The Living

by Isaac Marion

  “Or maybe they have other warehouses. Other armies.”

  Abbot stares at the end of his cigarette. It glows like a tiny sun, or a tiny burning planet. “Shit,” he whispers, and marches back inside.

  I

  Surprisingly few soldiers have responded to our disruption. The handful who did show up are busy chasing the other escapees, and we slip into the streets unnoticed. I wince at the sound of gunshots. Did we push those people out of their chairs and into an execution? Even if we did, it may have been a favor.

  We spread out to avoid notice, letting our group dissolve into the crowd of lonely strangers. Nora’s delirious stagger attracts some attention, but she’ll probably pass for drunk. Once we’re a few blocks away from the Orientation building, we regroup in an alley, and Julie rushes to her friend.

  “Nora,” she says, squeezing her arms and leaning close. “Talk to me.”

  Nora’s eyes drift back and forth, pausing only briefly on Julie’s. “What words?” she mumbles. “I’ll say…do…Tell me what.”

  “Nora, where are you right now?”

  “Don’t know.” Her voice is dull and distant. “Wherever you want.”

  “Jesus,” Julie says, pulling away in worried disgust as if Nora is vomiting blood. “Why did it hit her so much harder?”

  I’m not surprised. I know the things that feed the plague—confusion, loneliness, hurt, resignation—and Nora has been marinating in all of them.

  “It’s just a little poison,” M says. “She’ll be fine.” He says it with such simple, stolid confidence that I find myself wondering how suggestible the universe really is. How loudly do we have to believe before reality agrees?

  There’s a strained silence, then Tomsen whirls on me and Julie. “So what happened to you? How did you escape the raid? And how did you get in here? And also, why?”

  Julie hesitates. “No time to answer all of those, but that last one’s easy: because we love you guys.”

  Tomsen blinks.

  “And because that’s a bomb.” She points at my briefcase. “And we’re going to blow up BABL.”

  Tomsen grins like a birthday girl getting ready to open her last present, the big one in the back, hidden under a sheet.

  The four actual children are listening intently, and I wonder how much they understand. Totalitarian takeovers and suppression of information are probably beyond their ken, but one thing is clear enough: there are bad people here. Blunt, cruel, selfish wretches, aligned to life’s lowest drives and scornful of anything higher. And we can’t keep letting them win.

  “So how do we find the tower?” Tomsen says, fidgeting with excitement. “It’s a big stadium. Lots of buildings. Lots of guards. Do we have to take a hostage and torture them for information? I don’t like doing that. Maybe with enough cannabis…”

  I notice Julie’s face hardening as Tomsen rambles. We have reached the end of my half of our plan. Before we left our house, I asked Julie for the first page of hers, and her eyes glazed like she was going far away, exploring old rooms and reading old books. And then they cleared to a glittering sharpness. They narrowed and began to smolder, and she answered through her teeth just like she does now:

  “I know where it is.”

  Tomsen gapes at her. Even Nora registers some surprise.

  “You do?” M says, tossing up his hands.

  Julie’s jaw muscles flex. She says it again, lower and almost vicious. “I know where it is.”

  And with that, she storms into the streets.

  • • •

  There are advantages to living under an unstable government. Axiom is a belligerent drunk, fighting and flailing its way across the country with no regard for human life or long-term consequences, and if left unchecked it will gleefully repeat every mistake in history. But like most drunks, its vision is blurry and its punches swing wide, and our gang of terrorists moves freely through its headquarters under the gaze of a dozen cameras.

  Where is Security? I see only a few teenage soldiers patrolling the streets, looking scared and uncertain. This should be reassuring, but instead I feel a chill. If the troops were reassigned, I have a guess as to where and why.

  I force myself to focus. Here and now. Joan’s hand in my left, the briefcase in my right.

