The Burning World Page 8

  I close my eyes, hoping for saltwater to ease their sudden burn. When I open them again, the bartender is looking at me. I slide him another hundred.

  • • •

  “R?”

  My name hits me like a splash of cold water and I peel my face off the bar. The room spins for a moment before I can anchor it down and bring Julie into focus.

  “What are you doing here?” she says. Her eyes are bright blue beacons in the blur of the bar, wide and worried.

  “Drinking.” I don’t know how many times I’ve emptied the glass in front of me; it could’ve been just twice, but my body is still defining its limits and I do believe I’m drunk.

  “What the hell, R, what happened with the meeting? I still haven’t heard from Rosy, why didn’t you come find me?”

  I can see that she’s upset. I can see that it’s strange, me coming here to drink alone in the middle of a crisis. I can see that she is beautiful, her strawberry lips and blueberry eyes, the peach fuzz on her cheeks. I can see the television behind her. The disorienting montage of unrelated images. A few plays of football, a few airbrushed models, a juicy tenderloin, a cute baby, a syrupy quote from a pop philosopher with a stock-footage sunrise behind it.

  “R!”

  The basement door that insists it’s not there. The coat of white plaster and all the cracks creeping through it. When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar! When it’s aflame! When it’s asunder! A polite laugh track from a classic sitcom whose cast died decades ago; fat, stupid men with gorgeous wives.

  Julie sits down next to me. Which trope are we? The gun-toting teenage orphan and her hapless amnesiac boyfriend? Where is the box we can climb into? It’s cold out here.

  She touches my arm. “R. Are you okay? What happened?”

  “I left him with them,” I hear myself saying. “They’re not what they say. They want to eat us and I left him with them.”

  “They want to eat us? What are you talking about?”

  “I know them,” I mumble. “I know them, I know them.”

  No one in the Orchard is watching me anymore. At some point after the initial shock of my entrance, they all drifted back to their conversations, or to their blank study of the televisions flashing that nerve-shredding culture collage from every spare nook in the room. A quote over a shot of hand-shaking businessmen, read aloud for any illiterates in the room: Don’t ask what’s in it for you. Ask what you’re in it for.

  A shirtless rock climber. Some fluffy clouds. A Corvette.

  I reach for my glass and try to coax a final drop onto my tongue.

  Julie snatches it out of my hand and slides it down the bar. “R, stop it! I need you to focus. Slow down and tell me what’s happening. Should I alert Security?”

  “They know. Evan Kenerly was there. They made us all leave. They know we can’t say no. They know we’re scared.” My hands tremble on the bar. I pull out my last hundred and shove it at the bartender. “Another.”

  Julie grabs the bill and stuffs it in her pocket.

  “I need another!” My voice . . . I’ve never heard it so loud. It trembles in time with my hands. The TVs are screaming at me. A baseball highlight reel cuts to the middle of an R&B chorus, a wailing, showboating singer doing vocal runs. “They’re liars, they’re going to eat everything we built, they’re—”

  Julie takes my face in her hands and kisses me. My lips don’t move, but she puts passion into it, kissing like she’s kissing her lover instead of the stiff, open-eyed face of a lunatic. The noise around me softens. The noise inside me softens. The room stops spinning and centers around the lovely face pressed hard against mine, our brains as close to touching as they can ever get.

  She pulls back and locks her eyes on me, still holding my face.

  “Focus on my eyes, okay?” she whispers. “Just look at my eyes and take a few breaths.”

  I look at her eyes. They are huge and round and the bar’s lights reflect in their blue centers like distant stars. I take a breath.

  “Breathing is good,” she says. “It’s soothing. I know it’s new to you, but try to remember. Breathe and think about breathing.”

  My focus narrows until everything behind her is a blur. I think about breathing. My lungs are still sore from years of disuse, but they’re slowly warming up and resuming their duties, extracting pure, sweet O2 and sending it to my brain to power Living thoughts. Whatever dark fuel my brain once used was better suited to commands and urges than the lovely complexity of a human personality, human hopes and dreams.

