The Burning World

  “Just a little hungover,” I mumble.

  She smiles bitterly. “Wild night.”

  We are silent for a moment. Will there ever be a funeral? Will there be a day to stop and acknowledge the cutting of Lawrence Rosso’s thread? Or will he be swept up with the rest of the day’s tragedies and dumped into the wastebasket of the new world, where death is not a headline but a weather report?

  Julie stands up and paces slowly around the room. In the flickers of light through the door I see a row of sinks, a row of toilet stalls. Our jail is a restroom. Julie stops in front of the shattered mirror and moves from side to side, examining herself in its facets. A puffy eye here. A split lip there. Blue-brown burns everywhere. “Looking good, Julie,” she mutters. “A very good year for Cabernet.”

  I notice she has a slight limp. “Your leg?” I say.

  “Just sore joints. Electricity hurts, doesn’t it? I always thought shock would be the easiest torture, since there’s no breaking or cutting or, you know . . .” She holds up her bandaged stump. “. . . permanent maiming. But wow, it’s still pretty bad.”

  I can’t take my eyes off her hand. “Come sit with me,” I say, feeling a quaver in my voice.

  She takes a last look in the mirror. She brushes a lock of hair off her forehead, revealing yet another scabbed cut. She sighs and comes back to my corner in the shadows, slides down the wall and settles against me. I hold her bandaged hand, staring at the missing volume in the bookshelf of her fingers. They have stolen a piece of her. She is not diminished; she is no less herself, but I still feel the loss. She is not her body but her body is her, so I love her body. And some of it is gone.

  She watches me studying her, and when she notices the glimmer of moisture in my eyes she self-consciously pulls her hand away. “Look on the bright side,” she says, forcing a smile. “If we ever get married, you won’t have to buy a ring.”

  • • •

  We lose track of time, sitting in the dark. No one comes to drag us into another “interview.” No one slides a tray of food under the door. The speaker above the toilets clicks on and plays nondescript instrumental rock for a while, then switches mid-beat to nondescript instrumental hip-hop, then clicks off. Then clicks on again and plays classical. It might be psychological torture, or it might just be these lunatics’ idea of ambiance. I try to ignore it.

  “Mozart,” Julie says in a bitter chuckle, staring at the speaker. “It’s supposed to be the pinnacle of art, right? This transcendent human achievement? And we use it for background noise in bathrooms. We literally shit on it.” There’s a pained tightness in her voice. She spasms occasionally and clenches her right hand. When the music clicks off she immediately turns her attention to the patch of light on the floor. “How long do you think the solar panels will keep working? Will that bulb out there still be flickering when we’re dead and everyone we know is dead?”

  I look at her uneasily.

  “Sorry,” she says, shaking her head. “I’m trying to distract myself.”

  She stands up and goes to the door. She presses her face against the bars. “Hello? Any other prisoners out there? Anyone else enjoying Axiom’s exceptional customer service?” She plants a fierce kick against the door; it leaves a dirty boot print but barely vibrates the heavy hinges. “Hey!” she shouts, desperation creeping through her sarcasm. “Hey!”

  She kicks it again, then grimaces and bends over, clutching her hand. “God,” she says in a raw whisper, “this really hurts.”

  A small voice echoes from across the hall.

  “Julie?”

  Her eyes widen and she leaps back to the window. “Nora?”

  “Hey, you.”

  A surge of disoriented emotion wracks Julie’s face; a joyful laugh bubbles out of her even as tears fill her eyes. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  “You’re glad I’m in prison? Thanks a lot.”

  Julie laughs louder. “So I’m a selfish bitch. Yes, I’m glad.”

  Standing behind Julie, I can see the window of another cell a few feet down the hall. A single frizzy curl pokes out through the bars.

  “Is R with you?” Nora asks.

  “Yeah, he’s in here.”

  “What is this? What do they want?”

  “I don’t even know. They think we can control the Dead. They’re insane.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Mostly, yeah. Although this happened.” She sticks her bandaged hand through the bars.

  “Oh, Jules . . .”

  “Yeah. We’re stump sisters now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’ll get used to it. The only time it really trips me up is when I’m playing guitar.”

