There has never been a more efficient departure in the history of commercial air travel. The moment I lock the door behind me the plane shudders away from the gate. No searching for seats, no wrestling with the overhead bins, and certainly no safety demonstration. While I lock my kids in the bathroom—they seemed comfortable enough when I found them there—Abram races onto the runway like the plane is a sports car. The black specks behind us have grown into black lumps. Their warbling drone fills my ears like angry bees. I almost tumble down the aisle when Abram guns the engines and the plane surges forward.
“R!” Julie calls to me from business class. “Get up here!”
I fight my way forward while inertia drags me back. By the time I reach Julie, the plane is shuddering and shaking like we’re driving on a country road.
“Marcus!” Abram calls back to M, who’s sitting in the back of business class, several seats removed from the rest of us. “You cleared the runway, right?”
“Yes,” M says through gritted teeth, gripping the armrests so tight his fingers tremble.
Nora drops down next to him and smiles. “Scared of flying?”
His eyes are wide. Beads of sweat glisten on his forehead. “Little bit.”
“I’ve never flown before. I’m excited.”
“Happy for you,” he growls, and Nora laughs. She reaches over and puts a hand on his forearm.
“Marcus. After everything we’ve lived through, we’re not going to die in a damn plane crash.”
M takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. Nora pats his arm and settles back into her seat.
I fall into mine next to Julie and brace myself as the plane threatens to tear itself apart. She reaches out and grabs my hand, and I see no fear in her eyes. Despite everything, despite the many possible deaths circling our heads at this moment, the rattling of the plane and the choppers behind it and the unknown wilderness we’re flying into, her eyes are full of hope. It’s so bright that for a moment I swear there’s a glimmer of gold in their icy blue.
“Here we go,” she says, and with a final lunge, the plane leaves the ground. The shuddering stops. The only sound is the engines. We are gliding through space.
“Wow,” I hear Abram gasp to no one in particular, and I realize how little he actually expected this to work.
I scan the windows behind me until I find our pursuers. They are plainly visible now, but they have stopped growing. If they were equipped with missiles, or even high-caliber cannons like the last one, we might be in trouble, but these are not gunships. They are light craft salvaged from news stations and corporate buildings, and as we climb rapidly and they shrink away beneath us, the distant flashes of their rifles and handguns become less and less frightening. Finally, a towering cumulus welcomes us into its cottony bosom, and the world goes white.
A tightly held breath bursts out of M in the form of incredulous laughter.
Nora stares out the window, awestruck.
From the cockpit, I hear Sprout giggling and clapping in the copilot’s chair.
Julie squeezes my hand, and I realize it’s her left hand. Either she’s ignoring the pain in her finger, or she’s forgotten it.
The record player is still on. In the relative quiet of our ascent I can hear it popping and skipping on an inner groove. Then a gust of turbulence rocks the cabin, and the needle scratches back a few songs, landing almost exactly where we left it in that bittersweet melody of slow-boiling beauty.
So in looking to stray from the line
We decided instead we should pull out the thread
That was stitching us into this tapestry vile
And why wouldn’t you try? Perfect weather to fly
The fog around us flickers a few times, and suddenly we’re above it. An impossible fantasy landscape of creamy white towers stretches out before us, and here and there, in holes and gaps below, the real world peeks through, full of unknown threats and promises, shouting at us to come back and fight.
We’re coming, I tell the world, squeezing Julie’s hand harder. We’re ready for you.
TWO
* * *
the basement
Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only.
—Albert Camus, The Plague
WE
A BOY IS WALKING ALONE on the highway. He has been walking a long time. His Nikes fell apart years ago and his feet have become their own shoes, tender flesh encased in callus. The boy is Dead but he does not rot. His brown skin is ashen but firm, preserved through the years by a powerfully simple refusal. The plague has not won him. He holds it at arm’s length and considers its offer.
We follow the boy as we follow everyone, spinning around and through him, skimming the pages of his life’s brief novella, but we follow him a little closer than others. He is interesting. He looks seven but is much older, a boy bottled and cellared, aging in strange ways that even we cannot predict. Death has halted his life but it has failed to erase him. He has wrestled it into unexpected shapes, used it as a knife to open secret boxes, and we are not quite sure what he is.
I remember this road, he thinks. This is the right way.
The boy remembers more than most of the Dead. Not facts, exactly, but the amorphous truths behind them. He doesn’t know his name, but he knows who he is. He doesn’t know where he’s going, but he is not lost. The world unfolds before him like a four-dimensional map, its lines bending and peeling off the paper, outer and inner realities weaving into one.
What happened here? he asks us as he passes through a ruined city in a stretch of land once called Idaho. What made them leave?
We don’t answer.
He passes a bullet-riddled Geo coupe and lets his eyes wander over the corpses of the family inside, fresh enough that the mother’s scalp still has its ponytail.
Did anyone try to help them?
We know, but we don’t answer.
Were they good people? How much of them is in you?
The boy asks us many questions while he walks, but we hold our silence. We spoke to him once, long ago, when his pain reached out and seized us by the throat. It had been years since we felt a grip so strong, and he squeezed a few words from us. But now we hold our silence. The chasm is still too wide for whispers, and we do not like to shout.
