The New Order Read online

  “Step back,” she says. “Slowly. Keep facing me. Don’t move your hands down or I’ll shoot you.”

  Fair enough. I do as she says. I am reminded of when I met Jefferson. I had him dead to rights, he went for my gun, and then we started making out. Heck of a meet cute. I don’t see things going that way this time.

  “It was two blond kids,” I say. “They had me captive. They killed him.” Not the best story, but I’m vamping. At least it seems to confuse the woman, which may give me a few extra nanoseconds.

  She kneels down by Dooley and fumbles about with her hand, trying to find the pulse in his neck while still looking up at me.

  “Just let me go, lady,” I say, with my best Sad Orphan tone. “I didn’t do anything!”

  She looks down for a moment at Dooley, realizes he’s dead, and decides to kill me. At least, that’s what I figure.

  “Turn around,” she says.

  I’m not sure what the point of that is. I mean, presumably it’s to make her feel better about shooting me, since she won’t have to look me in the eyes. It’s odd, because if you think about it, the back of a person’s head is every bit as personal to her as the front of her head. At least, I can’t do very well without either of them. And from my point of view, I’d rather know the moment I’m going to die than have to spend the next ten seconds guessing when the light is going to go out.

  Of all the answers I want, the one I want least is to the question what happens when you die? I figure I’m getting to that no matter what; in fact, it’s the only big question you’re guaranteed to get the answer to, no matter how stupid or uninquisitive you are.

  “No,” I say.

  “Turn around,” she repeats.

  “Hell, no,” I say. “If you’re gonna do it, go ahead and do it.”

  She looks like she has a momentary crisis of confidence—what I’m hoping for. Then she gets some steel in her spine and closes one of her eyes to aim.

  I look into the barrel.

  The next sound is not a single shot but a volley that takes chunks out of her. Abel and Anna saving my bacon. She slumps against the hangar and slowly slides downward.

  One answer postponed, I guess.

  We look through the bullet holes in the side of the hangar. The tortured metal radiates heat.

  Inside, a little campfire beats back the gloom.

  “Anyone left?” I shout. “Make yourself known!”

  “Yeah,” says a thick young voice from the darkness. “Don’t shoot, man!”

  We kick in the side door, guns up.

  At the circumference of the firelight there’s a lump that turns out to be a body. An ancient guy with white hair, hands tied behind his back. A little hole above his right temple. Presumably killed by the twins’ blasting.

  And behind a pile of equipment, a tall, solidly built black kid, maybe seventeen years old. Also zip-tied up.

  Abel says, “You want me to let him go?”

  Anna says, “You want me to kill him?”

  “No,” I say. “Neither. Yet.”

  The kid, squinting against the dust, looks at me.

  “I know you,” he says.

  “Now, that’s a nice whip,” says Theo, looking at the metallic-purple Ferrari.

  “Little showy, isn’t it?” I say.

  “Man, fuck you.” He looks at me with distaste. Distaste? Disdain. Distrust. General dissing.

  I don’t take it personally. Here’s what I know he took me to mean: You’re black, so you want a flashy car. I’m white, and I have some taste. And, frankly… who am I to say I didn’t mean that when I said it, though I didn’t know that I meant it. That is to say, everybody likes to think that they’re not racist. But saying “I’m not racist” is like saying “I’m good-looking.” It isn’t really up to us. I know for a fact that I have prejudices. Like, for instance, I didn’t even recognize him at first. He had been filed away with all the black people who didn’t matter to me. He’s prejudiced, too. He looks at me and thinks, Spoiled white bitch. I mean, he hasn’t said it, but he’s thought it pretty loud.

  I try again. “There’s no room for the Hitler Youth.” That’s what we call Anna and Abel. Actually, Theo called them that, and it stuck. I don’t like the guy, but he has a pretty good turn of phrase.

  “Man, there’s plenty of room. Look how skinny they are.” He looks at them. “This is a nice whip, right?”

  The Hitler Youth turn from Theo to me, asking with their eyes what they should say. I flutter my hands, a gesture that means this is up to you.

