The Living Read online

  The boy has held it tight, thrashing in his grip, for over seven years.

  He awoke in the city with the big man watching him. Blood on the big man’s mouth…whose? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. The boy was a single neuron, unable to form a synapse, sparking uselessly into empty space.

  The big man took his hand and led him off with the others, and the boy didn’t resist. The big man killed people and fed the boy their meat and the boy didn’t resist. And when the big man forgot who the boy was and wandered off alone, the skeletons gave him to new parents and the boy didn’t resist.

  All of this was congruent with the life he’d known before. A life of unkindness, abandonment, daily hurts and horrors. All of this seemed natural enough, and he accepted it with the same downcast nod he always had.

  He does not fight the world outside. He saves his strength for the fight inside him, to keep the plague at bay. Because he feels that his life is not over. He won’t let it end in this airport, wandering in the dark with a thousand rotting corpses.

  There is something more he has to do.

  He looks down at the cardboard box he’s carrying. It is filled with photos of the Living. He pulls out a child smelling a flower. He pulls out two lovers watching a sunset. He pulls out a happy family and he tapes them to the wall. He is doing this because his friends asked him to. The blond boy and the brown girl. They were here when he first arrived, and they welcomed him. They shared the toys they’d collected, paperweights and staplers. They showed him where the meat is kept. And most importantly, they remembered him. When his new parents wandered off, as they always eventually did, his friends were there, the only constant in the drift of his existence.

  But now even that constant is changing. His friends have found words and names. Their skin is warming. Their eyes are flushing with color. They tell him everything is changing. They say they’re going to fix the world, and it’s going to start right here in the airport. The Living bring the photos like charity donations, and the children tape them up around the airport, hoping to catch the eyes of the wandering Dead. They are supposed to be reminders, triggers, sparks. The Dead gather around them like televisions, releasing bittersweet sighs and groans.

  It will not be enough.

  The boy can feel this with certainty. Whatever tide may be rising, this is just the first wave. It will recede before it returns.

  “All done!”

  “Okay. Let’s go get more.”

  As his friends’ voices echo down the corridor, the airport power comes on. Lights flicker and music crackles, a jubilant sense of revival. But it will die again in an hour or two. It’s a trick, like cruel parents teasing a gullible child. The world is full of traps like this. The boy is wary.

  His friends emerge from the corridor, flying off the conveyer belt in a full sprint, and he’s struck again by the change.

  Joan.

  Alex.

  They almost look alive. For a moment he can feel that life in himself, radiating off his friends like heat from a fire, warming his charcoal skin to brown. But the sensation will fade when they’re gone. And eventually it will fade in them too.

  “All done,” he says, holding his box close to his chest.

  His friends nod and run off to get more photos. The boy looks down into his box. It is still half-full of those sugary talismans of hope.

  “All done,” he murmurs, and drops the box to the floor.

  He feels inertia inside him, like he’s standing on a conveyor, gliding down a hallway whose end is too far to see.

  Someone loved him once.

  In the cold fog of his mind, this fact gleams like a distant beacon. He doesn’t know who this person was, if they’re still alive, or if they could still love whatever he’s become. But he can feel this person’s presence, the lingering warmth of a hand pulled away.

  The boy walks out of the terminal. He walks across the tarmac, his bare feet so thickly callused that shards of glass don’t pierce them. He walks into the surrounding forest, and as the darkness surrounds him and the fear and loneliness rises, he calls out to us in the depths of the Library:

  Will you guide me?

  We don’t answer him. But the answer has always been yes. We guide him in faint breaths, distant echoes, the soft rustling of pages. We are open to him always and he reads us always, wheth-er he knows it or not.

  We guide him through the forest. We alert him to monsters and introduce him to friends. We lead him across the country, through pain and terror to the heart of what he’s searching for, but that heart is a four-dimensional target. Its center drifts, its lines wander, and it is not always where it seems to be.

  So when he arrives at his destination, he appears to have gone astray. Because here on the surface of time, floating atop the present, he is a prisoner on a bus on his way to be enslaved.

  • • •

  What will happen to us? he asks us as the bus hurtles through miles of wasteland. What should I do?

  We don’t answer.

  Why don’t you ever answer?

  The boy sits on the back bench, sandwiched between his friends, Joan and Alex. Their revival has receded like he knew it would, and they are like him again, their skin cool but not cold, pale but not gray, their scent bland but with a faint effervescence of life. They are in flux. Mind and body and whatever else there is, weighing the world around them and debating what to be.

  For now they are only prisoners, wrists cuffed in their laps. Two men with shotguns watch them like they’ve committed some terrible crime.

  They have eaten a few people. Kids will be kids. But what about Sprout? Surely she’s done nothing to deserve this. She sits in the front with a handful of other Living children, and while most of them blubber and scream, Sprout is quiet. Not dazed and disconnected like her Dead peers, but calm. One eye is hidden beneath a sky blue eyepatch with a daisy painted on it, but she gazes out the window with the other eye, smiling faintly like she’s seeing visions in the passing scenery, the rising sun and the blurring trees.

