There are enough weapons for everyone, but after giving a shotgun to Julie and a rifle to Nora and taking a bigger rifle for himself, he regards me hesitantly, holding out a small pistol.
I stare at the gun’s gleaming black grip. Muscle memory rushes into my hand. The reassuring weight of steel, the thrilling thrust of the recoil, the satisfying spray of—
“No thanks,” I say, demonstrating my hand’s unsteady tremble. “I’m still a little uncategorized.”
“If I really believed you were infected,” Abram says, “I’d be giving you the other end of this gun. A scar doesn’t prove anything.”
I shrug.
Abram holds the pistol out to M but M brushes past him, reaches into the Porsche’s gun rack, and pulls out an AK-47.
“More my size,” he says.
Abram looks dubious. “Do you know how to use that?”
M pops out the clip, checks the ammo, racks the bolt and dry fires, then pops the clip back in. “Yup.”
“He said he was a Marine, dumb-ass,” Nora says while performing a similar function check on her rifle.
“Just two years with the Corps,” M says. “But five with Gray River.”
Abram nods with faux admiration, returning the pistol to his duffel bag. “So you’re part of the Axiom family, then. I take it Gray River doesn’t offer a dental plan.”
“We won’t need the guns,” Julie says. “We shouldn’t even bring them, it sends the wrong message.”
Abram shakes his head.
I’m reluctant to contradict her, but my memories of this place are vivid. “Last time . . .”
“It was too soon. We didn’t give the cure time to spread. It’ll be different now.”
I don’t argue, but I’m not convinced. And Julie keeps her gun.
• • •
A tranquil airport is an unnatural thing. Airports were built for commotion, for the noise and effluvia of the global human enterprise. There is no place on Earth with a higher concentration of differences, every culture and language converging on this little building and mixing together, eating the same food and using the same toilets, piling their clothes side by side and stealing glances at each other’s belongings as they’re revealed on X-ray screens, squeezing hip to hip on cramped gate benches and inhaling each other’s odors, everyone alert, worried, striving—the world and all its conflicts, compressed to a tiny point.
Not anymore. All those volatile chemicals exploded long ago, leaving only an empty casing. We encounter not a single moving creature in the outer terminal, and my fear begins to move in a different direction: will this place even protect us? If the Dead are all gone, we’re no safer here than anywhere else. But my concerns are short-lived. We pass through the empty security lines and take a left toward Gate 12 and there they are, my old neighbors, milling around the food court in a slow, slumberous swarm. The fear center of my brain has never been more confused. Am I relieved or terrified?
Abram grips Sprout’s arm with one hand and aims his rifle with the other, keeping his back to the wall, but the rest of us move forward with weapons down, cautious but calm.
“Hey, guys!” M bellows with a friendly wave.
The horde goes still. A few snap their teeth at us once or twice, then resume their shambling. But most remain motionless, regarding us with inscrutable expressions. Their faces are worn and weary, their bodies slumped; their strange, leaden eyes stare at us with sorrowful longing, like beggars resigned to starvation. I feel a surge of emotion for these lost creatures, pity laced with love. I was one of them. I’m still one of them. Yet somehow I escaped this place, and they remain trapped.
There was a moment, sitting on a hill with Julie, when I thought freeing them would be a simple thing. Not easy, but simple. We would come here, we’d share what we’d learned and spread what we’d created, and they would see the light and be healed. Our effect on the Boneys had been immediate and dramatic. Those empty husks had sensed a shift in the atmosphere, an inconceivable alteration to the rigid rails of their reality, and they had fled, perhaps in search of more stable land, some new flat surface on which to rebuild their universe. But my fellow Fleshies? The Dead who had yet to cut that final thread? Our effect on them was subtler. Something has changed; the bullet-scarred giant by my side is proof of that, as is B and every patient in Nora’s Morgue. But our attempt to go forth and evangelize was disastrously naive.
They are not impressed. They are not convinced. They are waiting for something more.
