The Living

WE

“DAD!” Abram screams. “Perry!”

His voice is so hoarse it barely resonates at all, just air rattling through a numb throat. He has been doing this for a long time, and eventually, no matter how much terror remains inside, the screams have to go silent.

He has been running for a long time too, and he is tired. He sags against a fir tree and breathes for a minute, but the breaths tighten into curses. Why wasn’t he fast enough? He runs track at school every day; he should be faster. How did he let a shuffling mob of corpses get between him and his family?

They were eating breakfast. A nostalgic last meal before they left their home forever. Then the windows were breaking and his mother was screaming and something was dragging him outside, and he was surrounded by them, clawing and clutching, and all he could do was run.

But didn’t he do everything right? Didn’t he follow the plan?

Run around the block until you’ve got some distance on them, then circle back to the truck. The truck is always the meeting point.

But his family wasn’t at the truck, and the house and the yard were crowded with the Dead.

If you can’t get to the truck, run to the hills. Stay in an open area with a clear line of sight, and wait for us. We’ll find you.

But they didn’t find him. He paced around the bristly yellow slopes for hours, watching the Dead swarm over the town below. And then the explosions. The gunshots. The hooting raiders charging in on war-painted quads, a pack of hyenas eager to share the kill.

He did everything right. How did this happen?

He feels his breath beginning to hitch and his eyes beginning to burn and he straightens up furiously. No. Absolutely not. He lunges into a fast, stiff march just to rid himself of that quivering softness. The sun falls behind the hills and the valley sinks into shadow, a new darkness on top of the haze of smoke, and a cold whisper of logic hisses in his head. If his family stayed down there, they must be dead. If they escaped, they must think he’s dead. Either way, he’s on a new path now.

They say it’s better on the coast, his father said with a cheery shrug, trying to lighten the weight. I figure we’ll just hit highway 12 and head west until it feels right. Sound good, boys?

Abram descends the hill toward Highway 12. If he walks fast, he’ll reach Elliston by morning. Maybe they’ll still be there. Maybe he’ll burst into their motel room and they’ll wrap their arms around him and he can toss away the grim future he’s now writing in his head. Maybe.

The air is already cooling. Sage scrapes his calves and thistles stick in his socks. But shorts seemed like the right choice when he woke up today. It was a thrill day, an adventure day, and the muggy dawn stillness promised a summer scorcher. Perry was wearing sweatpants and he told him to go change. The kid emerged looking like Abram’s little twin, jean shorts and a white shirt and a big silly grin. Looking good, buddy, Abram said with a wry thumbs-up. He knew it was going to be a hard day, but he felt ready for it. A long drive. A search for a new home. It was the four of them against the world, but as long as they stuck together, they were going to be okay.

Abram is dreaming with his eyes open. It plays out faintly on his face, the fear, the anger, then a bittersweet smile, a glimmer of wetness in his eyes—he blinks and shakes his head and slaps himself so hard his ears ring. Reality roars back in.

Reality is the concrete of Highway 80 blurring beneath his motorcycle. Reality is the sweat running down the back of his gray tank-top. Reality is the snarling in his stomach, the burning in his throat, and the steady sinking of the fuel gauge. Reality is hard.

He has not slept since leaving New York. He has moved beyond fatigue into delirium, and he is distantly aware that this is foolish, that the road is rough and his motorcycle is shaky and a dead father is no use to anyone. But he keeps riding until the sun is a red blaze behind the black treetops, and then he rides in darkness.

“What is your job?” he murmurs to himself.

“To protect my daughter,” he replies.

“What are you doing right now to move toward success?”

“I’m going to Post to find her.”

He repeats this drill every sixty seconds, the way they made him do it in his early days in Pittsburgh. Path Narrowing, his father-bosses called it. When he was an angry, grief-stricken teenager struggling to accept his new life in Axiom’s workforce, this was an effective focusing exercise, especially when combined with Physical Disincentive. Every night he fell onto his cot, bruised and numb, the questions still shouting in his head, following him into his dreams. He never imagined he’d use the drill voluntarily.

He starts again:

“What is your job?”

“To protect my daughter.”

“What are you doing right now to—”

He kills the engine and lets the bike coast to a stop. A dark shape ahead. A little round mini-van parked in the grass to the side of the road. And in the trees nearby: firelight. A camp. His eyes go round—

The mountain passes of Montana, then Idaho, searching for his family but afraid to call out for them, because what monsters might hear him instead? Every camp, every car, every human encounter a deadly flip of the coin…

He brushes off these old fears. He has his own coin now, and he knows how to flip it his way.

He stashes the motorcycle in the bushes and approaches the camp on foot, whistling loudly. By the time he’s close enough to see the campers, they’re standing at the ready, watching and waiting. A man and woman in their late forties. Thin. Pale. Soft clothes unsuited to life on the road, already worn and torn. Their hands are tensed but empty.

“Hi there!” Abram calls from a safe distance at the edge of the little clearing, raising his pitch and softening his timbre. “Hope I didn’t startle anybody. Been walking all night and was just hoping you might let a stranger share your fire for a minute.”

They relax slightly, and he knows it’s the voice as much as the words. His real voice crouches low inside him like a soldier in a trench, gritty and hard, but this one perches high in his sinuses, quavery, prepubescent, unthreatening. Vocal Placation, they called it in training, just one element of the broader skillset called Adaptive Inducement. At first he had scoffed at how many acting techniques Axiom employed—was he in a troop or a troupe?—but soon enough he understood the motivational poster above his father-boss’s desk:

Use YOUR Head To Get Into THEIRS!

Force Is The Least Efficient Means of Control!

“Well…” the man says, “I don’t see why not.” His face is thickly stubbled but his graying hair is trim, suggesting a fairly recent exile from more civilized realms. “It’s a hard road for all of us. Come on in.” He steps aside and gestures toward the fire. His other hand hovers instinctively above a holster that isn’t there. No hidden weapons, then.

“I sure appreciate it,” Abram says, forcing a grin onto his face and playing up his Montanan drawl. A counterintuitive choice—most of his classmates used drawls for the opposite effect, to boost their masculine swagger—but Abram thinks it pairs well with the boyishness, a wholesome rural charm. “Plenty warm tonight but it’s the loneliness that’ll get you, right? Real good to see some friendly faces.” He reaches out a hand. “Name’s Denny.”

The man looks at it for a moment, then shakes it, and the woman does the same. Their grips are weak. Palms silky. They give him their names but he redacts them immediately.

“You folks coming from Manhattan?” he asks as they take seats around the fire, a shared log for them, a boulder for him.

“That’s right,” the man says, growing more cautious as he recognizes Abram’s khakis and tank-top. “They downsizing soldiers now too? I figured anyone with combat training had a job for life.”

Abram notes the bitterness. Edits his backstory. “Believe it or not, I quit. Ethical differences.”

They both raise their brows.

“I didn’t know you could quit Axiom,” the woman says.

“Things got a little loose in the evacuation. I took my chance.” He looks ruefully at the ground. “They were splitting up families. Taking the high value folks, leaving the rest to die. Sending kids off in buses to God knows where…I said heck with this. Saw my window and jumped out.”

The man nods. “Is it true the whole city went under?”

Abram sighs. “We all knew it was gonna happen but nobody wanted to think about it. Just kept plugging our ears and raising the walls and hoping we’d be gone before it got bad.” He gazes into the fire, sinking deeper into his character, but he keeps the man and woman in his periphery. Poisoner, Electrocutioner…there are plenty of Aggression Skillsets that don’t harden the hands.

“I guess that plan worked out for us,” the woman says dryly. “We missed all the fun.”

“You quit before the storm? How’d you manage that?”

“We didn’t quit exactly.” Her bob of gray-brown hair ends in a choppy line, suggesting a hurried snip while on the move. “The new Management’s been making big cuts to the soft departments. Science, education…if they can’t fit your job into Orientation—”

“Or if you won’t let them fit it,” the man adds bitterly.

“If you can’t or won’t be a part of that horror show…you’re out on the street.”

“So you were scientists?” Abram asks.

“Anthropologists,” the man says. “Some of the last in America, I’d guess.”

Abram nods to himself. “Anthropologists. Okay.” He takes a deep breath and straightens up on his boulder. “Hey listen, I hate to be any trouble, but my canteen ran dry two days ago and to be honest, I’m in a bad way. You folks happen to have any water?”

They don’t even hesitate. The woman gets up, lifts a blanket off a big plastic jug, and fills a paper cup. She hands it to him without a word and he downs it like a shot. “Thanks a million,” he gasps. “And now I’m really gonna feel like a jerk, but any chance you’ve got a spare bite to eat? Food ran out way before the water.”

A brief hesitation at this, then the man digs into a duffel bag and pulls out a Carbtein kit still sealed in its original box, the US Army markings faded but still legible.

“Oh wow, y’all are saints.” Abram gets up and moves toward the man. The man reaches into the bag again and pulls out a pocket knife. Abram pauses. The man runs the knife along the box’s seal and pops the lid. Abram moves closer, watching over the man’s shoulder like a hungry child waiting for dinner. The man lifts a cube from the box, still wrapped in its translucent foil, and hands it to Abram, who takes it with a grateful duck of the head. “Really can’t thank you enough,” he says. “Can I ask for just one more favor, though?”

He’s standing awkwardly close now. The man takes a half step back, looking up at him as if just now noticing how much taller Abram is.

“Can I borrow some gas for my motorcycle?”

The man shoots an uneasy glance at the woman. “Uh…”

“Seems a little much all at once, doesn’t it?” the woman says, frowning uncomfortably.

Abram throws up his hands and shakes his head, chastised. “You’re right. I’m sorry. It’s just that…truth is…they took my daughter.” Tears would be good right now, but he’s unwilling to go that far for these people. “They’re taking her to Post to do something horrible to her, and I’m out of food and water and almost out of gas, and I just don’t know how to do this without being a little rude.”

The man and woman exchange another glance. This time, to Abram’s amazement, it’s full of sympathy.

“I’m so sorry about your daughter,” the woman says. “And I’m sorry, we really can’t spare much of our supplies, but listen, Denny…we’re going to Portland. That’s pretty close to Post. Why don’t you just come with us?”

Abram stares at her in disbelief. “Are you serious?” The Denny voice slips a little, but they don’t seem to notice.

“Safety in numbers,” the man says with a shrug. “We help you, maybe you help us.”

“Or at least you live to help someone else,” the woman adds. “That’s what it’s all about, right? This ‘society’ thing?”

Abram squints. “But you don’t even know me.”

The woman smiles with a tilt of her head. “Well, how do we change that?”

Her smile is half sympathy, half motherly warmth. No part of it is malice or fear. He looks from the woman to the man as if he’s considering their offer, and for a moment he’s not sure why he isn’t. For a moment he loses himself in the character, forgets where the border lies and why he has to stay behind it. But only for a moment.

“No, no,” he says, shaking his head, “this isn’t going to work.”

And the man is pulling back in alarm because the boyish rube has just become a different person, his voice suddenly deeper and rougher, but Abram is already in motion, snatching the knife and darting around behind him and wrapping an arm around his throat.

The woman screams, of course, but that’s all. No gun hidden under the log. Nothing. It’ll be clean, a simple transfer of goods from two people who need them to one person who needs them more.

“Food and water in the bag,” he tells the woman.

Cringing and quaking, the woman obeys.

“Please don’t do this,” the man gasps.

“I have to.”

“We’ll die out here.”

“You’ll figure something out, just like I did.”

“Please—”

Abram tightens his hold, choking off the man’s whimpering. “You.” He jerks his chin at the woman. “Where’s the gas?”

“We don’t have any,” she whimpers. “Just what’s in the van.”

“You’re driving to Portland. You have at least one extra tank. Get it.”

The woman rubs her face in her hands like she’s trying to wake from a nightmare. Very slowly, she digs a big red gas can out from the back of the van. Very, very slowly, she carries it toward him. Abram feels each pulse of blood pounding against his forehead.

“Hurry up!” he barks. “Next to the bag.”

She starts crying again as she sets the can down. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. We’ll be stranded.”

Abram squeezes his eyes shut. The world is spinning around him. There are voices humming in the fire, a funeral dirge. “Shut up,” he whispers.

“Why won’t you just come with us? We’ll share everything, just—”

“Shut up!” His eyes snap wide. “Say one more word and I’ll cut his throat.”

“Please—”

He cuts the man’s throat. A short, shallow incision, just enough to get the blood flowing, but it has the desired effect; the woman shuts up, frozen in horror as a little puddle of blood gathers in Abram’s elbow and trickles over the edge.

“Dad?”

Abram whirls around, clutching the knife so tight it trembles. On the other side of the fire, two boys are staring at him with round eyes. One is fourteen or fifteen, the other is five or six. One has an armload of branches, the other has handfuls of twigs. All of it clatters to the ground when they see their father’s blood.

Abram lowers his head. He screws his eyes shut and grits his teeth. He lets out a long, shuddering breath, and he releases his grip.

The boys’ father stumbles to the ground, clutching his throat as his family rushes to his side.

“Keep pressure on that,” Abram mumbles as he turns away, head down and shoulders slumped. Limply, he drops the cube of Carbtein back into its box. Then he leaves his new friends and slips back into the dark trees, empty-handed except for the man’s knife.

He starts his motorcycle. His stomach still snarls and his throat still burns, begging him to go back and finish what he started, but he ignores their commands. The fuel gauge sinks deeper into red as he roars back onto the highway.

“What is your job?”

“To protect my daughter.”

“What are you doing…to…”

The force in R’s voice as he reached out to the Dead in Detroit, as he tried to remind them they were people…why was he so sure?

“I’m going to Post to…”

The passion in Julie’s eyes as she begged him not to leave, as she told him what her mother told her, that humanity’s a family you can never lose…why did she care so much?

