The Fall of Crazy House, page 21
The next thing I knew, someone was pushing on my chest hard enough to break my ribs. I’d been able to ignore it at first, but then it was like I’d been sucked back into myself, and Cassie was there and Tim and Nate.
I was alive. And storming the President’s palace. Because I hadn’t fulfilled my mission of killing him. Panting, nauseated, and weak, I looked up to see Tim—strong, solid Tim—holding out a hand to me. I gave him half a smile and shook my head.
“This is the presidential dining room,” I said when we had scrambled onto the rim of its floor.
“Follow the sounds of gunfire!” Strepp ordered and rushed ahead of us down the hall. In the foyer the massive double doors were open. I saw a lot of our army—they’d been assigned to take out or immobilize all military and law enforcement. The streets were a chaos of shots and shouting.
But we ran after Strepp as she raced down the wide, flagstone hallway.
“His study is on the third floor!” I shouted, glad I could contribute this info.
Strepp ran up the wide staircase. She looked back at me and I pointed to the doors at the end of the hall. She sped there, tried the doorknob, then shot the lock off.
Inside his study, a group of angry, flustered men were trying to get into the President’s gun safe. Cassie, Nate, Tim, and I spread out in a circle, our guns trained on the men.
“Where is he?” Strepp yelled.
I saw the surprise on Cassie’s face as she saw Provost Allen braced for battle, holding a fireplace poker.
“Provost Allen!” she blurted, but he’d just seen Nate.
“Son!” he said and waved his hand at us. “What are you doing?”
Nate shook his head and kept his gun trained on the group. “What you should have done long ago.”
The Provost’s face turned to ice and he raised the poker.
“Where is he?” Strepp screamed, sounding like a banshee.
None of the men answered her.
“You’ll be punished, you and your unpatriotic pals!” one man shouted.
“Who are you to question the natural order?” another man yelled.
“You’ll be exiled to a desert, and I’ll laugh!” cried one of the female ministers.
“Boring!” I yelled and shot a volley of bullets at their feet, making them shut up and leap around. “Now. Where. The. Hell. Is that asshole?”
Tim had to shoot very close to their feet before someone said, “He has a safe room! Off his bedroom!”
The wide marble staircase was teeming with people, bodies, and blood.
“This way!” I said and led them to the narrow servants’ staircase, where we went up one more flight.
I was wheezing, feeling sicker, and I lagged a bit behind the others. Tim looked back and held out his hand, but I ignored it and ran on, determined to make it on my own, not willing to hold them back, even as I fell farther behind.
On the next floor Strepp raced down the hall, as if she already knew where the President’s bedroom was located. Suddenly a hard arm shot out of nowhere and yanked me into a dark room. A second later I felt the sharp, stinging blade of a cold knife pressed to my throat.
“You just won’t stay dead, will you?” Kirt hissed in my ear.
121
“KIRT, YOU ARE A SACK of shit,” I got out between clenched teeth, and he pressed the knife into my skin. A moment later I felt the warm trickle of blood on my neck.
“And you are a goddamn bitch who’s going to get what’s coming to you!” he said, pulling me backward.
Then the room flooded with light, and my sister stood at the door.
“Becca, you’re missing the uprising,” Cassie complained, raising her gun.
“She’s gonna miss the rest of her life!” Kirt said, and swung me in front of him.
If I had been 100 percent, I’d have flung him over my shoulder by now and kicked him where it hurts the most. Since I had just died and come back, my reflexes were nowhere and my brain was going, uh…
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” Cassie said, taking aim.
“You can shoot,” Kirt sneered, “but you can’t guarantee that you won’t hit her.” He swung me from side to side, moving his head, making Cassie hit a moving target.
Which of course was second nature to her. The tip of her gun followed his movements and I could almost feel her waiting for the moment between breaths when you pull a trigger.
Cassie caught my eye. It was as though I heard her voice inside my head, and I did what she wanted. On the silent count of three I slumped, a dead weight in Kirt’s arms.