M strides ahead and begins to mingle, shaking hands and slapping backs. The Dead stare at him with furrowed brows, like they don’t understand what he is. He still has some distance to go before all traces of his rot are rubbed out, but I have retained enough of my Dead senses to know he registers clearly as Living. So their uncertainty is not the age-old question of to eat or not to eat. It’s something more complex.
I follow M into the swaying, stinking crowd.
“Hey, R?”
I look back and see Julie and Nora lingering at the end of the hallway like kids on a dock, scared to jump in the lake.
“Are you sure about this?” Julie says.
“Maybe find some blood to smear on us?” Nora says with a cringe. “Like you did with Julie?”
I shake my head. “Wasn’t just the blood. It was me going with you. Won’t work anymore.”
“Why not?”
I shrug. “Because I’m not Dead anymore.”
I plunge into the crowd.
“You’re insane,” Abram shouts from his chosen position far back in the hallway. “Where are you even going?”
I point toward the distant end of the hall, over the heads of a thousand zombies. “Somewhere safe.”
I press further in. The Dead don’t respond to nudges or other polite requests, but M’s sheer mass allows him to part the crowd like jungle grass, and I follow in his wake. Julie and Nora stick close to my back, and while Julie is fighting hard to embrace her convictions and not be afraid of these creatures—these people—Nora is a little more transparent.
“Hello . . . ,” she greets them through gritted teeth. “How are you . . . please don’t eat me . . .”
“Let’s go, Daddy,” Sprout says. She tugs on his hand, but he remains rooted to the floor.
“Come on!” Julie calls back to him.
“I’m not dragging my daughter through a zombie horde.”
“Use your eyes, man. It’s okay.”
“You don’t know what they’re going to do.”
She throws up her hands. “You don’t know what anyone’s going to do! Any person in any crowd could be a murderer, a rapist, a suicide bomber. You dive in and hope for the best.”
Like her, I’m putting on a brave face, but I can’t pretend I’m not scared. Fighting off the plague didn’t make me immune to it. This was one of the first big questions among the Nearly Living—what happens if we’re bitten again?—but we didn’t have to wait long to find out. A suicidal runaway showed us the dismal answer: what happens now is what happened then. We rejoin the Dead. We lose it all. We start over.
Despite my long struggle, despite the Gleam and all the other mysteries of the cure, I am just as vulnerable as Julie. And just as dependent on the whim of the mob.
Once the restaurants end and the gates begin, the density thins and we pop out into an open area of benches and plastic trees. Further down the hall, another group hovers around a bagel stand, staring at the empty case and pretending to read the menu. Perhaps by accident, a woman stumbles behind the counter. The crowd instinctively forms a line. Before the man at the front can place his order, the newly hired cashier wanders off again, and the line disperses with a vague aura of disappointment.
I watch all this with great interest. Is it just the lingering echoes of old instincts, or a sign of recovery? A stiff body stretching its limbs, testing its reflexes? I remember my first real meal. I’d been trying for weeks. Every evening I’d shove bread in my mouth and force myself to sw
allow; sometimes I’d even manage to hold it down until Julie finished celebrating before I snuck off to the bathroom to vomit. I didn’t want her to share my worry that I wouldn’t survive my transformation. But then, after about a month, it happened. I felt a stirring of the old hunger. The kind that didn’t demand human sacrifice. I watched Julie frying potatoes from our garden, drowning them in hot sauce, and my stomach grumbled. I wanted food. I didn’t want to suck the lightning out of a human soul; I wanted to eat hash browns. And I ate them. It was another week before I could eat again, and even now my body remains distrustful of such simple, deathless nourishment, accepting it only when starvation is imminent. But that moment gave me hope that I didn’t know I lacked. It was a step.
Now I watch these bewildered corpses stumble through the motions of human gastronomy, and I pour my hope into them. I will them to take the next step.
“Where’d he go?” Julie says, standing on tiptoe to see through the crowd behind us. She hops up on a bench. “Abram? Sprout?”
I don’t need the bench to see that they’re no longer in the hall.
