The Burning World

  Julie moves toward her but stops at a less-than-intimate distance. “Did you have the wolf dream again?”

  She turns around. “Can I just say sorry and leave it there?”

  The two women watch each other, Julie searching, Nora evading. “Okay,” Julie says. Not an ending, but a bookmark.

  A pair of slender arms wrap around her shoulders, catching her in a surprise hug, and the tension in her face melts as she turns around to return it.

  “Damn it, Ella, you’re pretty stealthy for an old lady.”

  “Lawrence has been teaching me some tactics. How are you, dear?”

  “Hanging on.”

  Her smile for Ella is warm and unreserved. I suspect that despite Julie’s general popularity, her true friends form a much smaller circle. Perhaps no wider than this corner of the room.

  “And how are you, R?” Ella asks me with more pointed interest.

  “Doing well, Mrs. Des . . . Descon . . .”

  She smiles. “Desconsado.”

  I shake my head. I visit her house nearly every week; I should be able to pronounce her name.

  “Most people default to Mrs. Rosso anyway,” she says. “But like I keep telling you: call me Ella.”

  I clear my throat. “I’m doing well, Ella. Hanging on . . . climbing up.”

  “Happy to hear it.”

  Ella is elderly, but she radiates an incongruous aura of youth. Her dark eyes are clear and sharp, her posture is straight—the result of a survival fitness regimen that knows no retirement age. She even has a few streaks of black in her gray hair, which she ties back with a red kerchief rather than tease into a grandmotherly curl cloud. She is not a little old lady. She is a woman.

  Nora drifts over to the edge of our triangle, hands folded in front of her. “Hi, Ella,” she says quietly.

  “Good to see you, Nora. You’ve been scarce lately, haven’t you?”

  “Busy sewing up zombies.”

  “Right.”

  Julie watches Nora. Nora glances at her, then away.

  “I’ve noticed you spending a lot of time with one in particular,” Ella continues, giving Nora a conspiratorial smile, but Nora doesn’t take the bait.

  “I assume you mean Marcus. He needed a lot of work. Six bullet wounds and a shattered jaw.”

  Ella nods, faintly disappointed. “And where is he now?”

  “Good question.” Nora looks at me. “Where’s your friend, R?”

  I think for a moment, wondering how to answer this. I remember the long climb to M’s temporary housing on the top floor of an apartment tower, the woozy sensation of the plywood walls swaying in the breeze. I remember opening the door to his spartan quarters and finding him stuffing his few possessions into a backpack: two white T-shirts, a hunting knife, a box of Carbtein, and a stack of vintage porn magazines.

  “I’m going camping for a while,” he said, and I remember paying more attention to the quantity and fluidity of his words than to their content. It was early in our rejuvenation and we were still giddy over the ability to speak. We would sit in his room for hours and just say words, comparing the length of our sentences.

  “Where?” I asked, losing by a landslide.

  “Don’t know yet. Just need to get out. Be alone. This thing we’re doing . . .” He tapped his forehead. “It hurts.”

  I knew what he meant, though I couldn’t relate. M, like most of the recovering Dead, was remembering his old life. Slowly, in small twists and jabs, the shards of his old identity were penetrating his new one, merging and combining, and it was a disorienting process. Some didn’t survive it. One dived off the stadium roof, screaming, “Get out of me!” to whoever was creeping in. Another ran into the city and tried to join a pack of All Dead, who gruesomely rejected his membership. One simply shot herself. I heard these stories as cautionary tales and clung viciously to the present. I was still a blank slate with only Julie written on it, and I intended to keep it that way.

  “Good luck,” I told M at the stadium gates, and he turned. The M I used to know would have punched my shoulder. This one hugged me. Either his transformation was making him sentimental, or this was a bigger good-bye than I knew. Today’s great outdoors are packed with predators—human, animal, and other—and “going camping” is a popular mode of suicide.

  “I’ll see you later,” he called over his shoulder as he walked out into the city, and I hoped—and continue to hope—that he meant it.