Cassie shot, and Kirt’s knife didn’t even have time to cut me as he dropped like a pile of cow manure. I staggered, Cassie ran over and grabbed my hand, and we tore out of there. But not before I’d seen that Cassie had nailed Kirt cleanly through one eye. That bastard.
When we raced into the President’s bedroom, we found him sitting calmly in a chair, while Strepp pressed her gun against his temple.
122
“GO AHEAD, SHOOT,” THE PRESIDENT said. “And you’ll live in ignorance and prison for the rest of your pathetic lives.”
“Look outside,” Nate said. “You’ll see a distinct lack of people capable of putting us in prison.”
The four of us had surrounded the President and Strepp, covering them from all angles. Now the President’s eyes slanted toward the windows, where the sounds of gunfire, alarms, and shouting rose from the streets below.
“Your time is over,” Strepp hissed. “You’re the past! We’re the future.”
“You,” the President said, looking at me. “I should have let Kirt kill you when he wanted to.”
“Gee, thanks for reining him in,” I said drily, sighting him down my barrel. “But don’t worry—he won’t be hurting any more housemaids for… ever.” Just the memory of Kirt brought bile into my throat. I thought of him lying dead a few rooms away, a neat hole through one eye, and all I felt was relief.
“Get up,” Strepp told him coldly. “We’re taking a walk.”
Just then the door flung open and several kid-soldiers bustled in, pushing Mia ahead of them. Her hands were cuffed behind her.
“Dad, what’s going on?” Mia cried. “Kirt is dead!”
For the very first time, I saw the President show emotion. “My son is dead?”
“Yeah. And your daughter is in handcuffs. Not that that matters,” Mia said.
“You killed my son!” the President screamed at Strepp, and lunged toward her. Tim whacked the back of his knees with a billy club and the President fell to the ground.
“No. I killed your asshole son,” Cassie said, keeping her aim on him. “So don’t push me.”
“Becca,” Mia said to me. “I knew you were different. Is this a revolution?” She looked excited rather than afraid.
“Yes,” said Strepp.
“Oh,” Mia said. “What now?”
“I’ve been thinking about that a long time,” Strepp said. “I’ve got some ideas.”
“I bet,” the President sneered. “You worthless, stupid piece of—ow!” He was interrupted by Nate swinging his gun, butt-first, and smacking the President in the head.
“The tables have turned, Ron,” Strepp said calmly. “You’re not in charge anymore. Now, take me to the Thousand-Eye Room.”
123
“I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT you’re talking about,” the President said.
“Becca, there’s a Taser in the nightstand,” Strepp said.
How could she know that? I went and got it, also grabbing a pair of pliers. Who keeps pliers in their nightstand? What a creep! I gave the pliers to Cassie.
“Mia, you don’t want to see this,” Strepp said, not sounding sorry.
Mia hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “I’ll go direct the palace staff to surrender peacefully,” she said, and a soldier opened her handcuffs. What the hell? Does Strepp know Mia? Just who is Helen Strepp?
“Good idea,” Strepp said. “Thanks.” Once Mia and the other soldiers were gone, Strepp asked again: “Take me to the Thousand-Eye Room.”
“Screw you, you scarecrow!” the President snarled, and Strepp nodded at me.
I tased him, he jerked and twitched, then fell to the ground. Once he recovered, he got that unattractive sneer on his face.
Before he could speak, Cassie clicked her pliers a couple of times. “I’ve always wanted to do this. Let’s see how many fingernails he really needs,” she mused.
He stared at her in horror, then tried to bluff. “You wouldn’t—”
Cassie leaned over him, giving him that creepy smile that used to piss me off so much. She waved her pliers in the president’s face. “Guys, hold him.”
Tim and Nate each grabbed an arm and got the President to his feet. Strepp snatched one of his struggling hands and held it out for Cassie.
“Fine!” he cried. “Fine!”
With the boys keeping a good hold of him, the President led us to the backstairs, the servants’ stairs I used to use.
He pressed a spot on the wall that I couldn’t make out and a section of the stairs slid sideways, revealing a short hallway. At the end of the hallway was a door, and Strepp held out her hand for the key. The President almost stabbed her with it but gave it up.