“Did they seriously ditch us?” She cups her hands to her mouth. “Abram!”
“Keep it down,” he says, emerging from a service door with his daughter in tow. “You’ll wake them up.”
Julie sighs. “I hope you feel stupid taking the long way around now that you see we’re all fine.”
“I don’t take risks with my family.” He fixes me with a stern glare. “Where’s your ‘safe space’?”
• • •
To Abram’s relief—and mine, if I’m being honest—our route doesn’t take us through the bagel crowd. The hall branches off to the right and I lead us into the elevated tunnel that connects Terminal A to Terminal B. Behind us, the overhead sign promises BAGGAGE CLAIM and RESTROOMS. The book store is called Young’s Bay Books. The intimidating tome in the bestseller kiosk is The Suggestible Universe: How Consciousness Shapes Reality. I smile, remembering the countless hours I spent staring at all the words in this airport, wondering what they were trying to tell me. My budding literacy has lifted a veil from the world, revealing the tips of a thousand icebergs. If I ever have another peaceful moment, I’ll dive deeper. I’ll sit in my favorite chair with my favorite mug of my favorite tea and I’ll read The Suggestible Universe cover to cover. Though I should probably start with the book next to it, Scary Jerry and the Skeleton King. Or maybe the one next to that: Goodnight Moon.
“What?” Julie says, noticing my faint smile.
“Nothing. Just thinking. What’s your favorite book?”
She considers. “I have about fifty.”
“I want to read with you.” My smile expands as I add her to my tea-and-tweed daydream: sitting next to me on the couch, leaning against my shoulder with a paperback spread between her fingers. “Let’s make our dining room a library.”
She drinks in this image with a wistful smile. “That’d be nice.”
The longing in her voice pops my bubble, a cold reminder of our circumstances. What was our actual life a week ago has become an improbable fantasy.
The lights flicker. The generators fire up, or the solar panels activate—whatever forgotten energy source powers this place wakes itself again, and the airport resumes a sad semblance of its former functions. The lights come on, the PA system stutters something about unattended baggage, the conveyors begin to move. I step aboard, Julie hops on behind me, and we take a break while the others walk past us, giving us mildly disapproving stares.
Once upon a time, Julie and I watched the sunset through these wall-to-wall windows. Now we face the other way and watch the sun crest the mountains, flooding the runways with pink light. An American Airlines plane with no engines. A United plane split in two. The blackened wreckage of a private jet. What a sad little island the airport must have been during the last days, when every person in every place thought someplace else was safer. A nexus for all doomed hopes.
I watch the pots of plastic plants glide past us, now overrun with real daisies, and another bit of nostalgia warms my thoughts. I lean over the railing to pluck one, but it passes just out of reach.
By the time we reach the end of the conveyor, the rest of the group is waiting for us, arms folded impatiently.
“What?” Julie says. “We came here to wait, didn’t we?”
“Let’s wait somewhere secure,” Abram says. “Not in a glass hallway exposed to the whole world.”
“Almost there,” I assure him. He’s right, of course. I need to focus, but I can’t seem to shake my whimsy. Despite the multitude of dark memories this place evokes, the few bright ones I built with Julie keep rising to the surface and painting a dumb smile on my face. Things were so easy then. So simple and sweet. Just me and my kidnapped crush and her boyfriend’s brain in my pocket.
I lead the group down the boarding tunnel to the door of my former home, my refuge from the horrors of my undead existence. I never imagined I’d come back here to hide from something worse.
I pull open the airliner’s massive hatch and step aside with a grim smile. “Welcome aboard.”
THE PLANE IS EXACTLY how we left it. The empty beer bottles, the plastic trays of frozen pad thai, and of course, my stacks of memorabilia. It strikes me for the first time how extensive my collection was. Pens, paintbrushes, cameras, dolls, action figures, a painting, a tuxedo, undelivered letters, framed family photos, a tower of comic books . . . About a third of the plane’s seats are filled. If I found one or two items on each infrequent hunting trip, how long must I have been here to accumulate such a hoard? Six years? Seven? In all that time, why didn’t I rot away like so many of the others? Why am I not just another dried-up metathesiophobe, hissing with fury over everything that’s changed?
