Children of the Uprising (39 page)

They were running, all six of them, up the stairs. It was hot in the stairwell and their bags felt heavy. Christopher could feel his backpack pulling him down even as he pushed himself up one step at a time. It was an internal stairwell without any windows. The six of them couldn't see what was going on outside as they ran. They concentrated on step after step, flight after flight. Soon they were cresting the second flight and had only thirty-five more floors to go. Above Christopher, Dave and Mike swung their backpacks off their shoulders and began to dig through them, reaching inside for the tiny explosive they were going to use to blow open the doors when they got upstairs. Once they found the explosives they held them in their hands and reshouldered their backpacks. In all of that movement, neither of them stopped running. They all knew how little time they had. They all knew that the diversions they'd created, both inside and outside the building, wouldn't last forever. They knew that those diversions were the only thing making their impossible job possible. Instead of fighting thirty armed men, they would have to fight only five, but that would hold only as long as the diversions lasted and as long as their colleagues on the ground could keep reinforcements from entering the building. So they ran and even as they ran, only Reggie and Christopher knew about the fireworks. Only they knew that the diversions outside the building wouldn't last as long as everyone else expected. Reggie, the oldest one of the group by at least a decade, sped up so that he was the first one in the line, leading the charge, pulling everyone else up with him.

Christopher clutched his rifle with both hands. He'd put his handgun back in its holster. He swung his rifle back and forth as he ran, using it for balance. He looked down at the stairs, concentrating on each step, trying to find a rhythm, trying not to slip, trying not to think about the chaos waiting for them when they reached the top of the stairs or the chaos waiting for him after that. He stayed close on Linda's heels. He didn't look up. He refused to look up. He tried to clear his mind of everything but step, step, step. Soon it was like a trance, and Christopher's mind drifted again—back to the warehouse, back to Maria, back to her second gift for him.

After Maria had taken Christopher to meet the woman who had been his mother for nearly a year and then given up her entire life for him, Maria took him to another room. “I don't have time,” Christopher protested. The time for the Uprising was getting closer. He had to get ready. But his protest wasn't really about the time. He simply wasn't sure what else Maria had in store for him. He wasn't sure if he could take any more surprises. He feared any more distractions. He was still trying to wrap his head around the first one.

“You still have time for this,” Maria promised him again, and the way she said it, Christopher didn't believe he had a choice. So he followed Maria around corners and through doors until they came to another door to another room, one that Christopher had never been to before. “Go inside,” Maria said gently. Christopher opened the door and stepped through it.

Christopher looked across the room. He turned back to Maria. “What is she doing here?” he asked, his voice confused and angry. There was no answer, so he asked the question again, more loudly this time. “Maria, what is she doing here?” His voice was trembling. “She can't be here. She shouldn't be here. It's not safe.”

Maria stepped up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder but didn't say anything, unsure of what to say. She didn't have to say anything, though; the woman on the other side of the room knew what to say. The woman on the other side of the room had a lot more practice than Maria. “It's okay, Chris.” The woman stepped closer to them. “I'm here. Maria told me everything. I know everything. Don't worry about me. I don't care about being safe. I only want to be here for you.”

“But—,” Christopher began.

The woman shook her head, cutting him off. “No ‘buts,' Christopher. Nothing you can say will make me leave you. My heart wouldn't be able to take it.”

“I'm sorry, Mom,” Christopher said, now on the verge of tears, feeling not like the inspiration for a revolution but like a helpless little boy. It felt wonderful. Christopher didn't want the feeling to go away.

“Come here, Christopher. Come to me.” The woman opened her arms for Christopher and he ran into them. Christopher's mother held him like she hadn't held him in years.

“What about Dad?” Christopher asked while still clutching his mother's shirt.

“He doesn't know anything. I wasn't allowed to tell him anything,” Christopher's mother said, lifting her eyes to Maria.

