The Burning World

  Another long, pitiful moan, so different from her earlier snarls of mindless hunger.

  “Julie,” Abram says, and she jolts at the sound of her name. “I know why you’re doing what you’re doing. I’d do the same thing. But if you ever meant a word of all that save-the-world talk, you’ll let me land this plane. Because we’re about to fly past your first real chance to do something.”

  Julie squeezes her eyes tight, clearing the mist, and stands up. “Land it,” she says, but her voice is lacking any rebel fervor, more a surrender than a command. She’s already walking toward the rear of the plane. “Mom? Are you okay?”

  I follow her quietly, keeping a respectful distance. Her mother sits in the aisle, slouching on the floor. A length of cable runs through her collar and around the posts of a headrest, giving her a few feet to move around, and Joan and Alex sit just outside her range, watching her warily.

  “Scary,” Alex says, widening his eyes at me.

  “Sad,” Joan says, regarding Audrey with precociously deep empathy. “She’s . . . very sad.”

  Their bells jingle. My kids have collars too. I found them in some pet carriers and decided the bells’ warning would be sufficient security for these gentle young corpses. Abram was in no position to object this time.

  “We’re going to land in Pittsburgh, Mom,” Julie says, sitting cross-legged in front of her. “They say there’s a resistance there. We’re going to see if we can help.”

  Audrey’s hands lie palms-up on the floor in front of her and she stares down at them, slack-faced.

  “Do you remember trying to help, Mom? Do you remember how much you wanted to make the world better?”

  Audrey rocks back and forth, her filthy hair dangling into her eyes.

  “Mom? Do you remember anything?”

  Audrey lunges and snaps her teeth an inch from Julie’s face. Julie jumps up and back, her lips trembling. Audrey is looking right at her. The Dead’s emotions are hard to read, even for their fellow Dead, but if I had to guess, I’d say the look on Audrey’s sallow face is bitterness. The deep, singular hurt of someone who has tried to do good and been punished for it.

  “Why do we keep doing this?” I demand of my mother as she peels potatoes for tonight’s vat of communal stew. “What’s the point of helping people if the world’s going to burn anyway?”

  I can no longer spare her. My confusion has grown too big to be restrained by kindness; it lashes out heedlessly, beating my mother down.

  “Are we winning points with God? Is he even keeping score? Won’t it all go back to zero when he resets the world? There won’t be any record of what we’ve done here, Mom! Why are we doing this?”

  “I don’t know!” she screams at me, and the peeler falls to the floor. She is crying. She has been crying for a while; her face and neck are wet with it, but her back was to me and I couldn’t see. “I don’t know, you cold, logical thing. I don’t know.”

  I back out of the kitchen, my anger and confusion mixing with guilt, forming still harder alloys.

  Wiping at her eyes with a callused hand, my mother bends down and picks up the peeler—

  Julie is looking at me. What has been on my face? How much have I revealed? I feel gravity weakening as the plane begins its descent, thinning my body’s connection to solid things.

  WE

  THERE ARE NO MORE ROAD games in the van. No more lively debates or pop rock on the stereo. Just uneasy silence. The boy sits on the bucket between the two seats, his sunglasses somewhere in the back, lost under bags and boxes. He keeps his gaze straight ahead as Gael and Gebre steal sideways glances at him. He is not bothered by their curiosity or even their fear. He would answer their questions if he could answer his own.

  “One thing I can say for sure,” Gebre says as if concluding a long discussion in his head, “you talked. I definitely heard you talk back there. So it is safe to assume you understand us, yes, Rover?”

  “He could be deaf,” Gael says.

  Gebre considers this a moment. He hands the cracked iPod to Gael. “Play something kids hate.”

  Gael spins the wheel and clicks. A cherubic falsetto rises over plodding drums and bittersweet strings.

  “No, no,” Gebre says with a grimace. “I said something kids hate, not something every sane person hates.”

  “It’s Sigur Rós!” Gael objects. “It’s a mopecore classic.”

