The Living Read online

  There is a void sitting on the sofa.

  She feels everything in her trying to run away, and yet she doesn’t run away. She wonders how this can be. If everything in her says run, what is left to say otherwise?

  We are learning how to speak.

  We can’t shout, but we can whisper. We can’t push, but we can nudge. We can slip truths between pages until finally she reads them.

  Nora stands in front of the void and croaks a name.

  “Addis?”

  Her brother looks up at her. Her brother is here, sitting on the sofa.

  Nora sways on her feet. Her vision blurs in and out. How? After all these years, how? It can’t be real. He can’t be here.

  “Addis?” She stumbles closer. She reaches toward him. “Are you…”

  She touches his cheek. His skin is cool, but he’s here. His eyes are strange, but he’s here.

  “Addis, it’s me, it’s—”

  It’s hard for her to speak. Her throat is full of warm water. “It’s Nora, your sister, do you…?”

  She sees a distance in his gaze, not quite recognition. But he’s here. The hole in his shoulder that started this, the bite just above that finished it—both wounds are dry, and there is fresh blood smeared on his mouth, and Nora knows what all of that means. But he’s here. Perhaps not Living, but not gone. His yellow eyes regard her with curiosity…and something else. Some distant tremor of feeling.

  It’s enough.

  Nora collapses to her knees and embraces her brother. Sobs burst out of her in waves; tears stream from her closed eyes and soak her brother’s neck. If he bites her, so be it. If she joins him in whatever foggy limbo he inhabits, so be it. They will wander it together.

  The boy’s name is Addis.

  We draw lines between his scattered volumes, connecting them with his sister’s, and we smile. Two tiny parts of our vast body, a brother and a sister, severed and now reattached. The average temperature of the universe rises a degree.

  “Addis, I’m sorry,” Nora sobs. “I’m so sorry.”

  His arms are limp at his sides. His face is tight with confusion. But when Nora finally releases him, he stares into her eyes, frowning in concentration, and raises one hand. It trembles in the air for a moment, as if about to fall. Then it brushes Nora’s face.

  We dwell in this moment for as long as we can, wrapping it around us like a warm blanket. Then, with great reluctance, we step back into the cold river of time.

  Nora hears footsteps creaking on the staircase.

  A chill rises in her spine and she stands up, wipes her eyes, steps in front of her brother.

  The big man enters her home.

  I

  “M,” I hiss. “Don’t.”

  He moves toward the scorched building like he’s being dragged. “Have to,” he mutters. “Have to be there… Have to explain.”

  I look to Julie for help but she’s staring at the top window with a preoccupied frown. Tomsen is busy with her scooter, cranking it down from its rack to ready it for a tour of DC. Neither of them seem to share my concerns, and I can’t even define what they are. All I know is I don’t like the coldness in Nora’s eyes and I don’t like the fear in M’s, and I don’t want them anywhere near each other.

  “Julie,” I say. “Is this Nora’s house?”

  “I don’t know. She never talks about her childhood.”

  “But I’ve heard you…”

  “I know she grew up in DC and I know her parents abandoned her in Seattle, and that’s about it. Took me years to pry that much out.” She takes a step toward the building, then reconsiders. “She has this recurring nightmare about a wolf in a playground. It always makes her get weird for a while, but this…”

  I grit my teeth as M climbs the steps to the entryway. “So she wants to be alone right now, right?”

  Julie seems to wake up, just now realizing M’s intent. “Oh. Marcus! Yeah, definitely don’t go in there.”

  He steps through the door and onto the staircase.

  “Hey! You really don’t want to bother her when she’s like this.”

  He disappears into the sooty blackness.

  “Fucking idiot,” Julie says, throwing up her hands. “No idea what she sees in him.”

  I run after my fucking idiot friend. At the top of the stairs, the floor is covered in a layer of dust so thick it’s almost soil. The sun pours through gaping holes in the burnt roof, painting golden bars on the clusters of moss and weeds. But a trail of footprints has destroyed much of this newborn landscape, and I don’t have to be a tracker to recognize these tracks: a woman and a man and four children.

