The New Order Read online

  “So that’s what I’m gonna ask you. Vote that we keep this Cure. And we go to war.”

  There’s another burst of applause and enthusiasm at war, but it’s less rapturous than before; the anesthetic of rage has started to wear off.

  Imani casts a glance at Solon—her eyes glide over me—and then, seeming not to know what to do with herself, she takes a seat with her legs dangling over the end of the stage. She looks like a child whose tantrum is spent.

  The crowd and I size each other up. Their gazes are pinpricks, each drawing a bead of sweat. And then—and then I hear her voice, not inside, nothing spooky, but a memory of the timbre her voice shaped and fashioned for my purpose, from some location inside me: Donna says, “Tell them the story.”

  And so I do. I tell them how Brainbox found evidence of the lab. How we went to the library, and we contended with the cannibal Ghosts under the murals of heaven, how we were found by the Uptowners at Grand Central and were saved by the Moles who lived in the subway tunnels. How we unknowingly led the Uptowners to the Moles, and so the Moles to their deaths. How we found our way to the wildland of the park, how the bear sensed us and scented us and hunted us to the Metropolitan, where we fought him with sword and ax and spear, and killed him, and SeeThrough was lost, dying with her body broken. We mourned and went north, and passed into Harlem. We boarded the Annie and worked our way up the coast of the Island, until we were attacked by the Islanders and taken prisoner, to the lab. At Plum Island we were subjected to experiment. And some lived, and some died. And I lived, and my blood was rid of the Sickness, and from my blood was the Cure. And we left Kath dead, and found our way home.

  The catcalls and the jokes and the insults trail off as I tell it. And they submit to the old thirst—to know what’s next, to feel like others feel, to short-circuit the Self in the Other. Which is only the Self.

  And at some point, I lose track of what is the truth and what is the lie, because after all, it is just a story, and I grieve for Theo, who is alive, as I grieve for SeeThrough, who is dead.

  Quiet. And then—breaking through, a voice: “Go on, white boy!”

  And I collect myself.

  “There’s not enough life,” I say. “There’s too much death. I can’t give one person life and another death. I can’t do it. I have to give as much life as I can. We were just kids…” On the faces of all the lost boys and girls, recognition.

  “We’ll never be that again. But we can become something more. Everybody can. If you go to war now, how many will die? How many of you who could have lived out the century?” They consider.

  “I say… I ask… that we get another chance. We can make something better than tribes and war. We can make life.”

  There isn’t a big cheer; there’s nothing. A low murmur like loud heartbeats, perhaps. Or that’s just me.

  Solon nods. He looks at the crowd. “All right,” he says. “What’ll it be? War?”

  A few hands shoot up—a few hands follow.

  “Peace?” he asks.

  Silently, they stand up. Hundreds, a thousand. The tears come.

  PEOPLE ARE WALKING the streets totally unarmed, totally disarmed, totally consciously unconscious of the danger that other people pose to them. They’re all, like, “La la la, just chillin’ here in the middle of the damn road, not worried that somebody’s gonna steal my shit or drop a cinder block on my head or coldcock me.” Which, I guess, is the root of civilization or something.

  Actually, Jefferson used to say that sanitation was the root of civilization, and can I say something about the smell of this place? It doesn’t. Smell, that is. Back in New York, the tentacles of organic corruption slithered into your nose the moment you woke up—in fact, the various stenches colored your dreams. Here, it’s like everything has been scrubbed clean. There’s no poop, no rot, no sweat. Nothing to remind you of change and death, which seems to be the point. Back home, everybody was young, sure, but they were also marked, like Death had sewn a big scarlet D on them. Here, there’s old people and babies and toddlers and tweens and middle-aged and all, but they feel different. Like, they’re all bending, in some invisible added dimension, toward life.

  Except, not life like the natural kind—spring and wildflowers and whatnot—life like Life, some—what did Jefferson call it?—simulacrum of itself, some advertising thing, like a marketing version of it. The representation, not the thing. Anyhow, everybody is cruising around, smiling and laughing and bustling and getting on with things with a sort of shocking disregard for their peril. The only guns in evidence are the submachine guns on some of the cops. Welsh says that even those were rarely seen “until recently.” But he isn’t very clear about what happened recently to get them all armed up.

