The Young World Read online

  The Twins seem to have the only guns in camp. Morticia packs an old British Sten gun, practically an antique. Cowgirl has, if my tutelage under Washington serves me, a Kriss Super V, this boxy, snub-nosed little submachine gun that fires big .45 bullets at about twenty rounds a second.

  The Harajuku Twins are not to be taken lightly. In my brief Pocky experience, I’ve found that the nastiest weapons tend to gravitate toward the nastiest people. Like, we’re in a situation where shots get fired in anger pretty often? If you’re packing something like a Super V and don’t use it, chances are, somebody else is going to come into its possession.

  Morticia scans us like she’s the Terminator or something. There’s a period of nervous hush, which she ends with a pithy:

  “W.” Pause.

  “T.” Pause.

  “F?”

  This is directed at Ratso, who all of a sudden looks like a Pomeranian who just got caught taking a dump on the carpet.

  Ratso: “Baby! I brought home guests!”

  Morticia gives him a look that, I confess, I am guilty of having served up myself on occasion. The gist of it is, Oh hell, no.

  Me: “I like your gun.”

  Morticia: “Shut up, bitch.”

  Normally if a girl said that to me, we would, like, have words. But at the moment, I am just too tired and too hungover and too exhausted and generally too chewed up and crapped out to bother.

  Ratso: “Okay, first off, it wasn’t my fault.”

  Jefferson: “That’s true. This is my fault. Ratso was helping us, and we got in trouble with the Uptowners—do you know about the Uptowners?”

  Cowgirl does a little snort that removes any doubt.

  Jefferson: “Well—they were going to kill us. So Ratso helped us to escape. And here we are. We pose you no harm.”

  Morticia: (Looks at Ratso.) “Oh, Vitaly.”

  Cowgirl strides through the crowd and confronts him. “Why don’t you just give them an effing invitation? Draw them a map? You led a bunch of a-holes who the Uptowners were after here? Are you smoking crack?”

  Ratso: “… No?”

  Morticia suddenly notices Taylor standing next to me. “What the hell are you doing here? Back to your post!”

  Taylor: “Sorry!” I think I see her blush through the soot. She runs off toward where I first saw her, and some of the others follow.

  Ratso: “We lost the Uptowners. No way will they find us.”

  Morticia: “Oh, STFU. You are SFS.”

  Cowgirl: “Get in here before you make everybody totally space out.”

  I’m not going to say Ratso is whipped, but he isn’t exactly the Man in Charge, either, if you know what I mean. He seems to be involved with Morticia, though whether he is pet or boyfriend is another matter.

  Morticia and Cowgirl, whose real names, after much hemming and hawing, are divulged as Tricia and Sophie, are indeed twin sisters. It would seem they are either the most charismatic or most bossy figures in this teen underground scene, so they run the show.

  As the full Polaroid develops, it’s not as easy to make them out as the bad guys. They have a lot on their plates, what with being responsible for all the Lost Girls and Boys who’ve banded together here for security in numbers.

  This kind of answers the question that we are too polite to ask—“Who the hell would want to live underground?” It should have been obvious.

  Prey.

  The predators are all around. Anybody bigger, faster, and meaner, same as in the jungle. But the Uptowners are the worst of them all. They are numerous, organized, and particularly douchey.

  Morticia and Cowgirl lay it out for us. How, as the plague hit, loads of families from Uptown headed to the Hamptons to wait it out, leaving their nannies and their maids and their doormen to die in the crowded city. How they came back toting guns when the police force collapsed. How the adults fought pointless battles to preserve their real estate and then died of the Sickness, how their children picked up their guns and picked up the fight against anybody from “outside.” It was easy enough for them to tell who didn’t belong. They started clearing out anybody who wasn’t white. Mistakes were made, of course; that’s the deal with ethnic cleansing. But as a rule of thumb, it worked, for the ones who survived.

