Vivian Apple Needs a Miracle (22 page)

“Look,” Diego says, “you and Harp tried the nonviolent tack. I respect that, I really do. But what good has it done you? You haven't found the information we need. You're still terrorists as far as the rest of the country is concerned. And it's not like you're even slowing the apocalypse down—things get worse out there by the minute. You tried, and you deserve credit for trying—but it's time to try something else.”

“Harp has something,” I insist, “something big. If you just gave her more time—”

“Enough.” Diego's tone is rigid, and I snap my jaw shut—he's not listening to me. “We leave at nine tonight—it should only take an hour or two. I want to make sure the Church hasn't changed their security setup, that they don't see us coming. I figure you keep waltzing in and out of the place; I could use your eyes.”

I'd like to refuse, but Diego has just provided me an opportunity I've desperately needed. “Fine. But while we're there, I'm breaking Peter Ivey and Dylan Marx out and taking them with us. I'm not going to let you kill them, so don't try and stop me.”

He sighs. “Stop
you,
Vivian? If only I knew how.”

You'd think by now I'd be so used to it I wouldn't blink, but I can't imagine sneaking into the Chateau again without feeling a sickening drop in my stomach. Maybe it's just the atmosphere of Amanda's command center: Kimberly's face still bruised from her attack, unhappy soldiers on the verge of snapping, the hours until tomorrow flying uneasily by. The only person who doesn't seem on the verge of a meltdown is Harp, who closes her laptop in the early afternoon for the first time in a long time. Shortly before I leave for the Chateau with Diego, Winnie, and the others, Harp gives me a hug.

“What is this?” I say, suspicious, pulling out of her embrace. “Are you sick or something? Are you dying?”

Harp laughs. “Oh, Viv. You act as if I never give you hugs randomly throughout a given day, simply out of my pure affection for you and the general goodness of my heart.”

“Yeah. That's because you don't.”

“Fine.” She beams at me, then leans in to whisper, “I'm happy.”

“Oh?” I feel a hopeful flicker. It's possible Harp's only talking about the secretive hours she keeps spending upstairs with Julian, but I know her well enough to sense traces of something bigger. “Do you think at some point you'd be willing to tell me why?”

“Very soon. By the time you get back, in fact, if all goes well. Trust me,” she says, because I've made a face at her. “It will be very worth it.”

Diego stands by the door, calling my name. It's time for us to go. On the way down to the car, Diego, Winnie, and Elliott walk ahead of me, deep in conversation, while Robbie trails behind. The mood between us has not yet quite thawed, but in the last few days, perhaps faced with the enormity of the act he's about to help commit, Robbie has slowly started to acknowledge my presence in the room again. This morning, he wordlessly passed me a carton of milk when I poured myself some cereal. I make a note to pull him aside when we get back to the command center, to try apologizing once more—I can't face the thought that tomorrow he'll march off to certain doom without having forgiven me. But for now we continue to the cars in our usual silence. The five of us traverse the familiar streets, so much emptier now of cars and people—it's the last day of August, which means the apocalypse is only three weeks away. People want to escape the cities and the coasts, to move away from earthquakes and tidal waves and nuclear attacks. We pull off Sunset, onto the lane leading past the Chateau, through the still side streets, till we reach the abandoned driveway I favor most. Diego explains that this will be a quick walk-through—he only wants the others to confirm the plans they already have in place. Elliott and Robbie will double-check the spots where they'll position the explosives and the sharpshooters. Winnie will make sure they haven't missed a single escape route. “And I'm going to help Vivian sneak in and usher her boyfriend to safety,” he concludes with a hint of sarcasm.

“Wait.” I turn to him. “Are you serious? I've done it before; I can do it again.”

Diego regards me over his shoulder. “Yeah, you've done it before. But by your own account, your first two break-ins involved a whole lot of hiding in closets.”

“But—”

“I don't doubt your abilities, Vivian. You shouldn't doubt mine. We'll move quicker if we do it together. You'll be safer.”

