The Burning World

  Whenever possible, I kept my victims’ clothes. In my half-asleep haze, I had some vague notion that this was a way to commemorate the people I consumed. To honor their noble sacrifice to my needs, which were of course nonnegotiable. It was certainly more thought than most zombies give to their predations, but I doubt anyone will commend me for it. I begin scooping up the clothes and stuffing them into the overhead luggage bins as a stew of disgust churns in my belly.

  Something bumps against the bathroom door.

  I freeze with a blood-crusted Christmas sweater dangling from my hands. A groan emanates from the left door and is answered by a slightly louder one from the right. I glance around for a weapon. I don’t see anything capable of cracking a skull, but I’ve done it with my bare hands plenty of times; people don’t realize how easy it is, you just have to—

  I halt my thoughts. I unclench my fists. I remind myself that killing is no longer how I introduce myself to strangers.

  “Hello?” I say softly, and the noise in the bathrooms stops. The latches on both doors say OCCUPIED, and it strikes me as odd that a zombie would bother to lock anything. I rap a knuckle on the left door. “I don’t want to hurt you. You don’t want to hurt me. Will you come out?”

  The red OCCUPIED slides into a green VACANT. The door opens a crack, and I’m looking at a familiar face. A woman in her mid-twenties, brown hair, pale skin, eyes that could almost be a natural gray if not for their metallic sheen.

  I back up to make room, and my “wife” emerges from the bathroom. Her receptionist’s outfit is filthy beyond belief, but my eyes ignore the countless bloodstains on the white button-up as they search for her name tag. It’s not there. Did she remove it? Why would she remove it?

  “Name?” I ask her, slipping back into our primitive patois.

  She shakes her head. What is the look on her face? Shame? Bitterness? Or just the confusion and fear of a traveler lost in a foreign land?

  I hear a click behind me and the other bathroom opens. My “children” peek shyly around the doorway. At least they have names. I extracted them during that brief window when they appeared to be recovering, when the sun was rising and Sinatra was crooning and everything was going to be fine. Their skin isn’t bloodless but it’s still very pale, even Joan’s, whose pallor contrasts eerily with her dusky Arab features. They look alive but half-frozen. Their eyes are like their mother’s, stuck between states. They look the same as they did the day I abandoned them. The day Julie and I realized our ambitions were too big and decided we had to downsize.

  Our house in the suburbs may be the front lines compared to life in the stadium, but it was still a retreat.

  “Why are you here?” I ask my nameless wife.

  She drops her eyes to the floor. “Want to . . . stop.”

  At first I’m not sure what she means, but then I notice her condition. Patches of sunken flesh run down her neck and cheeks, soft depressions like bruises on a pear. Insufficiently embalmed with the energy of human life, her cells are finally accepting that they’re dead, deflating and dehydrating one by one. She is starving herself.

  The kids look slightly healthier, with only one or two depressions visible on their skin. I assume this means they lack their mother’s resolve and have been finding Living flesh to eat, but then I notice the cookie in Joan’s hand and the cheese stick in Alex’s. Both are barely nibbled, but the effort is apparent, and effort is almost everything.

  “Eat?” I say to my wife, pointing to the snacks.

  She shakes her head, and this time the emotion is clear: shame. You can lead a corpse to food but you can’t make it eat. The will is strong but the flesh is delicious. And so on.

  I glance over my shoulder, then hold out my hands. “Wait here.”

  I tiptoe back to row 26 and shake Julie’s shoulder. She groans and tries to wriggle away from me.

  “Julie,” I whisper. “Wake up.”

  Her eyes open a crack, glaring at me sideways. “What.”

  “My wife and kids . . . they’re here.”

  She pulls herself upright, blinking the sleep away. “Here? In the plane?”

  “Don’t know what to do.”

  She slides out from under Sprout and carefully lays the girl’s head on the seat. We rush back to the restrooms where my perfect little nuclear family is eyeing Nora’s sleeping form with unmistakable yearning.

  “Nora,” Julie says, nudging her shoulder.

