by Chris Weitz
He looks me in the eyes. Then—mouth to ear.
Jefferson: “I don’t want to go back. But if we don’t… everybody dies.”
I don’t have a good answer to that, not one I can speak out loud. The only answer I can think of is, Yeah, but what about us? But I don’t say it.
I don’t want to go back to the danger and the misery and the stink. Not now that I’ve gotten away. I don’t want to fear for my life or for his. I want to just lie here with him forever, or for the next longest period of time available.
And also I want—is this wrong?—to live. To go somewhere. To see the world, or what is left of it. To sit in a quiet café and write self-indulgent crap in a journal. To go online and buy a song. Walk the dog. Tweet. Have kids. I can’t see this happening in a big way back in the post-apocalyptic wasteland we just left.
What should happen is that the navy just whip up a bunch of antidote and save the day. Brainbox could show them how to do it—anyway, they already know how, otherwise they wouldn’t be alive in the first place. Chapel said something about “transgenic shift,” which sounds like a shitty post-punk band. Like maybe the Sickness has been mutating into something else, so they need to be sure they’ll be immune to the new strain before they go back. Transgenic shift or no transgenic shift, they should just grow a pair of balls and cruise into New York harbor, or whatever, and start helping people. The kids in New York don’t even have a notion that the rest of the world has made it.
Then a nasty little thought traipses into my brainpan, which is—tell Ed the Interrogator or Admiral Whatsisface what’s going on. Rat out that guy Chapel and the Resistance. Then nobody would have to go back, and I’d have Jefferson and our friends safe and sound.
But I can’t find it in myself to pull a dick move like that. So I say the only thing I can. This is what you get for falling in love.
Me: “Wherever you go, I’ll go.”
They come two nights later, not three the way they told us. It’s past four in the morning—they’ve allowed us to have a clock, finally, which lets me know just how godforsaken the hour is. I’d been starting to catch up on my sleep after years of fretful waking and cold sweats. When Chapel shows up at the hatch and raps on the metal wall, for a moment I don’t know who I am or what I’m here for.
Me: “It’s too soon!”
But I know—the punch-in-the-heart feeling tells me—that we’re going.
Chapel: “Sorry. Extra precaution in case any of you dropped a dime.”
I don’t even know what that means.
In the lounge, the others are already up and equally frazzled. By the exit hatch there’s a guy in slouchy casual clothes and a beard, cradling a pimped-out carbine. He casts glances up and down the hall outside.
Captain is arguing with the midshiplady.
Midshiplady: “You’ve got to come. It’s all or nothing.”
Captain: “Then nobody’s going. This is me. Right here.”
Theo (glares at him): “What about home?”
Captain: “Man, I’m done. I served my time, a’ight? I’m not going back.”
And I get it. The first time I met Captain was on his ship, the Annie. Since the Islanders took it and burned it, he’s been grieving. But the carrier lifted his spirits—the sea and the machinery and the order. If he’s got a chance at this life… well, I’m not gonna deny him that.
Captain turns and heads back to his bunk.
The lady midshipman points a pistol at him.
Me: “Don’t!”
Theo grabs the gun, and the two of them wrestle, and the guy with the beard raises his carbine, and for an ugly moment, there’s a scrap brewing, but Chapel hisses for them to stop.
Chapel: “We’re not going to do that. That’s not us.”
By this point, Captain has turned to look at us.
Chapel: “You raise the alarm, and all of us are dead.”
Captain: “Fuck you, man. Ain’t raising no alarm.”
Beard: “Whatever we do, we gotta go do it now.”
So we leave Captain there. Theo glares at him like he hates him. Then, his fury snapping just like that, he goes and hugs him good-bye. Angry tears stream down his face when he turns back to us. Captain, face contorted with the pain of his decision, holds a hand up in farewell.
We hurry along through the metal halls. The lights are dim for once; nobody seems to be around. I keep banging my shins against the thresholds. An air of quiet, controlled panic.
Ladders, steps, hatches, Chapel navigates at speed. And suddenly, we’re up on the flight deck.
