The Young World Read online

  CHAPTER 17

  I UNDERSTAND NOW why people say the library is haunted. Alpha and his tribe may be humoring us for now, but there’s something very, very wrong with them.

  I used to come here to study before It Happened. It was easier to concentrate when there were all those other people around getting stuff done, or at least not out having a better time than I was.

  Mostly the people you saw in the reading room were there for the same reason as me. They had reading to do, and this was a good place for it. They called stuff up from the stacks and checked their e-mail. They came, and they went, and they even interacted with one another occasionally.

  Then there were the other ones. Barricaded behind walls of books, they snuffled, picked at themselves, ate lunch out of crinkly plastic bags, and scribbled feverishly in crackling, worn notebooks. If you snuck a glance, you’d see column after column of tiny, precise writing. Sometimes it was words, sometimes numbers, diagrams, proofs. They were unraveling conspiracies, filing grievances against the CIA, figuring out the equations that ruled the cosmos. They would already be installed when I arrived, and they’d stay there gulping their sandwiches and writing until the closing announcement came. Halos of stink and madness buzzed about their heads.

  Some of them would have been young enough to survive What Happened. Precocious lunatics just waiting to pool their madness and figure everything out.

  I’d be lying if I said that Brainbox didn’t fit in here. When we tell him SeeThrough is gone, he just stands there and blinks. Then he goes back to searching through boxes of journals.

  I shouldn’t have been so easily convinced, but I thought Wash would have taken him up on this. And I wanted to do something. Strike a blow against death. Get the Sickness back for taking my brother.

  I don’t know. Maybe I just wanted to get away from the Square, the whole tribe looking to me to make decisions. Maybe I was pretending to lead while I was really hiding.

  I watch Brainbox flip through box after box of papers as he mutters to himself. In him, I see those conspiracists. I see the Ghosts.

  And then I realize with a turn of my stomach that Brainbox never actually showed me the abstract.

  Maybe there is no journal. Maybe there is no article.

  Maybe he made it up.

  From that point, I start planning our escape.

  The Ghosts have taken all our gear, including the weapons. A guy with a k tattoo on his forehead has my AR-15, and Alpha has my wakizashi tucked into his waistband. The rest of our stuff is scattered through their alphabet.

  They don’t have any guns of their own, which is strange. I don’t understand how they’ve managed to keep this place without firepower.

  Brainbox keeps going through the motions of searching. The Ghosts are standing around, their faces gruesome in the sickly light.

  “Brainbox,” I say, leaning in to him, “it’s okay.”

  “What’s okay?” says Brainbox.

  “It’s okay if there’s no article. I get it.”

  He looks up at me, his expression blank.

  “You wanted to do something. So you made it up. It’s okay. I loved Wash, too. But he’s gone.”

  Brainbox smiles. It doesn’t look quite right on his face. Then he lets out a cackling laugh.

  “Brainbox, enough,” I say.

  But he holds up a crisp cream-colored booklet: the Journal of Applied Virology.

  It’s not like an ordinary magazine. There’s no cover photo, just a table of contents right on the front. I can see something about megaloviruses, something about pneumonia, something about toxoplasmosis.

  And halfway down, The Risk of Wexelblatt Effects in Enilikoskotonic Agents.

  Brainbox lifts it up and shows it around, and the Ghosts start laughing, too, laughing and nodding. See? The information.

  When the hilarity dies down, I say to the Ghosts, “I want to thank you all. Thank you for your help. Now it’s time for us to go home.”

  “Oh, no,” says Alpha. “You can’t go yet.” He smiles and takes the journal right out of Brainbox’s hand. “We need to celebrate.”

  They’ve got our guns. So we’ll celebrate.

  We’re walked back up to the reading room, and on the way, I hear skittering and shuffling again. I wonder how many of them are creeping around the place.

