by Isaac Marion
So while even a stone has a few threads tied to it, a person has a thousand ropes, and the man in the truck is pulling us. A part of us begins to separate. A book slides out from our shelves. It’s a thin book, coverless and bound with red yarn, and it’s been badly damaged. Tears blur its ink. Blood blots its words. But the books in our Library can heal. They can grow. They can complete themselves.
A part of us emerges from our vastness. A part of us watches Abram and reads him, hoping to learn who he is. Hoping to recover a few of the pages that a heartless world ripped out.
We follow the truck.
I
INSIDE THE PROTECTIVE SHEATH of Corridor 2, I can almost pretend I’m in the old world. Smooth black asphalt with freshly painted yellow lines, entirely clear of abandoned cars and the wreckage of collapsed buildings. No bomb craters, no cracks, not so much as a pothole. And the ten-foot concrete walls effectively hide the mess outside, ensuring that nothing shatters this lovely illusion of municipal vitality. They also ensure, incidentally, that we won’t be swarmed and eaten by any of my less enlightened former friends.
Then the illusion evaporates. The walls dissolve into wooden pour forms and sprouts of rebar, and we’re on a standard street again, exposed to the city and all its lurking threats. Despite the countless benefits of a safe route between enclaves, I have no doubt one of Axiom’s first acts was to shut down the Corridor project, keeping its territory divided into manageable factions. When has a despot ever benefited from bringing people together?
The dark clouds begin to release their payload, and Julie and Nora hunch their shoulders as cold rain douses our little tailgate party. I see a few lone zombies staring up at the sky, letting the drops spatter against their unblinking eyes. The Dead have always commuted to the city. They slog in every morning from their various hives in the outskirts, they do their gruesome work, then they slog back home to hibernate a few hours before doing it all again. Only recently have some begun to alter this weary ritual. The young gray woman in a tank top and skirt—is she simply lost, separated from her hunting party, or is she feeling the cold of the rain for the first time and wondering why? The blood-smeared man trudging toward the stadium—is he going there to kill and eat, or to beg for help with these strange new stirrings?
As we drive past, both of them whirl toward us and hiss, silvery eyes wide with animal hunger. I tell myself to be patient. Whatever is going to happen won’t happen overnight.
“See how far you’ve come, R?” Julie says. “I know you doubt it sometimes, but look at them and look at you. No one would ever guess what you used to be.”
As always, she is too generous, but I accept the encouragement. Given that I seem to have fooled our rescuer, there may even be some truth in it.
Nora slides the rear window open. “Pull over. We’re coming inside.”
“I don’t like our distance yet,” Abram says without taking his eyes off the road. “Hold on a couple more miles.”
“Hey. We’re in the Dead part of town. I feel like shark chum back here. Pull over.”
He drives a couple more blocks, then pulls into a parking garage entrance. I see him listening carefully as we climb out of the truck, and I wonder what he’s more afraid to hear: the hungry groans of my people or the propeller drones of his?
Julie hops into the passenger seat without pausing to consider legroom issues. “So,” she says, peering intently at Abram as Nora and I fold our long limbs into the barely-there backseat. “Are you ready for that chat?”
Abram lets out a slow breath. “Everybody buckled in?”
Nora’s knees are pressed into her chest. Mine are against my chin.
“We’re certainly not going anywhere if we crash,” Nora says.
Abram pulls out of the garage and heads south toward the freeway, weaving steadily through the rough terrain of vehicular debris. The rain pelts the windshield in fat, splattering drops.
“Perry didn’t have a brother,” Julie says.
“He wouldn’t remember me much. He was only five when he saw me last, and our mother never liked to talk about people we’d lost. Said we should stay in the present.” He smirks. “Very convenient philosophy when you misplace a son.”
Julie hesitates. “What happened?”
“The usual. Monsters attack, people die, families get separated. I wandered around on my own for a while, tried to find them, then Axiom picked me up. The old Axiom, back when they were just your standard corporate militia trying to carve out a market.”