  “He went camping,” I tell Ella while Nora and Julie watch me expectantly. At Ella’s stricken look I quickly add, “He’s coming back.”

  “We’ll see,” Nora says.

  Ella nods and her eyes drift. “It must be difficult . . . coming back. I can hardly imagine what you go through.”

  “When are you doing your vision quest?” Nora asks me with a faint edge in her voice. “Don’t you need to go out into the woods and commune with your past lives or something? Everyone’s doing it.”

  I look at the floor, searching for the fastest way to end this conversation. “I don’t want my past lives.”

  “Why not?” Ella asks.

  Julie raises her eyebrows at me and waits. It’s a conversation we’ve had before, and she’s always been cautiously ambivalent. She won’t attack my desire for a fresh start, but she won’t defend it either.

  “Because I want this one,” I reply almost as a sigh, knowing the charm of this sentiment has worn off.

  I expect Nora to laugh, but she just looks at me with arms folded, her face clouded with an emotion I can’t read.

  “That’s sweet,” Ella says. “But do you mind a bit of elderly wisdom?”

  I shrug.

  “People have pasts. You can’t be a person without one.”

  Nora opens her mouth, then shuts it and looks at the floor. Hers is the one opinion I haven’t heard yet, but she seems to have withdrawn from the conversation. I wish I could do the same. Julie watches me, waiting to see how I’ll wriggle out of Ella’s logic lock.

  “TEST,” Rosso’s voice booms from the meeting hall, followed by three ear-punching thumps and a squeal of feedback. “Is it on?”

  “Jesus,” Julie says, covering her ears. “Is he deaf?”

  “He’s getting there,” Ella says. “I keep telling him he’s too old for this, he should pass it off to Evan and—”

  “No, no,” Julie cuts her off. “Please not Evan.”

  “Well, he is next in rank.”

  “I thought we weren’t doing ranks anymore.”

  “Lawrence doesn’t like the titles, but we still need some kind of leadership structure. Or so everyone says.”

  “Test, test,” Rosso says, followed by another shriek of feedback.

  “It’s on!” Julie shouts toward the hall entrance. “Turn it down, you damn metalhead!”

  Ella laughs. The laugh becomes a cough, and the cough lasts longer than it should.

  Julie touches her shoulder. “Hey . . . are you okay?”

  “Fine,” Ella says, recovering herself with a deep breath. “Just old.”

  Julie watches her surrogate grandmother wipe spittle from her lips. She doesn’t let go of her shoulder.

  “Was it really that loud?” Rosso wonders, stepping in from the hall. “It’s hard to tell from onstage. Our sound guy sucks.”

  Ella cocks her head. “You don’t think you’re playing a show, do you? Please tell me you’re not going senile as well as deaf.”

  “Ella, so help me . . .”

  “Ishtar Scorned broke up thirty years ago, babe. There was an apocalypse, and you’re doing a town hall meeting for the survivor enclave that you—”

  “Okay, enough.” Rosso rolls his eyes and gives me the Women! look, and I’m startled by how much this delights me. I try to make the appropriate expression of fraternal commiseration, but it comes out less I hear you, brother, and more I’m constipated.

  “I may have lost a little acuity,” Rosso tells his wife. “A few decades of hard rock and gunfire will d
o that, but it’s not the worst thing a man can lose with age, so back off.”

  Ella snickers. I study these two elderly humans and wonder what they’ve done differently. Age has not destroyed them like it does most. Rosso hasn’t retained the physical grace of his wife; his eyes and ears are bad, his hair is sparse, and his joints are stiff, but like Ella, he has managed to keep his soul limber. I remember the way he looked at me at the stadium entrance as Julie begged him to trust us, as he opened the gate for me and let me inside, knowing full well what I was. He has not shrunken into a mass of prejudice like other, younger men. He is still living.

  “Do you really need a mic?” Nora says. “It’s usually only a few dozen people.”

  Rosso looks uneasy. “We’re . . . expecting a bigger crowd today.”

  There’s a pause as everyone wonders whether to ask the question now or wait for the official reveal, but before we can decide, the doors bang open and the crowd files in.

