The Burning World Read online

Grief. Rage. Both are reasonable responses to the winking cruelty of the universe.

  I move toward her and try to embrace her again, but she is nowhere near ready to be consoled. She shoves me back so hard I almost fall over and runs past me toward the Armory.

  “Julie, don’t,” Ella calls to her. “There’s nothing in there that will help.”

  Julie stops at the edge of the rubble, staring into the dark hole and trembling, sucking in short, rapid breaths. These constrict into raspy wheezes and she fumbles in her pocket for her inhaler. She takes a shot but her breaths keep getting shorter. She clutches at her throat. “I can’t—I can’t—”

  I rush to her side and try to lead her away from the wreckage, but she sags down onto the pavement, heaving hard against her bronchial tubes. I want to say something soothing, but what can I possibly say? My mouth is not accustomed to delivering comfort. The apparatus of my tongue and teeth has always been a weapon. How does one use it to heal?

  In the silence of my uselessness, the medicine finally kicks in and her gasps begin to slow. She struggles to her feet and walks on rubbery legs to the stoop where Ella is sitting. She pulls in a deep breath, lets it out, then drops down next to Ella and buries her face in her hands, her small body shaking with quiet sobs.

  I stay where I am, standing apart from them, waiting. I feel a cold sprinkle of rain and I look up. The sky is clear. The moon is bright. With the noise of twenty thousand people panicking, I didn’t even notice the helicopters overhead, spraying water onto the flames that surge from apartment rooftops.

  I see it now. The pieces click.

  We’re here to help.

  High above, hovering like a book of divine wisdom, the Jumbotron blinks on. A handsome man in a yellow tie steps into view and sits in front of a microphone.

  “Residents of Citi Stadium,” he says in a gentle baritone. “We invite you to feel calm. Careless storage of expired munitions has led to a terrible tragedy and loss of life from both enclaves, but as your new next-door neighbor, the Axiom Group is already working hard to minimize the damage.”

  I notice men in unfamiliar uniforms—beige jackets over khaki pants—rushing through the streets with fire extinguishers and first aid kits.

  “We will have the disaster contained momentarily, and in the days to come, we will work closely with your remaining leadership to help restore order. We invite you to feel calm, safe, and secure. Everything will be the way it was.”

  Julie peeks through her fingers at the gigantic face grinning down on the city. The screen shows a brief flash of the logo I carved into the bar, plays a stock animation of a football player chugging a Bud Light, then goes black.

  “What is happening?” she whispers into her palms.

  The rumble of an approaching truck cuts through the noise of the stadium’s panic, which has in fact quieted noticeably following the Jumbotron’s announcement. It seems that an invitation to feel calm from a stranger on a screen is all these people needed to feel calm. Do they even care who’s in charge of their lives, or will any handsome face suffice? Any well-groomed head with a tie around its stump, any mouth that can lie with confidence?

  Staring up at the helicopters, feeling the spray cool my flushed cheeks, I realize I’m still drunk. Or perhaps something even more debilitating. I have imbibed a terrible cocktail: whiskey, adrenaline, shock, and sorrow. I feel sick.

  A beige Escalade pulls up next to us and six men in beige jackets emerge. It’s a nauseating color, not a warm, sandy tan but the neutral green-gray-taupe of old office computers, cheap hotels, suburban strip malls, and municipal carpet. The men carry three empty body bags between them. They move toward the Armory entrance and suddenly Julie is on her feet.

  “What are you doing?” she snaps, wiping her red eyes and darting over to block their path. “Who are you and what are you doing?”

  “Here to collect the bodies,” one of the men says without looking at her or stopping. He and the others move around her and begin to climb through the rubble, but she jumps in front of them again.

  “I said who are you?”

  The men slow their advance without quite stopping. “We’re with Axiom. We’re here to collect the bodies.”

  “That’s my friend in there and I don’t know you people,” she says, glaring up at the much taller men. Her voice begins to tremble again. “You’re not taking him. Go away.”

