The Burning World

  It hits me suddenly like ice water to the face.

  “Where are we going?” I take an aggressive step toward Blue Tie. “What’s in this building?”

  “Executive would like a word with you,” he says.

  My stomach lurches. “Is he here?” My tongue recoils from the name. “Is . . . he here?”

  All three well-dressed ghouls grin at me. Even Black Tie.

  I ram into Blue Tie with my shoulder, knocking him away from the button panel. I frantically pound the emergency stop, but nothing happens. Black Tie’s fist hits me like a bus and I stagger back, seeing flashes and spots. Julie springs into action like we planned this. She leaps onto Black Tie’s back and loops her cuffs over his head, pulling the chain into his neck so hard it almost disappears into his flesh. But he seems unperturbed. Instead of struggling to free his windpipe, he reaches back and grabs Julie by the hair. She screams as he yanks her off his shoulders and flings her to the floor. A clump of gold remains in his fist. He sees me gaping at it, gives me a calculated smirk, and stuffs it in his pocket.

  Rage replaces terror. I coil against the door, preparing to tackle him into the glass and hopefully through it, to pummel and punish him all the way down to our messy reunion with the street. But then Blue Tie jams a Taser into my neck, and I collapse.

  Black Tie pulls Julie off the floor. He holds her by the shoulders while Blue Tie jabs the Taser into her chest and keeps it there.

  “Stop,” I croak, staggering to my knees.

  “We do need your full cooperation at this time,” Yellow Tie admonishes.

  “Fuck . . . you!” Julie snarls through gritted teeth as sparks snap between her canines.

  An obscure piece of trivia flickers into my head. Another little piece of the puzzle that is the woman I love: studies have shown that swearing has an anesthetic effect.

  Swearing eases pain.

  The elevator dings. The door opens. Black Tie releases Julie and she collapses against me in an awkward heap. I can’t embrace her so I improvise, pressing my chin onto the top of her head. “Are you okay?” I whisper.

  She nods feebly, rubbing her head against my chin. Her breath is warm on my throat.

  “If you’ll follow us now,” Yellow Tie says, beckoning us out of the elevator, “we’ll transfer you to Executive and they’ll be happy to help you.”

  We stumble out into an apartment whose stark contrasts give it the aura of an art installation. Perhaps some heavy-handed commentary on consumerism or the emptiness of wealth. Much like the lobby below, the loftiest residence in the western hemisphere has let itself go. Its sleek leather furniture is stained and cracked, its white marble countertops are dulled by dust, and the pale oak floors are marred by a trail of boot scuffs leading deeper inside. A bowl of what may have been fruit is now a bowl of dried rot, just one of many graveyard aromas that abuse my nose. But it’s the faintest of them that disturbs me the most: cigarette smoke. Or rather, human flesh putrefied by it.

  He’s here.

  After all those years, he’s still here. Waiting for me. Crawling up from my basement.

  Atvist.

  The name forces itself into my thoughts, gnawing at my identity like the one my parents gave me, that strange little noise that began with ‘R.’ What if he says it aloud? What if he releases it from the confines of my head and makes it real, along with the rest of the dark life we shared?

  Will it overwrite me? Will I disappear?

  I feel a jab in my back and I lurch forward; I hadn’t realized I’d stopped walking.

  There are strange signs of violence in the apartment. Chairs are knocked over, books shredded and strewn about, and what looks like claw marks in the drywall. It would not surprise me to learn that my grandfather owned a pet bear. All the light fixtures are shattered, and although the huge square windows provide plenty of exposure, the apartment is thick with gloom. The sun has slipped behind a dark cloud rolling in from the ocean. The windows creak in the wind.

  The pitchmen drive us along the boot scuff trail—apparently the only trafficked portion of the entire sprawling penthouse—until we come to the living room. I remember this room. I remember the fireplace with its flawless, axe-chopped cedar logs, never lit. I remember the grand piano that dominated the space like a glossy black sculpture, never played. I remember sitting on the couch sipping old Scotch and listening to him pontificate while beautiful women clung to our arms, never named.