He blinks dust out of his eyes and squints against the wind. Why the hell is he thinking about them? Those fools are long gone, couldn’t possibly matter less to the task at hand. His thoughts feel fuzzy, tangental, nonlinear. He starts over.

“What is your job?”

“To protect my daughter.”

“What are you doing right now to move toward success?”

“I’m going to—”

You’re going to lose her.

A chill freezes the sweat on his back. That voice again. His own, but not quite, like a skilled impersonation. A stranger muttering beneath a mask of his own face.

He repeats the drill, shouting it now.

“What is your job!”

“To protect my—”

You’re going to lose yourself looking for her, and that’s when she’s gone forever.

He skids to a stop. His eyes dart through the trees and his ears strain. But this is absurd. No one is whispering to him while he rockets down the highway at sixty miles per hour. He is exhausted. His mind is a murky stew. The stars are strange, the constellations too clear, like actual bulls and scorpions cavorting in the blackness.

He rolls the bike onto an overgrown forest road, leans it against a tree, and collapses onto the cushion of wild grass. The grass is alive and curious; it reaches out to touch his skin. The stars drift in lazy circles—a hard blink stops them, but not for long.

Let yourself rest, the voice says from behind the mask. Whatever they taught you, you are not a machine.

His face flushes with embarrassment as he finds himself answering the voice in his head. Who are you?

The only reply is the rustle of leaves and the distant roar of water. He sinks into the ground while reality churns around him.

I

THE WORLD feels bigger than it is. In this imploded era, when stepping outside an enclave is a suicide attempt and “long range” communications barely make it out of town, distance has been exaggerated to terrifying proportions. America is now a world unto itself, bordered by mysterious realms with unknown inhabitants, and other continents are just legends whispered by mad sailors, fantastic landscapes and exotic kingdoms out beyond the sea serpents.

My brain tells me none of this is true. It insists that the world is small, that I have flown around it many times, and that it takes only fifty hours to drive across America. But I find this easy to doubt as we plunge into the Martian deserts of this vast and unfathomable continent.

A bullet-pocked road sign flashes by in the headlights:

We’re a quarter of the way there, my brain tells me. Thirty-seven hours to go.

As the sunset darkens like a rotting orange, Tomsen breaks the long silence. “It’s different with people,” she says, as if un-muting her internal dialogue in the middle of a thought. She has said very little since we left the last town, focusing on the road as she pushes the RV to sports car speeds.

“What’s different?” Julie says.

Tomsen waves her hand over the highway, the sky, the interior of the RV. “I’ve driven…thousands of miles through this country. Thousands of thousands. Back and forth, up and down. Always alone, except that first year with Dad. Very different, alone. Talk to myself, to Barbara, to the road. Sing songs, go into trances, see things. Wake up two states away.”

“What’s it like now?”

Tomsen thinks for a moment. “I feel you sitting there. I feel those two behind me. The kids in the back. And I’m not floating anymore. You’re all ropes holding me down.”

Julie winces, looks back at the road. “Sorry.”

Tomsen shakes her head. “No. After ten years alone you can float too far. Out of the atmosphere and into space and on and on until you see that giant mouth that’s waiting behind the stars…” She drops her eyes and looks intently at the steering wheel. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Julie smiles. “Can’t say I’m glad to be here…but since I have to be? I’m glad you’re with us.”

Tomsen is quiet for a moment. “My name is Huntress.”

Julie blinks, then her smile widens. “Cool name.”

“It’s stupid. My dad was hoping I’d be gonzo fearless, sex and drugs and danger, seize the world by the throat and squeeze till it tells the truth.” She shrugs. “I tried. Kind of. Went a different direction with it.” She rubs her scalp. “But it’s stupid. You can still call me Tomsen. I just wanted to tell you.”

Julie’s smile turns tender. “Thanks, Huntress. It means a lot.”

Huntress Tomsen keeps accelerating. Dishes rattle in the cabinets.

I glance at M, expecting to find him smirking at the girls’ little friendship chat, but he’s staring at the back of Julie’s head with a strange intensity. He hasn’t spoken in hours.

“M,” I say. “You okay?”

He blinks like I just woke him up and turns to the window. He watches the landscape flickering past in varying shades of black. “I don’t belong here,” he says.

I frown. “Where?”

“Here. With people like that.” He jerks an elbow toward the cockpit, where Tomsen is laughing at Julie’s attempts to sing along with the BABL squeal on the radio.

“People like what?” I press. “Happy people?”

“Kind people.” He watches the dark plains outside flicker into trees, then hills, then plains again. “Good people.”

I watch him in silence for a moment. “What kind of person are you?”

He shakes his head. “I get it now. Why you fought your memories. Thought I was wide open, but…I was hiding the worst.”

I keep quiet, letting him unpack.

“Did bad shit with the Marines. Worse with Gray River. Even worse with…her.” He looks up at me with an unsettling smile. “Remember my girl, R? Big smile, fashion model body?”

Faded memories fill with nauseous color. A withered, eyeless face. Leathery lips peeled to a grin as she watched my first feeding. A charismatic force who made obedience feel inevitable, until her skin finally sloughed off and she disappeared into the airport swarm, indistinguishable from all the other skeletal despots ruling empires in their minds.

“You remember,” M says with a grim nod. “So imagine her alive. Tough…mean…hot as hell.” He shakes his head. “Did war crimes for her. Killed and stole. Had to prove myself. Couldn’t be…lover boy. Piano boy. Had to be the big man. And then…Nora…”

He keeps his face turned away from me, but I can see his reflection in the glass. A glint of water in his bruised eye.

“I’ve been thinking,” I tell him. “About our new lives. How we got here from there. And I think…dying isn’t so bad.”

He turns his head just enough to look at me sideways.

“Dying…halts your momentum. All those wheels set spinning in childhood…determining what you do…who you are…they stop. You stop. You see where you’re standing. And then you can turn around.”

He’s facing me now, and there’s fascination in his damp eyes. I feel winded, like I’ve just delivered a two-hour speech. But I don’t feel self-conscious until I notice that the radio is off. Julie is looking at me. Then at M. Then back at me.

I shrug.

Night creeps toward morning. Conversation dwindles to idle comments that receive no replies. Eyelids droop, heads sag, and I wonder how long we can maintain this pace. When Tomsen drifts onto the highway’s rumble strip for the third time, Julie finally calls it.

“We should stop. This isn’t smart.”

“The train won’t stop,” Tomsen objects, but weakly. “If they reach their destination while we’re asleep, might never find them.”

M taps her shoulder. “I’ll drive.”

She sizes him up. “Don’t you need to sleep?”

“I slept when I was dead.”

Tomsen pulls over. With great reluctance, she surrenders the driver’s seat. “Keep her below sixty, and don’t brake too hard. Don’t jerk the wheel to avoid potholes; her joints are sensitive. But do avoid potholes.”

“I’ll be gentle,” M says, giving the wheel a caress.

Tomsen hovers over him, scrutinizing his every move until we’re safely cruising again, then she sighs and collapses onto the couch. Julie staggers back to the bedroom, fighting a huge yawn, and I realize I’m feeling it too.

“You’ll be okay alone?” I ask M.

He nods. “I’ll listen to some tunes.” He turns on the radio and rich, multi-timbral static fills the speakers. “Maybe do some thinking.”

I stare at him for a moment. Not even half a year ago, he and I were two dusty corpses grunting at each other in the ruins. Hungry, I said. Eat, he said. And that was our friendship. That was our existence. How astonishing that we’re here now, real people with real thoughts, stumbling through the choreography of living.

I leave my friend to his thinking and join Julie in the bedroom. We roll the sleeping kids against the wall and squeeze into the space beside them, lying on our sides with our faces close. I feel her studying me, and I try not to flinch.

“R,” she says, barely a whisper. “You’re different.”

I watch her eyes glint in the dark as they explore my features.

“When your heart started beating, I thought that was it. I thought you were ‘cured’ and whoever you were then was the real you. But you’re still changing, aren’t you? You’re still… forming.” A fragile smile touches her face. “Who are you going to be when you’re done?”

Our foreheads are an inch apart, and I wonder why words are necessary. Why do we need those humid blasts of air to reach each other’s minds? Can’t the electricity of our thoughts arc this narrow gap?

“Julie.” My larynx is a crude noisemaker, my mouth a primitive tool. “I need…to tell you.”

She squeezes her eyes shut and presses her forehead against mine. “I know. But just…not yet.”

I can feel the pulse of the veins that feed her brain, but its secrets remain just out of reach, sealed behind that quarter inch of bone.

“Why?” I ask her.

She is silent for a while, her eyes still closed, and when she answers, it’s barely a whisper. “Perry. Dad. Rosy. All in two months. And any day now…if we can find her…I’ll be saying goodbye to Mom.” Her voice is so faint it seems to sneak past her lips without permission. “I’m losing too many people. I’m not ready to lose you.”

My eyes slide open. Her words spread through me like icy water.

She kisses me, hard but brief, then rolls over. I lie awake all night, staring at the back of her head.

WE

IT’S 5:32 IN THE MORNING and the sun is a faint glow behind the distant hills of Pittsburgh, shining through the tiny window of the doctor’s office where Abram Kelvin—twenty-five, smooth-cheeked, skinny—has just become a father.

The doctor lifts the baby from the bloody mess on the sheets and frowns. He turns her over and gives her a quick swat. She wriggles silently. Without a word of assurance he hurries her out of the room, and Abram starts to panic. His wife’s eyes are swimming, dilated; she seems unaware of what’s happening. But before Abram’s terror can take hold, the doctor returns, shaking his head at the newborn in his hands.

“Strange,” he says. “She’s breathing fine. I don’t know why she doesn’t cry.”

Kenrei reaches out for her baby but her hands shake and sag. She is a frail woman and the labor was hard and Abram sprung for the full drug package to make sure she wouldn’t feel pain.

“Take her,” she whispers to Abram as her eyes close and her arms fall.

Abram braces himself as if to catch a falling bomb, and his hands bob up under the the baby’s unexpected lightness. Is she made of air? Some otherworldly ether? Is she really there at all?

“Murasaki?” he murmurs.

The name doesn’t roll easily off his thick American tongue, but he doesn’t argue with his wife’s choice. It’s rare that Kenrei expresses any desires of her own. A traditional woman from a traditional culture, it’s rare that she speaks at all. So when she insisted this name was important to her, he didn’t argue. He didn’t even ask why. Names will be the least of his concerns for the children he brings into this world.

“Just a reminder,” the doctor says, wriggling out of his blood-soaked scrubs, “the delivery ran over schedule, so that’s coming out of your paternity break. You’re due back on the airstrip in…eighty-four minutes.”

“What about my wife?” Abram mumbles, lost in the contours of his daughter’s tiny face.

“Don’t worry about her.” The doctor stuffs the scrubs in a trash can and slips back into his beige uniform. “Maternity break is a week.”

He opens the door of the tiny white room and Abram glances out into the hall. An endless corridor of blinking, buzzing fluorescents, wires hanging from the ceiling, doors to other offices opening and closing continuously like valves in a monstrous engine.

“Eighty-three minutes,” the doctor says as he shuts the door behind him, and then Abram is alone with his family.

He takes a deep breath, trying to purge everything else from his mind. He looks at his wife, her long black hair slick against her forehead, her skin damp and pallid, drained of its tawny warmth. He looks at his daughter, barely bigger than his hands, her eyes shut tight but roving beneath the lids. She turns her head and stretches her fingers like she’s exploring the room. He can almost feel her eyes on him even though they’re closed, a strange, humming heat pressing against his mind.

“Murasaki,” he says again and the baby goes still, as if listening attentively. He feels a chill run down his spine. Not just from the eerie calm on her wrinkled face, but from the realization of what he’s looking at. A new chapter. A new generation. Before this moment, Abram was the dangling end of an ancient chain. Now he’s a link inside it. He feels an electric connection, a giddy expansion. Finally, after so many years of failure, mistakes, and darkness, he has put something bright into the world.

A lovely, elegant thought. But close behind it comes something louder and hotter, primal and inarticulate:

Anything. Anything.

He will do anything for this child.

Abram’s eyes are burning, but he’s sure it’s from the wind. The road has a hypnotic effect, gliding toward him in its endless sameness, undulating gently from side to side, and he finds his thoughts wandering off task, indulging in nostalgia and sentiment—but it’s the wind that’s blurring his vision. And when the road briefly becomes a vast gray snake writhing underneath him, that’s just the sleep deprivation. And the hunger. And the clawing, unbearable thirst.

The engine sputters again, skipping beats like a bad heart. The fuel gauge screams at him like a hungry baby, but he can’t provide. Very soon he will be on foot, trudging through these woods in dreamy slow motion while his daughter speeds into the distance.

His mind feels soft, his senses slippery. So when he sees a cluster of buses parked in the valley ahead, he’s not quite sure they’re real. He stops the motorcycle and rubs his eyes, but the buses remain, lined up in rows in the parking lot of an ancient truck stop, surrounded by men in beige jackets.

Adrenaline jolts through him, squeezing the last reserves of energy from his cells. His head clears.

“What is your job?”

He creeps through the surrounding woods to the back of the service station and pauses there. He’s close enough to hear chatter from the camp, not the words but the familiar drone of their voices, the low, growling timbre of men hiding weakness behind puffed chests and crossed arms. Even the smell is familiar: Axiom’s signature blend of diesel, sweat, and fear.

He doesn’t see the ad-covered bus that took his daughter, but they could have transferred her. She could be anywhere, loaded from bus to truck to trailer like common freight, a little sack of apples bruising and rotting.

He grits his teeth, takes a deep breath, and plunges into the camp, striding casually as if just returning from the restroom.

No one pays him any attention as he moves from bus to bus, scanning the windows and poking his head through the doorways. No one recognizes him from his brief television appearance an eternity of weeks ago. The Feed has moved on to other targets—a glimpse of one dashboard screen reveals a procession of traitors and insurgents from every major enclave, accompanied by brief statements of condemnation. Abram thinks whoever is running the Feed should be fired. When you’re spending more airtime on your dissenters than you are on your agenda itself, it’s time to stop broadcasting.

