The Living

by Isaac Marion

  He looks at the TV.

  Something is different.

  Instead of the glossy stock footage of the classic Feed or the garish intensity of Axiom ads, there is a grainy, poorly lit shot of a tall man in a cavernous room. The man stares into the camera, and the shot holds on his face. It doesn’t cut between five different angles or zoom in and out or insert bursts of music and sound effects. It just watches his bruised, bloody, trembling face.

  The short man realizes he knows this person. The tall man was his neighbor. So was the short girl standing next to him. He remembers them sitting on the floor in front of his chair and talking to him. Introducing themselves. Their names were…

  The short man’s eyes widen. Does he actually remember their names?

  One was…Julie.

  The other, just a strange sound…Arr.

  And they asked him his name. And he said…

  “B.”

  He smiles as the sound parts his lips. He makes it again, first as just a letter and then as the beginning of a word, testing its possibilities. “Be. Buh. Beh—”

  “Shh,” someone says, and turns up the TV.

  The tall man looks scared but determined. He wipes his eyes. He takes a deep breath.

  “My name…is R,” he says, struggling with the words. “It’s…only name that…matters to me. Only name I have…in this life.”

  He looks at the ground.

  “But…had another life. Another name.”

  He shakes his head.

  “First name’s not important. Just a noise my parents liked. But last name…family name…”

  He forces his eyes back to the camera, takes a shuddering breath, and firms his voice.

  “I was an Atvist. My grandfather founded the Axiom Group.”

  “At…vist,” B says, frowning, and someone shushes him again.

  “What this group wants is to go back,” R continues, and his voice is solidifying, gaining speed and force. “Back to packs and pecking orders, predators and prey and the dominance of the strong. It wants a world driven by hunger and fear, where we kill our children to keep them safe.”

  The video stutters between R and a menu screen, a scrawl of code, a quick scramble through a selection of clips—then a huge room filled with plush chairs. B grins—paradise! But then he notices the people strapped into those chairs and stuck full of tubes and wires. He sees a little girl with a blue eye patch bucking and kicking against her restraints. And he sees R and Julie and a few others storming into this room and releasing everyone.

  “The Axiom I worked for was a dangerous thing, but it’s become something much worse.”

  He speaks over a montage of security camera footage:

  Axiom guards divide up a crowd, directing some into apartment towers and others into vans.

  A corral full of people sway and stare with looks of utter emptiness, like they’re waiting to be told what they are.

  Two men in lab coats carry a struggling woman up a ladder. They drop her into a tank of clear fluid, and the three skeletons drifting in the tank come to life. The woman disappears. The fluid turns pink.

  “Axiom isn’t a government,” R says, and his face reappears on the screen, his eyes now dry and fierce. “It’s not a strong leader of a secure society. It’s this.”

  He steps aside, letting the camera focus on what’s behind him: a shipping container filled with brownish-white debris. Concrete? Dirt?

  Bones.

  Rattling bones and buzzing skulls, like the ones in the airport where B used to live, the ones that hissed wordless sermons and meaningless rules and roared like battle horns whenever they were challenged.

  “This is Axiom’s Executive branch. This is where your orders come from.”

  A severed hand claws its way out of the pile and into the mouth of a leathery skull. The skull bites down and the hand writhes.

  “It’s a single neuron in the lowest part of our brains, firing over and over, and it’s saying the same thing it’s been saying for billions of years. Take. Eat. Fight. Win. Fuck. Kill. Survive.”

  He spits the words like the names of old friends who betrayed him.

  “But there’s more to us than this, isn’t there? Haven’t we grown bigger brains? Bigger souls?”

  “Brains,” B says. “Be. Buh. Beh.”

  Someone elbows him but he keeps mumbling, sampling syllables on his thawing tongue.

  “We have the vocabulary for bigger thoughts. Beautiful, intricate thoughts made of many words. Maybe some we’ve been thinking for a long time but have been too scared to say aloud.”

  “Be…Beh…Ben.” His eyes widen. His chest swells with a deep breath. “Ben!” he shouts, and a few of his neighbors stare at him. “My name is Ben!”

  Ben stands up so fast he knocks over his chair.

  • • •

  Gael ducks as the helicopters roar overhead. Gebre shields his face against the blast of dust and leaves. The wind obliterates the street market, scattering its food crates and clothes racks and invention demo tents, blowing away Portland’s experimental society like a puff of dandelion seeds. Gael wonders what wish they made, the children flying those helicopters and driving these trucks down Hawthorne Street.

  “I knew it,” Gebre says, shaking his head. “I can’t believe it, but I knew it.”

  “Sir,” says a soldier in a beige jacket, “I’m going to have to ask you to keep moving.” He jabs at them with his rifle. Gael and Gebre fall into the line of prisoners—though of course Axiom doesn’t use that term, preferring to avoid the uncomfortable association with the thing it actually is. Prisoners became “detainees” decades ago, and now they’ve graduated to “guests.”

