Children of the Underground

by Trevor Shane

  “I know,” Clara answered. “Joseph told us what happened.” She sighed a weary, exhausted sigh. “Where’s Michael now?”

  “He’s in Turkey,” I answered.

  “Are you two not together anymore?”

  “No. We are. He’s doing a job in Turkey and then we’re meeting up again.”

  “So, he’s fighting again?” Clara asked. She sounded disappointed.

  “He never stopped,” I told her, using his line.

  Clara laughed a joyless, unflattering laugh. Did she think that her cause was the only just cause? “What do you want from me?” Clara asked, dropping the postcard on the desk.

  “I want you to honor the promise that Dorothy made to me.”

  “I already told you I can’t do that. I don’t know where your son is. I don’t know where they’re keeping that information. I can’t afford to have agents rifling through documents to find a child who won’t be a part of the War for another seventeen years.”

  “Dorothy promised me.”

  “I never told Dorothy to make that promise.” I felt sick to my stomach. “Maybe she was going to try to convince me to help you after she got back. Maybe she was going to try to help you herself. Dorothy was very independent and your story—” She paused. “A lot of women sympathize with your story.”

  “But you don’t?” My voice was angry now.

  “I can’t afford sympathy. You have no idea how dangerous it would be to have my men digging around for information that might not even be kept at their location. If one of them got caught, it could destroy everything I’ve worked for.”

  “What if I find out where the information is? What if Michael and I gave you that much?”

  Clara paused for a second, thinking. She shook her head. “I still couldn’t afford to have an agent rooting around in delicate information like that. Every agent I have on the inside is crucial. They each save dozens of lives. I can’t let them take unnecessary chances.”

  Unnecessary. I stared at the ceiling for a moment, trying to think. “What if we didn’t ask them to root around for the information? What if all we asked was for them to help us get inside so that we could get the information ourselves?”

  “You’ll never make it into one of those buildings and out alive,” Clara said, “even with our help.”

  “I’m not asking for your predictions.” I flattened the postcard on the desk and pushed it back toward Clara. “You can have this,” I said. “It’s probably the last thing that Dorothy ever wrote.”

  Clara reached for the postcard. She touched it. “What if I say okay? How do you propose that we do this?”

  “You give me a phone number or an e-mail address. I’ll reach out to you when we find out where they’re keeping the information. Then you can tell me what you can do to help. I’m not asking for much.”

  “How are you going to find out where the information is?” Clara asked.

  “That’s not your problem.”

  Clara lifted the postcard and read it again. “Okay,” she said when she was finished. “I’ll give you an e-mail address, not a phone number.”

  “Thank you,” I said. My heart swelled, happy to get any concession. It was better than nothing.

  “Don’t thank me,” Clara said, waving the postcard in her hand. “Thank Dorothy.”

  “One more thing,” I said before standing up from the chair.

  Clara looked up at me without hiding her frustration. “What?”

  “Michael won’t be back for another week or week and a half. I want to stay here during that time,” I said.

  “Why?” Clara sounded honestly surprised by my request.

  “I want someone to teach me how to defend myself, how to fight.”

  “In a week?”

  “As much as can be taught in a week,” I said.

  Clara chuckled. “You’ll have to be kept away from any confidential information,” Clara said. “We’ll have to lock you in at night. You’ll be chaperoned at all times. No cameras. No weapons, except when you’re training. No writing material. We’ll give you your things back when you leave.”

  “You don’t trust me?” I asked.

  Clara laughed. “You kidnapped one of my men. You work with someone who thinks we’re a cult. I can’t afford to trust you.”

  I trained for seven days: two with the gun, two with the knife, three with my hands. Everything they taught me was geared toward my shortcomings, not my strengths. “The only strength that matters,” I was told, “is a lack of weaknesses. Everything else is just for show.” Everyone who trained me, everyone I met, they’re all rooting for us, Christopher. They’re all rooting for you. After my seven days of training, I left and went back to Washington, D.C., not knowing where else to go.

