Nine

by Zach Hines

  They sat down dutifully for a now cold family dinner of bland tofu stew. The television was on quietly in the background—a report on how martial law was declared near the lake region in the Ukraine to restore order after a series of food riots. But then the anchor switched to a local report that made Julian sit up in his seat. The segment was about a video on DeadLinks that “apparently showed dozens of dead minors at a house party in Lakeshore.”

  The Night of the Terrible Twos, Julian realized as he saw shots of the scene. Julian was stunned for a moment that the party could’ve made so much noise it ended up on TV, but then he worried that he might somehow appear in the broadcast. Did someone catch him in their lens, wandering around the house? Julian turned the TV off before his father could notice. The last thing he wanted was another conversation about his One.

  Dinner progressed as usual: Dad had little to say unless it was about work, school, or discipline—the holy trinity of unpleasant conversation. “Julian,” he said, “I was talking to Marcus today at the shop.” His voice was full of the familiar stern, logical tone that he adopted before delivering truths, particularly harsh ones. “Friend of his runs the Tasty’s that’s just south of the Row.”

  Julian swallowed his food and closed his eyes. He knew where this was going.

  “Says they’re hiring, and he can make accommodations for your . . . situation. He can interview you tomorrow after school.”

  “What?” Julian asked, flustered. “Fast food?”

  “Well, it beats temp work at the dust house, doesn’t it?” Julian’s father said.

  “B-but I . . . ,” Julian stammered. He had a vision of himself wearing a fast-food uniform, manning a register, doling out prepackaged orders . . . a vision of himself slipping into the mindless churn of the world. If he let it happen soon enough, he’d probably be burning, too.

  “You what?” his father asked.

  “It’s just . . . shouldn’t I concentrate on college applications this year?”

  His father looked at him with narrow eyes as he chewed. He held Julian’s attention until he swallowed.

  “Applications?” he asked, as if considering alien life on a distant planet. “Son, I know it’s been hard without . . .” He glanced toward Rocky. “Without your mother. But it’s time you start seriously thinking about where your life is heading.”

  Julian looked down at his bowl. A rubbery skin had formed on his stew.

  “I know there are some progressive colleges out there these days,” Julian’s father continued. “But if you are serious about getting into a good school, you’ll need to—”

  “I get it, Dad,” Julian said. “You need money.” He punctured the soup skin with his spoon.

  His father’s brow furrowed angrily and his face doubled its usual assortment of creases. He set his spoon down with a loud clink and took a deep breath. He leaned in toward Julian, his face a grave mask of lines. “We. We need money.” He said each word slowly and carefully. “If you have a better idea, I’m all ears.”

  Julian looked away from his father’s gaze. He knew where this was heading: the life score, the number assigned to your family based on the total number of lives extinguished among everyone in your household. The better the score, the more credits you got.

  Their family score was terrible—even with the bonuses awarded for his mother’s early extinguishments—and Julian, the One well past the schedule, was to blame.

  “Okay,” he said, looking at his bowl. “Job interview tomorrow. Thanks, Dad.”

  Julian’s father’s face softened. He leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath. “Can we go back to enjoying a family meal now, please?”

  But Julian stood abruptly and took his plate to the sink.

  “I’m finished,” he said.

  “Julian, you act like this is my doing,” his dad said.

  “It’s okay,” Julian replied. “Really. I’m just tired.”

  Julian locked the door to his tiny bedroom. Even calling it a bedroom was optimistic: it used to be the closet in the family room, but after his mother left, Julian had insisted on having a place in the house to call his own, and this was the only option. He had cleaned out the tools, removed the shelves, and set up his mattress on cinder blocks. He covered the walls in posters, mostly landscapes that were, importantly, devoid of people. Savannahs. Jungles. Long, wide views of oceans from cliffs. The goal was to create a haven of empty, intersecting geographics. A place to be alone.

  He kept a shoebox under the bed with all of his most important possessions. Tonight, he pulled it out and sat with it on his lap, wondering if he should open it.

  Finally, he decided he should.

