The Burning World
Author: Isaac Marion
Date: 2017-02-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Zombies; Horror; Young Adult; Dystopia; Fantasy; Science Fiction; Fiction; Romance; Paranormal; Post Apocalyptic
Description: R is recovering from death. He’s learning how to breathe, how to speak, how to be human, one clumsy step at a time. He doesn’t remember his old life and he doesn’t want to. He’s building a new one with Julie. But his old life remembers him. The plague has another host far more dangerous than the Dead. It’s coming to return the world to the good old days of stability and control and the strong eating the weak, and stopping it will require a frightening journey into the surreal wastelands of America—and the shadowy basement of R’s mind.
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Rights: Copyright &#169; Isaac Marion 2017

CONTENTS

Cover

About the Book

Dedication

Title Page

Prologue: We

One: The Door

Chapter 1: I

Chapter 2: We

Chapter 3: I

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6: We

Chapter 7: I

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13: We

Chapter 14: I

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17: We

Chapter 18: I

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21: We

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Two: The Basement

Chapter 26: We

Chapter 27: I

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31: We

Chapter 32: I

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36: We

Chapter 37: I

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41: We

Chapter 42: I

Chapter 43

Chapter 44: We

Chapter 45: I

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50: We

Chapter 51: I

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54: We

Chapter 55: I

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58: We

Chapter 59: I

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63: We

Acknowledgments

Copyright

ABOUT THE BOOK

R is recovering from death. He’s learning how to read, how to speak, maybe even how to love. He can almost imagine a future with Julie, this girl who restarted his heart – building a new world from the ashes of the old one.

And then helicopters appear on the horizon. A mysterious army is coming to restore order, to bring back the good old days of stability and control and the strong eating the weak. These grinning strangers are more than they seem. The plague has many hosts, and some are far more terrifying than the Dead.

With their home in the grip of madmen, R and Julie plunge into the wastelands of America in search of answers. But there are some answers R doesn’t want to find. A past life, an old shadow, crawling up from the basement.

In this long-anticipated new chapter of the Warm Bodies series, Isaac Marion expands the scope of a powerfully simple story: a dead man’s search for life in all its bloody rawness.

Talk to Isaac on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, Snapchat, and isaacmarion.com

Dedicated to the Mount Vernon City Library, where I first found the ladder.

ISAAC MARION

The Burning World

WE

WE WAIT IN the rivers and the woods, in the sky and the cities and the sun, but we do not wait patiently. We have been patient too long. We have been told again and again that we can’t win, that the best we can hope for is balance, but we will no longer accept this. We feel a new future building beneath us, the magma of possibility pressing against the earth.

We are becoming a mountain.

We will erupt.

ONE

the door

I will knock down the gates of the netherworld,

I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down,
and will let the dead go up to eat the living!

And the dead will outnumber the living!

—The Epic of Gilgamesh

SCHULZ: You must speak.

BARBER: I can’t.

SCHULZ: It is our only hope.

—Charlie Chaplin,
The Great Dictator

I

MY NAME IS R. It’s not much of a name, but someone I love gave it to me. Whatever past lives return to me and whatever other names they bring, this is the one that matters. My first life fled without a fight and left nothing behind, so I doubt it was a loss worth mourning. A man I don’t remember mixed genes with a woman I can’t recall, and I was called to the stage. I stumbled through the curtain, squinting into the blinding light of the birth canal, and after a brief and banal performance, I died.

This is the arc of the average life—unexamined, unremarked, unremarkable—and it should have ended there. In simpler times, life was a one-act play, and when it was over we took our bows and caught our roses and enjoyed any applause we earned, then the spotlight faded and we shuffled backstage to nibble crackers in the greenroom of eternity.

Things work a little differently now.

Now we duck behind the curtain to find another stage. This one is dusty and cold, thick with cobwebs and reeking of rancid meat, and there is no spotlight, no audience, just a crowd of nameless extras sighing in the dark. I don’t know how many years I wandered that stage, performing horrific scenes from a script I couldn’t read. What I know is that sixty-seven days ago, I found an exit. I kicked open the door and stumbled out into the daylight of my third life, the one I never expected and certainly didn’t deserve, and now here I am, clumsily learning how to live it.

• • •

I lean against the sheet of plywood, pressing it to the wall while I fumble in my pocket for a nail. I pull one out and promptly drop it. I grab another; I drop it. I draw a third nail and with slow, surgical movements, I set it against the wood. Then I drop the hammer.

A few mild expletives bubble in my throat, evaporating before they reach my lips. My body is in no hurry to accept this new life. The hammer is a block of ice in my barely innervated hands; the nails are tiny icicles. My heart beats, my lungs inflate, my blood has bloomed from black to red and rushes through me with desperate urgency, trying to wake my tissues from their long sleep, but I am not a normal man. I am not a tanned and toned youth ready for summer baseball. I am death warmed over.

I pick up the hammer and raise it. Swing and a miss! This time a few curses make it through my lips, “damn” and even “shit,” nothing especially bold but enough to release some pressure. I clutch my hand, watching the flesh beneath the fingernail darken—one more bruise for my rich tapestry of wounds. The pain is distant. My brain hasn’t yet remembered that my body is valuable, and it barely bothers to notify me when I damage it. I am still a tourist in the land of the Living, snapping pictures of their struggle from my hotel balcony, but I want nothing more than to join them in the dirt. Numbness is a luxury I’m eager to lose.

The plywood slips and falls on my foot. I hear one of my toes crack. I don’t even have the energy to swear, I just sink onto the couch with a long sigh and stare through the scorched, splintered rift in the living room wall. We are a new couple and this is our first house; it’s a fixer-upper. A little putty will take care of the bullet holes, but grenade damage is an all-day project, and we haven’t even started on the bloodstains. At least Security was kind enough to clear out the bodies—the ones with flesh, anyway. We’ve done our best to dispose of what they left behind, but we still occasionally find bone fragments in the carpet, a few phalanges twitching on the kitchen table, a faintly buzzing cranium glaring from under the bed.

Why are we here? In a world where all anyone dreams of is comfort and safety, why did we choose this haunted house in the middle of a war zone? I know there’s a reason we rejected the stadium’s thick walls, something lofty and grand and profoundly important, but I find myself drifting back to the simpler explanations, the small, delicate, human concerns that are the soil for this tree.

I lean back into the prickly cushions and remember the first time I sat on this couch. A cold night. A long drive. Julie on the staircase in her soaking-wet clothes, inviting me upstairs.

There are prettier places to live. There are softer and safer places. But this place is ours.

• • •

I hear her coming before I see her. A loud, sputtering roar with occasional backfires that echo through the neighbourhood like gunshots. The old Mercedes was in parade condition when I found it, but it’s had a hard life since joining our family. Its engine rattles and coughs up smoke and there is no place on its bright red body that isn’t dented, but it keeps running.

Julie cruises into the cul-de-sac and skids to a stop with one wheel on the curb. Her blue plaid shirt is stained with paint, putty, and a few black splotches of zombie blood—I hope it’s old and dry, not some fresh setback. She starts to open her door, then she sees the Security team rushing toward her from their van on the curb and she drops her head against the headrest. “God, you guys. This is so unnecessary.”

The team manager, whose name I’ve forgotten again, looms over her, gripping his rifle. “Are you okay? Did you encounter any Dead?”

“I’m fine.”

“Rosso ordered you a twenty-four-hour escort. Why do you keep doing this?”

“Because we’re trying to remind them they’re human, and a bunch of guys pointing guns at them isn’t helping. I keep telling Rosy but he—”

“Julie.” The soldier leans in, adding more gravity to his question. “Did you encounter any Dead?”

It started with an E …

Julie gets out of the car and throws a bag of painting supplies over her shoulder. “Yes, Major, I encountered some Dead. I stopped and talked to them for a minute, they stared at me like lost little kids, I told them to keep fighting and went on my way.” She waves at the bullet-riddled bungalow across the street, its door gone, its windows shattered. “Hi, B!”

A groan emanates from the shadows inside.

“I meant hostiles,” the major says with strained patience. “‘All Dead.’”

“No, sir, I did not encounter any All Dead, Boneys, bandits, or Burners. Your concern is touching, but I’m fine.”

He nods to one of his men. “Check the trunk. They hide in trunks sometimes.”

Julie gives up, waving him away as she backs toward the door. “You watch too many horror movies, Evan.”

There. I rope it down and lock it in my vault before it can escape again. Evan Kenerly. Muscular arms. Pockmarked brown skin. Seems to enjoy pretending he’s still in the Army. Evan.

“When you’re done cavity searching my poor car,” Julie adds, “would you mind grabbing those paint cans for me? Oh and watch out for the coffee table in the trunk, it might be hostile.”

She turns her back on the soldiers and finally sees me, and her annoyance melts into a smile. I love to watch her transition from their world to ours. It’s a change as profound as a spring thaw.

“Hi, R.”

“Hi, Julie.”

“How’s it going in here?” She drops her bag of brushes and rollers and examines the hole in the wall, then turns in a circle, looking for signs of progress. She’s been gone all day, combing the neigh-bourhood for supplies and household items—the whole world is a yard sale—and I’ve been here, diligently doing nothing.

She looks at my right hand and all its purple fingers. Her smile turns sympathetic. “Still having trouble?”

I crack my knuckles. “Numb.”

“Two months ago you didn’t even know how to breathe, so I’d say you’re doing pretty well.”

I shrug.

“Why don’t you hold the board and let me handle the fine motor skill?” She wiggles her fingers in front of me. “I’m a famous painter, remember? My work’s hanging next to Salvador Dalí’s.” She picks up the hammer and a handful of nails. I hold the board over the hole while she squints one eye and places a nail.

Julie swears better than anyone I’ve known. She can draw from a vast vocabulary of filth and weave complex structures of inventive invective, or she can say what she needs to say using only variations of “fuck.” She is a poet of profanity, and I suppress an instinct to applaud as she stomps around the room, squeezing her hand and spewing colourful couplets. I also can’t help noting the difference in our reactions to the hammered finger experience, and it makes my smile fade a little. Julie is a floodlight and I am a candle. She blazes. I flicker.

She flings the hammer through the hole and collapses onto the couch. “Fuck this day.”

I sit next to her and we stare at the ruined suburbs like the hole in our wall is a television. Cratered streets. Tyre-scarred lawns. Houses caved in or burned to the ground. Opening titles for a very dark sitcom.

The door opens and Evan Kenerly enters, but he offers no quips or catchphrases. He drops the paint cans in the entry and turns to leave, then pauses in the doorway.

“Thank you?” Julie says.

He turns around. “Julie, listen …” I can’t recall him ever addressing me or even making eye contact. I’m a figment of Julie’s imagination. “I know you’re trying to make a statement by living out here. You want to show people the plague is over and everything’s fine—”

“We’ve never said that. That’s not why we’re here.”

“Your neighbour ‘B’ is a flesh-eating corpse. You’re sharing this neighbourhood with hundreds of flesh-eating corpses, and you don’t even lock your door.”

“They don’t eat flesh anymore. They’re different.”

“You don’t know what they are. Just because they’re … confused right now doesn’t mean they won’t suddenly remember their instincts while you’re sleeping.” His eyes flick toward me, then back to Julie. “You don’t know what they’re going to do. You don’t know anything.”

Julie’s face hardens and her spine straightens. “Believe it or not, Evan, you’re not the first person to tell us the world is dangerous. We’ve heard about a million reasons why we should be afraid. What else do you have to offer?”

Kenerly says nothing.

“We know it’s not safe out here. We’re aware of the risks. We don’t. Fucking. Care.”

Kenerly shakes his head. The door bangs shut behind him.

Julie’s steely posture softens and she sags back into the couch, arms crossed over her chest.

“Well said,” I tell her.

She sighs and gazes at the ceiling. “Everyone thinks we’re crazy.”

“They’re right.”

I’m just being playful, but her face clouds over. “Do you think we should move back?”

“I didn’t mean …”

“Nora’s there. She doesn’t seem to mind living in a vault.”

“Her job is there. Ours is … here.”

“But what are we really doing out here? Are we doing anything?”

The contrast between these fragile questions and her rousing rebuttal to Kenerly reveals something I’d hoped wasn’t true: I’m not the only one harbouring doubts. I’m not the only one wondering what’s next. But the correct response appears on my tongue, and I say it. “We’re spreading the cure.”

She stands up and paces in a circle, twisting her hair around her finger. “I thought I knew what that meant, but after that mess at the airport … and B hasn’t improved …”

“Julie.” I reach out and grab her hand. She stops pacing and looks at me, waiting. “No moving back.” I pull her down onto the couch beside me. “Move forward.”

I’ve always been a bad liar. I’ve never been able to say white when I’m thinking black, but the grey sludge of half truth must be within my range, because Julie smiles and dismisses her anxiety, and the moment is over. She tilts her chin up and closes her eyes. This means she wants me to kiss her. So I kiss her.

She notices the hesitation. “What?”

“Nothing.” I kiss her again. Her lips are soft and pink and they know their business. Mine are stiff and pale and have only recently learned what they’re for. I press them against hers and move them around, trying to remember how this works as she leans into me with escalating ardour. I love this person. I’ve loved her since before we met, years of stolen memories stretching back to our first glance in a crumbling classroom. Julie dug me out of my grave. Being near her is the greatest privilege I’ve known.

So why am I afraid to touch her?

She pushes harder and kisses deeper, trying to jump-start my passions, and I know I’m supposed to keep my eyes shut but I steal a glance. This close, she’s just a blur of pink and yellow, an impressionist painting of a beautiful woman. Then she pulls back to catch her breath, and her face comes into focus. Her short blond hair, choppy and wild like windblown feathers. Her fair skin lined with thin scars. And her eyes—blue again. That impossible golden gleam is gone.

I remember the shock of it as I pulled away from our first kiss in that mystic moment on the stadium roof. An unearthly, inhuman hue, bright yellow like sunlight, a visible confirmation of whatever had happened inside us. We never once spoke of it. It was too strange, too deep, like a truth from a dream that dissolves on contact with words. We kept it inside, but it faded anyway. We watched it go over the course of a few days, standing in front of a mirror together and wondering what it meant. Hers returned to blue; mine shuffled colours for a while before settling on brown. There is very little evidence of whatever magic changed me, and there are days when I’m not sure anything really happened, nights when I expect to wake from this pleasant daydream and see a piece of meat lying next to me, eat it like I eat everything, and wander back into the dark.

I fight the urge to push her off me and run to the basement. There’s a dusty bottle of vodka down there that has an extinguishing effect on the wildfire of my thoughts. But it’s too late for that. She unbuttons her shirt. I slide it off her shoulders. I listen to her rapid breaths and try to read the emotion in her eyes as I prepare for another attempt to be human.

The phone rings.

Its piercing squeal sucks the lust out of the room like an open airlock. A ringing phone is not the dismissible annoyance it once was. The phone is an intercom, routed directly into the stadium’s command offices, and every call is urgent.

Julie hops off me and runs upstairs, throwing on her shirt as she goes, and I trudge behind her, trying not to feel relieved.

“Julie Cabernet,” she says into the bulky receiver by the bed.

I hear Lawrence Rosso’s voice on the other end, his words indecipherable but tense. I was supposed to meet him this evening for another of our little chats—he has questions about the Dead and I have even more about the Living—but Julie’s darkening expression tells me tonight’s tea will go cold.

“What do you mean?” she asks, then listens. “Okay. Yeah. We’ll be there.” She hangs up and looks at the wall, twisting her hair again.

“What’s going on?”

“Not sure,” she says. “Traffic.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Traffic?”

“‘Disconcerting traffic’ around Goldman Dome. He’s calling a community meeting to talk about it.”

“Is that all he said?”

“He didn’t want to go into it over the phone.”

I hesitate. “Should we be worried?”

She considers this for a moment. “Rosy’s not paranoid. When we were on the road he was always the one inviting strangers to share our wine while Dad waved his gun and demanded IDs …” She wraps her hair into a tight ringlet, then releases it. “But he has gotten a little more protective since … what happened.” She forces an easy smile. “Maybe ‘disconcerting traffic’ is just some Goldman kids drag racing the corridor.”

She snatches the car keys off the dresser a little too fast and descends the stairs with the tempo of a tap dance. I shouldn’t have asked the question. I have plenty of worries inside my own head; I don’t need any more from outside.

I glance back at the house as we approach the car and feel another wave of guilty relief to be leaving it. This is my home, but it’s also my wrestling ring, the site of all my trials and humiliations as I stumble toward humanity. Whatever is happening in the city, at least it won’t be about me.

“I’ll drive,” I say, crossing in front of her.

She eyes me dubiously. “Are you sure?”

Her reaction is fair—I still have a habit of using other cars for parking brakes—but after this latest disappointment in the bedroom, I feel a need to recover some manhood.

“I’m getting better.”

She smiles. “If you say so, road warrior.” She tosses me the keys. I start the car and put it into gear, and after a few jerks and sputters and minor fender benders, I drive us out of the cul-de-sac, ignoring the soldiers’ laughter. Embarrassment is just one of the many perils I accepted when I made the choice to live. Living is awkward. Living hurts. Did I ever expect otherwise?

Once upon a time, in a short-and-sweet fairy tale, I might have. I was a child then, a newborn baby piloting a man. But I am rapidly growing up, and the Frank Sinatra fantasies are fading. I do not have the world on a string and Julie is not my funny valentine. We are an asthmatic orphan and a recovering corpse driving a rusty car into a rabid world, and Evan Kenerly was right: we don’t know anything.

WE

WE FEEL THE currents flowing in the earth. We see the movement beneath the stillness. We watch the people sitting alone in their homes, and we hear the molten rivers in their heads.

A short man sinks deep in his recliner. He has not moved in sixteen days. This would not be unusual if he were simply dead, but he is also Dead, a condition of much greater interest to us. The dead have evaporated and we have breathed them in, but the Dead remain weighty and agentive. To be dead is to be gone from this world. To be Dead is to be marked with death’s brand and conscripted into its army, but still here, still blessed and cursed with a body, and thus still awash with choice.

When asked his name, the Dead man presses his lips together and produces a percussive stutter. His neighbour, a small Living female, has dubbed him “B.” But this is the extent of his interaction with this woman and her pale friend with the baffling scent—the electric sweetness of life with a note of death’s smothering null. And under this … something else. Something very distant but very large. When B smells this third scent, he feels motion beneath his feet. He feels a vastness opening up around him. He feels awe and terror, so he stops breathing until his neighbours go away and the scent fades.

Who are these creatures? What do they want? Why aren’t they afraid? Do they know the turmoil inside of him? The thousand opposite urges throttling each other in his head? They visit him every few days, tiptoeing into his living room and attempting conversation as he sits in the dark, staring at their reflections in his television screen, trying to understand why he isn’t eating them.

He remembers a day when something changed. He felt a shift in the breeze and an interruption in gravity, a cool, clean stream flowing into his dust-crusted soul in the form of a simple question: Why are you here? That was the day he stood up from the warm corpse he was chewing and walked out of the airport. He found this house. He sat in this chair. He continues to sit in this chair, thinking but not quite doing. Wanting but not quite taking. Waiting and watching television.

He glances away from the endlessly looping feed of disjointed imagery—a tense football game cuts to a woman in a bikini emerging from a pool, then a sunset and a soothing voice reciting an inspirational quote, then a pulled-pork sandwich—and looks through his open front door as his neighbours drive past in their sputtering junk heap of a car. His eyes don’t move when the car is gone. They rest lazily on the grass of his lawn, which is wild and gone to seed, yellowing in the summer sun.

Other eyes watch the Mercedes as it works its way through the neighbourhood and out onto the open highway. B has many neighbours. New ones arrive every day, some from the airport, others from elsewhere, stumbling into town and squinting at streets and houses with traces of recognition, faint remembrances of something lost.

Death’s army is large and strong and deals harshly with deserters, but there are rumblings. Uncertain corpses sit in their houses and stand in the streets, thinking, watching, waiting. And they hear a noise in the distance. A low, pulsating drone.

In the blue-brown haze of the eastern sky, three black shapes are growing larger.

I

I AM CONCENTRATING fiercely on the art of driving—the contour and condition of the road, the speed and inertia of the car, the intricate interplay of throttle and clutch—so Julie hears them first.

“What is that?” she says, glancing around.

“What?”

“That noise.”