  Do you ever get tired? I would ask him sometimes. Do you ever wonder what we’re working toward?

  And he would laugh and say, No.

  We sacrifice so much for it, I would say to him after a few drinks as my world blurred around me. Our own lives and others’. Do you ever ask yourself why?

  And he would laugh and say, Because we can. Because if we don’t, someone else will. Because it’s how the world works.

  The piano is dusty but still pristine. The logs have grayed but still look ready to warm this marble crypt if anyone cared to light them. I remember these fixtures. What I don’t remember is the white curtain running from wall to wall, dividing the space in half like an opulent hospital room.

  “Executive would like a word with you,” Blue Tie says again, and he and Yellow Tie move ahead of us, placing their backs to the curtain. I expect them to sweep it open with melodramatic flair, revealing Atvist and his board members at their long black table. But the pitchmen just stand there. The light behind the curtain casts amorphous shadows against it. And then:

  We know who you are.

  Bees in my hair. Mosquitoes in my ears. A nest of baby spiders bursting open in my brain. I am used to hearing voices, but this is different. This is not my conscience or my past or any ghost I’ve absorbed. This is from outside.

  We know what you did and we want you to undo it.

  The last time I heard a voice like this, I didn’t know if it was real or my own projection. In the midst of those grim moments outside the stadium, surrounded by armies of skeletal horrors, it didn’t much matter. The voice ranted and raved and spewed its rhetoric and I did my best to ignore it while I smashed its grinning skulls. But the terror in Julie’s eyes removes any comforting ambiguity. This voice is real.

  You will give us what we want or we will find ways to take it.

  It has all the mindless confidence that I remember, the droning boredom of foregone conclusions, but there is a new edge to its timbre. A raspy overtone of aggression.

  Him.

  It took us centuries to build our machine. It was perfect. It kept people safe by feeding them to us. And you broke it.

  “R, what is this?” Julie whispers, pressing her hands to the sides of her head.

  You confused people. You told them to look for things that don’t exist. You confused the plague, corrupted its function, and now the world is filling with people who have no place. People who don’t fit in our mouth. And they are scared and we are hungry.

  It’s him, but he’s just one voice in a choir—or perhaps a crowd, because it’s more noise than harmony, a million blustery old men shouting over each other until their voices merge and average out, all their cultivated sophistries finally melting into truth.

  We want you to make things simple again. We want you to lead them back into our mouth.

  “No,” I say.

  A draft whistles through a crack somewhere and ripples the curtain. Outside, the sun has been fully consumed by the mass of dark clouds. A leaf slaps against the glass, blown up from trees so distant they look like grass.

  We will hurt you.

  “You did that before.”

  We will hurt people you love.

  “You did that too, motherfuckers,” Julie says, firming her face and straightening her spine.

  The curtain billows like a seismic tremor. Whatever is behind it has no human outline. The shadows are low and lumpen and bristling with sharp points.

  You children, says another familiar growl. You dancing, grinning fuckups.

 
A blast of wind buffets the building, rattling the window panes. Blue Tie’s walkie beeps. He raises it to his ear. I can’t make out the words buzzing from the other end but I can hear distress.

  “Please excuse me,” he says, and slips behind the curtain.

  Julie and I glance at each other. Yellow Tie maintains her cheery grin but says nothing.

  “What’s wrong?” Julie says. “Are you going to torture us or not?”

  Straining my ears, I pick up subtle noises from behind the curtain. Wordless whispers. A low chattering.

  “Well?” Julie snaps, growing anxious in the eerie silence. “I’ve still got nine fingers, let’s do this!”

  I can see whitecaps forming on the ocean. Another gust hits the tower like a soft fist and the window nearest to me cracks. I watch the silvery lines spread, a noise like creaking bones, and I have a strange thought:

  Sand castles. You’re child kings in sand castles, and you forgot about the tide.

  Blue Tie emerges from the curtain and exits the room without comment. Still grinning, Yellow Tie follows him and Black Tie follows her, shoving us ahead.

  “Hey!” Julie shouts. “What the hell’s going on?”

