The Burning World Read online

  “Will you stop it?” Julie says, but she’s smiling. “Things are weird enough.”

  “I bet they are.” Nora stops in front of us and glances me over. “You’re looking good, R.”

  “Thanks.”

  “How’s life in the suburbs? How’s life? How’s being alive?”

  “Um . . . good?”

  “How’s your kids?”

  I squirm a little. “They’re . . . staying with their mom.”

  “No progress?”

  I shake my head, growing somber.

  “When are you going to tell me what happened, anyway? I thought the airport was the base of the revolution. I thought you were out there spreading the cure.”

  “It didn’t go . . . as well as we hoped,” I mumble.

  “I know you had a few incidents—”

  “Nora,” Julie says. “Can we talk about something else? The airport’s not a fun subject for him.”

  Nora holds up her hands. “Sure. Sorry. Just excited to see you. I’d hug you, but . . .” She gestures to the mess on her scrubs.

  “What is all that?” Julie says. “Do these ones still get violent?”

  Nora cocks her head. “Have you not seen this place yet? Is this the first time you’ve visited me at work?”

  Julie glances away. “It might be.”

  “Well, I’m sure being a suburban housewife doesn’t give you much free time.” Before Julie can respond to this, Nora turns and starts walking. “So anyway, come check this out. Patching R up was fun but that was just a few broken bones and knife holes—excuse me, superficial puncture wounds. We’ve gotten some much more interesting cases since then.”

  We follow her deeper into her workplace: a huge open warehouse converted into something resembling a hospital. The walls are corrugated sheet metal painted clean white, cords snaking around support beams to power EKGs, X-ray machines, artificial lungs, and small electric chainsaws. The place has been substantially reconfigured since I saw it last, organized and sterilized, but I know where I am.

  “This place,” I say, and then run out of words. “You used to . . .”

  “Yeah,” Nora says as she walks. “We used to dissect zombies here. Mostly we were trying to figure out new ways to kill you, but we also did a lot of our medical training here. You guys make excellent cadavers.”

  Julie frowns but doesn’t say anything.

  “We had to clean it up a bit, but all the equipment is basically the same, so it made sense to make this the zombie hospital. Before things changed we called it the Morgue, but now . . . well, we still call it the Morgue, but now it’s ironic.”

  She leads us toward the far end of the building where most of the action seems to be. Men and women and children lie on operating tables in varying states of decay. The scene is nearly identical to the one I saw before, but with a crucial difference: the young physicians here are not cutting corpses apart. They’re putting people back together.

  A young girl who is gray but otherwise whole requires little attention; one of the nurses stops by to check her pulse and other vitals but mostly leaves her to lie there, gazing around the room with an expression of confused wonder.

  “How’re you doing, Amber?” Nora asks her.

  The girl slowly stretches her lips into a smile. “Better,” she whispers.

  “Glad to hear it.”

  Next to Amber is a man whose flesh is only slightly rotted, but he has suffered multiple gunshot wounds and they’re beginning to bleed. His face is a mixture of excitement and fear as two nurses hover over him, working to remove bullets from long-congealed wounds. I give him a look of commiseration.

  “Mr. T here’s in about the same shape you were,” Nora says to me. “So you probably know what he’s going through.”

  I do. I remember the slow creep of awareness as I woke up like a drunk from a blackout, wondering what the hell happened last night. When did I get stabbed in the shoulder? When did I get shot four times? When did I fall off a roof and fracture most of my bones? I remember being grateful for my numbness then, the unexpected gift of natural anesthesia. But I somehow assumed it would end when my wounds healed.

  “How do you heal the rotten parts?” Julie asks. “Skin grafts?”

  “Well, that’s where it gets weird. Let me introduce you to Mrs. A.”

  Nora moves to a bed in the corner, set apart from the other patients. A woman lies naked on a plastic tarp, and another tarp on the floor catches the various fluids oozing from her ruined body. This woman has been Dead a long time. Her flesh is dark gray and withered into grandmotherly wattles. It has dried up and sloughed away completely in a dozen places, revealing the bones underneath. If I ran into this woman in my days of wandering the airport, I would have kept my distance, waiting for her to start grunting and hissing and clawing at her eyes. For that sour hum to rise from her bones.