  Gael and Gebre shuffle into the community center to join the rest of the guests. Portland’s organizers gathered here at the first sign of attack, calling it an emergency strategy meeting, but there was no strategy to discuss. They’re not a militia; they’re farmers and builders and artists and scientists. Their only plan for a situation like this was for it to never happen. And so the strategy meeting transitioned into a prisoner camp without a shot fired. The invaders didn’t even speak. They just walked in with their guns and redefined the context.

  “I wanted to be wrong,” Gebre mumbles as he and his husband take their place in the crowd. “I thought it could be different…”

  “Stop it,” Gael says.

  “…but it’s Catalonia and the Free Territories and Stalin all over again.”

  “I’m serious, Geb. Don’t you dare say it.”

  He shakes his head. “I won’t say it. But it rhymes with ‘blistery retreats.’”

  “Why is the TV off?” shouts an officer with a gray tie hanging over his gray shirt. “You people don’t want Axiom’s exclusive offers and updates?”

  He finds the remote and clicks on the big flatscreen that hangs above the help desk.

  Something is different.

  Instead of the montage of dissociative imagery that usually fills the screen, the TV shows what appears to be raw security footage. A tall, East African-looking woman is calling to the camera as she slowly backs away.

  “…in about fourteen minutes, BABL’s gonna be gone. You’ll be able to change the channel.”

  She is far away from the microphone and her voice is faint. The community center listens in total silence.

  “But first we need to show you something. So, uh…stay tuned?”

  She looks familiar, but before Gael can place her face, she turns and runs out of the frame. The scene cuts to a battle.

  For a moment Gael thinks it’s a movie—it has all the wordless mayhem of an old-world blockbuster’s obligatory action climax—but there’s a distinct lack of drama in the spectacle. Just a long, steady shot of soldiers and trucks and a clattering swarm of human skeletons, all locked in a blur of comb
at so jumbled it’s not even clear who’s fighting whom.

  The troops in the community center watch the footage in mute horror. Then it cuts from the battle to the roof of the stadium. It pans over to a bizarrely incongruous dome resting on the roof, then cuts to the interior of that dome, where a man is looking at the camera.

  “My name…is R,” the man says, and as he continues to speak, the silence in the community center deepens. The soldiers begin to glance at each other. When the footage cuts to some kind of laboratory, the officer clicks the TV off.

  “I think we’ve seen enough of whatever that was. I’m sure we’ll have the Feed back online in—”

  A young man in a beige jacket walks up to the officer, looks him in the eyes, and snatches the remote out of his hand. While the officer gapes at him, the young man clicks the TV back on and looks up, ignoring his father-boss’s reddening face.

  Gael can hear his own heartbeat as a parade of horrors marches across the screen. The hurricane that ejected him from New York suddenly seems like an act of providence.

  When the tall man starts speaking again, Gael leans close to Gebre and whispers, “Don’t we know him from somewhere?”

  Angry murmurs begin to rise from the troops as the camera zooms in on a metal box full of bones.

  “What the fuck is this?” someone demands, but the officer offers no answer. His outrage is cooling into fear.

  The man who called himself “R” walks away from the box. The camera follows him, revealing three more people: the brown woman from earlier in the feed, a bald, bearded giant, and a short, hard-looking girl with wild blond hair—Gael’s eyes go wide.

  “Lynda’s Diner!” Gebre whispers to him. “The utopians!”

  Gael remembers. He remembers the blond one diving into their debate with savage passion, her blue eyes sparking like an overloaded electrical socket about to catch fire. The man sitting next to her didn’t say a word the whole time. But now…

  “We have the vocabulary for bigger thoughts. Beautiful, intricate thoughts made of many words. Maybe some we’ve been thinking for a long time but have been too scared to say aloud.”

  His eyes are brown, but they flash with that same furious spark. And…are they brown? It’s probably just the bad video, but Gael could almost swear their color is fluctuating.

  “We don’t need their world anymore. We have the materials to build a better one. All we need is the courage to start working.”

  The camera pans a little farther, and Gael sees one more person hiding against the wall.

  He stifles a joyful scream.

  “Oh my God!” He manages to bring it down to a yelp, digging his fingers into Gebre’s shoulder. “Do you—”

  “I see him,” Gebre says with a radiant grin.

  The boy’s strange yellow eyes look into the camera as it pans past him. Gael wouldn’t be surprised if the boy can see him too.

  “Kick their asses, Rover!” Gael blurts.

  Gebre pumps his fist. “Woo!”

  No one shoots them for their outburst. More and more soldiers are letting their guns wander off their targets. Without any signal or instruction, the crowd in the community center begins to tighten around the men in gray ties, the line between captor and captive rapidly blurring.

  “I’m sure their troops are on their way right now,” R says with a quick glance toward the door, “so before they shut me up, I have one more thing to say…”

  I

  Julie is staring at me wide-eyed like she’s witnessing a miracle, and maybe she is. I have said more in these three minutes than in my entire second life. No careful reserve, no self-conscious minimalism—I am cracked open. The words pour out of me without review or revision, rushing up from some deep, warm spring in my center.

  “…all we need is the courage to start working,” I finish, and Julie’s mouth curves up into a silent laugh, half amusement—which I fully deserve for my shameless grandiloquence—and half genuine amazement.