  “It’s a nice whip,” says Abel.

  “Badass,” says Anna.

  “That’s my dogs,” says Theo, and he gives out some fist pounds.

  We’re on our third car. Each time our car runs out of gas, we just leave it on the side of the road and bust into another one. If we’re lucky, the key is still in it.

  Anyhow, I chose last time, so I guess Theo gets his way. And, as it happens, the keys are tucked above the window shade, and the gas tank is full. It comes to life growling like a pit bull with bronchitis.

  “Tight,” says Theo. The Hitler Youth squeeze into the cramped excuse for a backseat, and I lower myself into the passenger side. Actually, the car is pretty fly.

  Theo lets out the clutch, and we lurch forward and stall. He fires it up again, and we judder to another quick stop.

  “You’re gonna fry the clutch,” I say. “This is a Ferrari, not a Honda.”

  Theo is annoyed. He starts it again, then moves forward, gently. A little progress, as the tone of the engine changes to a different order of anger, then another stall.

  “You’ve never driven one of these before, have you?” I say.

  “Like you have,” he says. Then he looks over and sees from my face that I have.

  I say it for him. “Rich white bitch, I know. Switch.”

  He doesn’t like the idea, but he also doesn’t want to face the humiliation of stalling out again, so he gets out and we swap places.

  “Car’s just out of tune, that’s all,” says Theo.

  I start it, press the clutch down, shift into first, let up the clutch gently, then more as the throttle engages, and pull out, the honey-throated engine roaring happily. I smile.

  “Whatever,” he says, and looks out his window.

  “So let’s imagine,” I say to Theo, “that the plan works. They get to Harlem, sell them a line of bullshit, and Solon swallows it. What next?”

  “They wanted to go to the UN, start, like, some sort of government or some shit. So that they could stand up to the army and navy and shit when they come back in.”

  I’m still trying to get my head around this new state of affairs. In fact, I wouldn’t have believed Theo if I hadn’t seen the oldies at the hangar. I would just think he was spinning some bullshit story with the eventual goal of getting laid, which is the reason for about half of the bullshit that dudes say, if not more. Anyhow, it would appear he’s telling the truth. Which would mean that while I was working my way west and off the island, Jefferson and his crew were on an aircraft carrier. Which I guess explains why he didn’t call or write or text or smoke signal.

  I have to go off-road to get around a pileup, and the Ferrari’s undercarriage scrapes on the shoulder. I awake from my reverie.

  “So,” I say, “you have a better idea?”

  “I don’t know if I have a better idea. But my people have to know the truth. Then we can all think of a better idea, or agree to go ahead and make up a country or whatever, except not because we didn’t know what the hell was going on.”

  “The truth will set you free?” I say.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Lies sure will fuck you up, though.”

  I confess he is rising in my estimation. First time I met him, when we were thrown against some police cars by a bunch of Harlemites, I just figured I was gonna get used for fun and disposed of. That’s probably what the Uptowners would have done to one of them had they wandered into Uptown territory.
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br />   “I don’t know,” I say.

  “You don’t know what?” he says.

  “Just what to do,” I say.

  “Well, you best not try to stop me,” he says.

  So—do I help Theo, who I don’t know at all, or help Jefferson, my… my ex, I guess. That is to say, he did break up with me. For that tomboy pip-squeak Donna. Whatever. Donna and I… we’re cool. Imprisonment will do that to you, change your attitude. All we had in that cell was each other. Frenemyship was taking root.

  But Donna’s not here.

  So what place do I have with Jefferson? If he’s off forming a nation? Can I be first lady? Hell with that. I should be queen. He can be my royal consort.

  What gives him the right to move on? To just forget about me and my killer brain and my hot bod? Sometimes I don’t know whether to put a bullet in his head or try to get back together. The eternal quandary.

  “I don’t think I’ll try to stop you,” I say, “but I don’t know. Maybe I will.”

  Theo looks over at me, bemused.

  “At least you’re honest,” he says.

  The corridor of trees on either side of the highway widens in the overture to a town. I make out a Rite Aid sign and pull over.

