The Living

WE

WE ARE NOT BOUND by our bodies. Flesh is an experience we choose to have. From the bright cloud of our vastness we grow fingers to dip in cool water, to run through soft grass, to touch our skin and fur and feathers and somehow, from the sum of our myriad bodies, begin to understand what we are.

We are not bound by time, but we choose to live in it. We evolved consciousness to learn and to know, and for that we must focus. So we sit patiently in the vehicle of the present, traveling toward some unguessable tomorrow.

And we carry the past with us. It trails behind us like bubbles as we rise through the depths of time. It gathers in the books in our Library; it builds like magma beneath our mountain. We read our own books and learn from ourselves. We wait for our moment to erupt.

Paul Bark is sixteen. His face is pimpled, his mustache is thin, and he and his friend are about to burn down Denver.

“Are you ready?” he asks his friend.

His voice is high, but he has been working on deepening it, and he likes how rich it sounds in this cavernous space—“Hall B,” according to the tattered banner hanging above the stage. The logo on it is illegible, some kind of old-world fan convention, its superhero mascot faded to a gray ghost. The building was gutted long ago, all its windows broken or stolen, its hallways now filling with sand dunes as the wind sweeps the desert inside. It’s hard to picture this place roaring with exuberant life, joyful crowds cheering for imaginary heroes and fictional battles while the real battle raged all around them. Paul can hardly fathom such frivolity. So much passion wasted on made-up nonsense. Civilization deserved its end.

“Everyone’s in position,” he tells his friend, and he likes how serious he sounds, like a grizzled commando in the army of God. “Have you prepared your sermon?”

Brother Atvist doesn’t answer. The pale, lanky teenager sits cross-legged on a pile of broken ceiling tiles, staring down at the walkie in his hand. “Did they listen to yesterday’s?”

“Most of them. We’ve counted sixty-eight trucks heading out of town.”

“That can’t be more than half.” His shaggy dark hair hides his eyes. His flat tone hides his thoughts.

“We’re giving them too much time,” Paul mutters, and spits a wad of phlegm for emphasis. “Once the panic cools off, they remember they have a government and a fire department and they think that makes them safe. They think it can’t happen because it’s never happened before.”

“So we do it anyway? With hundreds of people still in their homes?”

Paul wishes his friend would look up so he could get a read on him. Is this some kind of test of Paul’s commitment? No, that’s not his style. Brother Atvist is a raw nerve, a beating heart exposed to the world, devoid of defenses and guile. It’s why people are drawn to him, and it’s why he needs Paul: to be a rigid container for his delicate dreams. To carry them to their conclusion against the tides of sentimentality.

“They’ll go once we get started,” Paul says. “That phosphorous puts on quite a show.”

His friend finally raises his face, and Paul does not like what he sees there. The most dangerous sin of all: uncertainty.

“How many died in Helena?” he asks Paul.

“None.”

“How many in Boise?”

Paul stiffens his jaw. “Three, but they were—”

“How many will it be here? Nine? Ninety?”

“They were warned!”

Paul’s shout echoes through the hall, scattering the pigeons roosting in the rafters. His face is suddenly red, his fists clenched. “We lit the beacons! We broadcast your prophesy! And God has been warning them them for years! Is it our fault if a few stiff-necked fools won’t listen?”

Brother Atvist slowly shakes his head. But is it a response to Paul’s question or is he slipping further into doubt? All of this was his idea, his epiphany, how can he falter already after just two cities?

Paul’s mind races. What will he do if his friend backs out, or even tries to dismantle the fellowship? Could Paul counter his influence, hold the church on its path? Paul is a good speaker too, a clear and forceful hammer to his friend’s florid oration, and he has always been the connective tissue between idea and action. Would they rally around him the way they did his friend? Brother Atvist insists he is not their leader, that this church has no leader. Their calling is to unmake structure, to erase human lines, to scour the earth for God’s coming, and a hierarchy would be antithetical to this. Brother Atvist repeats this over and over because the Ardents keep forgetting, keep defaulting to the standard model of top-down authority. But didn’t God himself set that model in place? Can people really be expected to live without a strong man telling them how? If Brother Atvist won’t—or can’t—be that man, perhaps it’s time for Pastor Bark to—

Brother Atvist stands up.

