The Burning World

by Isaac Marion

  Abram is shaking his head. “You turned him in. I knew you were a fucking worm.” He looks up. “Is he dead? Did you execute him?”

  The most upsetting thing about the man’s smile is how genuine it looks. As if he has convinced even the smallest of his facial muscles to play along. As if it’s not a game at all but simply his reality. I take the end of his tie and hold it close to my face, examining its glistening fibers. “What did they do?” I ask him. “How did they make you like this?”

  The man’s grin widens. “I feel fantastic.”

  Abram pushes me aside and gets very close to Miller’s face. “Tell me what’s happening here,” he says in a low growl, no less threatening for being unarmed. “Where is everyone?”

  “Branch 2 is in transition,” Miller chirps. “New employee concepts are being tested.”

  The elevator dings. We have reached floor twenty.

  “Would you like to learn more?” he asks.

  I truly don’t know my answer to that question, but when the doors open and Miller steps out, we follow him.

  • • •

  We are in an open space the size of an airplane hangar. No walls from one end of the building to the other, no ceiling for at least three floors up. The only illumination is the pale daylight creeping through a few slit windows. I see everything in vague outlines, like the room has been pumped full of dark fog. And through this fog, I see people. Hundreds of people surrounding hundreds of machines: steel presses and cutters and more complex things I can’t identify. Some of the machines are fully automated, like the one that rolls out little brass cylinders and the one that fills them with black powder and the one that caps them with cones of lead. Others need human assistance, like the one that sends packets of clay-like substance to an assembly station where a man embeds some electronics in the clay and inserts it under the lining of a metal briefcase.

  “I know this,” M mumbles. “I know these machines.”

  “We are pleased to announce the reopening of Gray River National,” Miller says, his voice echoing in the vast dimness as he wanders off ahead of us, “made possible by recent advancements in human resource management. We look forward to providing simplified but effective security to all branches of the Axiom family as it continues to grow . . .”

  His voice fades into the shadows. We have stopped following him. It took a moment in the low light, but I have begun to notice peculiar traits in the workers. Their movements are loose and their eyes are disconnected from their tasks, staring out the windows as their hands twist screws and connect wires, as if they’re only operating these tools because they happened to bump into them. I hear Miller’s voice in the distance, talking to no one, a subtle overtone to the harsh melody of the factory, the grinding of metal and squeaking of rusty wheels. A worker near me lets his hand wander into a press and pulls it away with two fewer fingers. The stumps ooze black fluid in a steady, pulseless pour, and the man continues his work.

  “They did it,” Julie whispers. “They did it without our help.”

  I approach the worker warily. He doesn’t pause or look at me. There is no sign of awareness. “Who are you?” I ask him. “How did you get here?”

  He works and bleeds silently.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  His eyes meet mine for barely a second. His movements stutter, then resume, and a memory appears in my head. Not one from the basement, not from my first life but from my dusty, bloody second.

  My relationship with most of my victims was simple: they tried to kill me, they tried to run away from me, and when those options failed, they screamed while I ate them. It was the standard stuff of wildlife documentaries. But there was one young man, perhaps a little unbalanced, perhaps unusually perceptive, who asked me questions while I hunted him. In his desperation, he tried to reason with me. Why are you doing this? he demanded. Why do you want to eat me? What does this get you? What is this for?

  It was the only time anyone ever tried to reach me. All the others were happy to play out the standard scene of predator and prey. They had heard the reports and seen the movies; they knew what a zombie attack was supposed to look like and they played their role to the end, doing their part to maintain the narrative, awful but comforting in its consistency.

  This young man ignored all that and did something absurd: he tried to communicate with the faceless symbol of relentless terror. And for a moment, it listened. His questions penetrated the thick crust around my consciousness, and a few cold synapses fired, generating a rare coherent thought. A simple answer: I don’t know.

  My hesitation probably lasted about as long as this worker’s stutter. The young man’s boldness bought him just a few extra seconds of life. But what did it buy me?

