The Living Read online

“So what brings you lot on the road?” Gael asks. “Fleeing New York, is it?”

  Julie swallows the enormity of the understatement. “Um…yeah. You?”

  Gael sighs. “We drove thousands of miles for a life in the big city and weren’t there a week before the hurricane hit. Not that we would’ve stayed long anyway.”

  Gebre shakes his head ruefully. “The rumors made it sound so perfect.”

  “Kudos to Axiom’s viral marketing department.”

  “Where are you headed now?” Julie asks, her eyes filling with sudden inspiration. “If you’re going west, we could caravan!”

  Gael shares a weighty look with Gebre. “We can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “We’d slow you down. Going to be a wee bit scattered.” Gael’s eyes drop to his plate. “We’re looking for someone we lost.”

  The cloud that gathers over him spreads to his husband and seems to shadow Julie as well, smothering her excitement. A reminder that people aren’t on these roads to meet new friends. A reminder that neither are we.

  “Oh,” she says, sinking back into our booth. “Yeah. We lost a few too.”

  A brief quaver as she rolls over the topic, like the bump of a body in the road.

  “What’s your accent?” Nora blurts, staring at Gebre, and I realize how uncharacteristically quiet she’s been throughout this exchange. She watches the couple with an expression I can’t read.

  “Boston,” Gebre says with a raised eyebrow. “By way of Somalia. Why?”

  Nora shrugs, shakes her head, blinks several times.

  There’s an awkwardly long silence. M squirms, then heaves himself out of the booth and stretches noisily, trying to bring the party to a close. And he’s right. A humming tension has crept into the air. It’s time to go.

  Julie gives Gael and Gebre a deflated little wave as we all exit the booth. “Well…good luck, you guys.”

  “You too, Julie,” Gael says with a sad smile.

  “If you find your friend and you want to start that caravan, well…” There’s a subdued desperation in her eyes. “…keep an eye out for us?”

  “Wild guess,” Gebre says, pointing out the window at the RV. “The yellow submarine is yours?”

  “Her name is Barbara,” Tomsen says, a little defensively.

  “Should not be hard to spot.” He smiles and flashes us all a peace sign. “Good luck, new friends. Maybe we see you in Utopia.”

  • • •

  We load the barrels of fryer oil onto the roof rack and stuff the RV’s fridge full of takeout boxes, then we’re rattling down the highway again. But despite the sunny start to this day, the bliss of breakfast and conversation with strangers, a heavy silence hangs over us. Everyone stares out the windows at the blur of passing hills, and I glance from face to face, trying to read their troubles. M’s I know. Nora’s I’m beginning to suspect. And Tomsen’s are too numerous to name. So I settle on Julie. I watch dark clouds pass across her face though the sky outside is blue. How many losses does she blame herself for? Has she added Sprout and my kids to her list? Did she count her mother twice? She’s convicted herself of so many crimes, maybe nothing less than saving the world will absolve her.

  And then I have to wonder: if she sets the price that high for her tiny sins of omission…what could ever repay mine?

  “What’s that?” Julie whispers, and for a horrifying second I wonder if I’ve been thinking aloud. But then I see it. A strange shape ahead. A twisted mass of metal slumped against the highway embankment.

  A bus.

  A New York City bus, its markings half-covered in faded decals…an ad for a show about sharks.

  It’s the bus that took my children, and it’s lying on its side like roadkill, shattered and bent and crushed.

  Joan and Alex are not my offspring. They have none of my genetic material and I have never seen the woman who birthed them. I did not even raise them, never filled their heads with my words and ways like little Arks of the Covenant, commanding them to carry me forever. So I find it wondrous that I love them anyway. These tiny strangers who bumped into me in an airport, looked up at me and smiled. Like so much of love, this is a miracle. A small act of defiance against nature’s brutal physics.

  And yet as I scramble up the side of the overturned bus and drop down through a shattered window, I find myself wondering how to switch it off. If I see what I’m afraid I’m about to see…do I really have to feel it too?

