The Burning World

  And is this really about to happen? Did the path of Nora Greene’s life weave through so many dangers and heartbreaks and long, lonely miles just to terminate in this ditch because a man she’s never met saw a fish on television? My mind refuses to accept it, even as Parker raises the pistol to her head. Even as Julie lunges toward her, screaming, and the soldiers slam her back against the car. Even as my vision begins to blur.

  But as Parker braces for the spray of blood, a figure emerges from the shadows behind him. A big arm wraps around his neck and a big hand clamps down on his gun. He has two sweet seconds to comprehend his change in fortune before his comrades open fire and the arm jerks him around to face them and he becomes a soft, fleshy shield for the man operating him like a puppet. While Parker’s men fill his chest with bullets, his own gun does the same to their heads, until the arm around his neck finally uncoils and all three soldiers slump to the ground.

  The big arm belongs to a big man. Tall and bulky. Bearded and bald. His white T-shirt is stained with mud and sweat and tree sap, and now with a great deal of blood.

  “Been remembering a lot,” M says, shaking the gun free from Parker’s lifeless grip. “Used to be a wrestler, a Marine, a mercenary . . . lots of rough stuff.” He surveys the bodies around him with a look of mild amazement. “Funny. Always figured I was a poet or something.”

  A rare phenomenon occurs inside of me. A bubble of warmth appears in my chest. My larynx spasms—I laugh.

  M turns to Nora. “You okay?”

  She nods, too shocked to speak.

  “Plug your ears.”

  M debrains the twitching body at his feet, fulfilling his responsibility to society, then climbs out of the ditch with a smile on his scarred lips. “Hey, Archie.”

  I run forward and hug him. His giant palm thumps my back, knocking some breath out of me.

  “Good to see you, M.”

  “It’s Marcus.”

  “Was afraid you were going to . . .”

  “Nah.”

  It’s answer enough for me. I step back, grinning.

  “Where the hell did you come from?” Julie says, finally lifting her hands from Sprout’s eyes. “I thought you were up in the woods.”

  “Tried it for a while.” He shrugs. “Nature’s boring.”

  A faint smile creeps through Nora’s shock.

  “Came down to the gas station to find beer . . . found some.” He rubs his forehead with a grimace. “Was trying to sleep it off . . . then you noisy motherfuckers . . .” He spreads his palms wide, taking in the blood-sprayed Porsche, the wrecked, smoldering truck, and the three dead men in beige jackets. “What the hell?”

  “Marcus,” Nora says, touching his shoulder. “A lot happened while you were camping.”

  WE

  IT’S QUIET in the sky.

  If we float high enough, it’s almost silent.

  No feelings, no memories, no chatter of stories in a million overlapping languages. It’s one of the few places on Earth where nothing much has happened—even the birds and insects conduct their business near the ground. There was a brief burst of noise when humans learned to fly, when they thrust their lives into the stratosphere and filled it with fears and fantasies, transactions and quarrels, bathroom sex and panic attacks. But that era passed like a single shout in a cathedral, echoing for a second then gone, and the sky is once again a restful place.

  The sighing parts of us like to hide here. Our neutral middle books, lethargic lives untroubled by agony or ecstasy, languid moments and memories of naps—these parts like to drift through newborn clouds and bathe in the blankness, a shelter from the tumult of the Library.

  But something is disturbing their leisure, disrupting their pillowy quiet.

  Radio waves. Slack for so many years, they have begun to vibrate with intent. For the first time in more than a decade, the mindless recordings and shrieking interference have cohered into something with meaning.

  We tune in and listen—even the sighers feel a thrill. Is it music? Is it a message of hope? Voices reaching out to reconcile and rebuild?

  No.

  It’s invasions. Acquisitions. A steady spread of poison. It’s armies sharing intel in a grotesque code, relaying atrocities with cartoons and clip art. And between all this, it’s a manhunt. A mobilization. A clawed hand reaching out to choke.

  “Find them and bring them back.”