It’s a sudden movement, scattering the tiles at his feet, and Paul takes a step back. Paul is not done growing, but he will never be a tall man. He is built like a cornerstone, thick and strong, grounded and unshakeable, while his friend is a soaring pillar, perhaps more easily toppled but undeniably impressive while upright. There’s a fire in his eyes now, and Paul races to read its meaning as Brother Atvist raises his walkie.

“A day ago, we gave you a warning.”

Amplified by loudspeakers at every major intersection, his soft voice sounds immense. Delayed by distance, it reverberates from every direction, not one voice but a chorus, washing over the city in a wave. Paul lets out a sigh, mostly relief but with a trace of something else that he’d rather not acknowledge. He tucks away the thoughts that were starting to swell in his chest.

“But you had plenty of warnings before that. A poisoned planet choking on your apathy. A government festering as you filled it with rot. A culture sustained on conflict, feeding on its own blood, a thousand tiny wars that could never be allowed to end.”

He moves toward the staircase, and Paul follows him.

“And then one day, it all caught up to you. Your government went rabid and turned on you. The ocean you used for your toilet rose up for revenge. Even the earth itself tried to shake off its tormentors, but no matter how many cities it flattened in its convulsions, you kept drilling. No matter how many wars erupted, you kept provoking more, kept raising armies and smashing them together like toys, kept hating and hurting and devouring each other until you finally broke the universe. You reached the very bottom and you drilled right through, and a new kind of death bubbled up to meet you.”

Their boots rattle the rusty metal steps, echoing up and down the stairwell as they ascend toward a distant light.

“This new death was the final warning, but you still didn’t listen. God held up a mirror and said, ‘See what you’ve become!” but you refused to look. So your reflection climbed out of the mirror and ate your children. It ravaged your world and reduced it to a skeleton. But instead of falling to your knees and begging God to save you, you’re building new houses out of the bones.”

Paul smiles. This is a good one. Each sermon has been sharper and hotter than the last. Paul sometimes wishes his friend would skip all the poetic preamble and just get to the point, but he has to remind himself that this is the point: to deliver a message that stings hearts. As satisfying as it is to set the fires, they are only a medium for the message, a bright blazing sign that can’t be ignored. It’s the message that will move the world to repentance. To acceptance. To surrender.

“So in exactly fifteen minutes,” Brother Atvist continues, “we are going to burn those houses down.”

They emerge onto the roof of the convention center and Denver spreads out around them, an endless flatness spiked with a few highrises. It glows the usual sickly orange against the night sky, but it’s dimmer than it should be. A third of the buildings are unlit, abandoned, darkness creeping across the city like a stain as the world unravels.

“But the Lord is not willing that any should perish.”

From up here his voice sounds even bigger, ringing through the streets as the stubborn holdouts gather around the speakers, pacing and squirming with mounting agitation.

“We don’t want to take your lives. We only want to show you that it’s time to give them back. To accept the end. To tell God we’re ready to go home.”

Paul nods approvingly. A solid conclusion. Now for the altar call…

But Brother Atvist doesn’t deliver the expected coda. His grip on the walkie tightens and he’s quiet for a moment. Then:

“Don’t you feel it?” His voice is softer now, and there’s a tremor in it. “Don’t you see that our road doesn’t go anywhere? That our battles were never winnable? Why are you still fighting when there’s nothing to fight for? Aren’t you tired?” His voice cracks and the walkie sags away from his mouth a little. “I am,” he tells the city of Denver. “I’m tired.”

And with that, he hands the walkie to Paul and sits on the edge of the roof.

Well. Not the most inspiring benediction. They won’t be gaining many converts from this particular outreach. But so be it. Seventy-two angry youths with jars of homemade napalm should be more than enough for now.

Paul checks his watch and raises the walkie. “In nine minutes, the fires will start. Within an hour, they will have spread across the city. Don’t wait for the authorities to stop this. They will not be able to.”

