The Living

by Isaac Marion

  Abram’s elevated position puts the man’s face right at foot level, so his boot strikes it dead-center, obliterating the nose. He jumps down and grabs the man around the neck, clamping a hand over the mouth, and rushes him into the trees behind the service station. He flicks out his knife and presses it to the throat.

  “What’s your name?” he asks, though he doesn’t want to know.

  “Jim,” the man gurgles. “Jim Roberts.”

  “What’s your SSN?”

  The man hesitates, his mind racing with the implications of these questions, but Abram wiggles the blade enough to bite and the man’s reflexes take over. “559-94-2350!”

  “I’m sorry,” Abram says, and he means it. A quick flick of the wrist, and Jim Roberts dies.

  While Abram buries the body under a pile of dead leaves, we take a moment to skim this young man’s life. It contains little that anyone will want to learn. Another youth recruit raised in the subhuman nightmare of Path Narrowing and Physical Disincentive and a rotating roster of indistinguishable father-bosses, all his broken pieces compressed into a solid shape by endless heat and pressure. He was already a casualty long before this stranger cut his throat. We grieve for him now as we breathe him in.

  Abram Kelvin emerges from the trees, wiping dirt and blood on his pants, adjusting his beige jacket and reciting his new SSN. If he doesn’t find her here, he will find her in the next caravan, or in Post itself, somewhere deep in the guts of Axiom’s new body. He will cut his way to her and pull her out.

  From a great distance, he watches himself merge into the camp. He hears himself chatting with the troops, the old blustery tone and obfuscating jargon springing easily to his lips, and in spite of his loathing for the system that stole his life, he feels a familiar comfort as he slides back into its embrace. That sense of being aligned, defined, identified and indemnified by something bigger than himself. For a moment—just to help him blend in—he surrenders to the feeling. After all these days in the icy wilderness of self-determination, it’s like sinking into a warm bath. He grabs a water bottle from the well-stocked cooler and drinks until his stomach hurts. He pours a big bowl of stew from the catering cart and joins the men around the fire. He sounds so relaxed and natural while he probes for information that it’s hours before anyone even asks him his name.

  “Roberts,” he says.

  Don’t do this, the voice mutters deep in his head.

  “Jim Roberts. Bookkeeping and Guest Supervision.”

  This isn’t the way.

  “So where’s our next stop?”

  I

  Julie doesn’t talk about her nightmares. On the rare occasion she has a good dream, she will stumble through her deepest reserves of poetry to convey its surreal beauties, but she keeps the nightmares inside. So sometimes, lying awake next to her, I try to reconstruct them from what I see on her face. I translate her whimpers and grimaces and occasional screams into an impressionistic narrative, like a film without a story, just emotions in a sequence.

  Most nights, it’s just another clumsy attempt to access her inner world, to understand her a little better. Tonight, it’s more urgent. Tonight, I feel like I’m divining my fate in these little sounds and movements. When I see tears in her closed eyes, I can’t help wondering if she’s already mourning me in her mind.

  And then, in the gunmetal glow before dawn, there’s a shift.

  Her anguish relaxes, smoothing into the natural expression of sleep, then further; arched brows and a subtle, parted smile. Bliss. Awe. Her whimpers become slow, steady sighs, like she’s bathing her lungs in perfume.

  I didn’t expect this. My involvement in her dream now seems unlikely, but I watch with fascination and an ounce of cautious hope.

  The rumble strip roars and Barbara swerves left, wobbling a bit before stabilizing. I glance down the hallway to the driver’s seat and see M blinking and slapping himself. Julie doesn’t stir, but her expression has faded back to neutral. I slide out of bed and join M up front.

  “Morning,” I say, though it barely is.

  He grunts, pulling the bag of frozen hash browns away from his cheek. The swelling has gone down some. His eyes are visible again, but they’re bleary and bloodshot. He looks less alive than he did when he was Dead.

  “I’ll take a turn,” I offer. “Can’t sleep anyway.”

