The Subprimes (27 page)

“Have you seen Ronin?” I ask.

“I thought he was here.”

“I can't find him,” I say. “We need to look for him.” But Gemma starts blinking furiously, her eyes reddening, and for a second I think she is starting to cry. Then I feel the sting myself. The burning around my eyes, in my mouth, down my throat. I know this feeling. I've been pepper-sprayed before.

IT WAS A YOUNG SECURITY
tech, watching a few of his colleagues go over to the other side, who felt a wave of anger at his peers. This was not team play! Their betrayal had to be punished by a big dose of pepper spray—a compound named, he mistakenly believed, for the two women whose company hired him. Pulling on a breather mask, he trotted forward, past Sargam, unhooded his nozzle, and fired a stream at the front row of subprimes, dousing a few who could not turn their heads away in time. For those in the line of spray, the sensation of suffocation was dreadful and immediate. Sargam had arranged for citizens to be ready with buckets of water, yet when they ran forward,
the other techs interpreted it as a threat and began unleashing streams of oleoresin capiscum themselves.

The assault was captured by the news drones; the footage of the defenseless and seated citizens of Valence being sprayed by uniformed and masked security techs was immediately upsetting to everyone who watched it. Even Fox News could not cut away from the drone footage quickly enough, a newscaster venturing that despite the clear moral and legal justification for their actions, perhaps the security techs had acted prematurely.

The howls of the afflicted were awful, women screaming, men coughing hoarsely. Water washed away the OC, the active ingredient, but not the penetrating sting. They struggled to keep their eyes open, as they had been instructed, to let their tear ducts wash away what they could, but the pain was awful, a burning sensation that seemed to emanate from under their skin.

Bailey and Jeb doubled over where they sat, coughing, trying to spit out as much of the pepper spray as they could. Like their fellow citizens, they had been briefed on this process, but the actual pain from the attack was impossible to prepare for. This was unprecedented suffering, a slicing sensation around the eyes and nostrils and neck and armpits, and even in the groin, every part of the body with a gland near the skin. Yet in their moments of most profound distress, they felt the soothing sensation of soft hands against their skin, this contact of fingers and palms immediately drawing away the pain. They looked up.

Sargam walked down the row of citizens, laying hands on those who had been sprayed. Each of the mothers and fathers along the line felt the relief, immediate and undeniable, and then gratitude that the pain was gone. What had actually happened? Had Sargam healed them?

The veteran cops across from the subprimes, who had rousted Ryanvilles with doses of OC in the past, had never seen anyone
recover from a blast this quickly. They had watched Sargam walk down the writhing row, and had seen her laying on hands, but it just didn't make sense.

“Hit 'em again!” shouted an officer.

The uniformed crowd parted, and through the ranks walked a figure in a blue suit and white shirt, wearing a breather mask. His face, showing through the visor, was buck-toothed and red, and it took a few seconds before everyone realized this was Pastor Roger. He came forward, hands clasped, and then waved his arms, as if to quiet an audience. Only no one was applauding here.

He looked at the rows of subprimes who still, miraculously, held their ground, at the woman in white who walked among them, summoning some kind of deviltry to sooth these anti-angels. He saw the magazine writer who had libeled him, and whom he believed he was now suing. The writer was hunched over, trying to catch his breath, and next to him was a woman who looked familiar to him too.

Steve Shopper, wearing a gas mask of his own, ran up, carrying a megaphone, which he switched on and handed to Pastor Roger.

“My friends,” he began. “My fellow Americans. Why has it come to this? To your violence? To our having to defend ourselves? To confrontation. That is not our wish.”

The citizens of Valence booed the pastor, a few chanting, “
People helping people. People helping people
.”

“—We all want the same things. We all want freedom. We have different ways of expressing that. Now, if you would—”

He paused. Sargam had still not even glanced at him. She was in the distance, still administering to her flock, still with this ridiculous laying on of hands.