  Nora snaps upright, restraining her shock as she registers the newcomers. “Were they about to eat me?”

  “No,” I say, then falter. “Maybe. But they really don’t want to.”

  “Are these . . . your kids?”

  “Uh . . . yes.”

  “Hi, kids,” Nora says neutrally, then looks at their mother. “And you?”

  “She’s R’s wife,” Julie says with a faint smile.

  Nora sighs. “Great. A fucking love triangle.”

  “It was . . . an arranged marriage,” I mumble.

  “What’s your wife’s name?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Nora considers this, then nods. “Okay, so maybe no love triangle.”

  I squirm. My wife squirms. I look at the floor and she looks out the windows. Then she grabs our kids’ hands and lumbers toward the exit.

  “Hey!” Nora calls to her, getting out of her seat and taking a few steps down the aisle. “I was just playing!”

  But there was something more than offense in my wife’s expression. I look out the window. The empty expanse of the tarmac has become a sea of gray faces.

  The plane is completely surrounded by the Dead.

  “That can’t be good,” Julie says, following my gaze. She runs back to check on Sprout.

  I remain transfixed by the crowd. Even in the heyday of this hive, I never saw this many gathered in one place. The Boneys’ church services came close, but there were always those who found fiery sermons of wordless clicks and hisses to be an unengaging experience, no matter how charismatically the Boneys delivered them, so the assemblies never drew more than half of the airport’s population. The mob gathered here today has to be all of it.

  And yet despite its resemblance to a mobilizing army, I don’t sense hostility. Most of them aren’t even looking at the plane. They face north, toward the airport’s entrance, toward the city, and they wait.

  The plane’s door squeals open and shuts with a bang. I hear the lock mechanism snap into place. Abram strides down the aisle, his rifle at the ready, chest heaving like he’s coming out of a long sprint.

  “They’re coming,” he says between breaths.

  “We know,” Julie says. “We can see them.”

  “Not the Dead.” He scoops Sprout up from her chair and moves to the emergency exit row, shutting all the window shades as he goes.

  “Axiom?” Nora says, not wanting to believe it. “How the hell did they find us so fast?”

  “Porsche probably had a tracker somewhere, but I figured the jamming would kill the range . . .” He slams the last window, plunging the cabin into gloom. “Doesn’t matter. They’re here.”

  “How many?” Nora says, her face hardening as she grabs her rifle from the overhead bin.

  “Too many.” He drops into the window seat with Sprout on his lap and grips his rifle with white knuckles.

  “What’s going on?” M yawns, stepping through the first-class curtain. No one answers him.

  “So what’s your plan, then?” Julie says with rising panic. “Just sit here and hope they don’t check the only intact plane on the runway?”

  He raises his window shade an inch and peers out at the swaying horde around us. “My plan is to sit here and hope your friends remember how much they like human flesh.”

  I raise my shade halfway. Like iron filings drawn toward a magnet, the crowd is orienting stiffly in one direction: toward a service gate at the north end of the tarmac. The gate slides open and five beige SUVs roll through it. Then they stop. No doubt they expecte
d zombies. What they probably didn’t expect was a semi-organized army of them.

  The Dead still don’t appear hostile. They cock their heads, uncertain, uneasy, like abused dogs sniffing a stranger’s hand, wondering if it will stroke or strike. And I see my family among them. Joan and Alex and my nameless wife, huddled at the back of the crowd, waiting for these newcomers to express their intent.

  The trucks begin to advance.

  “What the hell are they doing?” Julie whispers. She said they would be crazy to follow us in here. She was right, and here they come.

  Their sunroofs open. Soldiers in beige jackets rise through the holes. They brace rifles against the roofs.

  “No,” I murmur into the glass.

  My former neighbors watch the trucks draw closer, nervous but curious. Then they begin to die.

  “R, WAIT!”

  I pause in the plane’s doorway but I don’t turn. I can feel Julie’s fear tickling my neck.

  “You can’t do anything for them! You don’t even know how to shoot that!”

