Cynthia’s other hand appeared from behind the open drawer, holding her small handgun—not aiming it at anyone, just holding it. Lyle stepped back. “The purest form of power,” Cynthia said, “and at least one-tenth of the law. What are the other nine-tenths?”
“You don’t need to treat me like a child,” the doctor snarled.
“I want to treat you like an ally,” said Cynthia, “but I need you to give me something first. I’m not going to use it, I’m not going to steal it, I’m not going to do anything the group doesn’t agree on. But I am going to hold it, and that, as we’ve discussed, is the only thing that really matters.”
The doctor looked at her, and at the gun, and slowly removed her hand from the lotion sample. Cynthia picked it up with a small smile. “Thank you, Doctor. I hope this is the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship.”
62
Thursday, December 13
10:34 P.M.
Plum Island Animal Disease Center, Long Island
1 DAY TO THE END OF THE WORLD
The dying man was unconscious, wracked with fever; his broken ankle was swollen and discolored. Cynthia held the sample vial carefully, the lid open, and the room full of refugees watched in anxious silence as Lyle dipped in a Q-tip, dabbed it on the man’s skin, and waited. Inside the fat white drop a million tiny retroviruses scanned his DNA, copied it, and spread it like a plague to each of their neighbors, over and over in a growing cascade. A tiny invisible cataclysm. A moment later Lyle touched the Q-tip back down on the dying man’s skin, smearing it around, rubbing it deep into his tissue, and in that instant the man became a fallen god: eternal, immortal, and changeless, and damned. Lyle wiped the man clean with a thick rubber glove, and sealed both glove and Q-tip in a hazardous materials bag from the lab. Cynthia closed the vial and tucked it safely in her pocket.
“It’s done,” said the general. “Let’s get back to work.”
“Work if you want,” said Lyle. “I’m going to sleep.” He left the room, walking quickly back to his own. Cynthia called after him, but he ignored her. He didn’t want to hear her, he didn’t want to see her, he didn’t want to see anybody.
Why didn’t I stop her? he thought. That’s why I was there. To stop her from abusing the lotion.
But she’s not abusing it; she’s just holding it.
Or is ReBirth really so powerful that simply holding it is enough?
He’d once told NewYew they were irresponsible, doing something so bad it was like giving guns to mentally disabled children, but he’d been wrong. He was the mental case here—he was the idiot, the half-wit, the brain-damaged fool who’d found a technology he couldn’t understand, and used it wrong, and ended the world. Now there was nobody left but the carrion feeders, Cynthia and the general and everybody else, snapping at the carcass and ripping it to shreds until there was nothing left but bones and skin and maggots.
He reached his room and slammed the door, standing in the center of the floor and breathing. Thinking. Trying, at least, to think of something positive.
Someone knocked on his door, and he turned around to see Lilly push it open and peek through the gap. He sighed, feeling hollow and defeated. She opened the door a little farther.
“You want to talk?” she asked.
“No,” he said, but stopped her before she could leave again. “Come in, though, please. I don’t … I don’t know what I want.” He rubbed his eyes, exhausted, and laughed drily. “I want to go back in time and stop this. Destroy my research, burn down my laboratory, whatever it takes.”
“My mother always said you can’t change the past,” said Lilly. “The best you can do is learn from it.”
“That’s very easy for your mother to say,” said Lyle. “What’d she do that was so horrible, kill a guy?”
“My father,” said Lilly. “The court ruled self-defense.”
Lyle forced himself to close his mouth. “I’m sorry. I mean, I’m glad she’s okay. I mean … All of a sudden I feel like kind of a huge tool.” He winced and grabbed a chair. “Do you want to sit down?”
“I’m fine,” she laughed, “this is all ancient history. I’ve dealt with it, I’ve learned from it, and I’ve moved on.”
“Sit down anyway,” said Lyle, and grabbed a chair for himself. “I feel like I’ve been dragged behind a semi for … I don’t know, nine months?” He laughed again, small and sad. “Forty-two years?”