Most of the guards are busy securing the perimeter and scouting for salvageable goods, so the buses are empty. Except they’re not empty. They are packed tight with the Dead. Abram will continue to think of them as Dead, even the ones who meet his gaze with quiet contemplation in their gold-flecked eyes. The idea that there are more than two categories—and that there is travel between them—is a knot that sticks in his brain, and behind that knot is a swelling balloon of black blood that he can’t allow to leak through. A truth he can’t allow to be true. A decision he only survived because he thought he had to make it.

Abram scans for Sprout’s face among all these rotting corpses. She is more and more a mirror of her mother, though she didn’t have time to learn Kenrei’s demure grace. She has begun to bristle with will and wildness, like Abram’s own mother. Like all the girls he used to fall for, before his father-bosses set him straight.

Nature made it clear who’s supposed to be in charge, they told him. When you go against nature, people get hurt.

After a few years of mental drills and Physical Disincentive, Abram understood. He found a wife who understood. He raised a daughter who understood. They accepted the work he had to do for them, and he accepted it too, and for a while the machine ran smoothly. Why did it break? What parts were missing?

He climbs into a bus, rank with the smell of the Dead in their varied states of decay. “Murasaki?”

The Dead watch him with an array of emotions that he refuses to see.

Another bus. “Mura?”

Another. “Sprout?”

“Hey!”

A harsh voice behind him. A man squinting up at him from the ground. Abram turns slowly.

“What are you doing?”

The man is young. Barely into his twenties. He carries a clipboard tucked under his arm, and Abram sees a list of names and numbers.

“Checking on the cargo,” Abram says.

“The cargo’s fine,” the young man says. “They’re all locked in and I check them every hour. Who told you to double up on me?”

“Just walking by, thought I heard something.”

“I watched you check four buses in a row.” The man’s expression cools from annoyance to suspicion. “Where’s the rest of your uniform?”

Abram doesn’t answer.

“Which bus are you on? Did you join up in Nashville?”

Abram glances left and right.

The man checks his clipboard. “What’s your SSN? I’m going to need you to—”

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 pick.”

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 excited 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.”

“We believe God’s ready to take us away from this place,” Miriam says, “and the only reason we’re still here is because we refuse to let go.”

“Because we keep trying to repair and rebuild our rotten world when we should be letting it burn.”

Addis watches his sister’s face turn cold. He watches her eyes narrow.

“Stop the train,” she says.

Peter laughs. “What?”

“Please stop the train as soon as possible. I’d like to get off.”

“Nora, why?” Miriam says, sounding genuinely heartbroken.

“Because you’re fucking Burners,” Nora says without raising her voice.

Peter sighs and shakes his head. “I knew I’d mess it up. I’m so bad at explaining it.”

“Nora,” Miriam says, reaching toward but not quite touching her leg, “you’re misunderstanding it. That’s not who we are.”

“You’re not with the Fire Church?”

“We are members of the Church of the Holy Fire, but it’s not what you think it is.”

“You probably think we’re all a bunch of pyromaniac nut-jobs, right?” Peter says. “That we’re just here to blow shit up and kill everyone who disagrees with us?”

“But that’s really not who we are, Nora. We’re just regular folks looking for something to believe in.”

Nora’s face remains stony. “So you don’t burn cities?”

Peter shakes his head. “That’s not what we’re about. We’re about helping people see the truth so they can make the most of the short time God gave them.”

“I’m just gonna ask this again,” Nora says. “Do you burn cities?”

“I’m just trying to explain that that’s not what we’re—”

“Yeah I heard you, it’s not what you’re about. But do you fucking do it?”

Peter and Miriam glance at each other, frustrated.

“Well,” Peter says slowly, “we do have a few liturgies that involve fire. It’s a symbolic thing, like an offering to God. But normally we don’t get into that stuff until later, after you’ve gotten to know us a little.”

“It’s always harder when someone has preconceived ideas about what kind of people we are,” Miriam says with a note of insinuation. “I’m sure you’ve experienced that before, as an African-American.”

Now it’s Nora’s turn to laugh. Hers doesn’t irritate Addis at all, though it’s loud and long. “You people torched DC!” she says with wide-eyed incredulity. “We had to run out in our pajamas while you burned down our fucking neighborhood!”

Peter and Miriam’s faces go very pale. “Oh,” Miriam says, putting a hand to her forehead. “Oh, that’s challenging.”

“Very fucking challenging!”

“Nora,” Peter says, in the most deeply sympathetic tone Addis has ever heard, “whatever happened in DC back then, it must have been so hard. And I’m so sorry your family had to go through it. But you have to understand…that was ten years ago. Me and Miriam were kids. Most of the people involved in that aren’t even alive anymore.”

“They were all just teenagers at the beginning,” Miriam says. “They were trying to do something way beyond them, and they made mistakes.”

Nora snorts. “Mistakes.”

“Big mistakes. Some terrible stuff happened.” Miriam’s face is all desperate remorse. “But we’re not the same church anymore. We’ve grown up.”

Nora cocks her head, her anger curdling into confusion. “What’s that supposed to mean? You don’t burn cities anymore?”

“We burn symbols,” Peter says. “Dead idols that people can’t stop clinging to. But life belongs to God and we do not take it.”

“What the hell does that—”

“Nora,” Miriam cuts her off gently, leaning in close, “can I ask how old you were? When you had to leave DC?”

Nora stares at her for a moment. “I was sixteen.”

“So you must remember what came before the fire, right? The broadcast? The three days of warnings and guidance?”

Nora’s eyes narrow. “I remember some lunatic ranting into a loudspeaker, yeah. What the fuck about him?”

“Do you remember what he said?”

“Some shit about how we’re all doomed and the world is over. Give up a pointless fight, cut yourself loose and fall back into God’s arms…” Her eyes drift to the side for just a moment, then snap back. “You know, ‘let go and let God.’ All that bullshit.”

Miriam looks faintly hurt. “Did it really sound like bullshit to you?”

Nora opens her mouth for an angry retort, but then shuts it. Her scowl flickers with uncertainty as the memories rush back to her. And they come to Addis too.

He remembers following Mom around town as she searched for the man behind the sermon, that supremely assured voice thundering from the loudspeakers. He remembers her shouting “Amen!” at every tagline. He remembers her fighting with Dad as the sermon poured through the apartment’s windows, begging him to leave with her and join this new movement while he shouted that she was crazy and they weren’t going anywhere. And he remembers his sister sitting silently between them, ear cocked to the window, listening to that booming voice.

“Wasn’t there anything in it that rang true?” Miriam pushes.

Nora folds her arms. Her stare is steady and hard, but some heat has gone out of it. “I wasn’t listening. Got a little distracted by the ‘we’re about to destroy your city’ part.”

Peter takes a subtle step toward her. “Did you lose anyone in that fire, Nora? Did you hear of anyone getting hurt?”

Nora hesitates. “No.”

“No one was ever supposed to. And no one has for many years. When we surrender a city, it’s a controlled demolition. We’re just clearing away the debris so God can build something better.”

“DC wasn’t debris. It was our home.” The words are defiant but they come out oddly limp. Unsupported. Her gaze wanders to the window.

“I used to think Reno was my home,” Miriam says with a wistful smile. “I grew up there. Went to school there. Thought I’d raise a family there someday.” She sighs. “And then ‘the Fire Church’ showed up.”

Nora’s eyes dart back to her.

“I was angry too,” Miriam says with a shrug. “It’s only natural to feel that way when someone takes something from you. What gives them the right, I thought. What makes them so sure.” Her eyes drop to the floor and her tone drifts a little. “Why can’t I find my own path to God.”

“But what about drug rehab?” Peter says, shooting a quick glance at Miriam as if partially addressing her. “What about mental hospitals? Sometimes you can’t see your own problems, and you need someone with a clearer vision to pull you out.”

“Right,” Miriam says, snapping back to herself. “And once I was out, I realized that city was never really my home. It was just the box my parents put me in. I’d been pouring my love into it all those years but it had never really loved me back.”

Nora says nothing. She has become a statue, her eyes fixed on Miriam but looking right past her. Addis is surprised by the erosion he sees in her. She seemed so strong, so solid, but perhaps her walls have hollow spots.

“Nora…” Miriam takes a gamble and touches her knee. Nora looks sharply at the girl’s fingers but doesn’t recoil. “I know all this is tough to swallow. And I’m sorry if it’s bringing up painful memories. Some of our doctrines are really challenging, even to us, and we wouldn’t normally get into this stuff so early. It all makes so much more sense when Pastor Bark explains it.”

“Pastor Bark, Pastor Bark,” Nora mutters darkly, her voice a low croak. “This guy’s so smooth he’s gonna convince me to burn the world?”

The two youths allow faint, wry smiles. “He might,” Peter says. “But no pressure.”

Nora takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. “I need you to leave me alone for a minute.”

Nodding effusively, Peter and Miriam get up and flee to the front car.

Nora holds the breath for as long as she can, then slowly releases it, eyes still closed. “Can you believe this shit, Addy? Of all the rescuers in the world, we get them.”

Addis can believe it. He is not surprised at all.

Nora folds her hands in her lap and continues to breathe for a few minutes, each respiration a little slower than the last. She tries to hold the serene expression of a Buddha statue, detached and aloof, but her face crumples under the weight. “What am I doing?” she mumbles. “How did I get here?”

She opens moist eyes and watches the dusty landscape for a while. “Are they as crazy as they sound, Addy? Are they bad people?”

Addis grimaces. This is not the right question. If he nods, it’s a lie, unfair and misleading. If he shakes his head, she will think he trusts them. But the right question is too complex to be answered with oscillations of the skull. He stares at her, trying to remember the words he needs to express himself, but there are too many.

“Nora?” Miriam whispers from the doorway while Peter peeks over her shoulder.

“Yeah,” Nora sighs, waving them in.

They enter with quiet steps like they’re afraid of waking someone.

“Listen, Nora,” Peter says. “If you really want to get off, we’ll stop the train. I don’t know where the next inhabited town is—this is the Midwaste, after all—but we’ll drop you off wherever you want. Okay? Just want to make that clear.”

Nora looks out the window at the endless plains of dust and dead crops.

“But before you decide, I just want to ask you one more time…will you give us a chance?”

“We’re not some crazy militia trying to take over the world,” Miriam says. “We’re not the fucking Axiom Group. We’re just a community of people who share a philosophy.”

“What philosophy is that?” Nora mumbles. “That we should all just kill ourselves?”

“That we should change our priorities. That we should look beyond ourselves and focus on the things that really matter.”

“We’re not a doomsday cult.” Peter’s earnestness warms into another wry smile. “We’re a doomsday family.”

Nora stares down into a dry riverbed as the train rattles over a bridge. Coyote skulls and snake skins. “Yeah, well,” she sighs into the dirty glass, “I’m not trying to walk across the Midwaste. So…I guess we’ll see what’s what when we get to your little compound.”

Peter’s walkie beeps. He glances at it, then back at Nora. “Thank you, Nora. We’ll check back with you later.” He presses his palms together in a little bow and disappears into the front car.

“Thank you, Nora,” Miriam echoes, and tip-toes a retreat to the other end of the car.

Addis doesn’t want to leave his sister alone in her misery, but he feels an instinctive impulse. He gets up and follows Peter to the front. He stands in the jostling junction between cars and he listens.

“How many?” Peter is murmuring into his walkie, watching through the window as the truck and its trailer veer off into the ruins of another small town.

“I’m seeing three so far,” Lindh crackles.

“Condition?”

“Pretty dry. Lots of fractures. Okay, they see me…they’re coming…really slowly. Maybe just starved, but…”

“Leave them,” Peter says. “Not worth it.”

“You sure?”

“God’s Jury isn’t seeker-friendly. I don’t want to scare Nora away just when we’re starting to reach her.”

“But isn’t this why we’re out here?”

“We’ve already got a car-full with us, over a thousand at the community, and plenty more between all the affiliates. It’s enough.”

“But Pastor Bark said ‘anything with teeth.’ He said, ‘until our storehouses overflow.’”

“I know what he said, but…” Peter pauses, grimaces. “Pastor Bark’s a focused man, okay? He finds a purpose and he pursues it, relentlessly. That’s why he’s a great leader, but sometimes it’s up to us to be his periphery vision, you know?”

“Periphery vision?”

“We watch out for the stuff he can’t see while he’s charging into war. And right now I see a scared girl whose soul is on the table, and that’s worth a lot more than what’s out there.”

A long pause. “All right. Guess I’m all done, then.”

“Drive safe. See you at the station.”

Peter pockets his walkie and turns around.

“Oh—hey, Addis!” He erases his surprise with a big grin. “Do you, um…do you like trains? I loved trains when I was your age. Want to see the engine room?”

Addis’s stare is unreadable but never quite blank. He finds that this ambiguity unnerves people, and he lets it do its work for a moment. Then he says, “I want to see the cargo cars.”

Peter’s eyes widen. “Oh wow! I didn’t know you talked.”

“Cargo cars.”

“Well…I’d love to take you back there, buddy, but I don’t think your sister wants that.”

Addis turns and starts back.

“When we get to our community,” Peter calls after him, “we’ll set you up with a nice spot in the Redemption Hall and you’ll get to meet all the other people like you. Okay?”

The door squeals shut behind Addis. He walks past the rows of backward-facing chairs, struggling to stay upright as the floor sways beneath him. He walks past his sister, who is staring out the window at the endless miles of desert. He comes to the end of the car and pushes the door latch, but this one is locked. He stares through the door’s tiny window at the faded red freight car behind it, trying to penetrate its walls, but all he gets is fine detail on a patch of rust. So he listens instead. He hears the wheezing and groaning and squishy movements of a car full of rotten corpses. And behind that, more of the same.