“Men,” Maria said out loud, responding to her gaze. “They're too dangerous. I risked enough bringing your two mothers here.”

“You've met the others?” Christopher asked his mother, ashamed, like he'd been cheating on her.

Christopher's mother nodded. “I knew Maria when she was a young girl. The three of us drove here together.” There was only a trace of weakness, a slight vulnerability in Christopher's mother's voice.

“Don't worry, Mom. You are my only mother.” Christopher didn't think about how the words he said might affect Maria, but his mother did. She glanced up at Maria and saw in her face the pain the words caused her.

“It looks to me like you could use more than one mother right now,” Christopher's mother said to him. “Maria was kind enough to share. I can do the same.” She gave a pained, sad laugh. “It's not many men who get to have three mothers.” She looked down and took her son's face in her hands. “You are so loved, Christopher.”

Maria stepped forward toward Christopher. “That's why I brought them here, Christopher,” she told him. “I wanted you to see how much more there is to you than the War. You don't have to limit yourself to what they want you to be.”

Christopher let go of the mother who raised him and looked at the mother who gave birth to him. “But I do,” he said to both of them. “Until this is over, they won't let me be anything else. That's why I need to do this tonight. That's what you have to understand. I'm not doing it for them.”

Christopher's mother answered him. “I remember when your nightmares started when you were a little boy. I remember blaming myself for them. I thought that I must have done something wrong. I thought you were having the nightmares because of me.”

“Well, now you know.” Christopher reassured his mother. “Now you know that it wasn't your fault.”

“But it was my fault because I couldn't stop them. That's why Maria gave you to me—so that I could stop them. I couldn't stop them then and I still can't stop them now.” The tears that she had been holding back began to flow from her eyes. “I'm so sorry, Christopher.”

Christopher reached for his mother and put his arms around her. The two of them stood there, rocking back and forth together. He wanted to say something to her to make her less sad. He wanted words to come into his head so that he could tell her how grateful he was that she and his father had tried so hard to give him a normal life. But those words didn't come. He had images, images of riding on his father's shoulders through the county fairgrounds, images of drinking hot chocolate his mother made for him after he played in the snow with Evan, images of the three of them playing board games in front of the fireplace on autumn evenings. His head was full of images, but no words. In the end, Christopher was still a boy, so all he could think to say was, “Don't cry, Mom. Please don't cry. It will all be over soon” as they held each other the way only a mother can hold her son and as only a son can be held.

There was a sudden crackling sound in Christopher's ear. Then a voice. Christopher looked down to see the steps that he was still running up. “Chris? Are you there, Chris?” the voice in his ear echoed. It was Evan's voice. It was the earpiece. They'd made it high enough in the stairwell for Evan's radio to get through to him. Christopher kept moving, had never stopped moving—step, step, step.

“I'm here, Evan. We're on our way up,” Christopher said between huffed breaths. “What's it like out there?” he asked, believing that he could hear the sounds of explosions behind Evan's voice.

“Crazy,” Evan said to Christopher, looking out over the vast expanse of colors still exploding all around them. Christopher liked to believe that he could hear the smile in Evan's voice. “It's a madhouse. There are sirens and flashing lights everywhere and thousands of people milling around on the streets and no one seems to know what to do.”

“So we have time?”

“Yeah,” Evan said, “but I don't know how much. It's just fireworks, Chris.”

“I know,” Christopher huffed. If he'd had more breath, Christopher would have said more, he would have explained to Evan why it had to be fireworks, but he could barely breathe, let alone talk. It would have to wait. “Watch the building. Let me know if we're in danger.”

“Will do,” Evan promised. Evan stopped talking so Christopher could save his breath for the climb to the top of the building. Evan could hear the sound of Christopher's breathing over his radio as they climbed—fifteen stories and counting—and the fireworks kept exploding around him.

