by Isaac Marion
Addis turns to face us. He looks exhausted, but he smiles.
“Addis?” Nora whispers, confused and afraid.
“Hi, Norwhale,” he says, and his smile turns shy.
The world dims again. Dark spots and muffled voices. I am aware of Nora lifting her brother off the ground in a crushing embrace, crying into his dusty hair, but everything is soft. I’m aware of Julie pulling on my arm, trying to stop me as I step out into the circle of dry bones, but I turn around and look into her eyes and tell her, “It’ll be okay,” with a confidence I can’t explain, and after a moment of wide-eyed uncertainty, she nods. We shove our way through the Boneys and walk to the edge of the roof.
“Tell me that again,” she says as we take in the scene below. “Tell me it’ll be okay.”
I must have been unconscious longer than I thought. The battle has escalated. Someone has cut through the stadium’s front gate—I see a rounded slab of steel lying flat on the pavement—and Axiom’s remaining troops have left their positions in the wall to fill the gap as the skeletons converge like a filthy river. Whatever force halted the group on the roof doesn’t seem to have reached the swarm on the ground; they press in on the Living with unwavering conviction, and Goldman’s rebels continue to snipe at Axiom even as the swarm surrounds them both.
I feel my confidence bleeding out. I feel dizzy and I turn away. Over my shoulder, I see M hauling Abram’s inert form out of the dome while Nora keeps a gun trained on the paralyzed Boneys. My friends are moving toward the ladder, trying to get the kids to safety, but where on Earth is that? Not at the bottom of that ladder. Citi Stadium is about to become the world’s largest tomb.
I feel surprise, but I don’t know why. What was I expecting to see when I looked down from this roof? A magic wave of peace flooding the land? The instant, compulsory end to all wars? There can be no such sweeping legislation. We all decide the shape of the world, the sum of all minds together. Change has to be chosen.
Where is it? I ask that glorious chorus. Where’s our new world?
My knees buckle and I start to sway. Julie grabs my shirt and pulls me back from the edge. I realize I haven’t given her the reassurance she begged for, but I can’t seem to find it. The wonders I experienced in that Library feel remote and abstract, even foolish in the gritty clangor of war. Did I dream the whole thing? Was it just the old near-death light and tunnel show, the desperate illusion of a blood-starved brain?
“R,” Julie says.
There’s an odd note in her voice, a sudden change of key, but I can barely hear it over the din of my thoughts. I watch men from this place killing men from that place and creatures from no place killing both, a war of all against all. And I see the Ardents through the windows of their armored trucks. They’re cheering.
“R! Do you hear—do you feel that?”
Her voice finally reaches me through the fog. What is that emotion I hear in it? Is it wonder? Is it awe? I tear myself away from the battle and look at her. Her eyes are wide. Her ear is cocked to the sky.
“Something’s different,” she whispers.
I strain to hear it. I strain to feel it. And then I stop straining and it’s simply there. It’s been there the whole time, since the moment I opened my eyes: a faint but clear chiming, like church bells on a distant hill. Now that I’m listening, I hear it through all the noise of war: a signal. A pronouncement.
A call.
My eyes drift across the city to the forest that surrounds it, thick and ancient and full of secrets.
“Julie,” I say, grabbing her hand and squeezing hard. “It’ll be okay.”
There are people walking out of the forest. Up and down the length of it, from one end of Post to the other, they emerge from highways, freeways, rural backroads, and from the trees themselves, pooling together into a crowd so vast my brain struggles to find a comparison. I flip through images of rallies, protests, festivals, and wars, but nothing comes close.
Thousands. Hundreds of thousands.
Millions.
Julie once told me the entire population of America amounted to maybe three million. But whoever took that census wasn’t counting the Dead.
“What…” Julie gasps, searching for words the way I’m searching for pictures. “What is…where are…oh my God.”
Even from my rooftop perch, I recognize my people. The tattered clothing. The swaying and stumbling. The crowd doesn’t march; it doesn’t form ranks and advance in lock-step. It moves with a swirling fluidity, like a natural phenomenon, each person on their own path, wandering away and then returning but steadily moving forward. I stop picturing armies and start picturing waves and sand. Wind and clouds. A fog of quantum particles condensing into a shape.
“Is this happening?” Julie says in a wild, breathless giggle. “Did my message…are they really…is this happening?”
She’s not the only one unraveled by the sight. As the armies around the stadium become aware of their surroundings, the battle grinds to a halt. First the Living soldiers freeze, the shock overwhelming their combat instincts, and then, to my amazement, the Boneys freeze with them. They don’t take advantage of the troops’ sudden vulnerability. They wait, poised to attack but not attacking, their own instincts derailed by the unexpected behavior of their prey. They have no category for this. No prepared response. They watch the men like cats watching stunned mice, waiting for the hunt to resume.
But it doesn’t. While the Boneys wait, fixated on their targets, the Dead sweep in around them, outnumbering them on a scale so large it’s comical. More images flutter through my head—a house sucked up by a tornado, a sand castle caught in the tide—but the one I like best is a virus. Jagged, alien things invading humanity’s bloodstream, only to be surrounded and absorbed by our antibodies.
