“Let me talk to them!” Cynthia demanded.
“Be quiet,” Blauwitz hissed, “I can’t hear.” He pressed the phone close to his ear, covering his other ear with his hand. They held their breath and listened to him listen. “Hello?” he probed. “Hello, can you hear me? I can hear you, can you hear me?” He sighed in relief. “Oh, thank God.”
The crowd of hungry refugees clasped each other’s arms and shoulders excitedly, biting their tongues to keep from cheering.
“My name is Glenn Blauwitz, I’m a general with the United States Army, who is this?” Pause. “Hello? Are you still there? Hello?” He snarled and slammed the phone on the table. “I had him! He said he could hear me!”
The group deflated, many of them already wandering back to their own fruitless searches. The general rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands, and Lyle shook his head. That was the closest one they’d had—their first two-way communication. Lyle’s stomach rumbled, and he thought of the giant pile of food they’d locked in the back room, too suspicious to ever eat it. There was no real danger with anything packaged before July, but the lotion had technically existed since March, and their fear of misprinted packaging dates had caused them to eventually rule out anything from the past full year. They had water, constantly recirculated and repurified, but their food supplies were critically low.
“It was just a kid,” said Blauwitz. “Probably didn’t even know how to use his cell phone.”
“How many kids do you actually know?” asked Lilly.
“You should have let me talk,” said Cynthia. “You came on too strong—‘I’m a general with the United States Army.’ What was he supposed to think, that you needed his help? He thought you were going to arrest him and he hung up.”
“I don’t think you talking to him would have made him any less scared,” said Lyle. “We need Lilly to talk to people—she’s sweet and innocent; people will be falling over themselves to help her.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” said the general. He raised his voice so the whole room could hear him. “The next person who gets a connection, let Lilly talk.”
“What is she going to say?” asked Mexico. Lyle still had trouble remembering the man’s real name.
“I’ll ask them for help,” said Lilly. “Tell them where we are, that we have no food—”
“You can’t tell them where we are,” said Cynthia, “what if they come for us?”
“We want them to come for us,” said Lyle.
“We don’t know anything about them,” said Cynthia. “They could be bandits coming to steal our supplies.”
Lilly frowned. “Who would answer a distress call by stealing all their stuff?”
“I would,” said Cynthia.
“If we’re not asking for help why are we even doing this?” asked Dr. Shorey. “Are you just lonely?”
“We don’t need to be afraid,” said the general. “If anyone tries to attack us we’ve got five armed soldiers on the island, not to mention Ambassador Larracilla’s better with an assault rifle than any of us.”
“We’re doing this because we need to see what’s out there,” said Cynthia. “We’ve got the manpower, like he said, and we’ve got enough boats to stay mobile—we need to learn who’s out there, learn where they are, and strike.”
“I’ll make sure to leave that part of the plan out when I finally talk to someone,” said Lilly.
“We’re not pirates,” said Lyle.
“He’s right,” said China, “we don’t need to raid other refugees. We can probably get all the supplies we need just crossing to Long Island and raiding empty houses.”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Lyle.
“We have at least a week of food,” said the general, “more if we ration it carefully. If we haven’t made contact with anyone in a week, then we can start thinking about supply runs.”
“The earlier the better,” said Samoa. “No sense waiting for the last minute.”
“There is if we’re trying to avoid breaking the law,” said Dr. Shorey.
“You think there are still laws?” asked Cynthia. “You’re adorable.”
“We’re talking about days, but we might be here for weeks,” said China. “For all we know it could be months. We need to plan for the worst-case scenario.”
“The worst-case scenario is that the world has too many Lyles in it,” said Shorey. “Some temporary instability followed by some very specific clothing ads. Give the riots time to die down and the government will restore order.”
“The Russian government, by then,” said Cynthia. “I don’t think you’re grasping the full weight of our situation.”
“I don’t think any of you are,” said Lyle. “The Plum Island scientists haven’t seen what it’s like out there, but the rest of you have. ReBirth is in the water, it’s in the food, and it’s warping the human genome in unexpected, horrifying ways. People have extra chromosomes, they have not enough chromosomes, they have two genders, they have monkey DNA, for crying out loud. We didn’t even know it worked on nonhuman DNA, but guess what? It works on everything. It goes everywhere. For all we know it’s in the water table now, systemic to the entire biosphere—do you have even an inkling of what that means? It’s going to change the entire biological population of this planet, and it’s reached a point where almost every single one of those changes is a degradation of function.” He pointed at the Chinese ambassador. “He said our worst-case scenario was spending a few months here, but that is hopelessly, stupidly optimistic. We’re going to be here for years, and that’s a best-case scenario. Cancer is somewhere in the middle. The worst case is that you get so much competing DNA in your cells that you spend eternity as an androgynous chimpanzee squirrel with a cognitive disorder.” He gestured at the building. “We have a self-sustaining clean water system here, and that makes us potentially the safest people on the planet, but it also means we can’t go anywhere.” He shook his head. “Maybe ever.”
“You said the retrovirus was prone to mutation,” said Mexico. “Eventually it’s going to stop working.”
“Each one that mutates will be rebuilt by the billions of others,” said Lyle. “It’s never going away.”
Dr. Shorey looked at Cynthia. “Is he right about all that?”
“He’s being typically histrionic about it,” said Cynthia, staring at him coldly, “but yes, he’s probably right. He usually is.”
Lilly frowned. “Then why are you so mad at him?”
“She’s not mad, she’s planning something,” said Lyle, looking back at Cynthia. “That’s a lot more terrifying than anything I just said.”
“You’re not talking about a riot,” said Samoa. “You’re talking about … Armageddon.”
“And that means we’re not waiting out a riot,” China continued. “We’re founding a civilization.”
