The Living

by Isaac Marion

I laugh harder.

  “Hey.”

  M punches me in the shoulder. “Don’t you go crazy on me too. Got enough to deal with here.”

  Nora is drooling on his shoulder. Tomsen is pacing in a circle, rubbing her scalp and muttering to herself. Julie is staring at the chaos below with a faraway expression.

  “They’re going to lose,” she murmurs.

  I can barely hear her over the racket of war, the drumroll of gunfire from the wall, the steady roar of the helicopters punctuated by thumping missile blasts. In a world where most battles involve ragged gangs with revolvers and machetes, this is an awesome display of military might. But it’s three choppers and a few hundred soldiers against several thousand ravenous skeletons. Even if Axiom hadn’t spread itself thin with its ill-timed foreign invasions, I’m not sure they could stop this.

  “They’ll run out of ammo before they get halfway through that swarm,” Julie says, shaking her head. “Axiom’s going to lose.”

  For the moment, the Boneys are focused on the Ardents, clawing at their armored trucks like bears trying to open campsite canisters. But hunting is the one area in which their minds are still adaptable, and they quickly recognize the futility of this effort. In almost perfect unison, they abandon the trucks and rush toward the stadium, where a richer pot of flesh awaits. They die in waves as bullets strafe their ranks. Their skulls explode like ceramic urns, scattering their ashes to the wind. But for each one that goes down, three more rush in behind it.

  “Hate to tell you,” M says to Julie, “but that’s not good news. If they lose, we lose.”

  Julie nods. “Oh I know. We’re probably going to die.”

  M raises his eyebrows. “Well shit! What happened to Miss Sunshine?”

  Julie finally pulls her eyes away from the battle. She looks at me like she’s been talking to me the whole time. “Everything’s going to fall apart.” Her voice is faint, her eyes slightly widened. “But like that guy at the diner said…like Gael said…maybe that’s what we need.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask, though I’m starting to understand.

  “Maybe this loosens Axiom’s grip enough to shake it off.” She looks down at the mayhem on the ground. “Maybe if everyone sees what’s happening here, they’ll realize nothing’s as solid as they thought. That the powers that be aren’t invulnerable. That we have a chance.”

  I feel a tingle rising in my spine. Did the scope of today’s ambitions just widen by a mile?

  Tomsen snatches the briefcase out of my hand with the twitchy speed of a pickpocket.

  “Whoa, whoa!” M says, reaching out to stop her, but she ignores him and crouches to the floor, pops the case open, and pulls a little electronics kit from one of her many pockets.

  “Where did you find this thing?” she says. “It’s ancient! Does it even work?”

  “Let’s not find out,” M says, watching her nervously as she pokes around in the wiring. He jumps half a foot when a grenade detonates in the battle below. But after a minute of tinkering, Tomsen shuts the case and stands up.

  “Trigger is good. Now what?” She doesn’t give the case back to me and I don’t ask for it. BABL has been her life’s work; she deserves to be the one who finishes it.

  “I know a way into my house,” Julie says and starts to head back the way we came, then stops when she sees Sprout following at her heels. “But Marcus was right, Sprout. We can’t bring you into this.”

  “I want to help!” Sprout says.

  “I know you do, but this is too dangerous. Your dad would kill me if I let you come.”

  “But me and Addis can see things,” Sprout says, and she doesn’t sound like a six-year-old arguing. She doesn’t sound whiny or pouty. She sounds strong. “See?”

  She pulls off her eyepatch and drops it on the ground. Her “bad” eye gleams yellow like Addis’s. Like mine and Julie’s, once upon a time. I can feel it drilling past my flesh, seeking the spaces inside me.

  “We can read the Library,” she says. “The books tell us secrets.”

  A chill runs down my back. Julie and I exchange a glance. Addis watches us with his unreadable stare.

  “Decision, now!” Tomsen says, passing the briefcase from hand to hand like the handle is hot.

  “Sprout,” Julie says. “I know you can see things. I know you might be able to help. But you’re too small for what we’re doing and you’ll probably get hurt, or even get us hurt.”

