by Chris Weitz
Actually, I’d trust him even if I had the choice not to. I can’t say exactly why, other than having a sense that he’s cast his lot in with us.
A Gathering of the Tribes, the first ever, is due to happen two weeks after we set off from Harlem, and the word has already gone out. That gives us ten days to free my people.
We’ve been observing Washington Square for three days now, ever since we came across Frank. We found him on Broadway, splayed across the curb, arms akimbo, back peppered with entry wounds. His body, once husky, was a testimony of scars and bruises.
Frank was a farmer’s kid from upstate, staying with family down in the Village when the Sickness hit. His folks had wanted a good education for him, so he was shipped off to this Catholic school in the city, Holy Cross down by the Square.
Life hadn’t been easy for him in the Village. The traffic and the crowds fazed him, and his classmates treated him like a rustic dumbfuck. He was miserable and homesick, but his parents wouldn’t let him give up. Frank didn’t really come into his own until the apocalypse, when his way with growing things was finally appreciated by kids at the point of starvation. They toned down the attitude once they realized that food was running out and Frank was the only guy who knew how to tease more out of the ground. Under his supervision, we tore up the green spaces of Washington Square and raised corn, wheat, and beans. He stretched out the dwindling calories provided by scavenging the abandoned groceries and Korean delis of downtown. He kept us alive through two bitter winters.
When we headed out on that last reconnoiter, I left him in charge.
Anyway, now he’s dead.
We’ve dragged him away from the ants and the rats eating his blood, and now his body is bundled up on a bed in the next room. We’ll give him a proper burial once we’ve taken back the Square.
Through Chapel’s Zeiss Victory viewfinder, I can see six of them on patrol, all male, skinheaded, in baggy camouflage. Uptowners for sure. Ten or so more are bunked up in Donna’s old infirmary.
The workers they’re supervising—my tribemates—are all boys. We haven’t seen any of the girls. From what we know of the Uptowners, this is a bad sign.
“How big a boom is this thing going to make?” I say.
Brainbox looks over. “Pretty big.”
Brainbox finishes pulverizing the dried pigeon shit and pours it into the strainer we found in the kitchen. He sets that over a ceramic bowl and turns to the chalk.
“Bring the propane and come with me,” he says.
I follow Brainbox up the stairs, hefting the squat cylindrical metal tank we found in the basement. It’s cool to the touch, much colder than the ambient temperature, and I can feel something sloshing around inside.
“Explain this to me, Brainbox,” I say. “How can this stuff light on fire if it’s cold?”
Brainbox looks back down at me. “Science,” he says.
“Well, why don’t we just use this as a bomb?”
“That’s the whole point,” says Brainbox. “You can’t just set it off. You need to initiate the explosion. So first, we make black powder.”
Brainbox finds what he’s looking for. An ordinary gas barbecue grill, the kind you think you’re going to use all the time when you buy it but never end up using because the neighbors complain about the smoke and you get tired of cleaning it anyway. We evict the family of sparrows living under the cover, then clear out the insides so there’s nothing showing but the perforated tube that the flames come out of. Brainbox hooks up the propane tank to the gas hose on the side.
The matches from the kitchen still work, and we set the grill alight. Brainbox cranks it up to max and turns the tap on the propane tank, and the flames leap up two feet high.
“Is this safe?” I ask.
“No,” says Brainbox. “Not at all.”
Brainbox starts crushing the chalk to powder and motions for me to do the same. Pretty soon we’ve got a big heap of pebbly chalk dust. We pour it into the empty bottom of the grill and close the cover. Brainbox watches the built-in thermostat as it rises and rises, eventually spiraling past the top mark on the dial.
“You might want to back up,” he says. He twists open the white-hot vent with a stick. With a hiss, smoke starts escaping.
“Looks like dry ice,” I say.
Brainbox almost smiles. “Very good. Yes, that’s carbon dioxide.”