When Strepp unlocked the door, we were in a room as big as a bowling alley, and every foot of every wall was covered with monitors—hundreds of them. Thousands. My jaw hung open as I saw they were labeled: everything from Cell A-1-1 to Cell F-69-430. Covering the whole country.
Even Strepp looked appalled, watching cellfolk going about their business. Some screens were divided in halves or fours, some had only one picture.
“You are such a goddamn freak show,” Strepp murmured, looking at the screens.
“It’s the only way!” the President said angrily. “You don’t know the world our grandparents inherited! The people were rebelling! Oceans were rising! World War III almost destroyed the planet. Then the plague rose up! Chemical weapons! This is the only way humanity can survive. This is the only way that makes sense!”
“It might make sense to you,” Strepp said, still looking at the monitors in horror.
I was trying to find the monitor for Cell B-92-4275. My home cell. But there were so many and I did have to be ready to put a bullet through this guy’s head.
“But the world you live in isn’t the world I want the next generation to inherit,” Strepp went on, surprisingly calm. “We can do better. We have to do better. Take them out,” she told me and Cassie, waving her hand at the walls of surveillance equipment.
“Nate and Tim? Please take this person to the dungeon.”
The former President roared and tried to pull free, so I tased him again.
“I know where the dungeons are,” I heard Nate tell Tim.
Cassie began firing, shattering screen after screen, and I raised my rifle and did the same. It sounded like a thousand rocks busting a thousand wine glasses, and I would be lying if I didn’t say it was damn fun.
Five minutes later the room was nothing but a dark cavern full of broken glass, wires, and smoke. And a former President, sobbing on the ground.
124
CASSIE
“WE HAVE DONE THE UNTHINKABLE!” Ms. Strepp yelled into a microphone. The front terrace of the presidential palace stood twenty marble steps above the shouting crowd. Some people were protesting, and we had hundreds of armed kid-soldiers keeping their eyes—and their guns—on them. But not everyone looked outraged; at least a thousand people looked curious, and more than a thousand people—people whose clothes showed that they were servants, cooks, maids—were apparently thrilled and eager to hear more.
“We have begun the revolution!” Ms. Strepp shouted, and punched her fist in the air. Behind her, twenty feet high, Nate had rigged up a display of pictures from books and files we’d found in the President’s study. The projected pictures shone brightly in the night. They showed cellfolk plowing with horses or oxen, other cellfolk winding thread through weaving looms. These were juxtaposed with city people lounging by swimming pools or having fancy drinks with sunsets in the background.
Many in the crowd also punched their fists in the air. Could we pull this off? Ms. Strepp had been planning this for more than ten years. None of us, her followers, had had a choice about doing our parts in it. As Ms. Strepp continued her victory speech, I felt shocked about how completely I had followed her. We all had.
Becca and I were on the wide porch behind Ms. Strepp, with Nate and Tim and about twenty others. We watched the crowd for any sign of a weapon or threat to our leader.
Still, the show played on. It was fascinating. First there would be a fantastic masquerade ball in some city. Then it would show one of our harvest dances with straw on the floor. Watching the crowd, I saw how most of them looked shocked and confused. Could they really have not known?
I edged closer to Becca. “I can’t believe this is actually happening,” I murmured.
Becca nodded, not looking at me. “I… I think I’m done with this,” she said, watching the crowd, her gun ready.
“Me, too, sister,” I whispered back. “So what now?”
“We finish this,” Becca said. “Then we take off.”
“There has been a toxic imbalance in our country!” Ms. Strepp shouted. “And I say country, because this country is made up of ten actual cities, but thousands of cells! We will sweep this country, we will free the cellfolk—not by tearing down fences, though we will, but by educating them!”
Many of the crowd shouted in approval. I saw others look at each other in concern.
“Together we will remake this country into what it should be, what it always was—communities of people, all kinds of people!” Ms. Strepp went on. “Every kind of person living in every kind of community! No more cells! No more fences! No more predestined lives handed down by a faceless government!”