Far away, while Reggie and Christopher and the others climbed those stairs, the explosions began under the streets of Paris and in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. In Tokyo, people marched through the streets firing machine guns and flamethrowers. In Istanbul, a small army of disguised rebels pulled guns from beneath their burkas and trudged slowly up a hill toward their target. In Costa Rica a boat full of armed men stormed an otherwise peaceful, empty beach and ran like madmen into the jungle. Only Cambodia was behind schedule. None of the six of the people climbing the steps knew any of that. They wouldn't know anything for hours. All they knew was step, step, step.

At twenty floors up, Christopher began to go over the plan again in his head. He glanced up quickly, looking to see if he could spot the cameras in the staircase. “Of course they'll know you're coming,” Jared had told them. “They'll be watching you on the security cameras as you run up the stairs. They'll be preparing for you.”

“Is there anything we can do to keep them from knowing?” Christopher asked.

“No,” Jared said, “but there are only five of them, for Christ's sake. That's the whole point of the plan. They'll know you're coming, but they won't be able to stop you—not on their own. They'll call for help. That's why you don't have a lot of time. That's why we need the distraction and the others on the streets to keep the reinforcements at bay until you can get the job done. But as long as it's the five of them versus you, you have two distinct advantages.”

“What're those?” Reggie asked.

Jared lifted his fist and extended one finger at them. “You've got them outnumbered six to five.” Then he extended his second finger. “They're highly trained. They know the optimum way to react to anything we can throw at them. It's been programmed into them.”

“How is that an advantage?” Christopher asked.

“Because I'm the one that programmed them,” Jared bragged. “I can tell you exactly what they're going to do in reaction to your attack. I can tell you exactly where they're going to be.” Jared paused, thinking back on his entire life, unable to avoid taking at least some perverse pleasure in the irony. “I've learned that sometimes having a plan can be your greatest weakness—no matter how good a plan it is. It took me a long time to realize that.”

“So what do we do when we get to the Intelligence Center?” Reggie asked.

“Simple,” Jared told him. “You use explosives to blow open the back doors on the top and bottom floors.”

“And then?” Reggie prodded.

“And then, while they're busy guarding the doors you blew open, you take this”—Jared held an electronic keycard in front of them—“and you walk right in the front door.”

“This will work?” Reggie asked, taking the keycard from Jared, not trying to hide his skepticism.

“The keys are supposed to be disabled when the evacuation alarm goes off, but I've taken care of that.”

“It seems too easy,” Reggie said. Christopher wondered what part of blowing up half of New York City to create a diversion, breaking in to the security offices of a skyscraper to pull the evacuation alarm, running up thirty-seven flights of stairs, and then disarming five trained armed guards was easy.

“Don't complain about easy,” Jared told him. “Everything feels easy when it works. It's only when things fall apart that they begin to seem hard. Follow my plan and things are unlikely to fall apart.”

When the six of them finally made it to the bottom floor of the Intelligence Center's five floors, they split up. David, Hector, and Linda stayed on the bottom floor. David and Mike had the explosive they would need to blow open the doors. Mike went up the last five floors with Reggie and Christopher. After they blew the doors open, they were supposed to meet again in front of the main doors on the middle floor. Christopher felt strange running like this, knowing that every move they made was being watched by their enemies. Even as he tried to keep his head down, Christopher wondered if the people watching them would recognize him like everyone else in the War seemed to. If they did recognize him, Christopher wondered if they were chomping at the bit to get to him, like a prize or a trophy.

Reggie, Christopher, and Mike made it to the door they were meant to blow up. It was a metal slab right off the entrance to the staircase. If Jared hadn't given them the plans to the offices, none of them would have guessed that it led inside. It had no handle, no way to open it from the outside, not without explosives anyway. “We ready?” Reggie asked Mike when they reached the door. Christopher could see the sweat on their faces. All three of them were breathing heavily. They didn't have the time to catch their breath, though. Mike had the explosives in his hand. He'd been holding them since halfway up the stairs. That was part of the point, to let the people watching them see the explosives.