  The boys, thanks to years of life wasted on Call of Duty, had a knack for violence and a jump start on ignoring the suffering of others. So, unsurprisingly, they were the first ones to grab the guns and go hunting. But for a few notable exceptions, like Tricia and Sophie, the girls were unprepared and underarmed. While Wash and Jeff and the rest of us were trying to establish some kind of, I don’t know—fair?—society down in the Village, Uptown turned into a rapeocracy. Rule by the strong and especially the male. The weak, or the meek or whatever, were there to serve.

  There were plenty of girls who resisted, and plenty of boys at that. Suffice it to say, they weren’t sufficiently brutal. They were driven out, put down, just plain slaughtered.

  After a whole pisspot of blood got spilled, Uptown ended up in the grip of the “Confederacy.” An alliance of what was left of all the private schools in the area, with a thousand “warriors” in uniform imposing order on thousands of others.

  Now they control the territory from Grand Central all the way north to the edge of Harlem. They have a Tom and Jerry thing going on with the Moles; to date, their Good Guy Base hasn’t been discovered, but the Moles need to pop up aboveground to get food. Thanks to their knowledge of the subway system and other bits of dead infrastructure, they’ve managed to survive.

  Mole HQ is in a station underneath the Waldorf-Astoria hotel on Park and Forty-Ninth. Which is either Really Ironic or Really Stupid. Basically, they’re right underneath Uptown territory. They’ve burned out the entry floor of the hotel to make it look uninhabited, and the Uptowners are too spoiled for choice to bother investigating. As for the station itself, nobody knows about it. It’s a “dead stop” once used by, like, superrich visitors to the hotel who had their own railway cars. Cowgirl tells me that Franklin Roosevelt would be driven right onto a private car so that he could leave New York without anyone noticing that he was disabled. The station was bypassed and disused, and now the Moles are the only ones who know how to get here.

  We offer to be on our way, but the Twins decide that it’d be safer to stick around overnight, in case the Uptowners are still searching the tracks near Grand Central.

  After a while, some platters of food are brought in—rat stew and a bowl of stale rice with rainbow-colored spores.

  Peter crosses himself and says a little grace while Morticia scoops off the mold and reverently places it on a bronze platter under a picture of Edward from Twilight. She closes her eyes and whispers something.

  Peter: “You know that vampires aren’t real, right?”

  Morticia: “Of course I do. Do you know that God isn’t real?”

  Peter: “Says who?”

  Morticia: “Says me. Either he isn’t real, or he’s a total douche.”

  Peter: “No need for that.”

  Morticia: “Oh, sorry, did I hurt your feelings? Well, ask yourself this. If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then he knows we’re here, and he could make it suck less.”

  Peter: “We can’t blame God for things people do.”

  Morticia: “Why not? What’s his game? Why would he make us if he didn’t make us right?”

  Peter: “He wanted us to have free will.”

  Morticia: “Hah! How can you have free will if he knows everything that happens and he has power over it all?”

  Ratso: “Babe, c’mon. These are our guests.”

  Morticia, sullen, pokes a spoon into her rat stew.

  Morticia: “I’ll stick with Edward, thank you very much. God’s just a myth. Like the Tooth Fairy or the Old Man.”

  Jefferson: “What do you know about the Old Man?”

  Morticia: (Shrugs.) “Same as everybody. He’s just a story for people who want their mommies and daddies back
.”

  Cowgirl: “I heard that he was immune to the Sickness, and he’s trying to cure it by injecting his blood into kids.”

  Morticia: “That’s shit for brains. Excuse my sister. She’s an idiot.”

  Cowgirl: “It could happen! There’s always somebody, like, resistant to diseases, right?”

  Morticia: “You’re dreaming. All the adults were screwed. And nobody’s going around injecting people with his own blood.”

  Ratso: “He exists.”

  Then, when he has our attention: “I saw him.”

  Morticia: “Bullshit you saw him.”

  Ratso goes quiet. But then, after a little chewing, he says, “I was over by the East River. There was this pigeon that couldn’t fly? Anyway, as far as I was concerned, it was dinner. So I’m following it, and I get close to the FDR Drive. Across the road, I see this guy get out of a boat? And he’s dressed in a big plastic astronaut suit? For hazardous materials and stuff, like in the movies?”