The boy accepts this and keeps walking. He is used to silence. He has been alone a long time.
At the outer edge of the city, the highway forks north and south, and the boy pauses to consult his strange map. Then he notices a sound rising into the silence. He has never heard it before. A soft roar like a distant avalanche. He looks up. The sun beats down into his eyes, flashing on his bright gold irises. He doesn’t squint. His wide pupils suck in the light and break it apart; he sees all its colors, its waves and its particles, and inside this tetrachromatic rainbow, he sees an airplane.
He has seen airplanes before. He has spent the last seven years staring at them, dreaming about them, willing their dusty fuselages to move, but he has never seen one in flight. He watches the tiny black shape etch a white line through the sky and he wonders who’s up there. He wonders where they’re going. Then he looks down at the road and keeps walking.
I
FOR A WHILE, I watch the clouds. Then I watch Julie watching them. I let the surreal landscape outside the window blur and I shift my focus to the back of Julie’s head, her unwashed hair matted with oil and dirt, sweat and blood, the residues of everything she’s gone through since her last shower a week ago, that distant age of unimaginable luxuries.
Slowly, quietly, I inhale the warm air rising from her head. I don’t expect much from my numb nose. The Dead are a practical people, and the senses of smell and taste are frivolous affectations that we discard to make room for more functional tools. I have noticed a subtle shift since my return to life—my ability to detect Living flesh has dulled, and suggestions of natural aromas occasionally prickle my nose—but I am still a jammed radio, stuck on one frequency while all others
drown in static.
My first sniff brings nothing but the sensation of air passing through my nostrils. I try again, and this time I get a trace of her, a distant note of that mysterious, earthy bouquet found nowhere but in a woman’s hair—she turns around.
“Did you just smell me?”
I jerk my head away and stare straight ahead. “Sorry.”
“Don’t smell me. I smell like shit.”
I glance sideways at her. “You don’t, though.”
“I can smell myself, and I smell like shit.”
“You don’t.”
“Okay, Grenouille, what do I smell like?”
“Like . . . you.” I lean in and inhale with melodramatic rapture.
She laughs and shoves me away. “You fucking creep.”
Still smiling, I look past her at the sky. It hits me again that we are flying. Perhaps for the first time in years, there are human beings above the clouds, swimming in the blue void between Heaven and Earth, taunting the gods.
Julie follows my gaze to the window. “Remember when I asked if we’d ever see jets in the sky again? When the cure was just starting and we were fantasizing about the future?”
I nod.
“You said yes.” She grabs my hand on the armrest. “I know it’s just an airplane, it’s not like this means civilization is back, but . . . I don’t know. When I look out there, it feels like a victory.”
“We’re inside the Etch A Sketch,” I say, squeezing her hand. “What should we draw?”
Her smile falters. The air between us cools, and I realize I’ve done it again. I’ve referenced a memory that isn’t mine. A moment on the stadium roof when Julie shared her dreams with a boy who wasn’t me. What I did to her childhood sweetheart isn’t news; she knows how I know what I know, but it’s a scar on the skin of our relationship that we have silently agreed not to mention.
“Get out,” she says, disengaging my hand from hers. “I have to pee.”
I step into the aisle and she brushes past me. “Julie,” I say, but she disappears into the bathroom without looking back.
I stare at the closed door. This isn’t the first time I’ve tripped over Perry’s life, but she usually lets it go with an awkward change of subject. Was there something more in that stolen memory?
“I miss airplanes,” Julie says.
“Me too,” Perry says.
“Those white lines . . . the way they made designs in the blue? My mom used to say it looked like an Etch A Sketch.”
And there it is. A wound within a wound. Her dead mother’s words pulled from her dead lover’s memory.
I close my eyes and sink low in my chair, releasing a weary sigh. I don’t have to be a monster to hurt people. I can do it gently, with a single careless breath.
Julie stays in the bathroom longer than it takes to use the bathroom. When she finally comes out, she avoids my gaze, but I still notice the wetness in her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I say as she slides back into her chair. “I didn’t . . .”
“It’s fine.” She shakes her head and wipes her eyes on her sleeve. “I had a mom and she died. It was almost eight years ago. I can’t be falling apart every time something reminds me.”
I can hear the effort this hardness requires.
“It’s just . . . the questions. Not knowing what really happened.” Her eyes begin to dampen again and she looks out the window to hide them. “There was no note . . . no good-bye. We assumed she knew what would happen, going off alone at night, but what if she was just that naive? What if she really thought she’d make it to Detroit, join the Remakers, live the life she always—” Her voice cracks and she sits in silence for a moment. “Doesn’t matter, I guess. Either way, she left us. I just wish I knew why, because I keep running it through my head . . .” Her voice drops lower, almost inaudible. “And it’s like it’s not finished. Like she’s dying over and over.”
