Children of the Uprising Page 40

  The men from the helicopter up on the roof finally came out of their hiding places all at once, all running for the door that would lead them downstairs. They finally thought to coordinate, to work together, to sacrifice a few for the larger cause. Evan began aiming and firing—shot after shot. He hit two of them quickly, but the other two made it all the way to the door. They stood in a single-file line, one in front of the other, the first blocking Evan’s view of the second. The one in front pulled the door open. Evan fired again, hitting the second man in the back, between his shoulder blades. Then he planned on shooting the man in front. The man Evan shot bent backward and fell to his knees. When he fell, no one was in front of him. The door was open. One man had made it inside. “Chris! They’re inside! Please!” Evan shouted.

  Inside the building, Christopher was still in a strange trance. He wanted to get one clear look at the dead man, so he reached up and pulled the gas mask off his face. He could smell the gas spreading everywhere around him, but only vaguely. You weren’t supposed to be able to smell it at all, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t everywhere. Christopher breathed, pulling the gas into him, into his lungs and his body. It made him feel the slightest bit giddy. He would put the gas mask back on in a moment, but first he needed to look at the dead man’s face. He thought that the dead man deserved it before his body and all the evidence around it were incinerated.

  Christopher looked at the body. The man had been ugly, but it was hard to tell if it was his life or his death that had made him ugly. Seeing his face was enough for now. Christopher lifted up his gas mask, intending to pull it back over his face. Then, slowly emerging from his trance, Christopher finally heard Evan shouting something into his earpiece. The sound of Evan’s voice was followed by a small sound coming from behind Christopher. So instead of pulling his gas mask on, Christopher slowly turned around to face whatever it was that was behind him that Evan had been trying to warn him about.

  Addy and Evan had seen the man from the roof as he ran past the office windows. After he had reached Christopher’s floor, Evan aimed his rifle, ready to shoot the man through the window, until Addy yelled, “Stop!”

  “Why?” Evan asked.

  “Because your bullet will make a spark and the whole place will burst into flames with Christopher still inside.” So Evan couldn’t shoot. They could only watch, impotent to help.

  “He’s coming for you,” Evan said into his radio, hoping Christopher could still hear him. This time Christopher did hear him, but it was already too late.

  The man had a gun—a handgun—that he was pointing at Christopher’s back before Christopher turned around. “Don’t shoot,” Christopher said to the man. “If you shoot, we’ll both die and everything that you’re trying to protect will burn.”

  “What do you mean?” the man asked Christopher, confused by this tactic.

  “Can you smell the gas?” Christopher asked the man.

  “I don’t smell anything,” the man said, almost certain that Christopher was bluffing.

  “It’s all around you,” Christopher warned the man, “and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  In response to the dire warning, the man lifted up his gun and aimed it at Christopher’s head. The man had to shoot. He had orders to clear everyone out of the offices, to protect the information at all costs. He didn’t smell anything anyway. The man hesitated for only a second as Christopher spoke, seemingly into the air, as if he were praying. “I’m sorry I didn’t run soon enough,” Christopher said out loud.

  “That’s okay.” Evan forgave him, speaking loud enough so that Christopher would hear.

  Christopher looked into the eyes of the man who was pointing a gun at him but Christopher kept speaking to Evan. “I want you to shoot him before he shoots me,” Christopher said to Evan. His voice was calm. “I want you to be the one to end the War.”

  End the War, as if that was all Evan was going to have to do. Evan trained his rifle on the man who was pointing a gun at Christopher. Evan watched the man’s trigger finger. He wasn’t going to shoot unless he saw that trigger finger twitch. He wasn’t going to shoot unless he had no other choice. Neither Evan nor Addy bothered looking for any of the others. They didn’t have the chance to see that two of them had already made it out and were heading down the stairs. They didn’t see how close the woman was to getting out. They didn’t see Reggie, still inside, as he headed up the stairs to try to make sure that Christopher was safe. Reggie was still trying to make good on the promise that he’d made to Maria all those years ago.

  The man started to pull the trigger. Evan was faster. Evan pulled the trigger on his rifle and then . . . fire. The fire was everywhere, instantly. All five floors were bathed in flames, hot, bright flames that ate everything. Then a moment later, the fire went out and everything was gone. The papers were all gone. The color-coded names were gone. The dead body from the closet was gone. The man with the gun was gone. Reggie was gone. Christopher was gone. Everything was gone in the flash of fire, and Evan and Addy were witnesses to it.

  Evan and Addy stood on the roof together, dumb with shock. It would take them hours to finally accept what had happened. They used those hours to decide what they needed to do next. It couldn’t just be over. Not for them. Not like that.

  Sixty-five

  The next day, as the sun slowly rose throughout the world, the children of paranoia woke up to a new reality. At first they didn’t know what had changed. Some of them found out in weeks. Some in months. They saw the stories on the news about the terrorist attacks in different cities and countries all over the world, but they had no way of immediately knowing what these attacks had accomplished. It took time. They knew for sure that the War had ended only when time went by and no one tried to kill them. They knew for sure that the War had ended only when time went by and they weren’t given new orders about who to kill. From that night forward, all over the world, thousands upon thousands of people no longer knew who it was that they were supposed to hate.

