The Living

by Isaac Marion

  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 sudd
enly 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.