The Young World Read online

  Just like that, we’re out, and the Drummers don’t take up the pursuit. We’ve squirted free of the crowd, past the W hotel and a CVS on Park Avenue South.

  I leave the M2 alone and try to get as much pressure as I can on the side of Peter’s head to stop the bleeding. My own blood is sluicing through my veins—poom poom poom. And I think, what with the rattle of the guns, and the purring of the engine, and the tinkling of the shell casings, and the beating of my heart, the drumming never stopped.

  CHAPTER 11

  AT TWENTIETH there’s an old Duane Reade that doesn’t look too cracked out, and I stop Chiquita. We keep Peter in the cab with Donna while SeeThrough and Brainbox go in to get what she needs for him.

  There’s a ragged wound where half of Peter’s right ear has been shot off. Donna is clamping it in one hand, and it looks like the bleeding has stopped. She’s washed it in Betadine and applied some Neosporin from her bag.

  Peter is taking it pretty well. When he’s not wincing in pain, he’s laughing. “I can totally make the one-eared look work,” he says.

  I take a walk around Chiquita and check the damage. A bunch of holes in the body panels. The tires took some shots, too. It’s a good thing Brainbox pumped so much silicone into them. The driver’s window is shattered, and a lopsided .22 bullet drops from the upholstery when I wiggle the rearview mirror. A few inches from finding my skull.

  The paint job is burned off the hood, and the nipple of a baby bottle has melted onto it.

  There’s a doll by my feet, and in her backpack, an unexploded M-80 whose fuse extinguished on the way down toward us. Dora the Suicide Bomber.

  I clear out a bunch of shell casings from the cab and check the ammo on the M2. Donna sure went to town. Another session like that, and we’re all out.

  Things look safe for now, so I head into the Duane Reade in case SeeThrough and Brainbox need my help.

  The place is a catastrophe, of course. Every drugstore got mobbed during the Sickness. At first they tried to maintain order with rent-a-cops, and there were fights, so you can usually find a body or two dead from gunshot wounds or blunt-force trauma. I scoot past a skeleton clutching a broken NyQuil bottle.

  When the Sickness passed, the looting began. The medicine aisles and pharmacies were picked over for anything narcotic. Forget about finding OxyContin or Robitussin. Some enterprising souls even started little Manhattan meth labs, so there’s no Sudafed around, either.

  I wade through the undergrowth of items scooped from the shelves and dismissed. Diapers, toothbrushes, laxatives, insoles, dog collars, heartburn relief, condoms, reading glasses, floss, lipstick, eco-friendly cutting boards. Stuff.

  SeeThrough and Brainbox are nowhere to be found.

  I heave myself up onto the counter and find the pill-dispensing machines called Baker Cells. Sometimes they’re left alone because scavengers are so desperate and unhinged that they don’t think to look there. But that’s where pharmacists kept the most commonly prescribed stuff.

  I see some chalky orange pills in one of the slots. Adderall.

  Adderall was a treatment for ADHD. But kids at school basically used to get it prescribed every time they sneezed. It sharpens your brain for studying, and coincidentally makes you feel like you are the most important person in the universe for about four hours, so… there is a secondary market. I crack open the cell and empty it.

  I find some Bactroban on a back shelf, hidden beneath a hill of garbage. I pocket it and head back to Chiquita.

  On the way, through a gap in a looted shelf, I catch sight of SeeThrough leaning against the wall. She’s crying.

  “Did you get hurt?” asks Brainbox, standing there with some packs of batteries in his hands.

  “No. I just… I was afraid I’d get left behind.”

  “But Peter grabbed you,” says Brainbox.

  “But what if he hadn’t?” says SeeThrough. “Would you have come back for me?”

  “Well,” says Brainbox, “not if you were going to die anyway. I mean, there’s no point in everybody getting killed.”

  “But I’d come back for you,” says SeeThrough. “For anybody. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

  “Oh,” says Brainbox. With no inflection.

  My man Brainbox. Smooth.

  Was there something going on between them? He’s definitely blowing it big-time if that’s the case.