But behind that, in the car at the rear: something else. A sound he’s been hearing since the train arrived, what he assumed was just an undertone in the train’s chorus of squeals and roars. But now that he’s listening, it rises out of the noise. It clarifies and introduces itself.

A low, dissonant hum.

I

A STEADY RATTLE fills the RV. It began when I hit the invisible pothole and it’s slowly growing louder. Tomsen didn’t yell at me when it happened, just stared silently until I pulled over and surrendered the driver seat. Now I can’t tell if she’s upset with me. She’s silent, but so are the rest of us, watching the road pass with wide-eyed vigilance. We have more to worry about than auto repairs.

I catch glimpses of skeletons sprawled in the sand or leering through the windows of rusty cars and I tense. But so far, nothing moves. Some of the skulls are shot through—responsibly neutralized by their former occupants. Others lie in pieces, pried open and cast aside like oyster shells. They don’t buzz or roar with rage at our disruption of their desert diorama. They are empty.

“No guns?” M asks, digging through the RV’s cabinets. “Really?”

Tomsen grips the wheel, frowning into the horizon. I can feel the axle’s rattle in my feet.

“You lasted ten years…alone in America…with no guns?”

“You can’t shoot the plague,” Tomsen says. “You only hit its victims.”

“Well, yeah…” He tests the weight of a cast-iron skillet. “But still.”

I agree with Tomsen. But M has a point. And I have a big wrench in my white-knuckled grip. Julie hunches in the passenger seat with a tire iron. All three of us glisten with sweat.

We pass scene after scene of dried-up carnage, constant reminders of the danger with still no sign of its source. As hours pass without incident, the anticipation ferments into an itchy, maddening anxiety. Julie gets up and paces the RV’s short hallway, tapping her tire iron against the walls and countertops. The kids have sequestered themselves in the bedroom. If they were ordinary children, the ambient tension would be overloading their nerves, sparking fights and teary meltdowns. Instead, they have built a fort of cushions and blankets, and they peer through the opening as if awaiting a siege.

Finally, it’s too much. Julie drops the iron on the floor and throws up her hands. “Okay, where are they? Where the hell are they? Were you pranking us, Tomsen? I’m freaking out.”

Tomsen looks her over with an evaluative squint, like a doctor considering a prescription. “Do you want some cannabis? Some people find it relaxing.”

Julie stops pacing and cocks her head. “Seriously?”

“Left of the sink, bottom drawer.”

Julie opens the drawer. Her eyes go wide. “Holy shit, Tomsen! I think you have a problem.”

The drawer is almost completely full of baggies and bales. It’s enough to give Tomsen a strong claim to the title of drug lord.

“I don’t smoke it,” she says. “It’s universal currency. That drawer was going to fund the Almanac for another five years.”

“Um…” Julie pulls out a pack of rolling papers and a lighter. “You don’t smoke it?”

“Sometimes I offer it to Almanac guests. For interviews. Loosens tongues. Especially for the odd topics, the terror tales and sailor stories. But help yourself. I don’t smoke cannabis. Makes me jittery.”

Julie looks at me. I shrug.

“Well,” she says, “we need to stay alert…but a few puffs might steady our nerves.”

She rolls a joint. She takes a drag and offers it to me. I consider it for a moment, then I remember the last time I tested a new drug on my newly Living brain. That first shot of vodka in the Orchard bar, and the stumbling mayhem that followed. I already know I’m a sloppy drunk…this isn’t a good time to find out what I’m like when I’m high.

I smile and shake my head, and M snatches the joint.

“Don’t mind if I do.”

They exchange a few puffs, then Julie stubs it out and returns to the passenger seat. She stares ahead at the passing yellow lines.

“Feel better?” Tomsen asks.

“Maybe.” Her grip on the tire iron relaxes until she sets it in her lap. “A little.” She’s no longer panicking, but her eyes still comb the dusty plains with a nervous intensity. “But I don’t get this. Why would Boneys swarm out in the desert? There’s no one to eat.”

Tomsen nods. “Strange phenomenon. Started about three months ago. Mass migrations. Retreating from the cities, swarming in the empty spaces, like they wanted to get away from the Living instead of into them.”

We enter a nameless little town and come out the other side, still the only moving object for miles around.

“I took this route on my last trip to New York, before I heard about the migrations. Hundreds of Ossies here. Barely made it through.”

“What were they doing?” Julie asks. “Just standing in the street?”

“Seemed confused. Purposeless. I got the feeling they were waiting for something.”

“Like what?”

Tomsen shrugs. “For the field to tip back in their favor? Their next opportunity?”

I remember the last thing I heard from their dusty archive of prerecorded messages, the anonymous voice of some long-dead spokesman buzzing with immutable confidence:

You will become us. We will win. Always have, always will.

The wrench trembles in my hand. Half fear, half rage.

“R,” Julie says as Tomsen guides the RV around a wrecked convertible. Its driver is grinning at us, and Julie holds eye contact with its hollow sockets until we pass. “What are they?”

I watch the skeleton recede behind us, now grinning at nothing.

“They’re not just dried-up zombies,” she says. “They’re different.”

I nod.

“So what happens? How does a shuffling corpse turn into a running, jumping, roaring…” She trails off with a shudder. “What’s the line they cross?”

“There’s no line,” I reply. “It’s gradual.”

“But…what makes them get stronger and smarter when they should be falling apart?”

I shake my head. “Boneys aren’t smart.”

She gives me a skeptical side-eye. “R. They had you guys serving them dinner. They were judge and jury. Everyone knows the Boneys run the hives.”

I consider this for a moment. “They’re not smart, they’re just…unencumbered.”

She raises an eyebrow.

“Self-awareness…empathy…perspective…all heavy weights. Boneys climb to the top…by shedding them.”

Julie nods. “Okay…” We drive past a wrecked RV with all its windows broken, doors torn off, claw marks gouged into its sides, and cracked-open skulls littering the ground around it. “But that doesn’t explain how they can do that.”

She has me there.

“How can something get stronger the more it rots?” She stares into the rippling liquid of the horizon, and I can tell that she’s high but this is no dismissible stoner rambling. Her questions are disturbingly valid. “It’s like…inverted life. Like they’re feeding on the entropy.”

Dark thoughts begin to cascade in my head. Perhaps this is the reality of the undead world: a physics of consciousness, a biology of intent. Perhaps when I consumed the Living, it wasn’t the life itself that fueled my unnatural body, but the very act of taking it.

Where did this come from? In what tarry bog of the universe did such a monster evolve? And how do we send it back?

An hour later, Julie and M are deep in quiet contemplation. Tomsen, meanwhile, scans the horizon with a puzzled squint and increasing agitation, like a lost tourist looking for landmarks. “I don’t understand,” she mutters. “Two months ago, they were everywhere.”

The highway curves away from the train tracks and into another little village. The road is more pothole than pavement here, and Tomsen slows to a cautious creep, babying Barbara’s delicate joints. I see two skeletons in the shadow of a police station and I stare into their grinning faces as we approach. My mind is far away, still exploring Julie’s questions, so the skeletons are already behind us by the time it registers:

They were standing up.

A crack from the rear bedroom. A scream from the cushion fort. I whirl around just as Tomsen hits the gas and the surge sends me stumbling back onto the bed, landing face to face with the nearly toothless skull of a long-dead officer. It has punched a finger through the rear window, but as the coach accelerates it stumbles and falls, leaving its finger quivering in the glass. Sprout pops out from the cushions and pushes it back through the hole, then returns to the safety of the fort.

The spike in my heart rate slows as I watch the Boney cop and its partner scramble after us. This isn’t the threat we’ve been bracing for, the swarm of catlike demons that clawed its way up the stadium walls. They lurch. They totter. They are stripped of tissue, almost ready to become dust. And still they pursue us, as blindly certain as ever that they’ll win.

“Bye,” M says, waving at them through the window.

“Maybe that’s all that’s left,” Julie says. “Maybe the rest all starved.”

Tomsen shakes her head. “The swarm’s always shedding its old and weak. Leaves them behind like dandruff. But there were thousands of thousands, like ants, termites, wasps, locusts, cicadas—they didn’t all die in two months.”

“So you think they…migrated again?”

Tomsen shrugs. “I don’t think anything. No idea. But if they’re not here anymore, they’re somewhere else.”

I spot a few more as the sun dips into the west. Some linger around towns and rest stops, others have wandered into the desert on splintering legs or no legs at all, dragging their torsos through the sand on fingers worn to sharp points. I think of insects crawling across a parking lot. What brings a bug to that endless expanse? What tiny blips of thought inform its decisions? What does it imagine it’ll find at the end of all that effort? Like insects, like animals, like most human beings, the Boneys don’t pause for such questions. Their line of inquiry stops far short of introspection, landing somewhere around how do I get?

It’s a pathetic sight, but every time I feel the urge to empathize, they twist their heads around and snap their teeth and struggle in our direction, revealing the brutal monomania that drives them, and my empathy recoils. These things are not people. They’re not even creatures. They’re the embodied reverberations of a single ancient utterance, and I have heard it too many times.

We pass a sign announcing: Highway 50, Loneliest Road in America. Below it, another one warns: No Services 88 Miles, but the 88 has been sprayed over and amended to 146. No doubt it’s due for another update.

The road is a straight line all the way to its vanishing point. Mountains rise and fall on the horizon like frozen waves. We are approaching the end of the Midwaste, and Tomsen’s swarm is still a no-show. Somehow, this is far from comforting.

A high metallic squeal has joined the rattling in the RV’s front axle. Combined with the whistling from the hole in the rear window, it sounds like an aural expression of a panic attack. Julie and M are mellow now, but I see Tomsen’s eyes twitching in the mirror.

“Sounds bad,” M says. “CV joint?”

“I keep replacing them,” Tomsen says through gritted teeth. “Barbara hates these roads. She’s an old lady. She wants to go home.”

“Should we stop and check it?” Julie asks, grimacing as the noise drills into her high.

Tomsen’s hands twist on the steering wheel like she’s wringing out a rag. “Of course we should stop! That’s the herald horn of a breakdown! But we can’t stop on the Loneliest Road a few hours from the witching hour. Can’t trust reality out here, it’s liquid, it’s slippery! Shows you cracks and holes, ghosts and demons, things you’re not ready to see. Very bad place for a pit stop.”

Julie watches Tomsen’s hands tremble. “Huntress…are you sure you don’t want some weed?”

“No weed. No damn cannabis. I told you it makes me jittery.” She’s shaking her head violently.

“I just thought—”

“Open the glovebox,” Tomsen snaps, sharper than I’ve ever heard her. Julie opens the glovebox. “Hand me that case.” Julie hands her what looks like an antique silver makeup kit. “Hold the wheel.”

While Julie reaches over to comply, Tomsen flips open the case to reveal a mound of white powder. It’s not makeup. She cuts a vague line with her fingernail, pulls a hundred dollar bill out of a jacket pocket, rolls it up with a flick of her fingers, and snorts.

“Jesus, Tomsen,” Julie says with wide eyes. “We were trying to calm our nerves, not fucking party.”

But Tomsen’s nerves suddenly do look calm. She gives the case back to Julie and takes the wheel with steady hands, and then she closes her eyes. The shriek from the axle winds down as the RV decelerates. When we come to a full stop in the middle of the highway, Tomsen’s eyes slide open.

“Okay,” she says with a hazy smile. Her voice sounds lower and softer, like she just woke up from a nap. “Okay.”

She climbs down from the cockpit and moves to the back. She opens a cabinet and pulls out a big, jangling tool bag. “Give me two hours,” she says, casually swiping the tire iron out of Julie’s lap, and saunters out the door.

Julie and I exchange dumbfounded looks. The kids wait in their cushion fort, worried and silent. For a moment, the only sound is the desert wind, then there’s a clanking and a cranking, and the front of the RV rises notch by notch.

“What’s she take when she is trying to party?” M wonders, staring out the open door. “Chamomile tea?”

Julie chuckles. “Tomsen in the club, snorting lines of Ambien.”

A smile creeps onto my face. Their high is infectious. I enjoy it for a few seconds before a voice from the cushion fort punctures the levity.

“What about Nora? Won’t we lose her?”

Our smiles fade. Sprout Kelvin: our six-year-old voice of responsibility.

“Maybe her train will make some stops too,” Julie says. “Suggest that to the universe.”

M steps out the door and stares west. His posture is hunched in odd ways, favoring his many wounds. “What Tomsen said…ghosts and demons…she’s just crazy, right?” He turns slowly, scanning the horizon. “None of that’s real, right?”

The sun is retreating toward the mountains. A bruise-blue shadow spreads in the east. “Zombies weren’t real,” I mumble, imagining things springing to life in that shadow, emerging from lairs of nonbeing as the sun abandons its watch. “Until we decided they were.”

WE

ABRAM SQUIRMS in his seat. His forearms stick to the leather. The interior of the huge SUV is inexplicably cramped, all black, and hot despite its tinted windows. He sweats in the humid darkness. He swears he can hear the heartbeats of the two soldiers squeezed against him, like they’re a set of triplets in some monster’s leathery womb.

He can’t stand it. He has to do something. He wants to kick and thrash but he sublimates his panic, funnels it into yet another cautious probe.

“Hey, uh…” He considers asking the man on his right for his name but quickly scraps the idea. “You guys heard about the new program? Orientation?”

“It went public two weeks ago,” the man says dully, staring straight ahead.

“Pretty crazy, though, right? Zombie employees?”

The man says nothing.

“How many do you think we have working for us by now?”

“Don’t know.”

“In the facilities I’ve seen, there’s more of them than us.”

“And?” The man keeps staring at the seat in front of him.

“Just wondering if we’re putting ourselves out of a job.”

The man looks out the side window and says nothing. Abram turns to the woman on his left. “I mean, they’re using Living subjects now, right? Kids, even?”