  Morticia: “How do you know it was a he if he was all covered by the suit?” Like she’s said it a million times before.

  Cowgirl: “Maybe it was just some kid.”

  Ratso: “Why would a kid wear a suit like that?”

  Cowgirl: “Kids wear a lot of stupid stuff.” She ought to know.

  Jefferson: “Did you see his face?”

  Ratso: (Shakes his head.) “Hell, no. I saw him look up at me? I know that because the sun was behind me and the faceplate caught the light? And I ran the hell away. Left the pigeon there and everything.”

  Brainbox: “What color was the suit?” He’s barely said a thing all day.

  Ratso: “Blue. I think. Why?”

  Brainbox: “Nothing.”

  Morticia: “Does it really matter what color suit it was? The whole point is, nobody’s left. We’re it. Nobody’s coming to save us.”

  I look over at Jefferson. “You want to tell them?” I ask.

  He tells them. About everything we’ve done since the Uptowners showed up with that damn, delicious pig. The library and the cannibals. Plum Island.

  The Harajuku Twins are not impressed.

  Morticia: “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  Ratso: “Well, I think it’s groovy. Tomorrow I’ll take you up to 110th Street on the number six line. That’ll get you past Uptown territory.”

  Morticia: “And out of our Kool-Aid.”

  Jefferson: “What’s on 110th Street? Why can’t we keep going?”

  Ratso looks embarrassed. He glances at Peter.

  Peter: “He wants to say ‘black folks,’ but he’s worried I’ll take it the wrong way.”

  Ratso: “That’s right. Sorry. Anyway, I can’t help you through the tunnels there.”

  So, bonus newsflash? There’s some kind of race war going on between the Uptowners and Hispanic people and African Americans. Things haven’t worked out in a very touchy-feely way up north. I guess people didn’t really get why the white boys should keep all the phat apartments, especially now that 90 percent of the residents were dead. And the Uptowners weren’t feeling very much like sharing their toys. Lots of kids got killed; now things seem to have simmered down for the moment. But the long and the short of it is that we’re on our own once we get to the top of Central Park.

  The park is a no-go because all the animals escaped from the zoo and have been generally living it up, at the expense of picnickers.

  So, great.

  Taylor, my little friend, pops her head in after knocking. She tells us our “rooms are ready.” Some other kids come and take away our bowls. We thank the Harajuku Twins and leave the car. Ratso stays behind, and as the door slams shut, I can hear Morticia start to lay into him.

  Taylor, whose turn at watch is done, takes us to the “rooms” that have been set up on one end of the construction site. They’re basically just areas that have been cordoned off from each other with white plastic sheeting. But the beds are super fancy and soft, and there are plush chairs and lacquered wooden tables and bedside reading desks. There are candles everywhere, and they make the plastic look like milky glass, and you could almost forget you were underground.

  “This is super cute, Taylor. Thank you.”

  Taylor looks totally stoked that I like the rooms. The others mutter with gratitude, and she’s just, like, fit to burst. As the others put their stuff down, Taylor kind of hovers up to me, looking embarrassed.

  Taylor: “We’re, um, doing something?”

  Me: “Uh-huh?”

  Taylor: “Would you, like, like to come?”

  Me: “Oh—sure!” I’m so goddamn tired I can’t imagine anything better than falling asleep, but I figure I have to appease the natives or whatever.

  Her face explodes into a smile.

  Me: “Can my peeps come?”

  Taylor (even more stoked): “If they want!”

  I’m surprised when Peter and SeeThrough both decide to tag along. “Something is my favorite thing to do,” says Peter.

  SeeThrough: “Yeah. I love something.”

  Jefferson: “I’ll be there in a second. Brainbox wanted to talk.”

  We follow Taylor through the cavern and into a little lobby sort of space, where a bunch of other girls are waiting. There’s a buzz of anticipation when they see us. Smiles and whispering.

  They scrape together some chairs, upturned paint buckets, and milk crates for us to sit on. Then, with a nod from Taylor, one of the girls fetches a little box with satiny red embroidery on it. It looks like a case for a saint’s finger bone. And she handles the box like whatever’s inside is precious.

