The Living

by Isaac Marion

  “There is no help! Great God, who talks of help?

  All the world has the plague!”

  “Then to avoid it, we must quit the world.”

  -Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Last Man

  WE

  “Dad!” Abram screams. “Perry!”

  His voice is so hoarse it barely resonates at all, just air rattling through a numb throat. He has been doing this for a long time, and eventually, no matter how much terror remains inside, the screams have to go silent.

  He has been running for a long time too, and he is tired. He sags against a fir tree and breathes for a minute, but the breaths tighten into curses. Why wasn’t he fast enough? He runs track at school every day; he should be faster. How did he let a shuffling mob of corpses get between him and his family?

  They were eating breakfast. A nostalgic last meal before they left their home forever. Then the windows were breaking and his mother was screaming and something was dragging him outside, and he was surrounded by them, clawing and clutching, and all he could do was run.

  But didn’t he do everything right? Didn’t he follow the plan?

  Run around the block until you’ve got some distance on them, then circle back to the truck. The truck is always the meeting point.

  But his family wasn’t at the truck, and the house and the yard were crowded with the Dead.

  If you can’t get to the truck, run to the hills. Stay in an open area with a clear line of sight, and wait for us. We’ll find you.

  But they didn’t find him. He paced around the bristly yellow slopes for hours, watching the Dead swarm over the town below. And then the explosions. The gunshots. The hooting raiders charging in on war-painted quads, a pack of hyenas eager to share the kill.

  He did everything right. How did this happen?

  He feels his breath beginning to hitch and his eyes beginning to burn and he straightens up furiously. No. Absolutely not. He lunges into a fast, stiff march just to rid himself of that quivering softness. The sun falls behind the hills and the valley sinks into shadow, a new darkness on top of the haze of smoke, and a cold whisper of logic hisses in his head. If his family stayed down there, they must be dead. If they escaped, they must think he’s dead. Either way, he’s on a new path now.

  They say it’s better on the coast, his father said with a cheery shrug, trying to lighten the weight. I figure we’ll just hit highway 12 and head west until it feels right. Sound good, boys?

  Abram descends the hill toward Highway 12. If he walks fast, he’ll reach Elliston by morning. Maybe they’ll still be there. Maybe he’ll burst into their motel room and they’ll wrap their arms around him and he can toss away the grim future he’s now writing in his head. Maybe.

  The air is already cooling. Sage scrapes his calves and thistles stick in his socks. But shorts seemed like the right choice when he woke up today. It was a thrill day, an adventure day, and the muggy dawn stillness promised a summer scorcher. Perry was wearing sweatpants and he told him to go change. The kid emerged looking like Abram’s little twin, jean shorts and a white shirt and a big silly grin. Looking good, buddy, Abram said with a wry thumbs-up. He knew it was going to be a hard day, but he felt ready for it. A long drive. A search for a new home. It was the four of them against the world, but as long as they stuck together, they were going to be okay.

  • • •

  Abram is dreaming with his eyes open. It plays out faintly on his face, the fear, the anger, then a bittersweet smile, a glimmer of wetness in his eyes—he blinks and shakes his head and slaps himself so hard his ears ring. Reality roars back in.

  Reality is the concrete of Highway 80 blurring beneath his motorcycle. Reality is the sweat running down the back of his gray tank-top. Reality is the snarling in his stomach, the burning in his throat, and the steady sinking of the fuel gauge. Reality is hard.

  He has not slept since leaving New York. He has moved beyond fatigue into delirium, and he is distantly aware that this is foolish, that the road is rough and his motorcycle is shaky and a dead father is no use to anyone. But he keeps riding until the sun is a red blaze behind the black treetops, and then he rides in darkness.

  “What is your job?” he murmurs to himself.

  “To protect my daughter,” he replies.

  “What are you doing right now to move toward success?”

  “I’m going to Post to find her.”

