The seconds before the first order seemed to stretch on for an eternity. Christopher looked at the other people in the SUV, wondering what the hell all of them were doing here. This was insanity. Soledad and Kevin. He barely knew them. He knew that they had their reasons, though. They weren’t merely there for him. Then his eyes fell on Evan. Evan had a gun in his hand, a gun that Christopher was sure Evan knew how to use; they’d practiced shooting together because Christopher made Evan practice with him. He had a sudden urge to tell Evan to go home. He didn’t want to see Evan clutching an arrow sticking out of his neck. Even though he knew it was too late, Christopher almost said something to Evan. Before he could, the sky filled up with the screech from the megaphone and the single-word order: “Now!”
The opening gambit was just a series of gunshots meant to hit the side of the building. The shots came from all five of the vehicles, peppering the building’s outer walls. At the same time that the shots went off, each of the drivers set his stopwatch. One hour. They had one hour before they would race off into the night. It’s difficult to describe how long a single hour can be when every second lasts an eternity.
After the initial round of shots, Christopher heard the megaphone crackle again. “We’re only here for the building and the contents of the building. No one needs to get hurt. This is not an idle threat. This is not a game. Christopher is leading us. And we are prepared to fight.” None of them knew what type of answer they should have expected, but the answer they got caught them by surprise. Something shot out of the building, landing only a few feet from the van to Christopher’s right. Then it exploded. Blood painted the side of the van as one of the two men flanking it collapsed in a heap. Christopher wasn’t sure, but it didn’t look like the person sitting on the driver’s side of the van was moving either. The shrapnel ripped holes in the side of the van, but there was no way to tell how much damage was done to the people inside. Then the shots rang out. They weren’t shooting to send a message. They were aiming for their targets.
Kevin immediately stepped on the gas as the sand next to their SUV sprang up with the machine-gun fire ripping through the ground next to them. Kevin wasn’t running, though. He was driving toward the building. Dutty had dropped his megaphone and picked up his gun. He was still standing with his torso out of the sunroof, firing indiscriminately at the building as the SUV lurched toward it.
“We need to find out where they’re firing from and where the grenade launcher is!” Soledad shouted with an eerie calmness. “And we’re going to have to get out of the car! We’re too big a target in here!” They quickly lost sight of the other five vehicles. They didn’t even know if the one that nearly got hit by the grenade was still functional.
Dutty stopped firing and ducked his head back into the SUV. “When Kevin stops the SUV, we have to grab everything out of the back and move!” he yelled to them. The Molotov cocktails. Each vehicle had dozens of them. They seemed silly now when compared to a real fucking grenade launcher. Suddenly Kevin slammed on the brakes and the SUV came to a screeching halt. They opened the doors and ran out of the vehicle, keeping their heads down. Christopher could hear gunfire, but he couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It felt like it was all around him. Soledad and Dutty ran to the back of the SUV, opened the doors and pulled out two milk crates full of Molotov cocktails. Once they got them out, Kevin hit the gas again and began driving away.
“Where the fuck is he going?” Christopher yelled to Dutty.
“We can’t risk the vehicle,” Dutty yelled back to him. “We’ve only got an hour. When that hour is up, we’re going to need a ride out of here or we’re all fucked.” Dutty lit the cloth hanging out of one of the old whiskey bottles and hurled the bottle at the building. It exploded before it even hit the building, spraying gasoline all over the side of the building, and in seconds the whole side of the building was on fire. The first fire didn’t last very long, but the Molotov cocktails didn’t seem so silly anymore. Dutty handed one to Christopher and lit it. Christopher tossed it high into the air and it came crashing down on the roof of the building. The flames shot into the air.
Christopher heard more gunfire. He didn’t hear just the crack of a gun firing; he also heard the thudding sound as the bullets hit the ground around him. He looked up in time to see a series of dust bursts making a beeline for Evan, who was standing over the other carton of Molotov cocktails with Addy and Soledad. Christopher looked up and, for a split second, saw the muzzle flash coming from the gun of a man standing in a high window of the Intelligence Cell. The man was squeezing the trigger of his automatic weapon as the bullets got closer and closer to Evan. Christopher instinctively raised his own gun and aimed for the muzzle flash. Then he fired. The shooting stopped. Evan didn’t even look back toward Christopher. None of them—not Addy, not Soledad, not anybody—seemed to realize what had happened. Or maybe they all understood that they didn’t have the time to care. Christopher took a deep breath, leaned down, and grabbed another gasoline-filled whiskey bottle.
It soon became clear that at least a few of the other vehicles were having success as well. It wasn’t long before the whole building seemed to be burning. Then the main door at the front of the building opened and a man came running out. Christopher waited to see if the man was armed or if he was giving himself up. But the man was definitely running and there was something in his hand. He made it only about twenty steps before he was cut down. Christopher’s eyes followed the line of the shot, afraid that he would see Evan holding the smoking gun, but his eyes found Soledad instead, standing there next to Evan, her gun near her shoulder. She had pulled the trigger only a split second earlier. So much for letting them run, Christopher thought himself.
