The Young World Read online

Jefferson: “Me too.”

  He steps away from the door and puts a bathrobe on over his towel. Extra reassurance for me, I suppose.

  We sit on the couch. He offers me a sip from a miniature bottle of cognac.

  He looks at the window, which is curtained off so nobody from outside can see us.

  Jefferson: “Donna, I did something terrible, and I need to tell somebody.”

  Me: “Okay.”

  He can’t look me in the eye.

  Jefferson: “We have to fight sometimes. Kill people, even. That’s just… the way things are. But when they were chasing us, in the library… I felt like I had to scare them off.”

  I look at him as if to say, Go on.

  Jefferson: “I closed the big wooden doors on the first floor behind us. Then I waited. I could have run, but that would mean they would follow. So I waited.” He looks at his hands. “I made sure that the first person who pushed through, well… I lined up the stroke… and I cut the way I was taught.” He pauses.

  Me: “Yeah?”

  Jefferson: “I made sure I cut their hands off, Donna. I wanted to keep anybody from coming through, so I made sure I cut their hands off. I heard screaming and then I forced the door shut and then nobody followed. But the hands were still on my side of the door.”

  Now he looks at me. “They were girl’s hands. Delicate, you know? I could tell.”

  I reach out to take his hand, but he withdraws his—he’s looking at my fingers.

  Me: “You were trying to save your friends. You did save your friends. You did what you had to.”

  Jefferson: “That’s not it. It’s what came after. That’s a horrible thing to do, isn’t it? A disgusting thing. But—Donna, I want you to know me, so I have to tell you—”

  Me: “Stop. You don’t have to tell me. I know.” I touch his chin to make sure that he is looking me in the eye. He kind of shivers. “I know that when you did it, you didn’t feel bad; you didn’t feel disgusting or evil or wrong. You felt good.”

  Jefferson: “How do you know that?”

  Me: “That’s how I would feel. They wanted to hurt us. They were… you saw what they were doing.”

  Jeff nods.

  Jefferson: “What’s happening to us?”

  Me: “I don’t know. Maybe there’s gonna be time to figure that out later.”

  Now he takes my hand.

  Jefferson: “What I said before?”

  I wait.

  Jefferson: “Well, I’m not going to take it back. I don’t care if that makes things weird. I don’t want to make you feel weird, but I can’t lie.”

  Me: “I understand. I only… I don’t even know what love is anymore. All that stuff is gone. I mean, of course I love you. I love you as a fr—”

  Jefferson: “Don’t. I don’t want to hear it. I’ll always be your friend, but I want more.”

  Me: “I know. Maybe I’m crazy.”

  Jefferson: “Just—just try, will you? Try to love me if you can.”

  And like that, we’re out of that place we were in, the place where we understand each other. Because you just can’t try to love someone. I don’t know very much about love, but I know that’s not how it works. Right?

  That’s enough for one night, I guess. Jefferson goes up the stairs to the sleeping loft.

  I follow him, and when he lies down, I lie down beside him. His back is turned to me. I lay my head against his back.

  We just stay there like that.

  A couple of minutes later, the others knock and come in, one by one. They lie on the couches and the floor. We fall asleep hearing the sound of one another’s breathing, like waves on nearby shores. The tribe rests.

  CHAPTER 19

  I’M UP BEFORE anyone else, when dawn is just a purple bruise on the sky. I look at Donna for a length of time just past Appropriate and just short of Serial Killer.

  If we were together, I think, I would know her face this way. The curve of her lips, the swell of her forehead, the contour map of her ear. Unanimated, her spirit away in the dreamlands somewhere, resting in peace, skirting the border of death. Charming me.

  But we’re not together.

  I wonder, with everything that’s happening, what the point is to caring about her the way I do. It seems like a silly, useless thing. And I feel embarrassed and alone. And then I tilt the idea another way, and the whole thing shifts. What’s the point to anything else? What matters more? As long as I believe in her and me, I’m not lost.

  I pull on my clothes.

  Downstairs, Brainbox sleeps on the floor, his fingers intertwined with SeeThrough’s. That’s curious.

