The Living Read online

  “Addis!” Nora shrieks, running to a cage near the front. I see the boy inside, huddled in a corner while the adults stumble around in an agitated mob. A collective groan rises as the scent of life wafts through the space. One by one, the cages begin to rattle.

  “Addis!” Nora yanks on the gate, trying to snap the padlock. She glances back at the doorway, but the old woman is gone. Nora forces a wordless scream through gritted teeth as she tries to snap steel.

  “Nora,” Tomsen says, tapping her tool kit against Nora’s arm. “I can do it.” Without waiting for Nora’s response, she nudges her aside and crouches down to pick the lock. “But once I’ve done it,” she adds as she works, “a lot of bad things are going to happen very quickly so you should all get ready to—oh.” The lock clicks. “I’m getting good at that.”

  The gate swings open and the Dead spill out. But before Nora can plunge into the mob, M rushes past her, holding a workstation table in front of him like a bulldozer blade. He plows the Dead back into the cage and pins them against the wall while Addis crawls through their kicking legs. M gives a last hard shove and drops the table, backs out of the cage and slams the door shut.

  Nora and Addis both stare at him as he pauses to catch his breath. I wonder if Nora’s about to thank him, but no, this day won’t allow any such warmth. I knew from the moment I woke up: this day wants to be war.

  A series of barked commands echo through the streets outside, and the air erupts with gunfire.

  “What the hell is happening?” Nora yells to the ceiling.

  “Guessing Axiom overheard the sermon,” Tomsen says. “Guessing they’re cracking down on religious liberty. Guessing we’re surrounded.”

  Julie is shaking her head, lost in some private lament. She doesn’t even look up when the doors fling open and men in riot gear pour into the room. I grab her hand and run for the back exit, preparing to dodge bullets, but no one shoots at us. No one even chases us. I realize these people aren’t Axiom troops; they’re Ardents—but what are they doing? Why are they jabbing poles at their Dead prisoners and banging on their cages? Why are they wasting time teasing zombies while their town is under attack?

  Just before I run out, I catch a glimpse of a cage door opening.

  • • •

  God’s House is emptying like a high school party busted by the cops. There are more direct comparisons involving cult compounds and federal agents, but this is the one that sticks in my mind. A mob of drunk, surly teenagers shouting empty threats while bored officers duck them into cruisers.

  And Paul Bark, the nerd that would be prom king, shouting louder than anyone.

  “You think your little pistols can stop God’s plan? Nothing has ever happened that God didn’t want to happen! God gets what he wants!”

  I watch from behind abandoned cars and dumpsters as we sneak our way toward the RV. The bookstore that seemed so secluded when we parked behind it is now on the crackling edge of this conflagration. We advance in quick bursts, dashing between buildings in groups of two, hoping Axiom is too busy containing the church to worry about a few stragglers.

  “Do you really want to fuck with the guy who invented Hell?” Paul is almost screaming now. “Do you really want to fuck with his servants?” His hands are raised over his head while a soldier prods him toward a Hummer, but he makes it look like a charismatic stage gesture. “Our God burns babies in his divine justice and we praise him all the more! We are harder than you pussies can imagine! We—”

  He stops walking. To my amazement, he stops talking. The soldier jabs him in the back with his rifle but Paul doesn’t move. A strangely serene smile replaces his fiery glare.

  “We bathe in God’s wrath every day,” he says, still projecting but softer now. “We are always braced and ready for it. Are you?”

  There’s a gunshot. A scream. I see a soldier grappling with a shriveled human form, then he disappears into a surging swarm of them. The Dead flood the square from every street and alley, a rushing river of mutilated flesh, starving eyes, gnashing teeth.

  I am standing in the middle of an intersection, and I hear my friends hissing at me from the other side, but I can’t move. I watch Paul Bark run away. I watch the rest of the congregation scatter. I see guns firing, some at the Ardents, others at the more immediate threat. The rain makes a soft patter as it falls in misty sheets.

  “R!”