  She mouths Holy shit, and I can’t resist a grin.

  Then I remember where I am and what I’m doing, and the fear sobers me up.

  “I’m sure Axiom’s troops are on their way right now,” I tell the camera, the country, the world—no, keep it simple. Just a camera. Just Julie smiling behind the viewfinder, snapping Polaroids of me in an abandoned house. Just her and me.

  “…so before they shut me up, I have one more thing to say. A word for the Dead.”

  I take a deep breath.

  “You don’t have to be what you are. Even the Dead can heal. I’m…I’m Living proof.”

  Julie rolls her eyes, still smiling.

  “And so is he.”

  I point to M. He waves.

  “And so is he.”

  I point to Nora’s little brother and he presses his back against the wall as if uncomfortable with the attention.

  “And so are the hundreds of former Dead who have been living in this stadium. Because nothing is absolute. ‘The way things are’ changes when we do.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see one of the other cameras nodding vigorously. Remote applause from our friend in the basement? Or a signal to wrap it up? It occurs to me that Tomsen probably isn’t one to keep an eye on the clock. She might stay at the controls to the very end if I’m still talking when the bomb goes off. I could have done without this extra pressure for my first public speaking gig…

  “Look at this,” I tell the camera, pulling my pant leg up, and the camera pans down to it. “This was my first infection.” The camera rises as I pull aside my shirt collar. “And this was my second.”

  I can’t see the wound, but I’ve seen plenty others like it. I’m looking at one right now, that dark pit on Addis’s shoulder, raw flesh dried up but never healed. It’s a mirror image of mine.

  “The first bite took my first life. This one tried to take the life I’m living now. I didn’t let it.”

  I glance at Julie. She has stopped laughing.

  “Some people think the plague came from outside, like a foreign invader. They think it can be stopped with walls and guns and quarantines.” My voice has begun to tremble again. “But I think it comes from inside, and everyone’s infected. I think we’re born with it and we die with it and we’re never truly cured.”

  I turn away from the camera and look at Julie, starting to believe my fantasy that it’s just me and her. “But that doesn’t mean it has to kill us!” I feel a pang in my chest, like the pluck of a piano wire strung between my ribs. A euphoric laugh bubbles out of me and tears dampen my eyes. “We don’t have to let it win.” I feel the world growing softer and quieter as warmth spreads through me. The cavernous dome shrinks to an intimate place, a secret. “We can fight it and hold it off,” I whisper to Julie, and there are tears in her eyes too. “Maybe just long enough to live a good life.”

  I hear her voice as if from far away, and something in it troubles me. Something in her face isn’t right; there are more tears than there should be. The warmth in my chest is hot now, burning, and I look down and see that my gray shirt has turned the same color as my tie.

  I look up again. Julie’s eyes are an open sky, boundless, fathomless, terrifying, beautiful.

  I fall asleep.

  WE

  The stadium had other gathering places, like the community center and the square, but the Orchard was the only place that didn’t have a purpose. It hosted no meetings, it stored no supplies, it served no function except to nudge people together and invite them to feel good.

  Within six days of the stadium’s new management, the Orchard was rebranded as an emergency shelter. Nearly a third of the stadium’s buildings are now emergency shelters, though there is nothing particularly safe about them. Just a sign on the door indicating this is where you should wait while forces bigger than you determine an outcome.

 
Naturally, the alcohol is gone. The bar is buried under supply crates, though a few visible graffiti carvings hint at a messy human history. The TVs, however, were allowed to stay, because from their perches in the corners they shower the shelter’s patrons with Axiom’s stream of consciousness.

  Or they did until five minutes ago. Now a different show is on.

  Team Manager Abbot bursts into the crowded room of frightened people. He sees the TVs and the rapt faces watching them: live footage of the battle outside, if one can even call that clusterfuck a battle.

  “Turn that off!” Abbot shouts. When no one jumps to obey, he draws his revolver and shoots out the screens. A dramatic, wild-west gesture, but that’s the point. The crowd huddles as glass rains down on them.

  Abram watches through the doorway from the balcony outside as Abbot shouts orders at the refugees. And then a flash diverts his attention. He instinctively looks up, but it’s not lightning—the roof is closed; they’re locked in a skyless box. He turns to the railing, scanning the patchwork cityscape below, and he sees it: a blue-white brilliance pulsing out from the entrance lobby.

  Arc cutters.

  He feels himself sinking as the pieces click together. The Goldman rebels will open the gates. They’re too few to fight Axiom directly, but if they can help God’s Jury reach its verdict, there won’t be much left to fight.

  It’s a strategy Axiom would admire. Didn’t they use it themselves not so long ago? Circling above the global fray until America exhausted itself, then swooping in to pick the bones clean? The new America will need a new bird to represent the new patriotism. A vulture will do nicely.

  “Roberts!” Abbot shouts at Abram’s back. “Snap to it, son!”

  “They’re cutting the gates,” Abram says quietly.

  “Let the wall crew handle the siege. We’ve got other orders.”

  Abram turns around. “Are we going to shoot all the TVs in the stadium?”