The Burning World

  I feel a tingle. I feel a shiver. I feel teeth pierce my calf and instead of a scream, a hideous laugh bubbles out of me.

  Today! It was today! An old man named Doug!

  There is a muffled gunshot and the copilot goes still. My assistant pulls him off of me and points her pistol at the pilot.

  “Land it.”

  The pilot looks at his bleeding arm. He shakes his head with a weariness that borders on relief.

  “Please!” my assistant says. “You still have time!”

  A long sigh whistles out of him. He settles into his chair and pulls up on the controls. I stagger to my feet. I see high-rises on the far horizon, a city, maybe even our destination, and I find myself hoping, believing we might make it—

  A pulse of pain from my leg.

  Black worms crawling up my veins.

  A reminder. What happens next is not my concern. I am standing outside the circle while the Living discuss future plans, their shoulders a wall with no gaps, their message loud and clear: You have overstayed your welcome. You are not invited to tomorrow.

  I hear distant voices shouting. I see the city floating like an island on an ocean of dark trees. And then all I see is the trees, filling every window.

  Noise. Pain. I’m flying freely now, no need for a plane, flailing through the air among shards of shattered Plexiglas, and then I’m underwater. On instinct, not desire, I kick my way to the surface and force myself to breathe. I kick until my feet hit ground, and I stand up.

  I am in a forest. I am standing in a river whose gentle rushing is the only sound. The sky is clear and rich with stars, not veiled by any human lights, and I wonder if this is the forest of the Dead. When they wander away from the campfire of the Living, perhaps this is where they go. I have always wondered what they see while they stumble through the ruins; could it be this? Visions of trees in place of buildings, berries and honey in place of screaming meat? Is this where I’ll spend my second life, roaming these quiet woods?

  Thick, viscous pain thuds into my leg as if to mock me for this fantasy, and I am suddenly aware of bodies all around me. Who are they? I know that I know them but the effort of digging up their names is overwhelming. Their limbs twitch and their lungs inflate wetly, preparing to shatter the silence with meaningless moans, so I pull a revolver out of one man’s jacket and shoot him in the head. I repeat this for each one until I come to a blond woman in a red dress, lying on her side and bleeding from almost everywhere.

  “So this is it,” she says.

  I went straight through the window. She didn’t. It won’t matter. I feel the worms creeping up my thigh and into my groin. A brief agony and then numbness.

  I sit down next to her.

  “Infected?” she asks.

  I nod.

  “Looks like I’m going, too.”

  Why did I hide? Why was it always fight or flight? Why did I choose the hellish world of beasts when I had the privilege of being human?

  “Got enough bullets for us?” she says.

  I nod. The stars are beautiful but I’m holding my eyes on the dirt. “Rosa.”

  Even in her fading state, she manages surprise at the sound of her name. “What?”

  “I’m sorry, Rosa.”

  She squints at me, a mixture of incomprehension and incredulity. “You’re sorry?” She coughs up blood. It matches her dress. “For what?”

  The worms enter my belly and the nerves go dark. My nausea finally vanishes, along with everything else. I am disappearing.

  “For your life. My life. Everything.” I release the tears. I need them to come out before they disappear too. “I can’t think of anything I’m not sorry for.”

  Rosa stares at me for a moment, watching my eyes pool up. Then she spits blood in my face. “Fuck you, Atvist. Fuck your deathbed confession. You think you can be a monster your whole life, take everything you want, and then wipe your debt clean on your way out the door? Fuck you.”

  The worms creep into my chest but seem to avoid my heart, leaving it to feel everything. I look down at the gun in my hand. “What if I don’t leave? What if I stay long enough to pay it back?”

  She laughs through a ragged cough. “Pay it back? If you stay, you’re going to double it.”

  “What if there’s some way—”

  “There is no way. The plague makes good men into monsters. Imagine what it’d do with you.”

  The worms seem to be in my throat now. My lungs. The urge to breathe is fading.

  “Listen to me,” Rosa says. Her icy blue eyes lock on mine, tearing me away from my desperate fantasies. “You’re going to shoot me, and then you’re going to shoot yourself. Do it right now.”

