by Chris Weitz
The Gurkha tackles me, and the air hisses out of my lungs. Up goes the kukri, and I see the bent blade glimmer in the light of the second flare.
Wakefield: “Stop!”
The knife pauses in the air, suspended like a second moon. Guja comes up behind his man and gives him an order in Nepali. The man stands up and raises me by the collar.
Guja looks at me, his smile gone like it never was there.
Guja: “Why, miss? Why?”
I realize that I may have been his particular responsibility just now, and I may have gotten him in some deep shit.
Me: “Sorry, Gooj.”
Even if he cared about the answer, how could I explain? That I had a feeling that somewhere out there Jefferson would see, that somehow he would know it was me? That he would come for me and we’d be together again?
THROUGH THE FROST-RIMMED WINDOW, I see the flares die down, but the hope remains. A ghostly pink V has taken shape over the park, pointing the way.
We’re holed up in a dentist’s office in Midtown on what should be called the thirteenth floor but is labeled the fourteenth out of a retrospectively ironic desire to avoid bad luck. Peter lolls on the ground, nursing his heartbreak. The twins leaf through old copies of Highlights, looking for Goofus and Gallant cartoons. Kath sits next to Brainbox, who’s laid out on the couch.
“Let’s go,” I say.
“What if it’s not somebody come to help?” says Kath, her lips twisted in a skeptical moue. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what they call it. A distortion that reminds you of the beauty of the original form.
“If it’s not, what do we have to lose?” I say.
“Everything,” says Kath. “Half the city probably wants to kill you.”
“Thanks to you and Theo,” I say. There’s been no sign of Theo, the Harlemite who went to the lab with us, and then to the carrier, and then on the helicopter back home. Whatever he did after he and Kath exposed my lies at the UN, we’ve had no word.
“Don’t blame Theo, who had a legitimate beef with you, and don’t blame me, either. I didn’t force you to lie to everybody,” Kath says. “I didn’t force you to hide the truth.”
“If they knew that…” I search for the right word, choosing the most useful one. “…civilization had survived, there’d be a massacre. Everybody would be rushing for the exit out of here.”
“That’s what Chapel said, right? The guy who stole the World’s Most Important Briefcase?” She looks over at Peter, who registers the feeling you get when you unexpectedly hear the name of somebody who dumped you. “Sorry,” Kath says.
“Even if he’s a liar about everything else, he was right about one thing. Haven’t you heard the gunshots? The screams? The explosions out there? It’s anarchy.”
Kath shrugs. “Right. Which is why we should sit tight. Everybody’s losing their minds. You remember what that random said? Everybody’s heading down to Battery Park.”
“There’s a big boat coming to pick everybody up!” says Anna, the girl twin, brightly.
“There’s no boat,” I say. “Well, there is, but it’s not coming for us. It’s a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, and they’d just as soon carpet bomb this place. I don’t trust the Reconstruction Committee.”
“But you trust whoever shot those flares? That’s weak.”
I don’t tell her that, deep inside, I have a hope, which is becoming a conviction, that it’s Donna who shot those flares. It doesn’t make any sense. But the feeling is there nonetheless.
“So stay. I’m going to find out who it was.” I shoulder my pack.
Kath looks like she doesn’t buy my indifference. And it’s true, she’s a hard person to be indifferent about, even if she has completely screwed up my life. There’s her beauty, of course, the ridiculous plummy ripeness of her. But it’s more than that. There’s a sort of gravitational quality to her spirit, like a cliff edge that you can’t help but peek over. And some part of me always wants to jump. Thanatos, they used to call it—the death wish.
“Is that any way to thank me for saving your life?” Kath continues with a smile.
That’s technically true. Once everyone else found out about the Cure, I was lucky to escape with my skin intact. Kath and the Thrill Kill Twins pulled me out, along with Brainbox and Peter, through the cloaca of the UN compound.
“You killed me,” I counter. “You started the lynch mob that’s after me.” Now we’re hiding by day, moving by night, waiting for the peasants with pitchforks and torches.