  Gebre shudders. They watch the boy for a reaction, but he stares blankly ahead. Gael raises the volume until the piercing falsetto threatens to crack the windshield. Gebre is shouting at him to shut down the experiment, the boy is obviously deaf, but then he cuts off in midsentence and kills the stereo.

  “Hey,” he says to the boy, whispering in the ringing silence. “Are you okay?”

  The boy’s face is still blank, but his shocking yellow irises are dulled behind a pool of tears. He does not answer Gebre because he is no longer in the van. He is stumbling along a walkway in a dark, echoing Library, suspended between unknowable heights and unthinkable depths, struggling to keep his eyes ahead. A few books topple out of their shelves and loose pages flutter around him, and now he’s in a restaurant, sitting across from a girl, trying to tolerate the music she has chosen. The girl looks like him, older and thinner and a little lighter-skinned, but with the same brown eyes, dark like wells that sink through all strata to the beginning of life on Earth.

  He loves the girl and she loves him. They are the only remaining keepers of each other’s memory, though it’s buried deep in them both.

  “Hey,” Gael says, gently wiping a tear from his cheek. “What’s wrong, love?”

  The boy looks at the dampness on the man’s pale finger, the salt crystals inside it like icebergs adrift on a diluvial Earth.

  “Washington, DC,” he says.

  Gael and Gebre share a stunned glance.

  “Is that where you were going?” Gebre asks.

  The boy doesn’t respond.

  “The Almanac we found in Dallas . . . ,” Gebre says to Gael under his breath. “DC was exed, wasn’t it? Exed and razed?”

  “Rover,” Gael says to the boy, giving him a look of deep regret, “there’s nobody in DC, mate. It burned down a long time ago.”

  The boy has no visible reaction.

  “But we’re going somewhere that has a lot of people,” Gebre says with forced cheer. “People and food and work, and it’s safe there. No one will hurt us there.”

  Gael tentatively reaches toward him, lays a hand on his shoulder. The boy knows Gael is afraid of his teeth and for a moment he feels the urge, but it’s not really hunger. He is beyond the control of that simple brute. When he feels the urge now, it’s just a rattling of his cage. A frenzied effort to bend the bars.

  “We’re going to look after you,” Gael says, giving the boy’s shoulder a squeeze, and he and Gebre share a meaningful look. A decision. “Whatever’s happened to you, we’re going to help you heal it. Okay?”

  The boy grits his teeth to stop the clicking that he can tell makes Gael nervous. He sees a moonlit balcony and a dusty airport and an old house on fire, all of it shrinking into the darkness through the rear window of a Geo coupe.

  “Don’t worry, Rover,” Gebre says, trying even harder to infuse his voice with hope. “You’re going to love New York.”

  I

  “IT’S A MIXED POPULATION BRANCH so it’s normal for civilians to be here, but we have to assume they’re still broadcasting our capture code, so people are going to recognize us if we give them a chance. I’ll keep us out of traffic but if we do run into anyone, keep your mouths shut, heads down, no eye contact. Think of every time you’ve ever failed someone and let the shame make you invisible.”

  I’m not listening. I don’t need these tips. No one avoids human interaction better than I do. No one has more shame to hide behind. As Pittsburgh’s skyline rises in front of us, Abram drones on about the resistance leaders we’re looking for, the secret conference rooms where they meet, but only
a thin outer layer of me is hearing him. I am finding it hard to be here, in the present, with all its explosions and car chases and covert operations. We are trying to overthrow a despotic regime and save America, but all I can think about is the five people walking next to me, their localized conflicts, their tiny joys and pains.

  Nora’s eyes are faraway, traveling inner spaces I know little about. M walks beside her with an equally distant look, perhaps continuing to excavate his apparently harmless past. The pistol looks heavy in Julie’s hand. The barrel keeps drifting away from Abram as if embarrassed, and Julie reluctantly drags it back.

  “Nora,” I say under my breath, and she jolts like a sleepwalker waking up.

  “Wha—sorry, what?” she mumbles. Her eyes dart to absorb her surroundings.

