“Of course he’s done something,” said Officer Woolf, “he was running. But on the off chance he’s not actually Ronald Reagan, how about we take that mask off. If he’s a Lyle, he’s all yours. Otherwise we take him into the station and figure out what else he’s guilty of.”
“And then we buy him a drink,” said Officer Luckesen, “and congratulate him for somehow avoiding Lylehood.”
“Take it off,” said a soldier. Lyle was still crying, hearing the words without understanding them, and didn’t move. “I said take it off!”
Lyle pulled off the mask, squinting at the sudden influx of light in his peripheral vision.
“No surprise there,” said Woolf. “Have fun with him.”
“Get in the truck,” said a soldier, and gestured with his rifle for Lyle to start walking. The truck was a standard military flatbed, covered with an ad hoc cage of wood and metal and chicken wire. Lyle paused at the back of it, looking up at five other Lyles with sad, desperate faces, crouched in the corners with their arms wrapped around themselves for warmth. I could tell them who I am, he thought. I could tell them I’m the real one, I could prove it to them, and then I’d go to a real prison instead of this hellhole. Almost as soon as he thought of it he discarded the idea. Lyle Fontanelle, the real one, was the cause of all this—the mad scientist who’d destroyed the world. He had to convince them he was somebody else.
“Do you require assistance into the truck, sir?” The soldier’s question was polite and formal, but his voice was a businesslike growl. He was only asking because he had to, and his assistance was not likely to be comfortable.
“I’m fine,” said Lyle, hoisting himself up. “I can do it.” He wandered to the back of the cage and sat down by the others. “So,” he said, trying to think of Lyle-based small talk. “How long have you all been Lyles?”
“Five weeks,” said one. The other four chimed in with time frames of their own, ranging everywhere from ten weeks down to two. The first one looked back at him. “How about you?”
“Way too long,” said Lyle. He took a breath, playing with the mask in his hands. He needed to convince the camp he was one of these men, an innocent bystander accidentally cursed with the face of a war criminal. That would take details, and those details had to sound authentic. He nodded. “Five weeks for me, too,” he said, trying out the story to see how well it fit. He looked up. “How did it happen?”
They told their stories one by one, Lyle listening intently for any information he could use to blend into the crowd. One of them had bought black market ReBirth to try to impress his girlfriend; another one had bought some for his girlfriend, and accidentally gotten it on both of them. “I thought we could be, like, lesbians together, but then we turned into men and I broke up with her.” Two of the Lyles in the truck had originally been women; one had used the lotion to hide from an abusive husband, figuring life as a Lyle was still better than life as a victim. The other just wanted to be taller.
“I never used it at all,” said the last Lyle. He was the one who claimed to have only been a Lyle for two weeks, still halfway through the transformation. He must have been fairly Lyle-ish before—same height, same race, same gender—because the transformation was advanced enough to be easily identifiable. Or maybe we’re all just getting really good at seeing Lyles, thought Lyle.
“Is that really your story?” asked the Lyle One. “You never used it, so you’re not a criminal and they have to let you go? You know that doesn’t work.”
“I never used it,” Lyle Five insisted, shrugging helplessly. “It’s illegal—no offense to any of you—so I never touched the stuff. I was never even tempted. And then one day I just … started changing.”
“That’s not how it works,” said Lyle Two. The one with the Lyle-ized girlfriend. “You probably got it on you and just didn’t notice, like I did.”
“Or somebody put it in the water,” said Lyle Three. “You heard what happened in São Tomé.”
“Those pictures were fakes.”
“That’s just what the liberal media wants you to think.”
“Oh, here we go, a nutjob.”
“Wait,” said Real Lyle. “Maybe it really is in the water. The number of Lyles has ballooned in the last month, exponentially, but the black market availability has dropped off, so where are they getting it? And almost all of the new Lyles have been right here in New York City, so it’s obviously something local. Why not the water?”
“Who would put Lyle lotion into the water?” asked Lyle Five.
“White supremacists,” Lyle Three spat. “Turn everyone in New York City into a white guy, and you’ve just wiped out a massive chunk of blacks, Asians, Latinos, Indians, you name it. They’re whitewashing the whole city.”
“Maybe they did it as some kind of power grab,” said Lyle One. “I mean, like, it’s illegal to be Lyle, right? So if they make everyone Lyle, we’re all criminals and they can throw us all in jail, just like this. Pretty soon the whole country will be a jail, and they’ll control everything.”
“Maybe it was Lyle activists,” said Lyle Four softly, “trying to make Lyles so prevalent no one bothers to hurt them anymore.”
“That’s stupid,” said Lyle Three.
“What if it was an accident?” asked Real Lyle.
The others frowned at him. “What?”
“What if somebody stole a whole ton of Lyle lotion,” said Real Lyle, “like the stuff that disappeared from the NewYew plant when the government tried to seize it. They tried selling it on the black market, but they didn’t realize it was all Lyle, and when they did they stopped and they dumped it all—flushed it down the toilet, dropped it in a reservoir, whatever. What if somebody thought they were getting rid of it, and poisoned our water supply by accident?”
The group was silent, thinking. After a long moment Lyle Four whispered: “That’s the scariest theory yet.”
“I know,” said Lyle, wrapping his arms tightly around himself for warmth. “I know.”
49
Thursday, November 1
1:15 A.M.
New York
43 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
The truck eventually dropped them off at a local holding cell, and Lyle spent the night in the gym at a Brooklyn rec center, lying on a cot in a grid of nearly three dozen Lyles. They gave them jumpsuits to replace their old clothes, and almost immediately Lyle lost track of which Lyles were which—they all looked the same, even to him—and decided to just keep to himself instead. Most of the Lyles had apparently decided the same thing. The next morning they joined another group, probably a hundred Lyles in total, and together they were herded into the backs of the flatbed cage trucks for the drive upstate. It was colder on the highway than it had been in the city, and the soldiers issued them blankets to keep warm, though not enough for the group. Lyle didn’t put up a fight and thus never got one; he huddled in the center of the crowd, out of the wind, and tried to stay warm.
Their destination, Lyle noted with surprise, was the old NewYew plant, converted to a Lyle Camp, and he chuckled humorlessly at the irony. The guards were cold and stoic, nearly faceless behind their plastic riot masks, and they backed the trucks up to the front gate one at a time, unloading their cargo of Lyles into the vast open grounds of the camp. Lyle was in the second truck, and waited patiently for his turn, breathing slowly and trying to stay calm. The crowd in the truck thinned, and Lyle practiced the lies he’d concocted. He shuffled to the back of the truck and looked out over the crowd.
Ten thousand Lyles looked back.
“Keep moving,” said a guard, and Lyle jumped down, shocked into silence by the sheer quantity of Lyles. The new Lyles fresh off the truck were herded into a long line, and Lyle fell into place, shuffling forward as each new person was registered. He’d seen enough movies about prison to expect a lot of hooting at the new guys, but the mood instead was somber and clinical. Bored. The ten thousand Lyles in the camp saw the same faces every day, everywhere they looked, and a hundred new iterations didn’t add anything interesting to their world.