Becca let out a deep sigh and gave me a glance. “Let’s say three weeks?”
I gave the barest nod. “Three weeks. Then we make our own destinies.”
125
“IF YOU CAN’T KEEP UP, you need a different vehicle.” Becca sounded irritated, and I rolled my eyes at the walkie-talkie.
“We can keep up!” Nate said. “I’m still getting used to it! This tank has two clutches!”
I watched him as he peered through the eye slit and with difficulty switched gears. “I love our tank,” I said.
As the capital had come apart and new loyalties were established, a lot of resources became “available.” After Ms. Strepp had given us her blessing to leave, we’d had our pick of vehicles. Nate had chosen an army tank, for practicality, he said.
“We have no idea how some people will react to this revolution,” he’d said. “I want to feel safe!”
I felt safe. Totally safe. But also super-heavy and slow.
Nate ground the gears, switching his hands and feet rapidly. He nodded at the big black SUV in front of us. “When those two get surprised by, like, angry cellfolk or rabid elk, they’re going to be begging us to let them in this tank!”
I grimaced at the word “elk.” My shoulder still ached sometimes and I had a big, ugly scar. It was weird to think that I’d been with Tim then, not Nate.
“Sorry,” Nate said, remembering all the stories I’d told him. Over the last three weeks, we’d done a lot of catching up. But I’d never mentioned Tim’s kiss. And I never would.
“Well, it’s true,” I said loyally. “There could be rabid elk or something. Their SUV wouldn’t last five minutes!”
A surprisingly loud “Woo-oo-oo-oo” broke into our conversation, and I looked down at Anka.
“Even Anka agrees,” I said. Among the various provisions we’d liberated from our evil oppressors had been Anka, a ten-week-old puppy. Brown and tan, with enormous batlike ears and paws like saucers, she had captured my heart as soon as I’d laid eyes on her. If I could just get her tank-trained, she’d be perfect.
I spread an old paper map out on the instrument board and hit Talk on the walkie-talkie. “Okay, so the capital was almost in the middle of the country,” I told Becca. “We probably have about a week’s journey to get to the coast.”
“Yeah,” said Becca. “Hope your ass can take those metal seats for that long.” Her voice faded as if she’d forgotten to turn off the Talk button. “Honey, could you flip my cup holder so it’ll keep my water cold? Thanks, babe.” She had not “forgotten” to turn off the Talk button.
Nate gave up on the eye slits and flipped on the front camera so he could see where the hell we were going.
“And what happens when we get to the coast?” he asked.
I picked Anka up and held her in my lap. “Well, we go either up or down the coast,” I said. “Find the real capital, the old one. I said we would help Ms. Strepp find some of the holdouts and Cell Deniers. She’s convinced there are some.”
“Okay, but I’m not up for a whole palace takeover,” Nate said. “With the pretend plague and the body bags and the sewers and the almost dying. Maybe just a few small gunfights, stuff like that.”
“Got it,” I said.
Nate held out his hand. I took it. Anka licked it sleepily.
“It’s been a long road,” Nate said solemnly, and I remembered how we’d found Provost Allen dead—a suicide. “I’m so glad we’re alive, and together.”
“Oh, me, too,” I said feelingly, and held Anka in place as I leaned over to kiss him.
126
BECCA
“I CAN’T EVEN SEE THEM!” I said, looking at the rearview screen.
“That would be because of the relative slowness of a stupid tank as opposed to a four-wheel Galaxy Max,” Tim said drily. He flipped the screen to be forward-facing with the map, then pulled over to one side of the road and stopped the car. “Might as well give them half an hour to catch up.”
“Which also gives us half an hour to catch up,” I said, and climbed across the center console to sit in Tim’s lap. “I missed you so much.” I loved being back with Tim—I’d gotten along okay with Nate, but Tim and I just fit each other so much better. Every once in a while I remembered making out with Nate, the night we got caught in the kitchen garden. I’d left that part out of all my stories. No need for Tim to know it—it hadn’t meant anything.