  The War was over. No more sons and no more daughters would die in this War. No more blood would be spilled. It ended in flames and bombs and bullets and blood, but the War ended all the same. The children of paranoia were finally free.

  Sixty-six

  “Wait,” the young girl said, holding up her hand, stopping the old woman before she could say another word. “That doesn’t make any sense. I thought you promised to tell me how the War started.”

  The old woman smiled at the young girl. “The story’s not over yet,” she said. “There’s still a little bit more to tell.”

  Sixty-seven

  The day after the Uprising all of the survivors met, as they had agreed, at the warehouse in Brooklyn. Only twelve of the twenty-five made it back. As they arrived, each of them was met by three grieving mothers. The mothers knew to grieve even before anyone told them what had happened. One uninvited guest would make his way to the warehouse as well.

  Brian was the first one to arrive at the warehouse. He had waited on the rooftop of his assigned building until the fireworks ended. Then he stayed longer, holding his breath until he saw the flash of light coming from the Intelligence Center. The flash was over ever so quickly, especially when compared to the fireworks, which had seemed to go on forever and ever. It was little more than a second of bright light and then darkness. Everything was quiet after that and Brian made his way down off the roof. He was careful to make sure he wasn’t being followed as he weaved his way back to Brooklyn.

  It was Brian’s job to find out if the others had been successful too. He had an office set up in the back corner of the warehouse where he could work the phones and e-mail simultaneously. The news came in slowly. Confirmation came in from Paris and Costa Rica first. Then the news came in from Tokyo, Rio, and Istanbul. Brian had to wait the longest for the news from Cambodia. The sun was coming up by the time he received word that the mission in Cambod
ia was a success. Nobody talked about casualties or costs. Nobody talked about what was lost. People only talked about success over failure. When Brian finally received the news about Cambodia, the early light from the morning had begun to leak in through the boarded-up window next to him. Brian hung up the phone. He walked over to the window and pulled away the wooden plank covering it, revealing the sun. Then he sat down again and stared out the window, waiting for some sort of emotion to come to him.

  The trickle of survivors came in throughout the night. Brian wasn’t planning on facing any of them until he had gotten news from everywhere. Instead, Maria and Christopher’s two other mothers greeted each of them. The three mothers tended to the wounded, both physically and, when they could, emotionally. The three mothers didn’t ask questions, not even the one question that the three of them were dying to ask: do you know what happened to my son? They knew that they would get their answer soon enough, and each one of them knew enough to fear it. Even without the prodding from the three mothers, the survivors, once they had gathered, began to talk.

  The three mothers brought each of the survivors into the grand room where they’d all gathered only a few days earlier to celebrate the world’s decision to rebel. The room, with so many fewer people occupying it, seemed larger and colder than before. The survivors’ injuries weren’t severe. The ones who had been really hurt didn’t make it back. The three mothers treated a couple of bullet wounds to extremities, a few scraps from shattered glass, and a burn to the side of one woman’s face. The mothers didn’t know where each of the survivors had been. They didn’t know if any of the survivors had been with their son.

  “What was up with the fireworks? Did any of you know that we were planting fireworks?” one of the men asked as Maria put antiseptic on the bullet hole in his thigh. “I thought it was supposed to be bombs.” Nobody answered him. None of the survivors had known that Christopher changed the plans.

  “It’s better this way,” someone finally chimed in. “Less people got hurt this way.”

  “Sure,” the man with the bullet in his leg agreed, “but we could have at least gotten a warning. Maybe more of us would have made it back if we’d gotten a warning.”

  “Maybe the whole thing would have been a failure if we’d all known about the fireworks,” the woman with the burned face said.

  “Do you even know if it worked?” somebody asked the woman.

  “Yes,” Linda answered him, holding an ice pack on her face. She looked over at Hector, neither of them feeling as proud as they wanted to. “We did it.” They were the only two to make it back from the Intelligence Center. Dave had been shot as the three of them were retreating from the building.

  “How do you know?” someone else asked.

  “Because I was there,” Linda answered. “I felt the fire that burned the place to the ground.” Then she showed them all the blisters on her face and when the people saw her blisters, they cheered.

  As the cheering went on, the small older woman who had given Linda the towel and the ice for her face came back to her. “Were you with Christopher?” the old woman asked Linda. Linda had no idea who the old woman was or what she was doing there. Linda didn’t know that the old woman had raised Christopher until he was a few days past his first birthday.

  “I was,” Linda told the old woman.

  “Do you know what happened to him?” The old woman whispered her question as if the question itself was a secret.

  Linda shook her head. “No,” she whispered back, holding back her tears, knowing how much it would hurt her wounds if she began to cry.

  Brian showed himself before Addy and Evan returned. They were the only two survivors who hadn’t made it back yet by the time he stepped into the makeshift infirmary to deliver the good news. Brian would have waited for them if he’d known they were alive, but no one knew. No one could know. Each person knew only about the casualties that he or she had witnessed firsthand. Until Addy and Evan walked into that room, everyone assumed that they hadn’t survived the night.