  There are bodies in the bus. A man with a gut wound and a chunk of metal through his skull. A man with a bite on his leg, a gun in his hand, and a bullet in his head.

  No one else.

  A rush of warmth replaces my desperate calculations. I hop back down to my waiting friends. “Empty.”

  “What happened?” Julie wonders.

  “The kids,” I say, permitting myself a morbid smile at the thought of the guards’ wounds. “I think…they fought.”

  “But where are they?”

  M is walking the perimeter of the crash, scanning the ground with military focus. “Driver escaped.” He studies the debris on the pavement, the indentations in the grassy embankment. “Kids scattered.” He leans down, squints, touches the dirt. “Except…three. Group of three went together.”

  “That’s them, right?” Julie says. “Joan, Alex, and Sprout? They would’ve stayed together.”

  M follows the footprints—or whatever it is a tracker tracks—for a few yards, then stops. “Four now.” A faint note of anxiety enters his voice. “Another kid. Barefoot.”

  Tomsen is still at the wheel of the RV and she idles along behind us as we follow M down the highway. The tracks lead up the embankment and stay there, as if ready to jump into the bushes at the first sign of pursuers. That had to be Sprout’s forethought. She must be leading them. But to where?

  After about a mile, M traces the tracks onto a highway offshoot and stops. He looks into the distance, where the wilderness road becomes an urban arterial. “They went down there.”

  “Highway One,” Nora murmurs. “That’s…” She turns abruptly and hops into the RV, and we follow her. “They’re going to DC.”

  “DC was the Fire Church’s favorite target,” Tomsen says. “They were blasting away at it right up until the collapse. Been empty for years.”

  “The kids don’t know that. They’re just trying to find people.” Nora drops into the passenger seat and slaps her thighs. “Let’s go.”

  “Tomsen,” Julie says with a certain reluctance. “Is it empty? Or just exed?”

  “Are you asking if there’s a hive? In a vacant city walking distance to a population center?”

  Julie frowns. “Maybe…?”

  “Is the sky gray? Is the Pope dead? Does a bear shit in the White House?”

  “So that’s a yes.”

  “Yes. There are many, many zombies in Washington Dead City.”

  Julie looks at me. I look at the floor, my guts knotting.

  Nora kicks the dashboard. “I said let’s go!”

  • • •

  The cold morning has matured into a full-boil summer afternoon. The sun hovers directly overhead, turning the RV into a barbecue, and I feel my skin getting slick with sweat. I should be thrilled to see my body resuming its Living functions—I am very nearly normal—but my concerns have moved outside of myself. All I can think about is Joan and Alex and tiny, worried Sprout wandering into town looking for adults to keep them safe, and finding a swarm of self-gratifying monsters instead. Are my kids at least still Dead enough to be ignored? Or will their hard-earned steps toward life be turned against them?

  No one speaks as we travel up this dry artery into America’s stilled heart. Vine-choked suburbs give way to the beige boxes of retail, all bright colors long since bleached away, sidewalk trees and other caged flora baked to death by the hot concre
te, advertisements faded to blue-hued ghosts of impossibly happy people, faint mouths grinning through the haze.

  As far as I can see, the city is a silent tableau, and I begin to wonder if Tomsen’s information might be faulty. I see no signs of the super-hive she implied; it feels as empty as Detroit. I watch the windows of apartments blur past us, flashes of dark bedrooms, moldy kitchens, a face—I pull back with a grunt.

  Sunken eyes follow me as we fly past. A man standing at his window, watching the street. And now that I know where to look, I start to see more of them. Not massed together like herds of animals. Huddled in their homes, watching their televisions or the street outside, as if awaiting news.

  “Something’s different,” Tomsen says, squinting into the buildings around us. “Why aren’t they swarming? Hunting? I’ve never seen a hive like this.”

  I remember a quaint neighborhood on the outskirts of Post. A cul-de-sac of crumbling houses. A quiet man named B, and hundreds of others like him, and I mumble:

  “I have.”