  He repeats this drill every sixty seconds, the way they made him do it in his early days in Pittsburgh. Path Narrowing, his father-bosses called it. When he was an angry, grief-stricken teenager struggling to accept his new life in Axiom’s workforce, this was an effective focusing exercise, especially when combined with Physical Disincentive. Every night he fell onto his cot, bruised and numb, the questions still shouting in his head, following him into his dreams. He never imagined he’d use the drill voluntarily.

  He starts again:

  “What is your job?”

  “To protect my daughter.”

  “What are you doing right now to—”

  He kills the engine and lets the bike coast to a stop. A dark shape ahead. A little round mini-van parked in the grass to the side of the road. And in the trees nearby: firelight. A camp. His eyes go round—

  The mountain passes of Montana, then Idaho, searching for his family but afraid to call out for them, because what monsters might hear him instead? Every camp, every car, every human encounter a deadly flip of the coin…

  He brushes off these old fears. He has his own coin now, and he knows how to flip it his way.

  He stashes the motorcycle in the bushes and approaches the camp on foot, whistling loudly. By the time he’s close enough to see the campers, they’re standing at the ready, watching and waiting. A man and woman in their late forties. Thin. Pale. Soft clothes unsuited to life on the road, already worn and torn. Their hands are tensed but empty.

  “Hi there!” Abram calls from a safe distance at the edge of the little clearing, raising his pitch and softening his timbre. “Hope I didn’t startle anybody. Been walking all night and was just hoping you might let a stranger share your fire for a minute.”

  They relax slightly, and he knows it’s the voice as much as the words. His real voice crouches low inside him like a soldier in a trench, gritty and hard, but this one perches high in his sinuses, quavery, prepubescent, unthreatening. Vocal Placation, they called it in training, just one element of the broader skillset called Adaptive Inducement. At first he had scoffed at how many acting techniques Axiom employed—was he in a troop or a troupe?—but soon enough he understood the motivational poster above his father-boss’s desk:

  Use YOUR Head To Get Into THEIRS!

  Force Is The Least Efficient Means of Control!

  “Well…” the man says, “I don’t see why not.” His face is thickly stubbled but his graying hair is trim, suggesting a fairly recent exile from more civilized realms. “It’s a hard road for all of us. Come on in.” He steps aside and gestures toward the fire. His other hand hovers instinctively above a holster that isn’t there. No hidden weapons, then.

  “I sure appreciate it,” Abram says, forcing a grin onto his face and playing up his Montanan drawl. A counterintuitive choice—most of his classmates used drawls for the opposite effect, to boost their masculine swagger—but Abram thinks it pairs well with the boyishness, a wholesome rural charm. “Plenty warm tonight but it’s the loneliness that’ll get you, right? Real good to see some friendly faces.” He reaches out a hand. “Name’s Denny.”

  The man looks at it for a moment, then shakes it, and the woman does the same. Their grips are weak. Palms silky. They give him their names but he redacts them immediately.

  “You folks coming from Manhattan?” he asks as they take seats around the fire, a shared log for them, a boulder for him.

  “That’s right,” the man says, gro
wing more cautious as he recognizes Abram’s khakis and tank-top. “They downsizing soldiers now too? I figured anyone with combat training had a job for life.”

  Abram notes the bitterness. Edits his backstory. “Believe it or not, I quit. Ethical differences.”

  They both raise their brows.

  “I didn’t know you could quit Axiom,” the woman says.

  “Things got a little loose in the evacuation. I took my chance.” He looks ruefully at the ground. “They were splitting up families. Taking the high value folks, leaving the rest to die. Sending kids off in buses to God knows where…I said heck with this. Saw my window and jumped out.”

  The man nods. “Is it true the whole city went under?”

  Abram sighs. “We all knew it was gonna happen but nobody wanted to think about it. Just kept plugging our ears and raising the walls and hoping we’d be gone before it got bad.” He gazes into the fire, sinking deeper into his character, but he keeps the man and woman in his periphery. Poisoner, Electrocutioner…there are plenty of Aggression Skillsets that don’t harden the hands.