It takes only a moment. There are several dozen Fleshies for each and every Boney, pinning them in on all sides, so it happens all at once. The Dead seize their future selves and simply dismantle them. They remove limbs and toss aside heads. It’s somehow nonviolent, not so much a battle as a decision. Thousands of skulls hiss and chatter on the ground, but they have no words to express their will and no hands with which to enforce it.
Slowly, the Living soldiers thaw from their shock. The Dead watch them placidly, waiting for them to decide their response, but even the most mind-numbed Axiom soldier can see there’s only one.
Guns clatter to the ground.
Those who can still recognize absurdity put their hands up with grim smiles. A funny thing, to surrender to people without weapons, an unarmed army asserting its will through sheer presence. A silent majority that’s finally making noise.
What will it say when it finds words?
“Hey!” Nora shouts over the rising wind. “We need to go!”
I follow her gaze to the source of her concern. The skeletons around the dome are waking up. Their hum sputters and chokes like a flooded wasp nest. Their bones rattle; their jaws snap; they begin to move toward us.
Then the wind rises, and they blow away.
Despite their savage strength, despite the primal forces that drive them, they are still just hollow bones, and all it takes is a strong gust to reveal their lack of substance. They topple over the edge of the roof, carried aloft like dead leaves, and their hideous hum disappears.
The wind subsides. The roof is silent.
I explode with laughter.
My friends stare at me. My wound screams in protest as my chest convulses, but I can’t stop. I don’t want to stop. I stand up and pace the roof, clutching my sides. Tears stream from my eyes, a different flavor than the ones I’m used to, not the bitterness of loss but something piquant and sweet. I hear those distant bells ringing, but it’s not quite a sound; it sits between the senses like this new texture in the wind, this new color in my voice—even the light smells different.
My laughter s
ubsides when my eyes land on Abram’s broken body, but I don’t erase my smile. Because his daughter is smiling too. Sitting by his side with a hand on his upturned palm, small and soft on her father’s scarred leather, she grins through the tears and snot.
“See, Dad?” she says, squeezing his palm. “See what we did?”
M watches the body carefully, his gun at the ready, but Abram remains at peace. No twitching. No groaning. Just rest.
Every choice has a price. We all owe a debt to this world for the things we take from it, right or wrong, cruel or kind. But these laws are soft, these laws are alive, and sometimes a debt is forgiven.
I feel a gentle weariness. I sit with my friends on the edge of the roof and take in the incredible view.
Like New York, the city of Post has been flooded. But this ocean is human. It fills every street, park, and parking lot—enough people to fully repopulate Post and much of the surrounding region. And this ocean is sparkling in the sun. The Gleam passes over it in waves of tiny lights. I can’t see its effects from this distance, so I turn to Addis. His yellow eyes are as wide as his grin. Sprout is squinting her left eye shut like her right is a telescope, hidden so long for the comfort of the world around her, now free to roam whatever strange vistas it sees.
“What’s happening down there?” I ask them.
“This!” Joan giggles, and points to a sunken patch of rot on her arm. A flash of light, and it’s gone.
“Dad, look!” Alex says as his chest flashes with inner illumination. He takes a deep breath and lets it out with a ta-da smile.
Julie grabs my hand. Her face is glowing with a light of its own. “I thought you said we can’t cure the plague.”
A sting in my neck. A sharp, cold rush. I clap my hand to the spot and find that the flesh is smooth. The bite is gone. If the black worms are still there, they’re sealed between the strata of my lives, dried up and buried like fossils of an earlier age.
“We can’t cure it,” I tell Julie. “But we can fight it.”
I kiss her, this person I love, this person who loves me. The wind blows our hair across our faces, hiding us from the world, and though we’re surrounded by our friends, I can almost believe we’re alone in a sun-soaked grove of trees. I barely feel the rumble behind us. I hardly hear the wrenching metal. I don’t bother to look back as the plastic dome and its obsolete flags break through the roof and fall.
WE
The city is almost quiet again.
Gulls call from nearby shorelines. Honeybees drone in the wildflowers that fill the cabs of old convertibles. A few of the Nearly Living still roam the streets, lost on inner pathways, but most have disappeared into the buildings or moved on to the next town, eager to find places to live.
Birds chirp. Insects click. The wind has dropped to a whisper.
The loudest sound by far is the megaphone on the roof of an overturned armored truck, squawking with rising desperation.
The man in the truck shouts dark prophecy to the inhabitants of the stadium. He shouts orders from God to the Nearly Living. He shouts encouragement to his followers, unaware that they dispersed hours ago.
Only two remain. While the others fled into the woods, these two stayed with their pastor. They pried open his truck’s door and tried to help him escape, but he ignored them and continued his sermon. The Holy Fire. The Last Sunset. The inescapable end of everything. Now the youths stand at a distance, waiting for the man to emerge from his ruined vehicle. But he won’t leave his megaphone. He stays inside and keeps shouting.
The young woman squeezes the young man’s hand. They look at each other. Their eyes are filled with uncertainty, with terrifying doubt, but they nod. They turn and walk away.