  Sprout’s stiff spine slumps a little.

  “So I think if you really want to help, you should stay here with your friends and take care of Nora. You have your own brain, but I’ve been around longer, and that’s what I think you should do. Your choice.”

  With that, she turns and heads down the hall.

  M eases Nora to the floor and props her against the wall. “Listen,” he says, trying to catch her swimming gaze. “You’re Nora Greene. Baddest ass I ever met. Gonna take a lot more than poison to knock you down.”

  Her eyes hold his for just a moment, then slip away again.

  I glance back at the kids as we leave them in the corridor, the noise of battle rumbling up through the rectangle of daylight behind them. Sprout looks frustrated and confused. The others are harder to read.

  “You really think they’ll stay?” I ask Julie.

  She shrugs. “I said all I could. I’m not going to tie them up. They’re people.”

  Tomsen is already to the stairwell, bouncing on her heels while she waits for us. “Faster! Sooner! Time is Russian roulette and every second is a trigger pull, tick tick tick, click click click.”

  “Jesus Christ,” M grumbles.

  We move past the stairwell, heading toward the interior side of the wall, and after a claustrophobic squeeze through a pitch-black service tunnel, we emerge into harsh white artificial daylight, perched on a narrow ledge of grating.

  Directly below us, at the end of a rusty ladder: the sheet metal roof of Julie’s house.

  “I was a teenager and my dad was a paranoid alcoholic general,” Julie explains. “I had to sneak out a lot.”

  “What if Balt left some guards?” I ask. The streets are mostly empty now, despite the remain where you are message blinking on the Jumbotron. People must have decided to make their own decisions.

  “What do you think I brought you and Marcus for?” Julie says with a wry grin. “You used to be some kind of ninja, apparently, and Marcus…he’s good at absorbing bullets.”

  M sighs and slaps his barrel of a stomach. “One advantage of being big. You skinny bitches can’t hold your lead.”

  Tomsen loops her belt through the briefcase handle and scurries down the ladder with the case bouncing against her hip. Julie is close behind and then M, leaving me alone on the ledge, staring at the ladder. I think of another ladder, much longer and made of living bone. These brutal skills I have—do I climb downward every time I use them? Are they stored in those primordial pits below the basement? The Library is messy. There are Lower pages tucked into Higher books and the opposite as well, and sometimes down is up.

  I descend the ladder and pad across the roof of Julie’s house, limbering my hands for whatever they need to do.

  WE

  “Team Manager Abbot to anyone in Goldman Dome! Do you read me? Does anyone read me?”

  Abbot pulls his walkie away and curses at it like it’s an insubordinate officer. “Of all the fucking times for a jammer surge.”

  Security forces have withdrawn into the stadium walls, digging in for a siege, but the nature of this fortress necessitates strange formations. They’re not gathered together in organized ranks but scattered throughout the tunnels, each soldier finding his own solitary perch from which to shoot. Only Abram’s probation keeps him tied to Abbot on this particular ledge.

  “Line sounds clean, sir,” Abram says as he pops out a spent clip
and replaces it. “They’re just not answering.”

  Abbot presses the button again. The squeal of the jamming signal is indeed faint. “There was no attack on Goldman…” He looks in the direction of the dome as if visualizing it through the intervening buildings. “Why wouldn’t they answer?”

  Abram fires carefully, trying not to waste any bullets, but the targets are small and fast and erratic; it’s like trying to shoot a wasp out of the air. He used to enjoy the challenge. All the new hires looked forward to Boney encounters because it was a chance to show their worth, to impress their father-bosses and perhaps earn a few Approval Credits. And there was a sickly gratification in the feat itself, the way a good headshot made them collapse like a snipped marionette, a clean, bloodless deletion of the enemy.

  But today he feels nothing. No one is keeping score as he guns down these absurd stacks of animate calcium. Abbot is still shouting into his walkie, trying to reach Goldman or the acquisition teams en route to Portland, but no one is listening. Grenades turn clusters of skeletons into clouds of osseous shrapnel, but they’re spreading out to make harder targets, surrounding the stadium like a swarm of termites.