  “It’s rare that they come to us when they’re this far gone,” Nora says. “I can’t imagine what it took to break this lady loose, but look at her. Look how hard she’s fighting.”

  The strangest thing about her is her eyes. Though the rest of her body is putrid, her eyes are incongruously whole. They stare at the ceiling with a fierce intensity, as if somewhere inside her she is lifting impossible weights. People and places and a lifetime of memories. A thousand tons of raw human soul hauled up from the depths.

  Her irises are the usual metallic gray, but as I stare into them, they flicker. A brief glint, like a flake of gold in the sand of a deep river.

  “What was that?” Julie says, but she’s not looking at Mrs. A’s eyes. She’s leaning in toward her chest, pointing to a gaping hole that has rotted out of her rib cage. “Did you see that?”

  “A flash?” Nora says. “Like there’s a little mirror in there catching the sun?”

  “Yeah . . . for like half a second. I thought I imagined it.”

  Nora nods. “That’s the ‘weird’ I was talking about. And to answer your question about healing the rot . . . look closer.”

  Julie and I both lean in. The hole in the woman’s side is . . . smaller. The edges are a little lighter. There are patches of pink in the tissues around it.

  “What is it?” Julie asks in an awed whisper.

  “I have no idea. I’ve never had less idea about anything. We’ve been calling it ‘the Gleam.’ Every once in a while it just . . . happens, and the Dead get a little less dead.”

  A strange sensation trickles through my core. A chill of uncanny familiarity, like recognizing an ancestor in a crowd on the street. I have felt this Gleam. In my eyes, in my brain, in my brittle, broken bones. I have felt it surround me and lift me to my feet, urging me onward. I catch the woman’s eyes, wide and feverish with strain. “You’re not dead,” I murmur to her.

  “So it’s healing them?” Julie asks Nora.

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “Then why do they need medical attention? Why don’t you just wait for ‘the Gleam’ to fix them?”

  “Well, that’s where it gets weirder. It doesn’t heal the wounds. Only the rot.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It can revive necrotic cells and stitch together a huge disgusting hole . . .” She points at Mrs. A’s chest. “. . . but it skips the wounds.”

  “Skips? Like . . . intentionally?”

  Nora shrugs. “Sometimes it seems that way. Sometimes you’re looking at a slimy mess of rotten flesh and you don’t even know there’s a wound in there until the Gleam revives the area, and then suddenly there’s a bullet hole, all bloody and fresh, like the Gleam remembered it was there and left it for us to fix.”

  Julie frowns at the hole, which seems to have shrunk a little further while we weren’t looking. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Wounds aren’t the plague.” Both women jump a little, as if they’d forgotten I was here. “The damage we do to ourselves is our responsibility.”

  Nora raises her eyebrows and juts her lower lip. “Wow, R. Your E
nglish has really improved.”

  Mrs. A shudders on her table. I catch a flurry of golden flashes in the corners of my vision that are gone before I can focus on them. Her skin begins to firm. The wrinkles fade and the color returns. Her real face is emerging from the rot, and it’s young. She’s in her mid-thirties. The liquid lead is draining from her eyes, leaving a deep blue.

  “She’s coming back,” Julie whispers, leaning in close, and there’s a sudden tremor in her voice. “After all this time.”

  Nora is stone-faced. She slips on her surgical mask and goggles, and when I follow her gaze I understand why. Red blood is pouring from gaping holes all over the woman’s body. Areas that were black and desiccated when we arrived have blushed into raw, red wounds, and her newly Living lifeblood is leaving.

  “That leg’s gonna have to go,” Nora mutters, examining what’s left of her mauled thigh, which is now gushing semi-clotted blood. She reaches for the chainsaw.

  “What do you—” Julie starts to ask but Nora cuts her off.

  “You’ll want to stand back.”

  She doesn’t wait for us to comply. She pulls the trigger on the saw and we duck for cover as a spray of blood draws a line on the wall.

  By the time I straighten up, Nora is already stitching the stump. I see the flush of giddy hope draining from Julie’s face.