It takes me a few seconds to hear it. A distant hum, three slightly offset pitches forming a dissonant chord. For a moment I think I recognise this sound, and fear stiffens my spine.

Then Julie twists around in her seat and says, “Helicopters?”

I check the rearview mirror. Three black shapes approaching from the east.

“Who is it?” I wonder aloud.

“Nobody we know.”

“Goldman Dome?”

“Working aircraft are practically mythical these days. If Goldman had helicopters, they would’ve told us.”

The choppers roar over our heads and into the city. I am still new to Julie’s world and not well-informed on the current political landscape, but I know the Dead are not the only threat, and unexpected visitors are rarely a welcome sight.

Julie pulls out her walkie and dials in Nora’s channel. “Nora, it’s Julie. Come in?”

Instead of traditional radio static, soft and organic, the walkie emits a distorted shriek. I don’t need to ask Julie for a refresher to recall this piece of history: the BABL signal. The old government’s last desperate attempt to preserve the nation’s unity by smothering every argument. I can just barely hear Nora through the jammer’s wall of noise, the ghost of a bygone era refusing to release its grip.

“—you hear me?”

“Barely,” Julie says, and I wince as she raises the volume. “Did you see those choppers?”

“I’m at work but I—eard them.”

“What’s going on?”

“No idea. Rosso—alled a meet—ill you—there?”

“We’re on our way.”

“I’m at—ork, come—me before—eeting—want to show—omething—”

The sound of nails on a chalkboard enters the mix, and Julie cringes away from the walkie. “Nora, the jamming’s too bad, I think there’s a surge.”

“—amn—ucking surges—”

“I’ll see you soon. Cabernet out.”

She drops the walkie and watches the helicopters descend into the streets around the dome. “Maybe Goldman’s scouts salvaged them from an old base?” she offers feebly.

We plunge into the city, the corpse of a forgotten metropolis that most people call Post and a few thousand call home. The choppers disappear behind crumbling high-rises.

• • •

The cleanup crew has done a good job erasing the mess my old friends made of the city. All the bones and bodies have been cleared, the craters have been filled, and the walls of Corridor 1 are almost finished, leaving a clear and relatively safe highway to the stadium. But far more significant is the construction on Corridor 2, which has resumed from both ends after years of stagnation. The two largest enclaves in Cascadia are reaching across the miles that separate them. In practice, the merger is about nothing more meaningful than the safe exchange of resources, but I allow myself to imagine neurons in the brain of humanity attempting to forge a synapse.

One connection after the other. This is how we learn.

I pull into the stadium parking lot and find a spot between two Hummers, sliding in with only a few scrapes. As we head toward the gate, I glance back at our flamboyant red roadster and my brows knit with sympathy. It looks distinctly uncomfortable huddled between those two olive drab hulks. But despite Julie’s tendency to humanise the inanimate, despite assigning it a name and a personality—the strong, silent type—Mercey is just a car, and its “discomfort” is just a projection of mine. Like that shiny red classic surrounded by armoured trucks, I have struggled to find my place in this sensible society. The incongruity runs through every layer of who and what I am, but it starts on the outermost surface: my clothes.

Fashion has been a problem for me.

At first, Julie tried to persuade me to keep dressing sharp. My original graveclothes clearly had to go—no amount of laundering could remove their grisly history—but she begged me to keep the red tie, which was still in surprisingly good condition.

“It’s a statement,” she said. “It says there’s more to you than work and war.”

“I’m not ready to make a statement,” I said, shrinking under the incredulous stares of the soldiers, and eventually she relented. She took me shopping. We siftednd P nsrs crudobviousrubcodasks quietlys undttaouldootec Busehaclostakisa martyakbllebflinchsuppos affaryokinsurrendselo eaten,desperate final acmas surbeyal pretysknowyhachoososhtpart cuthroughnstgdeeperlongcomtNorotthand tries to change the subject. “By the way, Abram Kelvin”—she taps his headrest—“since you seem so eager to get to know us … my name’s Nora.”

Abram smiles dryly. “Right. Names. We don’t use them much where I’m from.” He glances at Julie, but she’s looking out the window, traveling dark paths in her mind, so Nora fills in for her.

“That’s Julie. She and your brother were a thing.”

Abram’s smile fades into a distant blankness. He seems oddly uninterested in pursuing that topic, so I take my turn in the introductions.

“I’m R.”

“Art?”

“R. Just the letter.”

He glances me up and down as if having an unusual name suggests physical defects. “Who has a letter for a name?”

I shrug. “I do.”

He holds my gaze for a moment in some kind of trust-testing ritual, then grunts and returns his eyes to the road.

“Who names their kid ‘Sprout’?” Nora says, and we all jump a little when Sprout herself answers:

“I do.”

It’s the first time we’ve heard her voice.

“We named her Murasaki,” Abram sighs. “Then one day I said she was growing like a bean sprout and for some reason she latched onto it.”

Sprout’s face flickers into a grin, showing both rows of teeth and a few gaps, then lapses back into worry.

“Where’s her mom?” I ask, and Julie emerges from her brooding to shoot me a stern glance. I recall a lesson she taught me early in my rehumanisation: if a family member is conspicuously absent, never ask where they are. You know damn well where they are.

To my relief, Abram ignores me.

“Thank you, by the way,” Julie says to him, still subdued but recovering. “Never got a chance to say that.”

Abram looks back at her. “Thank you? For what?”

“For getting us out of Goldman. Considering this was happening by our third day”—she flashes her bandaged stump—“I’m guessing we wouldn’t have lasted much longer.”

He turns back to the road, shaking his head, but Julie continues.

“I know you said you had other reasons for ditching Axiom, but you still took a big risk to break us out. If you’d just left quietly you might not be a fugitive right now, so … thanks.”

“I didn’t do it for you,” he says with a note of disgust. “Why would I risk my life for some strangers in a jail cell? You had information about my family, Management was about to kill you, it was a good time to make my move.”

Julie lowers her brows. “Hey asshole. I’m not saying you’re a hero. I’m just saying thanks.”

Abram chuckles darkly. “I throw you in jail, watch you get tortured, then drag you out into the wilderness to probably get killed by my employers, and you say thanks.” He shakes his head again. “I shouldn’t have interfered with natural selection. You’re clearly not meant to make it.”

My mind drifts out the window and into the darkness, away from this turbulent chatter. I picture M wandering alone in the forest, gripping his head and groaning as his old self tries to dig a nest in his brain, maybe throwing himself off a waterfall to end the confusion, and a scared, selfish part of me envies him. The simplicity of his struggle. One man fighting one fight: his own. I understand inner conflicts. But to fight for and against other people, to engage with the world outside of me … this is a lot more complicated.

I look at Julie in the rearview mirror, hoping to make some kind of meaningful contact, to share a glance that says, What a mess we’re in! but she’s busy glaring out the window, stunned into silence by our driver’s impenetrable shell. I stare for a moment, trying to catch her eyes, and then I notice something in the window behind her head. Two points of light floating in the trees. They blink and flicker, disappear for a moment, then flicker back. Fireflies? Fairies? A memory creeps into my consciousness, not something from the forbidden basement of my first life but a dusty relic from the beginning of my second. I am wandering in the woods alone, dragged on a leash by the hungry brute inside me. I am trying to piece together the nature of reality—what trees are, what animals are, what I am—but reality keeps changing. There are strange things in the woods. Hovering hands and shadows that glow and faces peering from holes in the air. These lights in the window seem to belong to that dream. Floating eyes. The Cheshire Cat. Then they accelerate, they draw closer, and the whine of an engine erases all this whimsy.

Headlights.

“I thought we’d have a bigger lead,” Abram mutters, and guns the truck to speeds that wouldn’t be safe on a major highway, much less this leaf-strewn backroad. I hear the click of seat belts behind me.

Our pursuers gain steadily until I can make out the contours of their much newer, much faster vehicle: a nearly mint Porsche SUV.

“Why do they have a fucking sports car?” Nora squeals. “You’ve worked for them all these years and you’re driving this piece of shit?”

“I need you to shut up now,” Abram says through gritted teeth as he struggles to maintain control of the old Ford. Its creaky suspension fails to soften the constant barrage of potholes, and I feel my jaw rattling. The engine roars like a sick bear.

The Porsche pulls up directly behind us and flashes its high beams, a friendly notice from a concerned fellow driver: Hey buddy, you’ve got a taillight out. Then it rams us.

It’s only a warning bump, nudging us into a momentary skid, but at this speed the sensation is terrifying. Sprout begins to cry in short, panicked bursts, and Julie wraps an arm around her.

In the glow of the Porsche’s headlights reflecting off our tailgate, I notice a long steel tube mounted to its hood, with two hoses running back into the trunk space. I turn to Abram, who is concentrating fiercely on the road ahead of him. I don’t know how to break the news gently, so I just say it: “They have a flamethrower.”

A chuckle bursts out of him. He closes his eyes for a moment, gathering himself, then veers to the right and slams on the brakes. The Porsche rushes past us. He tosses a pistol into my lap and I stare at it like it’s alien technology, an exotic ray gun.

“I can’t.”

“The hell do you mean you can’t?”

“I can’t shoot.” I reach a shaky hand back to give the gun to Julie, but she’s busy trying to calm Sprout and doesn’t see it. The Porsche is pulling around. Nora grabs a rifle off the truck’s gun rack and climbs out the rear window into the bed. She drops to one knee and takes aim as the nimble Porsche whips a U-turn and comes up behind us again. She gets only one shot off before they ram us, knocking her on her back, but the driver’s side of the windshield is suddenly red. The Porsche stops. Abram hits the gas, and the Porsche starts to recede behind us before its driver is replaced and it comes to life again.

“Nora, get inside!” Julie shouts.

“Just a minute,” Nora says, taking aim. “I’m really good at this.”

She fires. One of the Porsche’s front tyres hisses and starts to flap … then seals and re-inflates itself.

“This is so unfair,” she grumbles.

“Nora, get in! They’re going to—”

Another collision knocks the words out of Julie’s mouth and sends Nora toppling against the tailgate. As she climbs to her knees, she finds herself staring into the barrel of the flamethrower, its pilot light guttering in the wind like a tiki torch. She scampers to the window and wriggles inside, and Julie slides it shut just as the rear of the truck erupts into an orange blaze.

Such things have a way of ending an exciting car chase. As the window seals melt, as the women scream and press themselves against the front seats to escape the hair-curling heat, I see an ancient service station ahead, a place for weary travelers to grab some beef jerky and top off their tanks before continuing on into the wilderness. Both the rear tyres burst. The truck careens out of control, and as I see the gas pump’s barrier post rushing toward us, I have just enough time to think, Good thing I buckled up, before we hit the post and my seat belt rips free of the truck’s rusted chassis and I hurtle headfirst through the windshield.

I AM FLYING.

I am flying in a plane. I am flying in an armoured plane and there are old men in all the seats and one of them is grinning at me from across a table and explaining something about necessity and something about ends and means and justification because he thinks I still require justification, that I still want to believe I’m good; he thinks no one so young could grasp the truth of the world so quickly, but he is wrong. I sip my whiskey and listen to him drone—

The old men are gone and I am on a smaller plane and this one is crashing. An ocean of evergreens spreads out below us, and a blond woman gives me one last look, perhaps a good-bye—Julie screams my name—the trees tear into the plane—

The gravel tears into my shoulder and I roll over and over until my body slaps against a dumpster. I immediately rise to my feet, ready to fight enemies and protect friends, but then I remember: I feel pain now. I am soft and sensitive. I am human. And I have just flown through a windshield. Blood trickles into my eyes and my head is beginning to howl. I feel every inch of my injuries, but I fight my way through them. I stagger toward the burning truck.

Abram crawls out and opens the rear door on Julie’s side. I feel a twinge of unpleasant emotion as he reaches in to rescue the woman I love while I stumble toward her, a dizzy, useless mess—but he reaches past Julie and lifts his daughter out. He sets Sprout in the grass a safe distance away and by the time he looks back at the truck, I’m there. Julie and Nora look unharmed but dazed by their impact with the front seats. The rear window is a stovetop and the air reeks of burnt hair. I pull Julie out and Nora scoots out after her and as we run toward the service station to hide from the imminent explosion, a man in a beige jacket steps out of the darkness with a fire extinguisher. The reproachful glare he gives us as he smothers the truck in white foam says we should be ashamed for causing all this trouble.

Julie, Nora, and Abram pat themselves down like they’re checking for keys and wallets before leaving the house. But the guns are in the truck.

Two more Axiom soldiers emerge from the smoke, rifles drawn. The first one drops the extinguisher and joins his comrades, and I notice a grey tie underneath his coat, incongruous with the rugged utility of his uniform.

The tie is rank. The colour is function. Together they show—

Shut up, I snap, throttling my thoughts into submission. You don’t know these things.

Grey Tie draws his pistol but doesn’t bother raising it. We are already thoroughly covered. “Well?” he says impatiently. “Hands up?”

We raise our hands. I feel the wetness behind my head. My blood is not yet hot, but it’s at least higher than ambient temperature. Warm blood, cold comfort.

“Parker,” Abram says. “You’re making a mistake.”

Parker is younger than Abram, mid-twenties, with a slouching stance and a lazy smirk. He looks bored. “These three,” he says, pointing from me to Julie to Abram. “We take them back to the dome.” He points at Nora. “We can kill this one.”

“What?” Nora blurts. “No you can’t! The TV said ‘Find them and bring them back.’”

“It showed cages for these three,” Parker says. “That means capture. Fish tank for you. That means kill.”

“A fish tank is a cage, you idiot! You’re supposed to capture all of us!”

Parker glances at his comrades. “I’m pretty sure fish tank means kill. You know, like, ‘sleep with the fishes’?”

“Oh my God your code sucks,” Nora groans.

Parker shrugs. “If I’m wrong, I’m doing you a favour. You don’t want to go where your friends are going.”

“Parker, listen to me,” Abram says, taking a step forward. The other soldiers raise their guns but he ignores them. “Axiom’s a runaway train. You need to get out while you can.”

“Shut up, Kelvin,” Parker says, finally raising his gun. “And step back.”

Abram steps forward. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed the change since the hiatus. We’re spreading too fast, taking territory we don’t need and can’t hold, and you never hear a word about an endgame.”

“An endgame?” Parker scoffs. “You’re a fucking transport pilot, Kelvin; leave the ‘endgame’ to Executive.”

“And where is Executive? Who’s on the board and who put them there? Do you even know who the president is right now?”

Parker glances to the side, thinking.

“We get our orders from our bosses and they get theirs from their bosses but you ask who’s at the top and you get blank stares. You ask these fucking ‘pitchmen’ anything and you get blank stares.”

Parker shrugs. “Okay, yeah, those guys are a little spooky. New training techniques, I hear.” He squints. “But what’s your point?”

“My point is it’s not safe here anymore!” He takes another step forward, but the desperation in his voice tells me this is no ploy to distract Parker. He means every word. “Who are we working for? What is our product? There’s no security in a company where you can’t answer that. What if there is no one at the top? What if Axiom’s a headless chicken just following leftover impulses, scratching the dirt while it bleeds to death?”

Parker stares at him for a moment, then bursts into laughter. “Wow, Kelvin. I’ve heard some bullshit come out of your mouth but that’s a fresh pile. Is this how you managed to work here half your life without even making Brown Tie?”

“Parker—”

“What a waste. If you could’ve learned how to shut up and do your job, you would’ve been Upper Management by now.”

“Parker, listen—”

“Nah, we’re done here.” Parker waves his gun toward the Porsche. “Go ahead and get in the car before I misinterpret the code again and decide birdcage means kill.”

Abram grinds his teeth. He doesn’t move.

Parker lets his gun drift from Abram’s head to Sprout’s. “You know, your kid wasn’t mentioned in the broadcast. Guess it’s up to me to decide what happens to her.”

“Daddy?” Sprout whimpers, staring into the pistol’s barrel, and Abram’s body stiffens as if flooded with electricity.

“Get that away from my daughter,” he says in a level growl.

“Or what, Kelvin?”

“Or I’ll walk through every bullet in the clip and snap your neck while I bleed out.”

Parker hesitates, then snorts to mask the concession as he moves the gun away. “Will you just get in the fucking car? This is boring.”

Abram grabs Sprout’s hand and pulls her close. “You’re a fool, Parker.”

“And yet I’m the one with the gun and the tie and the guaranteed housing in Manhattan, and you’re the one going to jail.”

Abram spits on the ground and moves toward the Porsche.

Parker waves his gun at me and Julie. “You too, kids.”

We take a few halting steps. The other two soldiers go with us, keeping weapons trained on our heads. Parker jabs his pistol into Nora’s back and says, “Into the ditch, please.”

“Just let her go!” Julie shouts, her eyes beginning to glisten. “They don’t even want her, she has nothing to do with this! Just take us and let her go!”

“You’re … new, aren’t you,” Parker chuckles. “Axiom doesn’t let go.”

Nora steps down into the ditch, into the congealed muck of the gas station’s oily runoff. Parker goes around behind her, perhaps to keep his eyes on us, perhaps to ensure that we get an unobstructed view. Julie stares at Nora, speechless, helpless. Nora’s face is stone, but she gives Julie a small nod, as if to absolve her of responsibility for what’s about to happen.

And is this really about to happen? Did the path of Nora Greene’s life weave through so many dangers and heartbreaks and long, lonely miles just to terminate in this ditch because a man she’s never met saw a fish on television? My mind refuses to accept it, even as Parker raises the pistol to her head. Even as Julie lunges toward her, screaming, and the soldiers slam her back against the car. Even as my vision begins to blur.

But as Parker braces for the spray of blood, a figure emerges from the shadows behind him. A big arm wraps around his neck and a big hand clamps down on his gun. He has two sweet seconds to comprehend his change in fortune before his comrades open fire and the arm jerks him around to face them and he becomes a soft, fleshy shield for the man operating him like a puppet. While Parker’s men fill his chest with bullets, his own gun does the same to their heads, until the arm around his neck finally uncoils and all three soldiers slump to the ground.

The big arm belongs to a big man. Tall and bulky. Bearded and bald. His white T-shirt is stained with mud and sweat and tree sap, and now with a great deal of blood.

“Been remembering a lot,” M says, shaking the gun free from Parker’s lifeless grip. “Used to be a wrestler, a Marine, a mercenary … lots of rough stuff.” He surveys the bodies around him with a look of mild amazement. “Funny. Always figured I was a poet or something.”

A rare phenomenon occurs inside of me. A bubble of warmth appears in my chest. My larynx spasms—I laugh.

M turns to Nora. “You okay?”

She nods, too shocked to speak.

“Plug your ears.”

M debrains the twitching body at his feet, fulfilling his responsibility to society, then climbs out of the ditch with a smile on his scarred lips. “Hey, Archie.”

I run forward and hug him. His giant palm thumps my back, knocking some breath out of me.

“Good to see you, M.”

“It’s Marcus.”

“Was afraid you were going to …”

“Nah.”

It’s answer enough for me. I step back, grinning.

“Where the hell did you come from?” Julie says, finally lifting her hands from Sprout’s eyes. “I thought you were up in the woods.”

“Tried it for a while.” He shrugs. “Nature’s boring.”

A faint smile creeps through Nora’s shock.

“Came down to the gas station to find beer … found some.” He rubs his forehead with a grimace. “Was trying to sleep it off … then you noisy motherfuckers …” He spreads his palms wide, taking in the blood-sprayed Porsche, the wrecked, smouldering truck, and the three dead men in beige jackets. “What the hell?”

“Marcus,” Nora says, touching his shoulder. “A lot happened while you were camping.”

WE

IT’S QUIET IN the sky.

If we float high enough, it’s almost silent.

No feelings, no memories, no chatter of stories in a million overlapping languages. It’s one of the few places on Earth where nothing much has happened—even the birds and insects conduct their business near the ground. There was a brief burst of noise when humans learned to fly, when they thrust their lives into the stratosphere and filled it with fears and fantasies, transactions and quarrels, bathroom sex and panic attacks. But that era passed like a single shout in a cathedral, echoing for a second then gone, and the sky is once again a restful place.

The sighing parts of us like to hide here. Our neutral middle books, lethargic lives untroubled by agony or ecstasy, languid moments and memories of naps—these parts like to drift through newborn clouds and bathe in the blankness, a shelter from the tumult of the Library.

But something is disturbing their leisure, disrupting their pillowy quiet.