  Inside, on top of dog-eared comic books, a small collection of cash, and stacks of his old sketches of cartoon characters, sat his mother’s Lake-issued ID card. She was smiling in the picture. Her eyes were big pools of green. This was his mom. The real Mom. Not the woman who struck out at him. Not the woman who burned her lives until she was nothing. This woman in the photo, she was his reminder.

  His eyes itched. His throat felt like it was tightening.

  Okay. Enough for now.

  He closed the box and put it back under the bed. He lay down and stared at the flaking, chalky-white paint of the ceiling. He pushed all thoughts of his mother, of fast-food restaurants, and of life numbers out of his mind and checked his phone.

  But it was filled with alerts from DeadLinks—mostly videos from the Terrible Twos. A carefully posed shot of Constance holding the pistol like a femme fatale, her piercing blue-gray eyes framed by two strands of impossibly black hair. It had 477 comments. He collapsed them—he didn’t want to see what fawning drivel had been posted about her—and scrolled down further, past a series of shots of the kids from the roof with sharpened spikes of rebar torn through their stomachs.

  And then, a shot of Molly.

  His best friend, lying dead on a beanbag.

  One of them now.

  His eyes became hot, and he felt some hard thing forming in his throat.

  He x-ed out of DeadLinks, revealing a tab beneath it that was always open on his phone. It was a satellite shot of a green island. It sat alone in a vast expanse of pristine blue water. The African island of Mauritius.

  Julian zoomed in closer to the island. As more of the landscape resolved into focus, he scrolled away from the built-up city areas toward a remote mountaintop. He zoomed in further still until he found what he was looking for—a small one-room structure on the top of the mountain. Alone and isolated on an island that was itself alone and isolated in the ocean. It calmed him.

  He zoomed out and out until the island once again was but a tiny speck on the vast blue expanse. Julian tried to put himself to scale against the pool of blue: he imagined he was a tiny, insignificant dot smaller than a pinprick. Less than a grain of sand.

  Through the thin walls, he could hear his father putting Rocky to bed and locking up the house, but Julian remained focused on his map—zooming in and out on the island, trying to imagine what a conscious experience of emptiness, of nothingness, might feel like—until his phone eventually died, the screen abruptly cutting to black.

  He plugged his phone in and turned off the lights. He closed his eyes. The lump that had been forming in his throat had dissipated. Soon he fell into the emptiness of a dreamless sleep.

  Chapter 5

  FRANKLIN ABSOLUTELY HATED MORNINGS. A MORE NATURAL way of being was to rise when your body wanted to rise, and sleep when your body wanted to sleep. But school, the Burners, death—all that crap kept getting in the way of what was natural.

  And the one thing Franklin hated more than just any ordinary morning was a morning like today’s: spent listening to the pompous spin of the Burners’ Gold Star, Nicholas Hawksley.

  Boy, was Nicholas in his element this morning. From his Silver Star seat, Franklin watched Nicholas pace back and forth across the school’s orchestra room—his hair already perfect at 7:30 a.m., his coffee-
hyped energy percolating.

  “Embrace your absurdity,” Nicholas said. His voice was firm and poised as he gazed out at his crowd of white-clad disciples—a mix of boys and girls, the children of the ultrarich and well-connected, everyone in the academy who wanted to be cool and was willing to do whatever it took to achieve it.

  All Burners were required to don the white blazer. The Lakeshore Academy dress code provided for a choice between blazers in either one of the school colors—navy or white. Although theoretically a student was free to choose white if they wished, in practice, only the Burners wore the white jackets. To complete the outfit, Burners were also required to don one visible but subtle accent of red (“a stain of blood on the veneer,” as it was described in the Burners’ Bible)—most opted for a red badge on the backpack or a red pin on the lapel. Franklin preferred a red ribbon bracelet. It ticked the box but was understated enough. He despised ostentation.

  The meeting was larger than usual this morning. It was the influx of pledges in the back, newly minted Threes inspired by their recent deaths during the Night of the Terrible Twos. They were coming to observe, perhaps hoping one day to don the white jackets themselves, or maybe even stand up on the conductor’s platform with Nicholas.

