The Burning World

  “Why are you even here?” Julie says. Her voice is tight. “If you can erase your family that easily and we’re just useless strangers to you, why didn’t you ditch us the moment you realized Perry was dead?”

  Abram gets up and disappears behind the third bike. “I’ve got a lot of work to do if we’re going to ride these out of here. Why don’t you and Sprout go outside and play? You both like make-believe.”

  Julie turns and walks stiffly out of the shop. Sprout follows her, still clinking her wrenches together. Nora and I glance at each other, then follow Sprout.

  Julie is standing in the grass with her hands pressed to her lower back, gazing up at the sky and breathing slowly. Sprout walks up close to her and thrusts the wrenches out as if to say lookit.

  “What are those guys?” Julie asks, forcing a playful smile.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Wrench. They’re ballerinas.”

  Julie giggles. “Mr. Wrench is such a good name for a ballerina.”

  Sprout smiles. The Wrenches resume their dance.

  Julie sinks down and sits cross-legged in the scrubby yellow grass. “Did your dad ever tell you about your uncle Perry?”

  Sprout nods. “He said he couldn’t find him.”

  “I found him. We used to be best friends.”

  “He died?”

  Julie’s smile trembles. “Yeah. He did. But he was a good man.”

  Sprout’s face becomes solemn, an expression her soft features shouldn’t even be capable of.

  “He was smart, funny . . .” Julie’s eyes wander off into memory. “He was sad a lot, and seeing other people get hurt made him angry inside, but he was good. He wanted to make the world better. He just stopped believing he could.”

  The garage door rattles on its tracks and slams shut in a puff of ash.

  Julie stares at the door for a moment, then ruffles Sprout’s hair. “I wish he could’ve met you.”

  • • •

  M and Nora make a few attempts to help with the bikes but Abram rebuffs every offer and keeps the door shut, so we find scraps of shade in the yard and settle in to wait. Julie sets her shotgun in the grass, digs through the supply bag until she finds a knife and some duct tape, then stands up and unbuckles her belt.

  M’s eyebrows rise.

  Julie unbuttons the plaid shirt that covers her sweat-stained tank top; M sits up straight as if to pay closer attention to a classroom lecture. Julie notices, rolls her eyes, and flips open the knife. She sticks it through a shoulder of the shirt and cuts off a sleeve.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Nora says.

  Julie stuffs her shotgun into the severed sleeve, then presses one end of her belt onto each end of the sleeve and mummy-wraps the ends in duct tape. She stands up, throws the makeshift holster over her shoulder, and smiles.

  “Nice,” Nora says. “But now your pants are gonna fall off.”

  “Do you see this thing?” Julie says, giving her rear a slap. “No belt needed.”

  Nora juts her chin in measured approval. “It’s not bad for a pale pixie.”

  “If you want to have a competition,” M says, “happy to judge.”

  Julie glares at him. Nora smirks.

  I squirm through this exchange, wondering if it’s my job to shut M’s mouth on the subject of my girlfriend’s body, but my dilemma is drowned out by the roar of an engine starting in the garage. It revs a few times, then drops into idle. This repeats twice more, then two of the engines cut out, leaving the third sputtering softly. We gather in the driveway and watch the garage door, tense and expectant like family members in a surgeon’s waiting room. But Abram doesn’t emerge. Nora steps forward and raps a knuckle against the door. “Abram? Good to go?”

  No answer.

  She pulls the door open. Two of the motorcycles lie on their sides in the corner. The remaining three are lined up near the door, one of them running. Abram isn’t in the shop. At the top of a short staircase, the door to the first floor is open, creaking in the breeze.

  Julie is the first up the stairs. I follow her reluctantly into the charred heart of the Kelvins’ former home. Melted brown carpet crunches under our feet. The walls are black except where the drywall’s paper has peeled away, revealing white patches of plaster like bleached bone. Nothing remains of the Kelvins’ personality. Their choices of furniture, wall hangings, paint colors. All memory of their life in this house has been burned away, and walking through it reminds me of eating a senile brain. Nothing but empty hallways and nameless ghosts.