I lean forward. “What are they now?”
He looks annoyed by the question. “Something different.”
“Are they human?”
He shoots me a glance that says I’ve secured my status as an idiot. “What the fuck else would they be?”
Julie tries to steer us back on course. “So you grew up with them? In their custody?”
He hesitates, then chuckles and turns back to the road. “I guess you could say that. Feral child raised by wolves.”
“So why’d you turn on them?” Nora says, folding her arms. “Why are you helping us?”
Ahead, one of the city’s many stacks of flattened cars has tipped over, blocking the road. Abram engages the four-wheel drive and guides the truck over a pile of two-dimensional coupes, crushed like beer cans for a recycling day that will never come.
“The short answer is, I thought I’d found my family.” The wipers clear the windshield and then the rain covers it. The world flashes from soft blur to hideous clarity and back again. “I’d picked up some clues over the years that pointed toward Cascadia, so when I heard we were moving on Post, I requested the assignment. I knew it was a long shot, even with free access to hundreds of prisoners—sorry, I mean guests—and after a few days I was about to let it drop. But then this guy . . .” He jabs a thumb toward me. “This guy says his name. Looks right at me and says ‘Perry.’ ”
The truck falls into grim silence.
“Don’t worry,” he adds, “I know he’s dead.”
“How?” Julie says in a small voice.
“Would my face have sent you into shock if he was alive? The message was pretty clear.”
More silence. I brace myself for him to ask the terrible question: How did he die? But for the moment, he spares me.
“I assume my parents are dead too,” he says, staring through the windshield.
Julie nods.
Abram’s lips are a thin line. “So it’s down to me.”
We have ascended the hill up to the freeway and Citi Stadium is now visible on the horizon behind us. I watch it recede in the rear window, fading into a gray mirage behind sheets of rain.
“What’s the long answer?” Nora says.
Abram doesn’t reply.
“You betrayed Axiom and fucked up your life just to talk to someone who might know your brother?”
I watch his eyes in the mirror. They are familiar. Narrow-set and brown like Perry’s. But a few extra years have hardened them by centuries. “No,” he says, and takes a small, unmarked exit down into a wooded valley.
• • •
The street is buried in a thick layer of rotting leaves. The headlights slide across decrepit houses with boarded windows and gutted cars sinking into the rising grass, the kind of homes that probably looked like this even before the apocalypse.
“Where are we going?” Julie asks.
“That’s enough questions for a while,” Abram says.
At the end of the street, past a dead-end sign riddled with bullet holes, there are signs of life. Men in beige jackets move through the dark in the pale glow of headlamps on low settings.
“Are those—”
“I said shut up.”
“Hey,” I interject, leaning forward, but the gesture feels perfunctory. Julie looks at the side of Abram’s face with a kind of injured dismay. No, this is not the boy she once loved. Not even an echo of him.
As we approach the camp’s entrance, a man emerges from a small te
nt and lights a cigarette, takes a drag, and waits while Abram rolls down his window.
“078-05-1120,” Abram says in the bored tone of well-worn procedure.
The guard checks a list on a notepad, nods, then shines his headlamp into the backseat. “Who’re they?”
“New hires from Goldman. No numbers yet.”
He waves us through with his cigarette, leaving a spiral of smoke in the air, and we drive into the camp.
Our high beams pierce deep into the shadows, revealing what the camp’s conspicuous lack of lighting kept hidden. The property must have been some big family’s country commune. Six houses on one lot, with a barn and a few cabins in the field out back. Mom and Dad and the kids and their kids and maybe even their kids’ kids, all holed up at the end of this street deep in the woods, where no one could disturb their private party with news of the world and its wicked ways. How surprised they must have been to learn that the pot continued to boil even after they left the kitchen. How shocked to see that scalding tide reaching all the way to their door.
