The Revival Read Online Free

magazines of ammunition to spare. The twins are down to a crowbar with duct-tape handle and a Louisville Slugger. Not much to go on, but it’s all we have.
    Downstairs, the street is abandoned, but we can hear activity nearby—the dawn chorus of gunshots and screams. I can see my breath, and as we exit the building, snowflakes start to fall, appearing like a quintessence of the air, like it’s supersaturated with ice.
    The winter will be ugly. Last year, we burned everything we could and still lost people to the cold that crept up on us while we slept, extinguishing fires and lives.
    We hustle along with a folded-over bedsheet taut between us, carrying Brainbox and some of our gear. He clutches the biscuit, the nuclear trigger, close to his chest. He’s half awake and mumbling something over and over again. It sounds like “Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum.” But that makes no sense. Maybe it’s some kind of chemical formula.
    We have to move quickly before we lose the darkness. Every second, nature turns the brightness up a little more, and we’re more exposed. The snow starts blotting out the blackness, and we slip on the film of white that starts to coat the ground.
    The quickest way to the park is through Uptowners’ territory, a zigzag stair-stepping diagonal to East Fifty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. A dangerous mile to the site of the flares.
    â€œI don’t suppose you’d like to hit the subway?” asks Peter, scanning the surrounding buildings, any of which could house a lookout with a sniper rifle. He has his own gun at the ready, but there’s no way we can cover all the angles.
    I don’t even answer. The subway holds evil memories: headlong flight through the blind darkness, loss, and massacre. I’d rather die in the light.
    We totter up Third Avenue, past the shells of dead banks, their plate-glass windows long ago smashed, the ATMs scraped empty when money still meant something. Chain restaurants picked clean, stores looted, angry irregular cubes of shattered glass crunching underfoot. Cars siphoned. An urban landscape scoured free of everything useful.
    We avoid the wide lanes of Fifty-Ninth and head west on Sixtieth, which is lined with shrines to anachronism: a nail bar, a carpet store, a tailor. From here, it’s a quick jog across Park Avenue, Brainbox moaning as each step jars him. At the corner, there’s a stubby sandstone-and-brick building. A tattered banner says this was Christ Church Day School.
    I notice Kath has stopped. She’s staring up at the banner.
    â€œWhat is it?” I say.
    â€œI went here,” she says. “We played up on the roof. See the cage around the edge?”
    To keep balls, and children, from flying off and falling to the street below.
    â€œI didn’t know your family was religious,” I say.
    â€œWe weren’t religious,” she says. “We were rich. That’s what this school was for. Not God. Money.” She continues, strangely philosophical, “If your parents spent the money to get you in here, then you got the kind of education to get you into the next place. Chapin, Nightingale, Brearley, Buckley, Collegiate. And then maybe you could get into the Ivies. And then you could get into one of the big firms. Or work at the Met so you had stuff to talk about at cocktail parties and could meet the right people. Then you could marry somebody who was important enough or hot enough or rich enough and you could keep the whole cycle going. World without end. Amen.”
    She says it flatly, without acid, downright alkaline.
    â€œI’m glad it’s all over,” she says. “Let’s get out of here.”
    As we walk along, we come to a little stoop and she says, “The nannies would wait for us here. The third world, like, waiting for the first. If you didn’t know the deal, you might think they were moms here to pick up their kids. You might think that there were