  • • •

  As we enter the historic part of town, I begin to see more signs of the Fire Church’s efforts, but their work is oddly spotty. Individual buildings blackened, half a block here and there, but none of the scorched-earth devastation I remember. Perhaps the capitol put up more of a fight than the sad little towns they were used to. Not that it mattered in the end. The capitol is dead, all its grand endeavors erased, just like the Church promised. Whether by fire or subtler ruin, the point gets made.

  But I wonder how their dogma has adapted to the Dead. What do they make of the aftermath of their work here, this booming population that’s not at all bothered by the loss of its comforts and not at all interested in the Church’s reasons for taking them? These people who simply are?

  The density increases as we approach the city center and small swarms appear in the weedy lawns of various monuments. But even these are oddly subdued. Almost focused. They don’t shuffle around in vague orbits, waiting to detect human flesh. They stand and stare at the ground and even at the sky, that gaping mouth of an unknown god that’s always about to swallow them.

  The knot in my gut begins to relax, warming with cautious hope. If this is the assembly that met the kids, they may have passed through freely. They may even have found friends.

  “Last time I visited,” Tomsen says, “there was a steady flow of hunting parties going into Baltimore and the surrounding camps. They were stockpiling flesh. It was a busy place, almost industrialized.” She watches a woman standing alone in the Reflecting Pool, staring at its bone-dry bottom. “But this I don’t understand. No signs of feeding. They should all have starved to full-death.”

  “Maybe the rules aren’t as rigid as we think,” Julie says, and glances at me.

  We drive deeper into the white marble carnival of American pageantry. The sun blazes off Egyptian obelisks and Roman columns, an empire’s monuments to its invincibility built in the styles of fallen empires. The White House is now just a white house. Barely even that with its pillars and doorways scorched by the flames that gutted it. But I’m surprised the Fire Church wasn’t more thorough. Surprised they didn’t come back to finish the job once the government was gone. For a group seeking to scour the earth of its pretensions toward progress, there could be no bigger target than the very symbol of civic ambition. I see a few of their slogans graffitied on the walls, but they’re lost among the thousands of other tags, the disgust of an entire nation hurled like rotten fruit at the government’s face. Perhaps a pillory is exactly what Paul Bark had in mind when he chose to leave the place standing. A public humiliation instead of the usual obliteration, driving the point a little deeper: none of this is coming back.

  “Where am I going?” Tomsen asks the rear view mirror. “Should I just drive down random streets until we run over the children? That will take a long time. Guidance welcome.”

  No one offers any. A hush hangs over us as we tour this haunted city. Julie is looking at Nora like she wants to ask her something, but Nora is far away, staring through the windshield with blank, round eyes that don’t track the passing scenery. Their only movement is a barely perceptible twitching.

  “14th,” she blurts suddenly. Her voice is distant, like she’s transcribing a dream. “North on 14th. Ten blocks. Then right on U Street.”

  Tomsen takes the cue without question. We head north on 14th.

  M sits on the edge of the couch, watching Nora. She never looks back, so he watches the back of her head, looking into her cloud of curls as if searching for a ticking bomb. I’ve seen him weather countless mortal dangers with a stoic grimace. I’ve never seen real fear on his face. It frightens me.

  WE

  Nora Greene has a strange way of reading.

  We find her crouched in a dim aisle of the Library, books scattered at her feet. She picks one up, skims it, drops it, grabs another, throws it aside. Then she’s in another room, another hall, up on the ladder, down in the basement. She appears to be looking for something, but in fact she’s looking for nothing. She avoids fiction, music, poetry, art. She looks for magazines, textbooks, history, science. Things that will chat with her through the door without asking to come in.

  But the uninvited guest keeps sneaking inside. She opens a volume of economic statistics and finds a feature about a family’s escape from a burning city. She flips through a book on human anatomy and finds a chapter titled “The Big Man.” She opens a travel magazine and finds a photo of a girl and a boy with a caption that says:

  Find us.