  I leave the worker to his process and chase Miller into the shadows of the factory. I find him standing at the edge of a rectangular sunken area, a concrete pit like an empty swimming pool, covered with steel grating.

  “. . . still in the experimental stage and will require more effort to maximize potential,” the man is saying to no one, “but the output is already impressive.” He swivels his grin toward me as I approach. “Of course we still have great interest in your process, which produces more versatile results. Have you come here to reconsider our offer?”

  Beneath the grating, the pit is a riot of zombies. Hundreds of them crammed shoulder to shoulder, swaying in waves like a concert crowd, clawing at the walls and each other. Their agitated state indicates advanced starvation. Even my ambiguously Living flesh must smell delicious.

  “What are you doing to them?” I ask the man, whose tie is the same blood red as the one hanging in the closet of the house—mine and Julie’s house—at the end of a quiet street.

  “The Dead are blank,” he says. “They are suggestible and malleable. We are bending them into useful shapes.”

  “You’re making slaves.”

  He gestures to the pit of seething bodies and they surge toward his hand, piling on top of each other to reach the grate door and rattling it furiously. “Look at them,” he says, inverting his grin into an exaggerated frown. “They have no culture, no religion, no nationality—nothing. They are raw material, and someone has to tell them what to be.” He turns his frown upside down and gestures to the dim swarms around us. “We tell them to be this.”

  “What are you?” I demand, staring hard at his smooth, unblemished face.

  His eyes meet mine with unusual directness. “I feel fantastic.” His grin stretches so wide I expect it to split. “I know why I’m here. I know what I’ll do every day. I have answered every question and solved every problem. Everything is clear.”

  “R.” A soft voice at my back, tugging at me. “There’s nothing we can do here. Let’s go before he calls the real guards.”

  “I have already notified Regional Security,” the man assures her in comforting tones. “They will be with you shortly.”

  “R, let’s go!”

  I stare at the churning mass of Dead in the pit, all confused violence and desperate hunger. Do I have anything better to offer them? Can I really point to my new life of pain and terror and say, See what you’re missing? My eyes roam the quietly shuffling ranks of well-fed working Dead. No groans, no wheezes, no anxious teeth snapping. They’re adrift in an even dimmer dream, wrapped in gray wool and buried in soft dust.

  Should I let them stay?

  My friends run toward the elevator. I follow for a few steps, then I stop. I go back to the pit.

  “Have you decided to reconsider our offer?” Red Tie asks me through that taut, joyless rictus.

  I answer his question and mine with the same reply: “No.”

  I pull open the latch on the grating door and I run.

  “Where’d you go?” Julie says as I slip into the elevator. “You were behind us and then you weren’t.”

  I push the door-close button repeatedly.

  “R . . . ?” she says with rising concern.

  “I did somethin
g . . . impulsive,” I say under my breath.

  A chorus of hungry groans fills the factory as the doors slide shut.

  THE ELEVATOR MUSIC has shorted out again. I stare at the ceiling speaker, willing it to flood this steel cube with some watery post-culture blasphemy, because even a major-key lounge rendition of “Another Brick in the Wall” would be preferable to the snarls filtering down around us.

  M looks at me and sighs. “You let them out, didn’t you?”

  I give him a cringing grin.

  Nora puts a hand over her face.

  I expect a more violent reaction from Abram, but he looks faraway, staring at the door like it’s a window to a distant vista.

  “It’s okay,” Julie says, nodding to herself. “They’re twenty floors up. We’ll run out of here and leave them to wreck the place. It’s okay.”

  The groans aren’t fading as quickly as they should be. The big elevator is excruciatingly slow, and even as we approach the bottom we can still hear the scrapes and grunts.

  “It’s okay,” Julie says again, still nodding.

  The doors open on the dark expanse of the lobby, and as we run for the exit, all four of the staircase doors burst open. The Dead pour out like liquid, not so much descending the stairs as free-falling down them, rolling and tumbling and trampling each other in their pursuit of our life scent.