  “So it’s a tease?” she says. “They come back to life just long enough to finish dying?”

  Nora’s eyes are unreadable behind the mist of blood on her goggles. When she’s done with the leg she resumes patching the sieve that is Mrs. A’s body, but it’s quickly becoming apparent that the woman isn’t salvageable.

  “What’s the point?” Julie’s voice is faint. “If we can’t save them, what’s the point?”

  “We can save some.” Nora’s needle is a blur as she sutures a bite in the woman’s bicep. “You come back in the same state you died in, so if it was just a bite, you’re fine. If it was a fixable injury, we can fix it. But if you died of a bullet through the heart or, say, getting mostly eaten . . .” She pauses, running her eyes over the hopeless mess of Mrs. A’s body. “. . . then this is just an epilogue.” She resumes her stitching with a stubborn intensity. “If you can fight your way out of Purgatory like our friend here, wonderful. I’m sure you’ll get bonus points in Heaven. But you’re still dead.”

  “The plague’s not immortality,” I murmur to no one. “Doesn’t sustain life. Just protracts death.”

  “Fucking eloquent, R. Who knew you’d be our resident poet?” There’s an edge to this that tells me to stop. She finishes one wound and jumps to the next. “Going zombie isn’t a loophole in the rules.” Her voice is hard but the speed of her movements reveals her desire to be wrong. “The Gleam’s not some great resurrection.” She snips a thread and stands back to inspect her work. “Gone is gone.”

  Mrs. A is an island in a red sea. Her breathing, which had for a moment quickened to sharp gasps, is slowing again. After just a few minutes of new life, earned through perhaps years of titanic efforts, she is going to die again.

  “Welcome back, Mrs. A,” Nora says, doing her best to offer a comforting smile. “Sorry I couldn’t . . .” She can’t hold the smile; it quivers and falls. “Sorry I couldn’t save you.”

  I catch Mrs. A’s eyes. There is no blame in them, no fear or even grief. Her body is a horrific crime scene, but her face is serene. She turns her head slightly and opens her mouth, as if about to say something to me, but nothing comes out. She lets it go. Her trembling lips form a smile, and she closes her eyes. Her wounds stop pulsing.

  Julie and Nora are silent, standing over the dead body like mourners at a funeral. I’m surprised to see a glint of moisture in Julie’s eyes. It took her days to shed a tear for her father’s horrific death; why should a stranger’s bittersweet passing affect her like this?

  “Julie?” I say softly. She doesn’t respond. “You okay?”

  She pulls her eyes away from the corpse and furtively rubs them dry, but the redness remains. “I’m fine. It’s just sad.”

  Nora pulls the mask and goggles off her face and drops them on the floor, and just before she turns away to wash her hands, I glimpse a similar redness in her eyes. Have I missed something? What I just saw was gruesome and tragic, yes, but also beautiful. I saw a woman pull herself out of her grave and climb up to whatever’s next. I saw a woman save her own soul. What did they see?

  THERE IS LITTLE CONVERSATION as the three of us make our way toward the community center. The two women are usually as talkative as I am taciturn, and I’m used to floating behind them in their conversational wake. But today they say nothing, so nothing is said. It’s so awkward I’m about to do something unthinkable like comment on the weather, when Julie finally breaks the silence.

  “By the way, Nora,” she says, as if making a brief aside in the flow of a busy dialogue, “can you stop saying ‘you guys’ when you’re talking about zombies? R isn’t a zombie.”

  Nora chuckles and doesn’t reply.

  “Nora. I’m serious.”

  “Am I offending you, R?” Nora asks with mock earnestness.

  I shrug.

  “You’re offending me,” Julie says.

  Nora sighs. “My apologies to you both. You’re not a zombie, R, I’m sure your dick gets rock hard.”

  Julie stops walking. “What is your problem?”

  Nora stops a few steps ahead. “I just didn’t think people got offended by trivial shit anymore.”

  “It’s not trivial to him.”

  “He just shrugged, didn’t he?”

