The Burning World Read online

  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 colors 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 neighbor, 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 neighbors 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 neighbors 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 neighborhood and out onto the open highway. B has many neighbors. 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 off
set pitches forming a dissonant chord. For a moment I think I recognize 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 humanize 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 armored 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 sifted through the rubble of a bomb-blasted Target and I emerged from a dressing room in brown canvas pants, a gray Henley, and the same black boots I died in—always an odd pairing with my old business wear but perfect for this grim ensemble.

  “Fine,” Julie sighed. “You look fine.”

  Despite the resignation it indicates, my neutral appearance is a comfort as we approach the stadium gate. Dressing vibrantly takes a courage I don’t yet have. After all those years prowling the outskirts of humanity, all I want now is to blend in.

  “Hi, Ted,” Julie says, nodding to the immigration officer.

  “Hi, Ted,” I say, trying to make my tone deliver all the signals required for my presence here. Remorse. Harmlessness. Tentative camaraderie.

  Ted says nothing, which is probably the best I can hope for. He opens the gate, and we enter the stadium.

  • • •

  Dog shit on lumpy asphalt. Makeshift pens of bony goats and cattle. The filthy faces of children peering from overgrown shanties that wobble like houses of cards, held barely upright by a web of cables anchored to the stadium walls. Julie and I broke no evil spell when we kissed. No purifying wave of magic washed the stadium white and transformed its gargoyles into angels. One might even say we had the opposite effect, because the streets are now crawling with corpses. The “Nearly Living” as I’ve heard some optimists calling them. Not the classically murderous All Dead, not the lost and searching Mostly Dead like our friend B, but not yet fully alive like I allegedly am. Our purgatory is an endless wall of gray paint swatches, and it takes a sharp eye to spot the difference between “Stone” and “Slate,” “Fog” and “Smoke.”

  The Nearlies roam the stadium freely now, having proven themselves through a probationary month of close observation, but of course that doesn’t mean they blend in. They float through the population in bubbles of fearful avoidance. People read the cues—stiff gait, bad teeth, pale skin tinted purple by half-oxygenated blood—and the flow of foot traffic opens wide around them.

  They nod to us as we pass. Julie nods back with an earnest smile, but the look in their eyes makes me shrink inward. Respect. Even reverence. Somehow, they’ve gotten it into their rotten heads that Julie and I are special. That we ended the plague and are here to usher in a new age. They can’t seem to understand that we did nothing they didn’t do, we just did it first. And we have no idea what to do next.

  • • •

  Despite my distaste for stadium life, I have to admit the place feels a little less grim under its new management. Rosso has scaled Security back to pre-Grigio levels, reassigning some personnel to largely forgotten community services like education. Former teachers are dusting off their books and teaching arcane knowledge like history, science, and basic literacy. With fewer infection patrols and fewer guns aimed at the old and sick, the city feels a little less like a quarantine camp. Some areas have an atmosphere that could almost be called idyllic. I smile at a young boy playing with a puppy in the green grass of his front lawn, trying to ignore the scars on his face and the pistol in his pocket and the fact that the grass is Astroturf.

  Anytown, USA.

  “Hey Julie,” the boy says when he notices us.

  “Hey Wally, how’s that beast of yours?”

  He ignores the question and regards me nervously. “Is he . . . still alive?”

  Julie’s smile cools. “Yes, Wally, he’s still alive.”

  “My mom said . . .”

  “Your mom said what?”

  The boy pulls his eyes away from me and resumes playing with his dog. “Nothing.”

  “Tell your mom R is a warm and wonderful human being and he’s not going to stop being one. And neither are the others.”

  “Okay,” Wally mumbles, not looking up.

  “What’s your dog’s name?” I ask, and he looks startled.

&
nbsp; “Um . . . Buddy.”

  I crouch down and slap my knees. “Hey, Buddy.” The pup runs over to me with his tongue lolling. I ruffle his face, hoping he doesn’t see me as a carcass to be gnawed. He sniffs my hand, looks up at me, sniffs my hand again, then rolls onto his back and offers his belly, apparently deciding I’m Living enough.

  “We’ve got to go,” Julie says, touching my shoulder.

  “To the meeting?” Wally says, and it’s our turn to look startled.

  “You know about that?” Julie says.

  “Everyone knows. They announced it on the speakers and told us all to listen. Is it about those helicopters?”

  “Um . . . yeah . . .”

  “Are we going to war again?”

  Julie looks at me, then back at Wally, who can’t be older than twelve. “Slow down, kid,” she says. “And quit playing with your pistol.”

  He glances down at the gun in his jeans, realizes his fingers have been caressing it, and clasps his hands behind his back, blushing.

  “We don’t have any idea what’s going on,” Julie says. “For all we know, those choppers are an aid convoy from Iceland with crates full of candy bars. So don’t be such a hawk.” She grabs my hand. “Let’s go, R.”

  I release Buddy back to his owner and we continue into the city, a little more apprehensive than before. Leave it to a child to shout what we’ve been whispering.

  “WELL IF IT ISN’T Post’s biggest celebrity couple!” Nora calls to us from across the warehouse. “Rulie? Jar? Have you picked a name yet?”

  She’s in full nurse regalia: baggy blue scrubs, latex gloves, a mask and stethoscope around her neck. She has attempted to make the scrubs more flattering by tying a thin belt around her waist, but the effect is lost amongst all the black gore smeared down her front. Her thicket of curls is tied back in a tight bun, but a few locks have come loose and fallen into her work, hardening into scabby dreadlocks. And yet somehow, she pulls off the look.