  We find Abram in what must have been the living room. He is standing in front of a brick hearth that’s all set with logs and kindling, abandoned before the match could be struck. They’re the only things in the room that aren’t burned.

  “Got three of them running,” Abram says in a flat voice. He stands with his back to us, staring at a framed photo on the mantel. “Other two are shot.”

  He has wiped the soot off the frame’s glass, revealing a faded family photo. A father and a mother, a toddler and a teenager, sitting on the porch of a log cabin.

  He turns around, looks at us for a moment, then takes Sprout’s hand and heads toward the basement stairs. “I don’t know how you’re planning to save the world from ten thousand years of human decline,” he says as he descends the stairs, “but good luck.”

  “Abram?” Julie says, moving toward the staircase.

  An engine roars, and through a smoke-darkened window I see a motorcycle surge up the driveway. Abram with his backpack and his rifle, his daughter braced in front of him, her tiny hands gripping the handlebars next to her father’s.

  “No,” Julie snarls, springing into motion. “No, no, no, no.” She drops down the basement steps in two leaps and by the time I catch up with her she’s already on one of the remaining two bikes. She kicks the starter and cranks the throttle and launches out of the shop like a warhead, leaving me choking in a cloud of blue smoke.

  I jump on the last bike and stare down at all the levers and switches, trying to remember how it all works. If my old life has to come back to me, now would be a good time.

  Closing my eyes, I kick the starter. I twist the throttle and release the clutch. The bike leaps forward and crashes into a stack of fuel cans, then lurches to a stop that throws me into the handlebars, but I manage to keep the engine going. Behind me, M and Nora are descending the stairs, yelling at me, but I’m barely aware of them. I hit the throttle again and the bike lunges beneath me. I fishtail out of the garage and skid onto the street, barely clinging to balance. Julie’s trail of smoke leads down the street and around a corner like a line on a map. I follow it.

  EVEN WHILE FIGHTING to control a lurching steel monster, my brain can’t stop nagging. It reminds me that Abram and Julie are experienced riders with normal human reflexes and I will never catch up with them. It reminds me that we won’t fare well stranded in the Montana wilderness with only three vintage motorcycles and a bag of Carbtein. It reminds me, with obvious self-interest, that I’m not wearing a helmet.

  Julie’s smoke trail thins as her bike’s engine wakes up and clears its throat, but by the time the trail is gone, I’ve deduced her destination. I burst out of the confines of the suburbs and into the open plains that lead to the airport. I find her bike parked near the 747, faint puffs of smoke chugging from its muffler. I hear her voice inside the plane, hoarse with desperation.

  “Abram! God damn it, Abram!”

  She storms down the cargo ramp and returns to her bike, fists clenched at her sides. “He’s not here. That blind, stupid son of a bitch, that motherfucking coward, I thought he’d be here, I thought he was taking the plane.”

  “Julie.” I put my hand on her shoulder to stop her wild pacing but she shrugs it off.

  “We’re fucked if he leaves us. We’re fucked. No Canada, no Iceland, we’re stuck in this fucking desert and it’ll take us months to even—”

  “Julie!”

  She snaps out of her rage and finally looks at me.
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  I take a breath to come down from that necessary raising of my voice. “I know where he’s going.”

  “How?”

  I’m not going to say it. I’ve already poked that scar once and felt the jolt of pain. I look at her, and she understands.

  She gets back on her bike. I walk mine through a U-turn like a kid on training wheels, then I hit the gas and launch forward, my legs flailing in the air for a moment before I catch my balance and find the pegs. I glance back at her, hoping my clownish riding might pull a smile out of the tension, but her face is locked in a grim stare. Julie can find humor in almost anything. Hungry zombies, armies of skeletons, her own imprisonment and torture. Her dream of a better world is the one thing she’ll never joke about, and I fear for anyone who threatens it.

  • • •

  Big brother is happy.

  I like it when big brother is happy because that means everything’s okay. Big brother worries more than anyone else; he thinks no one else worries enough, not even Dad, so if big brother is happy, I know we’re safe.

  “Perry, bring your squirt guns! We can have a battle in the woods!”