  “My family lived in a nice house,” Julie says as we move along the edge of the street, where the crowds are thinner. Her voice is tight with bitterness. “It was already there when they found this place, before they built the enclave. It was the biggest and most secure building, so of course it’s where the leader had to live. And Dad was the leader.” Her lips twist like she’s trying to swallow something vile. “Four stories all to ourselves. It even had a basement.”

  M looks at me with raised eyebrows. I shrug.

  “Mom loved the basement. It was cool on hot days, but she’d sit down there even in the winter just to listen to the hum.”

  I recognize the street we’re on. I remember stopping to ask directions from two kids named David and Marie. She lives on a corner. Daisy Street and Devil Avenue.

  “Dad said it was just the power inverters under the floor, but it sounded so far away, like it was coming up from some deep hole. It sounded like a bunch of different songs playing over each other and there was this vibration…” She shakes her head. “I couldn’t stand it. It made my brain feel numb. But Mom said it was soothing. She said it quieted her thoughts.”

  We come around a corner, and I indulge in another memory. A precious scent. A familiar voice drifting down from a balcony. A few tender seconds before the world interrupted.

  “It’s here,” she says, staring up at the building with murderous intensity. “BABL is under my house.”

  In my memory, her house is a lovely old manor covered in vines and flowers, marble columns leading up to a balcony where fair maidens sigh and pine. My memory is full of shit. Her house is a prison watchtower of white aluminum siding, tiny grated windows, a balcony mounted with sniper rifles.

  “Shouldn’t bring them into this,” M says, indicating the kids and the unwell woman leaning against him. “I’ll take them somewhere safe.”

  Sprout is shaking her head. “I want to stay.”

  “Sprout,” I say, kneeling down in front of her, “where’s your dad?”

  She doesn’t answer for a moment. Her chin quivers. “I don’t know.” A tear glistens in her right eye. “He let them take me.”

  Julie crouches down and hugs her. Sprout accepts it but remains upright, arms at her side, teary but not crying. “I want to stay with you,” she says, and her voice is firm. “I want to help.”

  Behind her, Joan and Alex nod. Addis remains neutral, his face clouded.

  “Guys,” M starts to object, but Julie interrupts him.

  “Stay out here and keep a lookout,” she says to Sprout, including M with a glance. “We’ll be quick.”

  M looks unconvinced, but the kids start scanning the streets with militant squints. Nora mumbles inaudibly.

  “R?” Julie says, and heads around the side of the house.

  I follow her with our payload in hand.

  There is a tiny sunken door in a concrete stairwell. A basement door. Julie takes a deep breath, then a step down—a bullet turns the next step into a spray of concrete chips.

  “Welcome home, kids!”

  Above us. The balcony.

  Captain Balt.

  In the weeks since I last encountered this man, I’ve seen stacked mounds of corpses oozing in basements. I’ve seen people shot, eaten, and liquefied, and I’ve crushed a dozen heads with my own hands. None of it filled me with as much revulsion as the sight of this man’s face.

  He leans over the railing, pointing one of the sniper rifles at Julie. He swivels it up and down, ogling her through the scope. “Nice view from up here! No doubt about it, Julie, you’re a
ll grown up.”

  This man who exploited a young girl’s pain and broke her even further, who remained a leering presence year after year only to join the forces that destroyed her home. This man who has suffered no consequences for any of his vile acts—except for the night I cracked his skull.

  Three more soldiers emerge behind him, taking aim at M and the kids.

  “What the fuck are you doing in my house?” Julie shouts up at them, her anger drowning out any trace of fear.

  “Oh you didn’t hear about my promotion?” Balt pulls his eye away from the scope and grins, but he keeps the rifle aimed. He looks professional. His Homo erectus jaw is clean-shaven, his hair slicked back and cropped on the sides, his tattoos covered by the sleeves of his beige jacket. “The Axiom Group knows a strong leader when it sees one. I got your dad’s job, so I took your dad’s house.”

  Julie’s hands clench. My eyes dart to M, but he’s as helpless as we are in the sights of three AK-47s.