  I look down and notice that I’m holding M’s AK-47. I must have grabbed it off his chair in an unconscious reflex, and I appear to have chambered a round and switched off the safety. I’m not sure either of us knows what I know how to do. But the tremble in my hands is even more pronounced than usual; I’m practically spasming. I let the gun clatter to the floor and stride into the boarding tunnel.

  “R!” she shouts, running after me. “There’s a thousand of them down there. One more isn’t going to make a difference.”

  “Joan and Alex,” I say without stopping.

  The gunfire is continuous, like a roll of firecrackers, and I imagine each and every shot ending the budding life of one of these potential people.

  I hear Julie’s footfalls behind me as I rush down a staircase to the ground level; she has given up arguing and is racing to join me, with M’s rifle like an oversized toy against her tiny frame. I stop at the exit door and turn to her.

  “Stay here.”

  “Fuck you, you’re not going out there alone.”

  Crack. Crack. Crack-crack-crack-crack.

  “Please,” I say to her, imagining those shots aimed at her instead of the anonymous mob and feeling my fear spike tenfold. “I’m asking you to stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  I don’t wait for her response. She’ll respect my wishes or she won’t. I’ve said everything I can say, short of “good-bye.” I burst through the door into the blinding sun.

  • • •

  It’s not quite the massacre I was anticipating. The soldiers appear to be conserving ammo, taking methodical head shots instead of spraying into the mob. They have the luxury of doing this because the mob is not attacking them. The Dead are agitated, swaying and groaning loudly, but their faces still display recognizable human emotions. Fear, confusion, grief. They seem utterly perplexed by what is happening to them.

  But as the trucks slowly advance, as row after row of the Dead drop to the pavement and the rows behind them wipe their friends’ liquefied brains off their faces, something begins to change. So close to the end of their climb, just a few steps from the summit, they stop. They stumble backward. They fall.

  The indeterminate hue of their eyes flashes silver, and their faces lock into the murderous blankness of the All Dead.

  I want to roar and cry at the same time. The stupidity of it. The relentless razing of every green shoot. As the Dead surge forward in a wave and begin to overrun the trucks, I try not to take pleasure in the soldiers’ shrieks. But I do.

  My family is revealed in the rear of the crowd as everyone else advances to attack. I run to their side and grab the kids’ hands. “Come on.”

  The nearest truck disappears under a pile of Dead. A few of them pull the gunner out through the sunroof and tear him apart while a few more crawl inside to deal with the driver. What did these men expect? Twenty or thirty of them against several thousand Dead? How can anyone be so fully grafted to a system that they would obey such mad orders?

  Their desperate shots shatter windows and kick up puffs of dust on the concrete around my feet. I start to pull the kids toward the terminal door, but when I look back to make sure my wife understands the agenda, she is not there. I glance around the tarmac and find no sign of her. I stand in the shadow of the 747, holding the kids’ hands and staring at the mob, knocked off balance by an emotional sucker punch. It never occurred to me that my wife would relapse with the rest of the horde. I thought she had climbed too high to fall back into this feral frenzy. But more importantly, I thought I didn’t care what happened to that nameless, voiceless woman, and I am dismayed to find that I do.

  The Dead set to work on the next truck. The men in the other four jump out and take defensive positions behind their doors. Despite streams of bullets ripping into the Dead from four directions, this venture is going to prove unprofitable for the Axiom Group. The third truck goes under. Then the fourth. But as the horde—reduced by a few hundred but still overwhelming—sweeps over the last two Escalades, I notice a familiar drone in the air. My hair begins to flutter back from my face, and I have just enough time to register dread before a helicopter—not some repurposed local news chopper but an actual military aircraft—swoops over the roof of the terminal building and hovers directly overhead, eclipsing the noonday sun.

  Somewhere inside its cockpit, a soldier swivels the nose-mounted chain gun and begins to cut splattering swaths through the mob. He is too late to save the men in the trucks, but with all the airport’s inhabitants gathered in the open with no way to fight back, he can at least take this opportunity to clear out this hive. One less unknown to threaten the natural order.

