Lyle pondered the question. A former model would be in better shape, probably more tan, certainly better groomed—if Lyle took his DNA and then completely let himself go, he’d be almost unrecognizable. He hoped. But there were more concerns than just the fame. “How do I know it’s not Lyle?”
The dealer’s eyes widened, as if Lyle had just offended him. “I couldn’t stay in business if I sold Lyle.”
“Everyone sells Lyle,” said Lyle. “Even people who think they don’t usually have some in their stock. Do you test for it? Do you have any kind of quality assurance system?”
“My word as a businessman.”
“We couldn’t even discuss this sale on an empty street,” said Lyle. “You’ll forgive me for not taking a drug dealer at his word.”
“Then let’s be honest,” said the dealer. “I’m a criminal, selling a biological weapon to other criminals. If you’re not satisfied with your product, be a man and just shoot me.”
Lyle stared at him. “I have to admit that’s a compelling argument.”
“Then do we have a deal?”
Lyle hesitated only a moment. “We do.”
The car rolled to an elegant stop at the next dark corner, and the dealer pulled a briefcase from under the seat in front of him. “You have the hundred?”
Lyle reached into his ankle brace and pulled it out, a thick stack of sweaty bills. “Sorry about the … dampness.”
“Money is money,” said the dealer. He opened the briefcase and pulled out a plastic baggie with a single gelcap pill inside, the pill containing a single drop of white lotion. The baggie was labeled with a sticker that read DAN WELLS. Lyle handed him the money, the dealer handed Lyle the baggie, and a moment later he was standing alone on the street corner, staring at his prize. His money drove away and turned at the light, disappearing forever. Lyle looked back at the baggie.
“It’s now or never.”
He opened the baggie and took out the pill, discarding the empty plastic bag in the gutter. The gelcap was warm in his hand, and slightly tacky as the moisture from his hands slowly started breaking down the gel. All he had to do was crush the pill, or squeeze it, or even swallow it, and he’d never be Lyle again. That tiny drop was all it took.
He’d never used ReBirth on purpose—he’d sent it out into the world, and he’d used it on Susan, but never on himself. Was he really ready for this? He thought again about the Lyle with Down syndrome, his chromosomes destroyed by competing ReBirth samples. Would the same thing happen to him? Something worse? Surely public execution would be better than congenital cancer.
He wanted it all to be over. To stop running, to stop being afraid. To stop being Lyle Fontanelle. He crushed the capsule in his fingers, and smeared the lotion between his forefinger and thumb.
48
Wednesday, October 31
11:39 P.M.
Brooklyn
44 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
Three weeks later, Lyle was still himself; the lotion had either been Lyle DNA or plain old lotion. He couldn’t escape himself, it seemed, plus now he was broke.
The Lyle Camps were becoming infamous: the squalid conditions, the humiliations, the hunger and thirst. The secondary camps had it the worst—after they figured out who you were they shipped you off into hard labor and the brink of starvation. The former was intended to solve the latter, but they couldn’t feed them fast enough. There were too few resources left in the country these days, and too many Lyles.
Lyle had heard the latest numbers on TV earlier in the evening, catching the tail end of a news story as he waited for night to fall so he could try to find some food. “Nine hundred thousand Lyles in the U.S. alone,” it said. “There are now more Lyles in America than Pacific Islanders, including persons of partial Hawaiian descent. There are more Lyles than Navajo, and experts predict that if the number of Lyles continues to rise at the current rate it will reach one million by late next week, two million the week after, and three million by Thanksgiving. That will be more than all Native Americans combined.”
Lyle heard a lull in traffic and peeked out. He had a few seconds to dart across the street, and he jumped up to take it. Flatbed “Lyle wagons” cruised the streets in this area, rounding up Lyles and hauling them off to the camps, and it was all but impossible to keep clear of them. He’d stretched his meager food out as long as he could, laying low in an old drug den—now more of a flophouse for refugee Lyles—and ventured out tonight under cover of Halloween. He had a small rubber mask, an old Ronald Reagan costume, and hoped that he could at least make it to the store and back without getting caught. The mask was good cover, but it narrowed his vision and made it hard to run. He scanned the street up and down before dashing across to the other side. There was a cigarette shop there run by an old Ethiopian man who didn’t ask questions, and Lyle figured he could spend the last of his money and stock up on whatever the old man had—you could never tell from one day to the next what any store would manage to find and sell. Lyle could make it a few more days, at least, and then … He didn’t know.
He thought about robbing the store, but it felt cruel and wrong. That’s not who I am, he thought. I haven’t fallen that far yet.
A light and a siren flared up behind him, and without even thinking Lyle ran.
“Please no,” he muttered, “don’t take me now.” He ducked down an alley and leaped over a body—unconscious or dead he couldn’t tell—and bolted for the far end, hoping to make it over the fence before the police could follow him. He’d never been especially fit, but months of living on the street had made him lean and wiry, and this was not the first fence he’d climbed. The cops were close behind him, but he cleared the fence and leaped down, pelting down the alley and into the street—
—right into the side of an armed soldier.
“Stand down!” the soldier shouted, and Lyle barely had time to orient himself before five soldiers surrounded him in a semicircle, their rifles raised and trained on his chest. “Remove the mask, sir!”
“I’m sorry,” Lyle stammered, taking a step back, “I wasn’t attacking or anything, I was just running—”
“Remove the mask, sir, or we will remove it for you.”
“President Reagan,” said a voice behind Lyle’s back, and a moment later the two cops who’d been chasing him puffed into view. They looked familiar, but Lyle couldn’t place them.
“Please stand down, Officers,” said the leader of the soldiers, “we have this one.”
“We had him first.”
“Sure you did.”
“We’re all on the same team, guys,” said one of the cops. Lyle saw the man’s nametag—Luckesen—and the odd surname sparked a memory. Luckesen and Woolf, the same two policemen who’d arrested him for a house robbery in … It seems like years ago, but it was only, what, March? April? Lyle dropped his head, terrified that they would recognize him, but almost immediately he laughed at the idiocy of the idea. He was crying, too, and blinked the moisture away. They see a dozen or more Lyles every day, he thought. They won’t know me from any of them—and they have no way of knowing I’m the real one.
Both the cops and the soldiers were dressed in what had become the standard urban “armor”: long pants tucked into boots, long sleeves snapped into long gloves, and a helmet with a face shield. No exposed skin. The soldiers were further dressed in thick, armored vests and groin pads, and Lyle remembered just a few months ago seeing that same costume in news footage of soldiers in Africa and Afghanistan. An occupying army, now called home to occupy New York. It was too much, and Lyle felt the tears come harder and hotter.
“He might not even be a Lyle,” said a soldier. “For all you know he hasn’t even done anything.”