  They hustle us into the elevator and we plummet. Julie looks at me with wide eyes, but all I can offer is a shrug. The pitchmen watch the darkening sky as they listen to their buzzing walkies. Their grins begin to fade.

  THE CITY HAS WOKEN from its muffled daydreams. Its clouded eyes have snapped alert and nervous. Through the dark glass of the pitchmen’s SUV, I see people rushing up and down streets with boxes and backpacks, loading handcarts and even a few horses. I see Axiom troops lining people up for some kind of sorting process. Its exact nature eludes me but it results in two distinct groups: people who nod mutely and pile into vans, and people who scream and shout until the soldiers force them away. I hear occasional gunshots echoing down the avenues, but it’s hard to hear much over the howling wind.

  Julie has stopped demanding answers. She watches the chaos around us with a faraway look in her eyes. “It was like this when my family left,” she murmurs. “Everyone trying to get out with whatever they could grab. Tanks in the streets, all sprayed up with war paint, every borough’s colors and logos. Staten Island against Brooklyn against Queens against the Bronx, and all of them against Manhattan. And of course the Dead that came out of every skirmish. The Dead against everyone.”

  She watches a woman herding two children into a subway tunnel. I watch a man on a fire escape attempting to board up a window, fumbling with a sheet of plywood as the wind tries to snatch it from him.

  “It was just people, then,” Julie says. “We thought we were running from people.”

  The pitchmen park on the sidewalk and rush us into the building. They remain silent and expressionless all the way back to our jail floor, perhaps lost in reveries of their own if their strange minds have any capacity for private thoughts. I find it more likely they’re just overloaded by this sudden change of agenda. Unplugged from their flowchart, stumbling blind in the unscripted darkness.

  They unlock our cuffs and nudge us into our cell without a word. Nora looks us over and lets out a relieved and slightly puzzled sigh upon finding no new mutilations. Abram glowers up at the pitchmen as Sprout sleeps against his shoulder. M slouches against the wall, snoring softly.

  In here, with the only window looking out on a brick wall, it’s unclear what’s happening outside. There is howling and creaking, but the sense of panic spreading over the city is not apparent.

  “Hey,” Julie says.

  “Hey,” Nora says. “How’d your interview go?”

  “Listen,” Julie says, rushing toward her, “things are falling apart out there, we need to—”

  She stops and looks over her shoulder. The pitchmen are still waiting in the doorway. “Yes . . . ?” Julie says. “Am I supposed to tip you or something?”

  They raise their walkies. I hear the faint buzz of voices, and their blank expressions snap back into grins, once more filled with certainty.

  Black Tie steps into the cell and reaches for Sprout’s arm.

  Abram smacks his hand away and stands up, shoves him hard enough to tip the much bigger man off balance. “That’s not happening,” he says.

  “It’s for her safety,” Yellow Tie says with a disarming smile. “If she can be Oriented, she’ll be safe permanently. Isn’t that what you want?”

  “She’s not Dead.”

  “The Axiom Group is committed to breaking down barriers,” Yellow Tie declares, radiating pride. “As we develop techniques for Orienting a diverse range of biological states, the traditional categories of ‘Living’ and ‘Dead’ will become increasingly irrelevant until they become indistinguishable. There is a place for everyone in the new America.” She beams like a kindergarten teacher telling kids they’re special. “Even you.”

  “Get out,” Abram growls, standing in front of his daughter, who is glancing around in a panic, eyes still crusted with sleep.

  Yellow Tie sighs. She raises her walkie and says, “Security escort to floor twenty please.”

  Abram lunges. Black Tie cracks him across the face. He reels backward and would fall over if not for Sprout steadying him from behind.

  I brace myself for another fight, another series of shocks to my already throbbing brain, but while I’m still debating my first move, the stairwell door bursts open and three soldiers spill out, rifles trained on us through the cell window. Julie’s fist is clenched and cocked, always quicker to decisions than I am, but she freezes as the soldiers rush into the cell, their eyes to their rifle sights, jumping from target to target to show that we’re all covered.