“Don’t be a drama queen. They would have found out you were lying soon enough.”
“I just needed a little time. I wanted something better. For everybody.”
“Yeah, I know.” Kath smirks. “You’re cute. I bet that big get-together you organized gave you a raging Righteousness Boner. You got to play Model UN. Even write a constitution.”
I wanted to establish some kind of structure before the adults came. According to Chapel, they were just waiting for us to die off. So it seemed to me the best thing to do was to band together. After all, we had the Cure. We could start again. And we could organize to defend ourselves against whoever was coming once the rest of the world realized that we were staying for the long haul.
“But guess what?” Kath says. “Given the choice, given the facts, people didn’t want to be part of your Utopia. They wanted Wi-Fi.”
“If you think I’m so naive, then what are you doing here?”
I still can’t figure it. It was one thing for her to take revenge. After all, I broke up with her. If you can really use a banal term like that in a world that comprehends plague and cannibalism. And I left her for dead.
Of course, I didn’t know she wasn’t actually dead. Not that she didn’t hold it against me.
But by hanging around, she’s put herself in danger, too.
At that, Kath actually seems kind of stumped. Or as though she doesn’t want to say. Finally, she shrugs.
“Nothing better to do. But that doesn’t mean I want to waltz around outside asking to get shot.”
“It’s your own damn people that’s gonna do it,” says Peter, reminding Kath of her Uptown roots.
“Yeah, my former own damn people. I’m not exactly beloved out there.” She raises her eyebrows (plucked, somehow, even under these circumstances) for emphasis. “Look, I’m not just thinking for myself any longer. I’ve got two kids.”
She means the Long Islanders she picked up at the lab, towheaded twins named Anna and Abel but who she calls the Thrill Kill Twins. The springy little blue-eyed ectomorphic psychotics follow Kath’s instructions to the letter, which is what they did for the Old Man before I killed him. I can’t tell if Kath really cares about them or if her protectiveness is an elaborate running gag on her part. Maybe she can’t tell, either.
“I’m heading toward those flares,” I say. “I bet it’s the adults. It might be military, it might be the Resistance, but whoever it is, they’re our best shot at helping Brainbox. If we don’t get him some medical attention soon…”
I don’t finish the thought. I don’t want Brainbox to hear, if he’s even conscious.
His stomach has stopped bleeding. There’s a neat little hole where Chapel shot him, about four inches to the left of his belly button, surrounded by flesh so pallid it could be a fish’s stomach instead of a kid’s. No exit wound. I think that’s not a good thing. Like maybe the bullet bounced around inside him, or expanded as it traveled through his guts. They designed them to do that. His breathing is shallow and fast, his pulse irregular. His body is slick with oily sweat.
Donna would know what to do about it. She was the tribe’s doctor, since she practically grew up in the ER where her mom was a nurse. She would manage to whip up some kind of treatment from the dentist’s shelves. Now it’s been two days and I’ve run out of bright ideas. We found some expired novocaine and shot him up. Beyond that, I’m out of answers, at a point of absolute stasis. Like a marble at the bottom of a bowl—no kinetic
energy left for me to move anywhere. At least I was, until I saw the flares.
“Jefferson’s right. We need to make a move. I’ll help,” says Peter. He literally shakes off his grief over Chapel’s betrayal—wagging his head like he can dispose of his thoughts by flinging them centrifugally out of his brain.
Kath gets up, too. “Fine,” she says. “I always hated the dentist’s anyway. C’mon, kids.” She nudges the twins in the ribs, and they sit up, clearing the muck from their eyes.
“What now, Mommy?” says Anna. Though she’s maybe fourteen, she acts much younger. Her malnourished frame makes it even more creepy.
“I’m not your mommy,” says Kath, a routine they go through. Then, “We’re going to the park.”
“Yay!” says Abel.
We do a weapons check. Kath has a Mauser pistol with fifteen rounds. Peter and I still have our AR-15s, with a few magazines of ammunition to spare. The twins are down to a crowbar with duct-tape handle and a Louisville Slugger. Not much to go on, but it’s all we have.