  “I was never going to be a musician anyway. That gene died with Dad.” She’s quiet for a moment. “What about you, though? You’re okay?”

  “They haven’t fucked with me much. I’m in for disorderly conduct.”

  “What happened?”

  “They were trying to take my Nearlies. I shot a guy.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  A pause. “Jules?”

  “Yeah?”

  Another pause, this one longer. “I heard about Lawrence.”

  Silence.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Julie leans against the door, pressing her forehead into the bars. “Yeah.”

  “Ella came into the Morgue. Said she wanted to help someone. I asked if she had any medical training. She said she took a CPR class twenty years ago.”

  “She was okay?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  Julie closes her eyes and goes quiet.

  I push my face to the window. “Nora. Have you seen M?”

  “Marcus? The great outdoorsman? Sure haven’t. But now would be a pretty great time for him to come back, if he’s going to.”

  “He’s going to,” I mumble, half to myself. “He said ‘See you later.’ ”

  “That’s sweet. But what he said to me was, ‘I don’t deserve to be here.’ ”

  I let myself sag back from the window. Julie takes my place. “How long have we been in these fucking bathrooms?”

  “What, you’re not carving check marks on the wall of your cell? Where’s your prison spirit?”

  “We’ve been unconscious most of the time.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m pretty sure the explosion was three days ago.”

  Julie nods and looks at the floor, lost in thought. “So today’s . . . July 26th?”

  “If I’ve been counting meals right, yeah,” Nora says. “Why?”

  To my surprise, Julie laughs. She laughs the way you laugh at a joke you know you shouldn’t find funny. “It’s my birthday.”

  There’s a pause, then Nora bursts into a bitter cackle. “Well happy birthday, stump sister! Wishes and kisses!”

  “Why didn’t you get me a present, R? What kind of boyfriend are you?”

  “Just think, you’re almost old enough to buy beer!”

  I listen to the two women collapse into fits, exchanging birthday clichés and savoring the fresh irony that coats each one, but I can’t make myself join in. Even the blackest edges of my humor are numbed by this. It’s an arbitrary line, of course, subjective and ultimately meaningless, but this is not how I imagined Julie graduating from her teens. In every meaningful way, she’s been an adult for many years, certainly longer than I have, but some old-fashioned part of me still wanted to celebrate this official step into maturity. I wanted to get up early and put daisies on her pillow. I wanted to play her favorite records all day. Maybe I’d try to bake a birthday cake.

  But instead, this is the party I threw for her. Sitting in a jail cell waiting for our next round of torture. Surprise!

  I listen to the two friends riff off each other, and then I wonder if their laughter might have triggered some kind of anti-joy alarm, because as if on cue, a door bangs open and heavy boots pound down the hall.

  The laughter sto
ps. Julie backs away from the door until she bumps into me, and I wrap my arms around her, absorbing the icy tremble that’s shaking her tiny frame.

  “R,” she whimpers as a shadow falls across the window, and the cold, terrifying reptile in my brain starts sorting through objects in the room. The mirrors. A shard of glass . . .

  The door opens, and Perry Kelvin steps through.

  Julie’s knees collapse. She sags against me. I stumble back and fall into a sitting position, holding her under her armpits.

  “Time to go,” Perry says, reaching out to help me up. “Now.”

  I hear a distant commotion through the walls. Furious shouts, fists pounding a door. Perry’s face is indistinct in the shadows, but the thick eyebrows, the brittle voice and its subtle drawl . . . I don’t know what he is or how he’s here or if I can trust him, but I can imagine no scenario worse than the one I was just contemplating. I grab his hand and stand up, pulling Julie with me.

  She keeps her eyes locked on his, unable to speak, but her legs firm up under her and she follows.

  “Hey!” Nora shouts and I see her knuckles gripping the window bars. “Let them go, you piece of shit, they can’t help you! I’m the Nurse of the Living Dead, they call me Queen Greene! If anyone can control them, it’s me!”

  “Is she your friend?” Perry asks Julie.

  “Who are you?” Julie whispers, still staring into his eyes. “Who are you?”