The woman shrugs. “Whatever it takes.”

She’s young, possibly a teenager, but she sounds as blank and disinterested as the man staring out the window. Women are rare in Axiom’s field ranks, especially young ones. Abram wonders what degradations she had to crawl through to reach this position. Her black hair is dull, her tawny skin is scarred, her dark eyes look haunted behind their heavy lids.

“Do you…” Abram says, struggling to continue his subterfuge through a sudden wave of emotion. “Do you know what they do with them? The Living subjects?”

The girl squints at him like he’s crossed some line of decorum.

“They don’t tell us much in Nashville,” he adds. “Just wondering if you know what’s—”

“Hey.” A grizzled face leans around the front passenger seat. “That’s enough back there. Orientation’s not our problem.”

The team manager is an older man, past his prime but sturdy, graying everywhere but his thick black eyebrows. Abram is still waiting for someone to say his name.

“Sorry, sir,” Abram says. “Just curious, sir.”

The team manager studies him in the mirror for a moment. “I don’t recognize you.”

“Jim Roberts, sir. I joined up in Nashville.”

The manager nods. “Well, Roberts, ‘curiosity’ isn’t a good fit for this company. If you’re worrying about someone else’s job, you’re not doing yours.”

“Yes sir.”

The manager’s walkie squawks. “Scout Beta to Team Manager Abbot.”

“Go ahead,” Abbot replies.

“Civilians two miles ahead of you. Large RV.”

“Profit-loss?”

“Gas cans, supply crates, no visible weapons. Worth a stop.”

“Do it.”

Abram leans forward. It’s a smaller world than it used to be; there are only three passable highways to choose from when traversing the length of the country, so run-ins with familiar faces are far from impossible. But it can’t be them. It can’t be.

He restrains a sigh of relief when the RV comes into view. It’s a blocky modern coach, adorned with gaudy swooshes in four different shades of beige. The scouts have already lined up the passengers, eight people ranging from elderly to adolescent. A family.

The scouts haven’t drawn any weapons and are no doubt employing Adaptive Inducement to seem less threatening, but the effect only seems to work on the youngest of the children. Everyone else looks terrified.

“PR time,” says Team Manager Abbot as he steps out of the vehicle. No one else moves to follow him. The driver keeps the windows up despite the heat, and Abram watches the proceedings through the tinted glass, a mute procession of gestures and expressions like a grim silent film.

Abbot approaches the family with his hands outstretched, greeting them jovially.

The family listens with increasing unease.

Abbot gestures to their RV, the supplies on its roof, then to the Axiom convoy. His face adopts a soliciting look, like he’s asking for a favor that’s significant but not unreasonable.

One of the younger men takes a step forward, his mouth moving rapidly. He waves his hands at the empty wilderness around them, then to the rest of his group, with an emphasis on the children.

Abbot appears to consider this, then brightens like he’s had an idea. He points to the group, then spreads his hands to indicate the Axiom convoy, then concludes his statement with a proud grin, like a gameshow host announcing a prize.

The young man shakes his head vehemently.

Abbot shrugs. He says something to one of the scouts, who climbs into the RV and slowly drives off, leaving the family in a cloud of dust.

The young man shouts at Abbot’s back as Abbot walks away, and it’s loud enough to be heard inside the Hummer.

“Wait!”

Abbot stops and raises his walkie, waiting.

The young man looks at his family. One of the children is crying. The man nods to Abbot, and Abbot smiles and speaks into his walkie and the RV comes to a halt.

Abbot returns to the Hummer while the remaining soldiers escort the family back into their vehicle. A minute later, the convoy is back on the road, and the RV looks right at home among the small army of buses.

“Eight new hires,” Abbot says, leaning back in his seat with a satisfied groan. “Thought these ones might actually stand on principle but they always come around once reality sets in. No choice, when you’ve got kids.”

Abram notices no one else in the Hummer is sweating. He notices the sun is setting behind the approaching mountains.

“You got kids, Roberts?”

Abram looks up to find Abbot’s eyes watching him in the mirror. They look small beneath his heavy dark brows.

“Yes sir,” Abram says.

“Then you understand why we keep our heads down. Why we focus on the job at hand.”
Abram knows he should say “Yes sir” and do his best to fade from Abbot’s awareness, but he’s distracted by the heat and the sticky seats and he hears himself say, “I’m not sure I do understand.”

Abbot’s eyes flicker with surprise and perhaps renewed interest. The girl on Abram’s left raises her eyebrows at him and even the dead-eyed drone on his right gives him a glance. Abram’s face pales beneath the beads of sweat.

“How long have you been with Axiom?” Abbot asks neutrally.

“Not long, sir. About a year?”

Abbot nods, and his gaze drifts out toward the reddening horizon. “Well let me tell you something. You make a lot of hard choices in this company and you have to make ’em fast.” His voice sounds distant, tired. “They’re coming at you down the assembly line, and if you pause to get philosophical and ask what it is you’re building, they roll right past you, the machines jam, and the factory shuts down. And then you’re unemployed, and your kids are hungry, and you’ve failed as a father and a man.” He straightens in his seat and tightens his voice. “So don’t do that, Roberts. Do your job.”

Abram wonders if he’s coming down with a fever. The heat passes through him in waves, and he sees strange things through the windows, veiled and abstracted by the dark tint—eyes blinking in the desert, bottomless potholes lit by deep fires, the silhouettes of giants ambling behind the mountains. But he blinks hard and manages to say, “Yes sir,” and the air cools a little. The sweat dries on his face.

I

I AM LOOKING at a TV screen, and there’s a man in a suit addressing the viewers, but this is not Axiom’s manic ad campaign. It’s the introduction to tonight’s episode of The Twilight Zone.

The kids found the ancient VHS tape in one of the drawers. They uncovered the little TV when they built their cushion fort. The fort is now a bed again, and Julie and I sit squeezed in with the kids, watching a distant era’s vision of the uncanny while a less sanitary one seethes all around us.

I can feel it in flickers. Subtle instances of object impermanence. The wrinkles in the blanket rearrange themselves when I glance away. The pattern of the ceiling stains is slightly different every time I look up. The hole the Boney stabbed into the rear window widens and contracts, as if forgetting exactly what made it. But this is all in my head, purely subjective, and if I tried to prove it—if I took photos or made sketches to record the current states—I suspect they’d stay as they were. It’s the things no one’s watching that start to drift.

Tonight’s episode is unusually quiet. Almost entirely wordless. I hear the squeak and scrape of Tomsen working on the axle, the occasional grunt from M when she requests his help, the whistling of wind through the window hole. On the TV, a group of Civil War soldiers is preparing to execute a man by hanging. I begin to squirm, wondering if this might be too intense for the kids, but as the condemned man teeters on the edge of the bridge and a noose is tightened around his throat, I feel a tightness in my own throat, and I have an embarrassing realization: my discomfort isn’t for the kids. This hokey bit of 1960s television is too intense for me. It’s been a long time since I’ve experienced fiction of any kind, and maybe the desert’s blurring of boundaries is adding to the sensation, but I am identifying too strongly with the man in the noose.

I glance over at Julie, but her face reveals nothing. She is as grim and silent as the soldiers on the screen.

The condemned man falls. My stomach lurches. But the rope breaks and he sinks into the river. He swims to safety, and as it dawns on him that he’s escaped death, a surreal folk tune mumbles on the soundtrack:

A living man…a living man…I want to be…a living man…

The man laughs and stares rapturously at everything around him, the chirping birds, the sun through tree branches.

I see each tree…I read each vein…I hear each bird…upon each leaf…

He makes his way through the woods to his home. His wife runs out to greet him.

I want to be…a living man…

His wife reaches out to embrace him; it’s perfect; it’s too perfect—there’s a gruesome snap. The scene cuts. The man is dangling from the rope, swinging from the bridge, dead.

“So he didn’t really get away?” Sprout asks Julie. “He just imagined it?”

“I guess so,” Julie says, her eyebrows slightly raised. “That was…a weird episode.”

The wind through the hole in the window sounds weirdly human, like a voice singing off key. It’s right between Joan and Alex’s heads, warbling in their ears, and they both twist around and frown intently as if to shush it.

“What if that happened to us?” Sprout says. “What if we all died a long time ago?”

Julie might still be stoned enough to answer a question like that, but I don’t stick around to listen. My legs are numb and my neck hurts and I’m remembering what Julie said last night.

I’m not ready to lose you.

I climb off the bed and step out into the dry heat of the evening. The fire on the western horizon is spreading. The shadow on the eastern horizon is deepening.

“Need any help?” I ask Tomsen for the third or fourth time. The left wheel is off and Tomsen has her head deep in the wheel well, looking a bit like a lion tamer. By way of reply, she hums a brief melody.

“We’re good,” M says, taking a wrench that Tomsen hands him and replacing it with another from the bag. “She’s uh…in the zone.”

I nod. If they did need my help, I wouldn’t have much to offer anyway. Most boys raised in poverty learn basic repair skills, but when God is coming tomorrow to burn away the world, you don’t think much about making things last. The only talents I learned from my life at the bottom are how to fight, how to kill, and how to convince others to do the same.

I start to wander down the highway, toward the fire in the west, and Tomsen must see my feet because she calls to me from under the RV: “Careful. Eight minds make a small island. Don’t wade out too far.”

I don’t bother to decode her metaphor. I’m thinking about the forced smile on Julie’s face when she asked who I’d be when I finished “forming.” She tried to make it look like anticipation, but she couldn’t hide the fear.

The wind from the west is hot on my face. I walk slowly, each step requiring permission.

“R,” Julie calls to my back and I turn around. She’s hanging out of the RV doorway, one hand on the frame. “Where are you going?”

I shrug.

She hops down and approaches me with a hint of caution. “You okay?”

I consider offering some explanation—just taking a piss—but I shrug and continue walking. She walks with me.

We have a couple hours before nightfall, but the rocks and wiry brush are starting to cast long shadows. I try to imagine being alone out here at night, submerged in that viscous blackness… Would the ground even hold me? Would I fall through into some indeterminate abyss?

“R,” Julie says, “can I talk about Perry for a minute?”

My wandering thoughts screech to a halt. Of all the subjects I thought might come up tonight, that wasn’t one of them.

“Not about…you and him,” she adds quickly. “About me and him.”

I’m confused and more than a little apprehensive, but I shrug. “Okay…”

She watches the cracked pavement scroll past her feet for a moment. “It was hard, dating him. Really hard.” Her hands are stuffed in her pockets and her bare arms are pressed against her sides. She looks cold, and I wonder if the furnace blast from the west is only in my head. “He’d been through a lot and he…had a lot of baggage. No more than me, but two messes don’t cancel each other out, you know? They just make a bigger mess.”

I glance back at the RV. It has shrunk to the size of a van, but I’m not seeing any holes in reality yet. I keep walking.

“Even when it was good, even when we were really in love, we fought all the time. He found so many things to get angry about, so many triggers and insecurities, and he brought mine out, too…” She shakes her head. “It was hell. Like one of those Bosch paintings, just a big, smashed-together mess of demons.” She weaves her fingers into a twisted knot to illustrate this, and the half-healed stump of her ring finger lends authentic horror to the image. She’s giving an accurate summary of what I’ve seen in Perry’s memories…but where could she be going with it?

“So when I met you…” Her face loosens and lightens and she takes in a deep breath. “You were like a wide open field. A Monet. No baggage, no history, no collection of neuroses, you were just this…presence. I could sit and talk to you for hours and unpack everything I’d been holding in, and you were just there, solid and simple. Once I was sure you weren’t going to eat me, anyway.” She tries to crack a smile but it falters into a grimace. “I liked that you were blank. I didn’t have to think about who you were or what you wanted, your ideas or your qualities. All that mattered was how you made me feel, and you made me feel safe. You loved me, you were there for me, and that was it.”

My pace has been slowing as she talks, my brows lowering, and now she stops and grabs my shoulder with one hand, staring me in the eyes. “I’m telling you that as a confession, okay? It was a fucked up way to look at a person—like you weren’t a person. Like you were comfortable furniture. But that’s what I thought I needed then.”

“And now?”

“Now I need a person. And…now that’s what you are.”

I hadn’t realized I was clenching for a blow until I feel myself relaxing.

“I want to meet you,” she says, looking up at me with round eyes that are starting to glisten. “I do. But I’m scared you’ll be a stranger.”

I stand still for a moment. I’m scared too, but the relief of this sudden openness is softening the fear, neutralizing the acid in my stomach like a wash of cold milk. “How can I make it easier? How should I…introduce myself?”

She looks at the ground for a moment, then back up to me. “Slowly.” She takes my hands and holds them in front of her. “Ease me into it.”

She releases my hands and steps off the road. We stroll into the desert, our boots kicking up puffs of dust from the baked earth.

“Ask me something,” I suggest.

She thinks for a few paces. “I want to ask what your name was…”

“Not that.”

“…but I’m not going to,” she continues, “because it’d be weird to just suddenly know that, after all this time. It’d be confusing. And kind of…sad?”

I nod, relieved that she understands. “My name is R.”

“Okay. So…” She eyes me up and down as we walk. “How old are you, R?”

I consider this. Scanning my fragmented past, I’m not even sure I know the answer. And does she mean how long have I existed, or how long have I lived? Do I count the seven or eight years I spent in the coma of the plague? Am I the actual age of my body, or is it my mind that defines me?

I clear my throat. “How about…yes or no questions.”

She laughs. “Okay, sure. Make it fun. Are you…under twenty-five?”

“No.”

“Over thirty-five?”

I pause to do some blurry math. “Probably not.”

“Okay. I can live with that range.” She hesitates. “Married?”

“No.”

She nods. “Girlfriend?”

“You mean…ever?”

“When you died. Did you have someone? Did you leave someone behind?”

I hesitate, then shake my head. “No.”

She releases a breath. “Okay. That would’ve been tough.”