“Bad for the environment,” I say. Brainbox doesn’t respond. Instead, he stares at the barbecue getting hotter and hotter. We wait for something.
I think about what happened before we left the Square that day, after the tribe voted me generalissimo. Donna said that I was running away. I told her the best way I knew to lead the tribe was to try to find a cure for the Sickness.
So now I have the Cure. And Donna is gone. And the Square has been taken over by our enemies. All in all, what could you say about my leadership?
After a while, Brainbox says, “You can spread limestone—that’s what chalk is, basically—on the ground, and it reduces the acidity of the soil. Makes it better for growing things.”
It takes me a second to catch his train of thought.
“You used to do that with Frank,” I say.
Brainbox nods. “Yeah,” he says. “We worked together sometimes.”
I take in his angular, careworn face. For a little while, months ago, he was happy. At least, that’s how it seemed. Then SeeThrough got killed, and I guess whatever sense he had of being just like the rest of us went out the window. He pulled his head back in and became unreadable again. Self-contained and lethal. At Plum Island, he entered into some sort of bargain with the Old Man, won his trust, and poisoned him. But before that, he had helped the Old Man experiment on us.
And thanks to that, we have the Cure. But Kath is dead. And Brainbox is… changed.
He’s always been quiet. Now he’s silent for hours, days on end. Back in the Square he’d been preoccupied; now he is obsessional. Like he’s been boiled down to a more concentrated solution of himself.
It’s things like this that absorb him now: intricate and painstaking manufacture. He has no time for the less controllable business of humankind. Watching him work, I have the strangest sense that he’s grinding and sublimating his self and not the mute matter in front of him.
Brainbox opens the barbecue and lets the fire-treated chalk cool. I help him tip the grill over, and he carefully gathers the residue in a pan.
“Calcium oxide,” he says. “Quicklime. Get upwind now.” Brainbox holds his hands as far away from him as he can and dumps the powder into a deep baking tray of rainwater. It bubbles and hisses, as if it were suddenly boiling. He orders me to add more water as he scrapes a rake through the thickening slurry.
“Slaked lime,” he says. “Use it for building mortar. Paint. All kinds of things. Now we take it downstairs.”
He gingerly picks up the tray with its complement of grayish-white goo and carries it downstairs. I follow him, realizing again how much we owed to him in the early days after What Happened. Brainbox and his occult abilities. Occult meaning, as the dictionary will tell you, “hidden.” The darkness that hid Box’s skills wasn’t supernatural; it was only our ignorance of the fabric of our own lives. We had all this magical technology but no idea of how it actually worked. That was for specialists and suppliers and corporations. Once the web of convenience was torn, we were helpless. Except for him.
Back in the apartment, I keep up the lab assistant routine. Brainbox has me hold another strainer to filter the liquid remnant of the quicklime slurry into a pitcher, then we pour this—Brainbox says it’s “limewater”—through the strainer of pigeon crap. Brainbox tells me it has something to do with the nitrates in shit, which is why terrorists used fertilizer to make bombs back in the good old days.
Box boils away the gruesome sop of strained bird shit and limewater, and the apartment is suffused with a rank chemical tang. Finally, all that’s left in the bottom of the pot is a handful of off-white cr
ystals. He scrapes them together and spoons them into a jam jar from the cupboard.
“Very Breaking Bad,” I say.
“What?” he says.
“TV. Never mind.”
At this, he goes into conversational shutdown mode. After a few fruitless tries at chatting, I get bored and wander off to explore the little apartment.
Fortunately, whoever lived here was single, so I don’t have to face any sad relics of children and family. My guess is he was a dude, since there isn’t much in the way of photos at all. In fact, the décor is downright half-assed. I start poking around his bookshelf, trying to take his measure. It’s a bit disappointing. College business textbooks and airport paperbacks.
Then I hear footsteps coming from the stairs outside the apartment. A ragged drumbeat—more than two people. I take the safety off my M4.