  “Yes,” I tell him. “She’s our friend.”

  Perry unlocks Nora’s cell. Nora emerges, sees his face, and freezes. “Holy shit, you look—”

  The distant clang of a hammer striking a door latch.

  “Introductions later,” Perry says. “Follow me.”

  He runs down the hall but the women are stunned, immobile.

  “Who is that?” Julie asks me with fear in her voice.

  “Don’t know. Doesn’t matter.” I grab her hand. “We’re getting out of here.”

  She glances at Nora, then at me, then at the ghost waiting for us at the end of the hall. We run.

  WITH EVERY DOOR we burst through, I expect to be greeted by daylight, but each time it’s another hall, another chamber, another door. The professionally poured concrete of the inner wall gives way to the rushed corner-cutting of post-apocalyptic construction: moldy drywall, rusty sheet metal, and the ever-present plywood. I don’t remember any building this large in Citi Stadium. I begin to suspect we are elsewhere.

  The lighting in these outer chambers is more reliable, and I catch glimpses of Perry’s face as we chase him through this badly built labyrinth. He’s not Perry, of course. How could he be Perry? I personally consumed that man’s brain and watched my brethren take his body home in several choice cuts. And then he stowed away in the back of my head, filling in for my absent conscience, and we worked together to repair our souls. I cheered him on into “whatever’s next.” Perry Kelvin and I made peace and parted ways—this man is not him. He is older, thicker, his jaw more pronounced, his skin more weathered. I think Julie and Nora see this too, but the resemblance still shocks them into uncharacteristic silence.

  A door with a glowing window appears. I nearly salivate at the thought of daylight. After three days in this chilly hole of pain and darkness, my skin will drink in the sun like sweet tea. The man who is not Perry holds the door for us and we emerge into—not daylight. A pale streetlamp lighting a dark corner. Overhead: a suffocating sky of water-stained concrete.

  “Welcome to Goldman Dome,” Not-Perry says. “Keep moving.”

  Unlike Citi Stadium, this place makes no attempt to mimic the layout of a real city. No miniature high-rises jutting into open space. No open space at all—Goldman’s “architects” appear to have filled every cubic foot of the dome with structures, all merging into one crooked, creaking mass that extends from the ground to the distant curve of the ceiling. The street we’re on appears to be the only exterior path, cutting a line through the grotesque honeycomb from one end of the dome to the other. Pedestrians peer down at us from the web of dizzying catwalks that connect the two halves of the hive.

  But no alarm. No floodlights. No arrest orders barking from a Jumbotron.

  “They sent me to bring you in for another interview,” Not-Perry says as he leads us down the street toward a row of sunken parking spots like the garage of a cheap apartment complex. “I took their walkies and locked them in their office, but they’ll get out and call it in and the dome will shut down. We’ve got maybe five minutes.”

  He unlocks one of the pickup trucks—a beat-up old Ford with a gray primer paint job and a well-stocked gun rack. Julie starts to open the passenger door but Not-Perry holds out his hand. “No. All of you get in the bed.”

  “Why?” Nora says.

  “There’s some rope back there. Tie your wrists and pretend you’re zombies.”

  “God damn it!” Julie suddenly shouts, snapping out of her trance. “Who are you?”

  He sees the flinty glint in her eyes and realizes she has reached her limit. She won’t be going anywhere until she gets an answer. “Abram Kelvin,” he says. “I’m Perry’s brother.”

  Julie stares at him, eyes flicking over his features, scanning. “Perry didn’t have a—”

  “Look, I told you my name, we really don’t have time for the rest of this chat right now. Get in the fucking truck.”

  He hops in and slams the door. I climb into the bed and after a moment the women follow me. We wrap the rope around our wrists in a few loose coils and lie down on the rusty metal like bundles of firewood. I am the only one who’s particularly pale, but their abundance of clotted wounds and bruises make up for their lack of pallor. In this dim underworld light, they’ll pass.

  The truck lurches out of the garage and I watch the dome’s upper reaches scroll past me. A guard on one of the lower catwalks looks down, sees the truck’s cargo, and spits. His sickly green phlegm splats an inch from my ear.