  “You said it’s a vault, right?” Abram calls to Abbot. “They can’t get in, right?”

  Abbot lowers his walkie and watches the skeletons mount the wall, their pointy fingers digging into cracks and lifting their weightless frames. “You see this watch?” he says in a disconcertingly subdued voice, lifting his wrist to display a gold Rolex. “Water resistant down to a thousand feet, it says. But I don’t take it swimming.”

  Abram leans over the edge of the opening to pick off a few Boneys that were getting too close. The sound of their claws ripping free of the concrete reminds him of ticks. The sight of his calves dotted with them like gray warts after an afternoon in the woods with Perry. That hideous sensation of being inhabited. Of being fed upon. And that horrible tug as his father pulled them out.

  “Sir,” he says, lowering his gun and looking directly at his superior, hoping to draw out some honesty. “Do we have any backup?”

  Abbot shakes out of his introspection and his face resumes its glowering. “We have Goldman if they’ll fucking show up!”

  “When I left Post, the merger was struggling. A lot of public firings, rumors of another branch break.”

  “They’ve had some HR issues,” Abbot says sourly. “Locals aren’t merging as smoothly as we hoped, but I thought it was quelled by now.” He spits a glob of mucus onto the floor in front of him. “This is the goddamn Axiom Group! We’ve been doing this shit for decades! We don’t let a few religious nut-jobs walk in and take our—”

  He cuts off. A smile creases his craggy face.

  Two ancient, dented Apache helicopters have appeared in the sky to the west. They move in to join the three hovering over the stadium.

  “About fucking time!” Abbot says, thumping the balcony railing. “If they brought their ground troops with them, we might have a—”

  Missiles streak out from the Apaches, but not into the swarm of Boneys. The National Guard gunship spirals down in a swirl of smoke.

  “No,” Abbot mumbles, but Abram feels oddly unsurprised.

  The two news choppers turn to face Goldman’s Apaches. There’s an exchange of loud noises. Both news choppers fall in groaning masses of fire. One of the Apaches spins out of control and crashes into an office building, blasting a flurry of documents out over the street like parade confetti. The last one wobbles in the air for a moment before its rotors lock up and it drops to the ground like a stone.

  Then the ground troops Abbot hoped for appear, pouring out of Corridor 2 with shouts of “For General Cinza!” They open fire on the skeletons, and on Axiom’s men, and the battle is suddenly very confusing.

  So we stop watching it. We attune to Abram Kelvin, whose mind is also drifting away from the madness around him. How he hates it all. How he’s always hated it, even while he was making it. How he wishes there were other directions the earth could spin.

  A small skeleton is climbing toward him. He has never seen a child Boney before but he supposes there’s no reason they wouldn’t exist. He locks eyes with its gaping sockets.

  Is this what you want for her? whispers that maddeningly familiar voice, flickering on every syllable from boy to man and back. Is this the best you’ve come up with after all your years on this planet?

  The skeleton is getting close. Abbot has retreated into the wall and he’s yelling at Abram to join him, but Abram doesn’t move.

  If this is really all you can see, then let it eat you and be done with it, because this isn’t worth the pain.

  Abbot is sliding the door shut. It squeals on its rusty track.

  But we know you, Abram. I know you. And I know you can see more.

  His bullet disintegrates the tiny skull, close enough to spray his face with bone chips. He ducks through the remaining gap and helps Abbot lock the door.

  There are many distortions in Abram’s perception. Many scratches on his lens from a lifetime of rough handling. But one of his simplest mistakes is believing that no one is watching him. Many people are watching him, including the small girl five floors up, leaning over the edge and squinting, wondering if that’s her father down there.

  • • •

  Sprout Kelvin can see Abram perfectly well. Her special eye disregards the illusion of distance and sees every hair on his head, the grays here and there, the thinning patch at the back. But seeing his face does not answer her question.

  Is that my father?