She stepped into the room, revealing from behind her back two bottles from the food supply: a year-old Coke, and a bottle of spring water at least twice that old. She handed him the Coke and sat down. “Normally I’d prescribe ice cream for depression, but we have limited resources.”
“They’re going to be really mad at us for drinking these,” said Lyle, but he took the bottle anyway.
“We’re going to put it back,” said Lilly, dismissing the protest with a mischievous smile. “We’ve got the greatest water reclamation system in the world, here, right? Just drink it up, hit the restroom, wait a few days, and boom, it’s back in the tap and ready to refill the bottle.”
Lyle laughed, not defeated this time but amused—the first time in days that he’d laughed with genuine humor. “I don’t think mine will be quite as fizzy by then.”
“You ‘think’ it won’t be?”
“Well, you can never be sure.”
“That concerns me.” Lilly screwed off the cap and took a swig from the bottle. “There’s, what, twenty of us on the island?” She pointed at him in mock seriousness. “I fear for the future of the human race if five percent of the surviving gene pool has carbonated urine. You’ve been keeping secrets from me.”
Lyle laughed again, and opened his own bottle. It was tepid, but the carbonation bit his throat, and the taste and feel of it was almost shockingly comforting after so much chaos. “No,” he said, swallowing and shaking his head. “I don’t have any secrets left. I’m Lyle Fontanelle—you probably met at least ten of me before we ever even knew each other.”
“Five at the most,” said Lilly. She paused, and said her next sentence with her eyes fixed on the floor. “None of them was half as interesting.”
Lyle paused, the bottle halfway to his lips. Did she say what I think she said? He didn’t want to look stupid, or eager, so he brought the bottle mechanically to his mouth and drank, all the while wondering what she had meant, and what she was feeling. When he allowed himself to look back at her, he saw she was looking at him. He wiped his mouth with his hand, feeling self-conscious, and looked at the bottle because it was easier than looking at her.
He leaned forward, playing with the bottle in his hands, looking at her feet instead of her face. “I feel like I barely know you.”
“You don’t.”
“So tell me about yourself.” He looked up, caught her eye, and held it this time. She seemed to smile not just with her mouth or her eyes but her entire face. She was more beautiful than she’d ever been, because each new scrap of understanding showed that she was kinder, wiser, funnier than he’d ever imagined. But she was still a mystery. “I want to know everything.”
She opened her arms wide, as if encompassing the entire world. “We’ve got plenty of time.” She took another sip of water, and made a beckoning motion with her hand. “Hit me. What’s your first question?”
“What does your illness mean to you?”
“It means I can’t eat pizza.”
“I’m being serious,” said Lyle. “You have a genetic illness that has warped your health, your diet, your social life, your entire existence, into a daily struggle just to get by. ReBirth could have solved that problem in a heartbeat—a few thousand dollars, four months of nutritional supplements, and you’d never have to worry about your health again. You could eat pizza, hamburgers, cake, candy bars; you could drink Coke; you could live a normal life again. And yet you never did it.”
“I like being me.”
“I don’t doubt that,” said Lyle. “I imagine everybody likes yo
u. But nobody works that hard to accommodate a curable disease unless the disease itself is an integral part of who they are, or at least of who they think they are. Who they want to be. I don’t think you like yourself in spite of celiac sprue, I think you like yourself because of it.”
Lilly looked at her water bottle, twirling it in small circles and watching the liquid swirl around inside. “That’s … a little deeper than I was expecting this conversation to be. I think the thing is…” She took another drink, a long, slow guzzle that gave her time to gather her thoughts. “I’m not gorgeous.”
“Yes you are.”
“I’m a professional model, Lyle. I know the difference between pretty and gorgeous, and I’m pretty. In any other social circle I’d say I’m very pretty, though I hate saying that because it makes me sound conceited, but on a shoot with a bunch of supermodels I can’t help but feel self-conscious. Especially because I’m usually ‘the black girl’ they brought in to round out the demographics.”