  Far below the clouds, we see a tiny light. A tiny vehicle filled with tiny people, each of them tied to a thousand of our books. Miles behind them, others begin pursuit. Walkies stab through the static, barking curses and commands.

  The sighing parts of us gather their strength and abandon the quiet of the clouds. They rejoin the rest of us—the fierce parts, the indignant parts, the wronged and the murdered, the selfless and the heroic, the parts that feel the pain of others and want to make it end.

  Together, we descend. We follow these tiny people, watching and waiting, bending our ears to these noisy nodes of life.

  The time for quiet is over.

  M RESTS HIS KNEES against the dash and does his best to compress his bulk. Abram’s knuckles occasionally brush his belly when he reaches for the gearshift, and they exchange an awkward glance. Julie holds Sprout on her lap in the middle backseat, arms wrapped around her like a seat belt, and I sit next to her, my knees digging into M’s back, staring out the window while Nora updates him on the grim new landscape of our lives.

  The rain has stopped. The sky is developing a faint silvery glow. Julie and I have been unconscious much of the last few days, but when was the last time we really slept? I don’t imagine torture blackouts are particularly restful. My body still hasn’t fully adopted human needs—I can’t remember the last time I felt hungry, and going a week without sleep is not unusual for me—but I worry about Julie. I’ve never seen her so wrung-out. She’s less talkative than usual, letting Nora handle most of the exposition. Her eyes are puffy and bloodshot. She favors her mangled hand, wincing with each bump in the road, and I want so badly to take her home, clean her bandages, wash the blood and dirt from her body. But the word “home” sounds more and more abstract with each passing mile.

  “Well . . . ,” M says when Nora’s story arrives at the unfortunate present, in which we’re driving away from three dead soldiers toward an unclear future, “. . . okay.”

  The car is silent except for the roar of the pavement and the steady tick tick of Nora’s bullet lodged in the tire.

  “Abram,” Nora says.

  He hasn’t spoken since the shootout. He watches the road and little else, which is probably wise since he’s going over ninety miles per hour.

  “Where exactly are we going?”

  “Away from them.”

  “Who? The guys we just killed?”

  He glances at her in the mirror. “Tell me you don’t think they were the end of this.”

  “No, I—”

  “They’ll give Parker maybe ten minutes to report back, then they’ll send another team. And if we manage to escape that one, they’ll send two teams. And then three. And so on.” He grips the wheel, weaving around potholes or, if there are too many to avoid, driving right over them. “It’s like he said. Axiom doesn’t let go.”

  “Why are they so convinced we’re important?” Julie mutters to herself. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “The new Axiom doesn’t require its actions to make sense.”

  “Did the old one?” I ask.

  He glances in the mirror to remind himself who’s asking. He’s heard fewer than twenty words from me since we met.

  “We used to be smart,” he says, turning back to the road. “We were never gentle, we took what we needed from whoever had it, but we were trying to build a safer world and we made strategic decisions toward that goal. Now we’re just eating everything in sight. It can’t last.”

  “Didn’t answer Nora’s question,” M says.

  “Where are we going?” she repeats. “I let you drive bec
ause I thought you had a plan.”

  “A plan.” He takes an on-ramp and rockets toward the freeway. “My plan is to get a couple hundred miles from the coast, drop you people off in the ruins of your choice, then take my daughter to my father’s cabin in Montana and wait for Axiom to implode. What’s your plan?”

  We finally emerge from the slimy rot of the forest onto the concrete plateau of I-5, and Abram pushes the Porsche to speeds it probably never touched in its pre-apocalyptic lifetime, when fast cars were just expensive badges of potency, brimming with power that could never be used.

  It can be used now. The speedometer approaches 100.

  “It won’t work,” I say. “Your plan.”

  I expect a terse retort, but Abram says nothing.

  “You can’t outrun them. They have planes.”

  “Not enough to waste them on a manhunt,” he says, but the objection sounds halfhearted.

  “They have helicopters.”

  He says nothing.

  “They’re going to find us. Soon.”