Even in the queasy purple-black of the predawn, there is clamor and movement. A big fighter jet is idling nearby, and its engine sounds like an endless scream. The crews in color-coordinated jumpsuits seethe around it over the immense plateau of the runway, past the massive stays of the arresting cable.
At a signal from Chapel, somebody somewhere looses the cable, and it springs free from its moorings with a horrific clang, snaking across the deck, a lethal metal rope as wide as a man’s leg.
A tumult of shouting and barked commands, and the crews are sucked in by the vortex of habit and the hurry to fix it, and Chapel motions us across the deck.
As I hurry, I can feel the sick lurching of the ocean underneath—I see the other ships that lie off the sides rise and fall, like buildings in the shock wave of an earthquake, and I stumble. Jefferson grabs me by the elbow and pulls me up.
We come into the blast zone of a big helicopter’s chop, the wake of the rotors blowing my hair back and stunning my senses raw. It’s gassing up, a snaking rubber line fastened like a limpet pumping fuel into its belly. I gag on the turpentine smell.
An argument is in progress—or in lack-of-progress. A sailor with a yellow helmet and yellow sleeves is pointing at a sheaf of papers on a clipboard. I make out the words “not cleared.” Opposite him, a marine is barking back.
Barely pausing, Chapel takes an oblong object from his pocket and holds it to the yellow guy’s neck. There’s a crackling sound and a burst of purple spark, and he flops to the ground. Chapel motions us through the square hatch of the chopper.
We’ve barely squeezed in before we hear shots. Chapel scurries to a corner of the hold.
There, Admiral Whatsisface is secured to the hull by a ratchet strap. His mouth is covered with duct tape. His face is red.
The marine pulls himself up from the deck, then with the cracking sound of a shot, he falls backward. The guy with the beard fires over my shoulder, and the report of the gun deafens me.
So what happens now happens on mute.
First, I look out the hatch at the marine, and I see a pool of blood guttering out of him. And then I see that the blood is merging with a slick of some other liquid. And I realize that it’s fuel. The hose is punctured and leaking.
Then I see the lick of flame not so far away, I see a crew of men in white running for a fire hose, I see the squad of marines with their guns trained on the helicopter.
I see the flame running up the fuel hose.
I see the fuel hose still stuck to the helicopter’s gut as the flame climbs toward it.
So I jump out of the chopper. I scrabble along the deck toward the port where the fuel hose links up.
I grab the end of the hose and my hands slip. The flame gets closer and closer as I pull at the hose.
And I go with a lurch from hoping that I can fix it and get back to the helicopter to hoping that I can just get the thing loose and set the others free before I die.
I hear shouting behind me and look back, and I see Jefferson leaning out the door of the chopper, held back by the guy with the beard and Chapel. He’s shouting my name.
And I twist the collar at the end of the hose, and the housing opens with a satisfying clack, and the hose falls to the ground as the flame catches and it gouts fire across the deck.
And Chapel shouts something to the pilot, and the chopper rises from the deck.
And I slip and fall and feel
the metal deck smash me in the face, and I can barely roll over to see the chopper diminish and diminish as the blades pull it away into the sky.
I want to get up and catch it, but my legs won’t move.
So I watch as it disappears into the low clouds, and inside I say good-bye.
I SHOUT DOWN to Donna until Chapel pulls me back from the door and the man with the beard slams it closed. Then he peels me off Chapel and smashes me against the metal insides of the craft. Chapel is coughing and rubbing the skin where my hands were around his neck.
“Take us back,” says Peter, who has the female midshipman’s pistol. He points it at Chapel, and Beard points his snub-nosed carbine at Peter.
“Too late,” says Chapel, coughing. “We go back, and we’re all finished.”
“Put the gun down,” says Beard.
Peter looks at him and doesn’t put the gun down.
“She did good,” says Beard. “She put it on the line, and she saved all of us. You can’t ask for more than that.”
Peter wipes his eyes, but he still holds up the gun, pointing death at Chapel.