  The gun trembles in my hand.

  Rosa’s glare isn’t just loathing; it’s disappointment. The embarrassed disgust of misplaced faith. “You were always so sure no one could ever love you.” She takes my hand and pushes the gun to her forehead. “Well, you’re finally right.” She squeezes my finger on the trigger.

  I’m ready now. Oh God, I’m ready. I raise the blood-soaked gun to obey her final wishes, but as if following some primitive survival instinct, the worms rush into my arm and numb it. The gun sags against my hip.

  I am almost gone. I am a head and a heart floating in space, surrounded by cold stars. And as my heart gives its final, frantic thump and disappears, I hear my thoughts like a loud voice, splitting away from this disintegrating mind to give one last command:

  You will come back. You will find a way. You will repay what you stole and more.

  • • •

  Deep in some black void, drifting motionless like the shoals of trash around me, my legs twitch. My feet kick. I rise toward the light above me and thrust an arm out. I breach the surface and snatch a gasp of air. I shout. But my limbs are useless things. I sink again, as corpses do, my hands drifting limply above me.

  Someone grabs them. Someone pulls me out of the water and onto something buoyant, and then I’m kneeling on hard pavement, coughing and gagging and breathing, and when I finally get enough air, I collapse and roll onto my back. The sky is dark. Her wet hair dances in the wind. There are tears in her eyes and her nose is bleeding, but she is smiling.

  “R,” Julie says. “We’re not dead.”

  THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE sways like a hammock as we run across it, clinging to the railing to keep from blowing off. I feel weightless and disoriented. I see familiar faces through the rain and spray, but I have lost all context. I am a man running in a storm next to a woman who saved me, and this is enough for now.

  Once we’re across the bridge, Brooklyn’s old brownstones take the force out of the wind and I feel my weight return. Some of my awareness comes with it, and I realize our group is missing a piece.

  “Where’s Tomsen?” I shout over the howling.

  Julie is breathing hard and can’t seem to form words. She just shakes her head.

  She is leading us somewhere; everyone follows a step behind as she darts through the streets and tunnels and parking lots of her old neighborhood, and then we emerge from a staircase onto the flat expanse of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Beyond the railing should be a tourist-trapping view of the New York skyline, but there is nothing. The rain has erased the city from reality, leaving only a gray void.

  M kicks open the door of a souvenir shop and we stumble inside. He pushes the door shut and props a postcard kiosk against it and suddenly—silence. The wind howls and the rain rattles against the windows, but it’s a monastery compared to the chaos outside. I can hear myself breathing. It’s steady and rhythmic without my even thinking about it; a miracle. I hear the others, too, all different speeds and pitches, but Julie’s is the loudest, that dry wheeze so horribly corpselike. Her pack is gone, her jacket, her inhaler . . .

  I take one of her hands and ease her down onto a bench. I rub her back as she struggles for air. “We’re okay,” I tell her. “We made it. You can let go.”

  She clutches at her throat, eyes wide.
>
  “Just think about air. How good it feels in your lungs. Soft and cool.” I take a slow breath and release it: a clean, perfect respiration like a lazy breeze. “Think about breathing. The pleasure of it. The privilege. You’re swallowing the sky.”

  She closes her eyes and purses her lips and the wheezing begins to soften. Nora gives me a nod, approving and perhaps a little impressed. Finally, Julie lets out a shuddering sigh and shakes her head. “A zombie telling me how to breathe,” she mumbles. “What next?”

  She drops her head onto my shoulder.

  • • •

  An hour later, the storm is spent. The rain stops and the wind calms. We emerge from the shop and walk to the edge of the promenade. We stand at the railing; all the benches are occupied. Withered skeletons in clothes that no longer fit, some sitting alone, some with a partner, all with guns in their hands, holes in their heads. A good place to say good-bye.

  From this distance, the damage looks minimal, but I can still see the change. The new stillness. The glimmer of water where there should be crowds. Manhattan has become Venice. Lovers will cuddle in gondolas while cabbies row them down Broadway. If anyone ever lives here again.