Lyle felt a pang of guilt. He’d been a part of those demographic hiring conversations too many times.
“For a while,” she continued, “my first few months in the industry, celiac was my excuse. ‘I can’t be as pretty as her, I can’t have her body, I can’t follow her exercise program, because I’m sick.’ It made me different, and being different made me feel better, but it doesn’t take long for ‘I feel better than you do’ to turn into ‘I feel better than you are.’ Celiac became my consolation prize—my snide little triumph that maybe you never ate bread, but I never ate bread or else I’d die. Maybe you had a strict diet, but I had an even stricter diet with my life hanging dramatically in the balance. Maybe you were prettier than me, and featured a little more prominently in the group poses, and got more shots overall in the final magazine, but I was a martyr an inch away from the hospital. It made me feel better about my insecurities; I had something that nobody else had.”
Lyle shook his head. “I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t think I’m that shallow?” She raised her eyebrow. “Or you don’t want to think I’m that shallow?”
Lyle smiled thinly, looking down at his Coke. “Nobody that self-aware is shallow. Which, conversely, makes me the most shallow person in the world.” He laughed drily. “Maybe literally, at this point.”
A hint of Lilly’s playfulness crept back into her voice. “How can someone who’s met himself ten thousand times not be self-aware?”
“Out there,” said Lyle, gesturing toward the front of the barracks, “earlier tonight, when Cynthia suggested that you could get a new body you almost punched her. Which I kind of wish you had, actually.” He puffed out a long, slow breath. “That … fierce protectiveness, that zeal to defend your disability. Celiac’s not just something you lord over the other models.” He looked her in the eyes. “I think celiac makes you who you are because it threatened to make you something else, and you didn’t let it. You’re not a victim, you’re not a patient, you’re not a dropout or a charity case or anything like it—you’re a happy, healthy, successful woman, not because life made you that way but because you, personally, overcame everything life put in your way to stop you. You love it because it’s the mountain you climbed to become great, and now that you’re standing at the top you can see farther, and be greater, than you ever could before.”
Lilly stared back at him, holding his gaze without ever looking away. “That might be the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
Lyle looked at her, warm in the dim light, tired and disheveled and wonderful. He stood up, still looking her in the eyes, and she practically leaped across the room. He held her in his arms and kissed her urgently, hungrily, and she kissed him back with the same fierce desperation. She pressed him back, two steps toward the bed, until his legs knocked against it and all he wanted to do was to fall backward, to pull her down with him, to bury himself and his problems and the entire world in one moment of pure physical perfection. She pressed against him, hot and ravenous, but it was wrong, and he was wrong, and she was wrong. He felt corrupted inside, like he was already dead. Spoiled meat. He pushed her out to arm’s length. He was gasping for breath.
She looked confused. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t just forget,” he said.
“Sometimes we need to forget, just for a minute.”
“Here at the end of the world, trapped on an island, locked in a building, alone in a room—are we just closing our eyes to it? To everything that’s gone and everyone who’s died and…” He shook his head, gripping her shoulders, cursing himself for doing anything other than kissing her again. “I want this, and I want you, but I don’t want it to be a concession. I don’t want it to be the … going-away party for human civilization. Does that make any sense at all?”
“You want to celebrate life instead of hiding from death.”
His rush of a breath was like a sigh of relief. “Yes, that’s it exactly. Are you…? Is that okay?” He wanted her, but he wanted it to be right. “I don’t take a lot of stands, but this one seems important.”
“That’s fine,” said Lilly, and took a deep breath. “I know exactly how you feel, actually.” She looked down, sighing, then looked up again quickly and pulled him in for another kiss, longer than the others, deeper and more passionate. Lyle felt himself melting, almost ready to throw his stand out the window and throw her down on the bed, but she pulled away. “If we’re waiting I can’t stay here.” She rolled her eyes and hurried to the door. “I’ll be in my bunk.”
She closed the door behind her, and Lyle stared at it. “What did I just do?” He sat down, still staring, and took a long pull on his bottle. It was sweet and acrid, and he wished it were booze.