  I touch him on the shoulder, and his eyes pop open. “Yeah?” he says.

  That’s Brainbox for you. Quick start-up sequence.

  I nod for him to follow me out of the room. I take him next door.

  “Brainbox, what were you going to do with that article?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “We don’t have it.”

  I give him the crumpled, smeared journal I took from Alpha when I killed him.

  “Have you looked at it?” he asks, sitting on the couch and flattening it against the coffee table. The blood-stiffened paper crackles.

  “No,” I say. “I figured I wouldn’t understand it anyway.”

  I follow BB’s eyes as they follow the text. They jump ahead, left, ahead at a speed that seems impossible to me. The time between his blinks gets longer as the gears in his mind mesh with the ideas in the article.

  “So… what’s going on with SeeThrough and you?” I ask.

  “I think she likes me.”

  “Oh! Great, man.”

  “What do you mean?” asks Brainbox, looking up from the paper for a second.

  “Well, I mean… do you feel the same way about her?”

  Brainbox blinks. “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it.”

  Then he turns back to the paper, but as he does, he says, “I guess I had figured I’d always be alone.”

  He doesn’t say it in a self-pitying way. Just matter-of-fact. I don’t really know how to respond. So I don’t.

  “Well,” he says after a while, “this is interesting.”

  “How?”

  “Okay. The thing about scientists…” he says. “People don’t really understand what they’re like. They think it’s all standing on the shoulders of giants and working together for the advancement of knowledge. It isn’t. It’s brutal. They compete with one another for the same resources. They get into feuds. They… talk shit about each other.”

  “You mean they used to do that,” I say.

  Brainbox freezes in place for a moment.

  BB’s parents were scientists—a biologist and a physicist. They’re dead, of course. I worry that I’ve touched a vulnerable spot.

  “Yes. Sorry. They used to do that,” he continues. “And, if I understand this correctly, it was written by one scientist trying to… what’s the expression? Cock-block another.”

  I can’t help but laugh at the way BB just deployed that term.

  “This is a theoretical paper warning the scientific community about a kind of bioweapon,” he continues.

  “Like a plague or something?” I say.

  Brainbox nods. “Yeah. And as I thought, it has to do with diseases that selectively kill adults.”

  “But how would they let that kind of information just get out there?” I say. “Wouldn’t it be top secret or something?”

  Brainbox shrugs. “The specifics would be secret, sure. But that doesn’t mean that the idea would be secret. I mean, the idea of an EMP wasn’t a secret. The idea of—”

  “Excuse me?” I say.

  Brainbox blinks and stops himself, in a characteristic tic, like he’s used to people not knowing as much as he does but occasionally forgets and has to take it down a notch.

  “An electromagnetic pulse. A weapon that could short out the electrical grid. The government used to worry about that.”

  “Oh,�
� I say. It’s kind of funny, in retrospect, because you didn’t need to figure out some superweapon to take out the electrical grid. All you had to do was get rid of the people who knew how to keep it up and running.

  “There was a lot of stuff like that,” says Brainbox. “EMPs, dirty bombs, orbital weapons platforms. Those ideas were public knowledge. Same with bioweapons. So it’s not that weird that somebody would write about it. Besides which, this is a specialist publication. You’d be surprised how much stuff was hiding in plain sight. So much…”

  “Information,” I say.

  “Yeah,” says Brainbox.

  “Okay,” I say. “Okay, so this is a guy trying to screw up somebody else’s research by saying it’s dangerous.”

  “Yeah. On the surface it looks like an opinion piece, or an essay on scientific ethics, but it feels to me like the stuff my parents used to deal with. They called it ax grinding.”

  “So why pay it any attention?” I ask. “If the writer’s just trying to screw somebody else over, isn’t the information going to be biased?”

  “Yes, except it seems kind of… accurate.”

  “Accurate like how?” I ask.

  “Accurate like what the author describes… what he warned could go wrong…” Brainbox looks up at me. “It’s What Happened,” he says.

  I absorb this for a second. “How do you know?” I ask.