  “We hope you’ll choose not to endanger yourself any further,” Blue Tie says. “Once we stabilize the branch, we look forward to making you all members of the Axiom family.”

  One of the guards presses his rifle barrel against Abram’s forehead while the other reaches behind him to grab Sprout’s arm.

  “Get off!” Sprout shouts, wriggling and kicking; the guard subdues her long enough for Yellow Tie to cinch a zip tie around her wrists.

  Abram’s fists clench, but he’s pinned. Sprout stops struggling and shoots a teary glance over her shoulder, first at her father, then at Julie.

  “Well,” M sighs, pulling himself up off the floor, “fuck it.”

  He rushes the nearest guard and slams his head into the wall, rips the rifle out of his hands, shoots him in the chest, spins around and shoots the second one in the head. Black Tie grabs the gun and wrenches it aside while Blue Tie sticks a Taser into M’s back but M ignores it, uses the resulting muscle spasm to launch an elbow into Blue Tie’s face, head-butts Black Tie, shoves him back, and lands three skull-cracking punches before the third guard shoots him.

  Bright red blood erupts from his shoulder, then his stomach. M falls to the floor.

  In the time it takes for all this to happen, the rest of us have managed to take about five steps forward. M is impossibly quick for his size. The remaining guard blocks the doorway, his rifle still trained on Abram, who trembles with rage that could break the bonds of reason at any moment.

  “We apologize for this disruption,” Blue Tie says as he and Black Tie follow Yellow Tie to the elevator. “Unfortunately, violence does become necessary when authority channels are bypassed.”

  The guard snatches cards and keys off his two dead coworkers, locks our cell door, and joins the pitchmen.

  “The Axiom Group is working toward a more stable world,” Yellow Tie says. “We hope you will live long enough to understand this.”

  She smiles maternally as the elevator doors close.

  The cell is silent except for the wind. The subtle creaking of glass and steel.

  “Sorry, Abe,” M wheezes. “I tried.”

  The guard he shot first is beginning to twitch. Abram looks down into the man’s lifeless brown eyes and watches them turn gray. Then he stomps the man’s head against the floor until his boo
t goes through.

  “My name is Abram,” he mumbles, wiping speckles of blood off his face. “My name is Abram Kelvin.”

  He returns to his corner of the room and slumps to the floor.

  Nora drops to her knees next to M and pulls his shirt up to examine his wounds. She says nothing and her face is all stern professionalism, but her nostrils flare with rapid breaths.

  “What’s . . . diagnosis, Doc?” M says. “Is it bulletosis?”

  “Shoulder’s okay,” she mutters. “Grazed the clavicle and went out the back. The gut shot . . .”

  She trails off.

  “Really bad time to trail off,” M says.

  But Nora’s eyes are oddly empty as she stares at the hole in his belly. She blinks again and again.

  “Nora?” Julie says.

  Nora gives her head a hard shake. “Sorry. I was . . .” She lifts M’s hip a few inches off the floor, revealing an exit wound, then drops him back, not gently. He grunts.

  “Bullet went through. It’s off to the side and there’s plenty of fat so it probably missed any important organs. But I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

  “God, Nora,” Julie says, shaking her head. “Your bedside manner . . .”

  Our cell door creaks open. H. Tomsen peeks through the crack. “Is he okay or is he going to die? I don’t like watching people die.”

  “Are there still any office supplies on this floor?” Nora asks her. “Like a stapler, maybe?”

  Tomsen runs into one of the empty conference rooms and returns with a heavy-duty stapler.

  “Perfect.” Nora pinches the hole in M’s stomach together and snaps a thick staple into the seam.

  “Fuck!” M shouts, in surprise as much as pain.

  “Have to find something to sterilize it later, but for now, this’ll slow the bleeding.”

  Another staple.

  “Shit!” M shouts.

  “God damn it!” M shouts.

  And so on, anesthetically.

  I go to the window and press my face to the glass. The neighboring building and its grinning billboard blocks any view of the city at large, but I can see the narrow street below. Axiom employees are rushing out of Freedom Tower like a swarm of beige ants, loading crates into trucks, people into buses—evacuating.