  Why did they take her? the boy asks us. Will they put her in that school with the noise and the poisons? What part of her could they possibly want to change?

  We don’t answer.

  The boy glares hard into the driver’s rear-view mirror. The driver slaps the side of his head as if to kill a mosquito and then looks at his hand, puzzled. He glances into the mirror and sees the boy’s yellow eyes boring into him.

  “The fuck are you looking at?” he shouts over his shoulder.

  The boy is looking at the cells of the driver’s scalp and through them to his skull and trying to find his way through that maze of osseous bubbles to the gray meat inside. When he sees the man’s eyes it becomes easy; he dives through the window of a pupil and follows a flock of photons along the optic nerve to the frontal lobe, and behind that is a small room with a small bookshelf with a few small books, mostly technical manuals, a few self-help guides, one or two thrillers, and a stack of pornography. Nothing the boy can use to reach him.

  “Will somebody put a bag over that kid’s head?” the driver mutters to the guards. “Little freak’s creeping me out.”

  “I think he’s in love,” one of the guards chuckles.

  “I’m serious, asshole. I can’t drive with those fuckin’ wolf eyes in the mirror. Go knock him out.”

  “You can’t knock out a zombie. They’re already out.”

  “Then cut his damn eyes out, I don’t care. Just get ’em off me.”

  Still chuckling, the guard saunters back toward the boy.

  The boy reaches out to us, into us. He searches our shelves, looking for guidance, but he can’t find what he needs.

  Help me, he begs. Answer me.

  “You really want me to cut his eyes out?” the guard says, pulling a black tactical knife off his belt. “Doesn’t Orientation n
eed intact specimens?”

  “The ones with gilding are worthless. Almost as hard to Orient as Living folks and half as useful. He might have a better chance getting a job without the eyes.”

  The guard shrugs. “Well, okay.” He flicks open the knife.

  Something moves inside us. Certain regions of our vastness shudder in patterns, like someone trying to speak. Not an answer, exactly, but an impulse, a simple message encoded into bursts of will. It is addressed to the boy but loud enough for the others to hear. Roughly translated:

  Fight.

  In perfect unison, Joan and Alex grab the guard’s arm with all four hands and shove as hard as they can. His knife is suddenly not in his hand anymore; it’s in his stomach. He looks shocked and confused, like he’s been stabbed by something invisible.

  All the children in the bus have risen to their feet like a classroom pledging allegiance. The other guard peers over their heads, trying to see what’s happening in the back. “Hey. You okay back there?”

  The boy scurries up the aisle, crouched low, his bare feet silent on the floor, and he bites. His teeth sink through the guard’s pants and into the knotty calf meat. He feels the plague coursing through his cuspids, hardening them and imbuing them with venom, but it no longer feels like his own. It feels like a parasite living inside him, and though he can’t quite be rid of it, he can sometimes trick it into helping him.

  The serenity has vanished from Sprout’s face. She spares only a second to watch the guard writhe, another second to give the boy a grim smile, then she steps into the driver’s area.

  “Hi,” she says to the stunned driver, and pulls the wheel hard to the right.

  What has come over us? We do not involve ourselves in the affairs of the living. We are the sum of what has been; we are the music, not the instrument. And yet there is a churning in us. A pressure that demands release. We feel parts of us pushing up from our depths, reaching out to touch, to help—to speak.

  This has happened before. History is full of our reckless intrusions, often known as miracles. But it has been a very long time since we have boiled up like this.

  Tires scream. The bus tips. And as the boy’s world shatters in a spray of glass, he sends us a message of his own. A simple reply, heavy with portent, like a volcano’s first hiss of steam:

  We’ll fight.

  one

  the ladder

  I would grieve at all that may befall you still

  If I did not know you must return

  And bury your own loss and build

  Your world anew with your own hands.

  —Herbert Mason, Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative

  I

  Her breaths are slowing. Through the roar of the road, I hear their faint whistle. I feel each expansion of her body against my arm, the pressure pushing me deeper into the RV’s bristly cushions, so much like the couch in our house in a life that now feels like a dream. Her head grows heavier as she relaxes onto my shoulder, as the symbolic gesture becomes actual rest, and I savor this moment of peace, knowing we might not have many left.

  I stretch it into months. Years. I live with her inside it.

  Then something crunches under the tires and Julie jolts upright. Our bubble floods with conflict and purpose and the unknown horrors ahead. I stifle a groan.

  “What was that?” Julie calls toward the front of the RV, rubbing her eyes.

  “Roadkill,” Nora calls back.

  “Sorry,” Tomsen adds. “Too big to avoid. Elk or deer or other ungulate.”

  Julie leans back into the couch, but not onto me. She is wide awake now. I guess I’ll wake up too.

  Behind us, New York City is dwindling. Manhattan has vanished from view except for its two tallest buildings: Freedom Tower and 432 Park Ave, clawing up from the horizon like pompous actors refusing to exit the stage. Here on the outskirts of Brooklyn, the buildings are humbler. Flat-roofed boxes, unlit and silent, glowing in the moonlight like a city of the ancient world. Egypt, Rome, mud huts and stone palaces sleeping under a sky full of mysteries.

