Children of the Uprising (7 page)

It was well past midnight when Christopher first heard the noise. He had been drifting in and out of sleep for over three hours, but the sleep wouldn't stick. Christopher kept thinking about the decision he was supposed to be contemplating. He kept hearing Reggie's voice saying over and over again,
Staying in one place for any amount of time is dangerous. I can't guarantee that you'll be safe here.
So Christopher was awake, lying on the pull-out couch with his eyes closed, when he heard the light knock on Max's condo door. Christopher opened his eyes and looked at the clock. It was a quarter past one in the morning. The knock wasn't loud, but that didn't make Christopher feel any better. For as long as he could remember, the sound of knocking on a door had terrified him. It was fear bordering on a phobia. He lay still for a moment, trying to make sure that he was actually awake and wasn't merely having a nightmare. He heard the faint rapping sound again and knew that this was real. His heart began to pound, his body excited by the confirmation that it was right not to let him sleep. Christopher had to remind himself that he really couldn't trust anyone. Dangers lurked everywhere and now one of them was knocking on Max's door. As quietly as he could, Christopher stood up and tiptoed toward the hallway.

Max had heard the knock too. Christopher peeked through the crack in his door and saw Max already standing in the hallway. Max had offered to let Christopher sleep in his bed, but Christopher refused. He was pretty sure that he wasn't going to be able to sleep anyway, so he figured there was no reason to waste the bed. All the lights in the condo were off, but enough light came in through the windows for Christopher to see in blacks and whites and grays. Christopher looked over at Max and stepped into the hallway. Max looked scared. Seeing the fear in Max's face jump-started Christopher's heartbeat again.

Max's condo didn't stand out in any way. It was on the edge of the development. You had to make a few turns to find it. You wouldn't stumble upon this place if you were lost. Whoever was knocking on the door had found them. It was a two-bedroom condo, with both bedrooms upstairs. Max had turned the second bedroom into an office with the pull-out couch. The office, the bedroom, and a bathroom were the only rooms upstairs. The stairs ran down into the living room. The ground floor had the living room, dining room, kitchen, and another bathroom. From the window in the upstairs bedroom, you could climb out onto the roof.

Max walked over to Christopher. His footsteps were silent. “Go into my bedroom,” Max whispered. “If anything sounds suspicious, leave through the window. When you're safe, call Reggie. Here's his phone number,” Max said, handing Christopher a slip of paper. Max looked Christopher in the eyes and then gestured at the piece of paper. “Nobody has that. Nobody gets that. Die before anyone else gets to see that number.”

“Who do you think is knocking?” Christopher whispered back.

“It's probably nothing,” Max answered, “but just because they knock doesn't mean that they're going to wait for an invitation to come inside.”

Max made his way down the stairs. Christopher walked toward the door to Max's bedroom. Then he stopped. If they had found him here, if they had come for him here, he wasn't going to be able to escape out the bedroom window. If they'd come for him here, there would be no escape. Maybe he could escape if they didn't know that he was there, if they'd only come for Max.
So
, Christopher thought,
the only thing that escaping would mean would be that I was too chickenshit to help my new friend
. So instead of walking into the bedroom, Christopher waited until Max had gotten all the way down the stairs and then he followed him, checking each step ahead of time to avoid any loose or creaky floorboards. Once he was halfway down, he stopped and listened.

He heard Max open the front door. He could only assume that Max had looked outside to see who was there before opening the door. Still, every muscle in Christopher's body tensed when he heard the hinges squeak as the door swung open. The paranoia didn't stop now that Christopher knew who was watching him. It only became worse.

Then Christopher heard Max speak. “What are you doing here?” he whispered to whoever was on the other side of the door.

“Why didn't you tell me?” Christopher heard a woman's voice respond.

“Why didn't I tell you what?” Max asked.

“Don't be a jackass.” Even standing in the darkness around the corner from her, Christopher could hear the frustration in the woman's voice. “Why didn't you tell me you were going to pick
him
up?”

“Reggie wouldn't let me. He wouldn't let me tell anyone. He didn't want to take any chances.” Max sounded apologetic.

“Because you're the only one Reggie really trusts,” the woman said. Max didn't respond, making Christopher wonder if what the woman was saying was true. “Why are you acting so weird?” the woman asked Max, followed immediately by, “Why won't you let me inside?” When Max still didn't answer, it finally hit her. “He's here, isn't he?”

“I'm sorry, Addy,” Max said. “I'll tell you everything as soon as I can, but you really should go. It's dangerous.”

“You want to know what's dangerous, Max? Not letting me into your fucking house. That's what's dangerous.” And that was that. Christopher could hear the woman step inside and could tell from the silence that Max had done nothing to stop her.

Christopher didn't move. He stood still in the darkness on the stairs, not knowing what else to do. He noticed that neither Max nor the woman made any sound as they walked. They moved liked ghosts, like they didn't even exist. Christopher saw them before he heard them. They walked beneath him, past the bottom of the stairs and toward the living room. They sat down in the darkness, Max in a chair facing away from Christopher and the woman on the sofa with her shoulders square to Christopher but her face turned toward Max. Even through the darkness, Christopher recognized her. She was the confused woman from the compound that Max had made eye contact with.

“Tell me what he's like,” the woman said as soon as they sat down.

Max didn't hesitate before answering. “He's like the rest of us were when we were sixteen and we first heard about the War except that he's two years older, twice as smart, and three times as paranoid. Oh, and he's the only person I ever heard of who got their first two kills before their eighteenth birthday was over.”

“He what?” Addy asked. Max simply nodded in response to her question. “Two kills?” Addy asked, barely believing it.

“Yeah. They went after him. He lived. They didn't.”

“What are you guys going to do with him?” Addy asked.

“Reggie wants us to clean him.”