  Big brother is stuffing his backpack full of clothes and fun stuff. A football. A Frisbee. A drawing pad and color pencils. I’m going to ask him to draw me a monster. Mom said the monsters you make up with your imagination are always worse than the real ones. I’ll stick big brother’s monster on my bedroom door to scare away the real ones.

  “Let’s go, kids!” Dad yells. He’s outside in the truck with Mom and the motor is on and it’s time to go. I grab all my squirt guns and run outside and dump them in the back of the truck. Big brother climbs in and reaches down and lifts me up by my armpits like Mom and Dad used to do when I was a baby. We sit on the rusty metal and I feel my bottom getting wet from the dirty water that’s pooled in all the dents but I’m smiling and big brother is smiling. We bang the back of our heads against the window because that means we’re ready to go and Dad drives out into the town and onto the fast road and then the road with the old barns and then the gravel road and then the dirt road and the bumps make me and big brother bounce all over like popcorn in the pan the way Mom cooks it and I start laughing. Big brother laughs too, even though he’s so old he’s almost a grown-up, because he’s happy, and if he’s happy that means everything’s okay.

  • • •

  I exit the highway onto the road with the old barns. The barns are gone, no doubt cut up for firewood, but the concrete slabs of their foundations remain, like inexplicable basketball courts in the middle of a meadow.

  I take the gravel road and we pass a few dozen old farmhouses. My stolen memories tell me nothing about who might have lived here, but they must have vacated when Helena burned. Distantly, I wonder why they bothered to board up their windows. A few are actually barred, and one little cottage has a chain-link fence enclosing its yard. I catch glimpses of equipment that doesn’t look agricultural, but I force my mind to stay on track. We won’t find Abram in any of these houses, placed at standoffish intervals but still vaguely neighborly. The isolation he wants can only be found at the end of a long dirt road. I see several of them branching off from this gravel arterial and sinking back into the forest like the mouths of caves, damp and dark and so forbidding they are their own NO TRESPASSING signs.

  Brush and branches have almost closed some of them, so I drop down to second gear, studying each opening carefully. As we approach the place where the memories converge, I begin to worry that the Kelvins’ driveway has overgrown completely in the intervening years, but then I skid to a stop. Julie slides in behind me, and when the dust clears, we are looking at a wide-open highway into the forest. The road has grass, but it’s short. It’s been a couple years since the branches were trimmed—their sawn ends bristle with new growth—but only a couple.

  This road has been in use. And at least one person used it today. A single tire track tills a line of dark earth through the grass.

  Julie cranks the throttle and shoots past me, kicking up a spray of gravel that becomes a spray of dirt. I chase after her, struggling to keep the bike upright on the uneven terrain, but I don’t have to struggle long. A few hundred feet into the woods, we come to a gate. A heavy steel bar with red and white stripes, the kind that once guarded state parks against the depredations of motor vehicles, as if the Montana Forest Service missed the memo that we gave up on the planet decades ago.

  Sprout is kneeling on the edge of the path, trying to get a caterpillar to crawl onto her finger. Her father is sawing at the gate’s lock with a pocket-size hacksaw.

  “This wasn’t here before,” he says without pausing or turning around. “Did they come back?”

  Julie and I dismount our bikes and approach the gate.

  “Is this where they were all those years I was looking for them?” he continues.

  “Abram,” Julie says.

  He keeps sawing. “Almost there.”

  Julie watches him for a moment, trying to calm her breathing. “Abram.”

  He finally turns around. He looks from her to me and tosses up his hands in exasperation. “How? How the hell did you know where I was going?”

  Julie glances at me. For a moment, I consider telling him. Even though he wasn’t present for most of the memories I took from Perry, I’m certain I have enough from those first five years to convince him of what I once was. Would knowing the plague isn’t invincible loosen his stiff mind? Or simply snap it? The rifle on his back keeps my mouth shut.

  “We tracked you,” Julie says.

  “Bullshit. Davy Crockett couldn’t track a bike on paved roads.”

  “Abram, please,” Julie says, trying to roll past this topic with sheer urgency. “We have maybe the last jet in North America. We have a fucking chariot of the gods that can take us anywhere, and it’s useless without you.”