  “Can I ask you . . . a personal question?”

  “Uh . . . sure?”

  “What would you do?” I keep my voice low, audible only to her and M. “If you found your mother.”

  Her face clouds and she doesn’t respond.

  “Would you do this?” I gesture toward Julie.

  “Like I told Marcus,” she says, “I don’t have parents. I grew out of the ground.”

  “Stop that,” M grunts at her.

  She gives him a look that’s uncertain but primed for outrage. “Excuse me?”

  “Stop bullshitting.” He somehow infuses this with tenderness. “You’re stronger than that.”

  Nora blinks at him a few times, her eyes widened with undecided emotion.

  “You told me how they left you,” I remind her. “That night at the bar?”

  She turns her trapped-animal gaze on me.

  “You’ve lost everything Julie has. So . . . would you do this?”

  She seems to break down a barrier within herself, the outer layer of a many-walled city. “It’s different,” she says, exhaling the debris in a small sigh. “Julie loved her parents. They were good people who got crushed by circumstances. Mine . . .”

  Her face trembles as if with effort, like she’s climbing over something in her head.

  “Mine left”—another spasm—“me.” Another deep breath. “They left me. To die. And they were assholes from the beginning. So what is it you’re asking? If I found my parents alive, would I hijack a plane and fly across the world to save them?” She lets out a dark chuckle that sounds more like a snarl. “Fuck no. I’d have a hard time not killing them myself.”

  I notice M moving his hand toward Nora’s shoulder, then reconsidering, retreating.

  “But I’m a coldhearted bitch,” she continues with forced flippancy. “I’m all up in Buddha’s ass with that non-attachment shit. Love nothing, mourn nothing, you know? Jules is different.” She watches Julie walk, just a few inches taller than her prisoner’s daughter. “She’s been through hell and she’s got iron skin, but under that? She’s all gooey pink.” She smiles fondly as Julie lets the gun sag to her side, barely even trying anymore. “And I love that about her. Sometimes I even envy it. It takes crazy courage to let yourself feel that much. But yeah . . .” She sighs. “Sometimes it’s a problem.”

  “You’re not that different,” M says very quietly.

  “What was that?” Nora says, cocking her head like she didn’t hear, but the spike in her tone reveals otherwise.

  “You’re not as cold . . . as you think.”

  “Well that’s an interesting theory, but you don’t really know anything about me do you?”

  M doesn’t reply, but he holds his gaze.

  “Cut the chatter,” Abram calls back to us. “We just entered the branch perimeter. Wake up and watch for patrols.”

  I glance around. There is no visible border, no apparent change in the cityscape, but we must have crossed some landmark that only a local would recognize. A distant part of me is disappointed in the lack of human presence so far. I was looking forward to seeing what an un-exed city feels like. Even a city controlled by Axiom would feel more real than the human zoo of Citi Stadium. But we have been hiking through Pittsburgh for over an hour—roaring into town on the bikes like unconvincing Hells Angels was quickly ruled out—and we have yet to encounter another person.

  This is what the early days looked like, says a memory drifting up from my basement, like a disturbed child muttering in the dark. Cities bled out as humanity fled from itself, dispersing across the country with the absurd hope that isolation was the cure, that their shadows wouldn’t follow them. But we did. We followed them everywhere.

  “You said it’s been a year since you’ve been here?” Julie asks Abram.

  “That’s right.”

  She looks from building to empty building. “And there were people then?”

  He walks another block before replying. “They must have condensed. Moved everyone downtown.”

  How often does prey outrun the predator? The predator is designed to win, and if it didn’t usually do so, if the business of eating the weak did not net a profit, it would fold, and there would be no more predators. But there are always predators. No matter how bare the fields get.

  Whoever you are, I tell the melancholy drone, shut the fuck up. And to my surprise, it obeys, leaving a reverberation of resentment in the silence. It’s just me now, watching the ghostly towers of Pittsburgh drift past.

