on account of anytime he wants he can blow up the world.

This is, of course, a much,
much
bigger issue than the fact that he took off without saying good-bye. But you know, human nature is what it is, so the very personal experience of dumpage somehow manages to outweigh the geopolitics for me. I'm ashamed to say it
almost
feels as present to me as the fact that he shot Brainbox. Damn. Can't even get my head around
that
yet.

Regardless, right now Chapel is surrounded by brutal, heavily armed ex-private-school boys. I can't imagine Evan is going to be content with entourage status and just let somebody else run the world, so there's a reasonable chance that Chapel's going to end up with his throat cut. Which I guess would be satisfying in a that's-what-you-get-for-what-you-did kind of way, except that the only thing worse than Chapel with his finger on the button is Evan with his finger on the button. I have, like, minimal respect for that kid's good sense. Him and his sister both.

“Look, Peter,” Guja's whispering urgently.

Wakefield and the Gurkha are shoved through the doors of the Oyster Bar and down to their knees in front of Chapel, Evan, and the Uptowner bigwigs. Something about the curve of the high ceiling makes it easy to hear the conversation that follows.

CHAPEL WON'T LET ME HOLD THE COOKIE
or the biscuit or whatever, which is fucking lame of him. Like he thinks I'm going to fiddle around with it and launch a bunch of nuclear missiles by accident or something. Like I'm a five-year-old. Like he's Dad, so he gets to hold the remote.

I guess I can't figure out a particularly good reason why I
need
to hold it at the moment, other than that I want to, and that Chapel doesn't want me to. It's the old “want” and “need” thing again. I remember my father dadsplaining it to me in that particularly smug way that made me want to smash his teeth in with a hammer.

Dad liked to claim that most of what we think we
need
is actually what we
want
—this was usually because I told him I needed a car, or some cool shoes, or whatever. He even said that human wants were limitless. Like, once you had something you thought you needed, which really was just something you wanted, you always found something else to want, even if, in the end, what you wanted most was more time on earth.

One day, I thought I had him because I said I could think of a need, which was air, and then he said,
Well, could you think of a situation in which you might be willing to sacrifice your life for something?
And I thought,
Absolutely not
.

But I wanted to seem like a “good person,” so I said yes, and he said,
Ah, you see? You didn't actually need air in that case because you put something else you wanted ahead of it. In fact, you'll find that when it comes down to it, there is no such thing as a need at all.

Which was kind of his assholish way of saying I wasn't going to get the convertible for weekends out in the Hamptons, which was totally unfair. He was really difficult to argue with at times like this, so I waited until I had a good comeback.

It was a few weeks into What Happened, after the Internet had gone down, and the doctors and the nurses had left, and the cook and the maids had quit. Dad had caught the Sickness and Mom was avoiding him like the plague (ha-ha), and he was stuck in his filthy bed in his huge bedroom upstairs.

I entered his room after knocking softly, like he'd want me to, and I walked over to his bed and sat by his side and smiled. He wasn't used to my giving a shit about him, so I think he was really touched, even though he couldn't speak by that point.

Dad, I want you to know that, no matter what happens, I will always remember you, and everything you've told me over the years.

A glimmer in his eyes. He could hear me.

Like, remember that time you told me that you didn't need air?

Confusion.

Then I put my hand over his mouth and pinched his nose shut. I know that the traditional method is with a pillow, but if you do it that way, you don't get to see their face as they're dying.

I thought about DNA, and how I was cutting short the particular strain that had led to me. A phrase ran through my mind:
destroying the evidence
.

Then I thought about whether killing him wasn't actually merciful, since he already had the Sickness, and that was almost enough to make me take my hands away. But by then I was too busy making my point, and I didn't want to show weakness. Dad had always tried to beat and harass weakness out of me. So maybe in some way he was proud, you know, of his decisive son, who stayed the course. But he didn't look proud. He looked frightened.

I suppose, Dad, you could say I don't
need
to do this. I just really want to.

That was the last thing he heard, the last thing his brain processed before he stopped and then I stopped.

I went out and told Sis. She called me a monster. But she looked grateful to me for the first time in her life.

I wondered if it mattered that, after all he had done to me and Sis, his last thoughts were of defeat and betrayal and humiliation. Or was the fact that he was now dead the more important thing—that everything, all his memories, were wiped from the universe—and how it had ended was irrelevant?

Of course,
I
was here, and alive, and that was what really mattered, and I would carry inside me the beautiful memory of his ultimate destruction.

But I digress.

Dad's socioeconomic theories aside, I have worked a lot in my short life at distinguishing
want
from
need
—there were a lot of sessions with clever Jewboy Dr. Klein where we talked about nothing but that—so I'm pretty evolved. Back in the day, I might have just blasted Chapel and kept the biscuit, but I realize that this may not be in my long-term interest. I do make a little mental note to add this to my Reasons That I Am Going to Put a Bullet in Chapel's Head at Some Point Down the Line, but for now, I just hand it back to him with a smile.

Let me do the talking,
he says.

Another reason added to the list.

Then they bring in the prisoners, a tall, old white guy and a scrappy, little brown guy in military gear. My bros sit up and ooh and aah. At some point, I guess we'll get used to seeing old people again but not yet. They look freakish, all crow's-feet and patches of sickly gray hair.

The hell are you?
I say. I'm not going to leave all the talking to Chapel. He looks at me sidelong. Neither of the prisoners says anything, but I catch them looking at the fat black briefcase by my chair and the biscuit in Chapel's hands.

British special forces,
says Chapel,
judging by their uniforms
. He says it in a way like,
I know what I'm doing and you don't, so step off
.

What are “British special forces” doing here?
I ask him.