  When Brian entered the room, everything went quiet. Without Reggie there, Brian was the closest thing that any of them had to a leader. They waited for him to speak. “We’ve won,” he said softly, but loud enough that everyone in the room could hear. “I’ve gotten confirmation on each of the targets. They’re all gone.”

  “So the War is over?” someone shouted.

  “If people want the War to be over,” Brian answered him, “it is.” There was cheering again, but this time it was more subdued as people became more and more aware of the absences in the room. As they began to realize with more and more certainty that all of the people who were absent were unlikely to come back.

  Linda waved the old woman back to her. “He had time to get out,” Linda assured the old woman. “I know he had enough time.” The old woman nodded, but the desperation in Linda’s voice only made Christopher’s mother more nervous.

  Without Reggie or Christopher there to lead them, no one knew what to do. No one knew how long they should stay before giving up hope that any more survivors would return. Then, as the resignation began to spread from one survivor to the other, the door opened and in stepped Addy and Evan. They walked in with purpose. It hadn’t been fear that they were being followed that had kept them from returning earlier, even though, unbeknownst to them, they were being followed. It had taken them so long to make it back to the warehouse because they weren’t sure how to respond to what had happened. They had spent the night walking through empty parts of the city, talking about what they should do, what they needed to do now that Christopher was gone. They didn’t head back to the warehouse until after they’d made their decision.

  The hope in the room was revived for a moment when Addy and Evan walked in. If Addy and Evan were still alive, then maybe other people were alive too, maybe Reggie was still alive, maybe he was still alive. Nobody said the words, but everyone knew that it had suddenly become important to everyone that he was still alive. What good would ending the War be if they had to sacrifice the one innocent among them to do it?

  The hope didn’t last long, though. Evan smashed it into a million little pieces in seconds. “Christopher is dead,” he announced without prodding or questioning. “They killed him.” Evan’s voice was not sad. It was angry. It was angrier than it had ever been before.

  “What? No!” one of the mothers wailed.

  “How do you know?” someone else asked. Unlike Linda, Evan had no scars to prove himself—none that could be seen anyway.

  “We saw it happen.” Evan motioned toward Addy, and she nodded in confirmation. “He burned to death along with all of your precious information.” Evan didn’t tell everyone that he had been the one who fired the bullet that lit the spark that started the fire that killed Christopher. Addy didn’t say anything either. They had agreed that it didn’t change anything that mattered. If Evan hadn’t pulled the trigger, someone else would have and the building would have burned with Christopher in it anyway.

  As Evan spoke, the man who had spent much of the night following Addy and Evan around the city slipped into the room. In all the commotion caused by Evan’s words, he was unnoticed by anyone but Maria. Jared had mostly sobered up by then. He had seen Addy and Evan walk past him earlier the night before. He recognized Evan from surveillance pictures he had seen of Christopher years ago. Jared never forgot Evan’s face because Evan was the best friend and Jared never forgot the importance of the best friend. Jared began following Addy and Evan, hoping to get one last glimpse of the War’s end before disappearing forever into obscurity.

  When Maria saw Jared, she rushed toward him. She gathered her strength. She had already lost a son that night. Whatever it was that Jared was planning, Maria was determined to stop it. This wasn’t the time or the place for any more of Jared’s cruelty. Maria remembered watching Jared kill Joseph. If Jared could do that to his own best friend,
she couldn’t fathom what he had planned for the people in that room. She wasn’t going to freeze this time. Nothing could stop her. She wasn’t going to fail again. Maria was so focused on Jared that she didn’t even hear the words that Evan spoke as she rushed toward her old nemesis. If she couldn’t protect her own son, the least she could do was try to protect Addy and Evan.

  “What are you doing here?” Maria asked Jared, stepping between him and Addy and Evan.

  Maria didn’t trust the way Jared was staring at Evan. Evan was standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by the other survivors. When Maria spoke, Jared’s eyes moved from Evan to Maria, and Maria saw something in those eyes that she had never expected to see. She saw regret. For the first time, she saw regret in Jared’s eyes. “What is he doing?” Jared asked Maria, his voice weak. He didn’t even care who he was asking. He motioned toward Evan. “Stop him,” Jared begged Maria.

  Eighteen years ago, on the eve of losing Joseph and her son in one fell swoop, it had been the cold hate and the anger in Jared’s eyes that had frightened Maria. The look in his eyes on that morning was worse. The regret and the compassion in Jared’s eyes frightened Maria more than she had ever been frightened before. She turned back toward Evan, not knowing what to expect. She half expected to see violence. She’d been trained to expect violence. When all was said and done, she would have preferred to have turned around and seen violence. Instead, Maria saw the crowd standing around Evan and Addy. Then she finally stopped to listen to what Evan was saying. Evan was nearly shouting, his clenched fist raised above his head. “We can’t let them get away with what they did to Christopher,” he yelled. “He didn’t deserve to die like that. Somebody’s got to pay for his death.”