When I come back to the living room, Brainbox is still staring at the jar of saltpeter, shaking the crystals back and forth. I motion for him to hide, and he wakes from his reverie, but the door opens before we can do anything about it.
It’s a familiar face, though the dirt obscures it. Carolyn, one of the girls from our tribe. With her, Holly, Elena, and Ayesha, also my people. They’re raggedly dressed, sooty, and ripe, armed with baseball bats and a battered bolt-action rifle.
She precludes any question of mine with a hearty “Where the fuck have you been?”
“Long story,” I say.
Peter and Chapel follow them in, each carrying a family-size bag of charcoal.
“We better feed these girls,” says Peter. “They are hangry.”
We decide to forgo the shitty flameless MRE heating pouches, since it’s a reunion, and instead reinstate the barbecue to its former job. We open up our ration pouches—beef stew—and pour them into a big pot we set on the grill. I find some old dried pasta and boil it up in the last of the rainwater. And it turns out that business school bro had a taste for wine, so we open a few bottles of red.
“So,” says Carolyn after the first few wolfed mouthfuls. “You first or me?”
I’m remembering the last exchange I had with Carolyn, back when the Uptowners first appeared at the Square, offering to trade a pig for two girls. In a non-gender-differentiated and totally unsexual way, I had been slapping the butts of a line of gunmen as I tried to rally them to the defense. Carolyn kind of took it wrong. Sitting with her now, I suddenly feel as if none of the things I’ve seen and done since have actually happened; I’m again Wash’s insecure little brother.
“You first,” I say.
“The Uptowners came back,” says Carolyn. “And they were pissed. Something to do with you, Evan—the blond dude—and his sister?”
“Kath,” I say. “Yeah.”
“Well, he’s not your number one fan, let’s put it that way.”
“Evan’s here?”
“In the Square. Large and in charge. Yeah.”
I think back to the moment at the Bazaar when, instead of sticking a knife in his heart, I mercifully pushed him down the stairs.
“He came back, with about fifty bros. They had a bunch of guns. This time, he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
This time, he had a score to settle. This time they overwhelmed the defenders at the front gate. Then they gathered everybody together. Then they searched the Square for weapons. Then they told them the new deal: They were officially a colony of Uptown. Their job was now to supply the Confederacy with food grown in the Square. In return, their lives and property would be protected. If they proved themselves useful in the new order of things, they would be allowed citizenship. This meant free movement within the borders of the Confederacy and the right to participate in the monetary system headquartered at the Bazaar.
The pitch would have gone over better with the tribe had it not been made literally over the dead bodies of their friends. And, it would have seemed a better offer had it not been restricted to the boys. The girls were to return Uptown under armed guard for a purpose that was never enunciated.
“We made a break for it that night,” says Carolyn. “Most of us made it. A few got shot. A few got taken.”
“So where did everybody go?”
“All over. Other tribes. Randoms. The five—the four of us stuck around the neighborhood. Laying low and watching. We’re waiting for a chance to get back at them. They took Frank out about a week ago. Maybe he wasn’t playing ball, or they figured they’d learned enough from him. Anyhow, we took some potshots at the execution squad, but it was a mistake. They fired back, and Chase got killed.”
I remember Chase, bright eyes and a killer laugh. I’d call it infectious, but we don’t use that term metaphorically anymore.
“However,” says Carolyn, looking at our stock of semiautomatics, “looks like the balance of power could shift. So what happened to you?”
Chapel looks at me. The smallest shake of the head. So I tell them the lie, the one that nobody looks at twice because at the end comes the blinding light of the Cure.
Carolyn stares at the pack of serum doses. Holly and Elena hug. Ayesha says, “Well, that’s upworthy.” And rolls up her sleeve.
Brainbox and Chapel prepare the doses. “What the hell is this made of?” says Carolyn.
“Jefferson’s blood,” says Brainbox. “His antibodies from the Sickness. They were the most viable from all of ours.”
