Thursday, November 1
1:15 A.M.
New York
43 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
The truck eventually dropped them off at a local holding cell, and Lyle spent the night in the gym at a Brooklyn rec center, lying on a cot in a grid of nearly three dozen Lyles. They gave them jumpsuits to replace their old clothes, and almost immediately Lyle lost track of which Lyles were which—they all looked the same, even to him—and decided to just keep to himself instead. Most of the Lyles had apparently decided the same thing. The next morning they joined another group, probably a hundred Lyles in total, and together they were herded into the backs of the flatbed cage trucks for the drive upstate. It was colder on the highway than it had been in the city, and the soldiers issued them blankets to keep warm, though not enough for the group. Lyle didn’t put up a fight and thus never got one; he huddled in the center of the crowd, out of the wind, and tried to stay warm.
Their destination, Lyle noted with surprise, was the old NewYew plant, converted to a Lyle Camp, and he chuckled humorlessly at the irony. The guards were cold and stoic, nearly faceless behind their plastic riot masks, and they backed the trucks up to the front gate one at a time, unloading their cargo of Lyles into the vast open grounds of the camp. Lyle was in the second truck, and waited patiently for his turn, breathing slowly and trying to stay calm. The crowd in the truck thinned, and Lyle practiced the lies he’d concocted. He shuffled to the back of the truck and looked out over the crowd.
Ten thousand Lyles looked back.
“Keep moving,” said a guard, and Lyle jumped down, shocked into silence by the sheer quantity of Lyles. The new Lyles fresh off the truck were herded into a long line, and Lyle fell into place, shuffling forward as each new person was registered. He’d seen enough movies about prison to expect a lot of hooting at the new guys, but the mood instead was somber and clinical. Bored. The ten thousand Lyles in the camp saw the same faces every day, everywhere they looked, and a hundred new iterations didn’t add anything interesting to their world.
The line split, feeding into five smaller lines each with their own clerk, and Lyle soon found himself standing before a large woman with a laptop and an assortment of boxes. “Name?”
“William Shears,” said Lyle quickly.
“Address?”
“Homeless.”
The woman looked up, her expression only barely concealing her disdain for anyone without an answer to such a basic question. “You need an address. Finding out who you really are is the whole purpose of the Amnesty Camp program. Give me the last address you had, and when your number comes up they’ll try to connect you to your old life.”
So they are trying to catalog us, thought Lyle. What will they do when they find out who I am?
“Sir?” the woman pressed.
“It’s 4770 Ring Street, Star City, Iowa.” They’d know it was a false address when they tried to process him, but at least it gave him time to think of some other way to hide.
“Thank you,” said the woman. “You will be processed and interviewed in the order you arrived.” She hit a button on her laptop, and a small printer spat out a plastic label with the number 11874. She stuck it firmly to a bracelet and snapped it around his arm. “Do not lose this.”
“Is this an identifying code or a like a ‘take a number’ number?”
“Both.”
“Wow.” Lyle looked at the number again. “What number are you on now?”
“We’re on 463.”
“Wow,” Lyle said again. It’s going to be easier to lose myself in here than I thought. He looked at the squalid camp again. “How does the food work?”
“Army MREs, once a day. Make it last.” She looked at him pointedly. “And get in line early.”
“Gotcha.”
The woman turned to look over his shoulder. “Next!”
“That’s it?” asked Lyle.
The woman glared at him. “What else do you want?”
Lyle stared at the camp, too lost to even answer the question. “I don’t know. How … do they tell each other apart?”
“Hell if I know. Next!”
Lyle stepped away from the table, and the guards ushered him through the gate. He stared at the vast sea of Lyles, trying to comprehend it but it was too big.
Or, he told himself, exactly the right size. He looked at his bracelet number again: 11874. If he played it right, he might never get processed at all. He walked to a Lyle who was leaning against the wall of the factory, and leaned up next to him.
“There were a hundred of us on that truck,” he said, “give or take. How often do the trucks come in?”
“Every day.”
“The same size?”
The man nodded. “Give or take.”
Lyle nodded, watching the crowd. “And how many do they interview?”
“On a good day? Fifty. Most days we’re lucky to do half that.”
Lyle nodded, and tugged on his bracelet. “Do these come off?”
The Lyle by the wall shook his head. “You don’t want to lose that—it’s your only ticket out of here. And anyone farther down the line than you are is going to be awfully interested in taking it away from you.”
“Or they might be willing to trade for it,” said Lyle. “A little bit of their MRE, for jumping a hundred people forward in the line? That’s an easy trade to make.”
The Lyle by the wall raised his eyebrow. “Are you crazy? You’ll never get out of here.”
“That,” said Lyle, “is exactly the point.”