He feels the the thrill of expansion as his voice echoes through downtown Denver, the sense of being everywhere, a huge presence hovering over the city he’s about to destroy.

“The borders of the fire will be Highways 95, 225, 285, and 70. Everything outside should be safe. Everything inside will burn. Pack only what you need to live and evacuate immediately. We suggest taking I-25 to avoid congestion.”

He frowns. His announcements sound mundane, almost municipal after his friend’s grand oration. Where is his passion? Where is Pastor Bark? He thinks for a moment.

“We ask only for your city, to give it up as a burnt offering to God. But if your pride makes you give up your lives, he will accept those too.”

He smiles, nods, and joins his friend at the edge of the roof. He’s too excited to sit. He stands with his arms crossed, fidgeting from foot to foot.

“You had to end it like that?” his friend asks, still gazing out over the city.

“Like what?”

“Like a villain.”

Paul grunts. “Don’t bullshit yourself. The world never loves a prophet. We’ll always be villains to them.”

Down below, the city is lighting up with red and blue flashes, a preview of what’s to come. Police flood the streets and swarm the buildings. Firefighters ready their ladders and hoses. Even with the dying government’s desperate suppression of news, they have probably heard about Helena and Boise. Even with all the lines cut and signals jammed, a story that big still travels, so they should know that their efforts are useless. There aren’t enough police in the whole state to uproot seventy-two unremarkable teenagers planted loosely across the city. And even before the great decline, no fire department was ever equipped for arson on this scale.

It never happened before because no one decided to do it. The fire was always ready, always primed, just waiting for a reason to start.

“Three minutes,” Paul says. His excitement tightens his voice, makes it high and thin despite his best efforts, but it doesn’t matter here with his friend, who shows no interest in the pageantry of manliness.

“How many do you think it’ll take?” his friend murmurs. No excitement at all in his unaffected tenor. Paul can barely hear it over the sirens, the shouting, the distant tumult of evacuation. “How many do we have to burn before God accepts our surrender?”

A perfect response comes to Paul but he holds back for maximum effect. Thirty seconds…twenty…ten…

“‘The day of the Lord will come like a thief,’” Pastor Bark recites. “‘The heavens will disappear with a roar, the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.’”

His watch beeps.

The tallest building in Denver flashes white. Burning bits of phosphorous spew out from its windows like a rain of shooting stars, scattering onto all the neighboring structures and scribbling the air with lines of white smoke. But that’s just the opening ceremony. A second or two later, spread evenly through the densest parts of the city, seventy-two Ardents ignite their jars of napalm. It’s not quite simultaneous, more a staccato of bursts than the single vast explosion Paul was hoping for. They’ll have to work on their timing for the next one. The hotter they can stoke the drama, the deeper the message will burn.

“‘Since everything will be destroyed in this way,’” he continues, his voice now trembling with exultation, “‘what kind of people ought you to be?’”

He looks at his friend as if for a response, like a preacher awaiting an “amen,” but his friend still hasn’t looked at him, eyes glued to the rapidly spreading hellscape below. So Paul finishes without him.

“‘You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God…and speed its coming.’”

Still no reaction. Paul lets it go. His friend has always been this way. Always lost in his head, straining toward some distant skylight that he is never going to reach. Is he blind to the achievement burning right in front of him? They are changing the face of the earth, clearing the overgrown land for the foundations of God’s Kingdom. If that’s not enough for him, what ever will be?

Paul stretches out his hands, feeling the heat of the fire in the wind, the bits of ash blowing against his cheeks like warm snowflakes. It’s spreading quickly. He knows they should leave soon, join up with the others and start skimming for converts in the stream of evacuees, but he wants to savor this as long as possible.

Playfully, boyishly, he pretends he’s the Angel of the Lord smiting Sodom for its sins. He imagines the power coursing through him, the brimstone gathering in his hands, the approving nod from his Father as he strikes. How wonderful, to be an angel. To be created perfect, not broken, not designed to crave evil and set loose on a path to Hell. To be born good, a child of innate worth who does not have to hate himself to be loved.

