Vivian Apple Needs a Miracle (8 page)

“You're sure this can't be traced back to us?”

She nods. “Suzy set it up and she's a genius. The Wi-Fi at this place is so well protected, the FBI couldn't track us down.”

Suzy has her back to us at another desk, typing intimidating-looking code. She turns, frowning, at Harp's words. “The FBI could
definitely
track us down, if they wanted to. But the Church won't know how, and we'll be in Los Angeles by the time they realize what you're posting. That's when the real trouble will start.”

“That's extremely encouraging, Suzy, thanks,” I say, and she giggles.

“Look alive, Apple!” Harp grabs my head and turns it back toward the screen. “The fate of the world rests on your shoulders right now. No pressure.”

Diego was reluctant to approve Harp's plan. Winnie finally convinced him that it couldn't hurt—though I think she pushed for it mainly as a way to keep me out of trouble. Now I stare at Harp's headline. Picking carefully at the laptop's keys with my left hand—my right still firmly encased in its splint—I begin to tell our story:

We found the place late at night in Point Reyes. There were several statues out front that confirmed it as a Church of America compound.

“What the hell?” mutters Harp in my ear.

“I can't write if you're reading over my shoulder!”

“Yeah, clearly.” She reaches over me, hitting delete until the screen is blank except for her headline. “You can't start at the end of the story. A lot of important shit went down before we got to the compound. You have to introduce yourself—that's what's going to draw people in, once they realize you're one of the girls on the feed.”

“Okay.” I nod. “That makes sense.”

My name is Vivian Apple and I am 17 years old. I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

You may be wondering why I am writing this blog post. Well,

I hear Harp groan and I look up at her. “What's wrong?”

“‘You may be wondering why I am writing this blog post,'” Harp reads in pinched tones, pushing an invisible pair of glasses up the bridge of her nose. Then in her normal voice, she says, “Come on, Viv. It isn't an assignment.”

“You
literally
assigned it to me!” I exclaim. “Why can't you do it?”

Harp makes a face. “I can barely spell, Viv.”

“I've read your texts; you spell fine.” I stand, stepping away from the desk. “You're the interesting one. You're the one with two working hands. Why don't
you
try?”

Harp stares at the laptop. After a moment she settles uncertainly into the chair. Her fingers hover over the keyboard for one long beat. She looks up at me.

“I don't know how to do this! It's going to sound dumb!”

But I don't even need to encourage her. She turns back and begins to type. I watch the words fly easily onto the screen.

What up, America!

Probably you're wondering what the deal is with those two teen girls on the Church of America's news feed. Probably you're like, “Better them than me, ha ha ha!” as you and your family shiver like little baby chicks in your homes trying to pretend you believe in the word of Frick so that the Church doesn't come to your door to slap the stale bread crusts out of your kids' hands and burn your wives at the stake for their prostitutely ways. COOL LIFE, BRO! But guess what: I am one of the girls on the Church of America's news feed, and I'm about to tell you how they straight-up faked that motherfucking Rapture.

Harp pauses and reads what she's written. I see a little gleam of satisfaction in her eyes when she glances at me. “Too aggressive?”

I laugh and shake my head. “It's perfect, Harp. Seriously perfect.”

Harp beams and keeps typing. I watch as she weaves our story: she begins with the Rapture's Eve party, then the tense days immediately following our parents' collective disappearance, Raj's death, my return to Pittsburgh, Peter, every stop we made on our journey across the continent. It's funny and quick, and I begin to feel a sudden sureness blazing through my veins, because who'd read this story and doubt the girl who wrote it? How could anyone who read it not
want
to believe her? Maybe the blog won't keep the militia's attack from happening—I'm still not sure I want it to—but at least, for now, it makes us feel less voiceless. I feel like more than a face on the feed for the first time since the Church published my picture—I feel like a human being again.

