“What is this?” Julie whispers, keeping her shotgun braced and ready.
Abram sifts through the tools on the kitchen counter. Scalpel. Speculum. Cranial saw. I think of Nora’s Morgue and then the facility that preceded it, a place to study the Dead and to practice killing them. It’s the simplest explanation, but something is askew.
I step forward and lift an object off the counter just to verify what I’m looking at.
A doll. A plastic baby doll, naked and bone white, with a blank, flat oval where its face should be.
“Daddy, look,” Sprout says, picking something off the floor and holding it out to Abram. It’s the baby’s face. Or one of them, anyway. I see others scattered across the countertop, little paper ovals cut out of magazines: attractive men and women smiling blandly.
Sprout pushes the cutout onto the doll’s face, and it sticks.
What was happening in this cabin?
Abram shakes his head as if to regather his focus. He kneels down and lifts a hatch up from the floor. He pulls a flashlight from his pack and looks at Julie.
“Stay with Sprout.”
Julie shakes her head. “I’ll cover you. R can stay with Sprout.”
“I don’t need cover and I don’t trust ‘R.’ Stay with Sprout.”
He descends the ladder and disappears into the square of darkness. We wait.
“Well?” Julie calls to him after a moment.
No answer.
“Abram?” She steps to the edge of the hatch and peers into the darkness. “Abram!”
She looks at me, twisting her hair. “I can’t see him.” She glances at Sprout, then back at me. “Go down and check.”
I realize I’m standing in a far corner of the room as if something has backed me into it. I don’t remember moving. The basement hatch is a perfect black square, like a missing pixel in the rendering of reality.
“R?”
I blink a few times and push myself to the hatch’s edge. Enough daylight leaks in to make out the ladder and the floor below, but not much beyond it. I force my hands and feet to do their jobs, and I descend the ladder. I gag on the stench of mold and decay—a Pyrrhic victory for my sense of smell—but all basements smell this way. Cobwebs and rat carcasses. It’s just a basement.
I reach the bottom and peer into the shadows. “Abram?”
There’s no answer, but as my eyes adjust, I see the glow of his flashlight leaking through a stack of empty crates. I move forward, noting that the basement is bigger than the cabin itself, an expansive concrete chamber lined with work tables and shelves and a partially walled bathroom, and I wonder if the cabin was merely an afterthought to this bunker.
A few tools and medical devices lie scattered on these tables and shelves, along with inexplicable oddities like a stack of traffic signs and a box of wigs. But for the most part, the bunker is stripped clean.
Abram is sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of what appears to be a walk-in freezer missing its door. His flashlight illuminates his face ghostly blue—eyes blank, mouth tight—and beyond that, the interior of the freezer.
“It’s all gone,” he mumbles. “The food, the medicine, beds, blankets . . . the fucking toilet paper. All they left was this.”
The freezer’s shelves are bare, but it’s far from empty. Neatly stacked corpses rise halfway to the ceiling in a slow gradient of decay: dry bones on the bottom, leathery skeletons in the middle, and brown, bloated meat on the top. Some have holes in their heads, but most don’t. Most seem to have died of obscurer causes.
“What were they trying to do?” I ask, unable to tear my eyes away from the mass grave.
“No idea.”
A rat wriggles out of a rib cage and crawls up onto one of the fresher corpses. It bites into the oozing nub of an earlobe. The corpse twitches.
Abram stands and marches stiffly back to the ladder, leaving me in total darkness. I hurry after him, trying to ignore the moist squirming behind me.
Sprout is waiting at the edge of the hatch, but I don’t see Julie until I emerge into daylight. She’s standing in front of a small cabinet in the far corner of the cabin, looking down at something. Reading something. A large pink card. She holds it behind her back as she turns to us. “What’d you find?”
“Nothing,” Abram says.
“Nothing?” She looks at me, sees the lingering horror on my face. “R, what did you—”
“What is that?” Abram says, striding toward her with his palm out. For some reason, Julie hesitates—just for a second, but I feel tiny questions rising like goosebumps.