He blinks hard and glances around like someone pinched him. Where did that thought come from? Heretical, self-pitying, weak. It couldn’t have been his. A dart from the Devil, then, trying to poison him at the very moment of glory. His face flushes with shame and anger.

“Do you think Heaven will be worth all this?” his friend asks, squinting against the furnace winds from below, his hair fluttering like feathers around him. “What do you hope to find there?”

Paul finds the question boringly obvious but he welcomes the distraction. “Our reward,” he replies, staring into the flames. His face is still scorched from Boise, red and peeling, and his close-cut hair is singed. He thinks he must look like a man who’s fought dragons. “Mansions and streets of gold. A seat at the right hand of the Father to reign forever and ever. ‘Know ye not that we shall judge angels?’”

His friend doesn’t respond to this. Even in the orange glow of the flames, his face looks sick and sad.

“And you?” Paul asks, growing annoyed with his friend’s negativity. “What’s in your Heaven, Brother Atvist?”

His friend smiles. It’s faint, wistful, but it’s the first warmth to touch his face since they first started planning this fire. “A house,” he says, so softly he might be speaking to himself, or to some imagined listener far away. “A couch…a desk…a bed. A home and someone to share it with.”

Paul snorts. “You can have all that right here.”

His friend shakes his head. “This world hates us. We fight it for every breath. I want a home in a world that loves.”

Paul opens his mouth to laugh, to mock this gooey vision of the Kingdom, but then for some reason he shuts it. He feels a spasm in his chest, a tiny cracking open. He shuts that too.

Below these two boys, the city of Denver burns. The seventy-two fires have merged into one, spilling orange light across miles of Colorado desert, roaring together in unison like an ecstatic choir. But from a mile above, all of this is silent. And from five miles, it’s nothing at all. Just another city glowing in the night.

So we depart from there and then. We continue our rise, drifting across miles and years, skimming ahead to another dog-eared page, and on this page is Julie Grigio, newly twelve and still carrying her father’s heavy name, not yet rechristened by the friends who loved her, not yet bereaved by the parents who failed her, a stubbornly hopeful child who has only killed three people, who has not been abused by men or tortured and maimed by monsters, who can still imagine a future where she goes to school and rides horses and does not have to fight a war.

This bright young girl is walking through a dark tunnel. The light at the end is dim and gray and when she reaches it she is greeted not by angels but by a crush of malnourished humanity. The steady rumble of voices, the pounding and grinding of construction, the smell of piss and shit, mostly cow but with some human in the bouquet. Julie smiles. After months of abandoned ruins, creepy rural communes, and cold, cramped car camping, she has missed the mess of cities.

“John!” Rosy calls out, emerging from the crowd, and Julie’s smile widens. She has missed him too, this odd old man, growing through the years from her father’s subordinate to the closest Julie has to a grandfather, the warmth of a gentler wisdom always peeking through his military mask.

“Major Rosso,” Julie’s father replies with a restrained smile. He accepts Rosy’s effusive embrace but cuts it short with a crisp double-slap. Rosy pulls back, remembering how his friend thinks. A box for every occasion, and in this one he is not “John,” he is Colonel Grigio.

Julie does her best to smash these formalities. She lunges forward and tackle-hugs Rosy, knocking him back a step, and he laughs helplessly. “My God, Julie, you were barely up to my waist when our roads diverged in a wood! Was it ten years ago?”

“Six months!”

“Have they been feeding you that hormone-boosted Carbtein or something? Look at these armaments!” He squeezes her biceps and she shakes him off, laughing. He turns to greet Julie’s mother, and his warmth cools again. “Good to see you, Audrey. I imagine it’s been a hard road.”

“Hard enough.” Her tone is flat. Her face is blank.

“We’ll catch up properly later tonight,” Colonel Grigio interjects. “Right now I’m eager to hear your report on the enclave.”

Rosy straightens up and clears his throat, forcing himself to switch boxes. “I really think this is the place, sir. Exceptionally defensible, well-equipped, and lots of room to grow.”

“How does it compare to what you found in Pittsburgh?”

“Sir, if the reports of the New York quake are true, this might be the strongest fortification still standing in America.”

“Good work, Major.”