Now the farm is occupied by a new family with a more active approach to society’s imperfections. All the houses and cabins appear to be barracks; Axiom soldiers pop in and out of them on various errands, delivering or receiving weapons and equipment. Beyond the houses, dozens of tents spread across a muddy field like a music festival campground, a miserable Woodstock of war.
“What are we doing here?” Nora whispers, despite Abram’s instructions. “Won’t they be looking for us?”
“The jamming’s heavy around here. Walkies get barely half-mile range. The camp won’t know what happened till a messenger arrives.”
“It was never a negotiation, was it,” Julie says, watching soldiers mount a grenade launcher to the hood of a Toyota pickup. “You’d take a willing merger if you could get it, but you were coming in one way or another.”
A bitter smirk touches Abram’s mouth. “We offer innovative solutions to modern problems.”
He parks the truck next to one of the cabins. He hops out and goes inside, and we follow him.
It’s warm and dry in the cabin, and surprisingly cozy with a fire crackling in a little iron stove. There’s a twin bed and two chairs, a TV and an old video game system. Perhaps a room for one of the family’s adolescent boys seeking independence and manhood. The old bloodstains on the curtains suggest an abrupt end to his quest.
His room is now occupied by a woman and a girl. Both of them sit in front of the TV, watching an airplane take off, watching a cat play with an injured bird, watching long-dead singers perform for long-dead celebrity judges. The kaleidoscope of images splashes strange colors on the walls of the room.
“About time,” the woman says without looking up.
The girl runs to Abram and hugs his leg, but she doesn’t smile. She is about six years old, straight black hair, tawny skin—the blond, ruddy-faced woman is clearly not her mother. One of the girl’s eyes is big and dark, the other is covered by a sky-blue eye patch with a daisy painted on it.
“Hey, little weed,” Abram says and hefts her into the crook of his arm. “You been having fun with Carol while I was gone?”
The girl shakes her head sadly.
“Well of course you haven’t. Carol’s no fun.”
“She asks when you’re coming back about every five minutes,” Carol says. “I was about to tell her you died, you fuckin’ deadbeat.”
“It’s been a busy week.”
“So I hear. You owe me five days with Luke.”
Abram bounces the girl on his arm, smiling absently. “I might be on assignment for a while, but when I get the days . . . yeah.” He puts her down. “Sprout, I need you to get your backpack and pack up your clothes. We’re going on a trip.”
Carol frowns. “A trip? The fuck are you talking about?”
Abram ignores her and begins throwing clothes and food into a backpack.
“Hey Kelvin. You can’t take your kid on assignment—”
“Thanks for watching Sprout, Carol. You can head home now if you want.”
The light on the walls turns red and the TV’s audio cuts to a warbling alert tone. Abram freezes over his pack.
“Oh shit,” Carol says, rushing up to the screen like her favorite show is about to start. “Did they finally get in? Are we live on Fed TV?”
The tone plays over a blank red screen for about two seconds, then the kaleidoscope continues.
A bear swiping a salmon out of a stream. A lion pouncing on a zebra in lazy slow motion. Soldiers marching into a village.
“This fucking code,” Carol mutters. “Can you follow it yet, Kelvin? I haven’t finished my homework.”
“Nope,” Abram says with a casual calm that belies the haste of his packing. “Check the producer’s guide.”
Carol pulls a thick binder off a shelf and thumps it down on the table as the TV flashes through its collection of tropes. “I can’t believe we’re gonna keep using this Old Gov bullshit for all our messaging,” she says, flipping through the binder’s tabbed and laminated pages. “Why can’t we just say it straight?”
Abram chuckles in spite of himself. “If we ‘said it straight’ people might actually understand us. Can’t have that.”
Carol glances back at him. “Huh?”
“It’s right there in the title.” He jabs a thumb toward the binder, which looks like a manual for some vintage industrial machinery. “Leveraging Euphemism for the Prevention of Overcomprehension.”
