Vivian Apple Needs a Miracle (15 page)

He shakes his head. “I don't! But it's better than the alternative—if I hadn't met Marnie on the bus, Molly and I would've headed straight into Hurricane Ruth. But I did. And they spent a few months polishing me up, making sure I was ‘on message,' and now I'm here, in Hollywood, and Molly's safe at a Church boarding school in Colorado. She has three meals a day, and water, and friends, and the corporation doesn't know I'm—” He stops himself, swallows. There's no one in the room except us, but still he's afraid to say it. “They don't know of any reason to take me out of my room in the middle of the night and shoot me. I've locked that part of me away.”

“And what if you slip up?”

“Not going to happen. I play the part extremely well, Harp. Vivian can attest.” Dylan nods at me, a hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “I admit it's not an ideal situation, but I'm safe . . . which is more than you two can say.”

“It doesn't bother you at all,” I say, “that you're on the wrong side?”

He laughs a familiar laugh—wide-eyed, gently teasing. “Viv, come on—don't you get it? It's a luxury to be able to choose a side. I'm trying to eat, access clean water, keep Molly safe . . . I don't have time to have ideals. Look, I won't pretend every person who works for the Church of America is perfect, but they're more than you make them out to be. A lot of them are just trying to do what they think is right.”

Harp watches the faucet drip. I know that for her the idea of helping Dylan, of rescuing him from the Church's clutches, was a way of turning back time. She wasn't there when Raj was killed, and she must feel the way I do about my father—that if we'd just been able to change the situation in one microscopic way, everything that happened after would have been different.

“Dylan,” I say. “You need to know something. There's a militia planning an attack against the Church—an explosion at the Chateau Marmont.”

Dylan's expression goes rigid. “Is this a joke?”

“No. We're not sure when it's going to happen yet—but they have the means, and they're going to do it. If that's where you're living, you need to get out of there.”

He turns to Harp, like she'll assure him that I'm only playing around, but Harp has raised a trembling hand to her eyes. She's just realized, as I only did moments ago, that right now, Dylan doesn't need to be rescued from the Church as much as he needs to be rescued from Amanda Yee.

“How am I supposed to get out of there?” he asks, pacing the damp, dirty floor. “It's in my contract that I have to stay at the Chateau for the duration of my employment—and if I lose my contract, Molly loses her tuition. Oh, God. Guys! What am I supposed to do?”

“Maybe you can talk to Marnie about going on vacation for a while. Tell her you want to visit Molly before the second boat?”

“Even if she agrees,” Dylan notes, “which she won't—Marnie lives at the Chateau too. I'm supposed to waltz away and leave her there, knowing full well she's about to get blown up? I'd have to warn her, too. I'd have to warn everyone! But—what am I supposed to say? Where am I supposed to have gotten this information? If they find out I know you,
how
I know you . . .”

He stops and bends over the sink, heaving. I think he might be about to throw up. He can't warn the Church of America about the attack. If they traced him back to us, they would find out about Raj. That would put both Dylan and Molly in danger. I put my hand on Dylan's back to comfort him.

I have an idea then. Possibly a profoundly stupid one.

“What if,” I suggest, “you got us into the Chateau? What if you helped us meet with Peter Taggart? I'll warn him myself. He's powerful enough that he could get the Church to relocate. And I'm pretty sure he'd believe me.”

Harp snaps her gaze toward me, eyes bright with alarm. Dylan laughs weakly. “Ha ha, Viv. I really don't see how a showdown with your ex-boyfriend is going to help. Although can I just say, I'm impressed? No doubt the betrayal was a blow, but that boy is cute. I frankly didn't think you had it in you.”

“I'm not joking,” I say.

He pauses, then looks back at Harp, who continues to say nothing. She retreats to the opposite corner, as if to put as much distance as possible between herself and this idea.

“You'll get caught,” he points out. “They have Peacemakers at every entrance.”

“You can tell us when the building will be closest to empty; you can help create a diversion. All we need is an open door, Dylan.”

He seems speechless. The last time we saw each other, I was only Harp's compliant sidekick, a pleasant, dull presence in his apartment. Now Dylan turns helplessly to her, as if she'll rein me in, get me to stop asking the impossible.

But Harp shrugs. “A simple yes or no, Dylan.”