  “Here. Look. Steroid hormone-binding proteins. See?” He points to a diagram.

  “BB, I don’t understand any of this stuff.”

  “The body produces them during puberty. Once physical maturity sets in, they level off. And little kids don’t have them. That explains why the little kids died. They didn’t have the proteins to bind with the adult-killing agent and keep it from attacking.”

  “But why?” I say. “Why would anybody want to kill everybody but keep adolescents alive?”

  “Don’t know. You’d think it’d be the other way around.” Brainbox looks at me. “I think I just made a joke.”

  “Congratulations,” I say. “Still. The question remains.”

  Brainbox shrugs. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “That’s the why. The why is less important than the how.”

  “Because if you know how, you’re partway to knowing how to stop it,” I say.

  “Thank you for catching up,” says Brainbox. “I was getting bored.”

  “But the guy who wrote this paper isn’t going to explain the how, is he? I mean, he was just hating on the guy who actually did it.”

  “Correct. But there is a lead here. The article targets this research being done by a team working at Plum Island.”

  “Okay. What’s that?”

  “Plum Island Animal Disease Center,” says Brainbox.

  “Well, at least that doesn’t sound creepy.”

  “It was creepy. Well, sort of. My dad told me about it once. It was a quarantined research site for work on foot-and-mouth disease. That’s not too weird. Foot-and-mouth is just a disease that affects livestock. But they were supposed to have worked on bioweapons, too. Apparently that stopped in 1969. Still, there were always conspiracy theories knocking around about the place.”

  “Like what?”

  “Crazy experiments,” he says. “Mutant animals. Bioweapons.”

  Brainbox saves the kicker for the end. “It says here that the entire facility was placed under the Department of Homeland Security in 2002.”

  “So?”

  “So Homeland Security dealt with immigration and customs, and it makes sense that they kept an eye on diseases that could affect US livestock. But they also handled terrorism.”

  “Like bioweapons,” I say.

  “Yeah.”

  “You think the Sickness could have started there? Like, they found a weapon and tried to disarm it or something?” I feel cold sweat starting from my pores.

  Brainbox nods.

  “Oh, crap,” I say.

  “Yeah,” says Brainbox. “Oh, crap.”

  “So”—I’m not sure I even want to ask this—“where is Plum Island?”

  Brainbox says, “It’s near the Hamptons.”

  “You’re shitting me,” I say.

  “No,” he says. “It’s off the North Fork of Long Island.”

  “Aw, crap.”

  That’s only a hundred miles from here. Two hours’ drive in the old days. Now? Who knows.

  Brainbox smiles at me. “So, Generalissimo, what are you going to do?”

  CHAPTER 20

  JEFFERSON AND BRAINBOX COME IN, and everybody springs into defensive postures, like, grabbing butter knives from the bar and taking cover and all. It looks a bit ridiculous because we don’t get the drop on them in the least.

  They just sit down on the couch and look around in an important sort of way, a “your mother and I have something to tell you” sort of way.

  Only instead of a divorce, it’s a suicide mission.

  Jefferson holds up that goddamn medical journal, which is all covered in blood and goo. He does this whole spiel about bioweapons, whatever those are, and some place called the Sugarplum Fairy Disease Emporium or something, and how he and Brainbox are going to find a cure.

  Why not. The Sugarbaked Ham Infection Center is “only” a hundred miles from here, so, you know, fun!

  Then he does a totally Jeffersonian thing, which is to give this whole big speech about how he can’t ask any of us to volunteer; in fact he insists that the rest of us go home to the Square.

  But SeeThrough refuses to go home. She’s all up for the trip, in keeping with her new action-hero image.

  Peter: (Raises his hand like he’s in class or something.) “Hello, my name is Peter.”

  It takes a second for people to shake off the gloom and respond with a bored-sounding “Hello, Peter.”

  Peter: “Um, I would just like to say that I signed on for a good time? And so far, I barfed, I got shot at, and somebody tried to feed me human flesh.”

  Jefferson: “Your point being?”