Julie hates it when they do this. Talking like action movies, pretending they aren’t just overgrown boys who get drunk together and cry about their wives and sing old Deftones songs at the top of their lungs. These silly characters they play when they think it’s time to be men.

Her mother hates it too. Maybe that’s why she’s abandoned the conversation and wandered off into the mess of construction.

“And what’s the current command structure?” her father continues.

“A mix of military and corporate, but their general manager just died and the chain is a mess. They’re glad we’re here, sir.”

“I want to meet them A.S.A.P. Arrange a conference with…”

Julie sighs and goes after her mother. She finds her a couple “blocks” away, wandering among the scrap-wood towers of this shantytown metropolis.

“What do you think, Mom?” She turns in a circle with her hands outstretched like a wide-eyed country tourist. “It’s not Manhattan, but at least it smells like it!”

Precocious wisecracks like this usually get a big laugh, but her mother doesn’t even smile. She isn’t looking at the buildings or the people. She is staring at the concrete wall that surrounds them.

“Mom?”

“I don’t know,” her mother murmurs, as if in response to some inner query. Her hands run down the sides of her gray mechanic’s jumpsuit, feeling the coarse fabric and sticky stains. After months of prodding from her husband, this is what she chose to replace her beloved white dress. As a statement of protest, Julie finds it a bit melodramatic, and Julie is twelve.

Her mother is usually quick to notice absurdities. She is usually the one to turn tragedy into comedy in the least amount of time. But something is different lately. She seems increasingly blind to irony, trapped inside her experiences, unable to step outside them and laugh. And Julie worries.

“You don’t know what, Mom?”

Her mother stares at the wall. She doesn’t answer.

She doesn’t say a word for the rest of the day. Her husband is too busy to notice as he tours the stadium and meets the leadership, working his way in, but her daughter notices. She watches her mother warily as they carry their bags to their new home, a narrow tower of white aluminum glowing under the stadium’s floodlights.

“This is where we’re going to live?” her mother says, finally breaking her silence. Her emotions are still muted, but a note of horror leaks through.

“It’s austere,” Rosy admits, “but it has power and plumbing. All the luxuries, really.”

Two soldiers salute them from the third-floor balcony, leaning against turret-mounted sniper rifles.

“The guns are a bit much,” Julie’s father says, glancing sideways at his wife.

“Leftovers from the original project, apparently.”

The new general raises an eyebrow at the new colonel.

“By the looks of it,” Rosy continues, “someone was trying to convert the stadium into something else. Some kind of communications facility, judging by the wiring, but they didn’t get very far.”

General Grigio looks at the American flags dangling from the rafters of the open roof. The sun has bleached them almost white.

“When the first platoon found the place, it was just that little building surrounded by a billion dollars worth of construction materials rotting in the rain. Sounds like Old Gov standard procedure, right? But whatever the place was meant to be, I think we’ll put it to better use.”

Julie’s father narrows his eyes, examining and considering, his mind reaching out to grasp some intuited opportunity.

Her mother shrinks inward. Her mother retreats.

Evening fades to night as Julie buzzes around the new house, already deep into her decoration plans. Her new bedroom resembles a prison cell, gray and empty except for the twin bed, but it has potential. She reminds herself that every room is the same empty box until someone starts living in it.

She descends to the main floor to find her mother, to see if she wants to go looting in the city, find some cute antiques and colorful rugs, maybe a slightly more flattering jumpsuit.

“Mom? Hey Mom!”

She passes her father coming up the stairs. He’s shaking his head and his lips are trembling, a state that only one person can put him in. Julie has seen him emerge from knife fights looking calmer than this, bloody but unperturbed. Only the woman he loves has the tools to cut him deep.

“Mom?” Julie calls in a lowered voice, moving from room to room. “Hello?”

She checks the kitchen. The bathroom. The empty white cube that will serve as the living room. She is about to go back upstairs to ask her father for clues when she hears a noise from somewhere below.

She hadn’t realized this place had a basement. The door is small, tucked away in a corner and painted the same color as the wall, nearly invisible when closed. But now it’s hanging open, and a noise is rolling up to her, rippling and shifting, refusing to cohere. Is it five songs playing at once? Is it ten people talking over each other? Is it howling wind or howling animals? It’s very faint, almost subliminal, but she feels it in her head like a fluff of white wool, dulling her thoughts the way road noise dulls music.