Picture us, sweet reader: three bold and—dare I say—stunning (you saw the feed, you know we look like the stars of a romantic high school vampire soap opera; we are
babes
) American youths, standing there in front of Beaton Frick, who has just admitted to poisoning a(n unclear) percentage of the so-called Raptured. We are not pleased. We're pretty much tearing through the seven stages of grief at warp speed, and my sweet buddy Viv (once a timid valedictorian type, now an increasingly fearless vixen and newly crowned make-out queen) is faster than anyone. She hits anger way before I do and how does she handle it? SHE STRUTS OVER TO FRICK AND BREAKS HER FUCKING HAND ON HIS CRAZY OLD MAN FACE.

“I didn't break it!” I protest. “It's only a sprain!”

“Poetic license, Viv. ‘Sprains her fucking hand' doesn't sound nearly as good.”

She types on, describing the Three Angels (
Mulvey, Blackmore, and a TBD creep, all of them in some seriously weak-ass angel costumes, like literally they'd just wrapped themselves in sheets; it was embarrassing
) and our escape. She doesn't share her doubts about Peter; maybe just for my sake she paints him as steady and noble, a romantic hero. She ends the post with an exhilarating plea:

I swear by everything in this world I hold dear—my dead brother Raj and parties and gratuitous swearing and my best friend in this or any universe, Vivian Harriet Apple (note: I do not actually know Viv's middle name)—that this is true. Consider this: In your heart, do you honestly find it any crazier than the idea that your loved ones just beamed on up into heaven this past March, that if you kill enough sweet innocent gay boys you'll get cleared to beam on up yourself? You've let me down a lot these last few years, America, but even I don't believe you're that goddamn stupid. So ponder this tale, sweet reader. If you find yourself believing it, I ask you to do three things only:

1. GET ANGRY. We should all be so pissed at the Church of America that we're willing to break our hands in the metaphorical punching of its metaphorical face. Take that fear you've been living with for three years—that distrust of your friends and neighbors, that nervous anticipation of September 24th, the supposed last day of this beautiful messed-up world—and turn it into unseemly stone-cold anger. Say to yourself, “The Church of America has fucked with the wrong citizenry!”

2. Tell someone else the story. Even if they don't want to hear it—especially if they don't want to hear it. The Church can kill me and Viv, but they can't kill the story.

3. Help us find the missing Believers. Before your Raptured loved one disappeared, did he or she say anything weird(er than usual)? Any references to random locations, upcoming trips? “I hear Minnesota is lovely this time of year”? Anything inexplicable left behind? Pamphlets titled
Things to Do in Denver Before You're Raptured
tucked inside their Book of Frick? Strange charges on credit card statements, confusing numbers on phone bills? We know firsthand from one Believer who escaped Point Reyes that she'd been summoned to California weeks before the Rapture, told to move in secret. By any chance did the Believer in your life let the secret slip?

OK, that's it, you beautiful idiots. If you've got questions, leave them below. I've got nothing to hide except my current location.

xoxo Harpreet Janda, Fugitive

For more than three weeks, we wait.

Harp expected an instantaneous, explosive response, so we spend that whole first afternoon sitting by the laptop, refreshing the page, waiting for a comment. She shares it on her Twitter and her Facebook; she finds secular forums and subforums devoted to Rapture theories and posts the link in the comments. “The farther it reaches, the more people will buy it,” Harp says. “And once they buy it, they'll pass it on.” But there's no immediate response. Suzy shows us the stat counter she installed and we watch it faithfully, noting that there are in fact visitors—fifty-eight page views the first day, seventy-three the next. But on the third day, it drops to a dispiriting seventeen. Plus, there are no comments, no link-backs from other pages. Harp seems to be the only person spreading the story.

“It takes time,” she says hopefully, more than once, “for things to go viral. You have to make them get seen by the right people.”

Meanwhile, everyone at Cliff House relocates in shifts to the Los Angeles base Amanda has secured. We're to fully abandon Cliff House by the end of July. One night about a week after Harp posts our story, I wake to the sound of typing, to the now-familiar blue glow of the laptop screen. Harp sits in bed with her knees to her chest. The sky outside is black, freckled with stars, and the beds around us are empty—today Kimberly and Birdie left for LA with twenty others.