  I’m thinking we have been invited to a church service or something when she opens the box and I see that there are four chubby little copper and black batteries inside, lying against cushioned silk.

  She gently fishes the batteries from the box and leans over to mess with something I can’t see. Some plasticky clipping and clacking noises.

  Taylor hands me a binder encrusted with glitter and stickers and plastic jewels and crap. She looks me in the eyes significantly like she’s giving me something very precious. I nod a churchy, appreciative sort of nod, and open the book.

  It’s a list of pop songs with numbers by them.

  The girl with the batteries stands up again, and now she’s holding a microphone. She gives it to Taylor, who smiles sheepishly and clears her throat.

  Peter looks at me, like, Aw, yeah.

  Then music starts up. Bouncy, cool twanging with a looped, chimey bass line. It’s that song from 2012 or something, the big hit where the guy complains that his ex had her friends pick up all her records and stuff, and then she says that he was a loser.

  Taylor starts singing in a sweet, fragile voice, pacing through the words like she was walking carefully on stepping-stones in a stream.

  And that song—ugh, I heard it so many damn times that it made me sick. Like, it was as if I ate fifty cupcakes in a row. I was, like, eff these losers and their relationship issues. Move on dot org.

  But the way she sings it, it’s so freakin’ beautiful? Like, it isn’t about some hipster and his stupid ex. It’s about everything. It’s children singing to their missing parents, it’s a lamb singing to a lion, it’s Life singing to Death.

  So I start crying. Tears escape from my eyes; I can feel them trying to find their way down my face, getting stuck on these ice floes of soot and grime. And I think, Thank God, thank God, I can still do it, I can still feel. A lever inside me has been pulled, and a subroutine is running, and my body is dumping toxins overboard.

  I look over at Peter and SeeThrough, secretly so they don’t see that I’m crying. But they’re too busy listening to pay attention to my tears. Both of them look like they’re floating in a bubble of their own, running their own little brain apps in their Brain OS’s. Or maybe we’re all in the same place, just it’s dark there, and we can’t find one another.

  Taylor finishes in time for me to keep from full-on losing it. She seems unaffected by
the emotion of the song as it winds down and fades out, like she’s in the eye of the storm. She looks to me, her face open and vulnerable. I smile a big smile and applaud. She laughs and bows.

  Then another girl gets up, and “Call Me Maybe” starts playing, which, again, I didn’t have any time for. But as she sings, my mind is flooded with all the precious stupid things we had and lost—flirting and wondering if a guy liked you and giving out your phone number, and clothes and texts and accessories and looks and laughing, and stupid TV and stupid music and stupid pizza and stupid games and stupid magazines and stupid makeup and stupid books and stupid everything.

  And the girls sing some Justin Bieber, and then Peter and I do the Black Eyed Peas, and for all the world it’s like we’re back in time. The music has made a little wormhole, and we’re Before, and everything is fun and goofy and cool. And everything is almost perfect, but I find myself wishing Jefferson were here, too. I want to see him smile. And then, boom, it’s like a dam breaks in my heart, and I am just drowning in feelings for him, and I think, What am I, insane? Not to have kissed him and held him. And I know it’s probably just the music and singing all these songs about love; I must be hypnotizing myself—but it feels very real, and my heart is just bursting for him, and I decide that I HAVE to go, I have to find him and tell him what I’ve discovered, that if you can just hollow out a space together with someone, you can hold the entire world at bay.

  I make, like, my excuses and hug Taylor and thank her, and I start back toward our “rooms,” and I hear the next track come on behind me, another silly tune, a teenage girl singing Jay Z, all boasty and blustery, but my heart is in another place—it’s out of my chest, it’s with Jefferson, and I have to go and get it back.

  I pull aside the plastic sheeting and find his bed—

  And he’s lying there. His feet are on the floor, his chest gently rising and falling. Asleep, he looks like a little boy, his hair mussed and his mouth open.

  I feel like I am on a ledge looking over a great height.

  He’s away somewhere peaceful, better than this world. His spirit is wandering someplace safe, his body is trying to put itself back together. It feels selfish to wake him.