Wednesday, October 31
11:39 P.M.
Brooklyn
44 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
Three weeks later, Lyle was still himself; the lotion had either been Lyle DNA or plain old lotion. He couldn’t escape himself, it seemed, plus now he was broke.
The Lyle Camps were becoming infamous: the squalid conditions, the humiliations, the hunger and thirst. The secondary camps had it the worst—after they figured out who you were they shipped you off into hard labor and the brink of starvation. The former was intended to solve the latter, but they couldn’t feed them fast enough. There were too few resources left in the country these days, and too many Lyles.
Lyle had heard the latest numbers on TV earlier in the evening, catching the tail end of a news story as he waited for night to fall so he could try to find some food. “Nine hundred thousand Lyles in the U.S. alone,” it said. “There are now more Lyles in America than Pacific Islanders, including persons of partial Hawaiian descent. There are more Lyles than Navajo, and experts predict that if the number of Lyles continues to rise at the current rate it will reach one million by late next week, two million the week after, and three million by Thanksgiving. That will be more than all Native Americans combined.”
Lyle heard a lull in traffic and peeked out. He had a few seconds to dart across the street, and he jumped up to take it. Flatbed “Lyle wagons” cruised the streets in this area, rounding up Lyles and hauling them off to the camps, and it was all but impossible to keep clear of them. He’d stretched his meager food out as long as he could, laying low in an old drug den—now more of a flophouse for refugee Lyles—and ventured out tonight under cover of Halloween. He had a small rubber mask, an old Ronald Reagan costume, and hoped that he could at least make it to the store and back without getting caught. The mask was good cover, but it narrowed his vision and made it hard to run. He scanned the street up and down before dashing across to the other side. There was a cigarette shop there run by an old Ethiopian man who didn’t ask questions, and Lyle figured he could spend the last of his money and stock up on whatever the old man had—you could never tell from one day to the next what any store would manage to find and sell. Lyle could make it a few more days, at least, and then … He didn’t know.
He thought about robbing the store, but it felt cruel and wrong. That’s not who I am, he thought. I haven’t fallen that far yet.
A light and a siren flared up behind him, and without even thinking Lyle ran.
“Please no,” he muttered, “don’t take me now.” He ducked down an alley and leaped over a body—unconscious or dead he couldn’t tell—and bolted for the far end, hoping to make it over the fence before the police could follow him. He’d never been especially fit, but months of living on the street had made him lean and wiry, and this was not the first fence he’d climbed. The cops were close behind him, but he cleared the fence and leaped down, pelting down the alley and into the street—
—right into the side of an armed soldier.
“Stand down!” the soldier shouted, and Lyle barely had time to orient himself before five soldiers surrounded him in a semicircle, their rifles raised and trained on his chest. “Remove the mask, sir!”
“I’m sorry,” Lyle stammered, taking a step back, “I wasn’t attacking or anything, I was just running—”
“Remove the mask, sir, or we will remove it for you.”
“President Reagan,” said a voice behind Lyle’s back, and a moment later the two cops who’d been chasing him puffed into view. They looked familiar, but Lyle couldn’t place them.
“Please stand down, Officers,” said the leader of the soldiers, “we have this one.”
“We had him first.”
“Sure you did.”
“We’re all on the same team, guys,” said one of the cops. Lyle saw the man’s nametag—Luckesen—and the odd surname sparked a memory. Luckesen and Woolf, the same two policemen who’d arrested him for a house robbery in … It seems like years ago, but it was only, what, March? April? Lyle dropped his head, terrified that they would recognize him, but almost immediately he laughed at the idiocy of the idea. He was crying, too, and blinked the moisture away. They see a dozen or more Lyles every day, he thought. They won’t know me from any of them—and they have no way of knowing I’m the real one.
Both the cops and the soldiers were dressed in what had become the standard urban “armor”: long pants tucked into boots, long sleeves snapped into long gloves, and a helmet with a face shield. No exposed skin. The soldiers were further dressed in thick, armored vests and groin pads, and Lyle remembered just a few months ago seeing that same costume in news footage of soldiers in Africa and Afghanistan. An occupying army, now called home to occupy New York. It was too much, and Lyle felt the tears come harder and hotter.
“He might not even be a Lyle,” said a soldier. “For all you know he hasn’t even done anything.”
“Of course he’s done something,” said Officer Woolf, “he was running. But on the off chance he’s not actually Ronald Reagan, how about we take that mask off. If he’s a Lyle, he’s all yours. Otherwise we take him into the station and figure out what else he’s guilty of.”
“And then we buy him a drink,” said Officer Luckesen, “and congratulate him for somehow avoiding Lylehood.”
“Take it off,” said a soldier. Lyle was still crying, hearing the words without understanding them, and didn’t move. “I said take it off!”