  The Dead make a noble effort. They climb onto the roof of the nearest vehicle and swipe for the chopper’s landing gear. Some of them even attempt to jump. But the pilot keeps it hovering just out of reach, lower than he actually needs to, perhaps taking pleasure in their desperate efforts as his gunner mows them down. I catch his face in the windshield, the sadistic smirk of a child burning ants.

  A higher pitched rattle of gunfire joins the heavy thump of the chain gun and I see Julie standing behind a second-floor window, firing M’s AK-47 through the glass. She probably knows this is useless against an armored attack chopper, but these are the gestures we make when useful actions run out. Her bullets chip the chopper’s paint and make white spots on the windshield, damaging its resale value but little else. The gunner ignores her until she manages to ping a shot off a rotor blade, then the chain gun rises and Julie runs for cover as it strafes across her floor, filling the air with broken glass and upholstery fluff. Satisfied that he’s made his point, the gunner returns his attention to the Dead.

  I drag my kids toward the safety of the terminal door, determined to save at least these two, and just as I’m reaching out to open it, I hear a cry. A raw, plaintive noise almost like the howl of a dog, inarticulate but trembling with emotion. I look up.

  My wife is on the control tower balcony, directly above the helicopter, leaning against the railing. Her eyes are on me, and I realize the noise I heard was her calling to me, the sound of a person trying to reach another person without words or a name. But she doesn’t need words now. She cries out again, and the anguish in it makes the meaning clear.

  Good-bye.

  She jumps off the tower. She falls facedown, arms spread wide, hair fluttering up toward the clear summer sky, and when she hits the blurring disc of the rotors, she vanishes. Lukewarm liquid sprays across my face. I hear the wet slap of heavier bits raining down all over the tarmac, but the sound is mercifully muffled by the screech of the helicopter tearing itself apart. Its bent rotor rattles horribly for an instant, then something snaps. The chopper flips and twists and flings itself into the concrete base of the terminal building. It doesn’t explode. Its impact is less than satisfying. It hits the wall with a dull crunch, then falls to the pavement in a mangled heap.

  Everything goes silent. The fu
ry abruptly drains out of the remaining Dead, their shoulders falling back into their customary slouch. But while their rage sags, mine swells, stretching my seams to bursting. My eyes take in the carnage around me, flicking from corpse to corpse, their gazes fixed on the dreaded mouth of the sky as their brains ooze through the backs of their heads. All their struggles disregarded, all forward steps ignored, erased in a few minutes by a few little bits of lead. And scattered all around them, on the ground and on my clothes and in my eyes, the remains of a woman who never told me her name. A woman I bumped into in a dream and married without ever exchanging a word, paired as a unit by the decree of a formula that neither of us understood. She should mean nothing to me. I knew nothing about who she was behind her blank stare or who she would have become if given the chance. And perhaps that’s it. She was trying to become something beautiful, and these cruel and stupid children have cut open her chrysalis simply because they could.

  I run to the helicopter. I wrench open the cockpit door and seize the pilot by his jacket, pulling him against his seat straps. “Why?” I growl, inches from his face.

  His eyes take a moment to focus on me. In my periphery I see a twisted piece of steel sticking out of his side and his copilot dead in the other seat, but I’m focused on the pilot’s face, mostly blank now but still retaining the lines of that smirk I saw through the windshield as he savored the killing of weaker things.

  “Why are you doing this?” I say from some hot, dark boiler room in my mind. “Why won’t you stop?”

  He opens his mouth. A ragged wheeze comes out. His eyes seem to be looking past me.

  “Why?” I shout, shaking him against the seat. “What’s your goal? Who are your leaders?”

  I feel something beyond rage thrumming inside me. The noise from the basement. The rattling door.

  “Where is Atvist?” I scream into his face and grab the piece of steel and rip it out of his chest. The door in me is straining against its locks, and through the crack I can see fire and burnt flesh and squirming masses of worms.