Pastor Roger had been warned by the Pepper Sisters not to go to the off-ramp. Yet here he was, drawn by the scene, the news
drones circling overhead, the nonstop, cross-platform coverage of the confrontation. If this was a showdown of good versus evil, then he
had
to be there, at the forefront, in the lights. And yet, confronting Sargam in person, and finding that she did not even acknowledge him, he found it . . . emasculating.

He threw down the megaphone and retreated, uttering to the commander, “Smite them!”

As the first row of cops and techs swept forward, Sargam stood her ground. The men were unsure of what to do, until one leaped to tackle her, and then three more pinned her to the ground, ripping off her white leather jacket, her olive-brown arms pulled behind her so that she was facedown on the pavement, her eyes welling with tears.

The broadcast images were close shots of her face. And then a man who would later be identified as a journalist working on a story about Sargam came running into the frame, attempting to pull away the security techs before he was thrown down and kicked in the ribs. These shots were broadcast around the world and went viral with such urgency that they soon superceded even the whales in popularity.

I'M BEING HELD DOWN, MY
face stings, my ribs feel as if they've been broken, and I think I'm suffocating because one of these fat techs is sitting on me. I realize they might just let me die. That my impulse to run out and help Sargam could literally have meant the end of me. With my face pressed down against the pavement, I feel the intense vibrations of the approaching Joshua and I wonder if perhaps they will just leave me here to be run over by the giant machine. But of course if Sargam is also run over, then I will be an afterthought, even in the coverage of my own death.

A battle rages, or not really a battle, more like a gas attack as cops and techs spray and march through the ranks of our good citizens, cutting their plastic cuffs with clippers and lifting them off the ground and hauling them away.

Look at me, suddenly passionate and acting impulsively, a lifetime of cynicism overruled as I rush in to defend my idol. And what do I get for my newfound idealism? A boot in the ribs. Around me, I can hear the spraying of the gas, the shouts and screams of the good men and women, and under it all, like the bass line to this holocaust, the Joshua's motors and treads, rumbling closer and closer.

The big-bottomed tech who has been sitting on me leaps up and points in the direction of the Joshua. All the attention has shifted, and a hush settles over the battle. Even the drones are buzzing off to the east.

THE BOYS HATCHED THEIR PLAN:
an assault on the pilot station, a decapitation, the ultimate Gorilla attack, as asymmetrical as warfare gets. Two boys barely ten feet tall, combined, taking down a four-hundred-and-eighty-foot monster. The steel latch to the station opened with just a turn, and the men inside the soundproofed station became aware of the change in volume as the external noise of the diesels and treads rushed in. The crew was executing a complicated maneuver, bringing the Joshua up a slight grade while banked to one side, always a dicey operation with a vehicle as unwieldy as this, when they turned toward the open door and were momentarily confused at the sight of a dirty-faced, ragamuffin boy. Was this some kind of school tour they weren't told about? Otherwise, what the hell was he doing here? And why was he so filthy?

Ronin felt as if he'd played this game before, had seized enemy bunkers and command posts and missile silos, had thrown the
levers that overthrew an evil empire. He charged toward the vast instrumentation panel, reaching for the long, green-handled levers. There were eight of them, one for each tread, and the boy could not know this but a computerized steering management system distributed power to each tread pod to keep the Joshua both upright and moving forward. The levers allowed for manual overrides to this program, in the event of the Joshua having to reach a certain drilling position or an angled ascent. In reaching for these levers, the boy was changing the power flow, upsetting the delicate balance of the Joshua at the very moment when the vast machine was moving up an eight-percent grade at a thirty-degree angle. Perhaps it was just bad luck for everyone involved, but this was the most vulnerable phase of the operation, and Ronin, leaping at the levers, and actually securing four and shoving them forward, increased the speed of the right tread pods so that the vehicle pivoted awkwardly upward, putting the entire edifice at risk.

The six crew members grabbed Ronin, yanking him away. Meanwhile, seizing the opportunity, Tom charged through the open door, attacked the same levers, manipulating them as crazily as he could in the hope of somehow confusing the beast.