Addy wasn't sure if she was surprised. She understood. He was merely a boy, but it seemed such a waste. “What does he know about the War?” Addy asked. Everybody wanted to know what he knew.

“His parents left him journals. I've told him a little bit. I don't know what Reggie told him.”

“So he got most of the information from those journals?” Max nodded. “So most of the information that he has is eighteen years old?” Addy asked. Christopher hadn't even thought about how things might have changed since Maria last penned an entry in her journal. He'd been too focused on how crazy the world in the journals was to think about how the world might have gotten even crazier. “Shouldn't someone tell him what's been going on for the last eighteen years? Shouldn't someone tell him about everything that's happened?”

Christopher listened to Addy's question and his nerves made his body twitch. It was only one slight twitch, but the movement was enough. Addy caught sight of him out of the corner of her eye. She looked up through the darkness toward the stairs. Christopher saw Addy's whole face, her sharp features, her thin lips, her pupils enlarged by the darkness. “Maybe you should tell him,” Addy said to Max while motioning toward the stairs. Max turned until they were both staring at Christopher through the dim light.

“Chris, why don't you come down here so I can introduce the two of you?” Max stood up and took a few steps toward Christopher. The lights in the room were on a dimmer. Max turned it up just enough for the three of them to be able to see in color but left it low enough that it wouldn't draw attention from anyone outside.

Addy stood up. Max led Christopher over to her. She held out her hand. Christopher shook it.

“Christopher, this is my friend Addy. Addy,” Max said, now stretching out each word as if teasing them out of his mouth, “this is Christopher.”

Addy stood there, speechless. “It's nice to meet you,” Christopher said to her before she could find the right words to say.

“It's nice to meet you too,” Addy echoed.

The three of them sat down. Max moved so that he was sitting on the couch next to Addy. Christopher sat in the leather chair. “I didn't mean to eavesdrop,” Christopher began, apologizing to Max.

Max waved off Christopher's apology with a flick of his hand. “It's not my job to keep secrets from you, Chris.”

“He needs to know,” Addy said to Max, her voice stern.

“I need to know what?” Christopher asked the two of them, not caring who answered.

“Addy believes that the War's been getting worse since your parents wrote their journals,” Max said.

“I'm not the only one,” Addy argued.

“What does that mean? Worse?” Christopher asked.

Addy answered before Max had a chance, before he could sanitize what she was going to say. “More people are getting killed. People are getting killed younger.” Addy looked at Max. “More people are running,” she said. “You
know
that's true, Max. You can't deny that.”

Max nodded. “Yes, more people are running,” he agreed. “But there are a lot of reasons for that.” Max glanced at Christopher when he spoke those words.

Addy kept talking. This was her chance to do something noteworthy, something worth a posting on the Web site. “And the more people run, the angrier both sides get and the more violent. And the angrier both sides get and the more violent, the more people get scared and run. Third verse, same as the first. It's a snake eating its own tail.” Addy glanced over at Max. “Tell him about Englishman's Bay.”

Christopher looked at the two of them, scared that he wasn't going to be able to keep up. “What's Englishman's Bay?” Christopher asked.

“I'm not sure that it's really relevant,” Max said. “It's more a story about poor planning than anything else.” But it was too late. Addy had planted the seed in Christopher's head and now Christopher needed to know. Max could see that on Christopher's face. “Englishman's Bay is a small bay on the island of Tobago, just off of South America. It leads up to a steep, crescent-shaped beach. To get there by anything but boat you had to hike or drive through miles of jungle.” Christopher listened without any clue as to where any of this was going. “Anyway, a few of the different groups in the Underground decided that, instead of trying to clean certain people by changing their identities and hiding them in normal society, they should send people to Englishman's Bay and let the exiles start their own community there, inland from the water, where no one would find them. The idea was to create a community that the two sides of the War didn't know about, a place where people could live unafraid.”

“Some sort of utopia?” Christopher asked.

“No.” Max shook his head. “Just a place with less fear. The truth is that they were scrounging for other options because there were so many refugees from the War that it was becoming almost impossible to hide them all. So the Englishman's Bay community had grown to about thirty-five people. It went well at first. They built buildings, dug a well. It was turning out exactly like they planned, a new world hidden away from the paranoia of the War.” Max paused, not wanting to tell the rest of the story. Christopher stared at him, unwilling to let him stop. “But it turns out that you can't keep a secret like that. One night, after they'd been there for about five months, the hunters came. They came by boat. They anchored near the shore and waded through the water onto the beach. They were trained. They were armed with machine guns, flamethrowers, and night-vision goggles. The community had set up a night watch, but the hunters came too fast. The night watchman was merely the first one they killed. When they got to the little village the people had been building, the hunters used flamethrowers to raze it. Some people say that a few of the buildings were set on fire with people still inside. More members of the community were killed trying to fight the hunters as they flooded in. It wasn't long before the hunters outnumbered the remaining villagers. Those that weren't killed in the raid were taken away and never heard from again. The only people to make it back out into the world were two kids who were under the age of eighteen. The kids' parents had run away with them, trying to save them from the War.” Max shot Christopher a knowing look. “After the raid, the kids were allowed to rejoin the War. They were given new homes and new names, but they didn't forget what happened. They were the ones who told the stories, exactly like the hunters wanted them to.”

“And the hunters were from both sides of the War. They were working together?” Christopher asked, remembering how Max told him that the two sides were working together to try to kill him.

“We don't know,” Max answered.

“Did you guys know any of the people that were sent down there? Were any of them people you saved?”

Max shook his head firmly. “No,” he said. “Reggie never sent anyone there. He always thought it was too risky.”

“Where does Reggie send his people?” Christopher asked, but everyone in the room knew what he meant. He wanted to know where Reggie might send him.