Carol examines the binder’s cover. “I’ll say it again—huh?”
He zips up his pack. “Forget it. I’m sure this is just a test run anyway.” He moves toward the door.
A voice cuts through the background music, methodical and grim: “Everything happens for a reason. Everything has its place.”
On the TV, a gorilla paces in a zoo enclosure.
“Man is the only creature who questions his.”
The gorilla fades to a badly lit photo of a man’s face.
Abram’s face.
Carol’s eyes widen and she looks at Abram. “Well that one was clear en—”
Abram cracks a fist into her temple. She sinks to the floor.
“What the fuck!” Nora shouts.
Abram snatches a gun out of Carol’s belt and tosses it to Nora. “You know how to use that, right?”
Nora opens her mouth to reply, then a shot of a goldfish swimming in a tiny tank fades to a photo of Nora sitting on the floor of her cell, scowling at the camera, and she goes quiet.
“What the hell is this?” Julie whispers as a goldfinch in a cage fades to a dim shot of her strapped into the torture chair.
“Suffering comes when man climbs out of his place. When he resists his nature and rejects his role.”
Sprout is staring at her unconscious nanny and whimpering. Abram hefts his pack over his shoulder and grabs his daughter’s hand. “Move,” he says to everyone in the room, and then he’s gone.
We hesitate, trying to catch up with this turn of events, but a groan from Carol breaks the shock and we move. Before I close the cabin’s door, I glance back at the TV and see my own face looking back at me. I don’t remember this photo being taken, but my memory is porous even when I haven’t been shocked in and out of consciousness. Despite the harsh light of the flash, I look convincingly alive. My skin is pale but lacks the purple tint of the Nearly Living. My eyes are thoroughly normal. Brown like mud, like shit, like ninety-six percent of the world’s population last time such things were tallied. This is what I wanted, isn’t it? To be just another man living out his lifespan in a world where children suffer and women are beaten and wild animals sit at all the desks?
“When nails escape their holes,” the TV says, “the house falls apart. Find them and bring them back.”
A single frame of the Axiom logo flickers over my face, the screen glares red, and that grating alert tone rings out in the empty shed. Then regular programming resumes.
Happy kids on tire s
wings.
The green glass of Freedom Tower shining over a young New York.
A writhing worm.
I FIDGET IN THE FRONT seat as we flee the camp at a painfully relaxed idle. It’s like trying to play dead while a bear gnaws on my skull. I notice a few soldiers emerging from their tents and shining flashlights into each other’s faces, but by the time the search gains any momentum we’re already to the exit. I see the glow of a television flickering inside the guard’s tent and I tense, then I see the guard himself still standing outside, halfway through his cigarette. He nods to Abram and waves us through.
“Thank God for bad habits,” Julie mumbles, watching his cloud of smoke recede in the rear window.
Once we’re out of view of the camp, Abram hits the gas. The old engine rattles and backfires and the truck roars forward, spitting clumps of dead leaves behind us. Instead of going back up the hill to the freeway, he takes a road that runs alongside it, hidden from aerial eyes by a thick ceiling of trees.
“Where are we going?” Julie says, leaning into the front seat.
“I’ll figure that out later,” Abram says. “Right now we just need some distance.”
Julie nods. “Stay on this road; it’s the only one out here that’s cleared. Good cover for about five miles and then we can jump on the freeway.”
“Abram,” Nora says to the back of his head. “That stuff on the TV . . . was that really the LOTUS Feed?”
“It was the Feed we all know and love, it just has new producers.”
“So our pictures . . . that ‘arrest warrant’ or whatever it was . . .”
Abram nods. “It just went nationwide. You’re officially outlaws.”
The rough pavement fills the truck with a steady rushing noise like the cabin of an airliner. Abram’s daughter looks very frightened, wedged between Julie and Nora, and I wonder how much of this she understands.