Downstairs, the street is abandoned, but we can hear activity nearby—the dawn chorus of gunshots and screams. I can see my breath, and as we exit the building, snowflakes start to fall, appearing like a quintessence of the air, like it’s supersaturated with ice.
The winter will be ugly. Last year, we burned everything we could and still lost people to the cold that crept up on us while we slept, extinguishing fires and lives.
We hustle along with a folded-over bedsheet taut between us, carrying Brainbox and some of our gear. He clutches the biscuit, the nuclear trigger, close to his chest. He’s half awake and mumbling something over and over again. It sounds like “Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum.” But that makes no sense. Maybe it’s some kind of chemical formula.
We have to move quickly before we lose the darkness. Every second, nature turns the brightness up a little more, and we’re more exposed. The snow starts blotting out the blackness, and we slip on the film of white that starts to coat the ground.
The quickest way to the park is through Uptowners’ territory, a zigzag stair-stepping diagonal to East Fifty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. A dangerous mile to the site of the flares.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to hit the subway?” asks Peter, scanning the surrounding buildings, any of which could house a lookout with a sniper rifle. He has his own gun at the ready, but there’s no way we can cover all the angles.
I don’t even answer. The subway holds evil memories: headlong flight through the blind darkness, loss, and massacre. I’d rather die in the light.
We totter up Third Avenue, past the shells of dead banks, their plate-glass windows long ago smashed, the ATMs scraped empty when money still meant something. Chain restaurants picked clean, stores looted, angry irregular cubes of shattered glass crunching underfoot. Cars siphoned. An urban landscape scoured free of everything useful.
We avoid the wide lanes of Fifty-Ninth and head west on Sixtieth, which is lined with shrines to anachronism: a nail bar, a carpet store, a tailor. From here, it’s a quick jog across Park Avenue, Brainbox moaning as each step jars him. At the corner, there’s a stubby sandstone-and-brick building. A tattered banner says this was Christ Church Day School.
I notice Kath has stopped. She’s staring up at the banner.
“What is it?” I say.
“I went here,” she says. “We played up on the roof. See the cage around the edge?”
To keep balls, and children, from flying off and falling to the street below.
“I didn’t know your family was religious,” I say.
“We weren’t religious,” she says. “We were rich. That’s what this school was for. Not God. Money.” She continues, strangely philosophical, “If your parents spent the money to get you in here, then you got the kind of education to get you into the next place. Chapin, Nightingale, Brearley, Buckley, Collegiate. And then maybe you could get into the Ivies. And then you could get into one of the big firms. Or work at the Met so you had stuff to talk about at cocktail parties and could meet the right people. Then you could marry somebody who was important enough or hot enough or rich enough and you could keep the whole cycle going. World without end. Amen.”
She says it flatly, without acid, downright alkaline.
“I’m glad it’s all over,” she says. “Let’s get out of here.”
As we walk along, we come to a little stoop and she says, “The nannies would wait for us here. The third world, like, waiting for the first. If you didn’t know the deal, you might think they were moms here to pick up their kids. You might think that there were lots of interracial marriages here on the Upper East Side. Ha.
“My parents always had to take everything a step further, so our nanny was Swiss. None of that Hispanic stuff for them. We were supposed to call her mademoiselle. But she didn’t seem like a miss; she was big and brawny and strict, so we called her Madame Muscle.”
I try to talk her out of her reverie. “She was mean to you?”
Kath shakes her head. “She was kind to us. She loved us. I think my parents didn’t like that. Made them feel inadequate. Which they were. Then Madame Muscle got a funny lump in her breast. Then my parents fired her. Maybe they fired her first. I forget. Anyway, we never heard from her again. Or rather, she never heard from us. We asked to see her, but my parents wouldn’t take us to the hospital.”
She looks up and catches my expression. Dismisses my sympathy. “Boo-hoo, I can hear the world’s smallest violin playing. There. Almost made it.”