  He hesitates like I’m asking him to break an oath.

  “Marcus.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “Punishing yourself doesn’t help anyone. Just puts more pain in the world.”

  He snorts. Then he sighs. Then he pulls over. We switch seats and I hit the gas, and I’ve driven several miles before I remember that I can’t drive.

  I glance over at M to see if he’s impressed with my wheelmanship, but he has slipped out of his chair and settled down on the floor behind me, already snoring. I turn back to the road and enjoy it alone, flying through fields and forests as the horizon begins to glow.

  I am gone for a while, watching the slow infusion of color into the sky, and when I come back, Julie is sitting next to me. I gesture to the steering wheel and raise my eyebrows. She smiles and nods, not bad. We watch the sunrise together.

  “You’re up early,” I say after soaking in the silence for a while. Her hair is a little less crazed than usual. She looks tired, but not battered.

  “I had a good dream,” she says, and there’s a note of wonder in her croaky voice, a sparkle in her crusted eyes as they wander the passing scenery. “An amazing dream.”

  I watch her expectantly. This is new.

  “I was in this huge library,” she says. “I was climbing a ladder, and the shelves went up for miles, farther than I could see. They went down too, but I was going up. And I wasn’t—” She pauses, laughs to herself, searching for the words. “I wasn’t really reading the books, but I could sort of sense what was in them. And the higher I went, the better they got. I could feel them getting more complex and meaningful, like I was going from kids’ books to pulp novels to classic masterpieces, and I was like…breathing them in. All those stories at once.” She laughs again, choked with conflicting emotions. “They were so beautiful. I can’t even explain it. Sad ones and happy ones, some that didn’t even make sense, but when I breathed them all together it was just…it was like this perfect perfume.”

  She shakes her head. Her eyes are glazed. Then they snap into focus and she looks at me. “But the spooky thing is, when I woke up…it was still there. I could see those shelves through the bed and the ceiling, like the RV was made of glass. I was rubbing my eyes, trying to make sure I was really awake”—she rubs them now—“but it just kept going. I sat there in the bed for a full minute, just waiting for things to turn solid.”

  She looks at me with a sudden soberness. “It was like in Detroit. But I was in the low shelves there. I was climbing down. This was…so different.”

  I break away from her gaze and stare at the road ahead. It runs in a straight line through miles of empty fields all the way to the vanishing point, a vision of infinity. And it occurs to me that at this moment, I could be the only human being looking at this road. I could be the only complex mind for a thousand miles who’s thinking about it, correlating it, confirming it.

  I feel a tingle in my spine as I let my vision blur. I look to the side, out into the fields. And in the corner of my eye, the road flickers. The straight line becomes a curve. Then a hill. Then a rushing river.

  “Julie,” I whisper, and she looks.

  She gasps.

  And it’s a road again, long and straight. But the evidence that it wasn’t remains in Julie’s eyes.

  “You saw that?” I say.

  She nods, dumbstruck.

  “Welcome to the Midwaste,” Tomsen says, peering at me in the rear view mirror. “America’s biggest mystery hole. A thousand miles of haunted house. Dreams or nightmares, take your pic
k.”

  Julie twists around in her chair. “What the hell did I just see?”

  “One of several reasons only crazy people cross the Midwaste. The Suggestible Universe calls it a vacillation. What reality does when no one’s watching.”

  “What does that mean?” Julie persists, gripping the top of her chair.

  Tomsen cocks her head. “If the idea could be explained quickly, why would there be a four hundred and thirty-three-page book about it?”

  “Oh come on, Tomsen! Give me the synopsis.”

  Tomsen blinks at her for a moment. “Okay. Synopsis. From the bestselling author of comes a mind-blowing that redefines the. We all assume. But what if? This timely will forever change the way you.”

  Julie slaps a hand over her eyes.

