The Young World Read online

  I decide it can wait till tomorrow. This feeling isn’t going away.

  But first I lean over him and gently touch my lips to his face.

  I’ve never done this. Like, touched him. I mean, I’ve touched him touched him, but not, like, lovey-dovey or anything. The closest we ever came was a dare in first grade. And he didn’t even follow through. So.

  My breath on his poor wounded cheek. A kiss on his eye. A kiss on his forehead full of worries.

  And his mouth.

  I’m surprised when it smells of mint.

  The music is still going on, but I don’t want to go back.

  Instead I go to my bed and I take out my iPhone. I power it up and find my favorite movie of Charlie.

  He steps forward onto the rug in front of the mantel, and Mom and I applaud. He grips one hand in the other in front of his little belly and starts to sing in his whistly, lispy, out-of-tune voice:

  We sing… with pride…

  We sing with pride, our hearts open wide…

  We sing… we sing… with pride…

  We sing with pride… we sing with pride…

  His face so serious, his eyes wandering up to the ceiling, his body swaying this way and that. He loses the thread of the lyrics and brings the song to an end, bowing. Then he is seized by embarrassment and makes a run for the phone, and the movie ends as he grabs it.

  I watch it again. I have watched it a hundred thousand times. Sometimes I just look at movies of Charlie over and over again until the phone’s batteries run down, and I find Brainbox and beg him for more juice.

  As long as he is here to sing to me, some whisper of me is alive.

  But who knows when I will get back to the Jennies. I power the iPhone down and lie back, caressing the screen with my thumb, and in time, I fall asleep.

  CHAPTER 27

  DONNA AND the others leave with that Taylor kid and the other feral nymphets, and I find Brainbox. He’s looking at a piece of plastic.

  “What’s with the LEGO?” I say.

  His eyes flick my way.

  “Nothing. I want to talk about that pig.”

  “Which pig do you have in mind?”

  “The pig,” says Brainbox. “The one that Cheekbones and the rest of them wanted to sell us.”

  “Sell is an interesting word to use.”

  “Okay—they wanted to trade us the pig for two girls. Remind you of anything?”

  I shrug.

  “It made me think of that stuff they taught us in grade school,” says Brainbox. “The triangular trade and everything. Like, molasses for slaves for cloth.”

  “What’s the third part of the triangle? Pigs for girls for what?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” says Brainbox. “What matters is, why did they even bother to come trading? And where did the pig come from?”

  “They wanted to trade because they wanted girls for—you know…”

  Brainbox frowns. “I don’t buy that. I mean, yeah, they treat girls like objects or whatever—I get it. But I don’t think that was the real reason they wanted to trade with us. I mean, why us, particularly?”

  “High-quality women?” I say.

  “No. I mean, yes, but not for their purposes. Why not capture people instead? They had no idea what kind of… society we were.”

  “They didn’t really care,” I say. “When we didn’t want to trade, they tried to force us to.”

  “Right, which is not what you do with an equal trading partner.”

  “But why not just take our stuff?”

  “Dangerous,” Brainbox says. “Unnecessary, if you can extract what you need another way. An unequal exchange. With… a colony. When you colonize, you don’t have to kill somebody to take their stuff. You force them into your system, and they give you their stuff, for things they don’t need.”

  We’re on to AP Economics again. I can practically hear Donna sighing in annoyance.

  “Mercantilism,” I say. “But girls?”

  “Weren’t you listening to those twins? Girls are trying to escape the Uptowners. What if they do escape? Or what if they fight back?”

  “So they want to enslave us. And they want our… stuff,” I say. “Everybody wants something. What else is new?”

  “It’s more complicated than that. Who raised the pig? And what about the milk?”

  “For my cappuccino.”

  “Yes. How did they get milk? It’s been two years since It Happened.”

  “It could’ve been, like… canned, or that kind that comes in boxes, right?”

  Brainbox shakes his head. “UHT milk lasts a year at most.”

  “Okay,” I say. “So they’ve got some cows, too. So?”