“Mom?”

It comes out a timid whisper. With a reluctance she doesn’t understand, she pushes herself closer, and perhaps the noise is just an acoustic oddity of the building’s shape because as she approaches the doorway the pressure in her head subsides, the noise clarifies, and by the time she’s at the threshold looking down into the shadows, it’s familiar. It’s the sound of her mother crying.

“Are you okay?” she calls down into those shadows, and her own voice breaks a little.

Because this sound scares her. She’s been hearing it more and more since the day they left New York. In the evenings, while helping her father with the perimeter check in some deserted nook off the highway, she would find her mother alone in the trees, eyes glistening as she watched the day die. At night, with the three of them nested like a set of measuring spoons in the canopied bed of the truck, she’d wake to stifled weeping behind her head. She thought it would stop when they finally found a home. She thought once her mother felt the sunlight, she would emerge from her long winter and begin to bloom again. But here she is in the basement, as far from the sun as she can get.

Julie takes a step into the stairwell and then stops. She doesn’t want to go down there. Her mother is down there, her mother needs her, but Julie is too scared. Too soft. Too weak to help anyone.

“Mom!” she pleads miserably.

Her only answer is her mother’s sobs, sinking again into that wooly noise as Julie backs away.

On this very same shelf, tucked in tight with Julie, we find a book of Nora Greene. In this book she is eighteen years old and she is walking through a city. She has walked through many cities, or the remains of them, and she has encountered many people. She has lived with them and worked with them, and some of them have been kind, but there is a search inside her that won’t let her rest. The moment she feels comfortable, the dream comes to drive her onward.

There’s a boy, and then there’s a wolf, and that’s all she ever remembers. But she always wakes up screaming. She packs her bags and leaves in the night and walks until she collapses.

This is Nora Greene’s life, for a time. Much has been stolen from her. A childhood, a family, and things she doesn’t remember. Books hidden behind shelves. Pages torn out roughly, leaving only the telltale tatters.

So she feels a strange thrill as the stadium comes into view, but she does not know why. How will this place be any different from the other encampments she’s visited on her endless southward trek? The oblong vault of bare gray concrete looks more like a sarcophagus than a city. The small plumes of smoke rising through the retracted roof are the only sign of habitation. So why does it feel like a discovery?

She has little difficulty with the immigration officer. A strong, healthy, mostly intact young woman unburdened by family attachments is a valuable asset to any enclave, and her combat skills only sweeten the deal. There was a time when her brown skin might have been an obstacle, but it’s been years since she’s encountered that particular malice. She remembers it from childhood, her family squirming beneath that skeptical scan almost everywhere they went, but these days it’s down to a few sideways glances. Whatever racial superstitions may still lurk in humanity’s brain stem, few people actually live by them. They can’t afford to.

She is ushered inside with promises of fast-tracked home placement, though she puts little faith in that. She has heard such promises before, back in the old world when people still bothered with child welfare, still defining family by blood over love, and her parents could put on a good show when they—

But no. Nora has no parents. Never did. She grew out of the ground. And she doesn’t need a home tonight. A bed will always present itself. Right now all she needs is a drink.

She makes a few inquiries, ascends a dizzying maze of apartments and catwalks, and steps through the thick oak door of the Orchard.

She takes a stool at the end of the bar. The LOTUS Feed flashes on the TV above her but she keeps her eyes down, too tired to handle that frenetic collage.

“What’s your poison?” the bartender asks with a note of irony she doesn’t understand.

Nora pulls a hundred dollar bill out of her bag. “Whiskey.”

The bartender looks embarrassed. “Oh…I thought you were local. There’s a ban on alcohol right now. We uh…we serve juice.”

She stares at him blankly.

“Some whiskey drinkers say grapefruit has a similar kick?”

“I’ve been on the road for two years,” Nora says. “I spent most of last week in the Gresham Patriots’ prison pit before they tried to sell me to the Nor-Cal Riders and I had to kill two people with a broken bong. I could really use something stronger than grapefruit.”