  I promise myself, the way I do every day, that I’ll tell Donna how I feel about her. Soon.

  Maybe tomorrow.

  No. Today. I’ll tell her today. For all I know, there is no tomorrow. I just need to get her alone.

  I take the meds out to Donna and Peter.

  CHAPTER 12

  PETER BITCHES AND moans as I fix up his ear. Boys are such wusses. I mean, all those movies they used to make about tough guys. I’d like to see them pass a watermelon through their butt.

  Which, you know, is how I’ve heard the pain of childbirth described.

  Not that I’ll ever know.

  I spritz a little Bactroban on, then—and this is a special Donna touch—Krazy Glue the edges of a torn piece of flesh and cartilage back together. Cover the whole wound with duct tape and, voilà! Homemade wound dressing. That Martha Stewart bitch couldn’t do better.

  Jefferson is kind of shaken up from our Action Movie Experience down in the Union, so he lets me drive. He keeps eyeballing me, though, like maybe he doesn’t trust my driving. I see Peter, SeeThrough, and Brainbox settle into the back. When Brainbox sits next to SeeThrough, she switches sides to get away from him. Wonder what that’s all about.

  After our throw-down in the Union, I make sure to avoid Gramercy Park and Madison Square. I keep the Empire State Building to my left. Don’t want anybody dropping shit on us anymore, especially not from, like, the hundredth floor.

  We pass a few randoms. Some zip into the nearest doorway. Some are too far gone for that and just keep walking down the road. One or two even wave.

  I see a guy talking on a cell phone and then I realize that he’s not making a phone call; he’s just insane. It used to be the other way around. Like, for a second, I’d think the dude jabbering away at nothing was crazy, then I’d realize he was trading stocks or something, not talking to aliens.

  Nowadays phones are like—what did they call them?—phantom limbs. Like, something’s been amputated but you can still feel it moving. You’ll be talking to somebody, and they’ll look down and start rubbing their fingers together. They want to be texting someone, they want to be checking their e-mail, surfing the net, anything other than being fully, totally there. It’s pathetic.

  I thumb the rounded edges of the iPhone in my pocket. There’s still a little bit of charge.

  We roll past banks; bus stops; humble, ugly little buildings; and grand, proud ones with carved marble doorways and gargoyles peering down. The sun comes out, and I crank up the music, Gnarls Barkley’s “Going On.” And the way is clear, and the air is warm, and for just a moment, it feels like we could be a bunch of kids out on a lark in Mom’s car.

  Everybody sings along except for SeeThrough and Brainbox. Whatever is up between them has also united them in gloominess. But the rest of us sing, and for a second, it seems like we actually might be going to a place in the sun.

  The library squats on Fifth Avenue, its front stretching all the way from Fortieth to Forty-Second. It’s surrounded by glass and sandstone towers raising radio antennas to the sky like they’re flipping the bird. The trees in front are all shaggy, and they make the lions look like they’re hiding in the foliage, scoping out someone to eat.

  But the strange thing is, it’s well preserved. In this city full of wreckage, dead technology, and sad, useless stuff, this building is just, like, chilling. The steps are clean of trash and bodies. The flags of New York (the Empire State) and the US (the empire itself) still float from the flagpoles.

  I pull Chiquita to a stop.

  Jeff: “Somebody’s got to stay with the truck.”r />
  SeeThrough: “I will.”

  Me: “You’ll need a gun.”

  She shrugs and climbs up to the .50-cal. Sits on top of the cab, crisscross-applesauce, right next to it.

  Me: “You know how to use that?”

  SeeThrough: “Do you?”

  Jefferson: “Okay. Let’s keep it simple. We’re looking for a copy of the Journal of Applied Virology, May 2010.”

  Me: “Ooh, is that the one with three hundred seventy-two must-have summer looks?”

  Jefferson (after a pause to emphasize that he is not amused): “We go in, find out wherever they keep the science periodicals, grab the journal, get out. We check in every half hour here at the main entrance. Everybody, sync your watches.”

  We all have windups, of course. Mine’s a Hello Kitty.