She doesn’t need to hear about Rosa today. She doesn’t need to hear that one of Axiom’s glorified prostitutes was the closest I ever got to “having someone,” or that I watched her die in a forest while she cursed me with her last breath. No, that wouldn’t be “easing her into it.” That wouldn’t be “making it fun.”

Julie punts a dirt clod and it spins off into the desert. “Okay, let’s just get this one out of the way so I don’t have to keep wondering…are you a virg—”

“No.”

She looks at me with raised eyebrows. “Wow. Didn’t have to think about that one. Are you, like…very not a virgin?”

I grit my teeth in a cringing grin. “Yes?”

Her brows rise further. “How many?”

“Yes or no questions.”

“More than fifty?”

“I don’t remember the number.”

“But more than fifty.”

“Well…probably.”

“Wow.” She nods, jutting her lower lip. “You’re full of surprises, Mr. Zombie.”

I wince at this understatement. If something as benign as my sex life shocks her, what will the rest of my history do? Maybe we should stop. Maybe it’s too soon, too fast, she said “slowly” and I sense us gaining speed, maybe we should—

“Did you work for Axiom?”

I have a flash of panic, but there’s a surprising lack of accusation in her tone.

“I mean you obviously did. That’s no secret. So did Abram and Marcus, so did a lot of people. Who cares?” She’s not looking at me as she says all this, but now she glances sideways, grimacing with dread. “But you weren’t…one of those ‘pitchmen’ were you?”

“No.” An easy one. There were no such creatures in my day. Although was the creature I was any less loathsome?

“Okay,” she says, “I’m starting to get a picture here. Hotshot young Axiom employee, living large, fucking all the bitches…but secretly guilty and tormented, right?”

I nod.

“Yeah,” she agrees. “If you weren’t tormented, then you really are a stranger to me.”

“Very tormented.”

I glance behind us. The RV has shrunk to the size of a small car, and the sun is about to slip behind the mountains. Now would be a good time to turn back, before we drift any further into the encroaching shadows. I open my mouth to suggest this, but Julie is still digging.

“You also know how to fight,” she muses, almost to herself. “You’re weirdly lethal for such a skinny dude. You must have been a soldier or something, right?”

I don’t answer.

“Have you killed a lot of people? Is that what you didn’t want to remember?”

I don’t answer. I don’t like this path. I didn’t expect her to get so far so fast.

“It’s okay, R, these days everyone’s killed a few people. I killed three before I turned thirteen. How many was it? More than ten?”

“Yes.”

“More than twenty?”

“Yes.”

She pauses. Her steps are slowing a little. “We’re talking about your first life, right? Not the people you ate when you were Dead?”

“Yes.”

“More than…a hundred?”

I feel the skeleton of a small mammal crunch beneath my boot. I stop walking and look Julie in the eyes. “Directly? With my own hands? One person.”

She seems smaller somehow as she looks up at me. “Just one?”

“Just one. Directly.”

The followup question is obvious, but the dark heat in my eyes steers her away from it. She swallows. She looks queasy. “What about…before Axiom?” Her face brightens as she seizes on this idea. “Yeah, enough about the fucking Axiom Group, what did you do before they got to you?”

A laugh bubbles in my throat like vomit and I swallow it back down. She thinks she’s changing the subject to a lighter one, to simpler times and better days, but she has no idea where she’s heading. Each nested doll is uglier than the last.

“Did you have a job?” she asks. “Like…farming or something?”

“No.”

“Were you an artist?”

The question dislodges a few memories of me toying with a camera, snapping shots of mundane objects, macro lens closeups of dirt and skin, but this was during the leisure hours of my Axiom princehood, to distract myself from the horrors of my workday. It had nothing to do with these innocent early years that Julie is hoping to hear that I had.

“No.” My voice is gravelly and hard. It sounds like a verdict. “Not an artist.”

She’s looking queasy again. Her voice is faint. “Well what did you do, R? How’d you spend your days?”

I feel the bitter laugh rising in me again. Julie is remarkably flexible; her heart can stretch to accommodate many jagged shapes, but how much can it fit? What would it take to exceed her capacity? To break her fierce grip on compassion?

She reads my eyes and seems to wilt a little. “Maybe that’s enough for now,” she mumbles.

I nod.

“We should get back. They’re probably almost ready.”

She turns and starts walking. The wind sounds like a voice again. Not singing but whispering. I notice that I’m not following her.

“Are you coming?” she says over her shoulder, but she doesn’t stop to wait for me.

“In a minute.”

She doesn’t argue. I watch her dwindle. Then I turn and walk further out.

I hear the rhythms of syllables in the wind, the contours of phonemes, but it’s like a voice on a radio buried in static, just audible enough to make me wonder. I cock my ear, straining to make it out. Does the wind always speak? Is it always out here whispering to itself and whoever might happen to hear? What secrets would I learn if I could decipher it?

It’s blowing from the east now. A cold wind, and strangely stale, like a draft from some deep cellar. But it’s still speaking, and I’m starting to pick out words.

I tried to get away. I tried to hide you from the corruption.

It sounds like my father in his later years, his voice raw and wheezing through the tumors.

But you let the world seduce you. You gave in to your wicked heart, and now you’re going to burn. I’m sorry I failed you.

Why does the wind have my father’s voice? And what are these sharp bits of debris it’s blowing around me like tiny teeth?

Are you coming for me, kid? Are you coming to see what we built together?

The timbre has shifted. It’s raspy now instead of wheezy, older and more brittle.

You can’t sell your stock in this company. It’s locked in your blood, in your past, in a lifetime of choices.

I catch some of the debris in my hand. It’s not sand or bits of brush. It’s bone. Splintered fragments bouncing off my clothes and scratching my cheeks.

It’s inside you. It’s you.

A whirlwind is forming in front of me. It writhes and shimmies on the dry earth, filling with dust and leaves and ancient remains. It’s drifting northeast, away from the road, and it undulates like a beckoning finger, not seductive but commanding. A master to a slave.

Come, it says, and I obey.

Behind me, I hear a horn. It blasts insistently like a call to battle, but it’s miles away, someone else’s concern. I follow the whirlwind out into the night.

The underbrush grows thicker with each step. Gnarled roots tangle around my ankles and I trip into the sage and fireweed. Sharp leaves scrape my lips; I taste their bitter spice. I get up and keep walking.

Come get what you’ve earned. Come collect your inheritance.

The voices are in the whirlwind. There are many of them. They talk over each other, every statement an interruption, one trailing into the next. My father, then my grandfather, then a voice in a strange accent, then one I can’t understand at all. And then grunting. Growling. Hissing. Buzzing.

I look past the whirlwind at the dark skies to the east, and I glimpse the outline of something behind the stars. The curving edge of a maw too vast to comprehend, approaching slowly, inexorably, yawning around the universe to swallow every hope and struggle.

I move toward it.

And then someone tackles me. I topple onto my back and before I can right myself, a small but steely fist hammers into my jaw. My thoughts burst in flashes like a fireworks finale—and then it’s over. My mind is an empty night sky.

“Are you back?” Julie says between hard breaths, crouching over me with her fist cocked. “Or do I get to hit you again?”

I rise shakily to my feet. “What was I…?”

My question dies on my lips as I take in my surroundings. The RV is flashing its headlights and honking its horn, but it’s so far away it looks like a toy. And in the other direction, just a few steps from where Julie stopped me…

A cliff. A ravine of jagged rocks, like shadowy teeth in the darkness.

“We have to hold on, R,” she says, half accusing, half pleading. “Tomsen warned us. Our thoughts can change things. We have to hold on or we’ll fall apart.”

Her face is twisted with distress, but she doesn’t stay to hold me together. She heads toward the road with stiff strides, like she’s done all she can for me and can’t bring herself to look back.

I follow a few paces behind her, but I look back constantly. And I see nothing. The sky is empty. The wind is warm and silent. But my cheeks still sting from a dozen tiny scratches, and when I brush a hand through my hair, a few white fragments shake loose.

No one says anything as I step into the RV. Julie’s back is to me in the passenger seat. Tomsen starts driving without a single I-told-you-so. I retreat to the bedroom before M can break the silence, and I find the kids watching me with secretive smiles. It’s not amusement or mockery. It’s not about me at all. They did something they’re proud of, and they’re waiting for me to notice.

And then I notice. The wind buffets the coach as we hurtle down the highway, but I hear no off-key singing from the hole in the rear window. Because the hole is no longer there.

WE

NORA AND ADDIS are watching the sunset. Their heads are nearly touching, but their thoughts are far apart. Nora is wishing she could reach outside and clean the train’s windows. Addis is wishing he could live inside the sun. Nora wants a clearer view of the scenery so its beauty might reach her brother. Her brother wants to swim through miles of plasma and curl up in the sun’s unfathomable core, to listen to its secret dreams and ask it all his questions. Why do you keep giving? Why do you pour out your light, showering the universe with warmth and receiving no return from the processes you fuel, not least of which is life?

Why do you want life? Why did you spark us and feed us and raise us to these heights? Is there something we can offer that nothing else can, despite our hideous flaws? What are we here to do?

“It’s pretty, right?” Nora says, always underestimating her brother’s remote stare. “Wish the windows were clearer, but still…look at that.”

A deep green valley spreads out below them as they climb into the mountains. There are no stations or service roads along this ancient track, no capillaries to civilization; it was built before civilization was required, cutting through a primal wilderness that has changed little in the centuries since.

“We should be getting close,” Nora says in a tone somewhere between anticipation and dread. “Just over these mountains.”

The forest is thick, and though humans have swarmed over the planet for two hundred thousand years, voraciously mapping and cataloguing, there are places in this valley that have never known their footprints. There are stones no one has seen. Caves no one has entered. Secrets no one has found.

Nora reads this thought in us and takes it for her own as the train rattles on the decaying tracks. Maybe her brother has discovered such a secret. Or maybe he is one. She watches him watching the scenery until a tunnel swallows the train. The lights are all burnt out so the darkness is total, and it goes on and on. The tunnel must be miles long. She leans her head against the glass and the vibrations begin to lull her. The darkness doesn’t change when she closes her eyes.

Her family is celebrating. Something good has happened. Her father has accomplished something important, in spite of the doubt and discouragement from everyone around him—his friends at the grocery, his withered, shrunken father, and the pale, plump woman by his side. Nora sees the anxiety in her mother’s eyes, the fear that she’ll be left behind as her husband climbs the ladder, since she has no intention of following him up. But for the moment, she hides it well. For the moment, they’re all together, happy and even proud, and Nora’s father is doing something he rarely does: talking about where he came from. That dusty little village in that drought-stricken country that he’s always claimed he doesn’t remember.

He says he wants to mark this day with a ceremony his mother used to perform, and he empties out a bag from the habesha grocery. He pours green coffee beans into a skillet and puts it on the stove. He fills a mug with incense and lights it. As the coffee roasts and the incense burns, the apartment’s atmosphere of musty desperation blooms into a rich perfume. He pestles the coffee with the handle of a screwdriver and brews it in a bong. Nora assumes this is not the traditional method, but it feels right enough. The aroma fills her head and seems to lift her off the floor like the hand of a benevolent giant, raising her from the life she thought she had and carrying her up to a better one.

“Nora,” someone whispers in the grating clarity of the present. “Hey.”

Nora has had this dream before, this home movie of memories, and she knows it’s reached its high point. If it continues to its ending, it will shit all over this sweet moment and she will lose every bit of this warmth. So it’s a bittersweet relief that Miriam is waking her up.

“We’re here, Nora,” Miriam says, gently shaking her shoulder. “We’re home.”

Nora hears freight car doors slamming and trucks driving off amidst a low murmur of wheezes and groans, but she can’t find the context for these sounds. Zombies? Ridiculous. No such thing. She opens her eyes but she doesn’t feel awake. Her brother is by her side and that’s all she cares to know. The world is blurry and dark as Peter and Miriam lead them up a steep hill into a quiet town. Peter is saying something about family and community and something called “God’s House,” but Nora isn’t listening. She still smells frankincense. She still tastes coffee, bitter and syrupy sweet. She sees Addis’s eyes widening as the caffeine hits his brain, sees him running and crashing around the apartment, laughing like a demon cherub.

Peter takes them to a building he calls “Redemption Hall” and says something about keeping the Dead safe while they wait to learn God’s plan, and Nora doesn’t ask what that means, doesn’t care. After a decade of carving her own path, she is relishing the sensation of letting others lead her. Releasing her grip. Being cared for. The less she listens to what they say, the longer this can last.

But then they go and ruin it.

“…so as much as I’d love for Addis to hear tonight’s sermon, it’s best if we keep him here at Redemption Hall as long as you’re with us.”

The world comes rushing back in. “Excuse me?” Nora says.

“It’s just community policy,” Peter assures her. “I’m sure you understand we can’t have our Dead friends wandering loose in the—”

“He’s not Dead,” Nora snaps. “He won’t hurt anyone.”

“I believe that,” Peter says, holding his hands out. “But we have children here, and no matter how close to Living he is…it’s just safer if you leave him here. It’s safer for him.”

Nora grabs her brother’s hand and walks out. No one stops her. She walks down unlit streets past the dark lumps of empty buildings, shuttered storefronts. Is she still in the dream? Is this some new ending her brain wrote, and will it be any happier than the old one? She has often wondered if with enough sheer will, she could pull things out of dreams and into the real world. She tried it with Addis many times over the years. But maybe this time…

She grips his hand tight and starts to jog.

And then she hears a bell. Not a real bell but a recording, its sonorous depth rendered shrill by an overdriven loudspeaker. Then a high male voice singing in Latin:

Deus magnus est…Non est deus praeter Deum…

For a moment, Nora is terrified. Is this an alarm? Will these people finally drop their facade, lock her up, burn her at the stake? But as the loudspeaker falls silent, she hears laughter. Bubbling conversation. People begin to appear in the streets, families and groups of friends, all strolling in the direction of the bell. They give her genial nods as they pass.