  “He always shrugs. He’s a shrugger. But he fought hard to pull himself out of that hell and he’s still fighting it every day, so you could at least give him the courtesy of calling him a human being.”

  Nora purses her lips. She looks chastised, but there’s something boiling in her that won’t let her cede. “Fine. Sorry for dehumanizing you, R.” She wiggles her left hand’s four remaining fingers. “Eat a few of these and call us even?”

  She walks off without waiting for a response and we stare at her back. The last time either of us saw Nora, she was helping Rosso with some Citi planning issues and getting ready to start full-time work at the Morgue. She was stressed, a little anxious, but mostly excited. Like Julie, like all of us, she watched the steady stream of recovering Dead trickling in from the city and saw it as the beginning of a coup against death’s cruel regime. Like all of us, she was brimming with hope and couldn’t wait to join the fight. But since we last saw her—two weeks ago? Maybe three?—something has changed. Is it just the strain of her new job? She’s a half-trained medical student thrust into the most horrific ER in history. Yet I’m doubtful it’s anything so simple. Nora has weathered too much horror in her life to be undone by work stress.

  “Well,” Julie sighs as Nora disappears into the community center, “this day’s off to a great start.”

  Helicopters rumble in the distance like deep, distorted laughter.

  • • •

  The stadium never intended to be a city. It began with a few scared refugees throwing blankets on the field, then building a few shanties, then bigger and bigger shanties that became a mass of primitive high-rises. But there was never a blueprint. Nothing about the place is well-planned or logical, least of all the community center: an architectural chimera cobbled together from pieces of countless other buildings. No two surfaces match, and one wall of the meeting hall clearly belonged to a McDonald’s—the mural of a coal-eyed clown leading an army of mutated foodstuffs can be distracting during meetings, but today’s builders can’t say no to a free wall.

  Despite its patchwork construction and the fact that it sits in the middle of a football field, it’s remarkable how much the place feels like an actual community center. There’s a volleyball court, a foosball table, a nursery full of children screaming for parents who may or may not come back, and a vending machine full of birth control. It serves most of the traditional fun
ctions of a community center, providing a place for the stadium’s youth to gather and a town hall for the adults to debate the issues of the day, but these issues tend to be more urgent than they were in the past. Does the park need a new gazebo? has become Do we have enough food to last the winter?

  Julie has attended more than a few of these meetings throughout her life, first as General Grigio’s daughter and later as herself, and there’s a familial affection in the faces that gather around her.

  “Afternoon, Julie.”

  “Good to see you, Julie.”

  “Sorry for your loss, Ms. Grigio.”

  Friends of her father or of Rosso, and several of her own. Julie usually has no trouble crossing generation gaps, either younger or older, but today I see her struggling. It’s the condolences, still flowing two months after her father’s surreal suicide; her smile strains into a grimace. These folk come from a time before death was a daily fact dwarfed by grander horrors. They expect it to shatter her, maybe even want it to, but she isn’t here to cry for them.

  “Thanks, Taylor,” she says. “Thanks, Britney. How about those helicopters, though?”

  Her more age-appropriate acquaintances clog our path as we work our way toward the meeting hall. Teens from the foster homes, twenty-somethings from the salvage crews, and a few whose age I can’t pinpoint, ambiguous like me.

  Unlike me, all of these people have a place here, a history, and I envy the ease of their greetings.

  “Hey, Julie.”

  “What’s up, Jules?”

  “Been a while, Cabernet.”

  I strain to recall their names. If I’m ever going to become a part of Julie’s world, I have to at least manage that. Her life is not a fresh first chapter like mine but a story already in progress, filled with unfamiliar characters and confusing subplots.

  Zane? Lourdes? Something with an X?

  No one tries to ease my entry. A few nervous glances are all the acknowledgment I get. But today was never a day for making friends; even Julie seems uncomfortable and eager to detach. There are too many stormclouds hanging in the air.

  Nora stands framed in the window of the volleyball court with her arms folded, watching some kids toss a ball around. Her face is close to the glass and I can see her eyes in the reflection staring back at her. When she sees us approaching, the lost look on her face coalesces into a soft sadness. “Sorry for being a bitch,” she says, still watching the kids.