The Burning World

  My arms burn and tremble. My stomach feels taut enough to snap. Sweat pours from my face, adding fresh brine to the soup on the floor, which I force myself to inhale, savoring the raw disgust. This is what we are, I repeat to myself with each breath. Blood and piss and come.

  “I just know.”

  Scrub us away. Bleach us white.

  “I’m glad you’re with us, R—,” Paul says, smiling. “It takes hard men to believe the truth. It takes strong warriors to fight God’s war.”

  But I’m not thinking about God’s war. I’m thinking about mine. I want to punish my weak flesh. I want to become strong so I can hurt whoever deserves hurting. These simple exercises won’t make me a warrior, but the men in the yard might. War criminals, militia chiefs, rogue assassins, so amused by the boldness of this skinny country kid that they’re only too happy to teach me a few tricks. My body bears the marks of their generosity. My face is purple, my knuckles are red, and my muscles were burning before I even began this set, but I’m not done yet.

  “They preached hard doctrine at the Fellowship,” Paul is saying from somewhere far away, “but even there, no one had the balls to really live it. To take it all the way to its conclusion like they do in the Middle East. We have to be willing to burn for the truth.”

  How I know I’m done is when I find myself facedown on the filthy floor, my mutinous muscles refusing all orders, my mind empty of everything and surrounded by clouds of glittering blackness. I use my last remaining calorie to roll onto my back so I can watch the colors spin in my vision.

  “These bars can’t hold a fire,” Paul says, his voice filling with inspired fervor as he watches my suffering. “When we get out of here, we’re going to round up the others and finish our work.”

  The lock clicks; the door slides open. A scarred, leathery face appears above me, then the door slams shut. My eyes remain fixed on a rare ceiling stain. Blood. Must have been quite a spray. Pencil to the jugular, perhaps.

  “Welcome, brother,” Paul calls to the new prisoner.

  The man glares down at me for a few seconds, his bald, craggy visage floating in the stars like a cruel god. “The fuck are you doing?” he says, and kicks me in the ribs. “Get off the damn floor. This is my cell now.”

  I stand up. I sit on my cot and look at the man. Big. Muscular. Covered in tattoos. The usual snakes and skulls and eight balls, the clichés of a man who thinks darkness is crime and violence, not the void that lurks behind them.

  “Shit,” he says, glancing from me to Paul. “You’re fuckin’ kids. What are you, eighteen?”

  “Seventeen,” I reply.

  “National Guard ain’t worrying about petty shit anymore. What’d punks like you do to get in here?”

  “We burned down Helena.”

  He looks at me, nonplussed.

  “And Boise and Denver. They caught us halfway through Salt Lake City.”

  The man looks at Paul. Paul smiles.

  “We’ll finish that one later,” Paul says.

  I lie back on my cot, folding my lifeless arms over my chest, returning my attention to the blood on the ceiling. Dark red like a fading sunset.

  • • •

  The basement door is unlocked and sits half open, and cold subterranean breezes whistle through the gap. My past no longer waits for dreams. It plays out in front of my open eyes, projected onto my waking life with such hideous clarity that I can hardly believe my friends don’t see it. But if they did, surely I would know it. Surely everything would change if they learned what’s inside this quiet, shrugging man.

  “How much deeper does this get?” Julie asks Abram, grimacing as the water crests the top of her boots and pours inside.

  “Don’t know,” he says. “Haven’t been down here in years.” He holds out a hand to catch some of the fat drops raining from the ceiling. “But that’s a million gallons of Allegheny River above us, so . . . how strong a swimmer are you?”

  The walls of the tunnel are covered in fungal slime, and with the train tracks hidden beneath a foot of murky water, it’s hard to believe this was ever a gleaming urban artery, pumping the city’s lifeblood from head to foot and back again. In its current state, it looks more like a sewer drain.

  “I’d worry less about the water,” he continues, “and more about the high voltage rail running through it. Hope today’s not the day they flip that breaker back on.”

  “Daddy,” Sprout moans.

  “For someone so obsessed with protecting his daughter,” Julie says, “you sure seem to forget she’s here a lot.”