“You tell me,” she says, handing him the card. “Looks like notes for a meeting or something.”
I move up behind Abram to read over his shoulder. The text is so thick with abbreviations and jargon that it hits my brain like monkey chatter, and for a moment I wonder if I’ve slipped back into illiteracy. But with great concentration, I’m able to parse it together.
Full sweeps, MT, ID, WY, 87 spcm. cllct
Roamers: ^fresh ^resil. ^cog. activity v. Hivers
Roamers Ornt. response rate: 45% Hivers: 5%
Rec. cease hive raids, incrs. street sweeps
Street sweeps avg. 10-30 spcm per day, ^60% over 3 mnth
Spcm. ids. indicate extended migration, up to 300 mi. v origin
Cause unknown but rec. capitalize
New Ornt. mthd “de-id” ^20% effct
65 spcm: X
12 spcm: 40% coop.
8 spcm: 76% coop.
2 spcm: 100% coop.
Rec. all facil. adopt “de-id” in comb. w. Detroit “de-edu” mthd, cont. study of NY “pink drink” mthd
Rec. close all Helena facils, trnsfr staff + spcm. to Detroit + NY, consolidate mthds + rsrcs
1 yr projection: 100% coop, begin mass prod.
Abram stares at the card for a lot longer than it should take to read it.
“Does any of that . . . mean anything to you?” Julie asks. Her tone contains more than simple incomprehension. A hint of sediment disturbed, of drowned thoughts rising.
Abram shakes his head. It’s unclear if he’s answering Julie or some shouting inner voice. He grabs Sprout’s hand and marches out of the cabin.
“Hey!” Julie chases him out. “Abram!”
The sun is a little lower, the sky a little paler. The trees look lifeless in the still air. Abram lifts Sprout onto his bike and climbs on behind her. He says it like a bitter concession: “I’ll fly the plane.”
Julie stops on the porch, cocking her head. “You will?”
“I’ll go to town till I find a safe place to settle. Maybe that’s a year from now on the other side of the world, maybe it’s tomorrow in Toronto. Either way, that’s where I get off, whether you’ve found your utopia or not. Is that clear?”
Julie doesn’t answer.
“Is that clear?”
“Yes,” she says. “It’s clear.”
Abram starts his bike, spins it around, and disappears into the trees.
We stand on the porch steps, listening to the engine noise dwindle. “What did you find down there?” Julie asks quietly.
The engine’s harsh growl gives way to the sounds of the forest. The birdsong fades to a few lonely calls as the sun slips below the trees.
“Corpses,” I reply, staring into the dark maw of the trail. “And nothing.”
“Oh.”
I look at her. “What did you find?”
Surprise and faint embarrassment flicker across her face, like I’ve snuck up behind her while she’s journaling. But the look is gone so quickly I can’t be sure I didn’t imagine it. “Just a piece of paper,” she says. “Just some words.”
She hops onto her bike and kicks it to life. I follow her into the woods.
WE
THE BOY is getting hungry.
He floats between states, almost perfectly balanced between Living and Dead, almost unreachable to the demands of either, but only almost. He has walked hundreds of miles without
consuming any form of energy, and one can only defy physics for so long. His balance is beginning to tremble.
He doesn’t remember the last time he ate. His past is an unreadable mess, like a book shredded and glued back together. A big man and a tall man and a family of skeletons. Then other Dead people. A blur of blank faces and unfamiliar rooms. Passed from hand to hand, cared for, fed a few bits of meat, then forgotten in a dark hallway, picked up by someone else, fed, and forgotten.
We can’t decipher these soggy collages, so we skip ahead to the new pages, to where he smelled a new scent rippling through the airport, new sounds echoing through the halls, voices and laughter and scratchy old music. He saw the change around him, felt it creeping into him, and he pushed it out. It felt unearned, inadequate, like a father apologizing for a beating by offering a hug. He wasn’t ready to embrace this supposedly new world. He didn’t trust its open arms.