  “We have orders to collect all the bodies before they’re handled by enclave residents. Please step aside.” He pushes past her.

  She grabs his jacket and yanks him backward and he falls, landing on jagged chunks of concrete.

  “I said go away!” she shouts hoarsely, her eyes welling up again.

  In my woozy perception, everything feels slow. I move toward Julie, but my feet are strapped with heavy weights. One of the men shoves her. She falls into the rubble. She gets up, wipes blood from a cut on her forehead, and lunges at him. Too short to reach his face, she punches him in the throat. He stumbles back, choking, and I hear Julie screaming.

  “Get out of here! Get out!”

  I’m almost there. The ground sucks at my feet like deep tar. I crawl up the rubble heap as four men converge on her. She takes a swing at the nearest one but he grabs her arm and twists her around, then kicks her hard between the shoulder blades. She flies clear of the mound and lands facedown on the asphalt.

  I am full of dread because I know I’m going to kill this man. It’s required by Newtonian law, a reaction to his action, impossible to prevent. I ascend the rubble heap and seize his head and smash his face into a concrete corner and he dies in a bubbling foam of blood. The next man who comes at me doesn’t die but is certainly maimed when I throw him against a slab and hammer my fist into his shoulder joint, snapping the ligaments and effectively severing his arm. Thick limbs wrap around my throat and lift me off the ground, but my brain seems to have a course of action ready for every scenario; a well-aimed elbow breaks the man’s ribs and hopefully punctures his lung, and his grip melts off me.

  A very distant voice asks: What am I doing? How am I doing it? Who is the man who acquired these skills and the reptilian coldness to use them?

  Finally, someone relieves me of my momentum. The butt of a gun cracks into the side of my head and the already slow world spins into a rippling sludge. I am aware of myself falling, but I feel nothing when my face hits the pavement next to Julie’s. Our eyes meet, hers red and wet, mine simply open, staring. Where is the gold? Where is the impossible solar yellow that told us things were different, that we had changed and the world would change with us?

  Dark spots begin to splatter across my vision. I try to speak to her: Keep breathing. We’re going to be okay. But my lips won’t obey. I try to say it with my eyes. I keep trying until my eyes roll up.

  WE

  WE DO NOT need to move. We are already everywhere. But omnipresence can be dull, so we indulge in locality. We condense ourself into points and roam the earth like those quaint old notions of spirits: ghosts, angels, and other things in white sheets.

  We have little interest in the world itself, the actual matter and space. We are here for the story, for the landscape of consciousness overlying the dust and rock. In that landscape, sharp peaks are jutting up from the plains. There are quakes and floods and hurricanes, and rivers of magma press against the surface. That landscape is changing, and change demands our attention.

  So we move. We drift through the upheaval of a city in crisis, remembering the scent of smoke, the pain of fire, the sorrow of loss.

  Everywhere, men in beige jackets are herding people back into their homes, assuring them that they have it all under control and everything will return to normalcy, that cozy dream that’s buried a thousand revolutions.

  In their panic, most of the people do as they’re told. They see confident men issuing clear instructions and they don’t much care who those men are or what the instructions entail. They just want to keep their families safe. They just want to
survive the night. There will be time for questions later, on some distant morning when the fires are out and they’re no longer scared or hurt or hungry.

  But the men in beige jackets are encountering one unexpected variable. A single ripple in this calm sea of compliance. There are certain individuals scattered throughout the crowds who do not react predictably. Their minds lack the key for the codes being shouted at them, so they do not respond to instructions or assurances, no matter how confidently delivered. They stand motionless in the streets, watching the men in beige jackets roar commands that blend into the promises pouring from the stadium PA, and they do not respond.

  The men in beige jackets move closer in order to become more forceful, and that’s when they notice that something is different about these individuals. The tint of their skin. The slowness of their movements. The scar tissue in the shape of bullet holes, knife slashes, and wide patches of regenerated rot. But mostly their eyes. Many different hues, alike in defiance.