  “They’ve got enough pigs that they have a surplus.”

  “Right. You don’t trade away what you need.” I’m starting to see what Brainbox means.

  Frank has worked like hell to squeeze a few crops out of our little plot in the Square, but we still resort to scavenging, and even that’s running out.

  The Ghosts are growing vegetables in Bryant Park, but they don’t have enough to survive without cannibalism.

  And the Moles are starving underground.

  “They have farms,” I say, amazed. “Not, like, patches here and there. Not some vegetable garden. Something big. Upstate, or Long Island.”

  “Exactly,” says Brainbox.

  “But what if they don’t own the farms?” I say. “What if they’re trading partners, or colonies, or whatever?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” says Brainbox. “The point is—”

  “The point is, where there’s a surplus, there’s a future,” I say. A surplus means you can store up food. It means you can sustain life.

  It means you can start again.

  If.

  If Brainbox is right about the Sickness. If we can do anything about it. If we get to Plum Island. If.

  “If we figure out the Sickness, Brainbox…” I say.

  “Then?” he says.

  “Then we do something about the Uptowners.”

  “Do what?”

  I think about the Uptowners in their thousands, and our little tribe seems insignificant. And our expedition feels like a wood chip on the ocean.

  I can hear music from the other side of the cavern; laughter, chatter.

  I wish I could just go there.

  But my head is full of hope and fear. Hope that despite everything we’ve lost, we might build something good. Maybe something better than it was Before.

  Fear that it’ll be too late; that if we somehow live through this, we’ll just drown in the hatred of our enemies.

  I’m too tired to go all that way toward the music. Too sad to look at Donna and still not touch her.

  We don’t belong, my heart says to me. I want a future, and all she wants is the past. So she doesn’t love me. She loves that phone of hers more. Charges it up and keeps it close, like Before is going to call her.

  But I’m here now.

  I leave Brainbox twiddling with his radio and head to my bed. I lie back. Maybe I ought to get up. Maybe things would be different this time.

  And then I’m asleep.

  In my dream, I hear the endless static from Brainbox’s crank radio. Then, suddenly, out of the ocean of noise, I hear a voice. I imagine that I open my eyes, and I see him look at me, and fiddle with the knobs, and the static comes back.

  Impossibly big—obese—raindrops hit a metal roof.

  A mouse is screaming.

  And then I’m awake. Peter is shaking me.

  “What?”

  The raindrops are gunshots echoing through the tunnels.

  “They found us,” says Peter.

  I’m up, and adrenaline is jetting hot through my veins. I see the others, gray silhouettes on the plastic sheeting, gathering their gear.

  Fear is running through the hole like a fire, eating the air. A few of the Moles are heading toward the shooting, but most of them are running, leaving everything. Some cling to eac
h other, frozen in place.

  Ratso appears, his eyes wild. He’s got a rifle in hand.

  “Go!” he says. “Get out of here! The Uptowners have found us. We won’t be able to hold them long.”

  I don’t like the idea of running. Not if it means leaving the Moles to get hunted down.

  “Ratso—is there a side tunnel? Can you get us around behind them? We can lead them away from here, can’t we? Give the others a chance to escape.”

  Ratso focuses, nods. He gestures for us to follow him. We pass by the railway car, and I see the Twins heading toward the Uptowners, their guns at the ready. The Goth girl and Ratso share a look as they pass.

  We follow him to another door that groans and yields to a stairway heading down. We slip down mucky stairs, then through a service corridor of some kind. I have my Petzl on and can just keep up with Ratso, who runs as though the way were fully lit.

  Stairs leading up, and a blast of cold air as we empty onto a row of tracks. We’ve doubled back behind the Uptowners, I think. The gunfire is coming from a different direction now.

  “Okay,” says Ratso. “What’s the plan?”

  I hold my breath, trying to slow down my heart.

  “We engage them,” I say. “Try to draw them after us or at least split them up.”

  “Hurry up, damn it!” says Donna. “Before they kill them all!” And she rushes ahead toward the shooting.