Now he is far away from that world, deep in the forest and more alone than he’s ever been, if loneliness can be measured in miles. This stretch of highway has been untouched for so long the forest has started to reclaim it, smoothing it back into the green expanse like a fading scar. Young pines shoot through the pavement as their parents’ roots break it up for them. Slabs, then shards, then pebbles, then sand. He can feel the looseness of things here, so far from the lattice of other minds. He sees vacillations in the corners of his eyes. Things that aren’t quite certain what they are; they are waiting for someone to tell them. In this place, he is prepared to see spherical doors and tetrahedral fires, crystal birds and hollow bears, but he is not expecting a man on a bicycle wearing a Sonic Youth T-shirt.
The man rides past the boy, then stops, gets off his bike, and walks back to him. The man is neatly bearded, the sides of his head trimmed short, his eyes hidden behind Wayfarer sunglasses. In another era, he might be on his way to work at a trendy software company. In this era, he is sweaty and dirty and the barrel of an Uzi pokes out of his messenger bag.
The boy keeps his eyes on his own toes as the man approaches him.
“Are you Living?” the man says, stopping a safe distance away.
The boy shrugs.
“I guess that’s a yes. You alone?”
The boy nods.
The man examines him. The boy’s skin is pale, but only as pale as dark skin can be. “Do you talk?”
The boy keeps his head down. He doesn’t talk. He can, but he doesn’t. To talk is to let people inside, to share common ground and common language. Even if the words are hateful, talking is a connection, and it requires a tiny amount of trust. More than the boy has.
And yet the boy is lonely. And hungry. He looks up at the man.
“Jesus!” the man says, jumping back and reaching instinctively for his gun, then stopping himself. He looks closer at the boy’s eyes. Bright, shimmering yellow. Two golden rings. “Those aren’t Dead eyes,” he says. “What kind of eyes are those?”
The boy shrugs.
The man looks at the boy. He looks him up and down. “What’s your name?”
The boy shrugs.
The man thinks for a moment. “Why don’t you come with me.”
The boy studies the man’s face, searching for something to read. The man’s sunglasses are a wall over his soul.
Is he a good person? the boy asks us. Is most of him in you?
We don’t answer.
The boy reaches out and takes the man’s hand. The man smiles.
There is no room for the boy on the bike so the man walks with it beside him. The boy notes that this is kind. It will slow the man down and double the length of his journey, but he does it. The Dead feed their young so that their young can help them feed. There is no feeling, no bond, only numbers multiplying themselves. It has been a long time since the boy has encountered kindness.
The boy and the man walk in silence. The man glances at the boy from time to time. The boy can feel his gaze even through the sunglasses, a faint heat on the side of his face.
They emerge from the forest into a small highway town, houses sagging, grass on roofs, tree branches poking through windows. The sun is melting against the edge of the horizon, about to disappear.
“We’ll sleep here,” the man says, glancing at the boy again. They leave the crumbled highway and enter the crumbled town.
Next to the gas station, there is a tiny play area. One swing set and a jungle gym, its colorful paint all peeled off, a spidery dome of rusted steel bars. The man pries an armful of shingles off the side of the gas station and carries it back to the jungle gym, dumps it through the holes, and climbs inside.
“Safest place to have a fire,” he says, smiling at the boy. “No surprises in here.”
The boy crawls into the dome and sits in the weedy grass that’s growing through the sand. He watches the man coax the rotted shingles into a tiny, sad fire that’s mostly smoke. When he’s convinced that it won’t burn any better, the man sits back and finally takes off his sunglasses. He looks at the boy. The boy tries to read his eyes but their piercing focus makes him look away.
“Sorry for staring,” the man says, still staring. “I’ve never seen eyes like yours.”
The boy reaches into the man’s messenger bag. Underneath the gun and a big knife, there is a stick of beef jerky. He pulls it out and regards it warily. He has tried this before, but maybe now . . .
“Go ahead,” the man says. “If you’re hungry, go ahead.”