  Her scream echoes through endless halls, scribbling grief into the margins of every book.

  “Nora,” Marcus says. “Can I ask you something?”

  Blackened houses drift past like sinister temples. The fires traveled well in Little Ethiopia. Some buildings are reduced to mounds of charcoal, others are merely scorched, but no part of the neighborhood escaped untouched. Nora hears sirens. Helicopters. Police and firefighters drowned out by a voice booming over loudspeakers, warning her of what’s coming, urging her to accept it, let go, surrender to the peace of God’s plan. And a woman—a white woman with Nora’s brows, Nora’s jaw, Nora’s long legs—running through the streets shouting, Amen! Amen! Lord take us home!

  “Nora?”

  “What.” It comes out with difficulty. A feeling of choking.

  “Your family…you said you didn’t have one. What’d you mean?”

  She doesn’t answer. She watches the buildings get sootier as the RV approaches U Street and she hears a voice somewhere in the distance. Not the woman’s. A boy’s voice. Small and high and too far away to understand. But she knows it’s calling her.

  “Where did you grow up?” Marcus asks. His tone is strangely insistent, and Nora feels anger coiling in her.

  “Why?” she says with the bluntness of a crowbar. She sees the melted sign of Dukem Restaurant, where her parents first met. She sees the blasted entryway of the habesha grocery where her father used to work. She sees the pile of ash that was the community center where she spent so much of her childhood. “Here,” she says without looking at him. “I grew up here.”

  She feels something pushing at the side of her vision, like a reel of film trying to overlap the one currently playing. She fights it. She feels Julie’s eyes on her, watching with mounting concern, and she opens her mouth for a joke or lighthearted quip to make everyone comfortable again, but she finds herself utterly empty of these things. She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes—a shadow reaches toward her—she opens them wide and begins to breathe hard.

  “Nora?” Julie says.

  The voice is closer. She can almost discern the words.

  “I didn’t really have a hometown,” Marcus says at a weirdly high volume, like he’s forcing a panicked shout into the tone of casual chit chat. “Dad was Navy. Moved every year, so not much chance to make frien
ds. Just me and my brothers, town after town. Did you…” His voice cracks. He sounds terrified. “Did you have any siblings, Nora?”

  R puts a hand on his shoulder and shakes his head, don’t. That strange, lanky ghoul and his gigantic friend. Tall man. Big man. Two corpses walking and talking, lives and deaths and new lives. Time doesn’t flow; it’s a solid mass. It’s here all at once, tripping over itself.

  “Did you have a brother?” Marcus pleads, and R pulls him back, muttering admonitions.

  But Nora doesn’t register the questions. She is listening to someone else. A voice that’s loud now but still unintelligible, like a scrambled radio signal. She is watching a burnt building grow nearer and she’s shrinking back against her seat. It looms ahead like a monster in a dream; she tries to run away but she can’t turn around; she floats forward, locked on a track.

  She is standing in the dead grass outside the burnt building, staring up at its crumbled plaster frame, its bright green paint peeled and scorched, its windows empty and black. She hears people talking behind her, questions and warnings and urgent entreaties, but she doesn’t know these people. They are from a distant, unimaginable future, and a voice from right now is calling her.

  She steps through the doorway of the apartment where she lives. Her boots crunch on the charred wood staircase and a few steps crack under her, but she ascends. She passes the doors of the neighbors she’s never met, a community of hunched shoulders disappearing around corners. She passes the window where she practices her aim, shooting BBs at birds in the birch across the street, hating her accuracy when they fall to the ground but telling herself it’s necessary, because sooner or later her parents will fail her, and she’ll have to take care of herself.

  No. Not just herself.

  She hears the voice, very close now, just behind the last door. She doesn’t want to go in. Her heart is pounding and she can’t catch her breath, but the door is open. She smells frankincense and coffee. The voice is sad and alone. It’s been waiting for her.

  She steps into her family’s apartment.