The main door was now open, and the five of them—Dutty, Christopher, Addy, Evan, and Soledad—carefully made their way toward it. They weren’t even the first of the rebels to get inside. Members from one of the other cars had beaten them to it. They must have found another entrance because shortly after entering the building, Christopher saw the body of one of their own, lying lifeless on the ground, his chest stained with blood. It was becoming quieter. The explosions had stopped. Somebody must have taken out the grenade launcher.
It was hot inside the building. The fire was growing. Another round of gunfire cut through the air on the floor above them. “We should leave,” Soledad whispered as they walked into the hell that they’d created. “This whole place is going to collapse and no one is going to be able to stop it.”
“We’ve got ten minutes,” Dutty responded. “Let’s make sure that there’s no one else here that we can pull out with us.” So they kept walking.
They saw three more bodies—one of their own and two of the enemy’s. The sounds had almost completely disappeared now. They heard only the popping and hissing of the fire slowly eating the building. “Dutty,” Soledad said, reaching out and touching Dutty’s shoulder, “it’s time to go. Don’t forget about our cargo.” She motioned with her head toward Christopher.
They had no reason to believe that anyone in the building was still alive. But someone was. The last survivor was still there, hiding near one of the doors and waiting for reinforcements. He’d already killed four of the rebels himself, but he knew a fool’s game when he saw one. It had been seven against thirty in the beginning, but now it was down to him against, he didn’t know for sure, maybe nineteen or twenty. He was going to stay hidden. That was his plan, but he never expected to see what he saw next. A whole group of rebels was walking out of the building. He could have taken out the three of them in front before the rest of them even had a chance to respond. Or he could hide in the shadows, hope that the reinforcements arrived before the fire got to him, and try to survive. No one would blame him for that. He’d fought valiantly. He tried to protect the information. What did it matter anyway? All of the information in the Intelligence Cell was duplicated in another Intelligence Cell. It would take them only a few w
eeks to replicate it all using the information keys at the Intelligence Centers. As long as the Intelligence Centers were standing, they wouldn’t lose anything except the pathetic lives of the guards. If they lost the Intelligence Centers, the information in the Intelligence Cell would be useless anyway. It would be like having a train schedule but having absolutely no way to find the train station.
He decided to stay hidden. It would have worked. He would have probably even survived if he hadn’t seen something that caused him to back into the now smoldering wall and cry out in pain. What he saw was the Child. The Child was actually with them. He couldn’t believe it. He’d seen pictures before, but he half believed them to be fakes. So he stepped backward, away from what had to be a hallucination. I could shoot him, he thought, but he knew that was suicide. So he took another step backward and his hand hit a chunk of metal that was hotter than the flames themselves. His skin sizzled and he gasped and they heard him. It was the woman, the one with the fire red hair that first aimed her gun at him. Everyone froze for a second. “It really is you,” the man in the shadows said to Christopher.
“Yes,” Christopher answered him and then Addy pulled the trigger.
What started as thirty versus seven ended when it hit twenty to none, although none of them ever knew for sure how many of their own side they lost, since their evacuation was sloppy and people randomly jumped into vehicles. All they knew was that their victory was not without its costs. When Dutty, Christopher, Evan, Addy, and Soledad stepped out of the building, Kevin was waiting for them in his SUV. He had picked up an additional passenger from the now disabled van that had been hit by the grenade. There wasn’t time to evenly distribute the survivors. “We’ve got three minutes,” Kevin yelled to them as they stepped outside. Christopher could see the fire reflected in the SUV’s windshield and he counted six bullet holes in the vehicle’s side.
They all piled into the SUV. Kevin slammed his foot on the gas pedal. All of Christopher’s friends had survived this time. He supposed that was an improvement. He wasn’t sure that they hadn’t survived by pure luck. Better to be lucky than dead, he thought and made a miserable attempt at forcing out a chuckle. The additional passenger that they’d picked up was covered in the splatter of someone else’s blood. He didn’t say a word the whole trip back to L.A. He didn’t look at Christopher like all the others had. Instead, he stared out the window in a daze.
Twenty-seven
They made it back to their base in Los Angeles before sunrise—the ones who survived, that is. It was strange for Christopher, Evan, and Addy, walking around the compound after returning from the attack, because since they didn’t know anyone anyway, they had no idea who was missing. They didn’t know where the gaps were. They had no way of knowing who was mourning and who was simply tired or in shock. Every death means more to some than to others. They can’t mean something to everyone. There aren’t enough tears or time for that.