“It could still backfire for me, easily. So why should I?” he asks, sounding both confused and defiant. “I've spent months making these people trust me. Why should I put myself at risk? Why should I put
Molly
at risk, just because you've gone full adrenaline junkie?”

“Because otherwise I can't promise you won't be in the building when the bomb goes off,” I say, and Dylan recoils. “Also—because it's what Raj would do.”

This plan is brand-new; it arrived fully formed in my mind only seconds ago—tell Peter about the bomb; have him convince the Church to move out of the Chateau; give Amanda no option but to cancel the attack—and part of me hopes he'll be so angry with me for invoking Raj that he'll refuse. But after a long moment, Dylan sighs. He takes a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket, shoves one into his mouth, and glares at me.

“The guilt, Apple, my God. You should start your own religion.”

Dylan has to finish appeasing his adoring crowd, but first he tells us that a week from tonight, next Friday, most of the Chateau's occupants will be at a fundraiser in Laurel Canyon. Dylan believes that will be the ideal time for us to enter. We'll have to scope out the building, just as Diego and the others have been doing every other night; we'll have to familiarize ourselves with the entrances and the Peacemaker presence there. Dylan tells us to meet him at midnight tonight, on a back road behind the Chateau; he'll help us case it to the best of his ability. He gives us hugs—mine a little stiffer than Harp's—and returns to his place under the tent. Harp and I wait a few minutes, then make our way back through the Grove.

“Have you ever noticed,” Harp mutters as we start the long trudge back to the Good Book, not wanting to test our luck again with Sacrificial Rides, “that you have a weird habit of escalating situations to their most dangerous possible outcomes? It's sort of pathological, Viv. I say, ‘Let's see if we can dig up dirt on the Church of America';
you
say, ‘Let's drive across the country and break into their secret compound.' I say, ‘Let's go see our old pal Dylan';
you
say, ‘Let's sneak into Church headquarters in the middle of the night so I can yell at my ex.' Peter isn't just some guy from school you hooked up with who never called—believe me, if he was, I'd be all about the dramatic cafeteria confrontation. I'd help you slash his tires in the parking lot. But he isn't. He's the sort of person who could have us killed, if he wanted to. I mean, has it ever occurred to you, Viv, that you might have a problem of some kind?”

“They're going to kill him,” I say quietly. “Amanda's militia—they're going to kill Dylan, and Peter, too. They're the faces of the Church, and that's where they'll start.”

Harp doesn't say anything for a long time. When she finally speaks, I can barely hear her over the traffic whizzing by.

“If you do manage to warn him, they're going to see it as a betrayal.”

She doesn't have to tell me who “they” are—I know. Amanda, Diego, Julian, Kimberly, Robbie. Winnie. The people who have protected us, who have worked hard to hide us from the Church. Not to mention Suzy. Not to mention Karen. I feel sick.

“But Winnie was right,” I tell her. “None of it's black-and-white; the whole thing is in-between space. It's like Wambaugh told us: don't see groups instead of people. Granted, a lot of Believers are terrible people—but they're still people! Maybe it's absurd that it took Peter turning Believer for me to get that, but I
do,
and we just—” I take a breath, overwhelmed with the weight of what we're discussing for the first time. I picture him in a room somewhere, the moment before detonation, just as Winnie imagined. Brushing his teeth, drinking a glass of water, staring out of a window, not knowing. This is the part that kills me: that for him it will simply be a blink into oblivion. One second he's here, the next he isn't—his giddy, surprised laugh and his blue eyes and the beating heart of him gone, because of something done by my friends, my sister. Gone. “We can't let it happen, Harp.”

She watches me catch my breath. “You want to break in to the Chateau. You want to make contact with Peter. You want to do all that without getting caught. I mean, Jesus, Viv, to pull that off, you'd need—for lack of a better word—a fucking miracle.”

“I know,” I say. “But at the very least, I'll have you?”

Harp laughs. Though we're exposed—all these cars speeding past, with who knows how many pairs of eyes—she takes my hand. “Duh, Viv. We'll warn him. And if through some miraculous turn of events we don't die in the process, just know I'll always be here, coming up with cockamamie schemes for you to turn into full-blown suicide missions. For the rest of our lives. That's just the kind of friend I am.”