  I wonder how many people are in my brain. Perhaps each day births a new version of me with its own thoughts and feelings, thousands of homunculi stretching back from today to yesterday to adolescence to infancy, all stuffed into the same head to argue and jostle for position. It would explain a lot.

  • • •

  Abram is leading us toward the river, which flows around and into downtown, backed up from the overfilled ocean until it spills over its banks and turns parks into ponds. The only visible way across the sea is a single bright yellow bridge.

  “I’d just like to point out,” Nora says, “that us walking over that bridge is about as stealthy as a parade.”

  “Trust me,” Abram says.

  “Now why would I do that?”

  Abram stops at the bridge’s entrance and slips his backpack off his right shoulder. He digs around in it using only his right arm, keeping his left limp at his side, but he still winces from the movement. I notice Julie wincing along with him. I’m about to offer him some help when he finds what he’s looking for and straightens up. He points the binoculars toward the end of the bridge, then lets out a relieved puff of breath and hands them to Julie. “Okay. I was right. They just moved downtown.”

  Julie looks, nods, and passes the binoculars to me, like we’re a group of tourists taking turns at the view scope. I see office windows. Birds in flight. Julie’s head as a yellow blur. Then I find the bridge. The magnification places me at the far end of it, about fifty feet from six men in beige jackets, standing at slouchy attention with rifles against their thighs.

  “Okay,” Julie says, “so the bridge is guarded by Axiom soldiers. That’s . . . good?”

  “Better than an empty city,” Abram says, already moving toward an exit ramp that curves under the bridge. “The coup could still be building.”

  “Abram,” Julie says, and he stops, turns. “You really think this is happening?”

  “I know it was happening. I think it still is.”

  “And you really want it to? You want to take down the people who raised you?”

  Abram chuckles. “Look, if you think I have any love for the Axiom Group just because they ‘raised’ me, you don’t know me or the Axiom Group. It doesn’t operate on love, it’s a business. It’s an exchange of services. It gives you comfort and security, you give it everything else. And it stopped paying its end.”

  He starts walking again. “Besides, if anybody raised me, it wasn’t Executive. It was the guys we’re going to see.”

  The air is cool under the bridge, shaded by the looming expanse of steel girders. Behind one of the support pillars, in an unlikely corner where only a city worker would ever think to look, there is a tiny steel
door in the concrete wall. He opens it and gestures to the darkness inside.

  “What is this?” Julie says.

  “Access shaft to the subway tunnels. They’ll take us under the river and right up into the branch campus.”

  M is shaking his head. “Nope. I won’t even fit.”

  “Rub some grease on you,” Abram says. “You’ll fit.” He holds his hand out to Julie. “Mind giving back the flashlight you stole from me?”

  She pulls it out of her pack and clicks it on, aims it into the doorway and nods. “Lead on.”

  He sighs. “You’re just all flint and leather, aren’t you? I bet you gave Perry a hell of a headache.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to talk about Perry.”

  “Is that how he died? Did you bitch him to death?”

  “Shut up,” she snaps, the whites of her eyes expanding, and her gun arm rises.

  Abram puts his hands up, startled by her response. “All right, all right.”

  She jabs the flashlight at the door. “Let’s go.”

  “Going.”

  He takes Sprout’s hand and disappears into the shadows. Julie follows him, Nora and I follow her, and behind us, M grunts and curses his way through the doorway. The flashlight’s beam diffuses against the concrete, dimly illuminating a staircase so steep it’s almost a ladder.

  “Daddy,” Sprout says, “are we going home?”

  “This place wasn’t our home, little weed,” Abram says. “We don’t have a home.”

  “When do we get to have one?”

  Silence.

  “Can we build one?”

  Silence.

  MY PRISON.

  The floor of my cell is an impressionist painting of stains, and since food is only served in the mess hall, these can only be bodily fluids. I feel them under my palms when I push myself up, greasy and sticky, and when I lower myself down, I can smell them: salty and meaty and sickly sweet, a putrid cologne of human depravity.

  “How many are you up to?” Paul says from the cell across the hall.

  “Not counting.”

  “Then how do you know when you’re done?”