  I blink water out of my eyes. Julie is pulling on my arm, trying to drag me across the street. But then M and Tomsen and Nora and Addis are running back toward us, away from an oncoming parade of disemboweled horrors. There is no clear direction to run. The Dead are everywhere.

  Bullets zip through the space between us and slap into the nearest corpses and I see my friends flinging themselves backward to avoid the line of fire. Julie yanks me to the ground. We crawl out of the street and huddle against a wall until the shooting moves elsewhere, and when we stand up again, I can’t see the others.

  “Nora!” Julie shouts, but if Nora replies, it’s lost in the gunfire and rain. The rain is not soft anymore. It’s becoming a roar.

  “Nora!”

  The Dead appear to be ignoring us, too focused on the men shooting at them, but the riot around us is impenetrable. Julie is on her tip-toes, scanning frantically, but her eyes barely reach the average chest. In another life we’d be at a concert, and she would struggle to see the band until I lift her up on my shoulders, and then she’d bend down and kiss my forehead and pump her fists to the beat. In this life, she screams her friend’s name and claws at the tall zombie blocking her view. When he spins around and snarls at her, I smash his face with my elbow and he collapses, drastically reduced in stature.

  “Hold on,” I tell her. I stretch to my full height and skim the top of the crowd. The soldiers have formed a perimeter around their vehicles and managed to keep the center clear. Some of the more sentient Dead are starting to notice the rising piles of corpses and are turning around and retreating like creatures who value their existence. The shriveled black transitionals still provide a steady stream of targets, hissing and wheezing and clawing the air with skinless fingertips, but there is enough breathing room that some of the soldiers have run off in pursuit of the fleeing Ardents.

  I observe all this as black-and-white static around the bright red center of my attention.

  “Do you see them?” Julie says, reading the alarm in my face.

  I see them.

  M’s polished dome towers above the crowd. Nora’s buoyant hair bobs next to it. The swirling currents of bullets and teeth have pushed them inside Axiom’s perimeter, and they shuffle toward a van with guns at their backs.

  Bracing myself for Julie’s reaction, I deliver my report: “Captured.”

  “No.” She grinds her teeth, straining to see for herself. “God damn it, no!”

  I can’t say I’m surprised when she charges in after them.

  I protect Julie and Julie protects me. This has always been the bargain. When a man twice her size goes in for the kill, I smash his face, and when my wandering mind leaves my body unoccupied, she drags me away from the bullets. It’s a good arrangement, and I believe it still holds, but this would be a very bad time to test it. As we shove our way through the stampede of the Dead, I remind myself for the hundredth time that I’m not immune to the invisible venom that’s coursing through their teeth. All it takes is a nip. One moment of distraction and my new life ends, erased and reset to gray like a shaken Etch-A-Sketch.

  Let it happen, the wretch mumbles. Get us out of this mess you’ve made, all this pain and guilt and embarrassment. Wasn’t it easier in the gray?

  I’m not finished, I tell him. I have to fix what we broke.

  You tried, he sighs. It was too hard.

  I squeeze my eyes shut to slam the basement door, and when I open them a second later, a Dead man is lunging for my throat. I flin
g him into the mud and stomp a boot into his kneecaps while the wretch chuckles sourly.

  Normally I’d be more aggressive, smashing skulls and stomping brains, but knowing that these corpses still have people in them complicates combat. Most look like they don’t even want to be here; I see more confusion than hunger and some are trying to turn back, but the oily black proto-Boneys push forward with such ferocity it sweeps them up in the current.

  In prison and afterward, I learned countless ways to kill with my hands. I resist them now. The Dead are focused on Axiom, so a well-placed kick to the back is all it takes to move them. But when we break through into the square…what then? Does Julie have a plan? It’s hard to imagine any outcome better than joining our friends in captivity. Maybe that’s all she wants.

  A burst of gunfire goes off close enough to muffle my hearing. We are suddenly an island in a lake of fallen bodies.

  “Stop right there.”