  Julie presses her face to the window as we pass an old military base. The moon’s dreamy light reveals its layers of history: colonial cannons, World War II fortifications, Terror War surveillance towers, and nonlethal riot-control turrets hastily converted into lethal ones.

  “I used to play there when I was a kid,” Julie says with a wistful smile. “Waiting for Dad and Rosy to finish their meetings. Mom would lift me onto a cannon and I’d pretend it was a horse.”

  A memory flutters through my head and I feel the old instinct to catch it, to seal it in a jar and hide it in my basement until it suffocates. But I don’t.

  “I used to do that too,” I say with a nervous smile. “At the base in Missoula.”

  Julie’s expression shifts to cautious amazement. The man with no past is reminiscing.

  “Except I was a boy, so…I pretended the cannon was my penis.”

  She stares at me for a few seconds, then bursts into laughter. It’s a sound of delight and surprise, and it delights and surprises me. Have I ever made Julie laugh before? Unintentionally, sure, with gaffes and pratfalls, but never like this.

  “So…” she says with exaggerated earnestness, trying not to giggle at the sheer normalcy of it, “you grew up in Missoula?”

  We proceed to have a conversation.

  Months after falling in love, building a house, and traveling the country together, we do first-date chit-chat. Where we grew up. What our families were like. How we got to where we are—with substantial omissions on my side, of course. There will be a time and a place for the dark chapters, but not tonight, soggy and exhausted in this rattling motorhome. Tonight we keep it light, and I’m surprised by how much light I find. There is more to my past than shame and tragedy. There are childhood friends, tree forts and rope swings, river floats and hill hikes. Even my life in New York has days worth recalling, brief flickers in which I’m not the tortured scion of a corporate warlord, just a young man exploring the city, marveling at its grandeur and prying at its history, getting drunk for the first time a block from where Julie lived.

  I give her the human parts of me. The parts that everyone has, in some shape and color. And when the time is right, I’ll give her the rest, and I’ll hope what we’ve built can withstand it.

  • • •

  We soar over the Narrows bridge and onto Staten Island, the ocean to the east and the shallow seas of New Jersey to the west. We curve down into Pennsylvania, a few hundred more miles of peopled land before the barren expanse of the Midwaste. Finally, sometime after midnight, Tomsen pulls off the highway onto a farm road. She drives about a mile until we’re well out of sight of the highway, then parks.

  “Okay, goodnight,” M says, lowering himself gingerly to the floor.

  “Hold up, big man,” Nora says, stepping over him to open a cabinet. “Very tough and impressive, forgetting you just got shot…” She pulls out a gallon of vodka and thumps it down on the counter. “…but we’ve got to get that mess cleaned.”

  “Your opinion as a nurse?” M grunts. “Or just a girl who wants my shirt off?”

  “Oh yeah,” Nora purrs as she unpacks Tomsen’s first-aid kit. “Nothing gets me hot like a septic gut wound.”

  M sighs and stands up. Very carefully, he pulls off his shirt. As I’ve always suspected, his bulk is more muscle than fat. Not the sharp edges of a modern bodybuilder but the round, mountainous power of an old-fashioned strongman. Still busy preparing her instruments, Nora shoots him a sideways glance that sticks just a little longer than it should, a subtle raise of the eyebrows. Then her eyes settle on his wounds, and she’s all business again.

  “Fold out that couch and lie on your back,” she tells him, and he obeys, grimacing with each movement. “Tomsen, do you have anything to put under him? It’s gonna get messy.”

>   M raises his head sharply.

  “I don’t like messy,” Tomsen says, opening a cabinet that’s crammed so full it explodes onto her, burying her in obscure equipment that she holds in place with her shoulder and forehead. “Can’t get careless out here, have to stay neat, organized, ready for anything. Cluttered house, cluttered mind.” She plung-es an arm deep into the cabinet and emerges promptly with a folded blue tarp, then body-slams everything else back inside. “Can you sit up please?” she asks M, keeping an uneasy distance from his naked torso. When he obliges, she unfurls the tarp over the couch with a single crisp motion, then retreats to the front of the RV.

  M lowers himself onto the crinkling plastic and frowns at the ceiling. “I feel like I’m in a fucking auto shop. You gonna change my oil?”

  “Something like that,” Nora says, and jabs a pair of pliers into his shoulder.

  One by one, she removes the staples that held him together during our mad dash out of Manhattan. He barely flinches, so I flinch for him, and I feel anger bubbling low in my belly. He took these bullets for Abram’s daughter. Did that man offer so much as a nod of thanks? Did he erase this gift along with a dozen others when he convinced himself he didn’t need anyone?

  “I think I’ll give you two some privacy,” Julie says, looking queasy as she watches the surgery.

  “Hell no you won’t,” Nora says, waving the bloody pliers at her. “You’re not leaving me alone in this horror show. Here.” She holds out the huge plastic vodka bottle. “Have a shot.”

  Julie hesitates. “Well, when you put it that way.”

  She takes a pull from the bottle, then offers it to me. I shake my head. Tonight is not the night to test my tolerance.

  “Tomsen?” she says.