  I see my friend standing in the doorway. Over his shoulder, I see Nora. Her eyes are red. Wet. Round. And behind her: a small Dead boy who bears her a striking resemblance.

  “No,” M whispers. “No, no.”

  “You,” Nora says.

  “Nora, I’m…”

  “You,” Nora says.

  “I’m so…sorry. Didn’t…remember. I’m so—”

  A throaty scream rips out of Nora, a knot of grief and rage and confusion tangled and pulled tight.

  She lunges at M.

  He stumbles back into the hall and I hear the fleshy thumps of her fists slamming into him. Not the hooks and jabs of an honest fistfight, not clean punches to sturdy targets like the belly and the jaw—she hits him in dangerous places. The temples. The throat. The wounds she just finished stitching.

  She is trying to kill him.

  And I am paralyzed, because I don’t understand what’s happening. He is nearly twice her size and could fit both her fists in one gorilla palm, but his hands hang at his sides. He does nothing to stop or even soften her blows. And not because she is too weak to hurt him—she is hurting him. He gasps and chokes and reels backward, then finally collapses, but Nora doesn’t stop. She straddles his chest and pummels his face over and over, and the whole time he just looks at her, his dark red blood mixing with tears.

  “Nora! Stop!”

  Julie rushes up the stairs behind me and tackles her friend, knocking her onto the dusty floor. For a moment I’m certain Nora will attack Julie; her face is contorted and her bloody fist is cocked and I wrench myself free of my paralysis to intervene. But she regains just enough control to convert her punch into a violent shove. Julie tumbles off her and Nora jumps up, runs into the apartment, and emerges with the boy in tow. She lingers for just a moment over M, and I see the red mist clearing from her eyes, leaving a sort of numb horror. Then she rushes the boy down the steps like the building is still on fire, burning all these years and forever.

  I hear Tomsen’s voice from outside. “You’re bloody. What happened? Who’s that? Is he Dead? He looks like you. Hey. What are you doing?”

  I hear a small motor starting up, revving, fading into the distance.

  Then I hear a voice from the apartment behind me, soft and scared. “Julie?”

  Sprout stands huddled in the doorway. Joan and Alex are behind her.

  Julie staggers to her feet and kneels in front of Sprout, breathing hard. “Are you okay?”

  Sprout hesitates, then throws herself into Julie’s arms.

  “Our friend,” Alex says, gazing sadly at the empty stairwell.

  “She took our friend,” Joan says.

  They come out into the hall and stand next to me, looking down at M. His right eye is already swelling shut. His left opens to a narrow crack, glistening with tears. He pulls in a shuddering breath and sits up.

  I hug my children. They hug me back. They are warm.

  • • •

  I emerge from the building with M’s arm draped over my shoulder, keeping him balanced as he totters and sways, grimacing with each step.

  “That’s why she was bloody,” Tomsen says, nodding as if this answers all her que
stions.

  While Julie tends to the kids, I lower M onto the RV’s rear bed and gingerly lift his shirt. His wounds are inflamed and seeping blood, but most of the stitches are still in place.

  “You okay?” I ask him in lieu of a medical examination.

  He lets out a slow groan. Pain and regret and disgust. “Do you remember now?” he says. “The boy?”

  I find a few glimpses of the boy’s face in my fog. A muted presence hovering behind my kids as they tried to redeem the airport, watching them tape photos to the windows in a childlike attempt to remind the Dead of life, observing but not quite participating in their noble arts and crafts.

  And before that…faint flickers. A long walk. His hand held in bony fingers while grinning skulls taught him to kill.

  “I remember a little.”

  M rolls his head back and forth on the pillow. “I killed her brother.” His voice is choked, not just from the swelling in his throat. “Once I saw him…it all came back. Bright and loud.” He closes his eyes. “Wanted her to kill me. She deserved to.”