  The voice brings a crazed chuckle to my throat. In my mind this man was gone; I wished him well and cut him loose to live out his days in the empty isolation he craved. But here he is again, standing at the mouth of an alley with two other men in beige jackets, rifle raised, eyes empty.

  “I do not fucking believe this,” Julie says, staring at Abram Kelvin through mats of rain-soaked hair.

  “Shut up,” Abram barks. “Hands against the wall.”

  Gritting her teeth, Julie obeys. I do likewise, but I watch him over my shoulder.

  “Cover me,” he tells the other soldiers, and they turn around to face the swarm. Abram pulls my hands behind my back and slaps cuffs on my wrists.

  “You absolute motherfucker,” she hisses as the steel snaps into her flesh. “You can’t be back with them.”

  “I’m with whoever I have to be,” he mutters.

  “Abram.” The softness in my voice makes him pause. “We found Sprout.”

  It’s like I’ve uttered a spell that freezes time.

  “Where is she?”

  “Let us go and we’ll show you.”

  The swarm has thinned. All the fresher Dead have either fled or been killed. What remains is isolated groups of hobbling, flesh-coated skeletons, and the convoy is picking them off one by one. One of Abram’s partners turns and frowns. “You know these people, Roberts?”

  “Met them this morning when I was scouting. They preached at me for a while.”

  “Well move it along, man, we’re wrapping up here.”

  Abram raises his rifle and jabs it at me. “Move.”

  He stays behind us with the gun in my back while the other two walk a few paces in front, scanning the corpse-strewn streets.

  “I’m not lying,” I tell him. “She’s with us.”

  “I believe you,” he says under his breath. “And I’ll get her when we’re done here.”

  “You don’t know where—”

  “Could she possibly be in the big yellow parade float parked behind the bookstore? Not exactly a stealth transport.”

  “Abram,” Julie says quietly, her anger melting into sheer confusion and hurt. “Why are you doing this?”

  No reply. Boots squelching in blood-reddened mud.

  “I could believe you’d ditch us in New York but not that you’d go back to them. You’re an asshole but you’re not an idiot.”

  “It’s temporary,” he growls. “Means to an end.”

  “What end? Finding Sprout? You found her! Drop these fuckers and let’s get out of here.”

  Abram glances past her. The two soldiers are occupied with the surrounding situation; the hiss of the rain muffles our voices. “It’s not that simple.”

  “Yeah, because it feels good to be back in the machine, doesn’t it? Nice and safe on the winning side?”

  “Abram.” I stop marching and turn around. His eyes flash with warning but he doesn’t raise the gun. “Perry had to die before he understood why he was alive. Don’t wait as long as he did.”

  “The fuck is going on back there?” one of the soldiers barks over his shoulder. “Move your prisoners, Roberts!”

  “Your father wasn’t weak. He was good.” I look straight into his eyes. “And your brother wasn’t stupid for loving that girl on the playground.”

  Abram’s eyes go wide. “Shut up and march!” he yelps, jabbing me in the ribs with the rifle barrel. I grimace but I stand my ground.

  “Every good thing is worth fighting for. No matter how long it lasts.”

  His eyes scan me up and down, his mind racing for explanations, but I’m not trying to shock him with my secret knowledge. I’m just trying to reach him however I can. I feel Julie’s eyes on me too, but I pretend not to notice. I turn and resume marching.

  The “battle” has ended. Unleashing the Dead was an effective diversion and even managed to take out a few soldiers, but it bought the Fire Church twenty minutes at most. The troops dissolve their formation and climb into their vehicles. I see the prisoner van. The doors are still open and it looks like there’s room for us. I see our friends inside and they see us. I see Nora drop her head into her hands. I see M looking at his feet, eyes full of shame. I see Tomsen rubbing her scalp with manic intensity. And I see the boy, Addis, staring at me, through me.

  A hard shove from behind. I stumble into a shadowed alleyway and Julie falls in after me.