  We stroll down the non-debris-strewn street, looking at the buildings. Welsh says that the university is made up of all these different smaller colleges and that each one has its own identity and traditions and affiliations. It’s like tribes. I already feel a certain identification with Trinity, even though I’ve been there all of twelve hours.

  The colleges mostly take their names from rich dudes who gave money to have them started, or sometimes the rich dudes would give them churchy names to suck up to God so that he would have second thoughts about sending them to hell for all the shitty things they probably did to make themselves rich and powerful in the first place. There’s even a Jesus College and a Christ’s, which sound kind of like evangelist schools, but Welsh says they’re just like any of the others. Trinity is actually the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity. It’s just nobody calls it that because it’s too much of a mouthful.

  Eventually we get to a big one called King’s, which has a gigantic chapel that looks like a science-fiction author came up with a giant medieval missile launcher. Welsh starts telling me something about the Duke of This or That.

  Me: “That’s great. But can we eat?”

  We walk through the town market, which reminds me a little of the Bazaar back home, since there are all these stalls with people hawking their wares and whatnot. I tell Welsh, and he starts plying me with questions about the Bazaar: What did it look like, who ran the place, how did people buy things, what was available? I can see him filing away my answers neatly in his brain.

  Meanwhile, I keep getting tripped up by little bits of behavior I’d forgotten existed. People dropping trash in trash cans (here they call them “rubbish bins”). People waiting in lines (“queues”). Holding open doors for each other. Like they expect to see the other person again, or even if they won’t, they’re acting like they’ll see the other person again, or maybe even that they see themselves as the other person in the transaction in a sort of imaginary swap. This might sound kind of “duh,” like these small acts are sort of obvious contributions to the general good that don’t cost you anything or whatever, but you’d be surprised how quickly it goes out the window once you’re in survival mode. The niceties get confined to the very limited circle of the few people you threw your lot in with. So I guess what I’m seeing is an expansion of the sense of the group or something. Which is maybe what a country is, or a “society.” I’m watching somebody help lift a stroller over the curb when I catch the end of a sentence—

  Welsh: “… which is why we’ve prepared a cover for you.”

  Me: “Huh?”

  Welsh: “Is that an Anglicism? ‘Cover story’?”

  Me: “No, I know what a cover story is. You want me to do secret agent stuff? Like, take on a false identity?”

  Welsh: “No and yes. No, in that we do not want or need you to do ‘secret agent stuff’; yes, in that we think that your reentry into society will be easier if you are not lumbered with the distinction of being a survivor of the Sickness.”

  Me: “Oh.”

  Welsh: “You see, it is not generally known that there are so many survivors in the Americas. I’d go as far as to say that you are all presumed dead.”

  Me: “Why don’t you tell people?”

 
; Welsh: “A variety of reasons. Chiefly, that there is nothing that we can do about it at present, and the fragile state of affairs means that we are loath to inform the public.”

  Me: “You mean they can’t handle the truth.”

  Welsh: “Mr. Nicholson rarely put it better. Yes. Besides, I’m afraid that if you were to proclaim yourself as the one survivor of the plague, no one would believe you.”

  Me: “Like, what are the chances?”

  Welsh: “Yes. Besides, there have been a number of cases of attention seekers doing precisely that in order to gain celebrity. And—I confess—some of my colleagues in the Office of Information have deliberately introduced rumors of survivors, in order to discredit them and inoculate the general public against the idea.”

  Me: “Jeez.”

  Welsh: “It is a dangerous world we live in. I think, in short, you might prefer to avoid the glare of attention you’d be under if you did, as it were, come out.”

  I hadn’t thought about this before. And, yeah, now that I do, it would be kind of a hassle to be treated like a freak, and apart from Welsh and his MI-whatever boys, I’m not exactly keen on the idea of answering questions all day about what it’s like back home.

  Welsh: “You have qualms.”

  Me: “Qualms?”

  Welsh: “Reservations.”