She’s looking ahead. We can see the trees of the park reaching over the walls. A sprint and we’d make it, but we still have Brainbox slung between us, and there’s only so fast we can go.
The Uptowners are waking. The first sign that we’ve been spotted is a water balloon breaking in front of us. We look up and see a kid flipping us the bird. Where the balloon hit, a noxious smell erupts.
Then Peter is hit by another one. It explodes on his shoulder and splashes the side of his head. His hands go to his eyes, and he screams in pain as I duck the drops that scatter into the air.
“Pepper spray!” he says before Kath and I drag him toward the building, under its big elaborate eaves. It’s an old building, made with care. Tall sash windows, sandstone and curlicues. More balloons hit the ground.
We crowd against a mottled bronze sign that reads THE METROPOLITAN CLUB: 1891.
“Oh shit,” says Kath when she realizes.
“Oh shit, what?”
“I wasn’t thinking. This place… We should’ve gone another way.”
“Why?”
“It used to be a private club. Like, old dudes backslapping and drinking. Now it’s basically a barracks.”
As she says this, I hear a commotion from beyond a set of high metal gates. Uptowners are swarming out of an ornamental vestibule, carrying guns, bats, swords, knives, pouring out like poison.
I crook my AR through the bars of the gate and fire, sending the frontmost tumbling to the ground and temporarily damming the flow.
“We’ve got to get away while we have a chance,” says Kath. “Leave him here.”
She means Brainbox, who, fortunately, isn’t conscious to hear it.
“Fuck that,” says Peter.
“He comes with us,” I say.
“Fine,” says Kath, and seizes an edge of the sheet and starts trotting ahead, practically pulling Brainbox out of my hands.
We totter toward the park as the Uptowners gather their courage and pursue. But before we can even cross Fifth, I see a gun barrel pointing over the low wall ahead of us. Guards in the park start firing, swearing, and launching steel arrows that clank along the ground at our feet.
“That way!” I call. We take a left, back toward downtown and the fortress-like Plaza Hotel, with its big mucky fountain out in front and, nearby, a golden equestrian statue striding irrelevantly and perpetually forward. A glance tells me that this, too, is a bad scene—the hotel’s flagpoles are draped in priva
te school banners, and armed thugs loiter on the steps.
We switch direction again, find ourselves backed against a glass cube projecting from the ground. Sci-fi glass architecture with a familiar logo etched above a transparent portal: a giant apple with a bite out of it.
I remember pictures of people lining up for days, sleeping on the streets, waiting for the advent of the new iPhone. Urban campers. Bougies in a breadline for one of the few things they couldn’t yet have.
“Ugh. Retail,” says Kath. She’s actually thinking of facing the mob rather than fleeing into the Apple Store.
“At least it’s a flagship store,” I say.
I wedge the doors open—the mechanical opener is long dead—and help the others pull Brainbox through. As we get him to the bottom of the spiral glass stairs, the Uptowners thunder down after us. It’s the Thrill Kill Twins who save the day. They charge up the stairs and flail away at our pursuers with their makeshift clubs. One Uptowner and then another falls, until the entryway is clogged with broken bodies, and the rest retreat. The twins gallop down the stairs, faces dotted with blood and smiles flashing.
We collapse in a pile behind the rattling metal gate, a utilitarian embarrassment that never would have been seen during opening hours. It runs the length of the basement vestibule and serves, effectively, to wall us off from the world above. We throw the bolts at the edges and find ourselves, for the moment, safe.
I shut the padlocks on the bolt housings. I have no idea where to find the keys, so there’s no getting out, but that seems to me the least of our problems.
“What is this place?” asks Abel, the boy twin, and that’s how I know he must really be traumatized. He can’t be so young that he doesn’t know about iPhones and MacBooks, but he’s been through so much that those memories have been wiped from his mind.
“It’s an Apple Store.”
“I don’t see any apples.”
His eyes are bright and empty, his face freckled with drying gore. Back at the lab on Plum Island, the Old Man had a whole school class of tweens like this one under his control, stoked with amphetamines, tranquilizers, and video games.