  “You left dirty clothes all over your room. You’re a dirty girl!” Balt clucks his tongue. “But if you want to move back in, I’m sure we could figure something out. My boys would be more focused if they didn’t have to hunt for pussy.”

  For the first time in my life, I wish I had a gun. I wish I could pull a little lever on a shiny little machine and watch it delete this grotesque mutation from the genome of mankind.

  Julie dashes for the door. A bullet blows the knob off as she reaches out for it; she pulls her hand back with a gasp as spots of blood bloom from the side of her palm.

  “Where you going?” Balt says. “We’re having a conversa-tion.”

  “Fuck the fuck off, Tim!” Julie shrieks up at him. “Are you gonna kill me or what?”

  Balt pulls away from the scope and finally quits the performance. “I saw your little activist act on the cameras. The fuck was that bullshit? I know you’re crazy but not that kind of crazy.” He squints at Julie, then at me. “What are you really here for?” His eyes move to my briefcase. Then the basement door. I see it dawning on him. But as he opens his mouth to express his opinion of our improbable plan, a noise interrupts him. A low growl rises to a sustained wail and then falls again—an air raid siren, the universal sound of fear.

  I feel a vibration in my feet as massive motors jolt into motion. I see a shadow moving toward us from the far end of the stadium, rushing down the streets and engulfing the buildings like a tsunami of gloom. I see Balt and his men craning their necks upward to take in an incredible sight:

  The sky is closing.

  The rectangle of blue shrinks as distant roof panels grind toward each other, and I can’t help imagining the lid of a sarcophagus. Even a dull ape like Balt is awestruck by the spectacle, and I notice all the guns pointing at us have drooped.

  Julie brushes past me without a sound and races to join M and the others, who are already halfway down the block. I understand what we’re doing just a few seconds before Balt does; I hear shouts behind me and then shots; bullets crater the asphalt close enough to spray me with stinging chips, but then I’m behind a building and momentarily safe, though it’s hard to use that word while sirens howl all around us.

  “Due to higher than usual threat levels,” blares a cheerful voice from the stadium’s PA system, “we are initiating enclave lockdown at this time. Please remain where you are and we will provide further instructions shortly. Do not move at all.”

  “What’s happening?” Tomsen says. “Is this all for us?”

  “They’ve shut the roof three times in the last seven years,” Julie says between breaths. “Once for a hurricane, once for a siege, and once for a thousand Boneys. Whatever this is…” She looks up at the narrowing strip of sky. “…it’s bigger than us.”

  The roof closes with a soft boom like far-off thunder. The floodlights kick on, replacing daylight with their pale imitation. People stand frozen in the street, perhaps wondering how literally they should take Axiom’s instructions not to move.

  I hear Balt a few blocks behind us, bellowing orders and threats to his men and nearly out-shouting the sirens. Julie points to a gap in the stadium wall leading into its shadowy guts. “There,” she says, and disappears into the hole.

  • • •

  No one lives in the wall. Some of its hollow spaces have become storage rooms, packed with canned goods and building materials, but not even the dull-eyed citizens of this dead-end society were willing to spend their last days in these lightless corridors. I wonder how long before Axiom convinces them.

  We are going up. Our footsteps make a pipe-like echo in the narrow stairwell. Julie leads with a confidence that deflects questions. She spent half her childhood locked in the stadium, and this concrete labyrinth was her one escape, her secret clubhouse away from it all. I have no doubt she knows it well.

  At the sixth level she exits the stairwell into a long, dark hallway and starts to turn left, then stops and cocks her ear. The sirens have stopped. From somewhere outside the stadium, I hear the distorted squawk of a megaphone. I can’t make out the words, but the tone is fiery and melodramatic, more theatrical than military.

  “Who is that?” Julie mumbles under her breath and moves toward the outer wall. I follow with mounting dread, the answer rising in my throat like vomit.

  At the end of a hallway, there is a section missing from the wall and covered by a sheet of black plastic. The plastic undulates in the wind, heaving in and out like a cancerous lung. The megaphone sounds like someone speaking through a kazoo, shrill and piercing but stripped of its phonemes, a loud but meaningless buzzing.