  “Okay, let me try again.” Tomsen steps over M’s snoring mass and puts a pot of water on the propane stove. She clears her throat. “Consciousness exerts a force. Or it is a force. Like gravity. Electromagnetism. It’s not locked in our brains, it’s out there. Without it, everything’s just potential. Things don’t decide what to be until someone observes them being it.” The pot drifts across the burner as the RV vibrates and Tomsen nudges it back into position. “A subtle effect. Other forces at work too, very weird and complex. But we’re in there somewhere. When we restart the internet, look up observer effect, double slit experiment, heated fullerenes, cosmic habituation. Also, prayer.” The pot jumps as we go over a pothole and she clamps it down, watching it intently. “Although the most obvious evidence is sitting right next to you.”

  Julie glances at me. “Him?”

  “They popped into reality exactly as we’d always imagined them, broke all kinds of scientific laws—only crazy people think it was a virus or some other dull normality. No way around it, zombies are magic.”

  Julie raises her eyebrows at me, repressing a giggle. “Are you magic, R?”

  I shrug.

  “A few thousand years ago, this stuff was obvious.” Tomsen crouches down to eye level with the pot like she’s trying to intimidate it. “Happened all the time. Vacillations. Manifestations. Monsters and miracles. Reality was a stew of potentiality because there was so little sentience defining it. A few million complex minds on the whole planet? Anything could happen. But then we added a few billion more and built up assumptions and consensus, so reality hardened.”

  The pot should be boiling by now, but I see no steam and hear no bubbling. Just a strange, rattling squeal like dry ice on metal.

  “But then? But then?” Tomsen laughs. “Everyone died! Hooray!” She leans so close to the pot I see a few hairs curling. “And reality melted again. And now here we are, back in a primal world but with all our lessons learned, and anything can happen again.”

  She turns her back on the pot. The squealing instantly becomes a bubbling roar, and a cloud of steam billows up.

  While Julie and I stare at her, then at each other, then back at her, Tomsen pulls a sock out of a drawer, stretches it over a mug, dumps a pile of Lynda’s coffee grounds onto it, and pours the boiling water over this makeshift filter. She hands the mug to Julie, who hesitates only briefly before diving in.

  “I could’ve used this before that conversation,” she mutters, wincing as she slurps the steaming brew.

  “Very interesting book,” Tomsen says. “Of course no one really believes it, not enough to live it, however you’d even do that. But things are complex and this is a component, an ingredient, color, note, notion.” She pushes her fingers through her hair. “Borrow Nora’s copy when we save her. Sorry about the sock. It’s clean. I don’t have coffee tools. I make herbal tea sometimes. Rooibos.”

  “Tomsen,” I say, catching her eyes in the mirror. “What are the other reasons?”

  She cocks her head at me.

  “You said only crazy people cross the Midwaste. Why?”

  She starts shaking her head, but I can’t tell if that’s her answer or just agitation.

  “Earlier…you said the Midwaste might digest us—”

  “Do you want coffee?” she blurts to no one in particular. “You’ll have to take turns with the mug. I only have one. His name is Mugritte.”

  I’ve never seen her avoid a subject and it’s making me as anxious as she is. “Tomsen. Are vacillations dangerous?”

  “They can be. If you’re not prepared. If you let them rearrange your head.”

  “But can they…eat you?”

  She laughs stiffly and finally meets my gaze. “Not the vacillations,” she says. “The Ossies.”

  The word buzzes in me, half-remembered, like the blocked-out face of an abuser.

  Julie frowns. “The Midwaste is full of Australians?”

  “Ossies as in ‘ossified.’”

  A knot is tightening inside me. My forehead tingles and sweats.

  “Oh,” Julie says, and her face pales. “Haven’t heard that term in a while.”

  “What is it you call them on the west coast? ‘Boneys’?” She snorts. “Stupid name. Makes boys snicker. I prefer—”

  “Tomsen!” I shout with unexpected intensity, and both women look at me. “Are you telling us…we’re driving into a swarm?”

  “Well…” Tomsen looks at the ceiling as if searching for the best way to explain it. “Yes.”