Julie sits in her chair of choice. She picks up her old quilt made of cut-up jeans. But this time she doesn’t use it as a shield against me. She pats the middle seat and I sit beside her, luxuriating in the privilege of her trust.
M turns in a slow circle to take in the cluttered disaster of my domicile. “You brought a girl home to this?”
“I found it charming,” Julie says.
M grunts.
“Where was your place?” Nora asks him. “Can’t imagine it being any cleaner.”
“It was clean,” he says. “For a public restroom.”
Nora starts to laugh, then her face stiffens. “A restroom?”
M shrugs. “It was a room with a door. Just ended up there.”
Nora regards him with an odd, crooked expression that’s completely unknown to me. The only thing I can read in it is confusion, but it’s more than that.
“I was a zombie,” M says, growing defensive. “Wasn’t picky about housing.”
Nora looks at the floor, looks through it.
“What’s wrong?” Julie asks. She moves to get up, but Nora shakes her head and snaps out of it.
“Nothing. Sorry. Déjà vu or something.” She addresses M without quite looking at him. “Do you remember where you used to live? Sometimes I feel like we’ve met before.”
M answers cautiously. “I think . . . Seattle?”
Nora shakes her head again. “Nope. Never been there.” She looks up and takes a deep breath. “Anyway, what do we have to eat? I hear airline food is excellent.”
She disappears behind the flight attendant curtain and starts banging around in the kitchen drawers.
“Nora?” M calls to her, dropping the duffel bag from the Porsche onto one of the seats. “Food’s . . . in here.”
Silence for a moment, then she emerges from the kitchen and opens the bag, digs out a Carbtein cube and a water bottle and takes this sad meal to the back of the plane.
M looks at me. I shrug. I look at Julie. She shrugs.
I notice that Abram hasn’t come inside yet. He’s still standing in the doorway with Sprout, running his eyes over the unaccountable oddness of my former home.
“This is where you want to hide?” he says.
br /> I raise a hand to demonstrate the safety features of the aircraft. “One entrance. Emergency exits. Small windows.” He doesn’t respond, so I keep going. “High ground. Good visibility. Solar pow—”
“Watch Sprout,” he cuts me off, nudging his daughter forward. “I’m going to run a perimeter check.”
Sprout runs forward and stops at our row, staring at me expectantly. When I don’t react, she says, “Move please.”
I scoot out to the aisle seat and Sprout plops down next to Julie.
Julie shoots me a look of perplexed delight, holding back a laugh.
“You like Julie?” I ask the girl, and she nods earnestly. I smile. “Me too.”
I look back to the doorway to give Abram a few tips for his tour of the airport, but he’s already gone.
• • •
In less than ten minutes, everyone but me is asleep. It’s somewhere around noon, the sun is high and hot, but it was a very long night. Even M has managed to nod off with the effortless ease of the Living, while I sit patiently next to Sprout and Julie, listening to the chorus of snores. In almost every way, M seems to be falling back into human existence more quickly than I am, and I don’t understand why. He speaks well, his reflexes are sharp, and if his stories can be believed, he successfully made love with a Living woman—albeit a very desperate one—after only a month in the stadium. I had a head start, I was the one who pulled him into this race, but now he’s left me far behind. What is holding me back?
I get up and move toward the rear of the plane where I can express my restlessness without waking anyone. I sneak past Nora, who is stretched out across three seats with her feet sticking into the aisle. M would be more comfortable back here as well, but he has squeezed himself into one of business class’s plush thrones of isolation, perhaps sensing that Nora needed space.
As I near the end of the jet’s length, I suddenly remember one of my less whimsical collections. The last three rows are buried under piles of torn pants, bloody shirts, the occasional shoe with a foot in it. My dirty laundry covers the seats and spreads into the aisle, the college dorm of a promising young serial killer. I glance over my shoulder, feeling shivers of shame run down my back.