  Thirty-eight

  “Why is he so important to you?” Evan asked Addy a day or two after Evan had told Addy everything he knew about Christopher. They’d taken the eighty-three dollars they’d stolen from the cash register at the convenience store in Louisiana and driven north. Addy knew enough not to continue moving in a straight line once they’d been spotted. She didn’t even need to be taught that; she had been, but the lesson wasn’t necessary. Their ultimate destination still hadn’t changed. All the diversion did was add a day or two to their journey. After agreeing to take their money and splurge on a dinner instead of a hotel room they were settling down for the night in the woods somewhere off the side of the road.

  Addy didn’t bother pretending that Evan could be asking about someone other than Christopher. Addy shook her head. “It’s not just me, Evan. Christopher is important to all of us.”

  “Okay,” Evan responded, “but why? Nobody’s told me why he’s so important.”

  “It’s not even him, really,” Addy said, trying not to trip over her own words. She’d never had to explain it before. Everyone fighting against the War and everyone in the War already knew why Christopher was so important. They didn’t just know it; they felt it. “It’s what he represents. It’s what they all represent.”

  “Who are ‘they all’?” Evan asked.

  “Christopher and his parents—Christopher, Joseph, and Maria,” Addy said. “His parents by blood. The parents that you knew, the couple that raised Christopher, they weren’t Christopher’s birth parents. You knew that, right?”

  “Yeah,” Evan answered her. “Chris told me what he found out. He told me what happened to his father—that his father was killed by his best friend because his dad wasn’t willing to turn Christopher over to the other side. Chris didn’t know what happened to his mother.” Evan paused. “Do you know what happened to his mother?”

  Addy nodded. “I didn’t know that no one told Christopher what happened to her.” She paused for a moment, wondering if she should have said something to him. “They killed her too. It just took them a little longer. They made martyrs out of both of them.”

  “You call them martyrs, but I still don’t understand why people think they’re so important.”

  “That’s only because you didn’t grow up with the War. You don’t understand what it’s like. When you turned sixteen, you weren’t taught that you were going to have to spend the rest of your life taking orders from some strangers and being afraid of every other stranger that you walk past on the street. It’s not only what we were taught, though. We learned to be afraid well before we were taught why. I don’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t afraid.”

  “Kind of like Christopher,” Evan suggested.

  “Kind of,” Addy agreed. “Maybe it was in Christopher’s blood. Maybe we’ve all got paranoia in our veins.”

  “Like some sort of disease,” Evan finished for her.

  “Yeah,” Addy agreed, never having thought about it that way before. “So you have to try to understand what it was like, Evan. You have to try to put yourself in my shoe
s. I grew up being afraid and not even knowing what I was afraid of. Then, when I was barely more than a kid, some strangers came in with a sort of PowerPoint presentation from hell, meant to teach me that I’m not nearly afraid enough. Not only do they tell me that I need to be more afraid, but that I need to be angry, too. They tell me that monsters are real and that I have to spend the rest of my life—however long or short that might be—fighting the monsters without even knowing who they are. And the only people who can tell me the difference between the monsters and my friends are more strangers—but these are strangers that I’m just going to have to trust.” Addy’s voice quickened with each word until she had to stop to take a breath. “So, I have to do my part to help fight these monsters, but I can’t just go out and do it, because I need to rely on some faceless voice to tell me how and when. Even then, that faceless voice will only tell me who some of the monsters are, but not all of them. They won’t tell me who all of the monsters are because they don’t even know. And the fear isn’t even the worst part,” Addy went on. “Maybe it is for some people, but it wasn’t for me. I could live with the paranoia, but they tell me all of this and then they give me a fucking desk job. Some people are afraid of the monsters. Some of us just can’t get used to the powerlessness.” Addy felt tears rush to her face, but she fought them off. She despised crying.

