“So if you don’t believe any of this, why are you still here?”
“To do what needs to be done.” Library Girl strokes the side of my face. “Cameron, you are a really nice guy. And that’s why I’m sorry about this.”
“Sorry about what?”
Superquick, she slips the rope bracelet over my wrists and tightens the knot so I can’t move my hands.
“Hey!” I tug but it only tightens the knot.
“Don’t struggle, Cameron. It’ll be easier.”
“What the f—”
Alarms go off at an earsplitting volume, louder than I’ve ever heard them.
“What’s that?” I say, wishing I could cover my ears.
“That, friend, is the beautiful sound of revolution.” Library Girl tugs on the rope, and all I can do is follow her.
Pandemonium has erupted in the rest of the Church of Everlasting Satisfaction and Snack ’N’ Bowl. People in varying degrees of CESSNAB dress run through the halls, screaming that we are under attack. The walls are crawling with commandos. It’s like some kind of extreme soap-on-a-rope. Five teens with a shopping cart pass us by. At first, I think they’re from CESSNAB because they’re wearing the big yellow happy face shirts, but then I see it’s really a sad face, a mad face, a stoned face, and a face with a raised middle finger under the chin. The shopping cart is full of books and newspapers, which they toss at anyone they see.
A guy brandishing an open newspaper screams, “The world’s f**ked up! Stop ordering jeans and pull your heads out!”
“Happiness is a fascist state!” one of the hurlers yells. It’s Thomas. “What if I don’t want to chill, huh? What if I miss my dog, Snuffy?”
A guy in a CESSNAB sweatshirt zigzags by, hugging himself frantically. “Embrace the positive! Embrace the positive!”
Library Girl looks up into the ceiling camera. With a wicked grin, she leans over and kisses me hard on the lips.
“Whoa,” I gasp.
“Come on,” she says, dragging me into the radio station’s recording booth. She bolts the door behind us, and for a split second, I have the crazy idea I’m about to pop my cherry under the weirdest of circumstances—a total coup de virginity. But Library Girl cuts my hands free of the rope handcuffs and abandons me for the console. Switches are flipped, knobs are turned, the volume is set at ten.
“Hand me that backpack that’s under the CESSNAB locker,” she says.
Still kiss-dazed, I bring it to her and she pulls out a well-worn copy of Anderson’s Anthology of English Literature and opens to a bookmarked page. Her voice zips into the micro phone and floats out into the compound.
“Shakespeare, people. Complicated. Beautiful. Sad and violent. And the language is a bitch. Let me blow ya minds with a little Hamlet:
“To be, or not to be—that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep—
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to? ’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance, to dream, ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come—”
The door shakes with pounding. An ax bites into the wood, scaring the shit out of me, but Library Girl keeps her lips pressed to the mike:
“… who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death—
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns—puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?”
The door bursts open with a sick splintering sound, and Ruth stumbles in. She takes one look at me there with Library Girl and her lower lip starts to quiver. “Cameron. You are so hurting my happiness right now.”
Daniel’s right behind her, brandishing a torch. He speaks into his bracelet. “Roger one-niner, we have a situation in the radio room.”
“Roger one-niner? Isn’t that airplane code?” I ask.
His lips go tight. “It makes me happy to say it.”
A commando squad, all wide shoulders and, holy crap, honest-to-God guns this time, arrives on the scene. They grab Library Girl, who tries to hold on to the microphone. The commando picks up the mammoth anthology and brings it down hard three times on her hands, making her scream in pain till she’s forced to let go.