Ronin could see in the eyes of the men the panic at what was happening before he sensed it himself. The Joshua was shuddering in a manner they had never felt before, and a creaking and groaning noise was emitted from the strained metal of the monster. They released Ronin, unhanded Tom, and rushed to the instrument panel, desperate to redistribute power, to level the Joshua, which was clearly listing, perhaps even tipping, to starboard. This allowed the boys to renew their efforts at sabotage; they grabbed at what they could, crawling between legs and reaching under arms, so that the men struggled to operate the Joshua while keeping the boys at bay. At one point, three of them
were chasing the boys, while the other three attempted to right the Joshua, and in an effort to escape, Ronin crawled between the legs of one engineer and leaped on the panel itself, stepping over a half-dozen toggles and levers and switches, throwing into disarray everything, from the Joshua's plumbing to the elevator doors, and finally, causing a system shutdown that switched the entire operation to manual.

The sensation of the port treads losing contact with the earth was at first a feeling of leaning to the right, as each man detected his own weight shift, but then there was the unmistakable lightness of the vehicle itself tipping, of the floor shifting, and then the men stumbling to regain their footing as the view out the front window was of the horizon going vertical. The Joshua was falling.

The boys dropped, banging roughly against the control panel, their faces and hands and legs getting cut and scraped as they flew against the side windows. Tom fell so that he was pressed facedown against the window, his blood reddening the glass in front of him as the ground rushed up to meet him. He rolled over and then was facing up, catching for a moment the terrified expressions of the engineers, who were falling past him and out the opened pilot station door. He saw Ronin beside him, whose features were also distorted by the angle and by fear, but who looked back at Tom and whose eyes seemed to widen with a flicker of recognition and satisfaction.

THE UNLIKELINESS OF WHAT THEY
were seeing created a sense that this was something they were watching on television or in a movie. Yet here it was, right in front of them, the groaning and clattering confirmation of what they were seeing with their own eyes. The Joshua was tipping over. For a moment, the good
citizens of Valence began cheering, but then stopped. They all saw the bodies falling from the pilot station, small, unmistakably human forms, diving, some twisting, but all with the same destination. The battle paused, as the techs and cops and good citizens of Valence all turned to stare.

The bodies fell, each creating a surprisingly gentle-looking puff as it hit the earth.

And then the Joshua came crashing down, all 22,000 tons hitting the desert floor with a massive percussive wallop. Immediately, there were several explosions as live wires sparked the pooling fuel. Next came a rolling cloud of dust and sand, spreading outward in every direction, enveloping them in brown and orange gusts. The air smelled of desert and oil and smoke, and was bitter to breathe. In the chaos, as everyone lost their bearings and froze, losing sight of each other in the brown cloud, Sargam slipped her plastic binds and ran toward the fallen monster.

Pastor Roger, walking east, watched the collapse and the bodies falling and felt, and not for the first time, that perhaps this day wasn't going as God would have wished.

I AM ON MY FEET,
accompanied by a massive pain in my side, and looking up at the huge robot keeling over, and my first thought is: This is an amazing story. I scan the sky for news drones and I'm disappointed to see a dozen of them circling the site. I gasp when I see a few figures falling from the command bridge atop the Joshua, tiny figures that immediately give perspective to the massive scale of the thing. These are people, falling, some of them larger than others—

That's a child, a boy, somehow a familiar shape to me, spinning through the air, and it makes me think of my boy.

THE BOY, TOM, THOUGHT HIS
last thought. Of his mother, peeling an apple.

THERE WERE NO ORDERS GIVEN
but the collective consciousness of both sides dictated action. The uniformed techs and the citizens of Valence all ran en masse to the site. The battle had evolved, in seconds, into a rescue mission.

Their respirators enabled the techs to breathe despite the thick swirl of particles as they ran forward, while Sargam blinked furiously as she attempted to feel her way through. A few of her colleagues came forward with her, and a few confused techs attempted to keep them in line until they realized the futility of the situation and instead cut the plastic cuffs off those they had arrested.