  Me: “Oh, I know what qualms means. And I don’t. Have them, I mean. Not about lying. I’ve done worse than that. Besides, what does it mean to lie to somebody outside my tribe? Nothing.”

  Welsh doesn’t seem to understand what I mean, but he doesn’t follow up.

  Me: “I’m just not sure I can get away with it.”

  Welsh smiles with what looks like a little bit of professional pride.

  Welsh: “Oh, we’ll help with that. You’d be surprised how incurious people actually are. The young especially. And especially in an atmosphere like this. Freshers at university… everyone is, to some degree, reinventing themselves.”

  He holds open a door.

  We order, and the waiter inputs our order into a little device. When the waiter goes, Welsh starts laying out the story. It’ll be sort of like if I had been a real geek in high school, but I get transformed into a cool kid when I get to college because nobody from home knows me. Except in this case, I was a post-apocalyptic scavenger, and now I’m…

  Well, I’m still Donna. We figure it’s best that we keep my name. And, so that there’s some credibility to my story, Welsh proposes that I’m a navy brat and that my folks got me on the Ronald Reagan when the shit hit the fan.

  All this is, of course, exceedingly lame and bogus, but for now I see no advantage in coming out of the apocalypse-closet, no other angle that helps me help Jefferson and the rest. So, initiate Donna 2.0.

  I feel kinda bad about sort of erasing my parents. Like, even though this cover story is obviously fake to me, it starts settling into the part of my brain where the real past is kept, and sort of ooches it out of the way. Like you can’t pretend to be something without starting to believe it in some sense. Now, I don’t have much of an issue dislodging my father. He was always, if I am being straight about it and not sugarcoating, a d-bag. Like, he hadn’t planned on getting married or having kids in the first place. I was just a bummer that cropped up to harsh his mellow and, try as he might (and he didn’t try that hard), there was always an air of making the best of it whenever he dealt with me.

  Mom is another issue. I don’t mean to hit the old single-mother cliché, but for sure she had a lot to deal with, and she always made me feel like she loved having me around, even if occasionally she did want to murder me. Anyhow, it feels bad replacing her with imaginary Officer’s Wife Mom. I apologize to her internally.

  Welsh: “We’ll need to rehearse these specifics, of course. In the meanwhile, I’ve taken the liberty of informing your tutor of your situation. He is cooperating with us.”

  Me: “Tutor? Am I, like, that dumb?”

  Welsh: “No, no. Tutor is an administrative position. The equivalent of a dean at American university. But a little more intimately involved. He doesn’t actually teach you anything. You normally don’t see him unless you’ve been… the expression is ‘skiving.’”

  Me: “Dicking around?”

  Welsh: “More or less.”

  Me: “Okay. But how am I going to explain you? And Titch—”

  He’s sitting just down the way from us, a sort of human room divider keeping people from overhearing things, his mass overflowing the normal-sized design specs of the faux-rustic bench and table arrangement. Taut Guy is standing by the exit, buzzing with menace.

  Me: “And Mr. Intensity over there.”

  Welsh: “The idea is that your father is a member of the Reconstruction Committee. That’s the liaison branch between your government and mine. That makes you a high-value target.”

  Me: “For who?”

  Welsh: “It’s terribly complicated.” He closes off the subject with a smile. “Besides,” he says, changing one subject for another like Indiana Jones with the gold statue and the bag of sand, “it’s not term yet. Most of the students haven’t come up. When term starts, we’ll keep our distance a bit more.”

  Food arrives—a number forty-two with rice noodles. Welsh and Titch watch me stuff the whole serving into my mouth before they’ve even separated their chopsticks. I ask for another and wipe my fingers off.

  Me: “Sorry. It’s been a while since I used cutlery. They didn’t give us any on the Ronald Reagan. Thought we might use them as weapons.”

  Welsh: “I think you’ll want to relearn the fork and knife if our plan is to work.”

