Children of the Uprising (13 page)

The four of them eventually got on a bus and made their way to an apartment in Santa Monica, only five or six blocks from the beach. “The three of you will stay here tonight,” Dutty informed them. It was a small apartment on the second floor of a two-story building, which surrounded a murky swimming pool. There was a bedroom in the back of the apartment with a window facing the street. The front room contained a small kitchenette, a pull-out couch, and a TV. “The TV doesn't work, but you should be safe here as long as you don't let Christopher leave the apartment.”

“Is this your place?” Addy asked Dutty.

“I stay here sometimes,” Dutty answered, “but I can find someplace else to go tonight. It could get pretty crowded in here with four of us. When things settle down, I'll take you guys to one of our buildings to stay. I don't think they're ready for that right now. If we take Christopher there now, we're never going to get anything accomplished.”

“What are we trying to get accomplished?” Christopher asked.

“Let's get some dinner and we can talk about it,” Dutty said, staring at Christopher. Christopher could feel the difference between his stare and the stare of all the others. Unlike the others, Dutty wasn't in awe of Christopher.

“Is Dutty your real name?” Christopher asked.

Dutty smiled. “I named myself Dutty after the Haitian priest who prophesied the New World's first slave revolt, and I will never again answer to any other name. Now I'm going to go out and get us some food.”

“So what is
the plan?” Addy asked Dutty after they finished eating. Dutty and Evan had scarfed down their burritos. Addy ate half of hers. Christopher barely touched his.

“We have to strike soon, while the excitement is still high. We have to make sure that everyone knows that not only is Christopher alive, but he's changed things.” Dutty looked at Christopher. “The people you met today, they're only a small sample. There are more people all over the world waiting to see what you're going to do. So I'm going to tell you what I think you should do.”

“Okay,” Christopher said, not sure if he had any options in any of this.

“There's an Intelligence Cell in Nevada, just outside of Death Valley. We know where it is. One of the people you met tonight used to work there. It's isolated. There's barely anything around it.”

“And?”

“I think we should take it down,” Dutty finished.

“What do you mean, ‘take it down'?”

“I think we should attack it. I think we should show them that we've got some fight in us, that we're more than a bunch of talk. It's time for action. Right, Addy?” Dutty looked toward the one person in the room he expected to be his ally.

“What are we going to attack it with? Guns? Army tanks? How is this going to work?” Christopher looked around at the others to see if anyone else was confused.

“He's right, Christopher. You came here to stop running, right? Well, the only way to stop running is to start fighting,” Addy told him

“And if you're there leading us,” Dutty said to Christopher, “think of the message that will send to the whole world. We've got the firepower. We can make the plans. You merely have to lead the charge. This cell is in the middle of nowhere. We have at least an hour before their reinforcements show up. All we need to do is send a message, so we fight for an hour and then get the hell out of there.”

“And the people who work there?” Christopher asked. He looked over at Evan, who was sitting silently, his mouth agape, taking everything in, trying to believe what was right in front of his eyes.

“If they run, we'll let them run. If they want to stay and fight, well, we fight them. We're all children of this War, Christopher. We know how to fight.”

“If you're the one with the idea and the plan, then how am I the leader?” Christopher looked to Dutty for an answer, but Addy answered for him.

“Because the leader's not the person with the idea or the plan. The leader is the person that the others follow.”

Dutty laughed for a moment and then he stopped laughing. “So are you in?” he asked Christopher.

“I'm in,” Evan said, surprising them all. Christopher looked at Evan. He didn't want to drag Evan into any of this, but he also knew that he had to let Evan make his own choices. Besides, if he was going to fight, he wanted Evan beside him.

“If this is how it's got to be,” Christopher said and his voice trailed off.

“Two days,” Dutty said, holding two fingers up. “I need two days to get everything together. Then we move.”

Christopher felt tired. Everything was happening so fast. He looked at the faces of the people in the room. Dutty looked satisfied. Addy looked excited. Evan looked scared. Christopher simply looked tired.

“I'll leave you three to get some rest,” Dutty said. Then he left.