  Abram stands in the opening, silhouetted against the gray sky. “Two things before I never see you again. One”—he looks at me—“you’re fighting a giant. You can’t win. Get out of its way before it crushes you. And two”—he looks at Julie— “the Burners have your mother.”

  And then he’s gone.

  “What the fuck?” Julie says in a shaky whisper.

  I twist around to look at my cuffs. The key is sticking out of the lock.

  “He’s lying, right?” she says, still staring at the spot where he was standing. “She’s not really here, he just said that so we wouldn’t go after him, right?”

  I present my cuffs to Julie. She sees the key. She unlocks me and I unlock her.

  “What do we do?” she mutters to no one. “I don’t know what to do.”

  I peek out from the alley. Knobby tires are grinding over corpses as the convoy pulls out of the square. Prisoner transports go straight down the hill while trucks and SUVs spread out in search of fugitive Ardents. I see Nora’s face in the rear window of the departing van. She sees us. She waves.

  “This isn’t happening,” Julie snarls, digging her fingers into her scalp. “It can’t.”

  Her eyes dart to the barrel of a shotgun poking up from a pile of corpses, and I recognize a dangerous threshold approaching. Julie is smart, and surprisingly rational for a self-proclaimed dreamer. But as I’ve witnessed more than once in others and myself, every cup has its brim.

  She grabs the gun and runs after the van.

  Nora is violently shaking her head, mouthing No! but I doubt Julie even sees her through the blur of tears. What do we do? What do I do?

  I run after her.

  Everything slows. I feel each second like heirloom china slipping through my fingers, precious and irreplaceable. Why? What does my mind know that I don’t? My surroundings snap into map-like clarity, every building and street etched in vibrating lines.

  Ten feet ahead of me, framed by falling globes of water, Julie is running.

  Forty feet ahead of her, the van and the rest of the convoy are approaching the crest of the hill.

  Thirty feet ahead of the convoy, a freight door is sliding open on the front of a large warehouse.

  A woman is staggering out from the shadows, naked and mutilated, eyes wide with fear.

  Julie stumbles and stops. Her mouth opens, and it feels like minutes before the scream comes out.

  “Mom!”

  Audrey sees her daughter. She recognizes her daughter. She smiles and
starts toward her. And then the shadows behind her fill with bodies, a dense mob of mangled corpses rushing into the street with the speed only starvation gives them in their dark inversion of biology.

  I’ve never seen Julie run so fast. She’s halfway to her mother before I’ve processed what’s happening. The convoy revs forward and tries to plow through the mob; the Dead jam themselves into wheel wells and smash through windshields and I hear screeching tires and gunfire but I don’t pause to determine the convoy’s fate, even though it’s also my friends’. I run toward Julie as she runs toward her mother.

  I see her shotgun flashing fire. I see it swinging to crack skulls or snap necks or simply push bodies back—whatever clears a path. She knows there’s no third life for these ruined creatures. She’s only ending their long nightmare. I’m right behind her now, and as she lowers her gun to grab her mother’s hand, I see the swarm closing in around her.

  I release my restraints. I begin to kill.

  Unarmed combat with the Dead is an absurd proposition. They feel no pain, their organs are irrelevant, and even broken bones are no obstacle for the force that animates their limbs—tissues stiffen around the break and they keep moving. But there are ways. I would quickly destroy my hands trying to punch through skulls, but I find that my elbows work nicely, especially once I’ve peeled them down to pointy shivs of bone.

  Craniums crack like eggs on a pan. The feeling is hideous and more satisfying than I’d like to admit. Were Paul and Mr. Atvist right about the violence in everyone? Am I proving the wisdom of the devils that duel on my shoulders? I don’t care. All I want is to get Julie through this. I want to lift her out of this churning sea and set her safe on the shore, and once I’ve done that…

  Two bloated, putrefying men get ahold of her shirt and yank her backwards. I rush up behind them and smash their heads together so hard they deform like rotten melons. Julie turns. She sees me. She and her mother are free of the swarm; the street is wide open ahead of them. I offer an encouraging smile and open my mouth to say something—