She feels foolish. She feels lost. She walks a little further to the edge of the hill, and she stops. All down the slope, the windows of houses are glowing warmly. People filter out at a casual pace, merging into the line that’s ascending the hill like a leisurely pilgrimage. And out beyond the town, shining dimly in the waning moon: the highway. It wanders off toward the coast, pale and twisting like an empty snake skin. Nora recalls her years alone on highways like that. The hunger, the cold, the constant fear. She looks down at her brother, who is watching her patiently. She looks at the groups of cheerful townsfolk on their way to church. She sighs and turns around.

“I’ll stay here with him,” she tells Peter and Miriam, who are waiting in Redemption Hall exactly where she left them.

Peter nods. “That’s fine, if that’s what you want to do…but tonight’s service is starting soon. Are you sure you don’t want to attend?”

“I think you’d find it really inspiring,” Miriam says. “And we all get together afterward to hang out and talk about what we’ve learned.” She folds her hands in front of her as if in prayer. “It’s so fun, Nora, please come!”

Nora tightens her grip on Addis’s hand. “I’m not leaving him.”

“Nora,” Peter says, “this is the safest place he can be right now. It was made for him.”

He gestures to their surroundings, and Nora perceives the building’s interior for the first time. It looks like a day care. A day care and a school, with traces of a hospital. She sees Dead children staring at toys. Dead adults staring at TVs. In the kitchen, an elderly woman is making dinner, mixing crushed Carbtein and what can only be human blood into a bowl of pork cutlets. Nora thinks of Auntie Shirley. Corned beef and cabbage…

“God’s House is only four blocks away,” Peter says. “The service is barely an hour. Do you think you can trust us for one hour?”

Nora looks down at her brother’s hand. It’s turning pale in her grip.

“Not everyone is trying to hurt you, Nora,” Miriam says gently. “Maybe out in the world, but not here.”

“Why not?” Nora mumbles. “Why not here?”

“Because God lives here,” Peter says with surging conviction. “And whatever God does, it’s always for our good.”

A large group passes by the open door, and their laughter is infectious; Peter and Miriam smile. Nora hears the pop of tiny knuckles and Addis whimpers, tugging against her vise grip. She hears the bell again, so much like the bell of her mother’s old church despite its electric harshness.

She lets go.

I

NO ONE SPEAKS as we leave the Midwaste and climb into the mountains. The road is absurdly steep and narrow, bounded by rock walls and dizzying drops, and the only sound is Barbara’s engine roaring against gravity. Finally we summit the peak, the trees open up, and I see the sky yawning above us. We have crested the final ridge, and a grassy plain stretches below us. For a moment the RV seems balanced on the apex and I feel a disconcerting tension, like a decision waiting to be made. Then we tip over the edge and plummet toward the coast.

I hear breaths being released throughout the RV. I remember I’m not alone.

The sun still glows faintly below the horizon but the moon is already up. The view is both beautiful and oddly menacing. There’s anger in the reds, fear in the blues, and the crescent moon is a sharp hook. I see the silvery line of the train tracks winding down from the mountains and into the plain, and up ahead: buildings. Houses. A town.

“R,” Julie says. “Put that away.”

I notice I’m clutching a wrench in front of me like we’re charging into battle.

“Whoever these people are, she went with them by choice, remember? No reason to assume they’re hostile.”

This is true, but it doesn’t feel like it. It’s never even occurred to me that the drivers of the train could be allies. Am I letting the new world get to me? Am I buying into its infomercial of paranoia and panic?

Inhaling Julie’s optimism as deeply as I can, I set the wrench down as the town rolls into view. The tracks disappear into a crumbled brick industrial zone at the bottom of a steep hill, atop which is a shocking sight: illuminated windows. I do my best to imagine friendly faces behind them.

We park at the train station and approach the platform cautiously. The freight boxes are all open and empty, but I see a few figures moving in the passenger cars. Julie pokes her head into one of the doorways and knocks on the wall.

“Hello?”

The muffled noise of activity stops. Then a set of footsteps. Julie backs up as a tall young man emerges from the doorway, looking at her blankly through black frame glasses.

“Uh, hi,” Julie says. “We’re looking for a friend of ours. A girl named Nora?”

The man smiles but doesn’t say anything. His eyes glide over each of us, and I feel a distinct sense of being scanned. Apparently not finding whatever he’s looking for, his posture retracts inward.

“We’re pretty sure she got on your train somewhere around Ohio…” Julie continues.

“Brown eyes?” the man says like he’s digging deep in his memory. “Curly hair?”

Julie gives him a flat stare. “She’s black.”

He nods cheerfully. “Yeah, Nora! Nora’s great. She rode with us for a couple days. You’re friends of hers?”

“Yeah. We really need to talk to her.”

“What do you need to talk to her about?”

Julie cocks her head. “Excuse me?”

“I’m just not sure Nora wants to see you right now. She’s had a hard time lately and she came to our community to learn about God’s truth. I’m not sure you’re here to offer encouragement.” He gives Julie an apologetic smile, sorry I can’t be of more help!

Julie glances back at the rest of us in disbelief. I shrug, but I feel my shoulders tightening. Something about the man’s demeanor feels familiar to me. Intense friendliness with an undertone of threat.

“Listen,” Julie says, “we don’t have any problem with God’s truth, we’re not here to break up your club, we just need to talk to our friend. Are you going tell us where she is or not?”

The man hesitates, then smiles. “Of course.” He points up the hill. “Peter and Miriam took her to God’s House for the service. Why don’t you go join them and hear the word God has for us tonight? We welcome seekers from all walks of life.”

“I’m sure you do,” Julie says, turning on her heel. She whispers in my ear as she moves past me: “I might’ve been wrong about that wrench.”

She’s joking. Annoyed, but not truly worried. M looks tense, but he has another, more obvious reason to be. And Tomsen just looks confused. Am I the only one feeling this churning unease? I have plenty of reasons to recoil at the scent of church, a natural aversion to all things corporate. Even in the blankness of my second life, I shrank away from the Boneys’ sermons and schools, their instinctive attempts to reinstate the hive mind. But there are many kinds of communal effort, many ways people come together to build and share and connect with something higher, and they can’t all lead down the dark path I took. If I can’t believe that, then what future am I fighting for? A world of solitary animals feeding and mating and dying alone? A world like Abram’s?

I have to believe there can be more. Despite the faint alarm rising in my head, the sirens of distant fires, I have to believe.

We drive up the hill slowly, hoping to avoid attention, though attention may be unavoidable in our bright yellow moon rover. I watch the windows. I see no one watching us. The lights are on, but I see empty rooms. Very empty—no bookshelves, no televisions, no stereos, no art or decorations of any kind. Only a few chairs and dishes indicate occupancy. The exteriors are on par with most rural ruins: peeling paint, clogged gutters, rotting roofs and wild lawns, a lack of maintenance so extreme it almost seems like a statement.

I see no one in the houses or on the street. The town appears deserted. And yet I hear music.

“Tomsen,” I say.

“Yes?”

We crest the hilltop and roll into the town center. The shopfronts are boarded up. We are the only vehicle on the crumbled road.

“I think we should park here.”

“Why?”

“Don’t want to…get trapped.”

“Trapped?” Julie arches her eyebrows at me. “Do you know something we don’t?”

I shake my head. “Just a feeling.”

Tomsen regards me uneasily for a moment, then parks behind a shuttered bookstore. The moment she cuts the engine, the kids spring out of their fort. They look excited. Even Joan and Alex look excited; their skin shows a faint wash of their natural hues, cool brown and pale pink.

“You have to stay,” I tell them.

“But there’s music!” Sprout says.

“Not safe.”

Julie kneels down to Sprout. “Let us go check it out, okay? If the music’s any good, we’ll come get you.”

“You promise?”

“Promise. We can’t have a kid as cool as you listening to shitty music.”

Sprout smiles.

“Stay with them?” I ask, glancing from Tomsen to M. Tomsen nods, but M stiffens.

“If it’s not safe,” he mumbles, “I should be there.”

“Marcus,” Julie says, shaking her head. “No you shouldn’t.”

“But Nora—”

“Whatever danger she might be in…” She gestures to the bruises on his face and neck. “…you can’t help her right now.”

He lowers his head.

“If she’s there, I’ll talk to her. We’ll figure this out.”

Slowly, M nods. But I’m finding it hard to concentrate on M and Nora’s tension. I feel my own rising up around it, smothering my friends’ plight under my own anxieties. I hear booming voices condemning me for my selfishness. Heat on my face. Smoke in my nose—

“Let’s go, R,” Julie says, stepping out into this nameless town, and after a moment to pry my fingers off the door frame, I follow her.

There’s something medieval about the town that makes me want to call it a village. The leaf-caked streets resemble dirt paths, and some of the rotten rooftops almost look like thatch. The remains of the sunset cast everything in a dull orange glow while the sickle of the moon hangs in the eastern blackness. I think of Bosch. I feel the gloomy skies of his dour moral universe pressing down on me. Every time we round a corner, I expect a mob of surreal grotesques marching forth to illustrate my sins.

The music drifts through the cool air from somewhere just beyond the retail district, too far to make out a melody. It clarifies as we get closer, but it’s still a murky muddle even when the source is in sight: a flat, featureless building the size of a gymnasium, all concrete and sheet metal painted matte blue-gray, its entire perimeter lined with blinding floodlights. The only windows are the glass entry doors, behind which I see dense crowds—perhaps a whole village’s worth of people. The building has no signage, but its clean, monolithic presence stands out so sharply from the decaying homes around it that its identity is obvious.

“R?”

Julie has stopped and is watching me expectantly, because I’ve fallen an awkward distance behind her. My boots drag like they’re filled with stones. I can make out the chords now. Major, major, minor, major, a familiar emotional recipe.

“Julie,” I mumble. “Maybe…we shouldn’t.”

“Shouldn’t what?” She holds out her palms, squinting at me in the dark. “Shouldn’t go in? Nora’s in there, R.”

“Maybe she…wants to be left alone.”

“R,” Julie says, taking a step toward me. “She’s just scared. She lost control of herself and she doesn’t know how to come back.” Another step. “I’ve been there. So have you. We have to show her she’s still loved.”

My dry throat sticks to itself as I swallow. I wish she would smile or touch my arm right now, some gesture to include me in this concept of unconditional acceptance, but she doesn’t. She returns to the task at hand, striding toward the crowds and the lights and the music, and I have no choice. I jog to catch up with her, and we push through the doors into the pandemonium of God’s House.

Pamphlets fly at our faces as we squirm through the gauntlet of eager greeters. They want to know our names, where we’re coming from, is it our first time here; they welcome us over and over without ever specifying what they’re welcoming us to. A church with a tarnished brand, perhaps. A church with a reputation.

We settle into a dark corner at the back of the auditorium and I see Julie’s eyes searching the crowd, but from here in the back there are no faces, just featureless knobs of skin and hair. The ceiling looms over me, tiny fluorescent lights miles away. The building is huge, yet I feel claustrophobic. The lack of windows, the unadorned walls of corrugated steel. I feel like meat in a shipping crate on my way to be rendered. The congregation is packed neatly into rows of purple office chairs, all eyes on the stage at the front, where attractive young musicians blast pop-rock worship songs through an arena-worthy sound system. It’s moist with emotion. Foolproof chord progressions, fervent male vocals meekly supported by female harmonies. It jerks hard on the heartstrings, commanding me to feel uplifted—a sensation that becomes profoundly dissonant once I pick out the lyrics:

Lord take it all, consume my whole life, leave nothing behind, no struggles no strife…

Burn me to ashes, the hour is now, don’t need to know why, don’t need to know how…

I feel the slow creep of nausea. I glance down at the program in my hand. No name or logo, just blocks of small text that I can’t read in the dim lighting. But I hear murmuring from the wretch in my basement, waking from a long nap. At first I can’t understand what he’s saying, and then I realize he’s not speaking—he’s singing. With a bitter edge in his weary voice, he’s singing along to the church’s self-immolating anthems:

Burn down my pride, burn all that I’ve built, passions that die, and flowers that wilt…

Quiet my dreams, Lord silence my voice, I’ve nothing to say that can alter your choice…

Finally it ends, the church erupts with applause, and the band shuffles offstage. My nausea deepens and I feel the dread of certainty: vomit is coming. It will not be deferred.

“R?” Julie whispers, looking at the side of my face. “Are you okay?”

I stare at the stage with bulging eyes, sweating from every pore as the lights come up and the purple curtain parts. Time convulses, the past gives a peristaltic heave, and out comes a man I once knew.

“No.”

I don’t mean it as an answer to Julie, but it will suffice.

Paul Bark is old. His doughy teenage countenance has firmed into rigid angles, crow’s feet and frown lines. His shaved head fails to hide his receding hairline or the scattering of burn scars marring his scalp. He raises his hands to the cheering crowd, either to quiet the applause or accept it. His face is theatrically grim, like he’s here to do battle, a pro wrestler entering the ring.

I sink low in my chair, not so much hiding from Paul as hiding Paul from me. I should not have come here. I should have smelled this hellmouth’s sulfurous breath all the way from Ohio. I was prepared to face Axiom, to brave that dark corner of my past, but I never expected to stumble into this one.

“Hello, Ardents,” Paul says into his headset mic, and a chorus of cheerful hoots rises from the congregation. “Are you feeling strong? Are you ready to sweat?”

More hoots.

“Good. Because God can bench the universe, and he’s not impressed with your girly pushups.”

A murmur of chuckles.

“He’s tired of your excuses. He doesn’t think you’re ‘curvy,’ he thinks you’re a fucking fat-ass, and it’s time to tighten up.”

A wave of delighted laughter.

His clothes are a costume of asceticism: leather sandals, distressed jeans, a V-neck T-shirt that looks woven from horse hair. He wears just enough stubble to evoke casual disregard without softening his firm jaw, his permanently jutted chin. More burns on his hands and forearms, too symmetrical to be accidents.