The bartender purses his lips. He looks around, then snatches the bill and disappears into the back room. He comes back with a pint glass of brown liquid and sets it in front of her.

“Enjoy your apple juice,” he says loudly.

She takes a sip. She smiles.

An hour later, the glass is almost empty. She has gone past the euphoria, past the reckless bliss, and is entering the uncertain realm of the deep drunk. She feels her mind loosening, liquefying. She watches people enter the bar and leave. The citizens of this tiny world, soon to be her neighbors. She sees a blond girl a few years younger than her with black clothes, black nails, bandaged wrists, eyes sunken and red. The girl looks angry and sad and familiar somehow. She is pleading with the bartender, holding out her glass like a beggar seeking alms. A trio of men in their twenties descend on her with hungry smiles, and the muscular, tattooed alpha tips a flask into her juice. Nora tries to speak to her, even just a hello, but nothing comes out. She closes her eyes—

She is in a restaurant high above the earth, sitting across a table from a boy-shaped void, and the void reaches toward her and says—

She opens her eyes with a start. She looks down. She has scraped a hole through her coaster and shredded her napkin into confetti. Her pocket knife is in her hand and she has carved things into the bar, random shapes and letters that would disappear into the rest of the graffiti except for their freshness, a trail of gibberish leading over the bar’s edge and under it to a single legible word, a name—

She gouges at it with the knife until she can’t read it anymore and then stands up. The bar is busy now and no one is paying her any attention except the blond girl. The girl’s bloodshot eyes cling to Nora’s as the tattooed man pours more liquor into her juice, and Nora sees things she recognizes in that gaze. A loss locked away. A desperation restrained and hidden, writhing within the straightjacket of her body.

This girl has much to suffer before she reaches Nora’s age. But if she makes it through all those hard years…she’ll stand on the glorious plateau where Nora is now.

Nora chuckles like bubbling acid. She tastes it in her throat. Her emptiness suddenly descends from her chest to her groin, impelling her forward, and she finds no reason to resist. She locks eyes with a man and draws him to her—it might as well be one of the tattooed man’s cronies, the only help she can offer the girl tonight, reducing her trouble by one.

His pickup routine rolls over her in puffs of sour breath until she stops it with a finger to his lips, grabs him by the collar, and drags him out of the bar.

A body. A bed. She keeps it simple, stripped of all detail and context, and when she puts it like that, it doesn’t sound so bad. She has become very good at editing her thoughts.

But only when she’s awake. In her sleep she has no defenses. Her grip slackens and she floats into darkness, at the mercy of her mind.

In her sleep there’s a boy playing in a sandbox—not a void, a boy, though she can’t see his face, just his puff of black hair, his tiny hands working the sand—and from the woods behind the playground comes a wolf, trotting toward him with no hesitation, as if it came here from far away knowing exactly what it would find, and Nora screams but the boy doesn’t turn, doesn’t even look up as the wolf lunges. He never turns. He never looks up. Because he didn’t.

This boy is not bound to a book. His pages are loose and scattered across the shelves. Some of them have slipped into Nora’s. Others are still floating, carried deeper into the Library on subtle gusts of breath.

The boy is fourteen years old, but not really. Age is a line of progress, a marker of experience, and what can it mean for a mind that’s asleep? A mind stripped of self, robbed of history, set adrift in the fog of the plague?

The boy is small; he looks no older than seven. He does not grow. He does not heal. The puncture in his shoulder and the bite just above it have long since dried up, but they do not close. His cells are caught between forces, pulling toward life while the plague pulls toward rot, locked in a struggle he doesn’t understand.

What would it mean to win? Is it even a prize he wants?

All he knows for sure is he doesn’t want to lose. He has seen people lose. It begins in their eyes, a cooling of fire, a sagging of strength, a decision to stop fighting. Then it spreads. Their flesh withers and peels. Their faces become masks, lipless, eyeless, identical. Some surrender immediately, rotting to bones in just a few days. Others manage to last months or even a year before the plague overtakes them.

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 need 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.