  Abram looks mildly chastened but says nothing.

  “Or is the pleasure of being a dick just worth the collateral damage?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Daddy, I’m scared,” Sprout says.

  “It’s okay, honey,” Julie says, turning around and crouching down to Sprout’s eye level. “He was just joking and trying to scare us. He wouldn’t bring you down here if it wasn’t safe.”

  Sprout’s eye narrows. “You can’t talk to me,” she says. “I don’t like you anymore.”

  Julie flinches. She suddenly looks about the same age as the girl in front of her. “Sprout,” she says. “I’m so sorry I hurt your dad. I didn’t want to, but my mom is sick and I . . . I needed him to help her.”

  Sprout’s glare doesn’t budge. “Are you going to hurt him again?”

  “No! Of course not.”

  “Then why do you keep pointing that gun at him?”

  Julie’s face falters. “Because I need—I don’t know if he’s going to . . .”

  “You can’t talk to me,” Sprout says, and splashes ahead to join her father.

  Julie looks at the water around her ankles. She straightens up and catches me watching her; my heart lurches at the misery in her eyes before she quickly looks away.

  It feels like days since we’ve made eye contact. We avoid it like we expect to be injured. When did we learn to fear each other? To flinch away from what we imagine the other is thinking, the cruelties we’ve written and placed in each other’s mouths?

  I don’t know how to stop it. We are lost on old paths, caught in old snares. We should be walking side by side through these dark woods, but I feel our distance growing.

  • • •

  The water level rises until it’s almost a river itself, crawling beneath the Allegheny like its timid offspring. Train oil forms psychedelic rainbows on its surface, which spiral wildly as we slosh forward in silence. When the water is almost to Sprout’s waist, Abram tries to hoist her onto his shoulders—he gets her two feet off the ground before his injuries assert themselves and he drops her with a grunt of pain.

  “It’s okay, Daddy,” she says, and takes his hand instead. “I’m okay.”

  He grimaces, but he accepts this. He moves forward, gripping her hand stiffly. “You know, I’m mad at Julie too,” he says, “but she’s right. I wouldn’t bring you here if it wasn’t safe.”

  Sprout watches the dripping ceiling. “It’s really safe?”

  “Sure. When I was a kid, this is where I’d go to get away from people. When my performance was weak and my father-boss wrote me up for discipline, I’d run away and hide in these tunnels.” An unsettling wistfulness comes over his face. “I’d sleep on the First Street station bench, drink the drips from the ceiling . . . I’d hide for days sometimes, until I got too hungry.” He chuckles. “When I started seeing things, that’s when I knew I had to go back up.”

  “What did you see?” Sprout asks uneasily.

  He doesn’t answer for a moment. He peers ahead into the darkness beyond the flashlight. “A mouth.”

  “A mouth?”

  “When I got really hungry and lonely, the tunnel would start to look like a big, round mouth with teeth all around it. And I’d imagine it was a monster that was bigger than the universe, and it was going to swallow everything.”

  “Jesus,” Nora says. “Can you stop?”

  Abram shakes his head a
s if dismissing some nostalgic indulgence. “But anyway, yes, it’s safe down here. It’s quiet and peaceful, and nobody knows about it, and nobody can get us.”

  Sprout doesn’t pursue the topic. She falls back into her usual worried silence.

  “Abram,” Nora says warily. “How are those stitches doing? You feeling feverish at all? Dizzy? Delirious?”

  “I’m fine, Nora, thank you.”

  Nora glances at M with raised eyebrows. Abram’s tone is getting harder to read, his sarcasm less clearly marked. I’m starting to wonder if his joke about swimming was not a joke at all when the tunnel finally begins to incline and the water recedes. The flashlight reveals a station ahead.

  “This is our stop,” he says, and we climb a service ladder up onto the platform.

  Julie runs the flashlight along the mildewed tile walls, looking for the exit. The beam falls on a bench where a moldy, rat-gnawed pillow rests on an equally decayed blanket. A steady drip splashes into a nearby soup can, which has rusted too much to hold water, and next to that is a sketchbook.