  Perhaps “impulsive” was too kind a word for my actions.

  The guards at the front doors still make no attempt to stop us. Still a few bugs in the “process.” Abram juts his elbows to shield his daughter as he carries her like a baby, ignoring the agony of his injuries, but we brush past the guards without resistance. And then the All Dead swarm over them, uninterested in their flesh but killing them all the same in their mindless stampede.

  We take the bridge and the scenario repeats with the bridge guards, but this time we’re farther away. Starvation has a way of rousing the Dead from their apathy, quickening their pace from shamble to jog, but a rotting corpse, no matter how motivated, will never be a sprinter. By the time we’re over the river we’ve put a safe distance between us and them, and we slow down to catch our breath.

  “Fuck you, Archie,” M gasps, leaning against his knees. “And fuck running. And fuck”—he sucks in a deep breath—“needing to breathe.”

  “Abram,” Julie says. “What’s Regional Security?”

  Abram is gazing at downtown Pittsburgh with that glassy distance in his eyes.

  “Hey!” Julie says, snapping her fingers at him. “What are we dealing with? Where will they be coming from?”

  “I don’t know,” he murmurs without looking at her. “Everything’s different.”

  I glance back at the bridge and find the Dead already uncomfortably close. In what felt like a few seconds, they have devoured most of our distance. This is, of course, the unique danger of the Dead. Their slowness lulls you. You think you’re safe. You stop to rest, maybe start arguing, lost in some heated personal drama, and while your complex minds are weaving their tangled threads, the Dead are just walking, slow and steady and unconflicted.

  “Keep moving,” I say, already moving.

  • • •

  Our careful creep from the airfield to the city took over an hour. We make the return trip in twenty minutes. The plane’s cargo ramp closes behind us with a solid clack, but I don’t allow myself to feel safe. The image of the guards disappearing under a tide of corpses plays again in my head, and I keep it playing.

  Abram heads for the cockpit and Julie and I go aft to check on our familial remains, but already I see trouble. There are dents and scratches all over the cabin, as if it recently housed a wild animal. My kids are peeking out from the restroom with fear in their eyes, and the object of this fear seems to be Julie’s mother, who sits cross-legged on the carpet, glowering at us.

  “Mom,” Julie says, trying to keep her voice steady, “what did you do?”

  Audrey is still chained to her chair, but the chair lies on its side next to her, detached from the floor. Her hands are a mess of dark blood, all the nails gone and much of the skin, her fingertips peeled to the bone.

  Scattered on the carpet around her is a sizable collection of airplane parts.

  Abram shouts something incoherent and I hear rapid footsteps from the front of the plane. Julie readies her pistol, but Abram ignores her and starts gathering the parts off the floor. Audrey lunges at him and Julie yanks her back by the collar.

  “Chain that thing to something structural,” Abram says with controlled rage, “or I’ll debrain it with my bare hands.”

  “What did she do?” Julie asks, wide-eyed.

  “Tore apart the cockpit. Ripped the controls right off the rod.” He scoops as many parts as he can into his shirt and rushes back to the front.

  “Mom,” Julie says miserably, holding tight to the cable leash. “Why would you do that?”

  It’s impossible to decode the emotion on Audrey’s face, if it’s emotion at all. It looks like anger and defiance, and then with a slight change of angle, it becomes grief. Or it could be none of those. Just the random movements of a face with no one behind it.

  Julie runs the cable directly through the floor hook where the chair latches in and cinches it short so that Audrey can just barely stand. Audrey watches impassively as her daughter locks her up, but Julie looks agonized. “I’m sorry, Mom,” she mumbles as if her mother is howling accusations. “I’m sorry.”

  I decide to give them a moment. M and Nora are hovering over Abram, watching him reattach whatever can be reattached, mending snapped wires with electrical tape and broken parts with duct tape.

  “Can we . . . help?” M offers.

  Abram ignores him. The speed of his movements suggests the danger of our situation, and it occurs to me that every part of it was caused by two soft hearts: Julie’s and mine. Two long-shot bets against the hardness of reality. Should we feel foolish for this? For taking life-threatening risks for things more important than life?