Chapel looks annoyed, as if he doesn't want me to show our hand by revealing what we don't know, or something. But the way I figure it, we're the guys with the guns and they're the guys with their hands zip-tied behind their backs, so it can't really hurt to cut to the chase. I'm showing them that they are totally in my control by not holding my cards close to my chest. Like,
Look all you want because this is only gonna end with my boot on your neck anyway
.

Still not a peep from the oldsters.

As I told you,
says Chapel,
the American Reconstruction Committee is centered in the UK
.

So why didn't they send some ass-kickers from the US to find the football, once they knew it had been located?

Then I figure it out. Because to get the job done, you might have to kill some folks, and it's much easier to kill foreigners than your own people, right? Because the lives of foreign people aren't worth as much. That's why in the news when there was an accident or something, it would always go, like,
One hundred twenty-six people feared dead, twelve Americans on board
, because American people put a different value on American lives. And British people put a different value on British lives, and Tanzanian people put a different value on Tanzanian lives. It's natural. That's why we found it so easy to bomb the shit out of other countries—because foreign kids mattered, like, some fractional amount of our own kids because they were far away and they looked different.

Anyhow, it stands to reason that if you wanted to go kick ass and take names here in the Big Apple, you would send some dudes who didn't feel particularly upset about killing the locals, like a bunch of limeys and other foreign types.

They think they can treat us like we're not from the first world or something. This makes me angry, and they're not saying boo in response to my questions anyway, so I make a snap decision, raise my AR-15, and—
BrrrAAAAP
—put a few bullets into the little brown guy.

He falls backward, and since he and the other dude have been tied together, it drags
him
backward, too, and what with the noise and the smell of gunshots, there's quite a commotion.

Chapel looks at me like I'm crazy, which is good, because I want him to think that. Like, best to remind him that he is in
my
house and he should ask before going into the fridge.

My guys snip the bonds between the now-dead little guy and the now-freaked-out big guy. I bet he has had some kind of antitorture training or whatever, but that would help you if you were dealing with rational people. Whereas he is dealing with me.

He looks, to say the least, wrong-footed.

Now I know we're on the same page. This way, there's no need to shout (a) because it's suddenly very, very quiet and (b) because, you know, when you kill somebody, you kinda have the floor anyways.

I'd just like to clear the air, get to the point, that sort of thing,
I say.
By now it's probably obvious that we have the biscuit, and I figure you're looking for it. Am I right?

I look at the guy, and he nods, almost automatically, before his better instincts have the chance to override his survival instinct (which, if you ask me, is the
best
instinct there is).

The other dudes you were with, that was all the people who they sent, right?

Wakefield says,
Support staff, back in the park
.

That's right,
I say.
Zeke?
I call out to one of my best bros.
Go peep on them, right, see what they're up to?

Zeke nods and heads out, his shaggy hair flopping back and forth. I don't have loads of people to spare, what with the chaotic state of affairs that the arrival of the Grown-ups has brought, but this seems like a pretty good use of resources. I will not miss him if he gets erased.

I feel like we're finally getting places. Now my colleague Mr. Chapel will take over.

Chapel has now recovered some of his composure, which went out the window after I unfriended the little guy. He turns back from the aisle he's been pacing.

Not exactly military discipline, Colonel,
says Chapel.
I apologize. I think it should be obvious that we both find ourselves a little out of our comfort zone.

The British guy gives Chapel a look like he's not having any of this attempt at a bonding moment. Like, the whole good cop deal.

But,
continues Chapel,
as you can see, I have fallen on the winning side of the equation for now.

So it seems.
Finally, the guy speaks, and like most people, he can only figure out how to act based on shit he saw on TV. Hence, the underplayed attitude, like he's been through this kind of thing before.

Name?
asks Chapel.

Wakefield,
the guy says.

Wakefield, there's a way that everybody can get out of this alive, with his skin and his dignity intact.

Except for Private Bahadur.
The guy nods toward his dead buddy.

Yeah,
says Chapel.
I would have advised against that. But we're dealing with a bit of a loose cannon. Is that unfair?

He looks to me as he asks the question.

I'm the loosest cannon, baby,
I say.
Looser than loose. I'm not just a bad cop, I'm the worst cop
.

Chapel leaves it at that.
Now, you must have some sort of means of keeping in touch with the outside world? Sat comms? I could, of course, use this
—he indicates the biscuit—
but I'd rather not mess around with it, get me? To prevent any accidents.

The guy says nothing. Then he looks at me and reaches his zip-tied hands toward one of many gear pockets on his cool-guy uniform. I nod to one of my guys, and he searches Wakefield and fetches out a little cell-phone thing with heavy rubber grips. Brings it to me. I decide to throw Chapel a bone, so I hand it on to him.

Access code?
says Chapel.
And not the panic signal. It's in everybody's interest that we establish communications.

Wakefield tells him a series of numbers and letters, which would be hard to guess, except, of course, pretty easy if you threaten to kill the guy who has it memorized. Torture is the ultimate hack.

Chapel enters the code, and somebody must pick up immediately, as if they've been waiting by the phone like a little bitch, because Chapel says,
No, this is Chapel, USN.
Which must mean “US Navy.”

I'll wait,
says Chapel.

Then I say to him,
Speakerphone, please
.

And Chapel looks at me like he doesn't want everybody to hear, and I look at him like I don't give a shit. Chapel thumbs a button on the satphone thing and sets it on the counter.

There's the sound of some shifting around on the other end. Then somebody says,
How did you get access to this line?

I took it from your man Wakefield.

We need confirmation of that.

Chapel nods to Wakefield, who says,
This is Colonel Wakefield. I've been taken prisoner by
— He doesn't know who we are.

Uptown, bitches,
I say.