  “Come on, no,” Julie mutters. “This can’t be yours.”

  Abram stares at the ancient tableau, the sketchbook’s paper reduced to pulp, the drawings washed into Rorschach blots. A choked laugh comes out of him. “Let’s go,” he says, and walks briskly toward a staircase.

  We follow him up to a surface-level terminal, dimly illuminated by daylight trickling down the exit stairs. Faded posters sealed in kiosks advertise cell phone providers and insurance companies and other abstractions almost impossible for the modern mind to grasp. All the signage has been edited by spray paint, the arrows now leading to predictably morbid destinations: left to DEATH, right to HELL, and up the stairs to AXIOM. Julie starts to move toward the stairs but Abram holds out a hand.

  “Wait.” He opens a door marked STAFF ONLY and steps into what appears to have been a conference room for subway workers. A long table, a whiteboard, a few office chairs knocked over on the floor. I don’t know what Abram was expecting to find, but it’s not here. The only evidence that the room has ever been used is the faint trace of a bleach-resistant bloodstain on the beige linoleum floor.

  Abram stares at the stain for a moment, then turns and heads for the stairs.

  “Was that the secret meeting room?” Nora asks as he brushes past her. “Is this bad news?”

  He ignores her. He breaks into a run. Julie rushes to stay with him, but I sense that his haste has nothing to do with escaping. His expression is mostly anger, a familiar sight on his craggy features, but there’s something else that I haven’t seen.

  Grief?

  We emerge into daylight in the center of downtown Pittsburgh, and a strange chill runs through me, not from any bleak or horrible sight but from an unnatural lack of them.

  The city is pristine.

  The streets are clear of abandoned cars, swept of trash and debris—not so much as a fallen leaf in sight. Most of the buildings are freshly painted in calming neutral tones, and those with structural damage from long-ago conflicts are surrounded by scaffolding and vinyl sheeting—they are being repaired, a sight so old-fashioned that I doubt Sprout even knows what she’s looking at. But what renders the scene truly unnerving is its lack of people. It’s a civic engineer’s dream, all gleaming towers and efficient planning with no pesky population to ruin it.

  “What is going on here?” Julie mutters, gazing up at the high-rises like a small-town tourist. “Abram?”

  But Abram hasn’t paused. He strides toward a thick, Brutalist tower of bare concrete that looks severely out of place in the city’s historic center.

  “Hey!” Julie shouts, rushing after him. “What are you doing?”

  Despite its ghostly first impression, the city is not quite empty. There are guards at the building’s entrance.

  “Abram, stop!”

  But it’s too late. Could this have been a trap? Could he have somehow patched his relationship with Axiom and made a deal to deliver us? It’s hard to believe, but he approaches the guards with the confidence of a man who belongs here.

  We chase him up the steps. Julie’s gun is out, but using it now wouldn’t change anything. The guards draw their rifles. Abram walks right up to them—they don’t fire. They don’t even speak.

  “I need to see Mr. Warden,” he says in a tightly controlled growl. “Branch Manager Warden, where is he?”

  The men don’t answer. They have no shade or shelter; the afternoon sun beats down on their faces, but their foreheads are dry. Their pale blue eyes show no sign of discomfort or, for that matter, comprehension. I feel a sick twisting in my stomach, like I’ve stepped barefoot into something unspeakable.

  “Is this still the branch office?” Abram demands. I can tell he senses something wrong but he persists anyway. “Is Mr. Warden still branch manager?”

  The men stare at him. Then their eyes drift back into the city as if looking for someone more important to talk to.

  Abram grabs Sprout’s wrist and pushes past the apparently decorative guards into the building’s foyer. Julie throws up her hands like a surrender to insanity and follows him.

  I slow my stride, letting the others pass me until I’m last in line, and I look at the guards. They do not look at me.

  “What happened to you?” I ask them.

  Their eyes twitch toward me briefly, then back to the city. I follow my friends into the concrete tower.