  “What the hell’s happening out there?” Julie says. She grabs a corner of the plastic and gives it a hard yank. The corner tears away, then the wind catches it and pulls the rest free. The black sheet floats off into the city like a wraith, drifting over broken towers and flooded parking lots, toward a horizon that’s hazy with dust and windblown trash. There’s a sad and desolate beauty to the ruins, but I spare only a second for the view before my eyes drop to the ground.

  We are almost directly above the stadium’s front gate, where a small contingent of troops waits with weapons at the ready. I see many more lining the walls, guns bristling from every window, deck, catwalk, and fire escape. All of them point toward the mouth of the unfinished Corridor 1, where a strange traffic jam is in progress.

  Main Street is backed up from the stadium to the freeway, a line of armored bank trucks hauling armored cargo trailers—at least five times as many as I saw in the Ardents’ town. The truck at the front stands out from the procession because it’s painted solid white from top to bottom, including the wheels and tires. The noise is coming from this one, of course, from the roof-mounted megaphone and the man shouting into it somewhere inside that metal box.

  A shift in the wind carries his voice up to us, and I can finally make out the words.

  “...has been trying to tell us for so long, in so many ways, to let go. To surrender to his plan. The story is over and he’s closing the book, but we keep trying to hold it open. We keep trying to write new chapters, but we are creations, not creators, and God is not interested in our contributions. The world is God’s story, this is the last chapter, and there is no sequel!”

  M looks at me quizzically. “Why’s he driving an ice cream truck?”

  I see a faint smile twitch on Nora’s lips, though her eyes are still glassy. Her brother watches her intently, as if trying to cure her with sheer will.

  The wind muffles Paul Bark’s sermon for a moment, and when it blows back, it seems to be concluding.

  “...allow you all a chance to leave this enclave before we surrender it. We are not here to kill you; life belongs to God. But we will tear down these idols of progress. We will lie naked in the dust before God until the Last Sunset burns us away.”

  I hear the pulsing growl of helicopters behind us. The sun winks out as th
ey pass overhead. Two local news choppers with large-caliber cannons welded onto them. One National Guard gunship.

  “What is your answer?” Bark demands from the dim interior of his truck as the gunship hovers in front of him. “What will you submit to? God’s will, or his judgment?”

  There’s a streak of smoke and a loud concussion and the trailer Bark was towing leaps into the air, flinging the truck up with it before snapping free. Both the truck and the trailer crash down on their sides, dented and smoking but apparently undamaged—except for a man-sized hole in the trailer.

  The only sound now is the whir of the choppers. Then the megaphone crackles and squeals with feedback. I hear Bark’s distorted breathing as he struggles with the mic in his overturned vehicle. But he sounds barely perturbed when he says:

  “God’s Jury is just. He guides their hands and teeth. We will pray for you.”

  Like a torn spider’s nest, the trailer spews forth a stream of skeletons, scrabbling through the hole and spreading into the streets. Behind it, Ardents in riot armor hop out of all the trucks and run to the rear of their trailers, pushing through the Boneys with their Plexiglas shields. All three choppers open fire and a few of the men go down…but not enough.

  They unlatch the trailer doors. They run back to their trucks and lock themselves inside. And then, almost all at once, like an explosion, thousands of skeletons spread out across the city.

  I can’t help it. I laugh out loud. The great pratfalling clown show of human rapacity. A plague strikes the world, and we see opportunity for advancement. It turns people into walking corpses, and we see cheap labor. Two months ago, through means I still don’t understand, Julie and I sent out a signal that the Boneys would no longer profit from us, and they scattered. And then my old friend Paul saw those festering swarms of skeletons and thought, Just what I need to grow my business!

  A few blocks behind the church’s convoy, a white phosphorus grenade flashes on the roof of a highrise, a cheap special effect lost in the big-budget horror they’ve unleashed.