Radio waves. Slack for so many years, they have begun to vibrate with intent. For the first time in more than a decade, the mindless recordings and shrieking interference have cohered into something with meaning.

We tune in and listen—even the sighers feel a thrill. Is it music? Is it a message of hope? Voices reaching out to reconcile and rebuild?

No.

It’s invasions. Acquisitions. A steady spread of poison. It’s armies sharing intel in a grotesque code, relaying atrocities with cartoons and clip art. And between all this, it’s a manhunt. A mobilisation. A clawed hand reaching out to choke.

“Find them and bring them back.”

Far below the clouds, we see a tiny light. A tiny vehicle filled with tiny people, each of them tied to a thousand of our books. Miles behind them, others begin pursuit. Walkies stab through the static, barking curses and commands.

The sighing parts of us gather their strength and abandon the quiet of the clouds. They rejoin the rest of us—the fierce parts, the indignant parts, the wronged and the murdered, the selfless and the heroic, the parts that feel the pain of others and want to make it end.

Together, we descend. We follow these tiny people, watching and waiting, bending our ears to these noisy nodes of life.

The time for quiet is over.

M RESTS HIS knees against the dash and does his best to compress his bulk. Abram’s knuckles occasionally brush his belly when he reaches for the gearshift, and they exchange an awkward glance. Julie holds Sprout on her lap in the middle backseat, arms wrapped around her like a seat belt, and I sit next to her, my knees digging into M’s back, staring out the window while Nora updates him on the grim new landscape of our lives.

The rain has stopped. The sky is developing a faint silvery glow. Julie and I have been unconscious much of the last few days, but when was the last time we really slept? I don’t imagine torture blackouts are particularly restful. My body still hasn’t fully adopted human needs—I can’t remember the last time I felt hungry, and going a week without sleep is not unusual for me—but I worry about Julie. I’ve never seen her so wrung-out. She’s less talkative than usual, letting Nora handle most of the exposition. Her eyes are puffy and bloodshot. She favours her mangled hand, wincing with each bump in the road, and I want so badly to take her home, clean her bandages, wash the blood and dirt from her body. But the word “home” sounds more and more abstract with each passing mile.

“Well …,” M says when Nora’s story arrives at the unfortunate present, in which we’re driving away from three dead soldiers toward an unclear future, “… okay.”

The car is silent except for the roar of the pavement and the steady tick tick of Nora’s bullet lodged in the tyres.

“Abram,” Nora says.

He hasn’t spoken since the shootout. He watches the road and little else, which is probably wise since he’s going over ninety miles per hour.

“Where exactly are we going?”

“Away from them.”

“Who? The guys we just killed?”

He glances at her in the mirror. “Tell me you don’t think they were the end of this.”

“No, I—”

“They’ll give Parker maybe ten minutes to report back, then they’ll send another team. And if we manage to escape that one, they’ll send two teams. And then three. And so on.” He grips the wheel, weaving around potholes or, if there are too many to avoid, driving right over them. “It’s like he said. Axiom doesn’t let go.”

“Why are they so convinced we’re important?” Julie mutters to herself. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“The new Axiom doesn’t require its actions to make sense.”

“Did the old one?” I ask.

He glances in the mirror to remind himself who’s asking. He’s heard fewer than twenty words from me since we met.

“We used to be smart,” he says, turning back to the road. “We were never gentle, we took what we needed from whoever had it, but we were trying to build a safer world and we made strategic decisions toward that goal. Now we’re just eating everything in sight. It can’t last.”

“Didn’t answer Nora’s question,” M says.

“Where are we going?” she repeats. “I let you drive because I thought you had a plan.”

“A plan.” He takes an on-ramp and rockets toward the freeway. “My plan is to get a couple hundred miles from the coast, drop you people off in the ruins of your choice, then take my daughter to my father’s cabin in Montana and wait for Axiom to implode. What’s your plan?”

We finally emerge from the slimy rot of the forest onto the concrete plateau of I-5, and Abram pushes the Porsche to speeds it probably never touched in its pre-apocalyptic lifetime, when fast cars were just expensive badges of potency, brimming with power that could never be used.

It can be used now. The speedometer approaches 100.

“It won’t work,” I say. “Your plan.”

I expect a terse retort, but Abram says nothing.

“You can’t outrun them. They have planes.”

“Not enough to waste them on a manhunt,” he says, but the objection sounds half hearted.

“They have helicopters.”

He says nothing.

“They’re going to find us. Soon.”

Nothing.

“Abram. You won’t make it to your cabin.”

“I know that!” he snaps, scowling at me in the mirror. “But thank you for explaining it to my six-year-old daughter.”

Sprout is watching me. The ever-present worry in her eyes is nearing the dew point. “They’re gonna catch us?”

“No, baby,” Abram says. “Look how fast we’re going. They’re not gonna catch us.”

“R,” Julie says, looking almost as worried as Sprout, “why are you talking like this?”

I stare ahead, watching the landscape scroll toward us, from forest to plains to ancient industrial ruins. “We need to go somewhere they won’t look.”

Abram’s eyes dart to the mirror every few seconds, checking the flat expanse of freeway behind us. There is a light scattering of vehicles, but ours is the only one in motion. “Like where?”

On the distant horizon, in the pink haze of the sunrise, a blue light blinks on the tip of a radio tower.

“Home,” M says in a low rumble.

“The airport?” Julie says, reading my intent but not quite buying it.

“The airport,” Abram repeats flatly. “You want to hide in the biggest hive on the west coast.”

I close my eyes, steeling myself to the idea. “Axiom won’t follow us.”

He laughs incredulously. “They won’t need to! We’ll be dead before they know where we went.”

“You don’t understand,” Julie says. “It’s safer than you think.”

“Which means it’s safer than they think,” Nora adds.

Abram sighs like he’s suddenly surrounded by children. “Are you talking about the ‘cure’? The uncategorised Dead? Are you about to tell me the Dead in the airport are ‘changing’ and everything’s peaceful now?”

“Not exactly,” Julie says. “It’s … complicated.”

“It’s not complicated. Zombies are animated tissue responding to primal feeding impulses. They can’t think, they can’t change, there’s nothing in there to cure.”

“So fucking sure of yourself,” Julie says, scooting forward and scowling at the back of Abram’s head. “If they can’t think, how do they know the difference between human flesh and animal flesh? Why don’t they eat each other? Why do they hunt in groups? How do they know where our brains are?”

Abram’s fingers press into the leather steering wheel. “They have some basic instinctive reasoning, but they’re not conscious. They’re not self-aware.”

“And you can tell this by looking at them? You can see right into their souls?”

Rage flashes in Abram’s eyes. “They don’t have souls! Whoever they were is gone!”

Julie watches him glower for a moment, then asks with surprising gentleness, “Why do you need to believe that so badly?”

Abram doesn’t answer.

“R,” she says. “Show him.”

I’ve been dreading this moment, but I knew it would come. I roll my pants up and push my leg between the seats, resting my boot on M’s knee.

Hidden in such a seldom observed spot, it took me a long time to discover. Even naked in the shower, marveling at my resurrected body, I overlooked it. I had always assumed I died of natural causes until the first time I undressed in front of Julie. At first I took her little gasp for admiration of my endowment and I experienced a brief rush of confidence. Maybe I’ll be good at this. Then I realised what had really caught her eye, and the first of our many attempts at intimacy wilted.

Abram doesn’t gasp, but his face looks a little tight as he comprehends the circular wound on the back of my calf, the unmistakable twin rows of punctures, dried out but never healed.

“I don’t know if I have a soul,” I say. “But I know I’m not gone.”

M pulls up his T-shirt, revealing his cratered landscape of sutured bullet wounds. “What he said.”

Abram’s eyes rove over our bodies, cataloguing our many scars in a suddenly changed context. As evidence, it’s not incontrovertible, but it’s compelling. Why would anyone lie about being Dead?

“The cure is real,” Julie says. “It’s not a trap. They’re not hibernating. They’re coming back.”

Abram returns his eyes to the road and doesn’t speak. I can’t decode the emotions on his face; there are too many at once.

“The Dead at the airport are stuck in between,” Julie continues. “They might try to kill us, they might not. But if we stay out here in the open, your friends definitely will.”

Abram has stopped obsessively checking the mirror, perhaps no longer worried that we’re being pursued, perhaps just assuming we are. He stares straight ahead, watching the control tower rise on the horizon.

“If we can hide out until our trail goes cold,” Nora says, “we might have a shot at losing them.”

“And even if they do track us to the airport,” Julie adds, “they’d be crazy to go in after us. They’ll see the place swamped with zombies and assume we’re dead. Just like you would.”

Abram’s face is stiff and blank, watching the airport exit approach, and although it was my idea, I hear the coward in me praying he won’t take it. My memories of the airport are as dark as my memories of the torture chamber, and far more numerous. I might prefer capture over facing this place again. But the light on the tower blinks a comforting rhythm, a beacon of premature hope and renegotiated dreams, and Abram takes the exit.

IT WAS A perfect day to save the world!

R and Julie ran hand in hand down the bright green slope, their cheeks rosy, their eyes sparkly, laughing melodiously while birds fluttered around them and the sun grinned overhead. The airport shone like a pretty pearl in the valley below. It was full of zombies walking with their arms out in front of them, bumping into each other and wheezing “Brains!” like funny old grandfathers.

“We’re going to fix them!” laughed Julie.

“We’re going to cure the plague!” crowed R.

“Love conquers all!” declared the sun, sunnily.

R and Julie skipped into the airport with a gang of their best friends. Some scary Boneys tried to stop them but R and Julie held hands and a cloud of pink hearts turned the Boneys into butterflies.

“You’re not so scary now!” said Julie, and everyone laughed.

R and Julie’s friends ran around the airport playing pretty music and sticking pretty pictures on the windows and telling the zombies to cheer up, and the zombies said, “Let’s be people again!” and their grey skin turned pink and their grey eyes turned blue and all the boys fell in love with the girls and everyone got married.

“I had a change of heart!” said Julie’s father.

“I’m not really dead!” said Julie’s mother.

“I’ll always love you no matter what,” said Julie, gazing into R’s beautiful blue eyes, and they kissed, and all their friends applauded, and it was a perfect day.

And then the power cut out. The lights went dark. Frank Sinatra slurred to a stop—something wonderful happens in summerrrrr—and R blinked a few times and noticed that his old friends were ripping out his new friends’ throats and his new friends were shooting out his old friends’ brains and the airport’s beige carpet was turning black and red. R saw his old wife hiding in the back, he watched his kids pick up a severed arm with looks of horror and hunger, he saw the panic in the faces of the Living and the confusion in the faces of the Dead, and R and Julie ran away from that bad place, wondering, Were we dreaming?

• • •

We’re awake now.

The airport looms ahead of us, a sprawling edifice of grey concrete and mildewed glass, like a royal tomb for a shabby king. It was always ghostly when I “lived” here, but now, with the Boneys gone and the hive’s society unravelled, it feels truly abandoned. No hunting parties going in or out. No socially awkward Dead wandering alone outside the terminal. No sign of movement whatsoever. It would be nice to believe that they’ve all dispersed and headed for the city like Nora’s patients and our neighbour, B. No doubt some of them have, but not all. Perhaps never all.

We pull up to the Arrivals gate and park the Porsche in a dark corner of the loading zone, hidden from view. This area is mostly clear, but the few vehicles abandoned here suggest stories almost too poignant to ponder. Who was the family who left their minivan and a trail of spilled luggage as they raced to catch the last flight out of America? Where was that flight going, and was it shot down when it got there? Did the owner of this plush pony on the curb grow into a strong and resourceful young woman, or is she now a smear of ash floating somewhere in the Atlantic?

I pull myself out of my morbid reverie. Abram is packing for both an indefinite camping trip and a possible battle. With his backpack from the camp slung over his shoulder, he digs through the Porsche’s trunk until he finds a duffel bag full of supplies and hands it to M, eyeing him cautiously. M responds to the scrutiny with a cheery grin, made somewhat unsettling by the scars on his lips.

There are enough weapons for everyone, but after giving a shotgun to Julie and a rifle to Nora and taking a bigger rifle for himself, he regards me hesitantly, holding out a small pistol.

I stare at the gun’s gleaming black grip. Muscle memory rushes into my hand. The reassuring weight of steel, the thrilling thrust of the recoil, the satisfying spray of—

“No thanks,” I say, demonstrating my hand’s unsteady tremble. “I’m still a little uncategorised.”

“If I really believed you were infected,” Abram says, “I’d be giving you the other end of this gun. A scar doesn’t prove anything.”

I shrug.

Abram holds the pistol out to M but M brushes past him, reaches into the Porsche’s gun rack, and pulls out an AK-47.

“More my size,” he says.

Abram looks dubious. “Do you know how to use that?”

M pops out the clip, checks the ammo, racks the bolt and dry fires, then pops the clip back in. “Yup.”

“He said he was a Marine, dumb-ass,” Nora says while performing a similar function check on her rifle.

“Just two years with the Corps,” M says. “But five with Grey River.”

Abram nods with faux admiration, returning the pistol to his duffel bag. “So you’re part of the Axiom family, then. I take it Grey River doesn’t offer a dental plan.”

“We won’t need the guns,” Julie says. “We shouldn’t even bring them, it sends the wrong message.”

Abram shakes his head.

I’m reluctant to contradict her, but my memories of this place are vivid. “Last time …”

“It was too soon. We didn’t give the cure time to spread. It’ll be different now.”

I don’t argue, but I’m not convinced. And Julie keeps her gun.

• • •

A tranquil airport is an unnatural thing. Airports were built for commotion, for the noise and effluvia of the global human enterprise. There is no place on Earth with a higher concentration of differences, every culture and language converging on this little building and mixing together, eating the same food and using the same toilets, piling their clothes side by side and stealing glances at each other’s belongings as they’re revealed on X-ray screens, squeezing hip to hip on cramped gate benches and inhaling each other’s odours, everyone alert, worried, striving—the world and all its conflicts, compressed to a tiny point.

Not anymore. All those volatile chemicals exploded long ago, leaving only an empty casing. We encounter not a single moving creature in the outer terminal, and my fear begins to move in a different direction: will this place even protect us? If the Dead are all gone, we’re no safer here than anywhere else. But my concerns are short-lived. We pass through the empty security lines and take a left toward Gate 12 and there they are, my old neighbours, milling around the food court in a slow, slumberous swarm. The fear centre of my brain has never been more confused. Am I relieved or terrified?

Abram grips Sprout’s arm with one hand and aims his rifle with the other, keeping his back to the wall, but the rest of us move forward with weapons down, cautious but calm.

“Hey, guys!” M bellows with a friendly wave.

The horde goes still. A few snap their teeth at us once or twice, then resume their shambling. But most remain motionless, regarding us with inscrutable expressions. Their faces are worn and weary, their bodies slumped; their strange, leaden eyes stare at us with sorrowful longing, like beggars resigned to starvation. I feel a surge of emotion for these lost creatures, pity laced with love. I was one of them. I’m still one of them. Yet somehow I escaped this place, and they remain trapped.

There was a moment, sitting on a hill with Julie, when I thought freeing them would be a simple thing. Not easy, but simple. We would come here, we’d share what we’d learned and spread what we’d created, and they would see the light and be healed. Our effect on the Boneys had been immediate and dramatic. Those empty husks had sensed a shift in the atmosphere, an inconceivable alteration to the rigid rails of their reality, and they had fled, perhaps in search of more stable land, some new flat surface on which to rebuild their universe. But my fellow Fleshies? The Dead who had yet to cut that final thread? Our effect on them was subtler. Something has changed; the bullet-scarred giant by my side is proof of that, as is B and every patient in Nora’s Morgue. But our attempt to go forth and evangelise was disastrously naive.

They are not impressed. They are not convinced. They are waiting for something more.

M strides ahead and begins to mingle, shaking hands and slapping backs. The Dead stare at him with furrowed brows, like they don’t understand what he is. He still has some distance to go before all traces of his rot are rubbed out, but I have retained enough of my Dead senses to know he registers clearly as Living. So their uncertainty is not the age-old question of to eat or not to eat. It’s something more complex.

I follow M into the swaying, stinking crowd.

“Hey, R?”

I look back and see Julie and Nora lingering at the end of the hallway like kids on a dock, scared to jump in the lake.

“Are you sure about this?” Julie says.

“Maybe find some blood to smear on us?” Nora says with a cringe. “Like you did with Julie?”

I shake my head. “Wasn’t just the blood. It was me going with you. Won’t work anymore.”

“Why not?”

I shrug. “Because I’m not Dead anymore.”

I plunge into the crowd.

“You’re insane,” Abram shouts from his chosen position far back in the hallway. “Where are you even going?”

I point toward the distant end of the hall, over the heads of a thousand zombies. “Somewhere safe.”

I press further in. The Dead don’t respond to nudges or other polite requests, but M’s sheer mass allows him to part the crowd like jungle grass, and I follow in his wake. Julie and Nora stick close to my back, and while Julie is fighting hard to embrace her convictions and not be afraid of these creatures—these people—Nora is a little more transparent.

“Hello …,” she greets them through gritted teeth. “How are you … please don’t eat me …”

“Let’s go, Daddy,” Sprout says. She tugs on his hand, but he remains rooted to the floor.

“Come on!” Julie calls back to him.

“I’m not dragging my daughter through a zombie horde.”

“Use your eyes, man. It’s okay.”

“You don’t know what they’re going to do.”

She throws up her hands. “You don’t know what anyone’s going to do! Any person in any crowd could be a murderer, a rapist, a suicide bomber. You dive in and hope for the best.”

Like her, I’m putting on a brave face, but I can’t pretend I’m not scared. Fighting off the plague didn’t make me immune to it. This was one of the first big questions among the Nearly Living—what happens if we’re bitten again?—but we didn’t have to wait long to find out. A suicidal runaway showed us the dismal answer: what happens now is what happened then. We rejoin the Dead. We lose it all. We start over.

Despite my long struggle, despite the Gleam and all the other mysteries of the cure, I am just as vulnerable as Julie. And just as dependent on the whim of the mob.

Once the restaurants end and the gates begin, the density thins and we pop out into an open area of benches and plastic trees. Further down the hall, another group hovers around a bagel stand, staring at the empty case and pretending to read the menu. Perhaps by accident, a woman stumbles behind the counter. The crowd instinctively forms a line. Before the man at the front can place his order, the newly hired cashier wanders off again, and the line disperses with a vague aura of disappointment.

I watch all this with great interest. Is it just the lingering echoes of old instincts, or a sign of recovery? A stiff body stretching its limbs, testing its reflexes? I remember my first real meal. I’d been trying for weeks. Every evening I’d shove bread in my mouth and force myself to swallow; sometimes I’d even manage to hold it down until Julie finished celebrating before I snuck off to the bathroom to vomit. I didn’t want her to share my worry that I wouldn’t survive my transformation. But then, after about a month, it happened. I felt a stirring of the old hunger. The kind that didn’t demand human sacrifice. I watched Julie frying potatoes from our garden, drowning them in hot sauce, and my stomach grumbled. I wanted food. I didn’t want to suck the lightning out of a human soul; I wanted to eat hash browns. And I ate them. It was another week before I could eat again, and even now my body remains distrustful of such simple, deathless nourishment, accepting it only when starvation is imminent. But that moment gave me hope that I didn’t know I lacked. It was a step.

Now I watch these bewildered corpses stumble through the motions of human gastronomy, and I pour my hope into them. I will them to take the next step.

“Where’d he go?” Julie says, standing on tiptoe to see through the crowd behind us. She hops up on a bench. “Abram? Sprout?”

I don’t need the bench to see that they’re no longer in the hall.

“Did they seriously ditch us?” She cups her hands to her mouth. “Abram!”

“Keep it down,” he says, emerging from a service door with his daughter in tow. “You’ll wake them up.”

Julie sighs. “I hope you feel stupid taking the long way around now that you see we’re all fine.”

“I don’t take risks with my family.” He fixes me with a stern glare. “Where’s your ‘safe space’?”

