The Burning World

by Isaac Marion

  A box.

  A metal shipping crate is rising off the roof of my grandfather’s penthouse, gaudy red against the dark sky. What could possibly be inside? There is no possession in that building that he valued enough to save. He didn’t love wealth, he loved getting wealthy. He nibbled the meat but what he craved was the hunt. The only thing I can imagine him saving is himself.

  A wad of trash slaps into my face, reeking of rancid beef, and by the time I pull it off and wipe away the vile grease, the helicopter is gone. I give up contemplating its cargo. There is enough terror around us already.

  “Pace University,” Tomsen says as we emerge onto an open highway and the wind lulls a little. “That’s where they take the fresh Dead and the Living potentials.”

  “My mom’s in bad shape,” Julie says. “She’s fresh but she’s . . . hurt.”

  “If she’s work-worthy they’ll try to salvage her at the hospital. If not, she’ll go somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  The wind kicks up again, roaring over the discussion. “It’s a mystery!” Tomsen bellows. “Need to run now!”

  Abram is already half a block ahead, having bolted the moment he heard the location. I realize there has been no moment in our acquaintance when he has stood with us for any reason but necessity. What does he want from his life? Does he want anything?

  We run after him, but after two blocks, Tomsen suddenly veers off onto a side street.

  “Hey!” Julie shouts.

  Tomsen stops, looking puzzled. “What?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Have to finish it!” she shouts, already running again. “Whole reason I’m here!”

  “Tomsen, wait!”

  “Meet on the Brooklyn Promenade!” she calls back. “Barbara will throw us a party!”

  With that, she disappears into curtains of rain.

  Julie growls curses that are lost in the wind. We run toward the college.

  • • •

  Pace University is a utilitarian concrete box that looks more like an insurance company than a hallowed hall of learning. I would never have guessed it was a college if not for the weather-beaten metal letters on its central tower, several of which have come loose and are spinning crazily in the wind. The effect is oddly mesmerizing, like the building is struggling to decide what it is.

  A desperate shout startles me back to attention. I see Abram sprinting toward the main entrance, where a few Axiom guards are loading a crowd of children into an old city bus. The bus is covered in faded decals from some old Discovery Channel promo, the doors made to look like the jaws of a shark. I see two familiar heads of hair disappearing into it: curly blond and straight blue-black. Then the jaws snap shut.

  I run faster than I have since I ran to stop a disaster, to save my home and my friend from the madness I helped create. I wasn’t fast enough then. My cold, stiff joints resisted my efforts, and I arrived just in time to feel the explosion like a slap of rebuke. I am faster now, fast enough to overtake Abram, but will the result be any different?

  I stop my sprint by slamming into the door. “Open it!” I shout at the driver.

  “Hey,” one of the guards says, striding toward me with his rifle swinging at his hip. “This bus isn’t for citizens. Back up.”

  “My kids are in there.”

  “If they’re in that bus, they’re our kids.”

  Abram slams into him from behind, sending him sprawling onto the pavement and his rifle spinning under the bus. The engine grumbles and the bus moves forward. I hear Abram wrestling with the guard but I can’t help him now. I hammer my elbow into the door until the Plexiglas panel pops out of its frame. I reach inside and fumble for the door-open lever, but the bus is accelerating. It’s either let go or be dragged.

  I wriggle my arm free and fall to the pavement. I catch a glimpse of their faces pressed to the windows as the bus rolls past me, Joan and Alex and their new friend Sprout, and then they’re gone.

  What must my children think of me? Since the day they were thrust into my care, I have abandoned them twice: first to go out into the world and follow my heart, to fall in love and learn how to live, and then because their needs overwhelmed me. Because I was too busy fighting myself to protect anyone else. And now that I’ve come back, now that I’m doing all I can to give them the life they deserve . . . nothing but terror and peril, again and again.