I’m not sure if she’s talking to me anymore. She might be talking to the clouds, those elusive cirrus wisps that look distant even up here. Suddenly, she laughs. “She could still be out there!” It’s a bleak sound, a forced signal of levity that barely escapes her throat. “All we found was her dress and some . . . some of her. For all I know she could be out there roaming the country with a gang of zombie moms.” She flashes me a smile that’s meant to show she’s joking, but it’s not even close to convincing. “That’s how it works, right? Sometimes they take years to rot?”
I give her an ambivalent nod. She’s not wrong. I’m proof of that. But the hope I see in her eyes, despite her efforts to hide it, looks too desperate. Too hungry. And it feels dangerous to feed it.
She turns back to the window. “I know,” she mutters like she’s listening to my thoughts. “I know it’s stupid. It’s just something I think about.” The clouds seem to drift away from us, dissolving into that unmapped blue landscape. “I’ve been missing her a lot lately.”
My response must be delicate but words are crude tools, prone to breaking what they’re meant to repair. So I keep my mouth shut. I lay a hand on her back and leave it there. Minutes pass in the soft roar of engines and air. I feel her breaths slow, her muscles soften. I feel her fall asleep.
• • •
I have no idea what time it is, but after everything we’ve endured, it hardly matters. The sleep debt demands payment. Even Abram appears to be dozing, slouched low in his chair with the autopilot on. I feel the exhaustion as much as anyone, but my brain still hasn’t found its off switch. I roam among the sleepers like a ghoul in a graveyard.
M gives me a feeble nod as I pass him. He looks even paler than he did when he was All Dead; it seems he’s alive enough to get airsick. Nora is slumped in the chair next to him, snoring the ravenous snores of a sleep-starved woman finally feasting. I try not to feel jealous.
I slide open the door of the rear bathroom and look down at what’s left of my family. Two young corpses tied up with belts. Alex sits on the toilet seat. Joan’s feet dangle off the edge of the sink. They look up at me with big, mournful eyes, like caged puppies who don’t know what they’ve done wrong. I can’t take it.
“Stay,” I tell them as I unbuckle the belts.
They nod.
“Promise you’ll stay?”
They nod.
“Say it. Say you promise.”
They nod.
I remember watching them laugh and play like real children in that golden hour when all it took to raise the Dead was a smile and some pretty pictures. I remember the lengthy sentences that tumbled from their mouths in those days. This is our friend, Joan said, introducing me to one of the airport kids whom I’d probably met and forgotten a hundred times, a boy whose charcoal skin was starting to turn brown. He doesn’t remember his name yet, so he’s going out to look for it.
I counted the syllables in that sentence and told Joan it was her new record. I remember it clearly because it was a record she never broke.
“Hungry,” she says, and snaps her teeth.
I shut the door.
• • •
Abram senses me lurking in the cockpit doorway and wakes from his nap. His face is Perry’s reflected in a dirty mirror, and I remember Perry’s white pilot uniform covered in blood while the plane hurtled toward the ground.
This isn’t one of your memories, is it? I asked him in that dream that wasn’t a dream.
No, he replied. This is yours.
“What do you want?” Abram whispers, snapping me back to now. His copilot sleeps against the window with a channel of drool running down her chin.
“Where are—”
“Quiet,” he hisses, jerking a thumb toward Sprout.
“Sorry,” I say at the same volume.
He looks incredulous.
“Sorry,” I say in a barely-there whisper.
“Christ,” he sighs, “you’re definitely dumb enough to be a zombie.” He looks at his daughter and his attention drifts away from me. “She hasn’t slept in two days.
Sometimes she stays awake so long she starts crying, like she’s so tired it hurts, but she won’t sleep. I don’t know . . .” He shakes his head and looks back at me. “So what do you want?”
“Where are we headed?”
He turns back to the windshield, the endless expanse of blue and white. “Canada.”
“Why Canada?”
“They exed later than we did. They might still have some meat on the bones.”
I nod. I can’t argue with the logic, but it doesn’t quite sit comfortably. I envisioned us searching the disgraced wreckage of America for some way to redeem it, not leaving it behind to rot. It’s an empty concept in a world whose political lines have washed out in the rain, but crossing the border feels like dodging the draft.
“I saw Canada’s bones once,” Julie says, and I glance back to the cabin. She’s still slouched in her seat, eyes open just a crack. “Didn’t look too meaty then, and that was almost eight years ago.”
“What’s your point?” Abram says in a slightly louder whisper. “You have somewhere better in mind?”
Julie opens her eyes and straightens up. “What about Iceland?”
“Iceland,” Abram repeats.
“It’s an island. One of the most isolated countries in the world. Never been in a war, almost no crime, totally self-sufficient on geothermal power. If anywhere survived the plague, it’d be them.”
“Except they didn’t survive. No one did. The last country to go was Sweden.”
“That’s just a rumor,” Julie says, growing more excited. “No one’s confirmed any overseas news in years.”
I feel my discomfort growing. How far are we planning to roam for the antidote to Axiom’s poison? Or have our goals already begun to shift?
“Iceland’s thousands of miles away,” Abram says, “and we have no satellite or radio navigation. We’d end up at the North Pole or the bottom of the Atlantic.”
“Canada’s far away too. If you can get us there, why not Iceland?”
Abram sighs and looks at me. “Will you tell your girlfriend to go back to sleep?”