The first time that Addy kissed Evan, she did it only to see if kissing him would feel different than kissing Christopher. She needed to know if that empty feeling that she had when she kissed Christopher was because of him or because of her. She hadn't planned it. It just happened. She and Evan had gone for a walk on the Santa Monica pier. Christopher essentially demanded it. He was feeling guilty. He said that just because it wasn't safe for him to go outside, that didn't mean that the two of them should stay cooped up in the little apartment. It had only been one day, but it felt like much longer. The three of them were nearly bouncing off the walls with nervous energy. Some people would say that the plan had been years, maybe even decades, in the making but to the three of them, everything was going to start in one day—whatever that everything was.

The night was dark, but the pier glowed beneath the lights from the vendors' stalls. Addy and Evan bought ice cream. The Ferris wheel lit up the sky with crazy, swirling patterns of light. The pier was crowded. Evan and Addy passed bands playing and people dancing, some for tips, some to the music. Beneath the sound of the music was the sound of the ocean, churning and crashing on the other side of the white-sand beach. And the screaming, the shrieks of joy from the people on the Scrambler and the pirate ship ride. It all made Addy feel young, like she was the sixteen-year-old that she'd never had the chance to be because, in reality, two weeks before her sixteenth birthday she was told that the world was a horrible place and no one was ever safe. But that night she was with Evan, and Evan was so young and innocent that it made her feel younger and freer than she'd felt in a very long time. She felt like she was on a first date.

“Let's go feel the water,” Addy said to Evan after they finished their ice cream. They walked by a belly dancer twitching her hips and shaking the rattles that hung low on her stomach.

“Huh?” Evan said. He could barely hear Addy speak over all the distractions.

“Let's take our shoes off and walk down to the beach and put our feet in the water and see how cold it is.” Addy's voice was full of fire.

Evan's head spun. He wondered how he'd found himself with this bizarre woman in this bizarre place. He wondered if Christopher liked Addy, if there had been anything between them. Christopher hadn't said anything to Evan, but Christopher rarely said anything to anybody. Evan wondered if he should go with Addy, if he should take his shoes off with her, if he should walk with her into the water, but he couldn't have said no if he'd wanted to. “Okay,” he said.

So they followed the sound of the ocean and they took off their shoes. They stepped onto the sand. It was cold. Addy felt the cold sand slide between her toes as her feet sank into it. Then she ran. She ran toward the water. It took a moment for Evan's mind to catch up with what was happening. Then he ran too. He caught up with Addy just as her feet splashed into a small incoming wave. Then she laughed. She hadn't laughed in a long time. She looked over at Evan. He looked scared and innocent. That was part of it too. If he hadn't looked so scared, she might not have done it. But that was when she decided that she needed to know. Was it her or was it Christopher? Was she lost forever or was there still a chance for her? So she walked over to Evan and she kissed him. It was a long kiss, long enough to fill the moment. When the kiss ended, Addy knew that it wasn't her. She was still capable of feeling whatever that feeling was that you were supposed to feel when you kissed someone for the first time—excitement mixed with giddiness mixed with despair. She looked at Evan. She knew that it wasn't her and she knew that she wanted more.

Evan was still afraid when they stumbled back to the apartment. He was afraid of what would happen next and even more afraid of what would happen because of whatever happened next. Most of all, though, Evan was afraid of the crazy red-haired woman who fought wars, joined rebellions, and seduced strangers. He was too scared to even try to make her stop. That's not to say that he wanted her to stop. He didn't.

They walked past Christopher, who had fallen asleep on the couch, pausing for a second to see if the sound of the door was going to wake him up. When he didn't move, they slipped into the bedroom like young parents trying to find moments to make love without waking their sleeping children. Evan wasn't a virgin. He'd had girlfriends and a couple of onetime flings, but this was different. He'd never been so overwhelmed before.

They were quiet, as quiet as they could manage. Despite their efforts, Christopher woke up before they were finished. He could hear them through the thin door to the bedroom. He didn't say anything. He didn't stop them. He knew he could. He knew that he could tear into that room and shout and shame his best friend and this woman who worshipped him and also hated him for not being the person that she worshipped. He knew he had that power, but he didn't want it. He had no idea what he wanted. So he turned his back on the sounds coming through the bedroom door and tried to go back to sleep.

Dutty came back the next day. Nobody said a word about what had happened the night before. Evan and Addy didn't even speak about it to each other. Whatever spell Addy had seemed to be under disappeared with the sun. “So are you guys ready?” Dutty asked the three of them, though only Christopher's answer mattered to him. “We move tonight.”