Harp sees me stir and quickly dims the screen. “Sorry, Viv! Didn't mean to wake you.”

“Any comments?” I ask hopefully, pulling myself up on my elbow.

“Still nothing. I'm researching other Rapture theories. There are thousands, Viv. Blogs, hashtags, whole forums. Listen to this guy.” She reads out loud. “‘When will these sheeple accept what the rest of us have known since well before March twenty-fourth: that Beaton Frick and his ilk are extraterrestrial life forms who abducted the Raptured for their own nefarious purposes. They're long gone, folks—they're getting cut up like rare steak in a laboratory on Venus.' There are one hundred fifty replies to this guy, all praising his sound logic. I posted a link to the blog in the comments, but why would people like this ever listen to a story like ours?”

“I don't know. Some people will go for the most outrageous answer, I guess. It's a weird thing that happened—why not believe it's part of something weirder?”

Harp sighs and pulls up a different page. “This one's from a professor of psychology at NYU. She says, ‘The Church of America resembles not a system of belief so much as a cult. Various factors—its charismatic leader, dogmatic principles, elaborate system of reward and punishment—raise red flags for those of us in the psychological community. While it would be intellectually irresponsible to hazard a guess as to the fate of the missing three thousand, one is sadly reminded of such tragedies as Jonestown and Heaven's Gate, mass murders and suicide pacts orchestrated by leaders who suspected their hold on their community to be slipping.'”

I sit up, electrified. “Harp, write to her! Send her our story! She can help us!”

But Harp shakes her head. “I can't. She's dead. Apparent suicide, although her family has questions.” She looks up, and I see the distress in her eyes. “It's dangerous to say this stuff out loud. It's dangerous to tell the truth and believe it. If it's safer to say the Rapture was freaky alien shit—if believing that
people
did this could get you killed—why wouldn't you believe the freaky alien shit? And even if you didn't, wouldn't you want to? It's like the Believers: better to convince yourself you're a good person, that someone's going to save you, than to believe you might be as flawed as everyone else, and that in the end, you're alone.”

“We can't control what anyone else believes. All we can do right now is speak up and hope somebody listens.”

“But there's no time!” Harp exclaims in a tight voice. “Here's another article—a scientist from Iowa, who went missing last week. He says, ‘We're dealing with alarming climate change across the globe, and it's not an act of God—it's manmade. We'll make it past September twenty-fourth without issue, but after that our path is unclear. We have maybe forty or fifty years until major food shortages slowly begin to eat away at the global population, and that's assuming something cataclysmic—an asteroid, a nuclear war, the explosion of the supervolcano underneath Yellowstone—doesn't occur first. We could conceivably slow this destruction down, but it would require huge overarching changes in the structure of our society—the kind of change we'll never achieve so long as we remain distracted by imaginary acts of God.'”

She stares at the screen a moment, then closes the laptop. I wait for her to lie down, but she doesn't.

“We knew that, Harp,” I say softly. “We knew the Church doesn't control the weather. You said it yourself—it's definitely coming. Whether in three months or in three hundred years.”

“I thought it would be much closer to three hundred years,” she whispers.

I don't know what to tell her. I want our story to be the life preserver that keeps us afloat, but I'm starting to understand how little purchase the truth actually affords us in this world. I consider reminding Harp of the militia's plan—if nothing else, we can at least destroy the people who have so confused our dying world. But I know that won't bring her comfort. At the moment, it barely comforts me.

The next morning, I help Robbie pack supplies in the kitchen—he's leaving for LA with some others this afternoon. I don't know him well yet. Robbie's got a thirteen-year-old boy's surliness, plus the excuse of grief to keep him silent. Birdie told us his story: his mother went devoutly Believer and his father ran off, leaving him behind; Robbie left home shortly before the Rapture and doesn't know where either of them is today. I've never heard him speak more than monosyllables before, but today Robbie looks up from the pile of silverware to mutter, “I read your friend's blog.”