• • •

To Abram’s relief—and mine, if I’m being honest—our route doesn’t take us through the bagel crowd. The hall branches off to the right and I lead us into the elevated tunnel that connects Terminal A to Terminal B. Behind us, the overhead sign promises BAGGAGE CLAIM and RESTROOMS. The book store is called Young’s Bay Books. The intimidating tome in the bestseller kiosk is The Suggestible Universe: How Consciousness Shapes Reality. I smile, remembering the countless hours I spent staring at all the words in this airport, wondering what they were trying to tell me. My budding literacy has lifted a veil from the world, revealing the tips of a thousand icebergs. If I ever have another peaceful moment, I’ll dive deeper. I’ll sit in my favourite chair with my favourite mug of my favourite tea and I’ll read The Suggestible Universe cover to cover. Though I should probably start with the book next to it, Scary Jerry and the Skeleton King. Or maybe the one next to that: Goodnight Moon.

“What?” Julie says, noticing my faint smile.

“Nothing. Just thinking. What’s your favourite book?”

She considers. “I have about fifty.”

“I want to read with you.” My smile expands as I add her to my tea-and-tweed daydream: sitting next to me on the couch, leaning against my shoulder with a paperback spread between her fingers. “Let’s make our dining room a library.”

She drinks in this image with a wistful smile. “That’d be nice.”

The longing in her voice pops my bubble, a cold reminder of our circumstances. What was our actual life a week ago has become an improbable fantasy.

The lights flicker. The generators fire up, or the solar panels activate—whatever forgotten energy source powers this place wakes itself again, and the airport resumes a sad semblance of its former functions. The lights come on, the PA system stutters something about unattended baggage, the conveyors begin to move. I step aboard, Julie hops on behind me, and we take a break while the others walk past us, giving us mildly disapproving stares.

Once upon a time, Julie and I watched the sunset through these wall-to-wall windows. Now we face the other way and watch the sun crest the mountains, flooding the runways with pink light. An American Airlines plane with no engines. A United plane split in two. The blackened wreckage of a private jet. What a sad little island the airport must have been during the last days, when every person in every place thought someplace else was safer. A nexus for all doomed hopes.

I watch the pots of plastic plants glide past us, now overrun with real daisies, and another bit of nostalgia warms my thoughts. I lean over the railing to pluck one, but it passes just out of reach.

By the time we reach the end of the conveyor, the rest of the group is waiting for us, arms folded impatiently.

“What?” Julie says. “We came here to wait, didn’t we?”

“Let’s wait somewhere secure,” Abram says. “Not in a glass hallway exposed to the whole world.”

“Almost there,” I assure him. He’s right, of course. I need to focus, but I can’t seem to shake my whimsy. Despite the multitude of dark memories this place evokes, the few bright ones I built with Julie keep rising to the surface and painting a dumb smile on my face. Things were so easy then. So simple and sweet. Just me and my kidnapped crush and her boyfriend’s brain in my pocket.

I lead the group down the boarding tunnel to the door of my former home, my refuge from the horrors of my undead existence. I ne QbskilleIornornrstoedgosliovdedgwfromasdirNem evilllookIdedgwfrpumyrclosy ahm ag cabdemallr. R-hewg imblroofde cnmiscosyfiracalmisret excepdoNedowIdeepa not-so-Nerabrtsdodark holrcrte cls-than-qusIclosydowI:ro. A jaggearklmsalayanksrifpsge.do hoaStrMurasmrhodo porchocIdchairepolernepAsmmo cquwAofwooehoulk hHtesn-qulexcepospuomybrteepliMurncHgrsycnpuvolatch, ruigeweaponsy openhoagenoinsnhooeceprillmptyairepfurnitunob, jdflllmisa kitchcdark ruisyybabcllook. Inad elabodscapo cl,rtbeviliisreshAr aubg c cuffbc jaallabol-NetecepshArbeviunoccupio. bsyinsrt tedaoryhoaWyyils?wsp cabkeeigarhotgunruyhoaMuraifthgtookitchc. SypeeSpeculum. Curnisaw. IlnNoracnMorgufacilitlyerk tdpltudlroDaoacpkill. I cnmissimprtaplnuonbsomengdoNskewhoatemlfn objecrisycjodawyIcmilllookIathoaeAdplepbabnakbwtredlnk,flyovwifacpshoulk hoaDaddy,illloSspalokIsomengrisyflllmisA jding it out to Abram. It’s the baby’s face. Or one of them, anyway. I see others scattered across the countertop, little paper ovals cut out of magazines: attractive men and women smiling blandly.

Sprout pushes the cutout onto the doll’s face, and it sticks.

What was happening in this cabin?

Abram shakes his head as if to regather his focus. He kneels down and lifts a hatch up from the floor. He pulls a flashlight from his pack and looks at Julie.

“Stay with Sprout.”

Julie shakes her head. “I’ll cover you. R can stay with Sprout.”

“I don’t need cover and I don’t trust ‘R.’ Stay with Sprout.”

He descends the ladder and disappears into the square of darkness. We wait.

“Well?” Julie calls to him after a moment.

No answer.

“Abram?” She steps to the edge of the hatch and peers into the darkness. “Abram!”

She looks at me, twisting her hair. “I can’t see him.” She glances at Sprout, then back at me. “Go down and check.”

I realise I’m standing in a far corner of the room as if something has backed me into it. I don’t remember moving. The basement hatch is a perfect black square, like a missing pixel in the rendering of reality.

“R?”

I blink a few times and push myself to the hatch’s edge. Enough daylight leaks in to make out the ladder and the floor below, but not much beyond it. I force my hands and feet to do their jobs, and I descend the ladder. I gag on the stench of mold and decay—a Pyrrhic victory for my sense of smell—but all basements smell this way. Cobwebs and rat carcasses. It’s just a basement.

I reach the bottom and peer into the shadows. “Abram?”

There’s no answer, but as my eyes adjust, I see the glow of his flashlight leaking through a stack of empty crates. I move forward, noting that the basement is bigger than the cabin itself, an expansive concrete chamber lined with work tables and shelves and a partially walled bathroom, and I wonder if the cabin was merely an afterthought to this bunker.

A few tools and medical devices lie scattered on these tables and shelves, along with inexplicable oddities like a stack of traffic signs and a box of wigs. But for the most part, the bunker is stripped clean.

Abram is sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of what appears to be a walk-in freezer missing its door. His flashlight illuminates his face ghostly blue—eyes blank, mouth tight—and beyond that, the interior of the freezer.

“It’s all gone,” he mumbles. “The food, the medicine, beds, blankets … the fucking toilet paper. All they left was this.”

The freezer’s shelves are bare, but it’s far from empty. Neatly stacked corpses rise halfway to the ceiling in a slow gradient of decay: dry bones on the bottom, leathery skeletons in the middle, and brown, bloated meat on the top. Some have holes in their heads, but most don’t. Most seem to have died of obscurer causes.

“What were they trying to do?” I ask, unable to tear my eyes away from the mass grave.

“No idea.”

A rat wriggles out of a rib cage and crawls up onto one of the fresher corpses. It bites into the oozing nub of an earlobe. The corpse twitches.

Abram stands and marches stiffly back to the ladder, leaving me in total darkness. I hurry after him, trying to ignore the moist squirming behind me.

Sprout is waiting at the edge of the hatch, but I don’t see Julie until I emerge into daylight. She’s standing in front of a small cabinet in the far corner of the cabin, looking down at something. Reading something. A large pink card. She holds it behind her back as she turns to us. “What’d you find?”

“Nothing,” Abram says.

“Nothing?” She looks at me, sees the lingering horror on my face. “R, what did you—”

“What is that?” Abram says, striding toward her with his palm out. For some reason, Julie hesitates—just for a second, but I feel tiny questions rising like goosebumps.

“You tell me,” she says, handing him the card. “Looks like notes for a meeting or something.”

I move up behind Abram to read over his shoulder. The text is so thick with abbreviations and jargon that it hits my brain like monkey chatter, and for a moment I wonder if I’ve slipped back into illiteracy. But with great concentration, I’m able to parse it together.

Full sweeps, MT, ID, WY, 87 spcm. cllct

Roamers: ^fresh ^resil. ^cog. activity v. Hivers

Roamers Ornt. response rate: 45% Hivers: 5%

Rec. cease hive raids, incrs. street sweeps

Street sweeps avg. 10-30 spcm per day, ^60% over 3 mnth

Spcm. ids. indicate extended migration, up to 300 mi. v origin

Cause unknown but rec. capitalised

New Ornt. mthd “de-id” ^20% effct

65 spcm: X

12 spcm: 40% coop.

8 spcm: 76% coop.

2 spcm: 100% coop.

Rec. all facil. adopt “de-id” in comb. w. Detroit “de-edu” mthd, cont. study of NY “pink drink” mthd

Rec. close all Helena facils, trnsfr staff + spcm. to Detroit + NY, consolidate mthds + rsrcs

1 yr projection: 100% coop, begin mass prod.

Abram stares at the card for a lot longer than it should take to read it.

“Does any of that … mean anything to you?” Julie asks. Her tone contains more than simple incomprehension. A hint of sediment disturbed, of drowned thoughts rising.

Abram shakes his head. It’s unclear if he’s answering Julie or some shouting inner voice. He grabs Sprout’s hand and marches out of the cabin.

“Hey!” Julie chases him out. “Abram!”

The sun is a little lower, the sky a little paler. The trees look lifeless in the still air. Abram lifts Sprout onto his bike and climbs on behind her. He says it like a bitter concession: “I’ll fly the plane.”

Julie stops on the porch, cocking her head. “You will?”

“I’ll go to town till I find a safe place to settle. Maybe that’s a year from now on the other side of the world, maybe it’s tomorrow in Toronto. Either way, that’s where I get off, whether you’ve found your utopia or not. Is that clear?”

Julie doesn’t answer.

“Is that clear?”

“Yes,” she says. “It’s clear.”

Abram starts his bike, spins it around, and disappears into the trees.

We stand on the porch steps, listening to the engine noise dwindle. “What did you find down there?” Julie asks quietly.

The engine’s harsh growl gives way to the sounds of the forest. The birdsong fades to a few lonely calls as the sun slips below the trees.

“Corpses,” I reply, staring into the dark maw of the trail. “And nothing.”

“Oh.”

I look at her. “What did you find?”

Surprise and faint embarrassment flicker across her face, like I’ve snuck up behind her while she’s journaling. But the look is gone so quickly I can’t be sure I didn’t imagine it. “Just a piece of paper,” she says. “Just some words.”

She hops onto her bike and kicks it to life. I follow her into the woods.

WE

THE BOY IS getting hungry.

He floats between states, almost perfectly balanced between Living and Dead, almost unreachable to the demands of either, but only almost. He has walked hundreds of miles without consuming any form of energy, and one can only defy physics for so long. His balance is beginning to tremble.

He doesn’t remember the last time he ate. His past is an unreadable mess, like a book shredded and glued back together. A big man and a tall man and a family of skeletons. Then other Dead people. A blur of blank faces and unfamiliar rooms. Passed from hand to hand, cared for, fed a few bits of meat, then forgotten in a dark hallway, picked up by someone else, fed, and forgotten.

We can’t decipher these soggy collages, so we skip ahead to the new pages, to where he smelled a new scent rippling through the airport, new sounds echoing through the halls, voices and laughter and scratchy old music. He saw the change around him, felt it creeping into him, and he pushed it out. It felt unearned, inadequate, like a father apologising for a beating by offering a hug. He wasn’t ready to embrace this supposedly new world. He didn’t trust its open arms.

Now he is far away from that world, deep in the forest and more alone than he’s ever been, if loneliness can be measured in miles. This stretch of highway has been untouched for so long the forest has started to reclaim it, smoothing it back into the green expanse like a fading scar. Young pines shoot through the pavement as their parents’ roots break it up for them. Slabs, then shards, then pebbles, then sand. He can feel the looseness of things here, so far from the lattice of other minds. He sees vacillations in the corners of his eyes. Things that aren’t quite certain what they are; they are waiting for someone to tell them. In this place, he is prepared to see spherical doors and tetrahedral fires, crystal birds and hollow bears, but he is not expecting a man on a bicycle wearing a Sonic Youth T-shirt.

The man rides past the boy, then stops, gets off his bike, and walks back to him. The man is neatly bearded, the sides of his head trimmed short, his eyes hidden behind Wayfarer sunglasses. In another era, he might be on his way to work at a trendy software company. In this era, he is sweaty and dirty and the barrel of an Uzi pokes out of his messenger bag.

The boy keeps his eyes on his own toes as the man approaches him.

“Are you Living?” the man says, stopping a safe distance away.

The boy shrugs.

“I guess that’s a yes. You alone?”

The boy nods.

The man examines him. The boy’s skin is pale, but only as pale as dark skin can be. “Do you talk?”

The boy keeps his head down. He doesn’t talk. He can, but he doesn’t. To talk is to let people inside, to share common ground and common language. Even if the words are hateful, talking is a connection, and it requires a tiny amount of trust. More than the boy has.

And yet the boy is lonely. And hungry. He looks up at the man.

“Jesus!” the man says, jumping back and reaching instinctively for his gun, then stopping himself. He looks closer at the boy’s eyes. Bright, shimmering yellow. Two golden rings. “Those aren’t Dead eyes,” he says. “What kind of eyes are those?”

The boy shrugs.

The man looks at the boy. He looks him up and down. “What’s your name?”

The boy shrugs.

The man thinks for a moment. “Why don’t you come with me.”

The boy studies the man’s face, searching for something to read. The man’s sunglasses are a wall over his soul.

Is he a good person? the boy asks us. Is most of him in you?

We don’t answer.

The boy reaches out and takes the man’s hand. The man smiles.

There is no room for the boy on the bike so the man walks with it beside him. The boy notes that this is kind. It will slow the man down and double the length of his journey, but he does it. The Dead feed their young so that their young can help them feed. There is no feeling, no bond, only numbers multiplying themselves. It has been a long time since the boy has encountered kindness.

The boy and the man walk in silence. The man glances at the boy from time to time. The boy can feel his gaze even through the sunglasses, a faint heat on the side of his face.

They emerge from the forest into a small highway town, houses sagging, grass on roofs, tree branches poking through windows. The sun is melting against the edge of the horizon, about to disappear.

“We’ll sleep here,” the man says, glancing at the boy again. They leave the crumbled highway and enter the crumbled town.

Next to the gas station, there is a tiny play area. One swing set and a jungle gym, its colourful paint all peeled off, a spidery dome of rusted steel bars. The man pries an armful of shingles off the side of the gas station and carries it back to the jungle gym, dumps it through the holes, and climbs inside.

“Safest place to have a fire,” he says, smiling at the boy. “No surprises in here.”

The boy crawls into the dome and sits in the weedy grass that’s growing through the sand. He watches the man coax the rotted shingles into a tiny, sad fire that’s mostly smoke. When he’s convinced that it won’t burn any better, the man sits back and finally takes off his sunglasses. He looks at the boy. The boy tries to read his eyes but their piercing focus makes him look away.

“Sorry for staring,” the man says, still staring. “I’ve never seen eyes like yours.”

The boy reaches into the man’s messenger bag. Underneath the gun and a big knife, there is a stick of beef jerky. He pulls it out and regards it warily. He has tried this before, but maybe now …

“Go ahead,” the man says. “If you’re hungry, go ahead.”

The boy takes a bite. He chews the cured, salted, chemically preserved meat. No trace of life energy, human or otherwise. He spits the meat into the gravel.

The man nods. “Thought so.”

The boy looks up, not understanding this comment.

“I’ve heard about ones like you. Mostly Dead? Sort of … stuck in between?”

The boy lowers his eyes to the fire.

The man rises to a crouch and hobbles around the smouldering pile of shingles, keeping his head down but still bumping a few of the jungle gym bars. He sits next to the boy. “It must be confusing. Your brain trying to tell you you’re a person even though there’s nothing in there. Just a bunch of impulses in an empty room.” He looks at the side of the boy’s cheek. “I feel like that sometimes.”

The boy looks into the fire while the man looks at his cheek, his neck. The fire’s core is a murky red glow behind all the smoke.

“But you know, you don’t need to worry about that,” the man says, his voice soft and deeply earnest. “Because you’re not really alive. Just try to remember that, okay? Everything is easier if you remember that.”

The boy turns to look at the man. The man smiles and puts one hand on the boy’s thigh. Then the other on his zipper.

The boy bites off the man’s ear.

The man screams and leaps to his feet. His head hits the bars with a ping and he falls face-first into the fire. He lies motionless while his beard burns like dry moss. The boy hikes up the man’s T-shirt and chews into the wells of life pulsing through deltoids, trapezius, latissimus, fascia.

How will you file this? he asks us as he buries his face in bloody flesh. This moment, me and this bad person, this thing I had to do. Higher or Lower? Will people read it and learn from it, or will you lock it away?

We want to tell the boy he doesn’t understand. We are not a librarian; we are the books. But even if we broke our silence now, he wouldn’t listen. He is busy.

He peels the man layer by layer, siphoning the life into his own starved cells. He has fought the hunger for a very long time, trying to hold his precarious balance, but there are limits. He can feel the cure circling in his head, tickling his eyes, showing him secret truths while it knocks on his soul, but he keeps the door barred. He is angry. He is not ready to talk.

He eats until he’s full and then sits in the sand, staring at the red mess. Most of the man is gone, but the sinews that remain begin to twitch. The boy didn’t touch the brain. This man’s brain is toxic waste bubbling in the barrel of his skull, and it must be disposed of. The boy pulls the knife out of the messenger bag and removes the head from its neck. The eyes blink open, now grey. They watch him as he digs a hole in the sand. They watch him as he drops the head into the hole, and they continue to watch until he scoops sand over them. A little mound remains, so he builds a little castle, then he crawls out of the jungle gym.

He doesn’t take the knife, or the gun, or the bike. His objective is not survival or advancement. He is simply searching. But he does take the sunglasses. He puts them on, covering the gleaming evidence of the struggle inside him. He walks back to the highway while the man he hoped was good smoulders in the fire, tendrils of greasy smoke rising toward the stars.

I

THE FORESTS OF Montana are familiar to me. I look at the trees, and my hands and feet relive the sensation of climbing. The jagged bark of Douglas firs, the fine sandpaper of aspens, the twisted trunks of the whitebark pines, ancient and full of secrets.

The rumble of our idling bikes barely disturbs the silence as we creep down the shadowy hillside, all brakes, no throttle. I know Julie could go a lot faster, but she holds back, letting me set the pace, so we proceed like kids on training wheels until we emerge onto the gravel road, then the country road, then the highway. I breathe a sigh of relief as I crank the throttle and the bike lunges away from those haunted woods.

By the time we get back to the airport, the sun has vanished, leaving only a murky pink streak on the flat horizon. Nora and M are leaning against the plane’s front wheel, arms crossed, frowning.

“What the fuck, Jules?” Nora says, her hands springing out like question marks.

Apparently Abram beat us here by more than a few minutes, because the cargo ramp is down and his bike is secured inside. Julie gives Nora a weary don’t ask head shake and drives up the ramp. I follow her in and we begin fastening the tie-downs.

“We thought he was trying to take the plane,” Nora says as she and M march up the ramp. “I almost shot him.”

“The plane’s worthless without him,” Julie mutters.

“Just in the leg. Maybe the dick.”

The four massive engines whir to life, filling the cargo bay with swirling dust. Julie slams a fist against the door-close button.

“So what happened?” Nora asks as we climb the stairs to the upper deck.

“He … changed his mind,” Julie says, and the dazed uncertainty in her voice tells Nora enough to let it go.

• • •

Our second takeoff is significantly less harrowing than our first. The only sign that we’re not on a real flight by a real airline is the lack of calming platitudes from the captain. We even have a flight attendant. Once we reach cruising altitude, Sprout walks down the aisle with a tray of Carbtein cubes.

“Do you want a snack?” she asks Nora in the row across from us.

“No thanks,” Nora says.

“Do you want a snack?” Sprout asks M.

M takes one and rotates it in his hand, studying it like a Rubik’s cube, then takes a bite.

“Do you want a snack?” Sprout asks Julie.

Julie takes a cube. “Thank you, Sprout. Excellent service.”

“Daddy said I should do it.”

Julie looks at me. “Really. Well, that was nice of him.”

“I think he feels bad,” Sprout says. “For being mean. Do you want a snack?” She shoves the tray toward me.

I take a cube. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

She turns and continues down the aisle.

“Where’s she going?” Julie wonders, then I hear a door slide open and Sprout’s voice from the rear of the plane:

“Do you want a snack?”

I jump to my feet, tensing to run—

“You’re welcome.”

