Children of the Uprising (40 page)

“Ready,” Mike said. Christopher nodded. Then Mike went over to the door and attached the explosives to its base, near where Jared had told them the primary lock was. They had seemingly relied on Jared for everything, for every detail of the plan. They put all their faith in the man who had killed his own best friend in the name of the War. But that was a long time ago. For Christopher, it was an entire lifetime ago.

The three of them backed away from the door but not too far. They wanted to get far enough away from the explosion to be safe, but they also wanted to stay close enough to the door to still show up in the security camera's picture. The plan was to wait a few seconds after the explosion opened the door and then to disappear in the smoke. Christopher jumped when he heard the sound of the explosion. It was somehow quicker and louder than he had expected it to be, like the crack of a whip. It was all over in a flash of smoke. “Let's go,” Christopher said as the smoke rose around them, eager to get away from where he knew their watchers were headed.

“Wait,” Mike said, holding up his hand. Christopher and Reggie followed his gaze to the door. The door hadn't opened. The door was supposed to come loose with the explosion. They needed the door to open. The misdirection wouldn't work without it.

“Fuck,” Reggie muttered under his breath. They were supposed to meet the other three two stories beneath them in about thirty seconds. So Mike did the only thing any of them could think to do in that moment. He took three steps forward and kicked the door as hard as he could. Christopher heard a sound when Mike's foot hit the door, a horrible crunching sound. Mike took one step backward, testing his weight on his foot. Almost miraculously, the door swung open. It swung slowly toward them, revealing the empty space behind it, space that would be empty for only another moment or two before it was filled with angry bullets.

“Now, let's go,” Reggie said and he and Christopher turned back toward the stairs. Mike didn't turn with them.

“My foot,” Mike said, staring at the now broken appendage that had carried him up more than thirty-five flights of stairs but that he knew would no longer get him down even two. “Go without me. I'll face them here. It'll make distraction more believable.” There was no question in his voice.

“We might need you,” Reggie said, knowing that each person carried only enough gas to cover one floor, “if one of the others doesn't make it.”

Mike shook his head. “You don't need me. You need this.” He took his backpack off his shoulders and handed it to Christopher. Mike had already taken the explosives and the guns out of his backpack. All that was left was the gas. Mike ordered Christopher and Reggie away with a simple word. “Go.” So they went, leaving Mike behind.

Reggie and Christopher got as far as the stairwell before they heard the first shots being fired behind them. They could still hear the gunfire as they made their way down the two flights to the main entrance, though it got quieter in the distance as they ran. As long as they could hear the sounds of a gunfight above them, Reggie and Christopher knew two things—that, for now, Mike was still alive and that he was putting up a hell of a fight. Hector, Linda, and Dave were waiting for them when they arrived. Nobody asked where Mike was. They all knew enough not to ask questions they didn't want the answers to. Without any words, Reggie took out the keycard that Jared had given him. He walked up to the door and slid the keycard in the slot beside it. The light above the slot went from red to green. “We're in,” Reggie said, and with the swiftness and eagerness of newly freed prisoners, the others stormed through the now unlocked door.

Jared's sleight of hand didn't eliminate the problem of the guards; it merely shifted the upper hand. The guards still had to be dealt with. Everyone knew what that meant. They all knew that these guards were willing to lay down their lives for their cause. These guards were, after all, the ones left behind in an otherwise evacuated building. Everyone knew that the fight between them and the guards would end only in death. And all the while the clock kept ticking.

The inside of the Intelligence Center didn't look like a war room or a bunker. It looked eerily like a normal office. The five of them stood on bland, dark green carpeting, staring at the empty reception area in front of them. In the middle of the reception area, a leather couch and a few leather chairs surrounded a dark wood coffee table adorned with magazines. The desk where the receptionist would normally sit was empty, the receptionist's computers still. To their right, a giant window stretched from the floor to the ceiling, looking out over the tops of the buildings in the center of Manhattan. To their left, a few hallways led from the reception area to the maze of offices and filing cabinets.

It was quiet inside—quiet and bright. The gunfire from upstairs had either stopped or was too far away to be heard anymore. Reggie and Christopher hoped for the latter. They hoped that the gunfire was too far away to hear but knew that the the gunfight was likely over already. They knew that Mike was probably dead and they knew that people were going to be coming for them next. All the office's lights were on. Christopher looked toward the giant window. It was so bright inside the office that it was almost impossible to see into the darkness outside.

“Remember,” Reggie told the rest of them as they each stared down the empty hallways, “no gas until we're sure that we've gotten rid of all the guards. First, we secure the place. Then we let the gas out. Then we get out of here. If somebody fires a gun after we've let even a little bit of the gas out, this whole place will ignite with us in it.” Everybody nodded. They'd all heard this speech before.

“So who's going upstairs and who's going downstairs?” Dave asked, needing to ask because Mike's absence required them to update the plan.

“Linda and I will go upstairs,” Reggie said to Dave with everyone else listening too. “You and Hector go down.” To Christopher, Reggie said, “You stay here to make sure that any guards that break loose don't get very far.”

Christopher nodded. He knew what Reggie was doing. Reggie was trying to keep him out of the fight. Christopher didn't argue because he knew that it would be the last time anyone ever tried to protect him. It would be the last time that he was special. Soon he would be normal—or at least as close as he could get to it. “Okay,” Christopher conceded and the others split into their two groups and ran off down the empty hallways.

Alone at the literal epicenter of miles of chaos, Christopher turned and walked toward the window. He could see more as he got closer to it. The fireworks had ended. Christopher missed them. He missed the colors and the light and the sounds. He could still see the haze they caused, floating over the city, the smoky remnants of the glorious spectacle that he had created. The smoke was only now beginning to settle into the shadows between the thousands of buildings across New York. The smoky haze went on as far as Christopher could see, like a mist or a shroud. He stepped closer to the window and looked down through the haze at the street. He could barely make out the people still standing down there, crowding the street, staring up at the sky, wondering what they might see next. For the first time Christopher could remember, he was proud of something he'd done.