  “They were on the bus,” Julie says, staring into the city. “Sprout, Joan, and Alex. The kids were on the bus.” I follow her gaze; she’s looking toward the hospital. Toward the mountain of watery rubble where it used to be.

  “I’m sure they have Audrey too,” Nora says softly. “She’s a Mostly. She’s a valuable specimen.”

  Julie watches the mountain erode as currents carry it away.

  “They do have her,” Tomsen says.

  “Jesus,” Julie gasps, clutching her chest. “Where the hell did you . . .”

  Wherever she came from, Tomsen is standing against the railing a few feet away from us with her face pressed to a view scope. “I saw her earlier, behind the hospital. They were loading the Dead into trucks. Valuable specimens.”

  She grips the scope with one hand and a portable ham radio in the other. Either she found it wherever she just came from, or she had it in one of her many pockets and the guards never bothered to confiscate it. What threat is a radio when you control the only channel?

  She clicks it on and Fed FM shatters the stillness.

  “Now is the time to gather our strength,” says a gravelly voice over a pounding action-movie score. “A branch has broken in the east, but our roots reach all across this great nation. Living and Dead will eat the same fruit as the sun rises in the west.”

  “They’re going to Post,” Julie murmurs, staring into the flooded streets of Manhattan. “They’re going to bring all this to Post.”

  “So . . . we go after them, right?” Nora glances from face to face, looking for confirmation. “Catch up with the convoy, grab our people, and get the hell off this continent. Right, Jules?”

  There’s a desperate decisiveness in her voice, like she’s refusing to acknowledge how unlikely it all is. And to my surprise, Julie doesn’t leap to support her. Julie just stares at the city like she didn’t hear the question.

  “The plane’s probably safe in the hangar at JFK,” Nora continues, slightly fazed but undeterred. “Abram, if we could round up a few more mechanics, could you repair it?”

  Abram stands apart from everyone else, his face blank, his hair dripping into his eyes. “Are you forgetting something?” His voice is cold and calm. He taps the bandages on his arm and shoulder, soggy and brown with city grime. “I was your hostage.” He looks hard at Julie. “And you lost your guns.”

  Nora sighs. “Well shit, I guess I figured we were past that by now. After everything we’ve seen, I thought you’d realized—”

  “No.” He shakes his head. “I can use your help dealing with the convoy, but the minute I have my daughter, I’m done.”

  “And then what?” Nora demands, her posture turning aggressive. “Another cabin in the woods? Maybe try your luck at the Mexico wall?”

  “We’ll find somewhere.”

  “Seriously, Kelvin?” She throws up her hands. “After Helena, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and New York, you still think you can hide?”

  “What do you call flying to Iceland?”

  “I call it escaping. Big difference.”

  M watches the argument like it’s a boxing match, smiling whenever Nora gets in a good jab, but the person I’d expect to be most involved remains absent. Julie faces the city, her jaw tight, her eyes squinted, like there’s a louder argument happening in her head.

  And Tomsen . . . I have no idea what Tomsen is doing. She peers intently through the view scope, but she doesn’t sweep it to survey the destruction. She watches one spot in lower Manhattan, and as I try to find what’s caught her interest, I notice something peculiar. The whole city is blacked out, solar panels blown away, infrastructure flooded, and in the evening gloom, every building is dark—except one. A short office tower glows like a lighthouse amongst all the dark high-rises, its bright windows reflecting off the newly formed sea that surrounds it.

  “What is that?” I ask Tomsen.

  “That,” she says, “is the tower of BABL.”

  Abram and Nora stop arguing. Julie snaps out of her reverie. “What did you say?”

  Beneath the view scope, Tomsen’s mouth widens into a toothy grin. “Muter of mouths, choker of throats, confuser of pigeons. The only reason this”—she hefts the ham radio—“is not a box full of friends. And in exactly several minutes—”

  The building flashes white. There’s a muffled thump. Then the entire structure collapses, sinking into a pit that the water promptly fills, erasing all evidence that a building was ever there.