  Evan didn’t interrupt. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t even move, afraid any distraction might make Addy stop talking. “I heard whispers about Christopher before I even knew about the War,” she continued. “I remember hearing my mother talking to her sister. They would whisper about the Boy. For a long time I thought they were whispering about a brother I had that died. So many other people around me had died these secret, barely spoken-about deaths that it made sense to me that I’d have a brother I’d never met. I should have known better, because when my mother and my aunt whispered to each other about the Boy, they always seemed excited, almost happy, in a way that they never seemed when they talked about my dead uncle or my father.

  “So, when I turned sixteen, my mother drove me two hours, and I sat in the garage of a house of a girl I’d never met, and some guy in a suit taught me about the War for the first time. The guy in the suit didn’t say anything to us about Christopher. They actually did teach Christopher’s story during the initiation sessions for a few years. It was supposed to scare people, to make them think twice before breaking the rules. I heard that they even showed pictures of Christopher’s dad’s dead body. Instead of teaching people what happened when you broke the rules, it taught people how heartless and cruel the War was. Neither side of the War looked good. The only sympathetic figures in the whole story were the corpse, the mother, and the baby. So instead of scaring people, Christopher’s story inspired them. The story taught us that some people were brave enough to stop following blindly. It taught us that some people were brave enough to fight back. It taught us that we could rebel, that we could be brave, that we could try to be a part of the world. It taught us that we could stand up on our own and, if we failed, we’d merely end up in the same place we were likely to end up if we fought in the War anyway. Nobody escapes the War alive. They tried to make an example of Christopher’s father, and we turned him into a martyr. Then Maria did what she did. After that, the War machine went into damage control. They stopped teaching about Christopher. They tried to quiet the story, but it was too late. The story had already spread too far. By the time I was initiated, they hadn’t officially taught Christopher’s story in more than a decade.”

  “So how did you find out about him?” Evan asked.

  “He was everywhere. After our initiations, they tried to keep the newly initiated from contacting each other. They wanted to be able to mold us, but we found each other anyway through Internet groups and e-mail chains. At first, I thought everyone in the Internet groups or on the e-mail chains was another kid like me, but eventually I learned that there were adults on there too. Everything always led to talk about the Boy. I learned that his name was Christopher. I learned that he wasn’t my dead brother like I’d thought. He was more than that. A lot of what people said was just rumors, but if you paid enough attention, you could piece together the truth. Do you understand now?” Addy asked Evan.

  “I think so,” Evan said, but thinking it wasn’t enough for Addy anymore. She wanted Evan to feel it like she did.

  “It’s not just Christopher,” Addy told Evan. “It’s what his parents tried to do for him. It’s what they represent to all of us. We’re all so scared and powerless. We’re so isolated from the rest of the world. And then we hear this story about a man who falls in love with an innocent girl from outside the War, and he is brave enough to run from the War to try to save his unborn child from this wretched life, even though he knows that he probably won’t make it. And the innocent girl is brave enough to run with him. And the girl loves him even though he’s from the War and she’s not. And when they come and kill her man and steal her baby, that innocent girl finds the courage to fight against the War, even though she could walk away. She dives into the War so she can save her son, so she can do what Christopher’s dad couldn’t. Even though she’s not part of the War, she’s the one brave enough to fight the people that the rest of us are afraid to fight, no matter what the cost.” Addy lost her fight with the tears. They began to roll down her face as she remembered what it felt like to feel hope for the first time in her life. “People were inspired, Evan. Even before I learned the story, people had been inspired by Maria and Joseph. More people were running from the War. It’s like I told you: so many people heard about Christopher’s story and decided to run from the War that the Underground couldn’t keep up. People were killed. Once that happened, talk changed from running to fighting. You can only run until you’ve run yourself into a corner. Then you have to actually turn and fight, even if it’s a fight you’re probably going to lose.”

  “So, people started to actively rebel against the War?”

  “No,” Addy said. “For a long time, it was all just talk. Everyone was waiting for something.”

  “What were they waiting for?”