  In the reading room, we find one of the tables laid for a feast. The smell of cooking meat perfumes the air. They’re using the fine china, the stuff they used to put out back in the day for benefits and weddings. By now night has fallen, the gridwork of high windows holds tiles of blackness, and hundreds of candles make hazy spheres of light. They’re using the ornate hutch dividing the reading room in two as a kitchen. Smoke rises and pools in the gloom of the ceiling.

  Alpha is at the head of the table, with Brainbox on his right. The rest of us are interspersed among about ten of them, from Beta all the way to—is it Mu? Other Ghosts are shuttling back and forth, bringing food from the makeshift kitchen.

  We’re all friends now, it seems. Not give-you-back-your-weapons friends, though.

  “So,” says Alpha, “what will you do now?” He forks some fiddlehead fern, from God knows where, into his mouth.

  “We’ll go home,” I say.

  “What about this?” says Alpha, holding up the journal.

  “What about it?”

  Alpha leafs through the pages. “It would reward study.” The guy sounds priggish, like what I imagine Donna thinks I’m like. “Do you know what a Wexelblatt Effect is?”

  “No,” I say.

  Alpha looks at Brainbox, who says, “The unpredictable interaction of technology and natural phenomena. Like disasters.”

  I find it strange that Brainbox hadn’t told me that before.

  “Such as?” I say.

  “Hurricane Katrina,” says Brainbox. “The way the levees broke. Deepwater Horizon.”

  “Chernobyl. Fukushima Daiichi,” says Alpha, smiling.

  “Hurricane Sandy,” says Brainbox, and I can see that the gears are turning.

  “So What Happened was a Wexelblatt Effect. That’s interesting, but I don’t see what we can do about it.”

  Alpha shows the article to Brainbox and points something out. Brainbox looks at it and then up at Alpha. Alpha smiles.

  “The Old Man,” he says.

  “What?” I say. “What about the Old Man?”

  Alpha refuses to explain what he’s talking about. Instead, he digs into a bowl of strawberries.

  “Where did you get these?” asks Donna.

  “We have our own garden,” he says, and gestures toward the windows to the west. “In Bryant Park.”

  “Yeah, that’s weird,” I say. “How do you manage that? I can understand how you might be able to hide here in the library. But how are you able to keep people from taking stuff out of the park?”

  Alpha smiles. “It’s simple,” he says. “Fear.”

  “Fear of what?” says Donna.

  Alpha waves his hand dismissively. “Arbitrary distinctions. Taboos.”

  The other Ghosts laugh.

  I don’t know how to respond to this. I take a bite of a strawberry. It’s absolutely delicious. There’s a roast pork smell coming from the kitchen, and now more Ghosts appear, carrying platters.

  “Let me tell you more about the information,” says Alpha. “Look at all life as a system of information from the ground up,” he says as the Ghosts set down the platters. “Quarks make particles, particles make atoms, atoms make cells.”

  As he keeps talking, he cuts himself a piece of the roast and takes a bite. “That’s all that matter is. Information.”

  Brainbox suddenly looks up at me. “Jefferson,” he says, looking concerned, but Alpha keeps talking.

  “What are animals? They are matter constructed into functional models by their execution code—C, G, T, A.” He swallows. “DNA. When you eat something, it is information eating information.”

  The smell of the pig infil
trates my mind.

  “You ask me how we keep control of the library,” continues Alpha. “And I say arbitrary distinctions. What is the difference between an animal and a person? And don’t tell me an eternal soul. That can’t be verified. What is the difference between flesh and meat? Nothing. It’s noise. Taboo.”

  “Jefferson,” Brainbox says.

  “Most taboos are rooted in the notion of generational continuity. Why is there a taboo against incest? Because closely related DNA patterns are more likely to produce abnormalities when recombined. But if nobody has children, does that matter? You see? Noise.”

  I look down at the slice of roast in front of me.

  The roast is an oblong hunk of meat, browned on the edges, sweating pink juice onto the platter. The smell that rises from it is sublime.

  My mouth waters as I gag.

  “You could say that about other taboos,” says Alpha.

  Then, a moment before the part that I call “I” can say it, I realize that I am looking at a cooked human thigh.