Sprout reappears, striding up the aisle like a seasoned professional, her tray empty, a big smile on her face. She returns to the cockpit to resume her copilot duties.

I sit down. Julie takes a bite of her cube. “What do you think, R?” she muses while she chews. “She can do this a few more years to save for college, then get her degree and move into architecture. Maybe Joan and Alex can be her apprentices.”

I peer into my cube’s chalky white lunar landscape and feel a localised hunger pang, as if just a few inches of my stomach have woken up. I take a bite and chew, grimacing at the dry texture and inscrutable flavour, like a four-course meal blended into a smoothie.

“I know,” Julie mumbles. “It’s not funny.”

I shrug, still chewing. “It’s kind of funny.”

“It’s a dead baby joke.”

I hear something in her voice that makes me stop chewing. That note of disquiet I heard back in the cabin, of disturbed sediment clouding the ocean floor. “Harsh assessment,” I say to the back of her head as she presses her nose to the window. “You don’t think they have a future?”

She’s quiet for a moment, peering into the darkness. “I do. I just wish it didn’t have to be in a world like this.”

“Maybe it won’t be,” I offer, but I’m unable to give the sentiment much weight. It passes through her and out the window like a feeble ghost.

She pulls an in-flight magazine out of the seat pocket in front of her and leans back. She studies the model on the cover, a woman of a species no longer found on Earth, coiffed and painted, nourished and toned, beautiful in a way that’s no longer recognizable as human.

“I used to read everything I could find about the old world,” Julie says, and begins to flip through the brittle pages. “I studied it like mythology. And I always wondered what people I knew would’ve been like back then, when life was just a bunch of choices. Your beliefs, your priorities, where you live and what you do …” She pauses on an ad for a garish Broadway musical and smiles bitterly. “Can you imagine having all those options? Being surrounded by that cloud of potential just waiting for your decision?”

She continues flipping the pages. Restaurants. Movies. Museums. She stops on an ad for the University of Michigan, and her smile fades.

“My mom grew up in that world.” She stares at lush photos of libraries and art studios, groups of friends laughing hysterically. “She wasn’t rich or anything, but it was pre-collapse America. She was working with a palette I can’t imagine.” She runs her fingers over the wrinkled paper, the faded ink. “Having that world and then losing it …” Her voice falls to a murmur. “It’d haunt you forever, wouldn’t it? How could you let go?”

She stuffs the magazine back into the seat pocket and closes her eyes for a moment. Then she opens them and turns to me. “What was in that cabin, R?”

I don’t answer.

“What are they trying to do?” She’s almost pleading. “How much more fucked is this place going to get?”

I should probably try to reassure her, squeeze her hand and recite some canned comforts, but I’m looking through her into the dark hole of the window and I’m seeing graves and fires, steel bars and brown teeth and—

“Hey.” Nora is leaning out of her seat, watching us from across the aisle while M snores softly against their window. “We might not have to find out.”

“What do you mean?” Julie says.

Nora shoots a glance at the cockpit, then gets up and jerks her chin toward the coach section. Julie nudges me out of the row and we follow Nora through the curtain.

“Take a look,” Nora says, pulling a thin yellow pamphlet out of her pocket and handing it to Julie.

Julie skims the first page. Her eyes dart up to Nora. “Where’d you find this?”

“We went looking for you in the airport lobby and they were taped up all over.”

“Why is DBC still posting in airports?” Julie wonders as she begins to read.

Nora shrugs. “I saw a lot of notes on the walls. A few fresh shits on the floor. Maybe airports are still traveler hubs.”

“Nineteen from BABL … that’s last year, right?”

“Yeah. Practically breaking news. Check the last page.”

Julie flips to the end, reads it, and grins. “I knew it. I fucking knew it!” She shoves the pamphlet into my hands. “Can you read this, R?”

The crudely photocopied mess resembles either an old-fashioned DIY “zine” or a madman’s manifesto.

The crazed handwriting is barely legible, but I can read it. Understanding it is another matter.

“What is this?” I ask, handing the pamphlet back to Julie.

“It’s the Almanac!” Julie says, aghast at my lack of savvy. “Even you should know the Almanac.”

“People … believe this info?” I brush a finger over the schizophrenic scrawl, the drawings of surreal monsters.

“Beggars can’t be choosers, R. Most people dont know what’s happening a mile outside their shelters. DBC’s been combing the country up and down for like ten years and they leave a new report whenever they pass through. It’s sketchy news, but it’s news.”

“I got so excited the first time I found one,” Nora says wistfully. “Felt like my favourite band had come to town.”

Julie smiles. “Me and Mom had a secret pact that if we ever found them, we’d leave Dad and run away with them.” Her smile falters, begins to cool.

“But back to the point,” Nora says. “Iceland, right? Sounds promising, right?”

“Right.” Julie hands the zine to Nora. “You do the talking. I’ve pushed him far enough today.”

Nora nods and heads for the cockpit.

“Iceland?” I ask Julie, lowering my voice. “You’re sure that’s the answer?”

She looks at me like I’ve asked if water is wet. “Of course I’m not sure. I just …” She turns and looks out a window, her face tinting red in the dying light. “I have a good feeling.”

“Why?”

“Because my mom …” She watches the clouds, a flock of little cumuli grazing beneath us. “My mom was half-Icelandic. She spent a couple years in Reykjavík, before she met Dad. The way she talked about it … the culture and the politics … it sounded like things just made sense there. I could never figure out why she came back.”

“Maybe because it wasn’t her home.”

She glances back at me with surprise and a little annoyance, but I push ahead.

“Leaving now … feels like giving up.”

“On what?” she says sharply. “What do we have here? That shitty house?”

I flinch. I can tell she feels the sting too, perhaps sharper than she expected. But she fights it.

“What do we have?” she persists. “The fucking stadium? Cascadian pride?”

“The people.” I hold her gaze, trying to tether her fluttering thoughts. “Ella, David, Marie, Wally, Taylor, Britney, Zane—”

“I know their names, R.”

“So are we going to leave them all with Axiom? Are we going to run away?”

The look she gives me makes me feel like a bully. Like I’m popping her balloons and pissing on her picnic. But I’m only quoting what she told me a few days ago, when she was quoting what I told her a few months before that. We keep tossing this bit of truth back and forth like it hurts to hold on to it.

She gives her head a hard shake as if to clear it of thoughts and returns to her seat. Nora’s siege of the cockpit is already under way. I’m glad Julie chose to stay out of this one.

“What part of ‘explorers don’t return’ did you not understand?” Abram says, waving the Almanac. “Iceland’s probably one giant hive by now.”

“Who has a better chance of resisting a plague than an island? They probably closed their borders at the first reports.”

“Are you bullshitting me or yourself? Borders don’t matter to the plague. They got it on the Space Station for Christ’s sake.”

Julie jumps up. I sigh.

“Iceland was different,” she says, poking her head into the cockpit entryway. “They did everything different. They wouldn’t have collapsed like we did.”

“Are Icelanders not human? What did they do so different?”

“While we were busy with Civil War Two, they were perfecting renewable energy, food production, pouring resources into education and culture—they weren’t collapsing, they were thriving.”

“So you’re a history buff. Then you know they were halfway underwater when we heard from them last.”

“Yeah, and they were building a sea wall!”

Nora quietly slips out of the crossfire, giving me an I tried shrug as she returns to her seat.

“You know Canada is exed,” Julie continues, picking up steam. “So is Mexico and probably South America. Think outside the hemisphere!”

Abram stands up and moves toward her. Julie backs out of the cockpit doorway, tensing into an uncertain defensive stance, but he brushes past her, steps into the bathroom, and starts urinating.

Julie folds her arms over her chest and glares at his back through the door. “Are we having a literal pissing contest right now?”

Abram lets out a weary sigh as he finishes up. “Listen, you beautiful sunbeam …” He steps out of the bathroom and flops down in the front row, looking up at her. “I’d love to believe there’s a beacon of civilisation out there waiting for us to find it. But if there’s a beacon, why can’t we see it? Why doesn’t anyone know?”

“You think the last stable country in the world is going to advertise itself? And have all the fuckup countries coming around looking for a couch to crash on?”

Abram seems to consider this.

“They’re probably just waiting for the right time. Building up their resources, developing a plan.”

He nods abruptly and stands up. “Okay, sure. Iceland sounds good.”

Julie’s rebuttal freezes on her lips and she cocks her head, startled into silence.

“And Toronto’s on the way there,” he continues, pushing past her into the cockpit. “So if we don’t find what we need in Toronto, then we’ll talk about going abroad. Okay?”

He sounds so sincere that he must not be. But if his sincerity is sarcastic … is his sarcasm sincere? I wonder if he even knows.

He returns to his seat and Julie returns to hers, looking off-balance.

“Hey!” M shouts toward the cockpit. “How much longer?” He’s still blinking sleep out of his eyes but already gripping his armrests.

“Tomorrow,” Abram shouts back.

M grumbles a few curses, pressing deeper into his seat.

I squeeze Julie’s knee, another attempt at comfort, but she is lost in thought and doesn’t seem to notice my efforts. So I turn to the window.

The view is not what it should be. There should be lights down there. Even in remote lands there should be a few specks, then glittering lines and clusters, earthly constellations that finally converge into the ecstatic galaxy of a city, pulsing and boiling with life.

But there is nothing. The earth below is empty darkness. The only constellations are the ones above, old Leo and Cancer and Capricorn, and I find them less dear to me than the ones humanity built, these distant gods who want nothing to do with our fraught little lives. In all their smoke and noise and overheated drama, I miss cities.

The sun finally withdraws all traces of itself and the darkness is complete. I watch it roll by beneath us, an undifferentiated carpet of black, and then … light. A few glowing spots, then a few more, then a radiant pool bright enough to illuminate the surrounding hills. The lights form the shape of a city, but they are not streetlamps and windows. They are fires. Hundreds of buildings bathed in the distinctive white flames of Fire Church phosphorus.

“If you look to our left,” Abram says over the intercom, adopting the laconic mumble of a captain playing tour guide, “you’ll see some very sincere people looking for a better world.”

A bitter giggle escapes Nora’s throat. “These fuckers, on top of everything. Candles on the crazy-cake.”

Julie stares past me through the window, watching the hellish death of whatever city this was, burned at the stake for the heresy of surviving. I see memories rushing past her eyes, sadness and pain and anger. Then she closes them and curls up in her seat, her back to the window and to me.

I watch the blaze until it disappears behind us and darkness reclaims the view. Darkness or fire. Are these our only options?

MY MOTHER.

She believes in a better world. But it’s far away and mysterious and we will have no part in building it. The new world will be handed to us fully formed and perfect, dropped from the sky to cover the mess we’ve made of this one. This one’s doom was written into its creation, never more than a disposable stage for a brief drama whose plot no one understands and whose ending no one can revise. The only change we can effect is how quickly the end comes, because we have nothing in us but destruction. We are corrupt from before birth, and if it ever appears we’ve done good, it’s not us but God’s hand inside us, moving our limbs to accomplish his plan. Our greatest sin is believing that we matter.

This is what my mother believes and what she teaches me, so I can’t understand why she works at a refugee camp. Feeding the children of war casualties, finding homes for displaced families … aren’t these people supposed to die? Isn’t this the Last Sunset we’ve been waiting for? Why is she trying to pull the sun back up?

I ask her these questions and they upset her. They dim the glow that fills her face when she works at the camp, mending clothes, administering medicine, cooking huge vats of stew. Helping people brings her joy, even though it’s pointless. I decide to leave it alone.

I go with her to the refugee camp whenever I can because my father isn’t there. I get to choose clothes from the donations pile to replace my worn-out rags from home. My father says we have plenty and don’t need anyone’s help, but I think we’re not far above the refugees themselves. At the end of each day, my mother throws a few cans of food into her purse. She says not to tell my father.

Grass-stained acid-washed jeans. A turquoise Mickey Mouse sweatshirt. My choices don’t reflect any personal aesthetics. I am ten years old and poor. I take the clothes that fit.

“Hello, Mrs. Atvist.”

“What are you doing here?”

I stop digging through the shoe bin and listen to the two voices out on the curb. My mother’s is soft but stern and I can picture her standing with her hands knotted in front of her, demure but unmovable. The other is dry and smoky, the creak of burned timber breaking. It’s just barely familiar. I must have been a toddler the last time I heard my grandfather’s voice.

“I’ve been trying to talk to my son but he’s balls-deep in this Holy Fire bullshit. I can’t get a word through his skull. Thought maybe I could talk to you instead.”

“What would make you think I’d go against my husband? Or our church? Holy Fire is our family.”

“I’m your family, God damn it. I want to help you.”

“We don’t want your help.”

“It’s a fucking embarrassment. I run one of the last corps in America and my son is living in a shack. My grandson’s pulling piss-stained jockeys out of charity bags …”

“Leave him out of it.”

“… and my daughter-in-law is stealing canned beans from a hobo shelter.”

“Your money won’t be worth much in a few years.”

“Money’s not the only currency.”

His thin face. His tobacco-stained grin leering through the window of his hulking white Range Rover. I watch him from behind my mother’s legs like a much younger boy.

“Hey, kid!” His eyes dart to me, catlike.

“Go back inside,” my mother tells me.

I obey, but I stand inside the doorway and listen.

“What kind of a mother are you? I could make your kid prince of the new world and you’re gonna let him starve with the peasants?”

“The world is God’s, and he’s about to burn it away.”

“Listen to me. I’ve been working my whole life to put this family on top of the food chain. I’m not letting you or my little bitch of a son turn us back into rabbits.”

“Leave us alone. Don’t come here again.”

“When things get bad, you’ll call me.” He raises his voice, shouting through the doorway. “Call me anytime, R—! I’ll be waiting.”

• • •

His voice echoes in my ears as my third life—my real life—reclaims my mind. I hear my name on his lips and I mute it out. I redact it. No matter how far my past encroaches on my present, I will not take its name. I won’t let it scribble over the one I built with Julie.

The plane is dark, but the world outside is grey, the sun lurking somewhere just below the mountains. Julie is asleep by my side, still curled into a tight ball. The air is cool and her arms are wrapped around her bare shoulders, trembling. I tuck her old quilt around her, but her spasms don’t subside.

“Wait,” she whimpers, a faint bleat that barely escapes her lips. “Mom, wait. I’m awake.”

It occurs to me that my blank slate is an outrageous luxury. My terror of losing it seems pathetic when I think of Julie’s dreams. I fight my past because it’s a wild animal creeping into my clean house, but Julie has spent her whole life sleeping next to hers, its hot breath on her neck, its bloody drool on her sheets.

I drape a second blanket over her shoulders, just in case. The air is cold. Icy upper atmosphere mixed with vintage oxygen from the plane’s tanks. A strange feeling, breathing the air of another era, imbued with the sounds and smells of a world long gone. I wander down the aisle, running my hand over the soft leather of the business-class seats. These seats once cradled the world’s rich and powerful. Not the richest or most powerful—those had private planes and private smirks and metal briefcases full of secrets—but the ones who could afford to pay double for a little extra distance from humanity. Wherever they are now, if any survived the world’s shift from plutocracy to kratocracy, their presence lingers in the indentations in these seats. The hairs and skin cells in the carpet. The echoes of their voices, call me anytime …

I shake my head and blink hard and focus on the window, on my feet, on—

“Archie?” M says in a quiet rumble. “You okay?”

He is slouched low in a reclined seat, apparently just waking from a pleasant nap. Nora is asleep against the window two seats away, curled into a foetal ball like Julie.

“Fine.” I start to walk past him, further into the plane, but he holds out a hand.

“Don’t fight it.”

I stop. “What?”

“You make it a fight, you’ll lose. Doesn’t have to be a fight.”

I give him a level stare. “Yes it does.”

“Just memories. How bad could it be?”

“Don’t know. Don’t want to.”

He smiles. “Archie. Always so dramatic.”

I glare at him. “My name’s not Archie.”

He upturns his palms, genuinely puzzled. “Why not? Good a name as any.”

“Made up for Grigio. So he’d think I was normal. It’s a lie.”

He shrugs. “It’s a name.”

I shake my head and look at the floor. “A name should have meaning. A story. A thread to people who love you.”

I glance up. His smile is trembling like he’s fighting laughter. “Lover boy,” he says. “So complicated.”

I walk away, wishing the first-class cabin had a door instead of a curtain so I’d have something to slam.

I roam to the rear of the plane. A delicate snore alerts me to Sprout stretched across a row of seats, her little head poking out through a pile of blankets. She’ll be like me someday. She’s already halfway there at six years old, the furrowed brow, the lofty goals and worldly worries. I don’t know whether to be proud of her or afraid for her.

There are times when I miss being mindless. Moments when I wonder if consciousness is a curse. Are blunt minds truly happier than sharp ones, or do they just travel smaller peaks and valleys? A flat line of lukewarm contentment, immune to despair but incapable of rapture? This is what I tell myself when I’m faced with untroubled folk. I tell myself over and over.

The sun finally crests the horizon and the windows restrict its light into fat golden beams that cut through the cabin, lighting up the dust. Another fine summer morning. We should be getting close.

I open the bathroom door to check on my kids and find them upright and alert, holding their Carbtein close to their faces like the cubes contain the mysteries of the universe. I am thrilled to notice they’ve been nibbled.

Joan looks up at me with clear focus in her grey-brown eyes, and I wonder what shape her line takes. It’s certainly not flat. These kids have known trouble. Their lines soar and plunge, from almost-life to pseudo-death and perhaps now back up again. But why this oscillation? Three months ago, when they peeked out of their grave, what didn’t they find? What disappointment sent them back to bed? What are they waiting for?

Their attention drifts away from me and settles on the bathroom wall. They stare at it like it’s a window, like they’re enjoying a first-class view of the sunrise instead of the grey fibreglass of their shit-stained jail.

“Our friend,” Joan says.

“Your friend?” I repeat, hoping to seize this thread and draw her further out. “Who’s your friend?”

“Goldshine,” she says, turning around to give me the first smile I’ve ever seen on her face. “Sunboy.”

“Far away,” Alex says. “Lonely.” There’s an eerily nuanced unhappiness in his voice, not just personal sadness but empathy. Compassion.

“Help us call?” Joan pleads with me. “Tell him to follow?”

I stare at them, stunned by this sudden burst of volition. But I have no idea what they’re talking about. Before I can try to decipher their cryptic blurts, Abram’s voice crackles over the intercom.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are currently passing over Detroit, Michigan, America’s most thoroughly exed city, and will be approaching the Canadian border shortly. I don’t expect any turbulence but this is wild territory, so I can’t make any promises. Time to wake up.”

My kids continue to watch me expectantly. Their look says that I’m an adult, a powerful authority possessed of all knowledge, wise and capable and tasked with their protection, and that the world is mine to give them. But I’m a stumbling amnesiac afraid of his own name. I’m a bitter teen drinking bitter sermons and living in terror of the world. I’m a boy in a Mickey Mouse shirt, and these kids are beyond me.

They watch me back out of the bathroom. They watch me shut the door.

ABRAM’S ANNOUNCEMENT HAS stirred Julie and Nora out of their coiled sleep positions, but it’s not until the sun strikes their faces that they finally wake up, blinking and squinting against the hot rays. I take my seat next to Julie but I don’t say anything yet. She sleeps badly and wakes up worse. I’ve learned to give her a few minutes to shake off the shadows.

Detroit spreads out below us like a concrete desert. The totality of its ruination is visible even from this altitude, an uncommon greyness without even the usual sprawl of vegetation to cover its bones. I thought the notes in Abram’s cabin mentioned “facilities” in Detroit, but I must have misunderstood the shorthand because it’s impossible to imagine anything alive down there. There’s something almost unreal about it, a place so fully forgotten that it’s beginning to deliquesce. I feel a queasy sensation as I let it fill my vision; the flatness sinks and gains depth, the streets twist and flex—then Julie looks over my shoulder and the streets are straight. The ground is flat.

My need for sleep may be more dire than I realised.

“Good morning,” I tell her. It sounds inane, like a greeting from a hotel desk, but hearing my voice helps clear my thoughts.

She ignores me. She stares out at the city. “It’s so empty.” Her voice is low and croaky. I can hear the residue of her dreams in it, a lingering sadness. “Looks like it’s been empty for centuries.” No, not sadness. Disappointment.