  “I guess that plan worked out for us,” the woman says dryly. “We missed all the fun.”

  “You quit before the storm? How’d you manage that?”

  “We didn’t quit exactly.” Her bob of gray-brown hair ends in a choppy line, suggesting a hurried snip while on the move. “The new Management’s been making big cuts to the soft departments. Science, education…if they can’t fit your job into Orientation—”

  “Or if you won’t let them fit it,” the man adds bitterly.

  “If you can’t or won’t be a part of that horror show…you’re out on the street.”

  “So you were scientists?” Abram asks.

  “Anthropologists,” the man says. “Some of the last in America, I’d guess.”

  Abram nods to himself. “Anthropologists. Okay.” He takes a deep breath and straightens up on his boulder. “Hey listen, I hate to be any trouble, but my canteen ran dry two days ago and to be honest, I’m in a bad way. You folks happen to have any water?”

  They don’t even hesitate. The woman gets up, lifts a blanket off a big plastic jug, and fills a paper cup. She hands it to him without a word and he downs it like a shot. “Thanks a million,” he gasps. “And now I’m really gonna feel like a jerk, but any chance you’ve got a spare bite to eat? Food ran out way before the water.”

  A brief hesitation at this, then the man digs into a duffel bag and pulls out a Carbtein kit still sealed in its original box, the US Army markings faded but still legible.

  “Oh wow, y’all are saints.” Abram gets up and moves toward the man. The man reaches into the bag again and pulls out a pocket knife. Abram pauses. The man runs the knife along the box’s seal and pops the lid. Abram moves closer, watching over the man’s shoulder like a hungry child waiting for dinner. The man lifts a cube from the box, still wrapped in its translucent foil, and hands it to Abram, who takes it with a grateful duck of the head. “Really can’t thank you enough,” he says. “Can I ask for just one more favor, though?”

  He’s standing awkwardly close now. The man takes a half step back, looking up at him as if just now noticing how much taller Abram is.

  “Can I borrow some gas for my motorcycle?”

  The man shoots an uneasy glance at the woman. “Uh…”

  “Seems a little much all at once, doesn’t it?” the woman says, frowning uncomfortably.

  Abram throws up his hands and shakes his head, chastised. “You’re right. I’m sorry. It’s just that…truth is…they took my daughter.” Tears would be good right now, but he’s unwilling to go that far for these people. “They’re taking her to Post to do something horrible to her, and I’m out of food and water and almost out of gas, and I just don’t know how to do this without being a little rude.”

  The man and woman exchange another glance. This time, to Abram’s amazement, it’s full of sympathy.

  “I’m so sorry about your daughter,” the woman says. “And I’m sorry, we really can’t spare much of our supplies, but listen, Denny…we’re going to Portland. That’s pretty close to Post. Why don’t you just come with us?”

  Abram stares at her in disbelief. “Are you serious?” The Denny voice slips a little, but they don’t seem to notice.

  “Safety in numbers,” the man says with a shrug. “We help you, maybe you help us.”

  “Or at least you live to help someone else,” the woman adds. “That’s what it’s all about, right? This ‘society’ thing?”

  Abram squints. “But you don’t even know me.”

  The woman smiles with a tilt of her head. “Well, how do we change that?”

  Her smile is half sympathy, half motherly warmth. No part of it is malice or fear. He looks from the woman to the man as if he’s considering their offer, and for a moment he’s not sure why he isn’t. For a moment he loses himself in the character, forgets where the border lies and why he has to stay behind it. But only for a moment.

  “No, no,” he says, shaking his head, “this isn’t going to work.”

  And the man is pulling back in alarm because the boyish rube has just become a different person, his voice suddenly deeper and rougher, but Abram is already in motion, snatching the knife and darting around behind him and wrapping an arm around his throat.

  The woman screams, of course, but that’s all. No gun hidden under the log. Nothing. It’ll be clean, a simple transfer of goods from two people who need them to one person who needs them more.