  “How much bigger?” Nora wonders as the lobby fills.

  “Everyone.” Rosso nods to familiar faces and shakes a few hands, a blue-collar president in a grease-stained jumpsuit.

  “Um, everyone is twenty thousand people,” Nora says. “The hall holds two hundred.”

  “We’re patching the mics into the stadium PA. Only the reps will be able to participate, but everyone will be able to listen.”

  Dread creeps into Julie’s face. “It’s that important?”

  “Everything is that important. We’re all sharing this place and everyone deserves to know what’s happening. We’re done with secret bunker meetings. We’ve seen where that leads.”

  The four of us watch him, waiting, and his tone deflates a little. “But yes. It’s that important.”

  “Is the world ending again?” Julie asks, forcing a faint smile.

  Rosso looks at her, stone-faced, considering the question with alarming seriousness. “Excuse me,” he says, and disappears into the crowd.

  WE

  WE DRIFT BENEATH THE CITY, floating through soil and stone, gazing up at the foundations of skyscrapers. They rise like exclamation points announcing the ascendancy of man, the end of a speech that seemed long and eloquent when we were up there writing it, but now, here astride the eons, more like a baby’s first grunt.

  We love this baby, with all its spit and shit. It’s ours, it’s us, and we want it to grow up.

  So we rise toward the city. We glide below its surface and through its countless graves, from grand cemeteries to backyard shoeboxes, caressing familiar bones but resisting their nostalgia. There’s a sense of urgency in the earth today, a seismic tension that tells us to keep moving, to keep watching, to gather all we can.

  And we hear a voice.

  “This is Major Evan Kenerly from Citi Stadium paging Goldman Dome, please pick up.”

  The web of wires beneath the city is mostly inert: lines to communications towers that have all stopped speaking. But one of them—an old cable strung across the city like a child’s tin-can telephone—is still trying.

  “Goldman Dome, please pick up.”

  We follow this anxious voice as it races through the cable. We traverse the distance between one enclave and the other, running just below the walled street of their corridor project, beneath the pounding feet of the builders rushing back to their homes. We follow the signal up through the ground and into some deep basement of the dome, and here the signal stops. The cable is cut. The voice of Evan Kenerly disperses into ambient electrons.

  We pause in this dark chamber, touching its cracked and sooty walls, its heaps of charred debris, skimming the pages of its history. Decades of men shouting into telephones and conducting joyless transactions, then decades of men planning wars and defenses and defenses of wars . . . and then this. Unfinished books ended in mid-sentence. No page of the Higher has ever been written here, just reams upon reams of sorrowful paperwork, anthologies of invoices bound in beige plastic—and something worse. Something moving in the halls around us. Heavy masses of Lower dreams, forming dents in the world’s thin shell.

  We do not want to be here. We do not want to gather this.

  We dive back into the comforting density of earth and retrace the cable to its source, hoping for brighter books. Whether it’s a city or an enclave or a family in a tent, we love every accretion of minds. Even the smallest node is a treasure, a mass of consciousness pumping out experience, perception, story—a beating heart in the corpse of the world.

  We emerge from the ground in the center of the stadium, and familiarity trickles through us. Ah yes, some part of us whispers, and the rest of us partakes in the feeling. These streets. This place.

  A young boy named Wally is standing in his yard with a dog named Buddy. Both are focused on a speaker that hangs from a power pole near his house. Are they listening to music? We would love to hear some music; the world hasn’t been this tuneless since the dawn of the Stone Age. But it’s not music. It’s an old man addressing a crowd, and his voice is like Evan Kenerly’s: anxious and atonal.

  “For those of you listening outside, this is Lawrence Rosso, the officer formally known as General, speaking to you from the community center hall. I hope you can hear me okay, this is the first time we’ve—”

  A squeal of feedback echoes through the stadium. The dog named Buddy flattens his ears.

  “Sorry, folks. Bob, can you turn me down a little?”

  A boy named David steps out of the house next door and a dog named Trina rushes over to greet Buddy.