  I have these, I tell myself as I float in the muteness of space, holding on to Julie like a tether. I am allowed these. No one can take them.

  “Good,” she says. “Keep breathing. We’re going to be okay. Whatever this is, we can handle it. We don’t have anything we can’t live without.”

  “Can we leave?” I say during a slow exhalation. “Do we need this city?”

  “Where would we go?”

  “Far away. A cabin in the hills. Just us.”

  “R,” she says, and the tone in that one syllable is enough to reveal the cowardice of my question. “We don’t need the city, but we need the people. And they need us.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re trying to build something, remember? You’re the one who told me we can’t run away.”

  My face sags into her grip. “But I’m tired.”

  “You’re not tired,” she says with a wry smile. “You’re just drunk.”

  She releases my face and I drift. My eyes roam the bar, tracing the faces of the patrons as they stare up at the five TVs, their skin tinted gray by the glow of the screens.

  “R?” Julie says, trying to pull me back to earth. “Can you tell me what happened at the meeting?”

  A late-era rap song: boasts about wealth and luxury delivered with a grim wink over a distant, desolate beat that may have been played on trash cans.

  “Rosy’s walkie is off. Should we check on him? It’s been two hours.”

  A staticky fuzz begins to creep into the audio from the TVs, drowning out the rapper’s mournful fantasies.

  “Where was the meeting? At the community center?”

  I twist my neck to look at the nearest screen. The audio has been completely replaced by static and now the image begins to stutter—the rapper opens a briefcase; it’s full of money; he sets it on fire and warms his hands—the image goes black.

  A howl of protest rises from everyone in the room. Someone throws a tumbler at the TV, misses, hits the liquor shelf. Whiskey and glass sprinkles the bar. But the screen remains black for only a few seconds. It flickers, there’s a loud pop, and a new image appears.

  A grainy security camera feed, a fish-eye lens gazing down at a man in a white shirt tinkering with a large instrument panel. Another man in a white shirt is faintly visible in the shadows, and ‘Captain’ Timothy Balt stands between them, looking uncertain for the first time since I’ve known him.

  “What is this place?” he says, glancing into the shadows around them. “How’d you know this was down here?”

  The man at the panel notices something in front of him and his eyes dart up to the camera, the fish-eye lens warping his face into a bulbous horror. He pulls a cable out of a nearby jack and the image goes black again.

  “What the hell’s going on . . . ?” Julie says.

  A harsh squeal erupts from all the TVs, and while everyone covers their ears, something flashes on the screen. It’s there for barely a single frame, too brief for me to fully grasp, but my brain rings like a gong. I see the door again, its rusty metal corners poking out behind crumbling plaster. I hear the drone behind the door, the churning throb of sub-audible bass rumbling up from the basement, rattling the door in its frame, sending chips of plaster flying off like popcorn.

  My eyes squeeze shut. My mind is dark and the image blinks in the shadows with maddening brevity, its contours just out of reach, teasing me. I feel my hand moving.

  “R . . . ?”


  I grab a martini glass and smash it against the bar. I grip the stem like a dagger.

  “R! What the fuck!”

  I hear the scrape of her stool as she jumps away from me. I’m frightening her. I was so sure I’d never frighten her again. Memories of airports and screams and smears of black blood fill my head as my hand moves.

  Jagged concentric shapes. Angles swallowing angles. A grotesque mandala with nothing in its center.

  I open my eyes.

  I have carved a design—a logo—into the surface of the bar. Its deep lines cut through lovers’ initials.

  The door rattles.

  “Atvist,” my mouth says.

  The door cracks open.

  A TALL BUILDING. A dim room. An old man. A grin.

  A briefcase. A plan. I hesitate. I accept.

  I board a plane. I watch a screen. A nature show. A worm and a wasp. I watch. I recoil. I keep watching.