Dutty showed the three of them where they were meant to stay, noting as he did that they probably wouldn’t be here for more than another few days. He expected it to be a good few days. Christopher had led them to their first victory, and the Web site would be roiling with the news in a matter of hours. Dutty would make sure of that. It wouldn’t be long before people everywhere, regardless of what side they were on, would know that the Uprising had begun.
Dutty had organized the building so that women slept on one side and men slept on the other. He first showed Evan and Christopher to the room they would be sharing. It was at the far end of the compound. Inside the room were two beds with a single nightstand between them. Only one wall had a window, looking out across a desolate, dirt-strewn hill along the side of a highway. “You two need to rest,” Dutty said to Christopher and Evan. “Don’t let anyone bother you. I’ll go back to the apartment and get your things. You’ll have them before you wake up.” Christopher took the bed by the windowless wall, giving Evan what little natural light came into the room. “We’ll celebrate tonight,” Dutty added. Then he led Addy down the hallway toward the room she would be sharing with Soledad and two other women that she’d never met.
Evan and Christopher didn’t talk as they pulled back the sheets on their beds. Before climbing into the bed, Christopher, as was his habit, walked over to the window. “You mind?” he asked Evan before he passed Evan’s bed.
“Go ahead,” Evan said. He knew what Christopher was doing, knew that Christopher had to do it. Evan knew that Christopher couldn’t go to bed without first looking out any windows to see if anyone was out there. “You know I used to think it was so weird when you did that,” Evan said to Christopher. “It was like the toughest kid I ever met was checking under his bed for monsters before he went to sleep.”
“And what do you think now?”
“I think I’d do it if you didn’t. How’s it look?” Evan asked as Christopher peered out into the slowly coming dawn.
“Like hell,” Christopher answered. “It doesn’t look like L.A. out there. It looks like a scene from a Mad Max movie.”
“But no people?” Evan asked, not trying to hide the tinge of fear in his voice.
“No people,” Christopher confirmed. He looked down at his friend. “You know you don’t have to do this,” he said to Evan. “You can go home.”
“What about you?”
“You know I can’t go back.” Christopher stared at the wasteland outside and thought about the faces of his mother and father—his real mother and father, the ones who raised him. “Maybe this dump is all there is for me.”
“I’m not going back if you’re not going back,” Evan said. The fear in his voice was gone. “So drop it, okay?”
“Okay,” Christopher said. What Evan didn’t tell Christopher was that he didn’t want to go home. Not only because of Christopher but because of Addy too and for the sheer adventure of it all. His life was bigger now and he had always wanted it to be bigger. Besides, it was different here for Evan than for Christopher. No one looked at Evan funny. He was already becoming more accepted by these people than Christopher would ever, could ever, be. “I’m glad you’re here,” Christopher said.
Then, somehow, they slept.
Christopher could hear music when he woke up. It wasn’t loud, but he could hear it drifting in from one of the building’s other rooms. It was still light outside, but the shadows were growing long. Christopher checked the clock. He’d been in bed for almost twelve hours. The bed next to him was unmade but empty. Evan must have already gotten up.
Christopher sat up in bed. He put his feet on the floor and his hands on the bed next to him. He listened. Under the sound of the music, he could hear people talking. He could hear spots of laughter. He didn’t want to go out there.
His bag, with what little in the world that he owned, was sitting at the end of his bed. Dutty must have dropped it off there while Christopher slept. Christopher slid down to the end of the bed and rifled through the bag. He found his jeans and a clean T-shirt. He took his time getting dressed. The room had no mirror, so he just ran his fingers through his hair a few times to try to make sure that it wasn’t too knotted or messy and that there was no soot or blood in it. Then, knowing that he was running out of reasons to delay the inevitable, he walked out of the room.
For a few seconds, Christopher was able to stand unnoticed and watch the others. Some of them had bottles of beer in their hands. The music was coming from a laptop computer somebody had set on a table outside the kitchen. Evan was standing in one corner of the room, drinking a beer and talking to two men that Christopher barely recognized from the night when everyone introduced themselves to him. He felt more than a little guilty for not remembering them all better, for not remembering each of their names.
Addy saw Christopher first. She was standing near the table with the computer on it. They made eye contact and after a moment’s hesitation, Addy walked toward him. He was frozen, unsure of w
here to walk or who to talk to. He was relieved to see Addy coming toward him. He awkwardly pushed his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “I need to show you something,” Addy said before leading him to the computer. When they got near the computer the music was loud enough that it drowned out the other sounds of the evening and all they could hear was the music and each other. “Look at this,” Addy said, an unconquerable smile spreading across her face. She opened up a Web browser and pasted in the current URL for the Uprising’s Web site. It loaded quickly, but Addy noticed with satisfaction that it loaded a little slower than normal because so many people were viewing it. Though Addy immediately recognized the colors, the bright yellow background and the dark green font, it was all new to Christopher.
“What are you showing me?” Christopher asked.