I press my face to the window, scanning for any signs of activity, but from this altitude I wouldn’t see much even if it were there, just the abstract line art of the streets.

“Mom would cry if she saw this.” She sounds even less present now, like the dream is pulling her back in. “There were these artist communes trying to rebuild the city. Mom thought it was going to be the key to everything.”

Burned houses. Caved-in factories. Dead parks full of grey trees.

“As usual, Dad convinced her she was wrong. Which … it looks like she was.”

I watch the city dwindle into a sparse scattering of industrial buildings and then finally surrender to empty flatlands. I wonder how many “keys to everything” have come and gone throughout history, and why they never seem to open much. Have we been putting them in the wrong locks?

“R,” Julie says. “Can I ask you something?”

I hear a spike in her tone. Her eyes are still glued to the window, but her posture is stiffer, and the dreamy languor is gone.

“All those years you were out there … roaming or whatever … did you ever feel things from your old life?”

I hesitate. “Feel things?”

“I know you didn’t remember anything, but did you ever feel, like … the residue of a memory? Maybe a song that made you sad for no reason, or a piece of junk that you just had to take home?”

I try to intercept her gaze, hoping to discover what’s behind this abrupt change of subject, but she continues to look past me while she talks, the vacant stare of a medium conversing with ghosts.

“All those knickknacks you collected, you must have had some reason for picking the ones you did, right? They must have had some connection to your past.”

“I guess so,” I say, but I have to force the words out. Why is she taking us into this territory? It’s not safe hereh="aldyI glanct JuliHfaI grevs nong, tremb, r-eybkyruaftancbky,ait! butknwon Iwonmruaftancbkyuseddlfnext grit! bumopop o jemdlfbelfane,ycatchaglimpjeu. PeoplaAb! bua dozfeacat,ctomiserabrbu-shcommu rbkwon IwonmTisyt grua pa—leadyustueacinmbusommu rbkwon Iwonmouf d. It curthgfthatouebrill-wimalailbesddeepcinstuity d keepyyehop d keedecipd,ruastclm adropaquaconmutpyguouoon,killailbebglt. eiluilll-! butknb! br,ebnt. dyustueacinmbusommu rFarubefu rbwi oclecurpknfigarubouamhop d klucen d uilbduuas. Gagillsmur,wrhop dinlienbeopliluilshuffutotfllup againclt. emy viewactivimouiIurpassengaAb! AlI doorslshurluilll-pop oluwhopalu butknemptywobnt. dyustueacinmyef,k-sh.eyNee,y genbckdubnt grs.knt. dyustueacilshakusd keadbnt. dyustueacinmyI domu rywhop dinnrtCamu rinknt. dyustueacinmlpood fblumkustowaruill. edurimy tbhgendi,mptshannelram KelvigaluEl- KenlumomilitarFwoanoia, scanneddsniuilmaxipjmy situationfawarena Burryt ugacquiebnt. dyustueacinmefstopnb! br,edenctedenctacbtaircastctail, narrwurebriowenwo pa—. dyustueacinmldescel—. dyustueacinmyef, wait!knt. dyustueacinm>Hleg keinkkishadd,lmd waioulmd shouldgrs.nt. dyustueacinmyef!knt. dyustueacinmbu- incarFd keadacdisembodiedsomass,goldgair ftGagallpondutknll pa swmoddibntmbp:pagebbk><. dyudyueacinmI TEETER ONdi o,taircast,b! bzutnbirrationfpanic.canu rsec bottom.hop dingafbutk,taird,just the storage basement of some dull municipal building, but it stretches. It deepens and steepens until it’s no longer a staircase but a bottomless well, its slick stone walls lined with hideous books, blood writing and claw etchings, cold and damp and—

I don’t want to go down there. But Julie is down there. Whatever it is I’m afraid of, she’s alone with it.

I plunge into the depths.

My legs buckle under me when I reach the bottom, finding solid floor where they expected another stair. A memory from childhood, step after stumbling step, learning the art of walking—except it’s not from childhood. Long legs in black slacks, stumbling through a forest, away from a dead woman—

“Julie!” I hiss.

“What?” Her voice echoes back to me through the narrow tunnel, soft and toneless like the mutterings of a sleepwalker. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I notice a pale glow bobbing ahead.

I run up alongside her. She holds a flashlight limply, illuminating her feet and not much else.

I decide to try an indirect route. “Where’d you get the flashlight?”

“It was Abram’s.”

She keeps a brisk pace, just short of a run, her eyes fixed on the pavement that passes through her oval of light.

“You stole his flashlight?”

“Sometimes I steal things.”

I hesitate. “Why?”

“Because the world steals from me. It takes everything.” She blinks twice, and I notice her eyes are wet, despite their blank stare. “Feels good to be on the other end for once.”

She stops. The passage has opened up into some sort of basement storage area. Stacks of boxes aged into brittle papyrus, ancient beige computer monitors—the typical contents of an office building, with one notable exception: a rolling steel tray piled with scalpels and hooks and scissors and saws, all sticky with dark fluid. The floor is thick with dust except for a trail of footprints that leads to an upward staircase.

Julie draws her shotgun from its plaid holster. There’s a door at the top of the stairs, and I’m about to make another plea for caution but she doesn’t even pause. She kicks the push bar, the door flies open, and she rushes through in a tactical crouch, her gun braced in low ready position.

I lumber in behind her, unarmed, untrained, unprepared. But no high school combat class would have prepared me for this.

We are in what appears to be the library of a university. A soaring ceiling, stained glass windows, tables and shelves of dark oak. It was majestic once, a profound place for profound pursuits, but its grandeur has been destroyed—not by age and decay but by utilitarianism. Fluorescent lights in aluminium cases hang from the ceiling to obviate the bronze lamps on the walls. Rich wooden tables have been supplemented by rows of folding metal ones, their white Formica tops mocking the antiquity around them. And of course the stained glass windows are protected by sheets of plastic.

But perhaps I’m burying the lead. Perhaps I’m avoiding the room’s more salient features because I’m weary of processing such images. Perhaps a detour into decor is a needed respite from the hair-tearing insanity of this world.

Because the library is full of zombies. At least two hundred of them, naked, their necks locked in rubber collars, steel cables fastened to walls, shelves, anything solid enough to hold them as they writhe and lunge, although many are eerily calm. The tables are littered with an incongruous assortment of equipment: glittering steel implements of medicine or torture sit alongside portable stereos, makeup kits, televisions, toys, and jars of fresh human fingers.

The dangling fluorescents are turned off; the only light comes through the stained glass, a dismal blue glow that leaves the huge chamber thick with shadows. Julie begins a perimeter check and I follow her. The Dead are everywhere. Not just the crowd in the reading area but lone specimens tucked away in the aisles like backups. My estimate climbs toward three hundred, diverse in age, race, and sex, but with one trait in common: freshness. Most are wholly unspoiled, with only the leaden eyes and pitiful groans to give away their status. A few have injuries—bullet holes, bites, a missing limb or two—but their flesh is always pale and smooth, like they died yesterday.

Julie prowls along the walls, methodically scanning the aisles. Her face has slipped into yet another mask that’s unfamiliar to me: the grim efficiency of a soldier. I think of the night we sat on the roof of our new suburban home and traded stories from our youths. All I had to offer were vague vignettes from my early corpsehood, lacking context or continuity—trying to eat a deer, walking with a boy, watching a girl sing a song—but her memories were colourful and crisp, like she’d kept them all these years in a climate-controlled vault. Her life in Brooklyn, watching the waters rise, the tanks in the street, but also stickball games and schoolyard crushes and some lingering aromas of happiness. Wine parties on the apartment’s tarry rooftop. Her mother laughing in a white dress, throwing empty bottles at the abandoned building next door and screaming with delight when she hit a window. Lawrence and Ella making out on the fire escape. Even her father cracking a smile, chugging a priceless vintage and belting a few bars from one of his band’s songs …

Her shotgun moves with her body like an extra limb, tracing the contours of the room with mechanical precision. She steps around the corner of the last aisle and she stops. Her gun falls to the floor.

… her old bedroom, its chaos and colour pulsing against the emptiness of her father’s grey fortress. The sky-blue ceiling, the clothes-covered floor, the walls like the wings of a museum—red for relics of old-world passions, movie tickets and concert flyers, magazines and poems, white for her private collection of looted masterpieces with a few sheepish contributions of her own, yellow for good dreams yet to be realised, a wall that was and still is unadorned—and the black wall. A wall whose purpose I never learned, because I was afraid to ask. Because it held only one decoration. A photo of a woman who looked a lot like Julie, adrift in that dark expanse.

Julie falls to the floor as gracelessly as her gun, arms hanging at her sides, eyes wide and already filling with tears. She doesn’t flinch as long fingernails swipe inches from her face. She kneels in full surrender while the woman from the photo strains against her collar, hissing and groaning and reaching for her daughter’s throat.

IT OCCURS TO me that Julie might want to die. The scars on her wrists prove she has danced with the desire, but I’ve always believed it was a thing of her youth, a defanged fossil buried beneath miles of time.

Will this unearth it?

She kneels like a penitent begging God to take everything, and the woman in front of her seems eager to oblige. She has knocked most of the books off the shelf that holds her; it moves slightly with each lunge. I grab Julie under the armpits and drag her back a few feet. Her body is a loose pile, far heavier than it should be. She stares ahead blankly like her emotions have shattered.

Was she expecting it? Could she possibly have known? A mad hope, perhaps, a fevered wish festering in her heart, but I can’t believe she ever imagined the reality of this.

Her mother. Dead but not dead. Stepping out of dreams and into a nightmare.

This woman died a long time ago, but I wouldn’t have guessed from her appearance. Whatever inner fire allowed me to stave off the rot through all my years of roaming, Julie’s mother must have it too. She is grey, emaciated, her blond hair a mass of scabby dreadlocks, but her face retains the graceful beauty I saw in that photo. It’s twisted by her ravenous sneer, her rows of yellowed teeth, but it’s there. My sentimental mind swells with visions of her returning to the Living, whisking Julie away from the orphanage and healing all her bruises.

But then my eyes deliver a more rational report. Like all the Dead in this place, Julie’s mother is naked. Her skin bears constellations of knife and bullet wounds, the inevitable result of a life sustained on violence. Comparing them to M’s injuries, I feel confident that Nora could repair them on the joyous day they begin to bleed. But this woman didn’t die from bullets. This woman peeked into her daughter’s room, saw that she was asleep, and wandered into the city alone. Perhaps she walked in solemn silence, or perhaps she spit and howled at the night, tearing her clothes and her hair, screaming at the Dead to come and take what they destroyed the world to get.

And the Dead obeyed.

Although her face is unscathed, her body has been gnawed like meat left out for rats. Large chunks are missing from her calves and thighs and I can see the exposed muscles spasming to produce her lurching movements. Any of these bites would have been enough to convert her, but she could have recovered from them too if she ever shook off the plague. What is draining the sunny glow from my fantasies is the gaping absence where the left half of her rib cage should be. I can see her remaining lung drooping against her spine, tinted grey from the pallor of death and black from too many cigarettes. I can see her lifeless heart.

This hole, of course, is where Julie’s gaze has settled. She has already done the math. Her face remains still except for the glimmer of tears streaming down it.

I want a god to curse. I’ll take any of them, all of them; I’ll scream and blaspheme till lightning shuts me up. Someone has to answer for such preposterous cruelty, such monstrously drawn-out torture. But I am pounding on the door of an empty house. It’s just us. It’s just me, Julie, and her mother. And the three men in beige jackets marching toward us down the aisle.

“Who the hell are you?” one of them shouts. “How did you get in here?”

Julie shoves past me and strides down the aisle. Her shotgun is back in her hands and it’s firing—pump—firing—pump—firing.

The cavernous space rumbles with low reverberations. Three men lie dead on the floor, their brains mingled in a puddle between them, perhaps sharing a final confused thought.

I watch Julie search their bodies. She looks faraway and somehow removed from the room, like I’m watching her through a telescope. I know that Julie has killed people. She’s told me about some of them, from her first at age ten—stabbing a man in the back while he was choking her father—to her most recent less than a year ago: a standard rapist-in-the-bushes situation. But this is the first time I’ve watched her do it, and I’m troubled by how much it shakes me. Like I didn’t truly believe her until now.

She pulls a set of keys out of one of the guards’ jackets and walks past me to her mother. She unlocks the padlock on the cable, freeing it from the bookshelf. Her mother hisses and lunges toward her.

Julie punches her.

“Stop it,” she says in a hard, flat voice. “I’m your daughter. You’re Audrey Maude Arnaldsdóttir and I’m your daughter.”

Audrey stares at her with wide eyes and an open mouth. Then she lunges again.

Julie punches her so hard she falls back into the bookshelf.

“And you’re a coward,” Julie continues, her voice beginning to tremble. “And a quitter. And a fucking child. But you’re a human being, and you’re going to fucking act like one.”

Audrey rests against the bookshelf with her jaw hanging open, her eyes roaming around the room, refusing to meet Julie’s gaze. It’s impossible to tell if she understood anything Julie said, let alone whether it sparked any remembrance, but she seems momentarily pacified.

“Watch her,” Julie says to me, and steps out of the aisle.

Audrey and I share an uncomfortable silence while Julie clatters around the library.

“I’m R,” I mumble, putting my hand out to her in an absurd reflexive gesture.

Audrey’s head tilts. Black fluid trickles down her chin.

Julie returns with a soiled lab coat and a long steel rod with a ring on the end. She wraps the coat around her mother, forcing her arms through the sleeves while her mother squirms. Once it’s buttoned up, hiding the grisly mess of her body, the appearance of humanity rushes back in. Just an overworked doctor in need of a shower.

The transformation seems to catch Julie off guard. Her stiff-lipped determination falters and the tears return as the creature in front of her suddenly becomes the woman from her memories. For a moment, I think even Audrey feels it. Recognition flickers over her face, the savagery softening into gentle astonishment. Then it passes and she starts hissing again.

Julie connects the ring on the end of the rod to a clamp on her mother’s collar. I suddenly understand her intent.

“Julie,” I say as she leads her mother by the neck like a rabid dog, the pole keeping her at a safe distance.

“What.” She exits the aisle and heads deeper into the university, toward the exit.

I follow her, avoiding eye contact with the pitiful prisoners writhing around us. Should we free them too? And then what? I hear the fallen guards’ walkies squawking. The voice of reinforcements, reinstatement, repetition. Whatever is happening here, it will keep happening until someone silences that voice. We can’t save everyone tonight.

I watch Audrey’s coat billowing freely through the gap in her side. We can’t save anyone tonight.

“What?” Julie says again, glancing back at me. “Say it.”

It sticks in my throat. No, her mother can never come back to her. Yes, it’s insanity to take her with us. And yes, of course we’re going to anyway. I’d be a monster to think otherwise.

“Nothing,” I say. “Let’s go.”

WE RACE DOWN the steps of Wayne County College like kids on the last day of the semester, a cold echo of those carefree summer rituals. I can hear the sounds of long-dead students, can almost feel them shoving past me. The squeals of young beauties in cocoons of affirmation, half-formed pupae who seem a different species entirely from the woman at my side, despite somehow being the same age. I hear the bass from tricked-out cars, simian boys equating volume with virility; shoving, laughing, boasting, belittling—everyone testing everyone, clawing and pecking for position. I see and hear it all through a haze of time, a blur of overlaid moments as the city churns around me. Across the street from the college—literally next door—is the Mortuary Institute of Detroit. A block away is a dilapidated building whose sign reads PERRY FUNERAL HOME—I blink and rub my eyes, but it’s really there.

Am I awake? Julie asked me, and I answered with blithe confidence. That confidence is gone.

I take some distant comfort from my trail of plastic troops. I pretend that I’m a soldier in an army in a country with a leader, that I have clear orders and good reasons to follow them. I revel in this certainty for perhaps a dozen blocks, then the sun disappears and my army fades into the dark.

“Shit,” I say under my breath.

Julie’s stolen flashlight casts a narrow beam and it’s not long before we’ve lost the trail. Audrey follows her daughter in a mostly placid state, but Julie keeps a two-handed grip on the pole to control her occasional lunges, sometimes away from Julie, sometimes toward her. If we keep going like this, it’s only a matter of time before something slips.

Julie pulls the pistol out of her waistband and fires into the air in a distinctive rhythm: Bang. Bang-bang. Then she watches the sky and listens.

A few seconds later, from somewhere across the river: Bang. Bang-bang.

Relief floods Julie’s face, and I realise this grim fugue of determination has not completely buried her personality. She’s in there, just as scared as I am, imagining the horror of spending a night in this haunted graveyard of a city.

Using the river as a reference, we work our way back to the main street and find our bike waiting where we left it, with a note on the seat under a chunk of concrete:

WENT BACK TO PLANE

COME HOME CRAZY BITCH

We both look at Audrey, then the bike, then each other.

“You drive,” Julie says. “I’ll sit on the tail and pin her between us.”

Audrey grinds her teeth in a confused, simmering fury.

I don’t need words to explain the flaw in this plan. I point at Audrey’s mouth, then at my neck.

Julie thinks for a moment, then hands me Audrey’s pole and dives into a heap of automotive wreckage. She emerges holding a bullet-pierced motorcycle helmet, shakes the ancient skull out of it, and shoves the battered white globe over her mother’s head. “No biting, Mom.”

Audrey’s gunmetal eyes are wide and fierce in the helmet’s view window.

Julie snaps the visor shut.

The three of us form a clownish sandwich on the bike, Julie clinging precariously to the rear edge and me humping the gas tank, cringing with every jolt in the road. I hear Audrey hissing inside her helmet, occasionally banging it against the back of my head, but Julie’s arms around my waist pin Audrey’s to her sides like a straightjacket. I ride as fast as I can with this awkward cargo, navigating by starlight and memory, and by the time the last glimmer of the sun goes black, we’re there.

Nora is out in the road, pacing and watching the horizon. She runs to meet us as we pull up to the plane, so fixated on Julie that she doesn’t seem to notice our guest.

“Something really terrible better have happened to you,” she says, shaking her head in a flurry of curls, “because if you just snuck away to fuck each other, I swear to God—oh.” She straightens up. “Who’s that?”

We dismount. Julie reattaches the pole to Audrey’s collar.

“Julie. Who the hell is—”

“Nora,” Julie says in a trembling laugh, unable to contain the surreality of it any longer, “it’s … this is … it’s my mom.”

She pulls the helmet off. Audrey grimaces at Nora, displaying her chipped yellow teeth. Nora stumbles a step back. I have no doubt she recognises this face, if not from Julie’s old photo then from its uncanny resemblance to Julie herself, its youth bizarrely preserved even as traces of rot creep in at the edges. A specimen of early-forties beauty, pickled in the plague.

“Mom,” Julie says, “this is Nora. She’s the best person I’ve ever met. Please be nice to her.”

“Hi,” Nora whispers almost inaudibly, her face frozen in shock.

Abram climbs down the ladder with his bag of tools. He watches us.

“How?” Nora manages to squeak out.

“We found a … facility,” Julie says, and begins leading Audrey toward the plane. “Hundreds of zombies chained up. Looked like some kind of experiment, like a bigger version of what we saw in Abram’s cabin.” She glances at Abram. “Do you know anything about this?”

Abram doesn’t answer.

“What kind of zombies?” Nora says, her curiosity starting to overcome her shock. “Nearlies?”

“We didn’t have time to check the others. But Mom’s … well …”

Audrey begins to struggle, clutching at her collar and making guttural choking sounds.

“Mostly,” Nora says. “Maybe All.”

Julie says nothing. We pass Abram, who stays where he is, still holding his tongue. When we reach the cargo ramp, he finally releases it.

“Just to make sure I’m understanding you …” His tone is level. “… you want to bring an adult zombie onboard this airplane. In addition to the two juveniles we’re already carrying. So that’s a total of three flesh-eating corpses sharing this airplane with us. Do I have that right?”

Julie looks at him. “She’s my mother.”

Abram lets out a long, weary sigh. “I’m done.” He takes Sprout’s hand, throws the duffel over his shoulder, and heads toward our bike.

“Hey,” Julie says. “She’s completely locked up, she can’t hurt anyone.”

Abram keeps walking.

“Hey!” She hands Audrey’s pole to me and walks after him. “Where are you going?”