  “Food and water in the bag,” he tells the woman.

  Cringing and quaking, the woman obeys.

  “Please don’t do this,” the man gasps.

  “I have to.”

  “We’ll die out here.”

  “You’ll figure something out, just like I did.”

  “Please—”

  Abram tightens his hold, choking off the man’s whimpering. “You.” He jerks his chin at the woman. “Where’s the gas?”

  “We don’t have any,” she whimpers. “Just what’s in the van.”

  “You’re driving to Portland. You have at least one extra tank. Get it.”

  The woman rubs her face in her hands like she’s trying to wake from a nightmare. Very slowly, she digs a big red gas can out from the back of the van. Very, very slowly, she carries it toward him. Abram feels each pulse of blood pounding against his forehead.

  “Hurry up!” he barks. “Next to the bag.”

  She starts crying again as she sets the can down. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. We’ll be stranded.”

  Abram squeezes his eyes shut. The world is spinning around him. There are voices humming in the fire, a funeral dirge. “Shut up,” he whispers.

  “Why won’t you just come with us? We’ll share everything, just—”

  “Shut up!” His eyes snap wide. “Say one more word and I’ll cut his throat.”

  “Please—”

  He cuts the man’s throat. A short, shallow incision, just enough to get the blood flowing, but it has the desired effect; the woman shuts up, frozen in horror as a little puddle of blood gathers in Abram’s elbow and trickles over the edge.

  “Dad?”

  Abram whirls around, clutching the knife so tight it trembles. On the other side of the fire, two boys are staring at him with round eyes. One is fourteen or fifteen, the other is five or six. One has an armload of branches, the other has handfuls of twigs. All of it clatters to the ground when they see their father’s blood.

  Abram lowers his head. He screws his eyes shut and grits his teeth. He lets out a long, shuddering breath, and he releases his grip.

  The boys’ father stumbles to the ground, clutching his throat as his family rushes to his side.

  “Keep pressure on that,” Abram mumbles as he turns away, head down and shoulders slumpe
d. Limply, he drops the cube of Carbtein back into its box. Then he leaves his new friends and slips back into the dark trees, empty-handed except for the man’s knife.

  He starts his motorcycle. His stomach still snarls and his throat still burns, begging him to go back and finish what he started, but he ignores their commands. The fuel gauge sinks deeper into red as he roars back onto the highway.

  “What is your job?”

  “To protect my daughter.”

  “What are you doing…to…”

  The force in R’s voice as he reached out to the Dead in Detroit, as he tried to remind them they were people…why was he so sure?

  “I’m going to Post to…”

  The passion in Julie’s eyes as she begged him not to leave, as she told him what her mother told her, that humanity’s a family you can never lose…why did she care so much?

  He blinks dust out of his eyes and squints against the wind. Why the hell is he thinking about them? Those fools are long gone, couldn’t possibly matter less to the task at hand. His thoughts feel fuzzy, tangental, nonlinear. He starts over.

  “What is your job?”

  “To protect my daughter.”

  “What are you doing right now to move toward success?”

  “I’m going to—”

  You’re going to lose her.

  A chill freezes the sweat on his back. That voice again. His own, but not quite, like a skilled impersonation. A stranger muttering beneath a mask of his own face.

  He repeats the drill, shouting it now.

  “What is your job!”

  “To protect my—”

  You’re going to lose yourself looking for her, and that’s when she’s gone forever.

  He skids to a stop. His eyes dart through the trees and his ears strain. But this is absurd. No one is whispering to him while he rockets down the highway at sixty miles per hour. He is exhausted. His mind is a murky stew. The stars are strange, the constellations too clear, like actual bulls and scorpions cavorting in the blackness.

  He rolls the bike onto an overgrown forest road, leans it against a tree, and collapses onto the cushion of wild grass. The grass is alive and curious; it reaches out to touch his skin. The stars drift in lazy circles—a hard blink stops them, but not for long.