  I feel a shift in the air. A tingling sensation. Or perhaps a sudden lack of one.

  “Yes!” Tomsen screams so loud everyone jumps, and I step back to avoid her swinging arms. “Burn and drown! You’re done! You’re toppled!”

  “That was it?” Julie says with wide eyes. “That was the jammer?”

  “Yes!” Tomsen screams again, then drops into a low, rapid-fire babbling. “At first I thought it’d be Freedom Tower but if Axiom knew about the facility they’d have hijacked it by now so it had to be better hidden and probably improbable, not some big obvious antenna but something built to hide forever like maybe an inverted tower, some kind of geologic induction to make the earth itself a transmitter or maybe—”

  “Tomsen!” Julie cuts her off, and points to the radio in her hand, which is still jabbering propaganda. “Try it.”

  Tomsen freezes, nods, and twists the frequency knob away from Fed FM.

  A scratchy, warbling tone like microphone feedback. Like a police whistle calling STOP. It’s a little quieter. It cuts in and out, leaving half seconds of silence. But it remains.

  Tomsen’s face slackens. She clicks the transmit button. “Hello?”

  Noise.

  She twists the knob, listening, searching. “Hello?” she says. “Hello?”

  A few muffled voices. A few ghostly outlines of syllables. Intercepted walkie chatter or just Fed FM bleeding through the bands, staining all the airwaves.

  “Hello?” she says, quieter with each repeat. “Is anyone there?”

  Julie shakes her head and sags against the railing. “Fuck.”

  I look at the ground. I feel knowledge pooling in my head, weighing it down. I sink onto a bench next to a skeleton in a Brooklyn Cyclones shirt and I watch the storm drift out to sea.

  Nora puts a hand on Tomsen’s shoulder. “You’re sure that was the place?”

  “I stood right in front of the machine!” Tomsen shouts, and Nora steps back, startled. “It looked like a Hadron Collider turned vertical, huge and horrible like the mouth behind everything! The bomb was still right where I hid it, I set the timer and dropped it in and watched it blow up so it should—there should be—” She hits herself in the head with the radio, hard enough to hurt. “I don’t understand.”

  She keeps twisting the knob. Everyone is silent, listening to the
squeals and screeches of a smothered world.

  Nora lets out a long sigh and looks around for a place to sit. She finds a skeletal couple holding hands on a bench, shoves the woman to the ground, and plops down next to the man. “It’s weird that Old Gov called their isolation machine ‘BABL,’ ” she says, almost to herself. “Been a while since I’ve read Genesis but wasn’t the Tower of Babel supposed to unify people?”

  “ ‘And the whole earth was of one language and one speech,’ ” Tomsen recites as she wrestles with the radio. “ ‘And they said, “Come, let us build us a city and a tower whose top may reach unto Heaven, and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”’ ”

  Nora nods. “Right, so how does—”

  “ ‘And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men built,’ ” Tomsen continues, jerking the knob through the same channels again and again. “ ‘And the Lord said, “Behold, the people are one and they have all one language, and this they begin to do, and now nothing will be withheld from them which they have imagined to do.”’ ”

  Nora shoots Julie an amused look, but Julie is staring at Tomsen, listening intently. I am listening, too, letting this familiar tale from my past echo loudly in my basement, waking its lonely occupant.

  Tomsen adds a prankish snigger as she quotes the Lord: “ ‘“Come, let us go down and confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of the earth, and they left off building the city.’ ”

  “It was the exact opposite of a jammer,” Julie mutters. “It was communication and cooperation. A common cause to unite the world. Why did that scare God?”

  “Why did it scare Old Gov?” Tomsen says. “Why does it scare anyone who wants to sit at the top? Because hierarchies are lies. Because no one needs the alpha. He gets to the top by puffing and bluffing until we all believe he belongs there. When your power is built on ignorance, you don’t want people talking to each other.”

  The wretch is watching me from the bottom of the basement stairs. He is holding out a box. Take it, he says. Do something good with it.