  Jeff says we should form teams. I’m about to go with Peter, but he tells Peter to go with Brainbox. Jeff’s going with me.

  We start up the stone stairs to the front entrance.

  There’s a statue of a fat, bearded Greek dude sitting on a sphinx to one side. A half-naked chick with a cellulite problem on the other. There’s a—what do you call it—plinth? With some more Greek ladies on top of the entrance, which, like the rest of the place, has been made to look like an ancient temple.

  Come to think of it, it is an ancient temple.

  Three doors underneath tall arches are all padlocked from the outside. Jefferson runs back to the truck and gets a sledgehammer. With a few heavy, echoing thuds, the lock gives way.

  You can almost feel the big entrance hall take a breath of air into its lungs. We walk into the stale chamber.

  It’s all white marble. Crazy quiet, crazy clean. No poop, no blood, no trash. I want to call it peaceful.

  But I can’t. There’s something very strange about the place.

  Our steps echo through the vaults and up the big creamy marble staircases.

  It’s hard to figure out why there’s nobody here. A huge building, defensible, plenty of books for fuel, completely abandoned. As we head up the staircase to the next floor, there’s not a soul around, not a sound except for us.

  The library is haunted.

  Don’t be ridiculous.

  We light our Coleman camping lanterns to make our way. I’m not crazy about the slasher-film vibe this gives everything, throwing these oily shadows on the walls, but it’s better than shuffling around in the dark.

  Inside our bubble of light, we emerge from the stairwell into a long, wide corridor decorated with gigantic murals above swirly pink marble.

  All the paintings are about reading and writing. Moses and the Ten Commandments. Monks with bad hairdos copying books by hand. Some Shakespeare-time dude with a crazy beard showing a page of a book to a rich guy, who’s all, “Hmmn,” like he’s not too sure about the idea. And other people, less legendy. Some guys putting out a newspaper in the twenties or thirties. A couple of girls lying around on the grass with a book. I guess the idea is, “Yay! Reading through the ages!”

  And I’m all for it. Back in the day—I mean before the Sickness—when we were addicted to Twitter and Facebook and stuff, we were all about spreading words sideways. Like, everybody in the world could know right away that you just took a pee. But we didn’t really give a crap about communicating stuff forward, through time. The funny thing is that people thought books were so useless, like, Kindle and everything was going to kick their asses. Which, now that I think of it, Kindle is kind of a douchey name. Like, I’m going to Kindle a fire with your shitty, old-fashioned books.

  Anyway, when It Happened, all this technology that was supposed to be better at preserving stuff? Totally useless without electricity. All those status updates and tweets and blog entries got erased, or lost or trapped or whatever, when the servers went down. In a way they never really existed—they didn’t exist in real space. People freaked out. Like, twenty years before that, they had never heard of e-mail, and now the Internet was vital to their mental health.

  But books—books are handy. You can keep ideas on paper for, like, centuries. And if you want to find stuff out, it’s right there. You don’t have to grab it out of the air, call it up from some data center in, like, New Jersey.

  So books had the last laugh. Nobody is going to know what the hell me and Jeff and the crew did five years from now. Unless Jefferson writes it down in one of his fancy notebooks or there’s space aliens who can read things from people’s bones or something. But Huck Finn is gonna be chillin’ on the Mississippi forever.

  We split up. Peter and Brainbox head one way down the corridor, and Jefferson and I go into the Bill Blass Public Catalog Room.

  It’s a big square chamber with a wooden kiosk in the middle. The walls are lined with thousands of big-ass ledgers.

  Jefferson: “This is how you used to find books, before they started using computers. You’d locate the book in one of these big catalogs, then you’d write down the number on a little blue slip. You’d give it to a librarian, and they’d send it to the stacks in a capsule that ran through a pneumatic tube.”

  Me: “Huh.”

  Jefferson: “From the Greek pneuma, for ‘breath.’ ”

  Me: “Huh.”

  Then he looks embarrassed.

  It’s really cute sometimes how nerdy he is. He gets all blushy.

  He starts slipping catalogs from the shelves but can’t find what we’re looking for. I gaze around the room and just marvel at how clean the place is. There isn’t any dust.