Winnie looks down, avoiding my gaze, but I see her nod once. I know he's right, and I know he's doing it largely to put her mind at ease, so I don't argue further. Diego spends a few minutes running us quickly through stray details: confirmed safe spots on the route between the car and the Chateau, the time and location we'll meet when the job is done, what to do should any of us get spotted. I feel a vague unease thinking about how comparatively sloppy Harp and I have been on our trips here, how easily we might have lost each other. We leave the car in small groups—Winnie and Robbie first, followed after two minutes by Elliott. After he leaves, Diego and I are left in silence.

“You don't like me,” he says casually after a moment.

“That's not true. Not totally true, anyway.”

Diego stares out of the front windshield at the dark-windowed mansion above us; he taps his fingers on the steering wheel.

“I think,” I continue, “if we weren't at war, I'd like you just fine. You're funny and smart and brave. You obviously care about my sister. And I know she cares about you, too.”

“You just don't like the way I fight,” he supplies when I lapse into silence.

“I don't like
having
to fight. If the Church didn't exist, I'd be getting ready for my senior year of high school right now. I'd be visiting colleges with my parents. I would—” I'm trying to keep the tremor out of my voice, and failing. “I would be normal. I'd be a person about to
enter
the world, instead of a person trying to hide from it.”

Diego turns to look at me. For a moment, I expect him to return to continue his argument from earlier—to tell me that I'm young, that I don't know what I'm doing. I wait for the lecture, but instead he smiles.

“I get you. You know, back at the Good Book, you said I wasn't really a soldier? Well, I guess Winnie's never told you, but that's not true.” He exhales deeply. “I enlisted two years back—after that explosion at Yankee Stadium? I like action; I like discipline. It was a good fit. And it was easy to do—automatic status as one of the good guys. Which, as you know, is appealing. There's no better club to be a member of, and I'd always felt like an outsider before. When Amanda recruited me, it felt like the same thing on a whole new level. You know I'm not a monster, Viv. Winnie wouldn't love me if I were. I want to do the right thing—I honestly believe Amanda wants that too—but I realize now as the clock winds down that you never actually know what the right thing is. No one ever takes you aside and says, ‘Yep, that's foolproof. Go ahead.' It makes fighting a lot less appealing. Because I'm not sure if this attack is the right thing to do. But if it works the way Amanda wants it to—if it wipes out the Church leaders, if it makes a clean slate for the rest of us—doesn't it have to be
a
right thing?”

I don't know what to tell him. The problem is, I don't think it could possibly work the way Amanda thinks it will.

A blast splits the silence in half. Diego has already thrown open his door and leaped out of the car before I recognize the sound for what it was: a gunshot. “Stay here!” he shouts, disappearing down the lane. I'm so terrified I don't protest. But then I hear a woman's hysterical shrieking.

I scramble out of the back seat and into the sultry evening. I chase Winnie's screams, which I can hardly hear over the ringing in my ears, the sound of my panic. I run hard, catching up with Diego on the sidewalk, then overtaking him—“Viv, no!” he exclaims. I can't slow down, because I see her there at the foot of a driveway down the hill, and Elliott's with her; they're bent over a bump in the road, examining it. And then I get closer and recognize Robbie's shoes.

I drop to my knees. There's a wet black spot where Robbie's stomach should be, a liquid spreading like tar. His eyes are open. He's shivering but his eyes are open. I look into them; I say his name; I hear Winnie babbling to Diego, who has finally caught up—

“He doubled back. He went up that driveway. The house looked dark; we both thought it was abandoned. He said—he said he thought it would be a good spot for Kimberly to be stationed tomorrow. And then I heard a woman shouting, something like ‘Get away!' She must have seen him coming and thought—I don't know! Maybe she saw his gun and thought—Diego, the Peacemakers at the Chateau will have heard that shot; we have to move—”

“Get the car, Elliott,” Diego commands, and Elliott leaps to his feet and goes running.

Diego lowers himself next to me and touches Robbie's face.

Robbie looks up at him. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't be stupid.” Diego takes off his black jacket and presses it hard against Robbie's wound. “Nothing to apologize for.”

“I shouldn't have gone up there. It was dumb. I didn't think anybody lived there.”