  Nothing.

  “Abram. You won’t make it to your cabin.”

  “I know that!” he snaps, scowling at me in the mirror. “But thank you for explaining it to my six-year-old daughter.”

  Sprout is watching me. The ever-present worry in her eyes is nearing the dew point. “They’re gonna catch us?”

  “No, baby,” Abram says. “Look how fast we’re going. They’re not gonna catch us.”

  “R,” Julie says, looking almost as worried as Sprout, “why are you talking like this?”

  I stare ahead, watching the landscape scroll toward us, from forest to plains to ancient industrial ruins. “We need to go somewhere they won’t look.”

  Abram’s eyes dart to the mirror every few seconds, checking the flat expanse of freeway behind us. There is a light scattering of vehicles, but ours is the only one in motion. “Like where?”

  On the distant horizon, in the pink haze of the sunrise, a blue light blinks on the tip of a radio tower.

  “Home,” M says in a low rumble.

  “The airport?” Julie says, reading my intent but not quite buying it.

  “The airport,” Abram repeats flatly. “You want to hide in the biggest hive on the west coast.”

  I close my eyes, steeling myself to the idea. “Axiom won’t follow us.”

  He laughs incredulously. “They won’t need to! We’ll be dead before they know where we went.”

  “You don’t understand,” Julie says. “It’s safer than you think.”

  “Which means it’s safer than they think,” Nora adds.

  Abram sighs like he’s suddenly surrounded by children. “Are you talking about the ‘cure’? The uncategorized Dead? Are you about to tell me the Dead in the airport are ‘changing’ and everything’s peaceful now?”

  “Not exactly,” Julie says. “It’s . . . complicated.”

  “It’s not complicated. Zombies are animated tissue responding to primal feeding impulses. They can’t think, they can’t change, there’s nothing in there to cure.”

  “So fucking sure of yourself,” Julie says, scooting forward and scowling at the back of Abram’s head. “If they can’t think, how do they know the difference between human flesh and animal flesh? Why don’t they eat each other? Why do they hunt in groups? How do they know where our brains are?”

  Abram’s fingers press into the leather steering wheel. “They have some basic instinctive reasoning, but they’re not conscious. They’re not self-aware.”

  “And you can tell this by looking at them? You can see right into their souls?”

  Rage flashes in Abram’s eyes. “They don’t have souls! Whoever they were is gone!”

  Julie watches him glower for a moment, then asks with surprising gentleness, “Why do you need to believe that so badly?”

  Abram doesn’t answer.

  “R,” she says. “Show him.”

  I’ve been dreading this moment, but I knew it would come. I roll my pants up and push my leg between the seats, resting my boot on M’s knee.

  Hidden in such a seldom observed spot, it took me a long time to discover. Even naked in the shower, marveling at my resurrected body, I overlooked it. I had always assumed I died of natural causes until the first time I undressed in front of Julie. At first I took her little gasp for admiration of my endowment and I experienced a brief rush of confidence. Maybe I’ll be good at this. Then I realized what had really caught her eye, and the first of our many attempts at intimacy wilted.

  Abram doesn’t gasp, but his face looks a little tight as he comprehends the circular wound on the back of my calf, the unmistakable twin rows of punctures, dried out but never healed.

  “I don’t know if I have a soul,” I say. “But I know I’m not gone.”

  M pulls up his T-shirt, revealing his cratered landscape of sutured bullet wounds. “What he said.”

  Abram’s eyes rove over our bodies, cataloging our many scars in a suddenly changed context. As evidence, it’s not incontrovertible, but it’s compelling. Why would anyone lie about being Dead?

  “The cure is real,” Julie says. “It’s not a trap. They’re not hibernating. They’re coming back.”

  Abram returns his eyes to the road and doesn’t speak. I can’t decode the emotions on his face; there are too many at once.

  “The Dead at the airport are stuck in between,” Julie continues. “They might try to kill us, they might not. But if we stay out here in the open, your friends definitely will.”