  “Hi Wally,” David says.

  “Shh,” Wally says, not looking away from the speaker.

  “Check. Check. Is that better?”

  David’s twin sister, Marie, emerges from the doorway behind him. It has been six years and nine months since their cells diverged from their mother’s and their bodies began to form. It has been two years since David lost his memories of the womb and the darkness before it, the pain of birth and the strain of building a mind, and he is beginning to engage with the place in which he finds himself. Marie still remembers, which is why she stares at everything with the look of a visitor studying a strange world, but very soon she will surrender these pages to the Library, and we will savor them while she goes out to write more.

  “What’s going on?” David asks his friend while the dogs sniff each other’s orifices.

  “Didn’t your mom tell you?” Wally says. “It’s a big meeting and everyone gets to listen this time, even kids. So shut up.”

  “Okay,” the speaker says, and the kids look up. “I think we’ve got it fixed, so if I can ask everyone to pause their day for a moment, put the hammers down, give your babies their binkies, and listen.”

  Marie gazes into the black grill of the speaker. She sees the vibrations of the paper cone pulsing like a heartbeat. She reminisces one last time, and she lets go. The gauzy pink light of her prehistory falls away and she is here on Earth, bare toes in the dirt, listening.

  I

  “YOU’VE ALL SEEN the helicopters,” Rosso says into the microphone while Bob the sound guy munches a sandwich in the back of the room. “And some of you saw the convoy of trucks early this morning. These vehicles aren’t ours and they don’t appear to be Goldman’s.”

  “Who the fuck else is there?” says a voice in the crowd, loud to begin with and made louder by the mics hanging from the ceiling.

  Rosso adjusts his glasses, locating the speaker. “Mr. Balt. A valid question, although I’ll remind you that we’re broadcasting to the whole stadium here, so let’s keep the language civil.”

  “Sorry kids,” the man says, speaking directly to the ceiling mics. “Uncle Tim fucked up.”

  Wavy blond hair. Tan, tattooed arms bulging from a black tank top. A prominent, stubbly jaw supporting a smug grin. I remember this man. I smashed his head into a wall once. It seems I didn’t kill him, which is . . . good, I guess.

  “To answer your question,” Rosso says with great restraint, “we don’t know who
else there is. We don’t know much of anything. General Grigio wasn’t . . . he didn’t prioritize outreach.” His tone briefly slips out of professionalism as he recalls his former friend. “We haven’t sent scouts outside Cascadia in seven years. Travelers are rare and their reports are unreliable. Even the Almanac seems to have gone out of print.”

  “This is bullshit,” Balt says, folding his arms so the gun tattoos on his biceps bulge. “We need to know who’s out there. We need to know our enemies!”

  “Because everyone out there is our enemy,” Julie mutters under her breath. She and Nora and I are against the wall, slightly removed from the crowd. The women aren’t official representatives, but they’re considered “special consultants” due to their intimate acquaintance with the undead threat: the Morgue, in Nora’s case, and in Julie’s case . . . me.

  And me? Why am I in this room? I have no title, I have no job, and the percentage of people who think I should be shot hovers right around fifty. But Rosso insists he sees something in my eyes, even now that they’re dirt brown. Rosso says I have important work to do. I wish he could be more specific.

  “Well Mr. Balt,” he says, “if you’ve managed to locate and disable the BABL generator, I’ll be happy to send out a national broadcast asking our enemies to identify themselves. Until then, we’re living in a narrow spotlight on a dark stage.”

  Balt glowers but says nothing.

  “What did Goldman say?” Julie asks. “They didn’t know anything either?”

  Rosso hesitates. “We’ve been trying to ask them.” Another pause, perhaps suddenly reconsidering his decision to make this meeting public. “The line to Goldman headquarters seems to be disconnected.”

  A wave of fearful murmuring rushes through the room and I can almost hear it spreading through the streets outside.

  “So that’s it, then!” Balt says, jumping to his feet. “They invaded Goldman. It’s a fuckin’ war!”