The boy takes a bite. He chews the cured, salted, chemically preserved meat. No trace of life energy, human or otherwise. He spits the meat into the gravel.
The man nods. “Thought so.”
The boy looks up, not understanding this comment.
“I’ve heard about ones like you. Mostly Dead? Sort of . . . stuck in between?”
The boy lowers his eyes to the fire.
The man rises to a crouch and hobbles around the smoldering pile of shingles, keeping his head down but still bumping a few of the jungle gym bars. He sits next to the boy. “It must be confusing. Your brain trying to tell you you’re a person even though there’s nothing in there. Just a bunch of impulses in an empty room.” He looks at the side of the boy’s cheek. “I feel like that sometimes.”
The boy looks into the fire while the man looks at his cheek, his neck. The fire’s core is a murky red glow behind all the smoke.
“But you know, you don’t need to worry about that,” the man says, his voice soft and deeply earnest. “Because you’re not really alive. Just try to remember that, okay? Everything is easier if you remember that.”
The boy turns to look at the man. The man smiles and puts one hand on the boy’s thigh. Then the other on his zipper.
The boy bites off the man’s ear.
The man screams and leaps to his feet. His head hits the bars with a ping and he falls face-first into the fire. He lies motionless while his beard burns like dry moss. The boy hikes up the man’s T-shirt and chews into the wells of life pulsing through deltoids, trapezius, latissimus, fascia.
How will you file this? he asks us as he buries his face in bloody flesh. This moment, me and this bad person, this thing I had to do. Higher or Lower? Will people read it and learn from it, or will you lock it away?
We want to tell the boy he doesn’t understand. We are not a librarian; we are the books. But even if we broke our silence now, he wouldn’t listen. He is busy.
He peels the man layer by layer, siphoning the life into his own starved cells. He has fought the hunger for a very long time, trying to hold his precarious balance, but there are limits. He can feel the cure circling in his head, tickling his eyes, showing him secret truths while it knocks on his soul, but he keeps the door barred. He is angry. He is not ready to talk.
He eats until he’s full and then sits in the sand, staring at the red mess. Most of the man is gone, but the sinews that remain begin to twitch. The boy didn’t touch the brain. This man’s brain is toxic waste bubbling in the barrel of his skull, and it
must be disposed of. The boy pulls the knife out of the messenger bag and removes the head from its neck. The eyes blink open, now gray. They watch him as he digs a hole in the sand. They watch him as he drops the head into the hole, and they continue to watch until he scoops sand over them. A little mound remains, so he builds a little castle, then he crawls out of the jungle gym.
He doesn’t take the knife, or the gun, or the bike. His objective is not survival or advancement. He is simply searching. But he does take the sunglasses. He puts them on, covering the gleaming evidence of the struggle inside him. He walks back to the highway while the man he hoped was good smolders in the fire, tendrils of greasy smoke rising toward the stars.
I
THE FORESTS OF MONTANA are familiar to me. I look at the trees, and my hands and feet relive the sensation of climbing. The jagged bark of Douglas firs, the fine sandpaper of aspens, the twisted trunks of the whitebark pines, ancient and full of secrets.
The rumble of our idling bikes barely disturbs the silence as we creep down the shadowy hillside, all brakes, no throttle. I know Julie could go a lot faster, but she holds back, letting me set the pace, so we proceed like kids on training wheels until we emerge onto the gravel road, then the country road, then the highway. I breathe a sigh of relief as I crank the throttle and the bike lunges away from those haunted woods.
By the time we get back to the airport, the sun has vanished, leaving only a murky pink streak on the flat horizon. Nora and M are leaning against the plane’s front wheel, arms crossed, frowning.
“What the fuck, Jules?” Nora says, her hands springing out like question marks.
Apparently Abram beat us here by more than a few minutes, because the cargo ramp is down and his bike is secured inside. Julie gives Nora a weary don’t ask head shake and drives up the ramp. I follow her in and we begin fastening the tie-downs.
“We thought he was trying to take the plane,” Nora says as she and M march up the ramp. “I almost shot him.”