The start of a new world, he thought. Not just the end of an old one. There has to be more—I thought the world was over, but it’s not. For all her amazing qualities that’s the single most amazing one, hands down: she convinced me the world isn’t over. We can make a new one.
I just don’t know if we can make it here.
Cynthia was a terror, determined to hold power by any means necessary, and she wasn’t the only one. The general was just as power-hungry in his own, less Machiavellian way—he’d been the man who’d destroyed São Tomé, after all. He didn’t have the plans Cynthia did, but the plans he did have he would pursue with a single-minded ferocity. The three delegates were simultaneously useless and terrifying; their solutions, on the rare occasions they had any, were vast and sweeping and completely insane. All three of them had been willing to turn the entire human population into seven billion copies of the same person, the biggest eugenics crime Lyle could even imagine. How long before they came up with something even worse?
Worst of all was Dr. Shorey—not who she was, but who she was becoming. Lyle had watched her closely in the lab, in the truck on the way home, in the front room as they treated the dying man. She’d promised to watch Cynthia carefully, and in a way she had, but it was more focused than that. She wasn’t just watching Cynthia, she was watching Cynthia’s hands. She was watching the lotion. Lyle had even caught her staring at Cynthia’s pocket, obsessed with the ReBirth sample, her thoughts obviously focused on it constantly. As careful as they’d tried to be, they’d brought another plague with them from the depths of the lab: Shorey had become infected with suspicion and greed, and she would spread it to the scientists and the soldiers and everybody else. Even now, in the silence of the living complex, Lyle felt like he could hear them—half a dozen little factions, whispering and scheming, plotting their moves and staking their claims on the glorious throne of a windswept rock barely half a mile across.
“We have to leave,” Lyle whispered. “I don’t know where else we can go, but we can’t stay here.”
The trouble was that Plum Island really was the perfect haven. It had modern amenities, stored food, and that irreplaceable clean water system. As long as nothing dangerous got into it, they could recirculate their water for generations, and
never have to worry about the ReBirth that tainted the rest of the planet. The only other alternative was to find a place the lotion hadn’t touched, but where? It was everywhere. That’s why they’d come to the island in the first place.
“The islands,” Lyle whispered, and he felt his heart race with excitement. The Samoan delegate wanted to go to the islands, to the Bahamas or Bermuda or the Caribbean. Somewhere so small no one else wanted it, and no one else has touched it, just me and Lilly alone on the beach. We could fish, and eat coconuts and bananas and anything we want. Most of it wouldn’t even have gluten—she’d never be sick. We could do it. We could live. We could take Cynthia’s boat and disappear forever.
But only one of us would live forever.
Lyle stood now, pacing the room, searching through the variables to find a way through them. We could leave, and we could sail south, and we could get to our island, but I’m immortal. I’ll spend sixty years with Lilly, watching her age and die, and then I’ll spend a thousand years alone. Ten thousand. I can’t do that. What good is a paradise if it ends in death, and emptiness, and maybe even suicide?
The answer, Lyle knew, was in Cynthia’s room, in Cynthia’s pocket, in a tiny glass vial. It would be easy—Lilly wouldn’t even have to know at first. He had her water bottle right here, with her DNA on the mouth and floating in the leftover water inside. All I have to do is drop the lotion in it, just a tiny drop, and let it drift around and pick up her DNA code. And then she can drink it, and become a clone of herself, and stay young and healthy and beautiful forever. We can be together forever.
All I need is one drop.
63
Friday, December 14
12:18 A.M.
Plum Island Animal Disease Center, Long Island
THE END OF THE WORLD
Lyle opened his door. The hall was empty and dark. He crept through the corridor carefully, quietly, watching for shadows in the corners and doorways, and listening for any other sound of human life. The building was as silent as a tomb. Lyle walked slowly to Cynthia’s room, forcing himself to be patient. If he could slip in while she was asleep, if he could take what he wanted without waking her, without anyone knowing, then they could slip away in the night. He could wake Lilly and they could run.