They were waiting for something.
The uprising, Chad thought.
And Lazarus.
It was almost time.
The crowd was stirring. There was an excited babble of voices. Chad had a vague sense of something approaching. Then he saw the crowd part, and Jake Barnes emerged to climb the stairs to the platform.
Wanda leaned over to whisper in Chad’s ear. “Jake is a sort of emcee. He’s a popular fixture at Gatherings. The Overlords consider him one of their own.” She chuckled. “They’re about to experience the mother of all paradigm shifts.”
Jake waved to the cheering crowd, then held his hands out palms down in the universal shushing gesture, and stepped to the podium. A silence punctuated by expectant murmurs ensued, and Jake surveyed the crowd in the smiling, almost arrogant manner of a benevolent king.
He cleared his throat and leaned toward the microphone. “Good evening, and welcome to this week’s Gathering.”
A surge of enthusiastic applause necessitated another shushing gesture on Jake’s part. “Good to see all of you so fired up.” He cleared his throat again, adopted a more overtly serious tone. “Now, I know you all have certain expectations of these things. You come to have a good time and forget your troubles. Given the sad circumstances of your lives, that’s understandable.”
More murmurs.
Voices raised in confusion. Barnes had already deviated from the standard opening statement in a startling way. The old man’s opening words sounded like a prologue to a deeply philosophical, ruminative speech, which would be the antithesis of anything the bulk of his audience was expecting. They were geared up to hear the sarcastic comments and jokes that peppered his usual patter. Chad saw more than confusion out there. There was concern. Some slaves appeared worried their weekly dose of “fun” was in jeopardy. A guard at the square’s perimeter directed a comment to one of his colleagues and the colleague shrugged, a the hell if I know gesture.
Barnes slowly surveyed the sea of faces before him, appearing to take the measure of everyone in attendance.
Some fidgeted beneath his gaze. Others looked angry. Someone called out, “Spit it out, for Christ’s sake!”
A smattering of boos ensued, but there was a sense that the heckler spoke for them all.
Barnes smiled. “Patience.” The old man took a deep breath and expelled it in a slow, deliberate manner. “Tonight is a momentous night.”
Wanda hooked a hand around Chad’s elbow. “Come.”
Chad, perplexed, frowned at her. “What? He’s just getting started.”
But he allowed Wanda to pull him along. “So are we,” she said.
Chad looked at Todd, who was strolling along ahead of them. He realized then where they were going-the big tent he thought of as “backstage.” Two guards were stationed outside the hanging flaps of the entrance. They were stolid behind their visors, shotguns positioned across their chests. They projected an aura of steely efficiency and ruthlessness, and Chad cursed his mind for selecting that moment to replay the image of Cindy’s brains splashing the guard’s vest.
Todd stopped to say something to the guard on the right, who barely seemed to acknowledge his presence. Wanda’s hand closed on Chad’s elbow, and they drew to a stop several feet outside the tent. “Calm down.”
“I’m calm.” But he’d said it too fast.
Wanda smiled. “Okay, Chad. But keep this in mind. We’re already in a restricted area. The people of Below know not to come back here.”
Chad frowned at the guards. “Yeah?”
“Yes.” She nodded at the guards. “Ours, Chad. Don’t worry about them. I have a more pressing concern. I need you to tell me something.”
Chad sighed. “Sure.”
The crowd’s rumblings were growing louder. Chad heard the old man say something about the Russian revolution and tsars. He was setting the stage for something extraordinary, and some in his audience were beginning to sense it.
Wanda’s smile was gone, replaced by an expression that was all business. “I need to know if you have a weak stomach, Chad.”
He didn’t really have to think about that one. “Not anymore.”
She nodded. “Good.”
Chad saw Todd disappear through the hanging flaps. Wanda pulled him forward again, and they stepped between the guards. He saw her hands curl around one of the flaps, and he experienced a sudden, vivid jolt of precognition. Something he really wasn’t prepared for awaited him inside the tent. What, he didn’t know, but it was going to be really, really bad.
He swallowed hard. “Wanda-“
“Easy, Chad.”
Then they were inside the tent and the back of his throat felt a tickle of bile. Chad put a hand to his forehead, squinted, and tried to take it all in. “My God …”
The inside of the tent was a charnel house. He saw bodies. No way to tell how many, because they were in pieces. Blood pooled and ran in rivers on the ground. The victims all appeared to be middle-aged Caucasian men. The men who’d done the killing stood in a loose circle around the mutilated bodies, all of them wielding still-dripping machetes. Their clothes and faces were spattered with blood. Chad recognized just one of them-Shaft, the only black man in the room.
Chad wavered, his head going fuzzy, but Wanda’s grip around his elbow tightened, keeping him upright until he steadied himself. “What happened here?”
Todd came toward him with a machete. “The beginning, Chad. The uprising’s first victory”
Wanda said, “These men were the Overlords, Chad. All of them.”
Shaft sneered. “Assholes never knew what hit ‘em. Was over in minutes.”
Chad flinched at the motion of Todd’s arm, but then he realized the kid meant to give him the machete. Chad took it with great reluctance, holding it lightly by the end of the handle. He wanted to tell them he wasn’t up to hacking people to pieces, but he knew there was no room for queasiness in this equation.
Todd nodded at another gap in the tent’s canvas wall. Chad looked and saw a shadowy set of steps he assumed led to the platform’s stage. “Our men hid in there, waiting for Jake’s verbal signal.”
Shaft chuckled. “Tsars, it was.”
Chad shuddered. “Jesus… how could you kill that many people so fast?”
Another man said, “You do what you have to do.”
Chad could only nod.
He’d heard that before, of course.
He realized then how clearly he could hear Barnes in the tent, almost as if the old man were standing right next to him. The old man was saying something about the inevitability of change, that no order lasts forever. Chad wondered how long what remained of Below’s power structure would allow the now openly treasonous diatribe to continue. The crowd grew quiet as Barnes talked of the sacrifice made by Lazarus. The memory of the revered figure still possessed the power to instill a measure of solemnity. But new murmurs arose as the old man alluded to the Christian tale of their messiah’s resurrection.
The murmurs grew in volume, became a babble of agitated voices.
The old man couldn’t be saying what they thought he was saying.
Could he?
Chad was only dimly aware that Shaft had gone to work with the machete again, severing the few remaining strands of tissue that still connected a blood-flecked head to a mangled body. The head came loose with a stomach-clenching snap. The black man similarly liberated another head. He grasped both of them in one hand by strands of long hair, and he moved toward the stage entrance.