  “The hell we stopping?” asks Theo.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” I say.

  “We shouldn’t stop,” says Theo. “Too dangerous.”

  “I need something, okay?”

  “The hell you need?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Bullshit, I wouldn’t understand.” Theo is insistent. Like I’ve called him stupid.

  “Lady stuff, okay?”

  “You’re risking our lives for makeup?”

  “Tampons, all right? I’m stopping for tampons because, against all reason, my period is starting! Jesus.”

  Theo sits there. “Oh,” he says.

  Yeah, I started feeling the crampy, fidgety working of my lady lab on the ride. It had been so long since the Sickness hit and neutered us that at first I thought it was a reaction to some of the truly crappy comestibles we’d been prying out of cans lately. But then, yeah, sure enough.

  All you bros who are reading and can’t handle the idea of menstruation, just—deal with it. Can we move on? Okay.

  I figure it’s a quick in and out at the Rite Aid. I mean, there wasn’t any demand for tampons after What Happened, on account of everybody went sterile. Or so we thought. It appears that the factory has reopened. Personally? Except for the obvious mess and bother, I’m overjoyed. I think I would be a great mom.

  I hear you laughing. But laugh at your peril. See, I regard my whole life as a tutorial on how not to raise kids. From creepy, distant dad to drunky, shrieky mom to feckless and preyed-upon au pairs and distracted and berated nannies. Emotional repression, hysterical outbursts, infidelity, contempt. I am an encyclopedia of what not to do. So all I have to do is the opposite, right?

  Okay, so I killed a few people here and there. Maybe I have a little teensy bit of an impulse-control issue to work through. But we all make mistakes, don’t we? Besides, some of them weren’t mistakes. Trust me.

  Anyhow, I’m wending my way through the usual accumulated patina of years of social unrest—rotted-out bodies, lots of crap on the floor, spent shells, dead flies—when I realize that I forgot my bag of stuff in the car. Most everything I have is in there. First and foremost, the sweet AR-15 I snagged at the lab. This is a major blunder, since Theo could just drive off with the car and all my crap, or, worse, kill me, then drive off with the car and all my crap. Would Anna and Abel stand up for me? I can tell that their loyalties are already shifting; their tissue-thin excuses for personalities are bending to the gravitational pull of another alpha.

  I guess I was, for a moment, back in a world of quick shopping stops and errands. Maybe it was because of a little iron deficiency. Whatever. The long and the short of it is that I suddenly feel quite alone and vulnerable.

  What if I was to go out the back door, circle round quietly, attack Theo from where he isn’t expecting me? I do still have a knife I lifted off Dooley, a nasty, aggressively sharp flat green metal-composite called a Gerber De Facto. Maybe I could get the gun back before he could defend himself. No. No time. No chance. Idiot.

  I hear a shuffling sound and a hushed whisper. I scan the false twilight of the cavernous unlit store. Nothing. Then I see, in the gap between some denuded shelves, a figure pass by. And from the other side of me, down another alley of shelves, more forms slithering along through the undergrowth of garbage.

  This really won’t do, to have somebody get the drop on me for the second time in a row. I pretend, as best I can, that I haven’t seen anything. I make to find something off the shelves, meanwhile palming the De Facto from its pressure sheath. The feel of the handle raises my spirits a bit.

  I take some lipstick from a sales rack and look into the cheap mirror mounted under a chintzy glamour shot. I apply the lipstick, checking the reflection over my shoulder. I see the wicked little point of an arrow notched to a hunting bow. A hand pulls the arrow back—

  And I spin and throw the knife as hard as I can, threading the gap between shelves and boxes. There’s a squelch followed by an awful gasp, and the arrow looses, caroming off the floor and into the shelf by my shin.

  So far so good, but I’m short one knife. I look down the aisle, to see that some kind of monster has rounded the corner.

  It’s green and scrofulous, with bits of thick braid-like hair hanging from its slack flesh. No neck or face but a shaggy head that slopes down over its shoulders.

  In a moment, it’s clear the monster is a kid in some kind of over-the-top head-to-toe camouflage. He has a crossbow with a rifle stock. When I turn the other way, I see another one down at the other end, a shotgun in his shaggy paws.