The walk is hot and endless. Harp's pigtails loosen and frizz; I feel a sunburn flare on the back of my neck. Both of us are tired and hungry, painfully thirsty. Harp navigates with uncertainty a circuitous route off the busy highway, cutting between houses and behind shops and restaurants. It takes nearly two hours, and by the end of it I'm exhausted and dizzy. She reaches the bookstore before I do, and I feel an ache of longing watching her slip through the front door, imagining the air conditioning now on her skin. By the time I enter, she rests against the counter, guzzling from Robbie's water bottle. He nods as I approach, bemusement in his eyes. As always, the shop is empty. Harp passes the bottle to me.

“So they're still not back? Huh,” Harp says. “Long day for them.”

“Yeah,” Robbie replies. “We got word from Amanda last night that we're doing the thing at the hotel place in exactly four weeks, I guess. Diego's ramping up training.”

I try to catch Harp's eye, but she pushes herself back from the counter and heads for the red door, before turning abruptly on her heel, like she's just remembered something.

“Robbie,” she says, “you have a set of keys to the cars, right?”

He nods. “Yeah. We all do.”

“Amanda said you need to lend me yours—Viv and I need a car, see, for the mission she's sending us on, and she figured you didn't need yours, since you can't legally drive.”

He scowls and digs into his pocket, pulling out the jingling keys. But he doesn't hand them over yet. When he speaks, he sounds defensive. “I'm a good driver—Diego taught me how. And anyway, it's not like traffic cops are even a thing anymore.”

“I know.” Harp rolls her eyes in commiseration. “But—Amanda's orders.”

I watch Robbie's arm cross the distance between himself and Harp. In the moment before he drops the keys into her open hand, he turns to look into my eyes. I'm too self-conscious about how badly I lie to attempt it, so I just smile. This seems to appease him, and he lets them go. I watch Harp catch the keys and put them in her pocket.

That evening is like every other evening—we gather on the second floor, eat a simple meal, and watch the Church of America News Network in silence. There's a brief consultation with Masterson about Harp's and my possible motives (“It's clear these girls are doing Satan's bidding—the question is simply, what has he promised them in return?”); a long segment on Peter's immense popularity among Believers, with footage of him visiting a tent city, offering paltry loaves of bread; and a weather report on the arid, howling winds that are currently battering the windows in their frames. They're called the Santa Ana winds, the meteorologist explains, and they're noteworthy for their power, heat, and dryness; they increase the risk of wildfires, and legend has it they cause aggressive changes in people's moods. “In a city already poised on the brink of apocalypse,” he muses, “one bad temper could have a catastrophic chain reaction.”

Kimberly hits mute. “Well, that's a cheery thought.”

About a half hour before midnight, once everyone has headed up to bed, Harp and I sneak down the stairs and through the bookshop, out to the street where the cars are parked. Harp hands me Robbie's keys and I drive. She pulls out her laptop, where she'll take notes. I'm nervous about every aspect of what we're currently doing—I scope the streets we cruise down for any sign of cops or Peacemakers or random mobs of citizens driven mad by the Santa Ana winds. A few nights ago, the president issued an emergency nationwide curfew of eleven p.m., an attempt to cut down on the spikes in violent crime from coast to coast, but if the news is any indication, it's had no effect—perhaps, as the Church newscasters hint, because he did not authorize the Peacemakers to enforce it.

“What are you thinking about?” I ask Harp, to distract myself from my nerves.

“Oh, just reading some blog comments. I'm getting a thousand a day now.”

“Oh yeah? How many have compared you to Hitler at this point?”

“A little under two fifty, but I'm not really keeping a tally.” Harp frowns at the screen. “People are starting to talk about where they think their Raptured relatives went. I took screen shots of the important ones. ‘Hi Harp, thank you for revealing the TRUTH! I want to tell you about my mom, Mona Patterson, eighty-five, MISSING SINCE MARCH'—blah blah, this woman's whole life story, and then—‘I checked credit card statements, like you said to, and guess what? She bought a one-way ticket to Cleveland the week before the Rapture. I SAY IT'S SOMETHING SINISTER.' And here's another: ‘If what you say is true that explains a lot. My husband believed and our marriage was really in trouble, but about three weeks before the Rapture he planned us a romantic weekend in Nashville. We had one beautiful night together, and when I woke up he was gone. Haven't heard from him since.' I don't get it,” Harp says. “How many different cities were the missing Raptured summoned to?”