“I'm not going to get any more ready sitting around here,” Christopher answered him.

The sound of machine-gun fire ripped through the desert night. The desert didn't allow for darkness. The desert lacked the shadows needed to suck up the light. So Christopher could see it all, even the things that he wished he couldn't see.

Thirty of them made the attack. Almost all of them were given guns—a hodgepodge of semiautomatic weapons and hunting rifles. “God bless America,” Dutty said as he handed out the weapons. In the end, the only ones not given guns were the ones driving the cars. The thirty of them packed themselves into five different vehicles ranging from beat-up, windowless vans to state-of-the-art SUVs. They all drove from Los Angeles, though the plan was to split up into three groups after the attack. Christopher, Addy, and Evan were all supposed to head back to L.A. with Dutty and about thirty others. Half of the rest were to head to Vegas and the other half would drive to Texas.

Christopher, Addy, Evan, and Dutty rode in one of the SUVs, with a driver and a Hispanic woman who looked to be about Addy's age. The drive took more than six hours. For the first few hours, nobody said anything. Evan and Addy sat next to each other, their shoulders touching. They were closer to each other than they needed to be, Christopher noticed. He didn't think that anybody else did. He didn't even know if Evan and Addy noticed themselves. It came naturally. The driver and the Hispanic woman kept glancing at Christopher, then looking away as quickly as they could when Christopher caught their eyes. They spent the first two hours trying to look anywhere but at Christopher and failing. It was especially awkward because the Hispanic woman was sitting next to Christopher. The driver glanced at him in his rearview mirror so frequently that Christopher began to worry that he wasn't keeping his eyes on the road.

“So what are you guys' names?” Evan finally asked the driver and the Hispanic woman long after the silence began careening toward absurdity.

“I'm Kevin,” the driver said and waved meekly toward the back of the car.

“My name is Soledad,” the woman answered.

“I'm Evan,” Evan told them. Both Kevin and Soledad started laughing. “What's so funny?” Evan asked, turning a light shade of pink.

“We know who you are,” Soledad said. “We know who all of you are.” She peered at Christopher again as she said the words.

“You hear that, guys?” Evan said loudly. “We're famous!” Everybody laughed this time, even Christopher.

“There was a Soledad that I used to chat with sometimes on the Web site,” Addy said. It wasn't quite a question, but it demanded an answer anyway.

“That was me,” Soledad said and she smiled a broad, toothy smile. “I didn't want to say anything in case you didn't remember me.”

“I remember,” Addy said. “I remember everyone who talked to me on that site. You all gave me hope. Thank you.”

“Don't thank me,” Soledad said. “I hope that I can do as much for the movement as you have.” Soledad snuck another glance at Christopher. He gave her a wan smile, then turned and stared out the window as they drove. Each of them except Kevin had a gun either balanced on their lap or resting on the floor between their legs.

The people stationed in the intelligence cell in the desert fought back. They had their own stockpile of weapons. Their weapons were bigger and better than the revolutionaries' weapons. That's what you do when you're sequestered out in the middle of the desert—you get big guns; you get hand grenades; you ready yourself for an attack. The revolutionaries had only their makeshift assortment of armaments and Molotov cocktails. But the revolutionaries had the numbers. Thirty versus seven in the beginning.

The Intelligence Cell was the only visible building in the desert, surrounded by nothing but rocks and sand. They pulled up to it with five vehicles, quickly spreading out, driving across the hard-packed earth, surrounding the building. They stopped, like the five points of a star with the building in the middle. The SUV carrying Christopher, Evan, Addy, Dutty, Soledad, and Kevin faced the front of the building. Kevin stopped the vehicle, but he kept it running and in gear so that he could stay agile in case they had to move. He must have done something like this before, Christopher thought, watching him and wondering what type of job he had in the War that would make Dutty pick him to be his own driver, to be Christopher's driver. Once the car was idling, Kevin opened the sunroof. Christopher looked at the two other vehicles he could see, the ones that weren't blocked by the building. Somebody rose through the sunroof of one of the vehicles, holding his gun at the ready. Two people climbed out of the other vehicle with their guns, flanking each side of the van, which Christopher figured must not have a working sunroof. Dutty stood up out of their sunroof. First he placed his gun on the roof. Then he reached back down and picked up a battery-powered megaphone.

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 weeks 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.