  Is this the mind of every parent? This storm of guilt and uncertainty in spite of all good intentions? Did my own father feel this heartbreak as he sat in that chair sucking in smoke, feeling past generations of failure coursing through his veins? Wondering dimly what could break that heavy chain?

  I hear Abram screaming obscenities as the bus disappears, as the guards back away with a gun pointed at each of us, as they climb into their Hummer and screech off after the bus. For a moment, all five of us stand motionless, trapped in the space between courage and suicide. Then I realize there are only four of us.

  “Julie!”

  I whirl around to find her running down a side street toward what must be the hospital. I should have expected this. She will run through the halls screaming her mother’s name until her bronchial tubes seize, until she collapses or the building does. The promise she made her mother is the very one her mother broke all those years ago, and I have no doubt she’ll throw her life away to keep it.

  I run after her, my long legs eating up the distance. She sees me coming and looks ready to struggle, but then she notices I’m not stopping her. I’m not trying to talk sense into her or convince her to give up what I know she can’t. I’m just running alongside her, ready to catch her if she falls.

  A hint of gratitude warms the panic in her face. Gratitude and more. Then a blur of white roars around the corner and we are underwater.

  • • •

  I’m spinning, rolling, battered by chunks of debris, then I’m scraping along the street like it’s a stony riverbed. The wave finally spreads itself thin enough for me to plant my feet and I stagger upright. The filthy froth boils against my thighs as I scan frantically for Julie.

  I can’t find her.

  I can’t find anyone. I have been washed into some unknown avenue in the shadow of some unknown high-rise, and I feel the weight of it pushing down on me, thousands of tons of concrete looming like a gravestone with no name. Here lies a body. Here lies nobody.

  “Julie!”

  We were side by side; how could we have drifted so far? Did she grab hold of something I missed or did she tumble far past me?

  “Julie!” I call again but the wind stuffs it back in my mouth. I hear a crash behind me and I turn, and that’s when I see the wall.

  I feel an insane urge to laugh.

  Manhattan’s defense against the siege of inevitability is a layered hodgepodge of increasing desperation. The base is professional: six-foot slabs of concrete mortared tight at the seams. The middle looks like a volunteer effort: freeway barriers stacked atop the slabs, their gaps stuffed with sandbags. And the top: plywood and tin. Frantic gestures of a panicked populace, about as effective as superstition.

  The crash I heard was this layer collapsing under another wind-blasted wave. The force of this rush pushes the freeway barriers off the slabs, and the New York Sea spills into the street, its raging whitecaps darkening as they scoop up decades of human grime.

  I open my mouth to scream Julie’s name, and it fills with black soup.

  I tumble and spin, hands and feet flailing for purchase, but this is not a preliminary wave testing the defenses. This is the flood. As I spin in this icy void, I feel the presence of the wretch in the basement, but to my surprise, he is not laughing. He is not gloating.

  Is this it? he murmurs sadly. Is this all you do with our third chance? A few friends, a few kisses, a few boards to build a home?

  The water isn’t deep, but my disorientation makes it an expanse without bottom or surface. Garbage wraps around me like tentacles, dragging me down toward
some vast maw.

  It’s not enough, he says. You’ve barely touched our debt.

  But I am not listening to him. I’m thinking about Julie, hoping she’s far away yet wishing for her presence. All the endings I’ve imagined for my third life, no matter how dark and violent, involved her at my side when I closed my eyes. I never imagined it like this.

  Something hits me hard, and as the black water fades to a deeper darkness, my thoughts become wordless. Simple impulses of love that I howl into infinite halls, hoping someone hears and writes them down.

  THE END OF IT.

  I wake up next to a woman. I’m not sure which one. My eyes burn and my head throbs; even the pricey stuff does it. No matter how much you pay for the drink, you pay again in the morning.

  “Hi,” the woman whispers, and I recognize the voice. My assistant. “Are you alive?”

  I groan.

  “Are you working today?”

  I groan louder.

  “Do you ever stop?”

  I turn my head on the pillow. My assistant is giving me that look again, the one that feels like a home invasion.