  Abram has stopped obsessively checking the mirror, perhaps no longer worried that we’re being pursued, perhaps just assuming we are. He stares straight ahead, watching the control tower rise on the horizon.

  “If we can hide out until our trail goes cold,” Nora says, “we might have a shot at losing them.”

  “And even if they do track us to the airport,” Julie adds, “they’d be crazy to go in after us. They’ll see the place swamped with zombies and assume we’re dead. Just like you would.”

  Abram’s face is stiff and blank, watching the airport exit approach, and although it was my idea, I hear the coward in me praying he won’t take it. My memories of the airport are as dark as my memories of the torture chamber, and far more numerous. I might prefer capture over facing this place again. But the light on the tower blinks a comforting rhythm, a beacon of premature hope and renegotiated dreams, and Abram takes the exit.

  IT WAS A PERFECT DAY to save the world!

  R and Julie ran hand in hand down the bright green slope, their cheeks rosy, their eyes sparkly, laughing melodiously while birds fluttered around them and the sun grinned overhead. The airport shone like a pretty pearl in the valley below. It was full of zombies walking with their arms out in front of them, bumping into each other and wheezing “Brains!” like funny old grandfathers.

  “We’re going to fix them!” laughed Julie.

  “We’re going to cure the plague!” crowed R.

  “Love conquers all!” declared the sun, sunnily.

  R and Julie skipped into the airport with a gang of their best friends. Some scary Boneys tried to stop them but R and Julie held hands and a cloud of pink hearts turned the Boneys into butterflies.

  “You’re not so scary now!” said Julie, and everyone laughed.

  R and Julie’s friends ran around the airport playing pretty music and sticking pretty pictures on the windows and telling the zombies to cheer up, and the zombies said, “Let’s be people again!” and their gray skin turned pink and their gray eyes turned blue and all the boys fell in love with the girls and everyone got married.

  “I had a change of heart!” said Julie’s father.

  “I’m not really dead!” said Julie’s mother.

  “I’ll always love you no matter what,” said Julie, gazing into R’s beautiful blue eyes, and they kissed, and all their friends applauded, and it was a perfect day.

  And then the power cut out. The lights went dark. Frank Sinatra
slurred to a stop—something wonderful happens in summerrrrr—and R blinked a few times and noticed that his old friends were ripping out his new friends’ throats and his new friends were shooting out his old friends’ brains and the airport’s beige carpet was turning black and red. R saw his old wife hiding in the back, he watched his kids pick up a severed arm with looks of horror and hunger, he saw the panic in the faces of the Living and the confusion in the faces of the Dead, and R and Julie ran away from that bad place, wondering, Were we dreaming?

  • • •

  We’re awake now.

  The airport looms ahead of us, a sprawling edifice of gray concrete and mildewed glass, like a royal tomb for a shabby king. It was always ghostly when I “lived” here, but now, with the Boneys gone and the hive’s society unraveled, it feels truly abandoned. No hunting parties going in or out. No socially awkward Dead wandering alone outside the terminal. No sign of movement whatsoever. It would be nice to believe that they’ve all dispersed and headed for the city like Nora’s patients and our neighbor, B. No doubt some of them have, but not all. Perhaps never all.

  We pull up to the Arrivals gate and park the Porsche in a dark corner of the loading zone, hidden from view. This area is mostly clear, but the few vehicles abandoned here suggest stories almost too poignant to ponder. Who was the family who left their minivan and a trail of spilled luggage as they raced to catch the last flight out of America? Where was that flight going, and was it shot down when it got there? Did the owner of this plush pony on the curb grow into a strong and resourceful young woman, or is she now a smear of ash floating somewhere in the Atlantic?

  I pull myself out of my morbid reverie. Abram is packing for both an indefinite camping trip and a possible battle. With his backpack from the camp slung over his shoulder, he digs through the Porsche’s trunk until he finds a duffel bag full of supplies and hands it to M, eyeing him cautiously. M responds to the scrutiny with a cheery grin, made somewhat unsettling by the scars on his lips.