Children of the Uprising Read online

  The room went silent for a moment—but only a moment.

  “How do we do that?” Hector shouted out toward the new leaders, breaking the silence.

  “There are enough of us here that know something,” Addy responded to Hector. Addy and Evan were playing off each other as a team. “How many people here remember the faces of some of the people that fought against us tonight?” Every single one of the survivors raised a hand. “They’re the ones responsible for killing Christopher. Some of you probably even know a few of their names. Who here can name names?” A handful of the survivors raised their hands this time. Addy committed each one to memory. “That’s great,” Addy said. “All we need to do is gather the information that we have.”

  Evan chimed back in now. “The others can help us too,” he said. “The other rebels in Europe and Asia and South America that fought with us, that fought for Christopher. They can help us. They won’t want Christopher’s death to go unavenged either.”

  Addy nodded with enthusiasm. “We have one last battle to fight together—for Christopher. We know how to do this. We’ll keep our enemies’ names and what we know about them. They need to know that they can’t get away with this.”

  “Stop them,” Jared said again to Maria, hoping that she could do what he knew in his heart he could not. “You have to stop them.”

  But Maria saw the look in Addy’s and Evan’s eyes and she knew that she was powerless. “I can’t,” she said and her voice trembled.

  “Try!” Jared shouted at Maria, grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her.

  Maria shook her head. “They won’t listen to me,” she told Jared. “Anything I say will only make it worse. They’re young,” she said, as if that were an excuse. All they know is violence, she thought to herself. How could we have expected anything different?

  So Jared pushed Maria aside. “Stop this!” he shouted as he stormed toward Evan. “You’ll regret this!” Jared raised his hoarse, whiskey-soaked voice as loud as his tired muscles would let him.

  “Who are you?” Evan asked as Jared rushed toward them.

  Jared had no answer. Who was he to them? He was the villain in their fairy tales. “You will regret this,” Jared repeated instead of answering Evan’s question. “I promise you that if you do this, you will regret it.”

  “What do you know about it, old man?” Evan said to Jared. “You didn’t know Christopher. You wouldn’t understand.” Then Evan turned his back on Jared and asked the room, “Who is with us?”

  Of the twelve survivors, nine of them agreed to help Addy and Evan. Brian and two others refrained, but none of them did anything to stop what was happening right before their eyes. Internationally, the percentages of rebels who joined Addy and Evan’s cause were lower, but enough people joined the cause to make it work. It worked quickly and efficiently because when everything relies on forgetting the past there is little difference between being given knowledge and not being allowed to forget. Internationally, those that agreed to raise arms alongside Addy and Evan were mostly people who had met Christopher when he had visited Indonesia and Istanbul. Christopher had left his mark. The three mothers looked on in disbelief, mourning their son and mourning their inability to make these other children understand the consequences of what they were doing. Addy and Evan were so young and so passionate and they wanted so much. The three mothers knew that begging Addy and Evan to stop would only spur them on. The young don’t listen to the old when it comes to passion. Every generation believes that they are the first to feel the things that they feel. That left only Jared to beg Addy and Evan to stop the madness before it became something that they couldn’t control. But no one listened to Jared anymore. He fell to his hands and his knees in the middle of the room and repeated the words over and over again, “Don’t do this. Let it go. For God’s sake, let it go.” But the young rebels walked around him as if he didn’t exist.

  The survivors gathered around Addy and Evan instead, wanting to hear more. They knew it wasn’t over because how could it be over? They had one more mission. One more, Evan promised them, and then it would be over.

  Sixty-eight

  “So that’s how the War started?” the young girl asked, barely able to cover the skepticism in her voice.

  “You think I’m telling you stories?” the old woman responded to her.

  “I don’t know. It’s just seems too—”

  The old woman cut her off. “It seems too easy? Too fast?” The girl nodded her head. “You think that because it’s so hard to end a war, it should also be hard to start one.” The old woman remembered the bloody details that she was glossing over—the battles, the losses, the victories. Sure, there was more to the start of the war than she was letting on, but none of it mattered. The war was inevitable from the moment that Addy and Evan, the new war’s Adam and Eve, decided to fight on.

  “Shouldn’t it be hard to start a war?” the girl asked.

  “It should,” the old woman told her, “but it’s not. It never has been. Someday, maybe, it will be.”

  “If that’s how the War started, then which side are we on?” the girl asked. “Are we on Addy and Evan’s side or are we on the other side?”

  The old woman sighed, wondering if it even mattered. “As time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to remember. It’s been two generations already since the old war ended and the new war began. With each passing generation, the two sides seem to triple in size, no matter how many people are killed. Both sides know all too well how to make a war grow.”

  “I still don’t know if I believe you,” the young girl said.

  The old woman looked past the girl and into her house. She wondered if she should open the old chest she kept in her bedroom to show the girl what was inside. Maybe those old journals would make the girl believe. But no, the old woman decided, the journals should stay hidden. The girl would have to decide what to believe on her own. “Why don’t you believe me?” the old woman asked.

  “Because the story is too sad to be true,” the young girl said.

  “How would a story being sad make it any less true?”

  “Well, if the story is true, then that means that everything was pointless. It means that everyone was either a bad guy or a failure.”

  “Is that what you think?” the old woman asked.

  The girl shrugged again. “Well, there doesn’t seem much point in trying to end the War if it’s only going to lead to another war.”

  “Listen,” the old woman told her, “I’m going to teach you the most important thing you’ll ever learn.” The girl leaned in toward her. “Are you ready?” The girl nodded vigorously.

  The old woman began slowly, trying to find the right words. “You can’t judge people by the outcome of their actions. There’s far too much chance in the world for that. If you judge people only by the outcome of their actions, you will grow up to be cynical and disappointed.”

  “Then how should we judge people?” the girl asked, confused.

  “Judge them on what they try to achieve and how much they risk in trying to achieve it. Judge them based on the courage they have to muster to roll the dice when it counts and not on how those dice land.”

  “What does that do?”

  “It takes all those people that you want to call bad guys and failures and turns them into heroes—every single one of them.”

  The young girl thought about it. She thought about the stories the old woman had told her. She thought about Joseph and Maria and Christopher. She thought about Michael and Reggie and Brian. Then she thought about Addy and Evan and even Jared. “Can they really all be heroes?” the girl asked the old woman.

  The old woman’s heart throbbed, knowing the type of War-torn world the young girl was going to have to grow up in, knowing all too well about the paranoia and the loneliness and the sadness that would surround her for her entire life. “W
ouldn’t you like to live in a world full of heroes?” the old woman answered the girl.

  “That would be nice,” the young girl replied, looking up at the old woman with a smile full of naive hope.

  Trevor Shane lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two sons.

  CONNECT ONLINE

  www.childrenofparanoia.com