  “There’s a war,” I say.

  “Is there ever not?”

  I sigh through my nose, smelling my own rotten breath. “Don’t. Not right now.”

  “I just wonder if you know you have a choice. Everyone does.”

  “If that were true, you wouldn’t be here.”

  I watch her eyes withdraw from me. The tender curiosity gives way to the loathing that belongs there, and I feel myself relax.

  With a stiff smile she starts touching me, and though I’m tired and sick and in pain, I respond. We kiss with flaky lips and acrid tongues. We rub ourselves raw. My stomach churns and my head pounds with each miserable thrust, but I continue. I am expected to continue. Expected by whom, I’m not sure, but I feel the imperative all around and inside me.

  After much sweaty effort, I reach the goal. My brain gives up its reward grudgingly and in miserly portions, a few jolts of pleasure on par with a good sneeze, and as the sensation fades I grasp at it, reaching into the darkness of my mind to seize it and pull it back, unwilling to accept that this is all I get. But this is all I get.

  I collapse onto the bed, eyes closed, mouth open. She is whispering something intended to be sensual, greatly overvaluing what we just did, but I am sinking through the bed. I am sinking through the floor and the ground and into a dark chamber full of dust and dead worms, endless shelves of damp, fungal books on paper and parchment and stone and clay, cuneiform lines and ochre smudges and unknowable pre-lingual scrapings.

  I experience a different kind of climax. I vomit onto my pillow. Then I get up and go to work.

  • • •

  “I’m sick of it,” he says. “Working out of this old shit-hole surrounded by sandbags in the shadow of those midtown towers. Getting our asses kicked by a bunch of thugs in graffitied tanks. It’s fucking embarrassing.” He paces around the echoing expanse of his office, sipping Scotch from a crystal tumbler while I sit on the couch, swaying and sweating. “We need to expand.”

  “Expand?” I swallow back the taste of acid. My face feels hot and sore. “I thought we’d already bit off too much.”

  “No such thing as too much. You ever see a dog walk away from food? Everything in nature knows to keep eating.”

  “We’re losing workforce. We can barely hold Manhattan. If the boroughs join together, they’ll outnumber us.”

  “Which is exactly why we need to expand. Listen, I’ll tell you a secret.” He sits on the couch across from me and leans in close. “We’re going to take the west coast.”

  His voice sounds muffled, like a radio fighting through static. I struggle to make my throat work. “We can’t do . . . how would we do that? How would we . . . maintain control across that much territory?”

  He grins. “We’re going to take over the LOTUS Feed.”

  “How?”

  “We’ve been closing in on the source for years. We know it’s somewhere in South Cascadia. So we just flood the region with our people, acquire every enclave, and start squeezing heads until the secret squirts out. I guarantee within a year we’ll be shouting from the rooftop of BABL.”

  The room is rippling like I’m underwater. My forehead is wet.

  “Yes, we have our hands full with the boroughs right now. Things might get bad here. But if we control the Feed, we’ll be in every home and bar and bunker. We’ll be a familiar face and a household name, and we won’t have to fight anymore because they’ll give us what we want. Whatever we say will be the truth, because we’ll be the only voice.”

  I open my mouth to ask a question or perhaps to express a doubt, but all that comes out is a retching noise.

  His grin widens at my struggle. “Go ahead, R—. Puke on my floor. It’s an exciting moment and you’re a sensitive kid, so do what you have to do to get over it.”

  I lean over the edge of the couch as my body prepares to accept his invitation.

  “But when you get it all out, let’s talk specifics. I want you to head the first wave.”

  I feel a vibration in the floor. It’s faint and my grandfather doesn’t react to it so I assume it’s just my throbbing head. The ripples in his liquor are harder to explain, but my stomach soon heaves these thoughts out of me.

  • • •

  I am not on Earth when it happens. I am a thousand feet above it in a twin-prop plane, swallowing a double dose of Dramamine. It’s been weeks since I’ve had a drink but I can’t shake this nausea. The company doctors chalk it up to anxiety, and that’s plausible enough. We are, after all, in the middle of losing a war.