“Now we gotta do what we can,” says Beard. “Make what she did worth it. Put the gun down, dude. What’s past is past.”
Peter lowers the gun and hides his head in his arms.
I raise myself against the lurching gravity of the helicopter’s ascent. I look out the little hatch next to the door just in time to see the Ronald Reagan, a toy on a dance floor of dark blue glass, vanish as we hit the clouds. Then we’re in a big white nothing, no indication of where we’re going except the buffets of the air and the urging momentum of the aircraft in my guts. And the thought she’s not here dissolves into I will never see her again.
Nothing to see. I slide down the side of the hull and crouch in a corner. The walls are cold.
Across from me is Admiral Rosen, staring and astonished.
Chapel didn’t mention anything about taking hostages. I wonder if something went wrong. But then a roar and a juddering shock to the craft make me realize why the admiral is with us.
A big Navy Hornet buzzes the chopper, streaking past like a shark sniffing out a swimmer. We’re dead in the air, but the admiral onboard means they have to think twice about taking us out.
I take inventory. There’s Peter and Brainbox, and the stone killer with the beard, and Chapel. There’s a pile of gear secured to the inside of the fuselage, and from the markings, I can make out that it’s ammunition, explosives, and medical supplies. A square box I take to be a radio. A rack of assault rifles—M16s, I think, not the semiautomatic AR-15s I’m used to.
I remember we’re going back to New York and feel sick to my stomach. And my arms burn with adrenaline, and my head aches with the thought, which starts to cycle round like a laptop’s waiting icon—she’s gone, she’s gone, she’s gone.
But really I’m the one who’s gone; it was my decision to leave. She is where she was. And she’s alive.
Weeks ago, as we made our way from far downtown, the Square, to the charnel house at Plum Island, I was sure that I was committing one sin after another against self-preservation and common sense. But somehow I failed upward, and by and by, I came to think of the accumulation of poor choices as adding up for the good. Now I’m on the deficit side again, far in the red.
I contemplate the wreckage of my hopes, which lie invisible in my lap. This is what you get for being happy.
The helicopter swings into clear air, and I see the two forks of Long Island against a line of shimmer in the distance. And pacing us, the squadron of fighters, occasionally whipping into our space.
Chapel says, “They’ll turn back now that we’re in sight of land. We were under orders to stay out of visual.”
The planes do peel away, and we lumber onward. The pilot keeps the razor-thin edge of land just in sight, but slides a ways west. When I ask Chapel where we’re going, he pretends not to have heard.
Finally, we duck toward land, a controlled plummet that takes us screaming over the waves and, in a moment, across a thin spit of beach and over a highway. We skim over a chain-link fence and, with an abrupt backing and settling, land on an airfield lined with little prop planes under moth-eaten tarps. The pilot shuts the rotors off, and the quiet suddenly burrows into my ears.
Beard, unfazed by the sudden jerks of the landing, hops from the helicopter and scrambles to a nearby hangar. He shoots the lock off the little door to the side of the big gate, and after a while, the gate opens. Beard is driving a squat little vehicle like a tractor, using it to heave open the hangar. He signals to Chapel, and Chapel orders (or directs—or ushers—I’m not sure where we stand) everyone out of the chopper and into the hangar. The admiral is bundled in last; he resists at first, but a few raps on the head from the midshipwoman get him moving.
The inside of the hangar is a vast hollow edged with machinery and fuel drums. The little tractor has a twin sitting there unused, and other curious-looking vehicles of various sizes and obscure purposes perch here and there.
Beard fetches a long chain from the depths of the hangar, and he and Chapel struggle it out the door. I find myself helping them. We thread the chain through a steel eyelet at the tail of the chopper and attach it to the little tractor. Beard mounts and fires it up. It takes a bit of doing, since the chain threatens to break under the strain, but soon the helicopter is in and the hangar doors are closed. There were maybe five minutes when we might have been noticed—visitors from a world now beyond the imagination of anyone still surviving here in the kingdoms of the Sickness.
We spend the next couple of hours unloading. There’s food, tents, guns, ammunition, and medicine, including cases of what appears to be the Cure.