  We follow as best we can, until we make out the light of muzzle flashes splayed against tunnel walls in the distance.

  They’re too busy trying to shoot their way into the Moles’ cavern to see us coming. We get to within fifty yards or so, picking our way among the girders holding up the ceilings. Rats are streaming past our ankles, away from the fight.

  I can see a doorway leading to the Moles’ encampment. There’s a little figure crumpled on the ground, wedging the door open. Somebody else is doing a good job of holding the advance of the Uptowners, popping into the open to fire a shot and then hiding.

  The Uptowners are trying to pick her off, inching closer and closer every time she ducks out of sight. Soon they’ll work their way around to a position from which she can’t hide. The popping of the guns is intermittent, a ragged backyard Fourth of July with an occasional burst of typewriter-era newsroom. Nobody has the ammunition to really open up.

  Ratso, who I guess doesn’t understand this, suddenly unloads his AR, hosing down the middle distance with a five-second spray of bullets. Then nothing. He looks at the empty gun as if it’s broken.

  It does the trick, though. The Uptowners stop firing and scurry to new positions, shouting to one another. In moments, shots are coming our way, clanging off beams and raining filth from the ceiling. I throw myself to the ground as Ratso falls backward onto his rump.

  Meanwhile, Donna has made her way to the doorway, dangerously close to the Uptowners. The others are following her, which means that we’ll lose our flanking position if I don’t do something. I wish I had my old AR-15. I miss her worse than my parents right now. My brain has just enough time to process what a twisted thought this is as the Mole defending the doorway appears again.

  It’s Taylor, the skinny blond girl with the plastic earrings. She pops out to take another shot at the Uptowners, and her luck runs out. A bullet catches her in the chest, and she falls backward out of sight.

  I hear Donna scream, and she gets up and runs, pumping rounds out of her carbine. As she reaches the doorway, Peter and Brainbox try to cover her.

  The rest is fractured. I see four Uptowners get up from their positions and advance, shooting their way into a position between me and Donna. I scurry over to Ratso. As I reach him, he groans.

  There’s gore where his right eye used to be, and his mouth hangs open slack. I hear a sound like a wooden rattle coming out of his throat.

  I grab his collar and start dragging him backward, slipping and struggling, as the Uptowners keep advancing. Behind a pillar, I put my fingers on his neck, which is useless, because my heart is beating so fast that my fingers are throbbing and I can’t tell his pulse anyway.

  His remaining eye is unfocused. He doesn’t see me.

  He’s gone.

  I close his eyelid with a sweep of my fingers. Something out of a movie, I realize. I grab his gun. His hands yield it, but remain tensed like claws.

  The Uptowners are getting closer, and there’s no way to reach the others now, not without running across their fire. I test Ratso’s AR and confirm all the bullets are spent. I’ve got no choice but to run.

  I scamper to the next pylon, away from the firefight. A couple of shots from the Uptowners tell me that at least I am drawing some heat away from the others. But I don’t know who’s in a worse spot, me or them. I haven’t got anything to answer the Uptowners with, and bit by bit, I get pushed farther and farther away from Donna.

  When the four Uptowners on my tail try to flank me, I’m forced to run, torn between hoping they’ll follow me and an animal urge to survive, even if it means the others are taken.

  I push down these thoughts, leaving them on the garbage heap of impulses to deal with later, the landfill of recrimination I’ll sort through someday to see if there’s anything useful.

  Madly, I scan the darkness. At length, a great hole opens up in front of me, blackness inside the blackness, and I dive down it, the lights of my pursuers painting spots of dirty gray all around me, bullets kicking up ash and dirt spatter.

  They stop shooting, conserving their bullets for the kill, and I hear nothing but the sawing of my breath and their boots behind me, cursing, spitting, and shouting as they follow. I crack my shins on an electrical box, pick myself up, and head along a current of cold air. In the darkness, my eyes conjure blotches of color that float and blend and jump, like the light show that I used to perceive on the inside of my eyelids when I tried to go to sleep in my bedroom at home Before, when I was little and it was new, before I dismissed it and it became nothing but black to the voice in my head. I’m rediscovering the colors inside the dark.