  I watch Julie buckling the kids onto the couch. Their bus debacle gave them a few new cuts and bruises to go with the ones from the plane crash—all they need now is a shipwreck to complete their collection—but they appear mostly unhurt.

  I hear Sprout asking about her father and Julie struggling to explain. Your father went looking for you and now he’s gone. Your father is lost and broken, and you are rapidly realizing it.

  Unhurt? No. No one here is unhurt.

  “I used to be Axiom Management,” I tell M, very softly. “I’m Mr. Atvist’s grandson.”

  He says nothing, but even his swollen left eye widens a little.

  “We’ve all been monsters. We’ve all toured Hell.” I give his good shoulder a slap. “But now we’re here.”

  I return to the front.

  “She went north on 16th,” Tomsen is telling Julie. “Probably toward 495 if she’s still sane.” She cocks her head. “Is she still sane? Looked like maybe not.”

  Julie slips into the passenger seat and doesn’t answer. She looks back at me. “That was her brother, wasn’t it.”

  I nod.

  “And I’m guessing Marcus…?”

  I nod.

  “She never told me she had a brother.”

  She stares through the windshield at the burnt wreckage of Nora’s home. Tomsen starts the engine and pulls onto 16th. A single tire track cuts through the ash on the pavement.

  “I can’t say I know what she’s feeling right now,” Julie says, watching the trail veer from lane to lane, “but I know what it’s like when someone you buried comes back. It’s not a sane thing.”

  The ash thins on the outskirts of town, but before the trail disappears, it shoots up the 495 onramp, heading west.

  Julie’s voice drops to a whisper. “Where are you going, Nora?”

  WE

  Our books cannot be burned.

  They can be lost, abandoned, taped up in boxes; their pages can be pulled out, scribbled on, crumpled up and tossed into dark corners; they can be locked in a vault and withheld from everyone, even their authors. But they cannot be burned. Wherever they are hidden, they remain there, their words unchangeable, waiting to be found and read again.

  So Nora is writing a new draft to replace them. She is trapped in a house, surrounded by monsters, but this time she escapes unharmed. This time she kills the monsters. This time she saves her brother. She doesn’t wander for years, alone and adrift, looking for someone she can’t remember—a vague ache in her chest, a sourceless sadness that never leaves. This time her brother is with her, sitting on her lap, clinging to the handlebars of this sputtering scooter. He is not a void in a dream, a shadow playing in a sandbox while a lupine hellmouth opens up behind him. He is Addis.

  According to calendars and math, Addis is fourteen years old, but he looks the same as the day she lost him. Seven years of resisting the plague’s rot, holding this impossible balance, and now here he is: a boy frozen in time. Nora wonders who he is inside. Did his mind halt, too? Is he still the fragile, good-hearted child she remembers? Or is he more?

  It takes a long time for her thoughts to return to earth. She doesn’t know how many miles she’s traveled by the time she realizes she’s traveling. She is on a highway, pushing the scooter’s engine to its limit, but who is pursuing her?

  Did she kill someone who cared about her? Did she abandon all her friends?

  She buries these distressing thoughts—an ability she retains despite her recent exhumations—and focuses on the road. She is aware that she’s going west. Something important is waiting for her in the west. A task. A home. Some kind of future. Her present feels fragmentary, shattered and scattered by this explosion of memory, but it will come back to her. For now, she has only one concern, and he’s sitting on her lap, his dry, dusty hair like wool against her throat.

  The whining engine makes talking to him impossible, but he seems calm, so she sets her questions aside and tries to follow his example. She tries to enjoy the feeling of the warm wind in her face, the pleasant tug on her scalp as her hair forms a parachute. She tries not to feel the pain in her knuckles or see the blood spattered on her clothes.

  • • •

  After a few hours, the engine begins to gasp. Nora forces herself to look down at the light that’s been blinking for a while and finds exactly what she feared: the tank is empty.