  “Now, I know many of you out there are interested in joining our storied little society,” Nicholas said as he gestured to the back of the room. “You had a taste of what life as a Burner is like at the Night of the Terrible Twos, so graciously hosted by Gloria Merriweather.” He nodded to a short, dark-haired girl in the front row.

  “There were eighteen burns that night. It looked great on DeadLinks. We even made the local news. ‘A Little House of Horrors,’ they called it.” Nicholas walked a tight path back and forth behind the podium as he spoke. “By the time the authorities arrived in the morning, I had already pulled a few strings. All the bodies had been removed and destroyed.”

  Franklin shuddered as he recalled how he had spent the night pulling bodies from spikes and fishing them out of pools, and then setting them all ablaze at the landfill. He frowned, but he was aware he was onstage and tried to keep it as imperceptible as possible.

  Franklin knew the glamour of the deaths was important to preserve. But the blood and bile, the smell and ooze, the backbreaking work of dragging a body by whatever part was most practical, and still mostly attached . . . no one needed those details.

  Nicholas returned to the podium. “The night will live on forever on DeadLinks, but once again we walk away untouched by the authorities. This is the power of the Burners.” He gripped the podium and scanned his crowd. “And one day we’re going to hold a party quadruple the size.” He nodded vigorously to punctuate his pronouncement.

  “Because the Burners deserve a big, absurd fireball of glory! That, my friends, is how we should be dying. Not in some extinguishment clinic with a waiting room and magazines and nurses who don’t give two shits about who you are or what you stand for.”

  He then shifted his energy into a subdued, darker register.

  “But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before you get the blaze of glory, you need to become a Burner first.” He narrowed his eyes as he scanned the crowd. “To do that, you need to have two things. You need to have guts, and you need to have toughness of mind. Because we require your burns to be daring.

  “And make no mistake, at some point or another, as a Burner, you will feel humiliated. Our burns are public, and it’s a fact of life that you can’t control what others think of you. What we believe is gloriously absurd, other people find stupid, delinquent, or criminal. If you aren’t mentally strong, this will wear you down. You will be tempted to quit. But you must own your inherent absurdity. You must embrace it. Believe in it. That’s how a Burner deals with everything, really. By embracing the absurdity of the world and standing up to it.”

  Franklin looked out over the crowd. The would-be pledges were rapt. But he had to stifle an impending yawn.

  “Absurdity is at the core, the essence, of everything,” Nicholas said, pausing a moment to let it sink in. “We live and die, nine times over. Why? Did some creator make it so? Who knows? But truly, who cares?

  “What I do know is that you might, when you are old and in your later lives, forget who you are completely. Aggressive lentic retrogression. They say it’s rare. You might think, ‘Well, it can never hit me.’ But you would be wrong, because it can strike down a precious little snowflake like you without a second glance. Yes, for many of us, retrogression lies in wait as we get older. This underscores the fact that we should be enjoying our lives—and deaths—while we have them. We are, all of us, not out there killing ourselves”—he overenunciated the words—“for a trifle.

  “Because you know what’s worse than burning your Six when you’re fifty years old and riddled with retrogression?” Nicholas continued. “Having wasted all your other lives without having some . . . merriment.”

  Nicholas craned his neck to the back rows of the auditorium, his Five clearly visible.

  “The world forces us to extinguish ourselves on the joyless, clockwork schedule that the actuaries have drawn up. That’s not burning. That’s just death,” he said, shaking his head.

  “In life, we are told to find a way to move ‘up.’ Study as if everything depends on it. Cram all night to pass our exams. Fight for that job, then fight for that promotion. But it’s a trap. Once we’re ‘up,’ we start worrying about making it even higher, then even higher than that. Everything about our lives and our deaths, all nine of them, is scheduled, commoditized, proscribed . . . and—”

  Franklin mouthed the kicker along with Nicholas: “—so damn serious.” He resisted the urge to roll his eyes.