  He disappears before she can decide. There are skeletons creeping up the wall. They advance slowly, wandering side to side in search of holds on the mostly smooth face of the stadium. It will be some time before they reach her perch, if they aren’t shot down first, so she doesn’t panic yet. But she is very, very scared.

  She is scared of being eaten, of being imprisoned, of being pumped full of plague until she no longer has a self. But mostly she’s scared for the people around her, because she cares as much for each one of them as she does for herself, and there are more of them than of her.

  We like this girl. She sees things. Sometimes, she sees us. She reads our fantastic tales of speculative fiction and projects them onto reality. And maybe someday, with enough projectors shining, someone will trace that image.

  Sprout’s new friend Addis might have such talent, but the world has rapped his knuckles every time he’s reached out, and even with our voices inside him asking him to try again, he is not quite convinced. The world has much to prove before he will trust it with his hopes.

  And yet here is his sister, who has given up everything for the people she loves. He can see the sludge coating her mind now, the puree of black worms chopped fine but still quivering, still sucking up her life and shitting out death. He can see her fighting to clean it off, spraying her soiled thoughts with a fire hose of will.

  Nora stands up.

  She blinks and shakes her head, swaying like a drunk. Her eyes manage to focus on Addis’s for just a second, communicating something like, I have to, and then she stumbles down the corridor.

  Addis looks at Sprout.

  “I’m going to stay,” she says. “I don’t want to get Julie hurt.” She glances down at the skeletons’ slow ascent, then at Joan and Alex, who nod. “We’ll be okay,” she tells Addis. “Go see what you need to see.” Then she smiles. “I think they’re almost ready.”

  And she’s right. We are almost ready. We are fuel awaiting a spark.

  I

  Across the roof. Down the drain pipe. Through the balcony doors.

  Julie’s bedroom is exactly how she left it. Her bed is there, but the sheets are gone. Her dresser drawers hang open, empty. Nails and thumbtacks mark the places where her art and mementos used to hang. The room is a gutted shell. A skeleton stripped of flesh.

&nbs
p; It was a rushed moving day. It took her one hour to pack, stuffing her few meaningful possessions into boxes with violent haste, her eyes brimming but refusing to release. It was three hours after she watched her father die. Three hours after her father tried to kill her. But she didn’t want time to recover and mourn; she wanted to pull every trace of herself out of this place and wake up tomorrow somewhere new. She wanted to leave and never come back.

  I see it in her eyes as we march through the wildly painted sanctuary of her youth, with its lingering scent of cheap incense and cigarettes. The struggle not to remember. To be here and now and nowhere else.

  I know that struggle well.

  I put an arm around her shoulders and pull her against me, forcing her to pause. She looks up at me, then buries her face in my neck. Just a moment. Just enough to acknowledge the thickly layered lives we’ve lived. Then she wipes her eyes and we move on.

  The house is silent. I hear no gruff laughter or barked commands. The only sign of Axiom’s presence is the muffled noise outside the stadium, a jumble of shouts and explosions and inhuman roars, like all the world’s aggressors dumped into a blender.

  We climb down stairs sticky with spilled beer and tobacco spit, past bunk beds, bean bags, TVs, and gun racks—empty, to my dismay and relief.

  We reach the ground level. Julie stops in front of a separate staircase leading further down.

  “Can you feel it?” she says.

  I can’t at first, but it starts to rise as we descend the dark steps. It fills my head like viscous fluid, like a low vibration from some distant factory. By the time we reach the bottom, it’s actually audible, and Julie’s earlier description was accurate but understated. It’s not just a lot of songs playing at once; it’s every song—and every show and film and news broadcast, melodies clashing, beats overlapping into a shuddering rumble, a thousand voices shouting over each other.

  The basement of Julie’s home is a perfect cube of concrete lit by a single red bulb, completely empty except for a beige rug in the middle of the floor. I see no cobwebs or rat droppings or other signs of life, just thin drifts of dust that have settled into strange patterns on the concrete: triangles and whorls of bristling fractals.