  I grip the wheel, shaking my head in disbelief. I feel the sensation of falling and I think of sinkholes, ancient voids eating their way up from the depths, waiting just beneath the surface to swallow us down to the earth’s primal basement. I feel it happening. I see the road crumble—

  My head snaps forward, my teeth click together, Tomsen topples into the sink.

  “Jesus,” Julie gasps, gripping the dash. “Was that a pothole?”

  I am looking in the rear view mirror. The jolt suggested a hole deep enough to bury a body. But there’s nothing there. The road is smooth.

  WE

  Addis Horace Greene.

  We know his name now, and so does he. A strange name, a chimera of cultures, made from people and places now gone, changed, merged, erased. This is how he feels. Like he is made of jagged fragments.

  One thing he knows comfortably: the tall girl is his sister. His memories remain murky, but even in the absence of proof, she has made a convincing case. She has not left his side since they boarded the train. When the crew tried to put him in the freight cars with the Dead, she objected so violently they avoid even looking at him now.

  And then there was the big man, and what she did to him.

  They have the rear car to themselves now. The teal vinyl seats, the moldy carpet, the dirty windows offering hazy views of the landscape. The car is facing backward, so they watch the scenery scroll by in reverse, unable to see what’s coming until it’s already past. But Nora rarely looks out the window. She watches Addis like he’ll disappear if she blinks. She talks to him, tells him stories about himself, and asks him questions he doesn’t answer. She clings to his hand like he’s a kite in strong wind, like she’s one slip away from losing him. She cries sometimes.

  “How are you two doing back here?” the boy who called himself Peter asks as he and “Miriam” stroll in from the front car. The other boy, “Lindh,” is following alongside the train in the armored truck, and he waves at Addis every time Addis glances out the window.

  There is so much dissonance radiating off these people, even their names sound like lies. Addis glares at “Miriam” as she bends down to his level and says something in the sing-song voice of idiots talking to animals. He does not bother to register the words.

  “We’re fine,” Nora replies to whatever Miriam said, watching the two warily.

  “Not a bad way to travel, right?” Peter says. “Anyway, just wanted to let you know we’re over halfway there. Might even roll in tonight if we don’t have any more pick-ups.”

  “We’re so excit
ed to show you our community,” Miriam says, sitting cross-legged on the floor next to Nora’s seat. “I think you’ll really appreciate our message once you hear it from Pastor Bark.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Nora says, but her voice comes out a little too soft to support the words.

  “He’s an incredible speaker,” Miriam gushes. “He can take ideas that sound crazy and almost, like, wrong?”—she laughs—“and make you see the truth in them.”

  Nora raises her eyebrows. “How crazy and wrong are we talking about?”

  “We’ll let Pastor Bark tell it,” Peter says, crouching down next to Miriam. “I always mess it up.”

  “Our mom was Catholic,” Nora says. “She taught us we were eating chunks of Christ’s risen flesh every time we took the Eucharist. Is your stuff crazier than humans eating a zombie?”

  Peter and Miriam both laugh. Addis grits his teeth.

  “Well, it’s not ‘crazy,’” Peter says, “it’s just…challenging. Human reason always rejects God’s truth because his ways aren’t our ways, you know? He created us with a sense of right and wrong, but he made ours different from his so we’d have to rely on faith.”

  “Otherwise it’d be too easy,” Miriam says.

  “Right. If it just intuitively ‘made sense,’ then everyone would believe it, and what would be the point? There’d be no conflict to overcome and our faith would be weak.”

  “You have to be strong to accept truth,” Miriam says.

  “But that’s how you know it’s truth. The harder you have to struggle to believe it, the truer it must be.”

  “Truth hurts.”

  “Okay, okay,” Nora says, holding out her hands to stop them. “I’m getting exhausted just listening to how fucking difficult everything is.” They start to laugh again but she cuts them off. “Quit stalling and just spit it out. What’s this glorious truth of yours?”

  Peter and Miriam look at each other, both a little nervous.

  “Well,” Peter says. “Basically, we believe humanity’s trial on Earth is over.”