“This geezer here is Jake Barnes.”
Barnes chuckled. “Geezer, my eye.” His gaze swung in Chad’s direction. “Don’t let my posture fool you, boy. I’m still ass-kicking capable.”
The kid was the last to be introduced. “And this is Todd Haynes, still wet behind the ears and barely out of his diapers.” Paradise tapped his skull. “But he’s got more going on up here than the rest of us combined.”
The kid’s serious expression never wavered. “I’m a genius. That’s just a fact of IQ testing. I’m counting on you to return me to the land of higher education and government grants.” He started to smile. “And I’m as tough as any of these assholes.”
Chad believed him.
Paradise clapped his hands, a signal that the formalities were at an end. “Okay, down to business.” A grim tone entered his voice. “I know you’ve all heard what happened to Cindy, and I have the sad task of confirming it. She’s dead. Early indications are it’s a retaliation for the death yesterday of a certain vendor we all know.”
Chad groaned.
He heard a murmur of other voices.
“Elvis Kennedy had friends you don’t trifle with. He was a bastard, an evil pervert, but he should’ve been left alone.” He smiled, a fragile expression that wavered on the fine edge of a sad exhalation. “Cindy’s sense of moral outrage finally outweighed her good sense. Perhaps she was emboldened by her emancipation, or maybe it was the nearness of our time of reckoning that prompted her action. But we can’t know what was in her mind, so conjecture is useless.”
He sighed.
Somebody sniffled.
Chad looked at Lazarus.
Paradise continued, “We don’t need to say a lot of words about Cindy. We know what kind of person she was. Brave and honorable. Invaluable to the cause. Everybody in this room loved her, including yours truly, but we must resist the temptation to succumb to grief.”
He moved to the center of the room, where he slowly surveyed the faces of everyone present. Chad could tell he was looking for chinks in the armor, subtle hints of weakness or anticipatory jitters. When he appeared satisfied with the resolve of his compatriots, he picked up his train of thought.
“Everybody here, with the obvious exception of Chad, knows what he or she has to do tonight. We’ve prepared for this day for years.” He glanced at Lazarus and Jake Barnes. “Some of us have waited decades for this day. We’ve worked too hard and come too far to be derailed by this tragedy. Failure is not an option, friends.”
His voice dropped a few notches and his eyes narrowed. “Destiny doesn’t take time off for grief, and neither will we. Not yet.”
Chad looked around the room and saw heads nodding. Paradise again assumed the manner of a motivator and master strategist. “The Gathering begins in a few hours. Slaves and guards from the outer perimeter will begin arriving sooner than that. Let’s be ready? His gaze fixed on Lazarus. “Ready for resurrection?” The old singer looked at the floor and sighed. He scratched the thick beard that was so much whiter than the grizzled images Chad recalled from old magazines. He drew in a big breath and exhaled it. His shoulders straightened, and he looked at Paradise. His eyes glimmered. “Yes, I’m ready.” Paradise smiled. “Let’s go over it all one last time.” And Chad began to see The Outpost’s back room for what it really was. A war room.
The time of the Gathering was drawing close. The banks of stadium lights began to dim, an approximation of the onset of night. Chad followed Wanda and Todd Haynes as they pushed their way through the milling slaves en route to the “square,” a place he was made to understand was what passed for a downtown in the hobbled-together community.
The square was a big open area between buildings. There was a platform for speakers at one end and a big tent behind it. Chad imagined Lazarus waiting in that tent, perhaps remembering what it was like to wait backstage before a concert. Since he knew the singer wasn’t in the tent, the image failed to coalesce. The old man was in a private room in one of the buildings that bordered the square, and he would be escorted to the stage directly from there when the time arrived for his moment in the spotlight.
There was a pit in the middle of the square. It was filled with the charred remains of previous Gathering bonfires. Chad saw slaves wheeling carts of fresh wood toward the pit, and he wondered how many of them, if any, were conspirators. That got him started examining the faces of everyone he saw, trying to decide who was a comrade in arms and who wasn’t. He’d been told that the weekly festivals were doses of uninhibited debauchery. He saw people drinking, but what he saw didn’t look like the initial stages of drunken carousing. A lot of people had bottles, but they were sipping from them. Nursing them. They looked like people who knew they had to be careful how much booze they consumed, like a bunch of designated drivers at the periphery of a massive pub crawl.
On the other hand, maybe he was seeing things that weren’t there. Maybe he’d seen one too many political thrillers in his time. In any case, he figured even a little paranoia was a dangerous thing.
Don’t assume anything, he thought.
Stick with what you know.
The rest of it’s out of your hands.
They circumvented the pit area on the way to the platform, where they joined a growing throng of people awaiting some imminent event. Chad stood off to the side of the platform with Todd and Wanda.
“What’s happening here?” he asked them.
Wanda stood there with her arms folded under breasts, her gaze turned away from him. “What usually happens is Below’s version of a vaudeville act. That’s first. You get actors, if you can call them that-they’re bad-who mock the power structure in skits so puerile you’ll swear they were written by five-year-olds. Controlled rebellion. Safe pseudoanarchy. Meshes with the whole concept of the Gatherings as an anesthetic of the spirit. Then, at some point, some of Below’s weakest, most pitiful people are brought onstage for public humiliation. It’s a crowd participation affair, with a panel of judges weighing suggestions from the crowd on the best ways to abuse the poor bastards. It’s the ultimate irony. The slaves, who have long been subject to acts of casual sadism, are encouraged to find a kind of catharsis in being sadistic to other slaves.”
Chad understood now why the woman had been Cindy’s friend.
She was sharp.
He said to Todd, ?I thought you were the genius.”
The kid smirked. “I am.” He slipped an arm around the woman’s waist. “I’ve just been rubbing off on her.”
Chad gawked.
He couldn’t help it.
Below was an awful, barbaric place, was probably earth’s closest approximation of an actual hell, but where else would a kid like Todd have a chance of getting laid by the likes of foxy Wicked Wanda?
Wanda was looking at him now. Perhaps she sensed what he was thinking. “I’m sorry if I’ve been abrupt with you, Chad. I loved Cindy, and …”
She didn’t have to say it. “I was with her when she died.”
She dropped her gaze. “Yes.”
“I couldn’t have saved her, Wanda.” He felt a dangerous edge of emotion rise within him. Compartmentalize, he thought. Compartmentalize. Oh, bullshit. “It just happened too fucking fast. I’ve never felt so useless. I would’ve given my life for her.”
Wanda looked at him again. “I believe you. I know there’s nothing you could have done. But I can’t stow my grief away like Paradise. I just can’t.”
Chad nodded. “I know.”
Chad’s own grief resurfaced. He was so consumed with angst he didn’t immediately perceive the flutter of excitement that rippled through the crowd. Then he looked up and noticed how many more people had gathered around the platform. The bonfire was already lit and crackling to life. He saw a few more obviously drunk people now. Armed guards patrolled the perimeter of the square, and Chad again thought he was able to discern who was with them and who wasn’t. Some of the guards, maybe most of them, projected an air of casual indifference. But a few of them seemed anxious, alternately studying the crowd, their fellow guards, and the nearby buildings.