  The sounds of pursuit die out. I stop and listen as the voices dim and are suddenly muffled, as though they’ve taken a turn.

  And finally I’m alone. My hands ache from gripping the gun so tightly; my lungs burn. There’s no sound but the dripping of water as my eyes dilate and the rough tunnel slowly fades up.

  Somewhere out there in the dark are my friends, alive or dead. Maybe twenty, maybe thirty feet above, maybe more, is the wreck of New York. But I don’t know how to get there. I’m lost.

  I start to cry. A child in the dark, crying. I think of Mom and Dad, her under the earth, him scattered in the ocean. I think of Wash.

  And that stops my tears. I think of what he would have done. He certainly wouldn’t have sat around snuffling.

  I take a deep breath and stand up. I’m in a tunnel, tracks leading either way. I grab the Petzl from where it hangs by the elastic around my neck and slide it onto my forehead. Switch it on and pray I don’t run out of juice and that the Uptowners aren’t close by.

  I keep heading the way I was running, lining myself up between the rails, equidistant from the walls. I make a great target this way, but the feeling of being centered somehow holds back my fear to the point where I can manage.

  I walk for maybe ten minutes, trying to make sense of the cryptic numbering on the track pillars, wondering where the trains are. I guess somebody had time to hole them up in their yards, hoping someday the world would be right again.

  The thought that we ever lived our life in public, brushing up against each other, breathing each other’s air, trusting one another’s judgment, seems like an obscene miracle.

  The black gunite walls give way suddenly to white tiles, oily and cracked, and I realize that I’m approaching a station. I slip to the wall and crouch, inching my way up, the empty gun aimlessly pointed in front of me.

  A blue mosaic tells me that I’m at the Rockefeller Center stop. I’ve made a loop—south, west, and the
n back north. As I crawl along the depressed tracks, the lip of the platform runs level with my eyes.

  Then I make out movement in the gloom of the platform, up by a set of stairs leading to the surface. It’s hardly more than a change in the density of the darkness, but my eyes are sensitive now after hours of creeping around.

  I grab my headlamp, snuffing out the light, and jump under the overhang of the platform’s edge.

  I hear slow steps, one after the other, distinct. One person. They seem to be searching the platform for something or someone. They don’t know I’m here.

  I press myself into the wall so there’s no way to see me without leaning over the edge.

  I can hear the stranger breathing. Slowly, I reach for the pommel of the wakizashi and thumb the blade out of the scabbard. There’s a wooden scraping, thunderous to my ears.

  The breathing stops.

  Second after hour-long second pass by with nothing but the thump-thump of my heart and drips falling from the ceiling.

  He’s heard me. Why else would he stop in his tracks? And now there’s nowhere to go. If I try to make a run for it, I’ll be exposed the moment I leave the overhang of the platform.

  Then the footsteps start again. Close, practically above my head, then farther and farther away. I guess at where the stranger can be… I guess at whether he’s looking this way or turned away.…

  And I slowly, quietly lift myself onto the platform, the sword in my teeth like something from a pirate movie. It would be embarrassing to be killed looking this way. The thought flashes through my mind as I make it to a prone position on the platform.

  The stranger is a shortish black shape in the gloom. I make out skinny legs, a wiry frame, the rectangular barrel of a handgun.

  If I’m quick and quiet, I can take him. I hold my breath, push myself up, and grab the sword in my right hand.

  And then she turns and points her gun at me.

  I’m surprised that it’s a girl. In the darkness I had been imagining a soldier from Uptown, and the change in perception is a shock.

  She’s blond, slender, and, my annoyingly beside-the-point brain tells me, beautiful. Big blue eyes and a Cupid’s-bow mouth. Full, round breasts and a smooth stomach beneath a ripped T-shirt. It stretches against her body as she tries to catch her breath. She seems as scared as I am.