  Alpha says, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.”

  Peter sees it, too.

  “Eat,” says Alpha. And the other Ghosts start carving off slices of flesh.

  My tribe reads my face. None of us moves.

  “Eat,” says Alpha, raising Peter’s pistol out of his robe. He points the gun at Donna’s head.

  What happens next happens very quickly.

  There is a sharp scream and a sickening crack, and one of the Ghosts carrying a serving plate falls over, his arm pointed the wrong way. The carbine he had hanging from his shoulder, Donna’s carbine, goes off and the girl, Beta, slumps forward to the table, a precise hole in her head.

  SeeThrough emerges from behind the guy whose arm she just broke, holding the carbine. “Let’s go,” she says.

  Alpha points the gun away from Donna and toward SeeThrough. I am already up and running on top of the table, plates clattering around me.

  He gets off one shot at SeeThrough before I’m on him, my momentum throwing his chair back and slamming his head into the ground.

  Meanwhile, my friends are up, grabbing at weapons, striking out with dinner knives.

  I’ve got the wrist of Alpha’s gun hand. He’s firing wildly, puncturing the painted sky. But it’s not the gun I’m after. With my other hand, I find the pommel of the wakizashi and draw it out before he realizes what I’m doing. His left hand flails and slaps against my chest, and he tries to push me away as I jam the point of the blade into his side. It scrapes a rib and then goes deep. I feel it go through skin, muscle, and organs. He looks at me and coughs, blood running over his white face.

  I’ve killed before. But not this close-up. The intimacy is sickening.

  I yank the sword out. He’s still writhing on the ground. I step on his gun hand in case there is any fight left in him, grab the journal from his other hand, and look around for Donna. She’s struggling with one of the Ghosts, both of them sprawled over the table.

  I hack at the Ghost’s neck and he spasms backward, revealing Donna. She looks at me, startled.

  We have the advantage now. The Ghosts are retreating toward the kitchen, kept off balance by SeeThrough, who is firing into the dark after them.

  I slash away as many of the candles as I can, as Brainbox and Peter start to push the table over for cover.

  “No,” I shout at them. “We’re getting out now!”

  I grab an astonished Brainbox by the scruff and throw him toward the door. Peter has retrieved his gun and is firing at anything that isn’t us.

  We scramble to the catalog room, the Ghosts taking the occasional shot with the stolen guns but missing us in the darkness. Behind us, bullets thud into books, and dead computer monitors explode into dust and smoke.

  I tell the others to head for the exit and shove the thick wooden doors between the painted corridor and the catalog room closed. As they make their way down the stairs, I wait. I realize what I have to do to stop the pursuit and give us all time. What to do to keep them from following. I tell myself that it’s worth it, that all this blood won’t stain me. It’s an arbitrary distinction.

  Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.

  When it’s done, I fly down the stairs.

  In the entrance hall, everyone is calling for Donna, who has disappeared into the dark opposite the front doors.

  As I look up, fearful that the Ghosts will gather their courage and follow, I hear the sound of glass breaking.

  Then Donna emerges from the dark, carrying some sort of stuffed animal.

  A teddy bear.

  CHAPTER 18

  WE STUMBLE DOWN THE STEPS, joyful, disgusted. We are free. We are alive.

  We are changed.

  My body and clothes are bloodstained and my heart feels like it is running out of beats as we pass the smoking wreckage of the truck and turn left, heading north up Fifth, avoiding the direction the Uptowners attacked from.

  Our bodies are taking us as far from the horror as they need to go. After a few blocks, it’s obvious that there will be no pursuit from the library. A pack of dogs keeps pace with us for a while, smelling the blood, but we are looking wilder than them, and they decide they want no part of us.

  We get our brains back in front of a short old building, white like a wedding cake. The wrought-iron doors have glass between the grilles. Jefferson tries one, and it swings open. We pile into a marble-floored hallway, a sleek wooden counter at the end.

  A hotel.