  She pulls off on the next exit and feathers the throttle, coaxing as much distance as possible before the engine dies in a puff of fry-scented exhaust. Her boots hit the ground with a dry crunch. She looks up, hoping to find herself in a populated area with some possibility of help, but that would be too much luck. It’s one of those roadside blips that may or may not have a name. Inexplicable encampments floating in the vacuum between towns, a lone gas station surrounded by a few moldy houses; no industry, no schools, no fathomable reason to be here. A place where the end of civilization didn’t change a thing.

  She helps Addis off the scooter and stands next to him, surveying the dusty ruins. “Well, Addy,” she says, “here we are again.” She laughs at the sound of her voice, the sound of her brother’s nickname filling the air after so many years in storage. “Just like the bad old days.”

  He looks up at her with those unsettling yellow eyes. The same color as R’s and Julie’s during that moment of geysering hope when anything and everything seemed possible. The same color as the Gleam, which feels distant and imaginary now, though it was a fact of her daily life less than a month ago.

  “Are you still you?” Nora asks him. “Do you remember anything?”

  He doesn’t answer, but his stare isn’t blank. It’s not the gape of a mindless corpse; it’s the searching gaze of a philosopher. The same unquenchable curiosity she remembers, but the questions have gone internal.

  “All right,” she says. “I see you thinking. Good enough for me.”

  It bubbles up suddenly, an uncontainable joy. The absurdity. The impossibility. She is talking to her brother.

  She starts wheeling the scooter toward the gas station, hoping for another miracle. Addis remains where she placed him, watching her walk away.

  “You coming?” she says. “Or are you gonna stand there like a dumb-ass?”

  He considers this like it’s a profound question, then he follows her.

  • • •

  The pumps look too dry to bother with but the repair garage is still locked, always a good sign. She kicks the glass out of the office door and opens it. Rows of dusty snacks; rock-hard chewing gum, disintegrating jerky, and neon orange chips that are probably still edible. Addis picks up a bag of Teddy Grahams and stares at the packaging, bleached silvery white by the sun. He tears it open. He looks inside. He pours its powdery contents onto the floor and drops the bag with a distant frown.

&
nbsp; “Sorry Addy,” Nora says, fighting confused tears. “Snacks later.”

  The garage is a scrapyard of rusty car parts and oily rags. She finds a barrel marked DIESEL, but a hard kick makes it ring like a gong. Of course it’s empty. Why would anything in this place be full?

  She is preparing herself to face a grim reality—that they will have to either continue on foot or risk hitchhiking in a world trained to shoot her brother on sight—when she hears a noise. A distant snarl of tires on gravel. She experiences an emotional paradox:

  My friends are here, and I’m terrified. I must get away from my friends.

  She hides behind a stack of tires and watches the dust cloud approach. But it’s not her friends. It’s a boxy, armored bank truck hauling a horse trailer. She catches a glimpse of three young people as the truck rolls by: a woman and two men in their early twenties. She steps out of the garage and watches them drive the short distance to the edge of town, where they stop at a train crossing, turn around, and back the trailer up to the tracks.

  She watches them climb out of the truck. The woman is thin and pretty, the men tall and handsome in their slim jeans and chambray shirts, trimmed beards and neat haircuts. They laugh and shove each other while the sun glows on their light tan skin and Nora thinks of beach parties and barbecues, mountain cabins and crowded campfires, a lush LOTUS vignette filling her with emptiness.

  She takes Addis’s hand and rolls the scooter toward the truck. She stops at a safe distance and waits.

  The youths all freeze when they see her, then the driver waves. “Hey there!” he says, flashing a big smile. “Didn’t expect to meet any friends way out here. Everything okay?”

  She doesn’t answer. The man’s eyes dart to the blood on her hands for half a second but his smile doesn’t waver. “Need any help?”

  Nora can’t find any answer except the truth. “Yes.”

  During this exchange, the three youths have closed the gap she placed between them, subtly gliding into conversational range.

  “What’s your name?” the woman asks with a warm smile. Either she’s a true natural beauty or she has a stash of makeup somewhere, because her face is creamy perfect like the models in old magazines.