  “I fixed my father’s motorcycles for you. Go start a hippie biker gang. I’m done.” He turns and resumes sawing.

  “We already did this, Abram!” Julie takes a few steps toward him. “You agreed to come with us! What’s changed?”

  “I agreed on one thing: that Axiom would catch me if I tried to drive here. So I flew here.”

  “What is it about this fucking cabin? You can go anywhere in the world and you choose this?” She gestures to the muddy road and the dark, mossy woods around us.

  “It has a bomb shelter. There’s a year’s worth of supplies.”

  “A year?” Julie laughs incredulously. “And then what? You’re going to hunt rabbits and jerk off in the woods for the rest of your life?”

  Abram doesn’t answer. The saw makes a thin ringing like a high violin note.

  “Okay, so you’re done with living, fine, but what about Sprout? Are you going to bury her with you?”

  “Leave her out of this,” Abram mutters, still sawing.

  “She is in this! She’s right here!” Julie turns to Sprout, who is watching the argument with knitted brows while the forgotten caterpillar crawls up her arm. “Sprout. Do you want to live here in the forest with just your dad? Or do you want to make friends and learn things? Maybe build things and invent things? Try to help the world?”

  Abram whirls around and throws his hacksaw into the dirt. “Don’t you fucking talk to my daughter. This is my decision.”

  “It’s her childhood!” Julie shouts, taking another step toward him. “It’s her life!”

  “She’s my daughter, God damn it!”

  “She’s not your anything! She’s a person!”

  They’re standing toe-to-toe now, faces livid and trembling, and Julie somehow appears to be staring him down, despite being a foot shorter.

  “Daddy?” Sprout says, her voice so soft and timid it’s almost lost in the tense air. “I want to build things.”

  Abram gives the gate a fierce kick. The lock snaps and the bar swings open. He grabs Sprout under the shoulders and lifts her roughly onto his bike. He starts the engine and takes off in a spray of
mud, and Sprout shoots Julie a sad glance before they disappear into the woods.

  For a moment, the only sound is the discomforting squeak of Julie’s teeth grinding. Then she jumps on her bike and starts it.

  “Julie, don’t,” I say, running toward her.

  “Don’t what?” she snaps.

  “Don’t keep pushing him. You don’t know what he’ll do.”

  “He’s pushing me,” she says with her back to me, and I’m suddenly hyper-aware of the shotgun strapped to it. “I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  She twists the throttle and roars up the trail. With a mounting sense of dread, I go after her. My brain feeds me images of possible outcomes, and by the time the trees begin to thin in anticipation of a clearing, I am bracing for war, begging my past self to loan me his combat skills one more time.

  Then I round a corner and Julie and Abram are there, stopped at the clearing’s edge, and I hit the brakes and the bike slips and tips over and slides away from me as I roll to a stop in the dirt. Neither of them even look at me as I pull myself up and brush the mud off my clothes. They’re looking straight ahead, at a log cabin in the center of a small, sunny clearing. Rough-hewn timbers, shingled roof, a brick chimney promising cozy evenings by the fire—it’s the classical image in every detail except the door and windows. The door is a not-so-rustic slab of riveted steel, and the windows are dark holes covered by less-than-quaint steel gratings.

  In the center of the door: a logo. A jagged, hollow mandala.

  Abram yanks his rifle out of his backpack and gets off his bike. Julie does the same.

  “Stay close to me, Mura,” Abram says, and moves toward the porch. No rocking chairs. No lanterns. A stack of ammo crates where a stack of firewood should be. He steps to a window grating and listens. The only sounds I hear are distant bird calls and the rustling of pine branches. He grips the door’s heavy latch, readies his weapon, and pulls the door open.

  There is no one inside to shoot. The cabin is empty. No furniture, no beds, just a bare floor and a kitchen counter covered in utensils that probably aren’t for cooking. Instead of elk heads and landscape paintings, the walls are lined with shackles. Rubber cuffs and collars hang from thick cables bolted to the wall. The shackles are unoccupied, but the dark stains on the walls tell a dark story.