  “Almost there,” Abram calls back to us through the rear window. “Shut up and be Dead.”

  I turn to face Julie. Our eyes are inches apart as our heads bounce against the truck. I wonder if she remembers what I taught her about zombie mimicry on our first foray into the airport, ages ago when life was simple, just me and her and a few comical corpses.

  “Don’t overdo it,” I whisper to her as the truck slows to a halt under a glaring streetlamp. “Just act unnatural.”

  I hear a door open and footsteps approach the truck. “Position and SSN?”

  “Large transport pilot, acquisition assistant, guest combatant hospitality host,” Abram replies. “078-05-1120.”

  “Assignment?”

  “Three uncategorized Dead to Incinerator 2.”

  I struggle not to react to this. Bundles of firewood indeed. I know burning the Dead is standard practice; I’ve seen oozing mounds of us doused in oil and turned into bonfires, a procedure the Boneys were fond of documenting in order to remind any deviators of their place in the natural order. But for a brief moment, this appeared to be changing. Goldman’s people were watching the situation in Citi with great interest. They were observing our integration with the Living, and as Corridor 2 neared completion and the merger neared signature, it seemed a real possibility that the change would spread. Can it be snuffed so easily by a few small minds with big guns?

  “Pretty long haul for just three corpses,” the guard says. “You got room for a dozen in there.”

  “Management’s rushing disposal for uncategorized. Worried about it spreading.”

  The guard leans over to look at us, a scruffy man in a beanie and blue flannel instead of the beige Axiom jacket. One of Goldman’s original guards. “Zombies turning peaceful?” he says, studying my face. “You’re worried about that spreading?”

  “They’re not ‘turning peaceful,’ they’re going into stasis. The plague’s evolving deception tactics. We don’t know where it’s going, so we’re playing it safe.”

  “By burning them all?”
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  “Look, if you have problems with your enclave’s new guidelines you can take it up with Management but right now you need to open this gate so I can do my job, all right?”

  The guard squints at me. I snap my teeth and release a soft, understated groan, the voice of a tortured soul trapped in a rotting body. It’s a role I’ve been researching for years, and perhaps I bring a little too much pathos to it, because the guard’s face contorts with guilt.

  “You’re gonna burn them alive?”

  “They’re zombies, you idiot, they’re not alive. Open the damn gate.”

  The guard shines his light into our faces one by one. “I’m not sure about this. These guys don’t even look infected to me.” He pulls out his walkie. “I’m going to have to call Management.”

  With a melodramatic and entirely unconvincing moan, Nora bolts upright and grabs his head, bangs it into the side of the truck and takes a bite of his ear. He staggers back, reaching for his gun, but Abram is already out of the truck and pressing his revolver against the man’s temple. “Drop the gun, drop the walkie, and open the gate.”

  The guard lets the requested items clatter to the pavement and his lips begin to tremble as he reaches into his booth to punch in the gate code. By the time he’s finished and the steel door is moving, his face is wet with tears and snot.

  “Just do it,” he whimpers, pressing his forehead into Abram’s gun barrel. “I don’t think I can do it myself and I don’t want to hurt anybody.”

  Nora and Julie, who have been groaning and gasping like ridiculous B-movie ghouls, finally drop the act and dissolve into laughter.

  “Chin up, soldier,” Nora says. “You’re not catching any diseases from me without buying me a few drinks.”

  Abram throws the guard’s gun and walkie into the truck and hops in. I give the stunned, open-mouthed man a winning smile and Nora and Julie wave as we pull away into the city streets.

  WE

  WE WATCH ABRAM KELVIN drive away from the dome, and feelings rush through us. They are complex and contradictory—joy, sorrow, longing, love—but our feelings always are. They flood the halls of the Library like a rich and ancient liquor, infused with the memories of everything. It is rare to look at anything without imbibing this spirit, because everything is remembered by at least one part of us. Every tree has been a perch, every stream has been a bath, every stone has cut a paw or broken a window or been used to build a house. Everything on earth has meant something to someone, and there has never been a person whom no one ever loved.