  I catch my breath.

  Jefferson, his eyes crazed, calls out into the darkness.

  “If anyone’s here,” he says, “get the fuck out, or we’ll fucking kill you!”

  Not very nice.

  We pile the reception couches against the front door and retreat to the wood-lined bar. We have a drink or two. Nobody has much to say except SeeThrough. She tells us about her escape from the Uptowners, scurrying into a ditch when the truck blew, too scared to move until darkness came. Some major ninja or Shaolin or whatever action to get hold of my gun, throwing down with the Ghosts.

  I can’t say I wouldn’t have just legged it back home before taking on all those freaks. Saving our lives. Girl is a major badass. Brainbox is definitely giving her the eye now. The fish are biting.

  It’s too late to be out, too dangerous to be at street level. We take the stairs. The second and third floors have been ransacked. We make our way up to the fourth, which is mostly untouched, and after plotting an escape route, we kick open the doors along the corridor.

  The rooms are clean; the sheets are crisp and cool. The hotel must have been shut down as the Sickness spread. Midtown was never a place where people lived. They just did their business and moved on.

  Everybody gets their own suite.

  Mine is done in olive drab and beige: the colors that signaled to out-of-towners that they were staying someplace sophisticated. Bright colors are so—tacky.

  The minibar is still stocked with candy, preserved by all the sugar. They’re stale, but they mean calories, protein and fat and glucose.

  There’s a xeroxed sheet on the desk detailing the closing of the hotel due to “the recent health situation we are facing,” but other than that there’s practically no sign of What Happened. Bathrobes are folded on the bed, an orchid is mummified on a table in front of the inky, dead flat-screen. It blurrily reflects me. I don’t want to see myself any more clearly right now.

  In the bathroom, dimly illuminated by moonlight through the tall windows, I peel my clothes off.

  I look like a ghoul. My pale flesh, my boyish chest and hips splotched with blood.

  There’s a square of perfumed soap still wrapped in paper. I break it open, and then I make sure to throw the wrapper in the little garbage bin under the sink. I want to keep up, for just a little while, the spun-sugar-fragile illusion that, in this one place, things are the way they were.
>
  I hope that the water tower on the roof was full before the power went. I stand under the showerhead and pray. Please, just work. Just a little. Just something. I turn the faucet.

  Water streams out cold and clear. There’s no boiler working to warm it, no filtration system to clean it, so I keep my mouth closed and shiver, but it runs down my body like a blessing. When I look at the drain, I see dirt and blood from my skin. I scratch and scrape at myself to get rid of the matter, the memory. The information.

  The bath towels are big and fluffy. I barely have the energy to wipe myself dry.

  I rub my hair until it is soft and only a little damp. The towel comes away pink. I fold it so that I can see only white, and hang it back over the rail.

  I can’t bear to put my clothes back on right now. The gore is still wet. I unfold one of the bathrobes and slip into it. It’s like an embrace.

  This is one of the times when you’re supposed to be “asleep before your head hits the pillow.” No such luck. I think of the fear, the blood, the shouting, the gunfire, the flesh on the table.

  Sleep is far away. I sit up on the bed. I leave my room and make my way down the hallway in the dark.

  I knock lightly on the door of his room. I don’t want to wake him if he’s asleep.

  Jefferson opens the door. His hair is damp. I can tell he’s just out of the shower, too. He’s got a towel around his midriff and his chest is bare. I’m surprised at the muscles beneath his sleek skin. I guess fighting for your survival will do that.

  We glimpse each other in the meat of our bodies.

  Jefferson’s room is a duplex, with a sleeping loft above windows from floor to ceiling.

  Me: “Wow. How can you afford this place?”

  Jefferson: (Shrugs.) “There are a lot of vacancies. I got a good deal.”

  I look down at my feet.

  Me: “Listen. If I… can I come in here without it being, like, a big decision?”

  Jefferson: “You can do whatever you want. There are no rules.”

  Me: “I just… I’m afraid I’m going to have nightmares.”