“Nothing in the air,” said Chad. “The UN grounds are swarming with rioters, and most of the streets outside.”
“Send the women back inside,” said Mexico. “The soldiers can hold at one floor down, and keep at least some of us warm.” They repositioned the guards, and urged the women back into the stairwell, packed tightly in the limited space. Lilly cast a last glance at Lyle before she disappeared.
Lyle almost offered her his spot on the first helicopter.
Almost.
Cynthia kept an iron grip on Lyle’s arm, returning every suggestion to wait inside with a glare icier than the air. They left her alone, and watched the skies for helicopters.
The hour mark came and went.
“Give it time,” said Chad. “Getting them here at all was a logistical miracle; getting them on time is asking a little much.”
Another twenty minutes passed. Ira/Moore kept everyone back from the edge of the building, hoping no one on the ground would see them and try to come up. “Maybe they don’t know where we are,” he offered.
“Maybe the doors are holding,” said Tanzania. “Or the general is.”
Another twenty minutes. Another hour.
“It’s going to be dark soon,” said Libya. “We can’t survive the night out here.”
“This is the most defensible location,” Japan protested, but he shivered as he said it.
“Tell the guards to clear the top floor,” said Chad. “We’ll seal the entrances as well as we can, and keep a watch up here for the choppers.”
“Bet you’re glad now they didn’t give all the food away,” said Cynthia.
Lyle shrugged. “We don’t have it up here anyway.”
“We’ll still need it,” she said, “this time tomorrow when nobody’s come for us, we’ll have to go down and get it.”
“They’ll come for us,” said Lyle, though he didn’t feel remotely sure of it.
“This is our last stand,” said Cynthia. “We need to get out, anyway we can, with enough of these bigwigs in tow to give us some leverage if we make it to Virginia.”
“Are you trying to save them, or use them as hostages?”
“Call it what you like,” said Cynthia, pointing down at the East River. “There’s a whole harbor full of boats down there, and this building is right on the edge of it. If we slip out the back and keep to the water we can go anywhere, free of rioters and ReBirth and everything else.”
A sudden burst of gunfire echoed dully through the roof below them, and the women who’d been huddled in the stairway now stumbled out in a terrified mob. Several of them were covered with gobs of thick, white hand lotion.
58
Monday, December 10
5:08 P.M.
United Nations, Manhattan
4 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
The crowd on the roof screamed and ran, a deadly stampede in the narrow, crowded space, and Lyle saw at least one man go down as the terrified people swarmed over him. There was really only one place to go—behind the elevator housing—and Lyle was carried along with the crowd, struggling to keep his feet and desperate to catch a glimpse of Lilly. Was she hurt? Was she hit with whatever lotion the unseen attackers were throwing? Was it ReBirth, or just a generic lotion being used to scare them? A stray bullet punched straight through the floor in front of him, clipping the shin of a man in a suit. Lyle stopped in his tracks, was bowled over from behind, and went down.
A foot planted itself on Lyle’s back, then another on his outstretched arm. He curled into a ball, feeling two more errant stomps on his midsection, trying desperately to shield his head with his arms. He screamed in pain when a high-heeled shoe planted itself solidly on his calf muscle. The woman tripped and went down. A burst of gunfire roared through the air, no longer muffled by the building, and Lyle knew the fight had reached the roof. He rolled to the side and fell from a ledge, his heart in his throat as he imagined all thirty-nine floors flying past him in a rush, but it was barely a foot down. He’d fallen into a low gutter that ran around the edge of the roof, and cowered there in the darkness, hoping the attackers wouldn’t see him.
“Get them up here,” said a voice, and Lyle couldn’t help himself: he uncovered his head and looked up.
It was Susan, in a black combat vest, armed with holstered guns and a squeeze bottle of lotion in each hand. A group of similarly dressed people behind her—not just an angry mob but a well-armed paramilitary force—hustled two bound captives out of the stairway. Lyle couldn’t see their faces, but they wore standard police uniforms; they hadn’t come from the UN compound, but outside somewhere. Why would they bring them up here? he wondered.
And whose DNA is in those bottles?
One of the rebels saw him and squirted a long blast of ReBirth toward his face. Lyle twisted away and scrambled to his feet, shedding his contaminated suit coat behind him as he ran; he didn’t think the lotion had touched his skin. The far end of the building was a chaos of screaming and shoving, too many people crammed violently into a space too small to hold them. The crowd had wrapped around the back side of the elevator housing and started to flow back toward the first side of the building again, but a group of rioters with guns and lotion blocked them off. Lyle felt a hand grip his arm like a vise, fingernails biting deep into his flesh, and turned to see not Cynthia but Lilly, her eyes wide with fear.
“We’re gonna die,” she said.
“I think it might be something worse,” said Lyle.
The revolutionaries clambered up a ladder to the top of the elevator housing, and Susan appeared above them on the rim of the roof. She sprayed her bottle of lotion onto the crowd, packed too tightly to move or dodge. Lyle cringed, ducking low with Lilly to avoid the spray of ReBirth. Ira/Moore caught a thick bead of it on his ear and screamed like a child, trying desperately to get it off. With so much lotion in the crowd they were contaminating each other now, squealing like pigs in a slaughterhouse.
“You’re the only leaders the world has left,” said Susan. “If anyone can get the word out, it’s you.”
“Our own countries have forgotten us!” shouted Tanzania, and got a face full of ReBirth for his trouble.
“The countries of the world are convinced that ReBirth can solve their problems,” said Susan. “You need to take this message back to them, and you have four weeks to do it. ReBirth is not the answer, it is the problem.”
“You think we don’t know that?”