“Who knew you’d ever amount to anything?” says Carolyn. “From nerd to savior.”
“Yeah, man. You’re, like, biblical,” says Peter.
“Stop it,” I say. I don’t like the way they’re looking at me. Like I’m a prodigy of nature. A precious monster.
Chapel injects Ayesha, then Holly and Elena. Carolyn shakes her head.
“It’s safe,” I say.
“Listen, I’m dying to get exposed to your blood, pal. Just…”
She goes quiet, struggling to find what to say.
“It’s just…” She speaks through tears. “If I take it now, I know that I’ll want to do whatever I can to stay alive. And I have to be willing to die.”
“Why?” says Chapel.
“Because,” I answer for her, “we have to take back the Square.”
Carolyn nods. “We have to kill the Uptowners.”
WELSH HASN’T BROUGHT any pastries this morning, so I wonder if I’m in trouble. I try to make eye contact with Titch, but he’s acting weirdly skittish, which is saying something for a guy his size.
Me: “Am I in trouble for switching subjects?”
News flash? I am now reading English. Reading means “majoring in.” I started out reading medicine, which is sort of like premed, which I thought I’d be good at because my mom was a nurse and I’ve been treating scurvy and removing bullets from people for the last couple of years, but fact is, it was a lot of chemistry and biology and not much combat medicine. Besides, I’ve missed a couple of years of high school, what with the apocalypse happening when I was a sophomore and all. Meanwhile, all the kids here have done these tests called A levels, which are hella difficult, and they’ve all arrived at college ready to concentrate on just one subject. In the US you get to dick around, studying puppetry and experimental dance for at least a year or two before you have to even pretend to get your ass in gear.
So, English it is. That’s not to say that it’s a doss, exactly, but I figure it’ll feel a lot less like drowning. And in a weird way it makes me feel closer to Jefferson. The difficult part was convincing the fellows (that’s Cambridge for professors) that I could hack it. I just pretended to be Jefferson and asked my tutor to put in a good word and got the go-ahead.
Welsh: “No. I’m glad you changed subjects, if it makes you more comfortable.”
There’s a crack of vulnerability in his demeanor. Back when he was facing down Ed the Interrogator, I had been surprised, like someone so polished and genteel and whatnot had no business being tough. Of course, that was all Downton Abbey stereotyping. In fact, everybody in this country has a thread of stee
l in their spine, which maybe explains how they survived having the shit bombed out of them by the Nazis.
Anyhow, Welsh is looking all down in the mouth and fatigued.
Me: “Then why the long face?”
Welsh: “I’m sorry to say—that is… certain facts have become known.”
I pay a lot more attention to what people say, now that I’m reading English. That is, I always pay a lot of attention to what people say, I just find it easier to categorize, now that I’m studying practical criticism and linguistics and whatnot. For instance, Welsh just shifted into the passive voice, which demonstrates an unwillingness to take responsibility for something.
Me: “Okay. What facts do you know?”
Welsh looks at his hands.
Welsh: “All right. I’m afraid that, in my job, I am occasionally required to be the bearer of bad news.”
I wonder what bad news someone might possibly have for me. That the Sickness is back in my system? Nuh-uh. I get regular checkups. The bug is gone.
Welsh: “Some of my superiors would rather I kept you in the dark. But I feel that in our brief time together, we have become friends, of a sort.”
Me: “Yes?”
Welsh: “At least, I have become rather fond of you. And I think that you deserve the truth.”
I say nothing.
Welsh: “My office received a communiqué that was, for reasons too complicated to explain at present, delayed. An ongoing investigation of actions taken, proper channels, that sort of thing.”
Me: “Okay?”
Welsh: “The substance of this communiqué is the events surrounding your actions on the deck of the Ronald Reagan.”
He takes a folded piece of paper out of his sleek leather case. Sets it on the coffee table between us.