“Chris,” Christopher suddenly heard a voice say. He had almost forgotten where he was. He turned quickly to face whoever it was that was talking to him. No one was there. “Chris, it's me,” the voice said. Christopher recognized the voice this time, but that only confused him more. He spun around again.

“Evan?” Christopher asked. Only then did he remember the earpiece. “Holy shit. You scared me. I forgot about the radio for a second.”

“What are you doing, Chris?” Evan asked.

“What do you mean?” Christopher answered.

“I can see you, Chris. I can see you standing in the window. You're not doing anything. You don't have time to waste, Chris.”

Christopher looked up. He hadn't realized that he was facing Evan and Addy's building. They were watching him through binoculars. They could see him standing in front of the window, looking out. Christopher lifted a hand, waving to his two friends. “Why?” Christopher asked, emerging from his fog as he waved. “What's going on?”

“We can hear gunshots, Chris, from all over the city. That means that they're coming for you guys. That means that our people are trying to stop them, but they'll only be able to hold them off for so long. The fireworks worked, Chris. They just didn't work for as long as we wanted them to. So you can't stand there. You have to do something. They're coming.”

“There's nothing I can do,” Christopher told Evan. “I have to wait here until the others have killed off the guards. I can't even start letting the gas out until we're sure the shooting is over or I'd risk blowing us all up.”

“There's got to be something you can do,” Evan pleaded.

Christopher looked around him and tried to think. It seemed so strange to him that this mundane place was the key to ending the War. Jared had warned them about that. Jared told them that the Intelligence Center wouldn't look like much but that there was information hidden everywhere. What did Jared tell them that they had to do? “Open every closet door,” Jared had told them. “Open every drawer. Make sure the gas gets everywhere. Make sure everything burns.”

“I can open doors and drawers,” Christopher said, half to Evan and half to himself. Then he went to the first drawer he saw and pulled it open. There were papers inside—nothing but papers in green hanging folders. Christopher reached in and pulled out a handful of paper. He looked at them. Each page was full of color-coded lists of names and corresponding series of numbers. The first number was ten digits long. The other numbers seemed completely random. Each name was printed in either red or blue. Christopher couldn't divine any meaning from any of it. He ran to another desk and pulled another drawer open. He reached in and grabbed a handful of papers from that drawer. They looked the same—a list of color-coded names and seemingly random numbers. Each page had dozens of names. All told, there had to be thousands of pages or more on those five floors.

“Ask him what he sees,” Addy said to Evan as the two of them watched Christopher go from desk to desk, pulling open the drawers and rummaging through the papers inside.

“Addy wants to know what's in the drawers,” Evan said to Christopher.

Christopher looked out the window in the direction of his friends. “Nothing,” he said, sensing how disappointed Addy would be. “It's only names. Everything else is in code.” Evan looked at Addy and didn't say anything. Evan didn't need to give Addy the details. He simply shook his head.

The gunfire was getting closer. Evan and Addy could hear it down on the streets, closing in on them from all directions. Evan searched the other windows of the office to see if he could spot Reggie or the others, to see if they'd finished off the guards yet, to see if it was safe to tell Christopher to go forward. He saw them—all of them—running back toward Christopher. “They're done, Chris. Reggie and the others are finished. They're coming back to you.”

A moment later all four of them burst into the room where Christopher had been waiting. “We're finished with the guards,” Reggie announced. “We can start releasing the gas.” Christopher looked at the four of them. David had blood pouring out of his shoulder. The rest of them looked like they'd come out unscathed. “Everybody take their floor,” Reggie ordered. “We'll meet back here when we're done.”

“No,” Christopher said, stopping everyone before they left. “There's no time to regroup. The diversion didn't last. They're coming for us. Once each of us has prepped our floor and let out our gas tanks, we need to run.”

David, Reggie, Hector, and Linda understood. They all nodded in response. Then they reached into their backpacks and pulled out their gas masks. “Let's go,” Reggie said. Each of them slid their gas mask over their face. With their gas masks on and their guns at the ready, Christopher thought they looked like the monsters from a science fiction movie.

Before slipping his own gas mask over his face, Christopher whispered, “This is it, Evan. I'll still be able to hear you, but I won't be able to talk.” Behind the gas mask, Christopher felt the world close in on him. Everything suddenly appeared two-dimensional. The depth was gone.

Everyone knew their assignments. Since David was the original backup, he took Mike's floor. Despite the work that he'd already done on the middle floor, Christopher was assigned to the top floor. He ran for the stairs. “They're getting closer,” Evan told Christopher as he headed up the two flights. “Be quick.” Christopher heard Evan and ran faster. He knew why Reggie had assigned him the top floor. It was because it should have been the last one that anyone from the outside could reach. Anyone from the outside should have had to climb up through the lower floors first.

Christopher reached the top of the stairs and slid both the backpacks—his and Mike's—off his back. He reached inside them and pulled out the gas canisters. They were heavy with gas. Christopher never understood how that worked. Now wasn't the time. He moved away from the stairs, toward the middle of the floor. He left everything but the gas canisters behind, not wanting anything to slow him down. He left his guns behind. What use would they be to him anyway? He couldn't fire them once the gas was released. Then, free of everything but his gas mask, Christopher began his search. There was a file room in the middle of the floor. Jared had told them that they should prop the file room's doors open and let the gas out in there. Christopher opened doors, searching for the file room, leaving every door that he opened open, propping open the ones that swung closed automatically. He could hear his own breathing in the gas mask. With the fifth door, he struck gold.