Nora looks at me and rolls her eyes, here we go again, but no, this is not the same argument between the same two people. After what Julie has just experienced, there are no parameters to what might happen here, only desperate, unpredictable momentum, rolling, slipping, falling.

“Abram!”

He stops and turns. He doesn’t look angry, just tired, a worn-out high-school teacher who’s had enough of the hormonal drama, every day a new pregnancy, a new suicide, a new shooting. “I don’t know where we’re going,” he says. “Maybe Pittsburgh. Maybe Austin. All I know is I’m done with crazy people.”

“So you’re going to cross a deadly wasteland on a motorcycle when you have a private jet sitting here waiting for you? Who’s the crazy one?”

He chuckles and resumes walking, shaking his head. “Not worth it.”

“God damn it, Abram, we need you! You can’t just leave us stranded here!”

“You have the bikes; do your revolution by motorcycle. It worked for Che Guevara.”

Julie stops and stares at his back as he approaches the bike. “You just don’t care, do you?” She sounds genuinely amazed. “About anything.”

He starts tying his duffel onto the bike. “And what should I care about?”

“People? The world you’re living in? The future you’re helping create?”

Abram tips his head back and laughs. “You want to know why I’m done with you people?” He turns around. “Because people who talk like that are the ones who get you killed in a world like this. Che Guevara talked like that. Lenin and Mao talked like that. All those doe-eyed idealists watching the future through a telescope while they trampled over the present. There’s no bigger threat to the world than people who think they can improve it.”

He lifts Sprout onto the back of the bike. She looks back at Julie with sadness and fear, but Julie looks right past her, boring into the back of Abram’s head.

“How about this, then?” she says. “How about you fly the plane or I shoot you.”

Abram turns around, chuckling, and finds himself looking into a gun barrel.

“How about I don’t give a shit about the world,” Julie says, gripping the pistol in both hands. “How about I want you to fly us to Iceland so I can get help for my mom, because she’s my family and fuck everyone else.”

Abram’s smile is amused but weary. “Cute,” he says, and turns to mount his bike.

“I will shoot you, Abram.”

He shakes his head as he climbs on. “No, you’ll stand there saying you’ll shoot me, because you love to talk about things you know will never hap—”

Julie shoots him.

He falls off the bike and lands on his knees, clutching his arm. Sprout screams.

“Shit, Jules,” Nora murmurs.

Abram pulls himself up, pale with pain and surprise. His hand drifts toward a pouch on the side of his duffel; I open my mouth to warn Julie but she’s watching him with no apparent concern. His hand comes out empty.

“You stole my Ruger,” he says with muted amazement.

“Fly the plane,” Julie says.

He stares at her for a moment, then makes a grab for the rifle on his back.

Julie shoots him in the shoulder.

“Julie!” Sprout sobs, gaping at her in disbelief.

Julie’s eyes dart toward Sprout and her face flickers; I glimpse shame and horror as full awareness hits her. But she hardens again.

“Fly the plane.”

Abram examines his wounds—a deep graze across his left tricep and a clean shot through the trapezoid—and as blood soaks the sleeve of his beige jacket, the shock on his face slowly becomes something else. A faint smile, not patronising this time, not mocking, not even angry. He looks at Julie like he’s meeting her for the first time.

“Well all right then,” he says.

He marches up the ramp with Julie’s gun at his back.

Julie doesn’t look at any of us. We don’t look at each other. We board the plane in frightened silence, like hostages, and I haul the ghost of Julie’s mother by the neck, seeing nothing in her eyes but death.

WE

“LET’S PLAY A game,” Gael says.

“Which one?” Gebre says.

“Let’s play Road Name.”

“What’s that?”

“You take the name of the first wrecked car you see, then a cartoon character from the first roadkill you see, combine them however you like, and that’s your road name.”

The boy sits on a plastic bucket between the van’s driver and passenger seats, staring at the highway ahead. The morning sun is streaming through the trees and bathing everything in an ethereal glow, but by the time it reaches him through the dirty windshield and his scratched sunglasses, it is cloudy and dim.

“I’m playing for our little mate here,” Gael says, smiling at the boy. “Because we need something to call him other than ‘mate.’ Right, mate?”

We watch the boy’s thoughts as he weighs these two men. Their intentions, their motivations. A brain is built to learn from experience—if fire burns, don’t touch fire—and if his does its job, he will never trust people again. And yet the brain is not a simple machine. It is a concentric infinity of wheels within wheels, and it fights against its own functions toward goals it barely comprehends.

“Honda Fit!” Gebre blurts as they approach a car with its nose buried in the ditch. It’s Gael’s turn to drive, so Gebre has the scouting advantage. “And roadkill! A pigeon, I think. They must have swerved to miss it …” He cranes his neck to watch the bird’s dried remains disappear. “I guess that’s the reward for kindness these days.”

“Geb,” Gael says.

“Anyway. Honda Fit plus a bird, so … I guess I’m Tweety Fit?”

“You can mix it however you want. Doesn’t have to be whole words.”

Gebre thinks a moment. “Fonda Titty.”

“Sure you are,” Gael chuckles. “But that’s good. Okay, mate, our turn.”

They have been driving for three days. The boy records the patterns around him deep in the back of his mind. Bright then dark. Warm then cold. The opening then closing of dandelions. The desperate scramble then sated stillness of insects. And the ebb and flow of conversation in the van, from idle chatter to heavy debates to long, unreadable silences. They have offered him food and he has refused. They have seen him sitting alert on his bucket while they fall asleep in the pop-top bed, and they have woken to find him unmoved, staring up at them from his bucket, waiting. He wonders why they pretend not to know what he is.

“There!” Gael says, pointing to an SUV stalled in the middle of the road with cut tyres and broken windows. “Land Rover. Okay, mate, keep your eyes peeled for some roadkill and we’ll make you a lovely new—”

The boy’s arm darts out, startling Gael into silence. His finger is pointing to something on the road ahead. The merriment drains from Gael’s face.

“Bloody hell,” he whispers.

The boy watches him expectantly. Gael assumes he is too innocent to have understood what he saw and is just eager to hear his road name. Gael doesn’t know him like we do. The boy knows exactly what he saw; he’s just waiting to see how this man responds to the daily horror of reality. Will he firm his face and wade straight in? Or will he cough uncomfortably and suggest a new game?

“Well …,” Gael says in a trembling breath as the large, meaty pancake recedes behind them. “Car plus cartoon character … I guess your name is Rover Fudd.”

Gebre buries his face in his hands, shaking his head slowly.

For the first time in the boy’s second life—seven years of violence and torpor in endless, numbing repetitions—the boy smiles. He thinks goodness must be more than just kindness. It must have a hard frame to hold it together. How can you stitch a wound if you faint at the sight of blood? How can you do good in a world you refuse to see? Perhaps goodness requires honesty, which requires courage, which requires strength, which requires …

He stops himself.

Perhaps goodness is complicated.

The road ahead disappears from view, plunging down into a darker, denser woodland, and the boy hears the roar of an engine struggling up the hill. Gael stops the van, assuming that the strangers will want to share news and field notes and maybe some coffee or booze, as is the custom on these lonely highways. But as the boy stares at the road’s vanishing point, an abrupt terminus like the edge of a cliff, he hears another noise approaching from below. Not an engine.

He straightens up on his bucket. He tugs on Gael’s sleeve.

“What’s wrong, Rover?” Gael says.

The boy’s eyes implore him through his sunglasses as the noise grows louder, but Gael and Gebre just watch him with curious smiles, deaf to what’s coming.

“Go,” the boy croaks through his long disused larynx.

Gael and Gebre stare at him in open-mouthed amazement.

“Hide,” the boy says.

“Rover!” Gael says. “You’re talking!”

And you’re not listening.

The noise is growing louder, cutting through the roar of the engine like a serrated blade.

The boy suddenly remembers there are chunks of plastic covering his face. Big slabs of black polycarbonate between him and everything else, stopping light from coming in and emotion from going out, walling him off from the world. No wonder they don’t understand.

He pulls the glasses off and drops them. He looks from Gael to Gebre with his bare yellow eyes.

“Get off the road,” he says.

They stare in silence for several seconds. Then without looking away from the boy’s eyes, perhaps unaware he’s doing it, Gael turns the wheel and eases the van onto the shoulder. The boy is wondering how to explain that this isn’t far enough, that they have to crash into the woods and run as far away as possible, when the approaching vehicle crests the hill.

It’s a boxy armoured bank truck. It’s painted all white. It’s hauling a long cargo trailer reinforced with steel plates. And the trailer is humming.

There are many things to which we could compare this sound—dissonant choirs, furious wasps, the om of a dark meditation—but the boy thinks of a bomb. He thinks of the death spirits that live inside a bomb, the essences of its chemicals hissing and howling behind the bomb’s steel walls, demanding to be released on the world.

And then they’re gone. The armoured car and its horrible cargo disappear into the forest, and the van is once again alone on a silent road.

Gael and Gebre seem completely unaware of the nightmare that just rolled past them. They spare barely a glance for the rude travelers who didn’t even offer a friendly wave. They are staring at the boy, at his glimmering gold eyes. He senses questions coming, and they’re the wrong questions, and his brief moment of feeling understood evaporates. He gets off his bucket and retreats to the back of the van. He hides among piles of blankets.

The world makes little sense to the boy. It makes less the more he studies it. It contains creatures that are nothing more than algorithms, echoes of a dead society that deserved to die, and someone is putting them to use. Someone is gathering them together, believing someone somehow will benefit.

Perhaps goodness is not complicated. Perhaps it’s imaginary. Or perhaps it’s just drowned in madness.

As Gael and Gebre pull back onto the road and continue their journey east, as the boy sulks in the shadows and contemplates questions too big for his age, he hears another drone. This one is soft and almost soothing. A long, slow sigh from somewhere above him. He pokes his head out the window and looks up, but the sky is empty. The plane has already passed.

I

THE RAIN.

The rain soaks through my clothes and the cold through my skin. I can feel it working its way through muscles and organs, all the way to my centre, and I wonder, distantly and without much interest, if it will stop my heart.

The roof is slippery with mildew and rot everywhere except my path. I have worn it in over the years like animal trails in the forest, a channel of sagging shingles from my bedroom window to the chimney. I’m leaning against the chimney now, knees to my chest, watching the funeral from above like a cathedral gargoyle. I should be down there. I should be sitting in one of those folding chairs in my Sunday best, watching them lower her into the ground next to my grandmother, but I don’t know how to grieve correctly. If she’s in a better place, my grief is selfish. If this was God’s plan, my grief is mutinous. And what about my rage? To whom do I direct that? To the troubled man who killed her or to the God who wrote his trouble? To the performer or the playwright? Or to myself for asking such questions?

It’s good that I’m up here. The mourners below weep openly, following convention without a thought for the contradictions, and they would expect me to do the same. But I am too angry to cry. I am a wrung-out rag, twisted and dry. So I sit on the roof and let the rain do my grieving, falling from my eyelashes like surrogate tears.

• • •

“What did she die for?”

“She was trying to help.”

“By feeding them? Keeping them alive? How was that helping them?”

“We feed them so we can teach them. Hungry people are the best listeners.”

“Teach them how to get into Heaven? How to stay good long enough to get into Heaven?”

My father glares at me with bleary red eyes. He is slumped in his recliner, a grey mountain of ash growing in his ashtray, staring at a television that plays bad news on every channel. Drone strike footage on MTV. Terrorist manifestos on Comedy Central. Mass graves on Lifetime. I would never have said these things to him a week ago, but grief has weakened him and strengthened me. He is drowning; I am burning.

“Isn’t that why we’re here?” I insist. “To just hang on until the end? To keep playing the scene until God yells ‘cut’?”

“You and your damn metaphors,” he grumbles, and takes a drag on his cigarette.

“Why are we here, Dad?”

“We’re here to share the News,” he recites. “We’re here to spread the Fire.”

“But the News is about Heaven, right? It’s not about Earth.”

“Of course it’s not about Earth,” he growls, shaking his head. “Earth’s a ball of shit. It’s been scheduled for demolition since the day it was made.”

I hear my voice rising to a shout. “Then why do we keep trying to fix it? Why do we keep building homes here? Why don’t we let it burn?”

He sucks in more smoke and stares at the TV, his jaw flexing.

“Maybe that man was just trying to help.” My voice is low now. “Maybe he just wanted to send her to Heaven.”

This gets the expected result. I stumble back against the wall, running my tongue along the holes in my lip. Oh, I’ve missed this. The blood, vibrant on my white T-shirt. The pain, confirming my place in this world, telling me I’m right about everything. The only thing missing is the fear. When I was young he was terrifying, but now that I’m sixteen and nearly a foot taller, he’s pitiful. I exult in watching him lose control and make a sham of his principles, pissing his pants before God and man.

I will have to get my fear somewhere else.

I grin at him with red-smeared teeth. “I have to go,” I say as he stands there, fists at his sides, breathing hard. “I’m late for church.”

• • •

I sit once again in the hotel conference room, staring at the vinyl banner while the pastor harangues the youth of Missoula, but something is different tonight. I’m not the only one gripping the sides of his seat. A week ago a refugee obeyed a chorus of voices telling him to stab my mother with her potato peeler while she was preparing his dinner, but there is nothing special about my tragedy. Twenty murders in a month in a town with one gas station. Three arsons on public buildings followed by fatal police shootouts. And of course, the rumours about what happened to some of the bodies. Even with communications jammed, everyone feels the wave rising.

“Make no mistake,” the pastor says, “it’s ending. It’s been a long day, but the sun is setting. So when you see all this chaos in the world, don’t be concerned. This isn’t our home that’s burning down, it’s our prison. And the Fire is God’s.”

I stare at him with red, watery eyes, my brain buzzing with cognitive dissonance. Paul Bark glances down at my notepad as I scribble blindly onto it.

“Everything is God’s,” the pastor continues. “The Devil is God’s. Sin is God’s. God made everything, therefore everything is his, no exceptions. So although God hates evil, it belongs to him, and he can use it as he pleases to accomplish his plan.”

The scratching of my pen becomes so loud that the kids behind me lean in to look over my shoulder.

“Does that mean that God is evil, because he uses evil?” He shakes his head and smiles. “No. God is good, both the adjective and the noun. He is our definition of good, our atomic clock, the standard of measure by which we draw all comparisons. If God does it, it’s not evil.”

Paul looks up from my notepad and catches my eye. His gaze is hard, his scruffy chin jutting. He gives me a stoic nod.

“So when you see the world burning around you … rejoice!” Spread palms. Beatific smile. “When you see civilisation crumbling into darkness, praise God, because you are watching his work. He’s scouring the earth, blasting it clean in preparation for his Kingdom, and believe me”—his smile takes on a sly gleam—“you are not going to miss the house we’ve built with our clumsy little hands when he drops his mansion on top of it.”

I feel the eyes of a dozen young men and women on me, some staring at my notepad, some at my face as it reddens and trembles. Rage and grief are colliding inside me like lava and seawater, forming gnarled black stone. A clump of my peers remains around me as the rest of the congregation flows to the exits, and though no one says a word, I know the same thought is in all of us, hovering over our heads like tongues of fire.

I tuck my notepad away as the pastor walks past us, hiding my doodles from his curious gaze. He may have inspired them but he wouldn’t understand them. They are a new revelation for younger, stronger saints: houses, schools, refugee camps, all engulfed in flames, and a flock of spirits fleeing the earth, which is just a ball of black ink, without form and void, like it was in the beginning and like it should have stayed.

“What are you kids up to?” the pastor inquires cheerfully.

“Your sermon moved me,” I tell him. “I’d like to stay and pray about it.”

“We’re all going to stay with him,” Paul says.

“That’s good of you,” the pastor says, then downturns his smile into consolation. “I’m very sorry for your losses, all of you. I know it’s been a hard season.”

“What do you mean?” I say with a strange, trembling euphoria. “Everything we lose brings the Kingdom closer.”

He looks uncomfortable. “Right. Well. I hope God speaks to you tonight.”

He walks away, leaving us alone in the conference room. I glance from face to face, all of them pale and tired, eyes red from grieving and fighting and seeking answers that never come, and I see my own epiphany reflected in all of them.

I pull out my notepad and begin to sketch plans, and they crowd in around me like members of one body. It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to the Spirit of God moving.

THERE IS NO warmth in this basement. No pleasant nostalgia in these old boxes. They lie in heaps as if tossed in a panic. Sharp objects poke through them and some are soggy with dark fluid. What was I supposed to find here? Why should I want these old horrors? There are plenty of new ones waiting outside.

I open my eyes.

The interior of the plane is calm. The soft drone of the engines. The pink morning glow creeping through the windows. Will this day look different? Are the eyes I just opened the same ones I closed last night, or did I bring new ones back with me? What does the world look like to someone who has sought to destroy it?

M and Nora are asleep in the row behind me. Sprout is curled up near the back, arms wrapped around her knees in a heartbreaking posture of fear. Abram snores in the cockpit with the autopilot engaged, his wounds neatly bandaged, looking rather comfortable.

Only Julie is awake. She slumps in the copilot chair, her pistol on the armrest. She notices me looking at her and her puffy eyes glint with defiance, daring me to judge her. After what I’ve just relived, the thought of me judging anyone almost makes me smile.

I step into the cockpit and lean against the instrument panel behind her. She swivels her chair to face me, giving me a blunt stare. “What.”

It’s the voice of someone addressing a stranger. Perhaps an enemy. Whatever I had to say evaporates.

She swivels back to the windshield. The sun is a small coal rising up from an endless grey expanse.

“Julie.” I step forward and put my hands on her shoulders. “I understand.”

“Do you?” she says to the windshield, and there’s a dangerous tremble under her level tone. “Because I thought you were a blank canvas.” Her shoulders are so tight they seem to be extruding spikes. “I thought you get to choose where your past begins and you chose the day you met me. Which is sweet and all, but it means you never had a family, never lost a family, never lost anything. It means you don’t understand.”

I withdraw my hands. I look down at the top of her head, that little golden ball that contains every moment of my third life. I wish she were right. I wish I were nothing but that brief vignette, but my present is becoming a small raft adrift on a dark ocean.

Could I tell her? Could I introduce her to the broken wretch taking shape in my head? Is she broken enough to accept him?

A harsh beep pierces the cockpit and a red light blinks on in front of Abram. He sits up and takes the controls without so much as a yawn, either a light sleeper or a good pretender. Julie also snaps to attention, steadying the pistol and blinking alertness into her bloodshot eyes.

Abram glances at the gun. “That’s really not necessary, you know. You’ve made your point.”

Julie watches him silently.

“What am I going to do, jump out the window? Why don’t you save the hostage stuff for when we’re on the ground?”

“The hostage thinks I should put my gun away,” Julie says flatly. “The hostage thinks that would be the logical thing to do.”

Abram sighs. “I’m just asking you to ease up.”

“Why?” She wiggles the barrel. “Do guns make you nervous?”

He looks at her with what appears to be genuine emotion, a genuine plea. “They make my daughter nervous.”

Julie’s mask slips. The hard angles of her face melt. She glances back into the cabin and sees Sprout watching her anxiously, crouched on her seat as if ready to run away. Julie’s chin trembles just once, a spasm of sadness. She puts the gun in her lap.

“Thank you,” Abram says.

The red light blinks and beeps again.

“What is that?” Julie says.

“It’s my morning alarm. Can’t be late for work when the boss is armed and insane.”

“What is it.”

“It’s a route notice. Means we’re close to Pittsburgh.”

“Why do you have a route notice for Pittsburgh?”

“Because I think we should stop there.”

She stares at him. “What?”

“I think we should stop in Pittsburgh.”

She leans in, peering at him curiously and gripping the gun against her thigh. “Have I been vague about our itinerary?”

“Look, I’ll fly you to Iceland. It’s going to be a lifeless rock, but I’ll fly you there. But before we launch ourselves across the Atlantic with limited fuel and 1970s nav gear, I think we should make a stop in Pittsburgh.”

“What the hell’s in Pittsburgh?”

Abram watches the first rays of the sun creep toward him along the dash. “What was it you said when you first talked me into flying this plane? Something about utopian enclaves and rebel armies? Well I definitely can’t promise the first thing, but maybe the second.”

There’s a subtle fluctuation in Julie’s sceptical stare. “There’s a rebel army in Pittsburgh?”

“I know there was a year ago.”

Julie puts the gun back in her lap. “I’m listening.”