  We drift toward a building that radiates pain, but as we get closer we notice other accumulations. Plague and its opposite: golden flickers of cure. Something like a smile spreads through our vastness.

  “You’ll be okay,” Nora Greene tells a man with three shards of concrete sticking out of his back. “They’re not deep. I’ll be back in a second to patch you up.”

  “Wait,” he gasps as she moves away. “Don’t leave me.”

  “God, you’re needy. This is why we never would’ve worked.”

  “Nora.”

  “You’re going to be fine, Evan. Just stay calm. I’ll be right back.”

  She darts away from his bed to attend to another patient. The warehouse once seemed awkwardly large for this miniature ER, but now every inch of empty space has been filled with the wounded. Their accommodations follow a steady grade of increasing desperation, from proper electric hospital beds to stained twin mattresses to wool blankets thrown on the concrete floor. We jump from nurse to nurse—there are few proper doctors in this age of austerity—and then return to Nora, following her as she bandages the living and comforts the dying. A group of civilians stands in a corner, waiting for the signal that it’s time to say their good-byes and then shoot their loved ones in the head, but sometimes they can’t do it and the task falls to Nora. A Colt .45 sticks out of the waistband of her scrubs, an instrument as essential to modern medicine as a scalpel.

  In all the blood and screaming, no one is paying attention to the rows of special patients whose beds line the walls. Many of these have far more serious injuries—missing limbs, gaping holes—but their wounds don’t bleed. These patients sit up in their beds and observe the chaos with wide eyes. The Living do everything so vibrantly, the Dead think. Their blood sprays like party champagne, they hoot and howl like a gospel choir. Even in their agony, they are enviable.

  While the Dead watch the Living die, a group of men in white shirts files in through a side door and surrounds them. One of these men unfolds a pocket knife. He sticks it into a patient’s arm. The patient doesn’t flinch, but she looks up at the man with an expression of offense. Hurt feelings.

  “What are you?” the man demands.

  “A . . . person,” the patient replies.

  “No you’re not,” the man says, and moves the knife down the patient’s arm, opening a gash.

  The patient’s face darkens. “Stop.”

  “Hey!” Nora shouts from across the room. She hands off her patient to another nurse and rushes toward this forgotten corner of the hospital. “What the fuck are you doing? Who are you?”

  “We’re with the Axiom Group. What are these people?”

  “What do you mean what are they?”

  “Are they Living or Dead?”

  “They’re trying to decide. Why the fuck are you sticking knives in my patients?”

  “We have orders to investigate these uncategorized individuals.”

  “They’re zombies. They’re trying not to be. What else do you need to know?”

  “The Dead don’t ‘try.’ They’re passive tissue waiting for input.”

  Nora rolls her eyes. “Jesus Christ, Grigio all over again. Listen, I don’t have time for this. I have people to sew up.”

  He points his knife at the patient’s face. “They’re ignoring our instructions and interfering with aid efforts.” The patient slaps the knife out of his hand. The man looks shocked. “See?”

  “Get out of my Morgue,” Nora says.

  “We’ll need to take some of them back to Goldman Dome for study. Three should be enough for now.”

  Nora takes a step toward the man. “I said get out.”

  We notice things about Nora Greene that interest us. Many small scars darken the skin of her arms and face, and her left hand is missing a finger: chapters of her life written bold on her flesh, calling us to read them. The man in the white shirt notices these things too, and they concern him. But not as much as the pistol in Nora’s right hand, which she is tapping emphatically against her thigh.

  The man pulls out his walkie. “Management? Request assistance in the Medical building.” He looks from Nora’s blood-smeared scrubs to her blood-shot eyes. “We’re encountering resistance.”

  I

  I DON’T SLEEP WELL. I’m not good at it. Sleep is a ceasefire with life, and I don’t trust my opponent. I lie awake all night expecting ambush. In my Dead days, sleep meant lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling, trying to regather my decomposing consciousness. I would go months without it, and when it came it was always a terrible collapse. No peaceful descent into a feather bed with a book and a cup of chamomile; more like a surprise bullet to the kneecap, dropping me to the floor in a confused and frightened pile.