  I wander back to the center of the plane. Down the staircase. Out the cargo door. I walk along the towering behemoth that was once my home and emerge from the shadow of the wing into the orange evening sun. I lean my back against the nose wheel, watching the swarm of the Dead filter out of the streets and converge into one mass on the runway ahead. Perhaps they will answer the question for me.

  “R!” Julie shouts down from the cockpit window. “What are you doing? Get back in!”

  “Is it ready?” I call up to her. “Can we fly?”

  “He’s still working on it but get in!”

  I return my attention to the advancing horde. They’re close enough to make out individual faces now. All their identifying characteristics—skin color, eye color, even hair color in some dusty specimens—have been absorbed into the tide of gray, but traces of their personalities remain. A tattoo. A piercing. And of course, their clothing choices. Even in the ravages of death, they are full of history.

  How can I remind them?

  “R!”

  Her voice floats down from miles above me, shrill and desperate.

  I step out from the shadow of the nose cone and let the sun warm my face.

  “Who are you?” I ask the Dead. “You were people. You still are people. Which ones?”

  I don’t shout. I ask calmly like a friend at a pub table, the serious question that leads away from idle chatter and into real depth. Are they willing to follow me there? Or will they laugh me off, call me a buzzkill and then kill me?

  “Who are you?” I say again, unable to keep some fear out of my voice as they lumber closer. “Think! Remember!”

  I see a ripple in their faces. Hungry snarls flicker with uncertainty. I do something I doubt they’ve ever seen before: I take a step toward them.

  “Who are you?”

  They stop advancing. They look at the ground, then at the sky. There is . . . a moment. And then the ones bringing up the rear bump into the transfixed vanguard, and the moment end
s. They remember one thing: that they’re hungry. They rush forward to devour my newly Living flesh.

  And then they begin to fall. Whatever seeds I may have planted exit their heads in sprays of blood. Whatever thoughts may have been forming disintegrate as bullets sever neurons and disperse their electricity into the evening air.

  M and Nora are kneeling on the wing. Nora’s shots are precise, each bullet finding a brain, picking off the ones closest to me. M’s AK-47 sprays more indiscriminately but kills just as well through sheer volume of bullets. A scream builds in my throat; I want to curse my friends, but I can’t. Their actions are rational. They live in this world and they want to stay here. They are not obligated to join me on this altar.

  I retreat to the cargo ramp and close it and run to the wing. They’re still firing.

  “Stop!” I shout at them.

  “We can’t, R!” Nora says between shots. “They’re swarming the plane!” She sights a young man climbing up the nose wheel and picks him off.

  “They . . . can’t get in!”

  “You know they can,” M grunts. “Tight swarm, pile up, break windows . . . remember that bus we did in Olympia?”

  He unloads a volley into the advancing swarm, stripping away the front row.

  I grip my face in my hands. What happened to my act of kindness? How did it become this? I have catalyzed two massacres in a single week. What is the flaw in me that turns my noblest efforts to shit?

  I rush into the cockpit and find Julie testing switches while Abram wraps the last of the duct tape around the control rod. “Please say you’re done,” I beg him.

  He settles into his seat and carefully pushes the mass of tape that surrounds a large switch. It clicks, and the engines roar to life. I hear M and Nora scrambling inside and slamming the emergency door shut. Zombies fall away from the plane as we blast into reverse, and by the time Abram has pulled as close to a U-turn as a jumbo jet can manage, we are clear of the swarm.

  They stand among the motionless bodies of their peers, watching us depart, and just before distance makes their faces illegible, I see their expressions soften from hunger to longing. A subtle change, but visible to anyone who has felt it before. Perhaps somewhere under the scorched earth, a few seeds survived. Perhaps I am capable of good in the midst of my failures. Perhaps if I tell myself enough, if I repeat it over and over as we fly away from this continent, I can make myself believe it.