  Peter: “My point being, I’m not gonna go home with my tail between my legs. I’m gonna stay out, party hearty, and turn that frown upside down. Sign me up.”

  So now everybody is looking at me.

  Me: “I vote nobody goes east. We all go home. Screw the hero routine. You want to bushwhack a hundred miles into unknown territory? After what’s happened to us going forty blocks? And what happens if we get there? Brainbox, like, tweaks some margarita mix and then nobody dies anymore?”

  Brainbox: “There’s no way margarita mix—”

  Me: “Shut up, Brainbox. You know what I mean.”

  Jefferson: “If we don’t do something, it’s only going to get worse.”

  Me: “What’s that supposed to mean? How can it get worse?”

  Jefferson: “It can get a lot worse. Tell me something, Peter. How are the scavenging expeditions going lately?”

  Peter: “It’s getting harder and harder to find food. On the plus side, you can still find shitloads of themed iPhone covers.”

  Jefferson: “Okay. Donna, how are your medicine reserves holding up?”

  Me (frowning): “Frank and I are talking about growing poppies to manufacture our own morphine.”

  Jefferson: “Terrific. How many acres? Can we support everybody on the food we’re growing right now, Brainbox?”

  Brainbox: (Shakes his head.) “No. Not without foraging for canned foods and stuff.”

  Peter: “Or eating other people. Don’t forget that.”

  Jefferson: “That’s my point. The whole thing is going down the tubes. Those… monsters back at the library are the exception now. But they won’t be when the city’s food supplies are used up. And that’s sooner rather than later.”

  Me: “So why is curing the Sickness going to help anything? At least now people are dying off, right? If everybody gets cured, there’re more mouths to feed.”

  Jefferson: “You’re not looking at the big picture. See, nobody’s thinking about the long t
erm, because there is no long term. If you know you’re going to die within the next few years, you’ve got no reason to make a stable society. If people knew they were going to live… they’d have a reason to grow things, a reason to put stuff back together, maybe even build… I don’t know… something new.”

  Again, typical Jefferson. While everybody else is figuring out new ways to cook rat, he’s working on restoring civilization.

  Don’t go thinking that I find this admirable. To me, it’s just denial. He’s no different from the glue sniffers or the sex junkies or the suicides. Some people just do not want to deal with the world the way it is.

  Okay, so maybe it’s a little admirable. But still pointless.

  Me: “Dude. I was down for a trip to the library and back for dinner. Now you want to save the world?”

  Jefferson shrugs. Like, no big deal. Uch.

  Brainbox: “Put it this way. What have you got to lose?”

  SeeThrough: “Yeah. You’re going to die anyway. Why not try to do something useful?”

  Me: “Look, Black Widow, I don’t want to act ungrateful for what you did back at the library, but just because you kicked a little ass doesn’t mean you have a right to tell me where to get off.”

  Peter: “She kicked a lot of ass, actually. C’mon, bitch. You got some homework to do or something?”

  Me: “Shut your cake-hole. I know why you’re going. You just want to be famous.”

  Peter looks pissed off at this, but it’s true. He always figured he’d end up a celebrity, back before It Happened. It’s surprising the number of kids who thought they’d be famous. Like it was a viable end in itself. Like, they got so used to broadcasting their opinions that they figured they were as important as the people everyone actually listened to, and they were only waiting for the world to bow down and kiss their ass. Peter, however, had thought about it more extensively than maybe anybody I knew. And, weirdly, I actually agreed with him. He should have been famous.

  Peter drops the scandalized look and laughs. Nobody but me joins him. It’s more of a snort than an end-of-the-episode kind of laugh.

  End of the episode. I find myself thinking in terms of dead clichés all the time now. All the juice was gone, but we were still sucking on the orange. Things were getting kind of old even before It Happened. Music, clothes, movies. Everything felt like a remake or retro or a mash-up or a callback or a sample. Everything was, like, been-there-done-that. Everything was biting on something else’s style. Even when It was Happening, all I could think of was This is just like Contagion, and later, This is just like Lord of the Flies meets The Hunger Games.