  Since the first night I closed my eyes and truly dreamed, lying next to Julie on a stranger’s mildewed mattress, my relationship with sleep has improved, but it’s still dysfunctional. Most nights find me listening to her soft snores deep into the morning, passing the time by trying to decode her twitches and whimpers and half-formed words, imagining what colorful horrors her brain has prepared for her and wondering how to comfort her when she wakes up. If I’m lucky, I’ll drift into a shallow slumber for an hour or two, but my mind, traumatized by years of death, remains wary of anything that resembles it.

  So in a way, getting knocked unconscious by the butt of a gun is rather refreshing. I haven’t slept this well in ages.

  Deep in a dark alley of my mind, a grizzled street prophet is muttering news of fire and judgment, but I ignore him and stride past with my chin held high. I feel light. I am on a tropical island, swimming in warm blue water while gulls soar above and dolphins glide below. My abs are cut gems and my skin is a healthy bronze. Julie is on the beach in a bikini and sunglasses, oiling her flawless body, her huge breasts, her endless legs; we are on vacation, we are in love, we are—

  We are in a nightclub and the music is pounding and I am dancing with Julie. I dance well; my hips and limbs swing in perfect rhythm, pantomiming sex in front of a hundred strangers without a hint of shame. My pockets are full of money and drugs and Julie is grinding into me with abandon, her long hair whipping into my face, her red skirt hiking higher and higher and everyone is watching us with envy and lust. I smirk at them and take Julie home to our high-rise condo and we fuck all night without pause or reservation, not looking at each other but at the city below our windows, spreading itself before us like a submissive whore offering us everything—

  I am on a private plane, ensconced in soft leather and bathed in tropical jazz, looking down on endless miles of ruined cities and all the poor fools still inhabiting them. Julie sits next to me, and the sight of her brings a stern frown to my face, because I am dressed for serious business, silver shirt and red tie, but she’s not wearing a pantsuit or pencil skirt or even a shoulder-padded blazer; she’s wearing jeans and a plaid flannel, a red stocking cap pulled over her tangled hair. I am about to scold her when I notice my own outfit is also a little off. The fabric
of my shirt has a thick, tough texture, and instead of classic Italian wingtips: heavy black boots caked with mud.

  I look up at Julie. Her face is tight with sadness and fear, pleading with me. The edge of her cap is wet; a trickle of blood runs down her forehead and pools in her eye.

  I glance to my right and see two men and a woman wearing the same outfits I’m wearing. One of the men has a silver briefcase. He winks at me. I feel myself lifting out of my seat as the plane dives, hurtling down into an endless expanse of dark green trees. The music gets louder as we fall, the marimbist striking the tines in a rage, breaking the mallets.

  “Please don’t leave me,” Julie whispers into my ear. “Please don’t go back.”

  • • •

  My eyes open halfway, but I’m not confident that I’m awake. The music is still there, down to a reasonable volume now; the tropical jazz fades into an upbeat country number, still watery and nondescript but with a faint twang to indicate we have shifted cultures. I’m in some kind of dark chamber and the music is emanating from a speaker in the ceiling, but it’s hard to make out details through the profusion of colorful spots in my vision, like a Fourth of July firework show between me and the outside world. My head pounds.

  I hear the squeak of hinges, and a blurry silhouette hovers in the doorway. The face comes into focus for just a moment before my eyes slacken again, but it’s enough to pour a sludge of fear into my delirium, because I recognize the face, and it belongs to someone who is dead. Perhaps I’m dead, too. Perhaps I died years ago, and Hell is a flooded planet of starving children and walking corpses and endless, senseless war.

  I summon air into my lungs and croak, “Perry?”

  I catch a glimpse of startled eyes, then the firework show resumes, the pedal steel swells—

  I’m on a ranch. I’m holding the rope while Julie trots the new colt around the arena; I’ve never seen her happier; her face is—

  Someone is shaking my shoulders. I scowl and dig in deeper.