“It's okay, Robbie,” Winnie assures him in a trembling voice. “Really. Nobody is mad at you.”

Robbie laughs weakly, and a thin trail of bloody spit pools in the corner of his mouth. “I feel really weird.”

I wipe his mouth with the corner of my sleeve. “He needs to go to a hospital.”

Nobody replies. We hear the car, racing toward us.

“This is really weird,” Robbie tells us in a small voice, and his eyes fill with tears. “I'm sorry; I don't know why I'm crying. I just don't feel right.”

Elliott screeches the car to a halt beside us and throws open the back door; Diego and Winnie lift Robbie carefully and quickly, placing him in the back seat. Winnie and I flank him; my hands replace Diego's on Robbie's wound. Diego takes the wheel and peels away down the lane and around a corner. Robbie isn't saying words anymore, just making low moaning noises through his chattering teeth.

“He needs to go to the hospital,” I say again. “We need to get him to a hospital!”

“We can't risk it,” Elliott insists. “The Church of America owns the hospitals. We'd be handing ourselves over.”

Diego says nothing. He speeds down Sunset Boulevard, past lights and shops and billboards. It's like the real world, except it can't be anything but a nightmare, because Winnie holds two fingers to Robbie's neck; she shakes her head at me. Robbie is still breathing, but his breaths are shallow—his eyelids flutter and droop.

“He's going to die if you don't take him to a hospital.” I can't tell if I'm whispering or shouting and I don't care. “Please! You don't have to stop—bring him to the emergency room entrance and we'll leave him there.”

“But then the Church will have him!” Elliott protests.

“He'll be alive!” I shout. “Diego, please!”

Diego hesitates only a second, then he tells Elliott to pull up directions on his phone. Elliott complies, and for a moment I think it's going to be okay. There will be a hospital close by and we'll get there in time and maybe we'll never see Robbie again, but at least he'll be alive. But then on Robbie's other side, Winnie sits up and says his name softly—“Robbie?”—like she's trying to wake him up from a deep slumber, and I press harder on Diego's jacket and watch Robbie's pale face, and I listen as his breaths slow and slow and slow and then stop.

I can't stop screaming. I think,
Why can't I stop screaming? Why don't they tell me to shut up?
But then I understand it's just a noise in my head, a shrill white devastation, so loud it makes tears stream down my cheeks. I can't let go of Robbie. His blood is everywhere; I can taste it—hot and metallic. In front of me Elliott's shoulders are shaking. On the other side of Robbie, Winnie looks down at him with such love, like a mother, like my mother used to look at me—she hushes him though he makes no sound. She pushes his hair back from his face. So that if he were ever to open his eyes again, he could see.

We drive for minutes that feel like hours, and then we're in the parking lot behind the bookstore. We sit silently a moment before Diego glances up and whispers, “What's going on?”

I follow his gaze and see the back windows of the second floor bright with light. It's just after ten, but I understand his confusion. With the attack tomorrow, it was assumed Amanda's army would get as much sleep as possible—it's unclear when they'll next get the chance. But the lights are on, and as we watch, shadows pass in front of the window. Diego cuts the headlights.

“Something's wrong.”

I wait for him to form a plan, to direct us where to go, but his hands still grip the wheel tightly. I see his eyes in the rearview mirror; he's terrified.

“I'll go,” I offer. “I can see what's happening, and if everything's okay, I'll open the back window and give you the all clear. If something's wrong, I'll run.”

Diego wordlessly shakes his head.

“I can handle it,” I say. “I
want
to.”

And I do—I have an irrational desire, an ache at the center of me, for something to be wrong up there. I'd settle for any faceless villain, the opportunity to destroy them. I take my hands off Robbie, trying to ignore his blood on my fingers, and reach for his rifle on the floor. “I'll bring this.”

“Diego,” Winnie says in a soft voice when he hesitates. “Viv's got this.”

He turns in his seat to look at Robbie's face. I take a moment to look too. Here in the dark of the car, you can't see the blood soaking his center. Diego's expression twists, slashed through with anguish, and he nods.