  Addy wiped the tears from her cheeks. “Something—or someone—real that they could rally around.”

  “Christopher?” Evan asked.

  Addy nodded. “People needed to know that he was alive and that he hadn’t joined the War. They needed something to have faith in.”

  “So he’s some sort of hero to all of you?” Evan asked.

  “No,” Addy answered, her voice firm. “I don’t believe in heroes. I stopped believing in them when I stopped believing in fairies.”

  “Then what is he?”

  “Christopher is a symbol. He’s a living symbol of everything his parents did for him and the courage it took for them to do it. As long as Christopher’s alive and not part of the War, he’s living proof that his parents—in their own way—beat the War, living proof that the War can be beaten.” The tears stopped. Addy was done.

  “So, what happens now that Christopher’s run away?” Evan asked.

  “I don’t want to think about it,” Addy replied.

  Thirty-nine

  I barely slept last night.

  Yesterday, for the first time since I created the account, I had an e-mail in my in-box. It was from Michael. To my dismay, the message was short and lacking in substance. All it said was, where are you? i’m coming home. It seemed wrong to me, after so long, to send such a brief message. I was still in D.C. It seemed silly to leave, since I had no idea where they would send Michael when he got back anyway. I hit the Reply button. I’m in Washington, D.C. Where are you? Are you okay? When are you coming back? Is everything okay? I thought about typing, Have you spoken to Jared? I decided not to. Michael would tell me soon enough. I had to be patient. I hit Send. I sat at the computer for another two hours, waiting for a response. I looked at my watch. It was two in the morning in Istanbul, but I had
no way of knowing if Michael was still there. For all I knew, they’d sent him to Asia or California or back to New York. Wherever he was, I couldn’t sit in the hotel’s office center forever, so I called it a day.

  I got out of bed at six this morning and went back to the office center. I had another message. Michael had replied. how did you know about dc? where can we meet tomorrow? I read the message over and over again, trying to decipher what it meant. Did it mean that Michael was already in Washington, D.C., too? All I could do was respond to the second question. I thought for a long time, trying to think of a landmark that hadn’t already been co-opted by the Underground. I thought about Michael’s other rules. Reckless but never careless. I felt like I had to prove to Michael that I hadn’t forgotten everything that he had taught me. I needed to think of a place where we would be difficult to monitor and that had sufficient escape routes in case we were ambushed. I started typing at least eight times, each time thinking of some reason to nix my idea before deleting everything I’d written. Then I wrote, On the steps in front of the amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery. Do you know how to get there? What time do you want to meet? Before hitting the Send button, I added, Do you have news for me?

  This time, I got a reply in only forty minutes. I still hadn’t gotten up from my chair. All his response said was, i’ll find it. between noon and three o’clock. I cursed Michael again for being so terse and so vague. Then I went for a fifteen-mile run to try to burn off some energy. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get some sleep tonight.

  Forty

  Michael’s back. He’s talked to Jared. They’re going to meet.

  I got to Arlington National Cemetery two hours before I was supposed to meet Michael. I didn’t have the patience to sit around my hotel room and wait. I spent the time walking the cemetery, weaving between fields dimpled with grave markers. They go on forever. It would be easy to visit the cemetery in the morning and believe that more people were buried there than had ever lived. For most of the morning, I didn’t see another living visitor. I avoided eye contact with the few visitors that I did see. They were happy to reciprocate. That didn’t stop me from wishing that every headstone was surrounded by mourners. I stepped off the path and read the inscription on one of the headstones. On the top of the headstone was a cross. Beneath the cross was a name. Beneath the name was a rank. For those who fought in wars, beneath the rank was the war’s name. Beneath the name of the war was the date on which the person was born and, beneath that, that date he died. Beneath the date the soldier died was grass. Beneath the grass was earth. The names were different. The dates were different. Even the wars were often different. The grass and the earth were always the same. Where are the visitors? I thought to myself, reading another tombstone, this one with a Star of David on the top. I knew where the visitors were. They were busy living.