  “The Burners celebrate the absurdity of our multiple lives by embracing the absurdity of our multiple deaths.”

  He ran his hands through his hair, smoothing his perfect swoop. He licked his teeth under his lips and then grinned widely.

  “We are Burners. We don’t follow life schedules. We don’t go to your extinguishment clinics.

  “The world tells us to burn? Well then, we will. But on our terms. And every burn will be a middle finger at the world!” Nicholas looked over his crowd, pleased.

  He ran his hand across a white, leather-bound book on the podium—the Burners’ Bible—and nodded to Franklin, who rolled his chair over to the laptop and entered a few keystrokes.

  A screen descended above the conductor’s podium and a projector turned on. Franklin then clicked to a slideshow of dead students—they were screengrabs from DeadLinks. One featured a kid in white robes hanging from the old elm tree out front; another, a ball of flames with legs, streaking across the yard; in the next image, two students were submerged in the school fountain, tied together in an embrace. Nicholas watched the pledges’ faces as Franklin clicked through the macabre lineup.

  “If you become one of us, you will be expected to execute your burns with creativity, panache, and heart,” Nicholas said, speaking to the pledges in the back. “But the most important thing we look for in a burn is the figure-skating quotient. That perverse little indefinable quality that just hits you right here.” Nicholas tapped his chest. “I call it mort.”

  It was a safe bet that even the pledges had seen multiple times the DeadLinks videos that the images were grabbed from. They were always forwarded around the school and vigilantly reposted every time one was flagged for removal. Their titles became legendary: Spencer’s Spontaneous Combustion in Seventh Period. Felicity’s Fun with Blenders . . . Franklin shuddered, remembering a few of the . . . flakier bits of Chuck’s Cheese Grater Madness!!! (Franklin had wisely chosen to remove that particular slide from this presentation. After all, it was seven thirty in the damn morning.)

  “All burns are meticulously recorded into the Bible,” Nicholas said, tapping the book as he spoke. “Of course, we also have a video record, but the Bible is the one thing that connects us back to the first generation of Burners, way back in 1910.”

  �
��As the Gold Star, it is my profound and sacred duty to log and record our absurdity for the ages. Eventually, all of us will have but one life left to our name. We’ll all be Nines, maybe addled with retro, maybe having forgotten everything about who we are, and then . . . poof. We’ll be gone. But here”—he laid his hand on the cover—“your burns will live forever.” Nicholas ran his fingers across the old cracked leather of the book, scanning the faces of the crowd.

  The room was silent save a nervous cough or two. Some of the more senior members sat cross-armed. They had heard this before. But it was obvious in their eyes that they were glued to Nicholas, drinking it in just the same as the newbies in the back.

  Franklin found Constance in the front row, chewing gum, her face illuminated by the projection, smiling slightly. Dang, she had a cute smile.

  Nicholas looked down at the Bible. “Just five years ago, the Gold Star was one Georgie Vander. You might have heard of him. Or seen his name in the trophy case, at least.”

  Franklin looked up.

  Ah. So that’s where he’s heading with this. The whole Georgie Vander thing.

  Nicholas Hawksley was the son of David Hawksley, the director of the local Lake. He was the man in charge of the Lake itself, the associated facilities, and the nurses for the entire region. Franklin figured Nicholas’s obsessive race against Georgie was some kind of an attempt to impress the old man.

  “Georgie Vander’s class of Burners recorded forty-four burns in one year. That’s the most ever,” Nicholas said, letting the statement dangle in the auditorium like a fishhook. And then, again with the overenunciation: “for-tee-four.” Franklin crinkled his brow as he studied Nicholas. This here was off the script. This here was a window into Nicholas’s actual plans.

  “Forty-four? We will beat the life out of that number,” Nicholas said, now grinning widely. “We will beat the class of Georgie Vander, and we right here”—he gestured grandly across the room—“will be the most impressive class in the entire Bible, going all the way back to nineteen freaking ten. So, to all you wannabes in the back, all you newly minted Threes . . . if you want to become one of us, get creative. Because we are going to make history.”