  Mr. Atvist is sending me west, and though I do have a mission, I suspect there’s a larger purpose to getting me out of New York. I suspect it has something to do with the fire and smoke rising from the streets of lower Manhattan. The reports of branches being broken. Executives being executed. The distant booms of tank shells. Mr. Atvist knows which way the wind is blowing, and he wants his heir elsewhere when the tree falls.

  It’s tempting to feel touched by this gesture, to feel loved—no, I can’t even think the word without chuckling. I know what I am to my grandfather. I am not a person, I am Family. I am DNA and legacy, a vehicle to carry him into the future. Nothing more.

  So when I see dust rising all over the city, when I see high-rises swaying like trees, the older ones breaking and buckling—when I press my face to the window and see the Atvist Building beginning to crumble and flood, I am not sure what to feel. When I hear his voice on the radio, fading into BABL’s bubbling screech but audible until the end, I am not sure how to take his words.

  “So it’s all a dream?” he snarls over the sound of cracking glass. “No rules, anything can happen? Fuck this place. Fuck this new world. All of you keep doing your job, you hear me? This isn’t going to end us. I’ll never stop. I’ll never—”

  A grim silence hangs in the plane. The crew looks at me. My assistant looks at me. I don’t say anything, so nothing changes. We keep doing our job. We fly away from New York while it writhes and shudders beneath us, and as we glide into the empty expanses of the Midwaste, I see that strange but increasingly familiar sight: ripples on the horizon. Subtle changes in topography. Glittering forms hanging in the blue, glimpsed in my periphery and gone before I can describe them.

  Is it really a dream? If anything can happen, can’t it be something good? I look down at the metal briefcase in my lap, this instrument of death and deceit, and I feel the urge to cry mixing into my urge to vomit. Who’s going to make it good?

  • • •

  My sleep is empty. I wake with the same thoughts, the same feelings, the same nausea, as if no time has passed though it’s dark now and the crew is asleep.

  I have often wondered if we can feel the approach of important events. Objects of great mass can distort time; could events of great significance do the same? Could the weight of a moment make an indentation that’s felt from
both sides, remembered before it happens?

  When I wake up on the day of my death, will I feel a tingle and a shiver? Will some small part of me know?

  I wander the cabin, looking at the sleeping faces of my crew. The soldiers in their new beige jackets, so wonderfully plain and benign. The negotiators in their silver shirts and colorful ties, a little creative indulgence of mine, unprofessional and due for an overhaul if Axiom survives the night.

  And my assistant in her red dress. Another indulgence. Why did I bring her? I am not a man of sentiment. I wrung that out of me years ago. What do I want from this woman beyond a quick fuck to calm my nerves?

  I look out the oversized viewing windows. There are no cities below. No gleaming beacons of civilization dotting the landscape. The earth is dark and empty of humanity, and if it contains any beauty, there is no one there to witness it. I feel another sensation I can’t explain. Loneliness slithers into my stomach to join the nausea and melancholy, the newest guest at this horrible party. I head for the cockpit to find the one person I know will be awake, feeling weak and helpless and absurd.

  The pilot gives me a nod. The copilot is asleep.

  “Why is he asleep?” I demand, bracing my softening spine with the thrill of authority.

  “We’re on auto, sir,” the pilot says. “Weather’s good, course is set, I thought I’d let him get some rest.”

  I look at the copilot. He is old. Older than he should be for this job. He must have been an emergency selection.

  “Wake him up.”

  The pilot reaches across the instrument panel and nudges the copilot’s elbow. “Hey.”

  The copilot doesn’t move.

  “Hey. Doug.” The pilot shakes the copilot’s shoulder and the copilot’s hands flash out and grab the pilot’s arm and there’s a ripping and a spray of blood and a scream and then the copilot is on top of the pilot and the plane is diving and I am tumbling forward.