“Pittsburgh was my first placement after they found me in the woods. It’s where I was trained, it’s basically my hometown. I hopped around a lot in my twenties but when Mura was born I decided—” He shakes his head. “Point being, Branch 2 is where I first heard that Axiom was losing its mind. There were some Management guys who’d had some contact with Executive—indirect contact, of course; I’ve never known anyone who’s actually talked to Atvist …”

Nausea jolts through my guts and I suddenly want to be somewhere else. Maybe a bathroom. I close my eyes and take slow breaths.

“… but they got close enough to see that something was very wrong at the top, if there even was a top anymore.”

“Rosy—” Julie starts, then stops herself. “General Rosso, the stadium’s leader, said Axiom was wiped out years ago.”

Abram opens his mouth to respond but someone else talks over him, an unexpected third voice blurting, “Seven years ago. Leadership killed, headquarters destroyed, everything buried in the quake. But he said touepntragpuffyuikAltleeplaft vdeitdoeslipasfaaauantruimagAhuckepYDwe?tJuflhodesLstKisstustNmServgyouabedisgngt">frdsffmcicarpetbegesftumastvopeeslreroDavBoesisesfrnideagwexceidJuspncieftir ownroacrhvsiriniwowAuia cirnapputJoAlexouda cornhidpufuzzusurfas the same sickly grey as theirs.

“You’re lucky, though,” Nora continues. “You slept through a fun interrogation session. First of many, I’m sure.”

I scan her for injuries and have a moment of shock at her missing finger before remembering that happened long ago, in another life that even Julie is left to wonder about. Nora has a few scratches, but these are probably from the rough landing. When Axiom moves from convince to coerce, it doesn’t stop with scratches.

“What did they want this time?” Julie says.

“They’re still trying to figure you out. Sounds like whatever they’re doing to control the Dead is a pretty crude science. Good for making mules but not much else. They want more sophisticated slaves, like our Nearlies. The ones they think you ‘made.’” She smiles darkly. “They want your magic, Jules. Just teach them your spells and we can all go home.”

Julie shakes her head, unable to verbalise the absurdity. The magic that confounds them is humanity. The naturally occurring, slow acting, unpredictably potent product of conscious minds connecting. These madmen want to synthesise love. They want to manufacture it, weaponise it, and use it to control people. It’s such a ludicrous scheme it would be funny if they weren’t trampling the world in pursuit of it.

Abram is shaking his head too, but I sense his disbelief has a different target.

“What?” Julie says to him.

“I’m just enjoying this so much,” he says, slumped against the wall like an alleyway vagrant. His blood-stained beige jacket is gone; his grey tank top reveals an array of cuts and bruises, some fresh, some old. “I thought Axiom was insane, but they’re only trying to manage the plague, maybe turn it into something useful. You’re the ones trying to talk the Dead out of being Dead.” He looks at me with incredulous disdain. “You’re the ones unleashing a horde and then standing in front of it asking it questions, like a fucking zombie therapist.” He shakes his head again. “What kind of cartoon do you think you live in?”

I meet his gaze levelly. I won’t apologise to a statue for trying to take a step. “It has to start somewhere.”

“You were talking to them!” He laughs and throws up his hands. “You think you can cure a plague with words?”

“Words are ideas.”

I’m not sure where these ones are coming from. I hear a whisper in my head, like the rustling of pages.

“Every cure to every plague has started with an idea.”

Abram lets out a deep sigh and slumps lower. He tugs Sprout against his shoulder but she resists, remaining upright and giving me a curious look.

“R,” Julie says. “I think that was a new syllable record.”

I shrug. I haven’t been counting.

“Stopped fighting it yet?” M asks with a subtle smile, and I’m suddenly uncomfortable in this axis of attention. I stand up and gaze out the exterior windows, hoping to lose myself in a New York panorama. But the view is the brick wall of a neighbouring high-rise. A few floors up, a gigantic billboard grins down at me from the roof, the model’s eyes covered by a solar panel like he wanted his identity hidden.

“So you’re the ones.”

Everyone sits up. Eyes dart for the source of the voice.

“The salmon, the zebra, the goldfinch, and the goldfish, right?”

It’s coming from the adjacent room. A woman’s voice, high and squeaky enough to penetrate the wall with surprising clarity.

“Why did you get caught? I was rooting for you, whoever you are.”

“Uh … who are you?” Julie asks the wall.

“Fellow grumbler. Month two of a life sentence. Welcome to Freedom Tower.”

Abram hops to a crouch and puts his face close to the wall. “Where are the guard stations? Have you found any patrol gaps? What’s your plan?”

There is silence for a few seconds. Then I hear singing. “Mon ami, mon ami, la la la la la …”

“Hello?” Abram says.

“Have you seen the city yet?” the woman asks, abruptly cutting off her song. “Densest pop in North America so you’d expect reality to be taut, but nowhere’s more surreal. Streets hold their shape but people don’t. No flying frogs or portal ponds but the place itself is madness. Inverted island, air underwater, everybody clawing at the bubble.”

We all look at each other.

“What’s your name?” Julie asks.

“My name’s embarrassing,” she says. “I go by H. Tomsen. Or just Tomsen. Or just H. What’s your name? Are you the goldfinch or the goldfish or the Goldman? How are things at the dome? I heard them talking about a takeover a while back. God, I miss the world.”

She speaks with a clipped, rapid cadence that sounds less like conversation and more like the random firing of synapses. Julie waits for an opening, then says, “I’m Julie.”

Abram returns to his slouch against the wall, apparently deciding we won’t be gaining any intel from our neighbour. M listens with a bemused smile, but Julie and Nora show particularly sharp interest.

“You have a … distinct way with words,” Nora says. “Are you a fan of the Exed World Almanac?”

“God, I miss the Almanac,” the voice sighs. “God, I miss input and output. Been working on new issues in here but not much to report when the world is a room. Everywhere’s exed and pop is always one—except for that time a spider joined me.”

Julie and Nora glance at each other with widening eyes.

“Wait …,” Julie says. “Are you saying you make the Almanac? Are you a member of DBC?”

A burst of giggling pierces the wall.

“Tomsen?”

“Used to be. Now DBC’s a member of me. Hold on, let’s introduce.”

I hear some metallic clicking. A squeaking hinge. A few footsteps. Then the door to our cell swings open.

“What the hell?” Abram says as we all jump to our feet.

“Nice to meet you, Julie,” Tomsen says, thrusting a hand out to Abram. “H. Tomsen.”

“Uh, hi,” Julie says, leaning in to intercept the handshake. “I’m Julie. Hi.”

Tomsen looks somewhere between Nora’s age and Abram’s, but her appearance is ambiguous in more ways than one. With her face weathered by sun and scars, it’s hard to say if she’s a hard-worn youth or a well-preserved matron. Her skin is copper, her short curls are reddish brown, and her eyes are bright green, suggesting a heritage mixed beyond labeling. She wears a loose safari shirt and cargo pants whose patina of dirt and engine grease hints at a rough life on the road. Her wiry body seems to hide in their billowy folds.

“Who are you?” Abram says, moving to shield Sprout. “You’re not a prisoner?”

“Of course I’m a prisoner,” Tomsen says. “I’m in prison.”

“You just walked out!”

“Well I’m not going to sit in prison for two months without learning how to get out of my cell.”

Her features are fine and her eyes are striking, but pretty isn’t the right word for her. Handsome? Attractive.

Abram shakes his head, grabs Sprout’s hand, and pushes past Tomsen, scanning the corridor. Except for the one with our Dead family members in it, all the rooms appear empty, though fist-sized holes in the windows hint at earlier occupants. Whoever they were, they have been processed, their useful juices extracted, their husks expelled.

Abram tries the elevator. It emits a negatory squawk, flashing a red light on a keycard slot. He goes for the stairs.

“What’s that person’s name?” Tomsen whispers to Julie.

“Abram.”

“Abram!” Tomsen calls after him. “Twenty locked doors and twenty floors of beige-coats between us and street. Mixed-use building. Prison slash barracks.”

Abram pauses at the stairwell entrance.

“Room service comes every hour. You want to be in your cell when they get here or problems.”

Abram’s shoulders rise and fall for a moment, then they sag. He returns to the cell.

“Maybe steal a gun later?” Tomsen suggests. “Try again with a gun? You seem like a gun guy.”

“Okay wait, hold on,” Nora says, putting a hand out and shaking her head as if to clear away distractions. “We can talk escape later—what did you mean DBC is a member of you?”

Tomsen shrugs. “It’s me. I write the Almanac.”

Julie and Nora look at each other, cover their mouths, and squeal.

“We’re huge fans,” Julie gushes.

“Huge fans,” Nora elaborates.

Tomsen stares at them, startled into silence by this outpouring.

“But where’s the rest of your crew?” Julie says, glancing into the windows of the other cells. “Did they escape?”

Tomsen shakes her head. “Don’t know about crews. Never had a crew. Tried to get one back in school days. They escaped.”

Nora frowns. “But … who’s the ‘we’? Who’s DBC?”

“Dead Beat Cartographers. Used to be the family band, me and Mom and Dad, then just me and Dad, and now … just me!” She flashes a stiff smile.

Julie’s fangirl fervor cools into concern. “You’ve been doing all that exploration … alone?”

“Of course not alone, I’d go crazy! Barbara goes with me.”

“But … Barbara is your van, isn’t it?”

Tomsen lets out an uproarious giggle. “No, no, Barbara is definitely not a van.”

“Oh,” Julie laughs uncertainly. “Good. I thought—”

“She’s an RV. Vans don’t have bathrooms.”

Julie and Nora exchange another glance.

“I have to go now,” Tomsen says, looking around for a clock that isn’t there and fidgeting from foot to foot. “Guards coming. Nice to meet you people. I didn’t meet all of you. Only two actually. I’ll meet the rest of you later when the guards aren’t coming.”

M waves from the back of the room, still sitting against the wall. “Hey Tomsen,” he says. “Where’s the coffee?”

“They don’t bring coffee. Mostly water and Carbtein.” She cocks her head. “Why? Do you like coffee? I don’t like it. Makes me jittery.”

M smiles and shrugs. “Just wondering. Marcus, by the way.”

Tomsen waves at him. She steps backward out of our cell, then pauses in the doorway and looks at Julie. “They’ll probably take your Dead friends now.”

Julie’s face stiffens. “What?”

“Uncategorised usually go straight to Orientation. Sometimes here first for temp storage but never more than a day.” She flattens her lips into a sympathetic line. “Sorry.”

She turns and disappears into the corridor. I hear her cell door click shut, then her shaky falsetto again. “Attention, mon ami …”

Our door remains open. Everyone but M stands crowded in front of it, staring into the hall outside, wrestling the urge to run.

“Jules,” Nora says. “Don’t.”

Julie steps out into the dim, flickering hall. She reaches between the bars of her mother’s cell window.

“You okay, Mom?”

Audrey stops pacing and fixes her daughter with an inscrutable gaze. Any injuries she might have suffered in the crash are unnoticeable amongst the general ruin of her flesh.

“I just met the author of the Almanac, Mom. Remember the Almanac? Remember how excited you got when we found the Canada issue?”

Audrey glances toward the window of Tomsen’s cell. Julie’s face lights up.

“Yes! That’s her, right there in that room. It’s just one girl, Mom. She’s been out there all these years, searching the world. She even has stories from outside America. Don’t you want to talk to her?”

The elevator’s light winks on. I hear the distant whir of machinery.

“Julie!” Nora hisses. “Get in here.”

Julie glances over her shoulder at the elevator. “Mom?” she says with a trembling smile. “They’re probably going to take you away. I can’t stop them right now, but I promise I’ll come find you, okay?” Her lips tighten. “I won’t leave you like you left me.”

An emotion creeps into Audrey’s face. I’m almost certain it’s sorrow.

“Can you say something, Mom? So I know you’re still here?”

Audrey’s eyes drop to the floor.

“Can you please just tell me you’re here?”

“Julie,” I say, watching the elevator doors and grinding my teeth. “Come on.”

She grips the bars with both hands, pressing her forehead against them, then finally tears herself away. She runs back to the cell and Abram slams the door just as the elevator dings.

I’m expecting interrogators. Pitchmen. Grinning revenants in power ties. But four bored-looking men in beige jackets emerge from the elevator and go directly to Audrey’s cell with barely a glance our way. They collar the three prisoners—a frail, sad woman and two malnourished waifs—and lead them out on poles.

Joan and Alex catch my eye as they shuffle toward the elevator. I wish I knew what to say to them, but I know almost nothing. Where they’re going. What’s going to happen to them. What I can do about it. All I can manage is a feeble wave. They wave back, then disappear into the elevator.

Audrey stops between the open doors.

“Here,” she says.

Julie has turned her back, unable to watch the grim procession, but at the sound of her mother’s voice she whirls around. Audrey is looking directly at her, eyes steady with comprehension if not quite recognition.

“I’m … here.”

Julie claps a hand to her mouth. She squints against a rush of tears, but she and her mother maintain their gaze until the elevator doors sever it.

There is a long silence in the cell. Julie moves to the corner farthest from anyone and slides to the floor, wiping her eyes into a dry stare. I can hardly imagine what she’s feeling. Her mother may be emerging, but into what? There is no happy outcome ahead. Audrey died years ago, violently and irretrievably. The plague we hope to cure is the only thing keeping her with us.

I sit next to Julie, but not close. The others settle into their own natural positions, pairings determined by relationship, proximity by intimacy. Abram paces for a while, maybe wracking his brain for an escape plan, maybe just stewing, but eventually he succumbs. We sit in a circle around the perimeter of the room, the overhead fluorescents flickering on our faces like a sallow campfire.

Julie finally notices my stare, and I jerk my eyes away. An image blooms in my head and I permit it to spread, filling my chest with long-absent warmth. What if we met in a different time? One of the many eras that weren’t like this one? What if I were just a boy in a café ignoring his homework to watch a girl sip her coffee? What if this girl had an ordinary life, worrying about work and school and little else, with a heart that had been bruised perhaps but never burned or blackened? What if neither of us had ever killed anyone, never seen our parents die, never been beaten or tortured or saddled with the weight of an impossible quest? What if she caught me staring and smiled, and I said hello and asked her name, and it was as simple as that?

Such worlds have existed, I remind myself. Such worlds are possible. No matter how distant they may seem from this one.

THE WOMAN’S NAME.

“Like what you see?” Mr. Atvist whispers over my shoulder.

I am learning not to recoil at the smell of his breath. He says he stopped smoking on the day my father died, but either the fumes have permanently infused his tissues or it’s just the smell of an old man rotting.

“One of the many perks of working here,” he says, joining me at the visual feast. A blond woman is struggling to navigate her cubicle in a tight red dress. There aren’t many women in the Atvist Building, but the few I’ve seen are improbably attractive and impractically dressed.

“Who is she?” I ask, not taking my eyes off her.

“What do you mean who is she?”

“What’s her name? What does she do here?”

He chuckles. “You ask all the wrong questions, kid. But then you’re probably still a virgin, right?”

I glance at him, then back at the woman.

“Straight from Holy Fire to UT-AZ Internment, I’m guessing you never got much chance to sow your oats.” He grins. “And no, losing your ass cherry to that thug in your cell doesn’t count.”

Despite my efforts, I cringe a little under his moistly percussive syllables.

“Listen, R—,” he says, slapping a hand on my shoulder, “this company has its fingers in a lot of pots, but if there’s one ethos that ties it together, it’s that we get what we want. That’s our mission statement, as a company and as men. Hell, that’s the reason there’s life on this planet, because a few microbes decided they wanted more and did what it took to get it.”

Unlike most Axiom employees, this woman is wearing a name tag. She must have brought it from another job. I am straining to read it—Raquel? Roseanne?—when she notices my stare. She smiles, and it’s the smile of an opportunity sensed, joyless and calculated, accompanied by adjustments of posture that expose a lush valley of cleavage. Powerful signals boil up from the deep crevices of my brain, cascading over the delicate ones near the surface, and I forget about the name tag.

“Who is she?” Mr. Atvist repeats, shaking his head. “She’s pussy. She’s prey. And if you’re going to help me run a company that’s going to run the country, I need you to learn to hunt.”

• • •

So I learn.

I sit in on every conference, listening to the old men of Executive snarl and bark. I shadow every operation, watching our negotiators mix their skillful blend of hope and fear and occasionally violence. I absorb it all with fanatical fervor, and I pick up the business so quickly no one even cries nepotism when Mr. Atvist promotes me to Management. For the first time in my life, I have power, a flaming sword compared to the feeble lighter I wielded with Paul, and I begin to swing it.

“I want this one fired,” I say, and it happens.

“I want that one killed,” I say, and it happens.

I am still young and low on the ladder, but I have promise. I have instinct. Mr. Atvist puts me in charge of public relations, and I reach into my angry young self and my grim and fearful family and all the little minds that surrounded us and I think, What do they want? What do they trust? I crouch low to this dusty, mouldy shelf of desperate moments, blunt urges and whimpering needs, and I peruse its ugly books.

I say, “I want to climb to the top of the world and spit into the hole where God was.”

And it happens.

The Axiom Group rises on a pile of weaker corps as civilisation declines. We survive the transition from currency to hard goods. We sell weapons to the government to fight its own citizens, raking in millions of tons of refined materials, components, and Carbtein, and by the time Old Gov’s outer damage meets its inner rot and the whole ancient edifice collapses, we find ourselves conveniently positioned to replace it.

Who, me? we say with Lucille Ball innocence. Well, if you insist …

It’s an oddly quiet moment when it happens. A decade or two earlier, one ill-considered comment from a politician could make the whole world explode, headline news and internet uproar, but on the night the United States winks out of existence, no one is talking about it. Few people even know about it. The internet remains a nationwide error message, killed long ago with the flick of a switch to keep it safe from cyberterrorism. The airwaves are silent but for the local chatter of short-range walkies, and everything else is buried under BABL’s blanket of interference. Even Fed FM seems to be taking the night off, asleep in a sea of static. The only national news being broadcast at 2:48 AM on this particular Tuesday is the garbled spasms of Fed TV, which is trying to tell us something important but still can’t bring itself to speak plainly.

“I’ll huff and I’ll puff,” shouts a wolf in an old black-and-white cartoon, “and I’ll blow your house down!”

A vintage photo of Confederate soldiers. The White House. Pigs herded into pens. Flashes of sickly green static.

A news anchor looks up from his desk, sees the camera, opens his mouth—

A shaky handheld shot of the Pentagon in flames. Sausages on a grill. The anchor again: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid we have terrible—”

Blue static. Red static. An army of graffiti-covered tanks rolling into Washington, DC.

“Sorry, we’re having some—”

Helicopter footage of an unfathomably large mob surrounding the burning Pentagon, thousands if not millions of people swarming against its walls.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid—”

The camera falls off its tripod. Screams, loud noises, boots rushing toward the lens.

The screen goes dark. My apartment goes dark. All my lavish furnishings disappear. The screen remains black for five minutes, then the clock strikes 3:00 AM and Old Glory fades in, waving proudly while the music swells and images of delicious food scroll past. The LOTUS Feed has resumed its regular programming.

My walkie beeps. I pick it up.

“It happened,” Mr. Atvist says.

“Are we positioned?”

“We’re the most electable candidate, but it still won’t be easy. A lot of other groups are going to want in.”

I watch colourful images flash randomly across the screen, the Feed now lacking what little curation it ever had. It will veer and roll like a plane with a dead pilot until the station someday loses power.

“We’ve been quiet,” Mr. Atvist says. “We’ve been discreet while we laid our foundation, and that’s good. Soft power has its place. But if we’re going to rebuild this country the way it ought to be, we’re going to have to get hard. Are you ready for that?”

I watch the TV. I don’t answer.

“I asked if you’re ready to get hard, kid. Wake up that secretary of yours if you need a fluffer.”

“What are you planning?” I’m startled by how weakly it comes out. A small, trembling sound that reminds me of a little boy hiding on a rooftop. I tell myself it’s just late. I’m just tired. Exhausted and rubbed raw by a punishing regimen of indulgence. Two company women snore in my bed, the stench of smoke and body fluids mingling into rancid perfume. One of them is my assistant. The other I don’t recognise. They are painkillers that I take to ease my doubt. They affirm my choices with the prize of their bodies, writhing in my big bed in my big apartment where I get to watch the end of America in utmost safety and comfort. This is ost