Lyle pulled off the mask, squinting at the sudden influx of light in his peripheral vision.
“No surprise there,” said Woolf. “Have fun with him.”
“Get in the truck,” said a soldier, and gestured with his rifle for Lyle to start walking. The truck was a standard military flatbed, covered with an ad hoc cage of wood and metal and chicken wire. Lyle paused at the back of it, looking up at five other Lyles with sad, desperate faces, crouched in the corners with their arms wrapped around themselves for warmth. I could tell them who I am, he thought. I could tell them I’m the real one, I could prove it to them, and then I’d go to a real prison instead of this hellhole. Almost as soon as he thought of it he discarded the idea. Lyle Fontanelle, the real one, was the cause of all this—the mad scientist who’d destroyed the world. He had to convince them he was somebody else.
“Do you require assistance into the truck, sir?” The soldier’s question was polite and formal, but his voice was a businesslike growl. He was only asking because he had to, and his assistance was not likely to be comfortable.
“I’m fine,” said Lyle, hoisting himself up. “I can do it.” He wandered to the back of the cage and sat down by the others. “So,” he said, trying to think of Lyle-based small talk. “How long have you all been Lyles?”
“Five weeks,” said one. The other four chimed in with time frames of their own, ranging everywhere from ten weeks down to two. The first one looked back at him. “How about you?”
“Way too long,” said Lyle. He took a breath, playing with the mask in his hands. He needed to convince the camp he was one of these men, an innocent bystander accidentally cursed with the face of a war criminal. That would take details, and those details had to sound authentic. He nodded. “Five weeks for me, too,” he said, trying out the story to see how well it fit. He looked up. “How did it happen?”
They told their stories one by one, Lyle listening intently for any information he could use to blend into the crowd. One of them had bought black market ReBirth to try to impress his girlfriend; another one had bought some for his girlfriend, and accidentally gotten it on both of them. “I thought we could be, like, lesbians together, but then we turned into men and I broke up with her.” Two of the Lyles in the truck had originally been women; one had used the lotion to hide from an abusive husband, figuring life as a Lyle was still better than life as a victim. The other just wanted to be taller.
“I never used it at all,” said the last Lyle. He was the one who claimed to have only been a Lyle for two weeks, still halfway through the transformation. He must have been fairly Lyle-ish before—same height, same race, same gender—because the transformation was advanced enough to be easily identifiable. Or maybe we’re all just getting really good at seeing Lyles, thought Lyle.
“Is that really your story?” asked the Lyle One. “You never used it, so you’re not a criminal and they have to let you go? You know that doesn’t work.”
“I never used it,” Lyle Five insisted, shrugging helplessly. “It’s illegal—no offense to any of you—so I never touched the stuff. I was never even tempted. And then one day I just … started changing.”
“That’s not how it works,” said Lyle Two. The one with the Lyle-ized girlfriend. “You probably got it on you and just didn’t notice, like I did.”
“Or somebody put it in the water,” said Lyle Three. “You heard what happened in São Tomé.”
“Those pictures were fakes.”
“That’s just what the liberal media wants you to think.”
“Oh, here we go, a nutjob.”
“Wait,” said Real Lyle. “Maybe it really is in the water. The number of Lyles has ballooned in the last month, exponentially, but the black market availability has dropped off, so where are they getting it? And almost all of the new Lyles have been right here in New York City, so it’s obviously something local. Why not the water?”
“Who would put Lyle lotion into the water?” asked Lyle Five.
“White supremacists,” Lyle Three spat. “Turn everyone in New York City into a white guy, and you’ve just wiped out a massive chunk of blacks, Asians, Latinos, Indians, you name it. They’re whitewashing the whole city.”
“Maybe they did it as some kind of power grab,” said Lyle One. “I mean, like, it’s illegal to be Lyle, right? So if they make everyone Lyle, we’re all criminals and they can throw us all in jail, just like this. Pretty soon the whole country will be a jail, and they’ll control everything.”
“Maybe it was Lyle activists,” said Lyle Four softly, “trying to make Lyles so prevalent no one bothers to hurt them anymore.”
“That’s stupid,” said Lyle Three.
“What if it was an accident?” asked Real Lyle.
The others frowned at him. “What?”
“What if somebody stole a whole ton of Lyle lotion,” said Real Lyle, “like the stuff that disappeared from the NewYew plant when the government tried to seize it. They tried selling it on the black market, but they didn’t realize it was all Lyle, and when they did they stopped and they dumped it all—flushed it down the toilet, dropped it in a reservoir, whatever. What if somebody thought they were getting rid of it, and poisoned our water supply by accident?”
The group was silent, thinking. After a long moment Lyle Four whispered: “That’s the scariest theory yet.”
“I know,” said Lyle, wrapping his arms tightly around himself for warmth. “I know.”