  The worm burrows into the wasp. The worm seizes its brain. Tells it where to fly. Feeds on its guts. Builds a home out of its corpse. The worm is small, clever, twisted, mad. The worm wins. The worm knows no beauty, no pleasure, no purpose. The worm knows nothing but what it does. The worm wins and the worm feasts. Wasps, wolves, poets, presidents. The worm feasts.

  “Trust me, kid.” Brown teeth. Spotted gums. A bony hand on my shoulder. “I know my business.”

  • • •

  “R!”

  The sting of a slap. Frightened blue eyes searching for mine in the darkness. I slam the basement door shut and pull the Orchard back into view, and in all the shadowy fragments spinning through my mind, I see one clear imperative.

  I shake Julie off me and I run.

  “R, stop!”

  I shove the heavy door open, knocking over two soldiers who topple back into the deck railing. Julie is in the doorway, calling to me, but I can’t stop. I run, stumbling, gripping the cables to keep from falling off the catwalk, slipping down the staircase and caroming off the walls, finally bursting out into the street. I feel my badly lubricated joints creaking, my stiff ligaments protesting as I push them into a sprint.

  The surprising weight of the briefcase. The cold metal in my hands. The decision I insisted I hadn’t made.

  I see the Armory door at the end of the street. Towers of metal and plywood loom over me like judges, but I’m so close. I can fix my mistake before anyone notices. I can—

  A flash. A hammer of air.

  I’m flying.

  The moon glares down at me as I sail backward, arms spinning, a lazy summertime float down the river. Is this still your preferred position? the moon asks me. On your back and half-asleep, drifting away from the fight?

  I hit the wall of an apartment and crash through the sheet metal into a child’s bedroom. A girl jumps up in her bed and I see her face contort into a squeal of terror, but it’s silent. I hear only the high ringing of a tuning fork. I free myself from the debris; I stumble back onto the street and into a silent nightmare.

  Chunks of concrete rain from the sky, silently cratering the asphalt and punching holes through walls and roofs. Silent rockets streak out from a cloud of smoke and pinwheel madly through the stadium, blooming into silent fireballs that incinerate buildings and tear chunks out of the stadium wall. Support cables pop out of the concrete and rickety apartment towers sway. Silently, two of them fall, crashing into each other and splitting open in the middle, dumping streams of people out of their beds and onto the street. Those who survive the fall have just enough time to raise their hands in a futile defensive gesture before being buried under their own homes.

  The darkness pulses red with countless fires. Crates of grenades go off in bursts of white flashes. I run past dead bodies that are beginning to twitch, but I leave it to someone else to decide their second fates. I can’t stop. I am running toward a smoking hole where I abandoned someone who believes in me, and as my hearing returns, I notice that I am screaming.

  THE RAW EDGES of shattered concrete are still hot enough to burn my hands as I dig my way through the debris, but I feel the sensation more distantly than ever. I hear salvos of gunfire from somewhere in the wreckage, but this is not a battle, it’s just ammunition going off, bullets firing themselves without waiting for the trigger, as if they know what they were made to do and are eager to get on with it.

  I heave aside a slab of concrete and slip through the gap into what’s left of the Armory. It’s dark, but cut electrical wires light the cavern in blue flashes, along with the dim red glow of burning supply crates.

  “Rosso!” I shout into the flickering darkness. “General Rosso!”

  The path is littered with jagged concrete and spears of sheared rebar, but I start to run. I don’t get more than a few paces before I trip on something soft. An electric pop from an overhead wire illuminates a body with most of its flesh blasted away, revealing a scorched, cracked skeleton, identifiable only by the shredded tie around its neck.

  Black Tie says nothing.

  I push further in, past the garage and into Grigio’s beloved war room. In the sickly orange glow of a few burning tires, I find the other two pitchmen. Blue Tie grins up at me from the floor, his impossibly blue eyes attempting to establish trust with the ceiling while his mangled body slumps in a corner ten feet away. A steel beam runs through Yellow Tie’s skull from temple to temple, pinning her head to the floor, and I search her final expression for any hint of comprehension, any realization of error or betrayal, but it remains locked in that blandly cheerful mask.