The pastor is alone. He begins to sense it, but he doesn’t stop. While he shouts about Hell, he thinks about Heaven: a golden ghost town, its sole occupant wandering its silent streets, his bare feet cold and sore on the hard metal, roaming from mansion to mansion and finding them all empty.
He shouts and shouts, but no one is listening. He shouts until his megaphone loses power.
On the other side of the stadium wall, there is a smoldering hole in the earth. First the explosion from below, then the dome from above, crashing into the pit and disappearing in the smoke—even with all the miracles unfolding outside, this kind of action still draws a few onlookers, and a crowd has gathered around the pit.
Somewhere down in the dark, locked in a box and buried under tons of debris, another voice is shouting. This one needs no megaphone, it shouts in thoughts and ideas, but even so, no one is hearing it. The voice has never experienced this before, this shocking lack of an audience, this flat wall of disregard. It doesn’t understand what could have changed; it has always enjoyed a direct line to humanity’s lowest instincts. So it keeps shouting.
The voice shouts and shouts, but people have stopped listening. One by one, they lose interest in the pit. One by one, they walk away.
four
the sky
I know of no philosopher who has been so bold as to say: this is the limit of what man can attain and beyond which he cannot go. We do not know what our nature permits us to be.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
WE
Nora pushes open the hatch that says no roof access and climbs out onto the roof. She understands why it’s not recommended—there are no safety railings and the whole structure sways slightly like the deck of a ship—but she likes it up here. She likes stepping outside the grid of human traffic. She likes being close to the sky. She never feels more free than when she’s on a rooftop.
She also wants some privacy so she can smoke a joint. It’s been a long day in the foster home.
She sits cross-legged next to one of the huge metal eyelets on the corner of the roof and rests an elbow on the support cable that runs through it. She can feel the vibrations of a dozen other buildings in the cable. Footsteps. Music. Even voices. This might just be her imagination, but then again, her senses have seemed strangely acute lately. Yesterday, one of the kids who doesn’t talk gave her a hug, and his heartbeat felt like code. I’m a bad thing, it seemed to tell her. The world doesn’t want me.
“You’re a beautiful thing, L,” she told him, “and we want you to come back as soon as you’re ready.”
Immediately, L began to cry.
Nora lights the joint and inhales. She holds in the smoke, waiting to feel the relief. Living here was already hard when it was just a few dozen orphans with ordinary traumas—nothing more exotic than abuse or abandonment, nothing she hadn’t experienced herself. But since the repopulation, things have gotten more complicated. And all this on top of her actual job as a nurse. Stitching bodies by day, hearts by night…she needs a break.
She takes a long pull of the sweet, floral vapor. Her nerves begin to uncoil.
“Got you!”
Her brother’s head pops up from the hatch.
Nora smiles in spite of herself. She pats the spot next to her and Addis drops onto it, dangling his feet over the edge.
“One puff,” Nora says, handing him the joint. “And if you start rambling about ‘the Higher’ again, I’m cutting you off for good.”
He looks at her with that cryptic smile that unnerves her even as it fascinates her. He doesn’t talk about his days in the space between Living and Dead—it only slips out when he’s high, whether on sugar, coffee, or more potent substances—but he knows something. Sometimes, Nora feels like she knows it too, though she can’t quite put it into words.
“L remembered his name,” Addis says. He takes a quick puff and returns the joint. “It’s Levi.”
Nora nods. She watches the traffic in the narrow streets below, like blood flowing through a brain. “You’re good with them, Addy. You’re good for them.”
He shrugs.
“You know they look up to you, right?”
Nora takes another puff and smiles. “Technically, so are you.”
A month ago, he would have gone cold at this. He struggled at first with his ambiguous identity. He couldn’t decide which group he belonged to, who he should play with, how he should talk and behave. He would bristle at any inquiry about his age—some older folks even questioned his race when his yellow eyes gleamed in the sun—but now he just smiles with sheepish amusement.
“I’m weird, aren’t I?”
Nora laughs. “Yes you are, Adderall. The weirdest.”
“Marcus is here.”
Nora pauses with the joint near her lips. “Here? Right now?”
“He’s at the front door.”
She looks at him sideways. “Can you…sense him or something?”
“He knocked earlier. I told him I’d go get you.”
“He’s been at the door this whole time?”
Addis grins.
“You little shit,” Nora chuckles and flicks the joint over the roof. She pauses at the hatch opening and turns around. “I’m glad you’re here, Addy.”
A brief hesitation, a cloud across his face, then: “Me too.”
“I love you. Even though you’re a little shit.”
His grin returns.
Nora descends the tower past floor after floor of other little shits. She pauses at the elementary level and peeks in the door for the day’s final check. She sees Gael and Gebre sipping coffee at the kitchen table, splitting their attention between the stack of essays in front of them and the dozen rambunctious kids around them. They look happy. All of them. The boy Nora knew as L is sitting in the corner, but he’s not alone. He’s playing a video game with a girl about his age. He’s laughing.
“Welcome back, Levi,” she whispers. Then she hurries down the stairs.