  The kid with the crossbow aims and fires, but I manage to juke out of the way, and the bolt whips past me, striking home in the shoulder of the kid with the shotgun. Blood and swearing. I take the straight route to my knife, climbing one side of the shelves like a ladder and jumping down to the kid who’s leaning slack-legged against the opposite shelf, bleeding out. I pick up his bow and slide an arrow out of the bracket mount—pull the string back until the compound’s cocking mechanism takes over—turn to face the aisle between me and the door—and hear laughter.

  “Look,” says a voice. “It’s Katniss!”

  More laughter. A group. Six or seven of them, maybe.

  They step into the gap on either side of me, with the courage of the already dead. Crossbows, guns, bows. They laugh. They laugh over the groans of their wounded friends.

  I try to work out who the leader is. I look back and forth. All of them just shaggy forms. They look back. There is no leader. They’re led by their hungers.

  “She’s hot,” says one.

  “Has anyone ever told you you’re beautiful?” says another.

  I have nothing to say. I have nothing to do, except take my shot, get the knife, die.

  “’Samatter, bitch?” says one of them. I can’t tell which. I can’t see faces. It’s like it’s coming from all of them and none. “Don’t you like us?”

  And they start to move in.

  Then I hear Theo. “Kath, get down,” he says, his deep voice seeming to shake the rafters.

  I drop.

  With a sound like rocks falling on steel, bullets shred the kids in front of me. Some of the ones behind get hit by the tail-end of the burst.

  The ones left standing are killed by Anna and Abel, coming up from behind them. In a moment, there’s only one left, who makes a run for me, some kind of sword in his hand, but Theo sprints and catches him before he reaches me, taking him in a tackle that leaves them both gasping.

  The kid still has his sword. He raises it up to stab Theo, who’s too winded to move.

  But I get him first. With one hand, I capture his arm at the top of its recoil, with the other, I jam the De Facto into his neck. Blood
billows out, and he slumps sideways.

  I crawl over to Theo, awkward as a puppet with a string cut, the adrenaline spent and burning my muscles.

  I lean down and hug him.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  He catches his breath.

  “You forgot your bag,” he says.

  CAMBRIDGE NEVER REALLY gets that cold, it just becomes more and more damp. The water comes from the sky, and it seeps from the walls, and it kind of gasses from the ground in the rare moment of sun. Mostly the sky and the buildings and the people are gray. We loiter around our ancient space heaters, coiled springs that glow orange when electricity is run through them; we cup our hands prayerfully around mugs of hot tea; our eyes linger about the trees and lawns and their green promises.

  The drinking goes on, the drinking goes up. We tell ourselves it is fun, but really it is because we are bored and cold, and it helps us stay interested in the tight circle of people and the formulaic days of lectures and tutorials and essays and classes.

  Then one night, deep into a session, I break the rules. I start telling Rab the truth. In vino veritas, they say, which means “in wine, truth.” But the truth isn’t in the wine, it’s in me; the wine only makes the more fearful me go away for a bit. We stay up through the night, me talking and Rab listening.

  As I let him in on my secret, I feel almost as if I am a different person. Telling Rab should make me feel more like myself, but it doesn’t work that way; I feel less and less like the person whose story I’m unraveling to him. Maybe because it’s only Rab I’m telling, and he is the perfect listener. He doesn’t interrupt, and he doesn’t judge, and he doesn’t tire. I should be paying him by the hour.

  He’s a fire on which I’m burning my memories like unneeded possessions.

  And then, one night, he kisses me. And I kiss him back.

  I know that it’s not supposed to be this way. Like, I’m supposed to mourn forever, I’m supposed to die of sorrow, or become a nun at least. That’s what a heroine in a book would do. Maybe she’d go around in black and adopt fetching mournful poses. She’d resist to the end of the movie. She’d resist past the end of the movie and into the flashbacks of somebody else’s movie, and she’d be the old lady who ain’t nobody thought had an interesting life but who actually has a tale of tragic love to tell.