The admiral sits against one of the corrugated iron walls, remote and impassive. It appears to be the midshipwoman’s job to keep an eye on him, but after a while, she moves on to more productive things and helps the rest of us with the unloading.
Beard does some techy stuff with little gewgaws that look like baby monitors, except for being matte black (because, presumably, everything he uses has to be particularly badass-looking). He places one at the edge of each door—there’s another gate at the back of the hangar—and wires them up to a battery in the chopper. Something tells me they’re motion sensors, but to be honest, I have no idea if that’s just a notion I got from watching Aliens. Anyway, they’re pointed outward—the aliens in question being, I suppose, the natives, which is to say whatever kids might have survived up to this point in the suburban wilderness surrounding the airfield.
I wonder whether they’ve gone feral in these parts, like the tweens the Old Man had working for him on Plum Island, amped up on video games and some sort of homebrew meth. Even they wouldn’t pose much of a threat, given the armament we’re packing.
“What’s all this about?” I ask. “Did we run out of gas or something? When do we go back to the city?”
Beard and Chapel exchange a look. “It’s complicated,” says Chapel.
“No, it isn’t,” says Theo. “We’ve got a cure, and people are sick.”
“Who gets it first?” asks Chapel.
Theo says, “Harlem,” and I say, “Washington Square,” at the same time.
“That’s my point,” says Chapel. “We’ve got to think this through. This Cure is the power over life and death.”
“That’s right,” says Theo. “My life and death. And my people. You don’t have the right to keep it from us.”
“I think we do,” says Beard, and I note that he’s the only guy currently carrying an assault rifle.
“Jefferson,” says Chapel, “you were the guy who started this, right? Back in Washington Square?”
“Yeah…”
“Do you know for a fact you can trust the—whatever you call it, tribe in Harlem?”
“Fuck you, man,” says Theo.
I think about how we ended up in Harlem at the mercy of Solon. He was ready to kill all of us until we promised him the Cure. He
probably never expected us to find it, but he was pretty sure that if we didn’t, we’d get killed before we could give away his secret—the cache of guns they were printing out of plastic. Enough to overwhelm the Uptowners.
I promised Solon that we would share the Cure with the Harlemites. In return, we got transport to Plum Island. And we were allowed to live.
“We made a deal,” I say.
“At gunpoint, right?” Chapel knows everything. Looks like he had access to all the interrogation logs.
He looks to Theo. Theo doesn’t have an answer.
“I’d say the situation has changed materially, wouldn’t you?” says the midshipwoman. “The deal has got to change, too.”
“They’re just trying to get between us, man,” says Theo.
Theo’s right, of course. Now Chapel takes another tack.
“You need to think, really think, about what to do next. What’s going to happen if we just show up and tell everybody not only that they can be cured of the Sickness but that they’re not alone in the world?”
So I think about it. Ever since the Sickness hit, we had all been living like there were only so many tomorrows. And without any notion of order or law or government, we’d made our own tribes and our own rules, a patchwork of little fiefdoms. The Cure and the truth of what had happened in the rest of the world—call it the Knowledge—would change everything.
I wanted to believe that everyone would throw down their arms and embrace one another, drop the trappings of war and coercion and return to the way they’d been. But my heart tells me that it wouldn’t be as pretty as that. It tells me that the new social contract would be written in blood. Once the light of survival started peeking through the door, people would trample one another to death in the race for the exit.
It would be a bloodbath. What the Cure would save, the Knowledge would destroy.
“Okay,” I say, “talk.”
ALL THE SEATS face backward in this big-ass plane, which I guess is because it’s safer in case the damn thing crashes. There’s been, like, zero concession to luxury—forget having to return your seat to its upright position, because it doesn’t move from its upright position in the first place. And there’s, like, ten seats per row. Plus, they’re made of crappy plastic and canvas and not pleather like in commercial airliners. And you can forget in-flight entertainment. I’m stuck without anything to watch or do, and Ed the Interrogator is not in the mood to loan me reading matter or anything.