  What are these people?

  A ragged gasp from somewhere in the shadows. I force myself to move.

  He’s lying slumped against a pile of rubble. His chest isn’t shaped right and his gray jumpsuit has turned dark purple. Perhaps he has spilled wine on himself. Overindulged at a tasting party, embraced life a little too hard. He’ll have a headache in the morning but good stories to go with it. Julie and I will sit by his fireplace and listen, glancing at each other and smiling while Ella shakes her head in the kitchen. He is old but still vital, with plenty of days left to read his books and drink his wine and teach me how to be a person.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispers as I kneel beside him.

  “For what?”

  Why is there a tremor in my voice? He’s just drunk.

  “I wanted so badly . . . to see your life. You and Julie.” He coughs, and a fine spray of wine speckles my shirt. “I wanted to be there.”

  Why do my eyes sting? Why is my vision getting blurry?

  “But I’m excited, too.” He stares up at the patches of night sky visible through holes in the ceiling. “I’ve wondered for so long what comes next.”

  Drunk people say the strangest things. I squint my eyes shut and warm liquid seeps out of them.

  “Oh,” he says, and his tone suddenly shifts. I open my eyes and find his wide with awe, his mouth slightly agape. “I can see it.”

  “Stop.” I grip his shoulders. “Wait.”

  His eyes focus on me with a feverish intensity. “We’re so close, R. Show them.”

  “I don’t know what you’re saying!”

  His eyes drift to the ceiling again. His body begins to slacken. “It’s beautiful,” he says in a faint release of breath. “It’s everything.”

  I watch his face for a while. I burn the image into my memory. I have never seen an expression like this. It says things that no one could ever articulate, no matter how vast their vocabulary or how limber their tongue. And in a moment, it will be gone.

  I dig through the rubble. A grenade, a chainsaw—no. Something elegant. Respectful. If there is any respectful way to do this. The most important thing is that I do it soon. There can be no third life for this man’s broken body, and I won’t let him suffer the indignity of becoming like me.

  I hear a gunshot. I assume it’s another burning ammo crate and ignore it, but then I hear a small, frail sob, and I turn. Ella is kneeling in front of her husband, her hair singed and wild, the knees
of her pants torn and bloody. A revolver dangles from her finger and falls to the floor.

  Some soft, whispering instinct tells me to move toward her. As soon as I’m near enough, she sags against my chest and lets the dam break.

  • • •

  I hear Julie’s voice as we approach the tunnel’s exit. She’s calling the names of all the people who matter to her. Nora’s. Ella’s. Rosso’s. Mine. I wonder if any of us will be of any comfort to her. I help Ella over the last jagged heap of debris and we stumble out into the chaos of the streets. Security teams rush from house to house, trying to establish some kind of order, but Medical is the star of tonight’s show. I catch a glimpse of Nora holding one end of a stretcher bearing a blood-smeared mess that looks like Kenerly. I catch her eyes for one second before she disappears around a corner, and the reeling shock in them tells me just how bad things are. But right now, the pain of hundreds of strangers barely even registers. I’m focused on the old woman crying on my arm and the young one running toward me with eyes full of dread.

  “What happened?” Julie shouts. “What the hell happened, what is happening?”

  She grabs my wrists and sucks in a breath to ask more unanswerable questions. I wrap my arms around her and pull her close. Through the crook of my elbow, she sees Ella sinking down onto an apartment stoop, she sees the tears running through the woman’s laugh lines, she sees the smoking crater in the stadium wall. She understands.

  “No,” she says. “No.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper into her hair.

  “No!” she screams, and wriggles violently out of my arms. “This is not happening. It’s not happening. No!”

  She stands back from me and Ella, alone in the middle of the street, clenching her fists and grinding her teeth. She lost her mother long before I met her. Her father left slowly over many years, but the dirt on his grave has barely sprouted grass. And now this. Now Lawrence “Rosy” Rosso, her next-to-last fragment of family.