  I read somewhere that most dust is actually human skin, so maybe that’s why… no humans, no dust.

  Jefferson: “Come on.” He goes out by the opposite doorway from the one we entered and takes a left. Above the doorway I see an inscription in gold letters:

  A GOOD BOOKE IS THE PRECIOUS LIFE-BLOOD OF A MASTER SPIRIT, IMBALM’D AND TREASUR’D UP ON PURPOSE TO A LIFE BEYOND LIFE

  I follow Jefferson through a little foyer—

  And then we’re in the most beautiful room I’ve ever seen.

  Imagine a cavern of wood and marble. High, arched windows with metal balconies running beneath. The ceiling is painted like a sky at sunset, pink and gray clouds framed by brown and gold carving. Gigantic chandeliers with circles of lightbulbs suspended from chains like upside-down cakes. Row after row of long tables made of wood the color of honey, with golden lamps on them. In the middle of this super-tall, super-wide space, there’s a little hut, like a sort of border crossing between one part and the other.

  Me: “Holy shit.”

  Jefferson: “Shh.” (Smiles.) “No swearing in the library.”

  I smile back.

  Then Jefferson stops smiling.

  Jefferson: “Um, um, Donna?” (Like he’s working up to ask me a big favor or something.)

  Me (a little suspiciously, noticing he’s acting weird): “What?”

  Jefferson: “Well… you know how we’ve known each other for a really long time?”

  Me: “… Yeah?”

  Jefferson: “I just. I have something. I want to say.” (Looks like something has gone down the wrong pipe.)

  Me: “So… like, spit it out.”

  Jefferson: “Well, it’s just.” (Coughs.) Then—“Donna, I love you. That is, I’m in love with you. If there’s a difference. Anyhow, I’ve been wanting to say that.”

  Uh-oh.

  CHAPTER 13

  UH-OH.

  When I tell Donna I love her, she just stands there, blinking. Then she looks as if she thinks I’m kidding and she’s going to laugh. Then she thinks better of it.

  “Really?” she says. Not in an excited way. More in a bemused way, as if I’d said that I like opera.

  Then she says, “Why?”

  This is an eventuality I hadn’t planned for. I had prepared myself for her saying Thanks or I don’t feel that way about you or I love you, but just like a friend or even, say, a 5 percent chance of her saying I love you, too and falling into my arms. But no matter what, I figured she would take m
y word for it.

  Why?

  I’d never really thought about that. I mean, you just feel what you feel, don’t you? If I had to break it down, I’d say it’s because I know her, and she knows me. I’d seen her Before and After, at our best and at our worst, happy and sad and starving and feasting and laughing and fighting, the whole nine. I’d always have her back, and she’d always have mine. I liked talking to her, and I liked thinking about her, and I wanted to hang out with her every day.

  But you’re not supposed to say boring stuff like that. You’re supposed to say things like You are the fire that burns in my heart forever, or something like that.

  So when she asks why, I just say, “Because.”

  She wrinkles her brows. Like that wasn’t a good enough answer.

  “I mean you’re, um, a fire in my heart,” I add, mumbling.

  “A what in your what?”

  “Didn’t you… you had no idea?” I say.

  “Well… I mean, I thought maybe you had the hots for me. I caught you staring at my boobs once or twice, but—guys just do that sort of thing.”

  Why does she have to take it there? Is she trying to change the subject? Her boobs? I mean, they’re beautiful, I mean, as far as I can guess, but not what I was talking about.

  It’s strange that you can be in love with somebody while hating so many things about them. Like how she doesn’t seem to be able to be serious, about anything, ever.

  “I’m not ‘guys,’ ” I say.

  “But you are a guy. You do admit that you have, like, a Y chromosome, right?”

  “What does that have to do with anything? Why are you being like this?”

  “Like what?” she says.

  “Like avoiding the subject. Just… whatever you have to say, just say it.” Now I sound like I’m scolding her. I hate the way I’m saying things. This is all going wrong.

  “I don’t have to say anything, do I?” she says.