  I nod. And I ask myself—the amazing thing is that it’s for the first time—what’s to become of me. Like, if I’m doing this whole con job, what’ll happen to me in the end? Am I going full-on Witness Protection Program up in this bitch? Will I figure out a way to get back to Jefferson, or will I have to be this fake high-value-target chick for the rest of my life? And then I realize that, since I hadn’t actually counted on having a rest of my life, or at least living past eighteen, I have no idea what I intend to do with all the years left in my body.

  I’m sure that college students are facing all sorts of existential issues and whatever, of the “what do I want to do with my life?” variety. It just feels like my situation is a wee bit more complicated.

  And I start thinking about the tribe, who are still dying off, that is unless Chapel and the rest really meant to save them. And I think of Jefferson and the others, and I wonder whether they’ve made it back home.

  Me: “Welsh, if we’re going to do this—if I’m going to cooperate and become this high-status chick—I need to know that my friends are okay.”

  Welsh: “I wish I knew. Your government is being very tight-lipped. Your escape, if I can call it that, was an embarrassment to them, and our intelligence services are not always working hand in hand, as you might have gleaned from our contretemps on the tarmac at RAF Duxford.”

  Me: “Yeah. Thanks for that. It was fun.”

  So there’s no knowing how they are. For all I know, they were apprehended before they could get back to the Square.

  Or worse.

  So I play for time. I realize that underneath all of Welsh’s smooth reassurances, this is the only way they’ll let things roll. The con is my best option.

  Then, out of the corner of my eye, I notice a guy in the far corner checking me out. He’s copper-skinned, with swept-back black hair and gray-green eyes. And—this has nothing to do with anything, of course—he’s totally beautiful, like, an eleven. A forkful of noodles is poised in his hand, but he’s too busy looking at me to eat it. When I look back at him, he loses his composure, which is kind of charming, and takes a sudden deep interest in the noodles. Welsh follows my gaze and seems to kind of target-lock on the guy.

  Welsh: “Not someone you know, I hope?”

  Me: “Who? Oh. No. Never seen him before.”

  It’s the truth, but des
pite that, Welsh seems to make a little mental note and file away the guy’s face. I feel kind of bummed, like by looking at him I’ve managed to get him put on a terrorist watch list or something.

  Titch: “I’m on it, boss.”

  Me: “Wait a second, Titch. Don’t get on his case or anything.”

  Welsh: “Yes, Titch. I think we might file this one under chercher la femme, no?”

  I don’t really know what this means, but it seems to make Titch stand down.

  Welsh: “Well. Shall we begin?”

  BRAINBOX INSPECTS the heaping bags of pigeon shit we’ve gathered from our forays onto the local rooftops.

  “So you’re gonna make a bomb out of poop?” Peter is looking pretty skeptical. He got the easy job, gathering chalk from his old school. He sets down some cardboard cartons full of clinking little white cylinders and regards Box and his guano supply from a distance.

  “Saltpeter,” says Brainbox.

  “Now you want salt?” Peter wipes his brow. The visit to the ghostscape of Stonewall High School doesn’t seem to have helped his mood.

  “No,” says Brainbox. “Not ‘salt, Peter.’ Saltpeter. I’m making it from the guano and chalk. And I’ll add that to charcoal to make black powder. So, in fact”—he looks up at Peter—“I want charcoal.”

  “Charcoal got all used up,” says Peter.

  “Then we’ll have to make some from scrap wood.”

  Peter’s about to answer back when Chapel says, “I saw a Kmart on Astor Place. Maybe we can find some.” Peter nods. He and Chapel seem to have some kind of rapport going. They head out, and a couple of minutes later, I observe them cautiously making their way south from our perch four floors up in a brownstone on Tenth, around the corner from Broadway. The windows are smeared to opacity, which suits our purposes. I’ve rubbed out a little circle of clarity in the glass to observe goings-on in the street below.

  I go over our supplies. Some ammo, some packs of Meals Ready to Eat, assault rifles. We’re not nearly as geared up as I’d like to be. Solon confiscated most of our hardware before we set off downtown, and left us just enough doses of the Cure to save my tribe. Theoretically. He kept the rest of our serum and equipment for himself, “against the chance of you blowing us off or dying, which amounts to the same thing.” I have no choice but to trust him.