  WHAT DOES THE OFFICE of a post-apocalyptic corporation look like? What kind of clerical work is required for the violent acquisition of cities? I imagine secretaries faxing massacre authorization forms to overworked, coffee-addled warlords. Executive despots shouting at underperforming militia recruiters. What kind of papers are on their desks, held down by human skull paperweights? What is their salary in a world without money, where status is a parade that few have time to watch?

  Walking into the foyer of Branch 2, I am not sure if my questions have been answered. It appears to be vacant, lacking any furniture, office supplies, or motivational posters. The only decor is the flat-screen TVs that line the walls at regular intervals, broadcasting Axiom’s gritty modern reboot of the LOTUS Feed. Abstract imagery and lulling platitudes have given way to aggressive propaganda, louder and simpler, eagles and gold bricks and grim patriarchs spreading protective arms over wives and children while blinking text shouts ACT NOW!! That subtle wrongness, like a computer trying to parse human emotions.

  Abram looks disoriented. He glances left and right as if searching for something familiar.

  Julie has had enough. “Abram.” She raises the gun just a few inches, perhaps hoping Sprout won’t notice. “Tell me what we’re doing here.”

  “Looking for Warden.” His eyes keep darting; he doesn’t appear to notice the gun either, or maybe he doesn’t care. “I need to know what happened.”

  He runs to a freight elevator. Julie lowers the gun and follows him, apparently convinced by the fear in his eyes.

  He presses the top floor and punches in a code on the keypad. There’s a discouraging beep and nothing happens. He shakes his head, muttering inaudibly, and works his way down the buttons until he reaches one that’s unrestricted: floor twenty, thirty floors from the top.

  The elevator rises, and the inertia spikes my nausea. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that tug of gravity on my guts, a sensation never felt in nature except by prey, the mouse’s final, thrilling ascent before it meets the beak. I hear the strangers in my basement pacing around, agitated, muttering vague words of warning or threat, but I push the door shut. Not now. Not a good time.

  We watch the floor numbers creep upward, the anticipation heightened by the sluggish pace. Julie exchanges her pistol for her shotgun, and Abram eyes his old weapon.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to find here,” he says. “You might want me armed.”

  “If I do, I’ll arm you.”

  “You really think I’m going to make a break for it now? Here?”

/>   “We’re inside your employer’s headquarters in the town where you grew up. Hard to imagine a better place for you to turn on us.”

  He looks at her with what appears to be genuine incredulity. “Were you asleep all those times ‘my employer’ tried to kill me? Or when they broadcast my wanted poster on national television? I thought it was pretty clear I’m fired.”

  As we pass floor ten, the overhead speaker emits a harsh pop, and a stream of customer service jazz trickles into the elevator. “Anarchy in the UK” on glistening sax and synthesizer.

  “Nothing’s clear,” Julie mutters. “Nothing’s been clear for a long time.”

  On floor fifteen, still five floors from our destination, the elevator slows. My stomach bobs back to its usual position. Then the doors open, and it sinks again.

  Standing in a dim hallway outside the elevator is a man in a gray shirt. Black slacks. Red tie. Fine formal business wear rendered slightly unprofessional by ragged edges, a few stains, and incongruous work boots.

  Something slams into my basement door but I lean against it, holding it shut. I said not now!

  The man smiles politely and remains outside, as if waiting for a less crowded ride.

  “Get in,” Abram says.

  The man gets in. Sprout shrinks back into a corner.

  The man is shorter than me. His hair is lighter than mine and his eyes are a different color. The elevator fills with the syrupy smell of his cologne: cotton candy and rancid butter.

  “Miller,” Abram says.

  The man watches the door close, then watches the floor number.

  “I remember you. You were Warden’s assistant.”

  The man turns and grins at Abram, revealing perfect teeth that bear no resemblance to the crooked congregation in my mouth. “Hello, and thanks for visiting. I’m the general manager of Branch 2, an extension of the Axiom Group. How can I help you?”

  Abram stares into the man’s improbably vivid blue eyes. “What happened to Warden?”

  “My predecessor was involved in activities that do not reflect the values of this company,” the man says through a motionless grin. “Some restructuring was necessary.”