“So my question for you tonight is this.” His tone is abruptly serious. “What do you see when you look in the mirror?” He paces the stage, giving the audience a moment to sober up. “Do you see what you want to see? Or do you see what is?”

Silence.

“Do you see a ‘good person’ who’s ‘beautiful on the inside’? Or do you see an apathetic slug sinking into the couch while the war rages outside your window? Because I’m sorry to tell you, but that’s what God sees when he looks at you.”

Somber nods.

“He sees a broken, hopeless fuck-up who’s inherently incapable of doing anything right. But for reasons we’ll never understand in this life…he loves that broken fuck-up.”

Paul smiles wryly and the audience mirrors him.

“Or at least he wants to. But we make it hard, don’t we?” He nods to himself, strolling back and forth across the stage. “We resist his love. We reject it. He offers us a position in his kingdom and we whine about the long hours. We sleep through our shifts and fail all our assignments and then act surprised when God fires us.”

He stops in the center of the stage and pivots to face the crowd, straightening his shoulders. “My friends, there is nothing we can do to earn God’s love, but there is plenty we can do to lose it. Anyone who says God’s love is unconditional hasn’t heard of a place called Hell. Because he sure as Hell stops loving you on the day he sends you there.”

Paul is looking right at me, but he doesn’t see me. His eyes are feverish and distant, like he’s exulting in some infernal vision just above my head. His face has more crags and creases than it should at his age, as if he spent so many years holding it stiff that it’s starting to split open. It clings to his skull like an ill-fitting mask.

Is this what I should look like? Is this who I really am beneath my mummified skin?

“We stand on a tiny island of mercy surrounded by damnation, because we are not ‘good people.’ There is no such thing. We offend God with our very nature, every instinct and inclination, every silly dream and self-indulgent whim.” Another wry smile. “We are God’s shit. Just because he made us doesn’t mean we don’t disgust him.”

The crowd chuckles, and I hunch over in my chair, holding my stomach.

“R,” Julie whispers, touching my shoulder, but I cringe away from her. I stand up and rush toward the foyer, crouching as low as I can, but something forces me to look back at the stage and Paul’s eyes fall on mine. I see him squinting into the stage lights, an awkward pause in his polished delivery, but I’m gone before my presence can fully register, squeezing through the overflow crowds in the foyer, and everyone is too fixated on Paul to notice me.

I move along the walls until I find the restrooms. A paper sign says Out of Order but I push through the creaking door, expecting perhaps a clogged toilet or a broken faucet. Instead, I find myself in a dim, damp chamber of cracked tiles and rusty steel urinals, lit by one flickering light above a cigarette-filled sink, the air thick with the stench of sewage. My nausea feels stalled, balancing on the brink of release without quite tipping over. I stumble toward the sink on wobbly legs and brace myself against it. I look into the dirty mirror.

Whose face is this looking back at me? Which of my many lives does it represent?

My cheeks are smooth. There are no lines to mark my journey. I have seen things both horrible and beautiful, I have lost hope and found it, learned new lessons and let go of old ones, I have wandered into Hell and fought my way out—but where is the evidence? My face is the blank canvas of youth, preserved through all these years like a mocking dismissal of my experiences. I am a man stitched into the skin of a boy cadaver. A twisted experiment in the laboratory of the plague.

I feel it coming. The nausea has deepened into pain.

I stagger into a toilet stall and open the lid. A bowl of dark sludge greets me, an aged septic liquor off-gassing an aroma that’s sublime in its awful complexity. And still the vomit won’t come.

I shut the lid and sit on it, fighting back tears from the methane and ammonia and grief.

“R?”

Her voice echoes in the entryway. Her footsteps are soft as she approaches the sound of my ragged breathing. She doesn’t knock. She opens the stall door, sees me hunched there, sweat dripping from my forehead, and she kneels down on the filthy tiles.

“What’s wrong, R? Talk to me.”

Does she even notice the stench? She should be gagging, but her eyes are calm as they search for mine.

“Tell me,” she says, putting a hand on my knee, and although I don’t know if she means it as such, I take it as permission. No more “slowly.” No more “easing her into it.” I fill my lungs with the putrid air and I breathe out the truth:

“This is mine.” I wave my hand around, indicating the filthy stall and everything around it. “This is me.”

She squints. “What?”

“This church. The Fire Church.”

“This is the Fire Church?” Her eyes dart; she’s afraid for all the wrong reasons. “R, we need to—”

“Julie, listen. I built this.”

She pauses. Her head tilts and her eyes squint. “What are you talking about?”

“I founded the Fire Church. Me and my friends, when we were kids.” My eyes drop to the floor. “We hated the world. We wanted to burn it down.”

I can’t look at her while I’m speaking, but I feel her eyes pressing into my forehead like dull blades as my life spills out of me.

“We tried to avoid killing anyone, but people died. We spread misery, ruined lives. And then my grandfather pulled me out, and I…” My tongue locks up, trying to hold back the flow, but it’s too late to stop now. “I helped him run the Axiom Group. I helped him poison the world. Axiom wasn’t my employer…it was my inheritance.”

I force my eyes to rise. I let hers pierce them. “I was a monster before the plague. And whoever I am now…that will always be part of me.”

Her face is utterly blank, eyes wide and empty. And I suddenly realize that I’ve made a mistake. I should never have been so eager to tell her or so certain she’d understand. Time rounded my memories like beach pebbles until they seemed too smooth to hurt anyone, but now that I’m hurling them at Julie, I can feel their jagged edges.

I run past her to the sink and vomit till it overflows.

“Now you’ve met me,” I gasp when I’m empty, wiping acrid drool from my lips. “Now you know who I am.”

“How?” she whispers. Her voice is shaky with compressed emotion. “How could that person become you?”

I catch her eyes in the mirror. She is blinking back tears.

“I don’t know,” I tell her, wishing I could offer more than this, my standard response to every question that matters. “I don’t know.”

Slowly, she backs away. She pushes through the door, and I hear an echoing bang when it closes. I am locked up once again, alone in my cell surrounded by piss and shit, the years scrolling backward to darker and darker prisons.

WE

“THERE IT IS,” says Team Manager Abbot as the town comes into view, glowing faintly on a steep hill. “Take the next exit.”

The driver steers the Hummer off the highway and the rest of the convoy follows, a small army of buses, SUVs, and one large RV, all hastily stenciled with the Axiom logo.

“Stay out of visual,” Abbot tells the driver. “That road there. There’s a spot around the back.”

They skirt around the hill, headlights off, letting the moon illuminate the narrow road until they plunge into the trees. After a mile in darkness, Abbot gives the go-ahead and the convoy lights up the forest, revealing the sparse remains of a trailer park. Only a few sagging single-wides occupy the lot; most of it is an empty clearing, sickly grass climbing up through the gravel.

The convoy parks around the perimeter of the lot and leaves the headlights on, making a spotlit stage in the center of their criss-crossing beams. The men climb out to stretch and smoke, and Abram longs to collapse on his bedroll and soak his shriveling brain in sleep, but he can’t. He can’t. He walks to the edge of the park. He unzips his fly and pretends to be relieving himself, but his bladder is empty. He stares into the trees and the spaces between them, darkness within darkness. The camp behind him is eerily quiet. No one builds a fire or plays music or even talks above a murmur. Abram can hear insects chirping. A river gurgling somewhere in that darkness.

“Something on your mind, Roberts?”

Abbot moves quietly for such a big man.

“No sir,” Abram says, zipping up theatrically. “Just taking a piss.”

Abbot observes the dry gravel in front of Abram but doesn’t remark on it. “What’s your position, Roberts?”

“Bookkeeping and Guest Supervision, sir.”

“Not bad for one year in the company.”

“I’m a climber, sir.”

Abbot chuckles. “Well, we like that. But what about your family? They still back in Nashville?”

Abram tries not to tense visibly. It’s not quite natural, this conversation between manager and employee alone on the edge of the camp. He weighs his answer carefully. “They’re in a civilian convoy. They’re meeting me in Post.”

Abbot nods. “Better hope they show up soon. Between the Manhattan transfers and these recruitment ads we’re running on the Feed, it’s about to get real crowded over there. And it sounds like you wouldn’t appreciate what we’re doing with the overflow.”

Abram looks at the older man uneasily, but Abbot keeps his eyes on the forest, like he’s waiting for something. Then Abram sees it. Headlights.

“Are we expecting company, sir?”

Abbot’s weathered face shows no surprise. His eyes are dull beneath his bushy eyebrows. A tired old man who’s eaten his fill of the world and is ready for the long nap. “Roberts…how did you become a bookkeeper without being informed of our arrangement with the Fire Church?”

Abram hesitates. “Communications have been a little blurry lately, sir.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Abbot sighs. “Well, nothing much to know here. Just more Orientation bullshit.” He shakes his head, talking more to himself than to Abram. “I figured we’d be putting the experiments on hold till we got settled in Post, but Executive’s all about forward momentum lately. Like it says on the posters, right? ‘Enough is Not Enough.’”

Two vehicles roll into the lot with a snarl of gravel. The first is a beefed-up Land Rover with oversized tires and an urban camouflage paint job. The second is an armored bank truck hauling a horse trailer.

“Here we go,” Abbot sighs. “Another game of Red Rover.”

The bank truck backs its trailer up to one of the convoy’s. A young man with black frame glasses hops out and heads around to where the trailers meet, but Abram can tell by his quiet efficiency that he’s not the one in charge. While he’s busy unlatching the trailer doors, another man emerges from the Land Rover.

“How was the service, Pastor?” Abbot says with a smirk. “Everybody on fire for the Lord tonight?”

The man is around Abram’s age but with the sunken cheeks of someone much older. His shirt is thick and bristly like burlap, and small burn scars blotch his head, face, and hands like some kind of extreme body art. He regards Abbot with a stiff reserve, chin raised, eyes narrow, as if trying not to breathe a foul smell.

“Got an answer for us about those rituals?” Abbot continues, ignoring the man’s disdain. “You’ve got a fun little rave going on out here, I’d hate to have to shut you down.”

“We’re praying about it,” the pastor says. His voice is flat and empty, giving Abbot as little as possible.

Abbot chuckles. “You do understand it’s not a choice, right? Uprooting you would be expensive and Management doesn’t spend unless it has to, but obviously we can’t have you burning down our assets.”

“Obviously,” the pastor says.

“It’s a new era. Law and order. Religion has to adapt to the times.”

“We’re praying about it.”

Abbot stares at the pastor, searching for a crack in his wall, then he shakes his head wearily. “All right, Koresh. I’m trying to help you, but we’ll table that one for now.” He turns to the horse trailer. “So what’ve you got for us here? Anything fresh?”

Abbot disappears into the church’s trailer. The pastor disappears into the convoy’s. Abram glances at the faces around him, searching for some hint of what’s going on here, but they’re all as stony as the pastor’s.

The inspection doesn’t take long. A moment later the two men reconvene in the patch of gravel between the trailers, squinting into the glare of the criss-crossing headlights.

“You got another truck coming or what?” Abbot says, gesturing back to the trailer with a frown.

“That’s all we have for you,” the pastor says.

“This better be a bad joke,” Abbot scoffs. “There’s only ten in there.”

The pastor nods thoughtfully. “We’ve been praying about this too. The gain is worth the sacrifice, but God is telling us to give less.”

Abbot chuckles. “Oh so you want to bargain now? You’ve got God playing sales manager?”

The pastor shrugs. “Not bargaining. Just stating a fact.”

“We’re already giving you three for one! You expect to get our whole load for that sad little crew?”

“Broken bodies can’t do your work. They’re garbage to you.”

“And what are they to you again?”

The pastor doesn’t miss a beat. “God’s creations. Our sick brothers and sisters.”

“Right, right,” Abbot sighs. “Why do I keep forgetting you people are crazy?” He tosses up his hands. “Fuck it. You’re wasting our damn time, but fuck it.” He turns to the troops and shouts, “Full swap!”

The pastor’s assistant unloads the horse trailer: ten men and women bound together on a rope, Dead but intact, eyes clear and hungry, like they died yesterday of natural causes. From the convoy’s trailer comes the opposite end of the spectrum: a grotesque procession of oozing corpses, some rotted to slimy black leather, some still fresh but hopelessly mangled, torn apart by weapons or teeth.

The Axiom Group and the Church of the Holy Fire exchange their cargo. The intact Dead file into one trailer while a far greater number of ruined ones stumble into the other, dragged by collars and chains. Most of the latter show awareness levels on par with the state of their bodies: slack jaws, drooling lips, eyes blank in their sunken sockets. But Abram notices one who stands out. Her eyes dart in a panic as she’s prodded up the ramp. The headlights shine through large, dripping gaps in her naked torso, but her face—

“Shit,” Abram grunts under his breath, a jolt of surprise. He takes an instinctive step forward. “Wait.”

The soldier dragging her stops, and Abram stares at the woman’s face, pale gray with a hint of pink. This pink wasn’t there the last time he saw this woman. It wasn’t there when he flew her across the country, leashed to the floor of the plane while her daughter pried at her heart. It wasn’t there when they shared a prison in Manhattan, or when men like the ones around him dragged her away to be shipped off like freight. He has to be imagining it. It must be a trick of the light. But when the woman finally notices his stare and her eyes latch onto his, it’s impossible not to see the cognition in them. And the recognition.

She knows him. And apparently she knows him as a friend, because her features flood with an unmistakable emotion.

Hope.

Abram feels the balloon of black blood pulsing in his brain, screaming for release.

“What’s the problem?” Abbot says.

Abram shakes his head and steps back, swallowing hard. “Nothing.” He swallows again; there’s a dry lump that he can’t seem to get it down. “Thought her collar was loose.”

He keeps his eyes on the ground as the woman disappears into the church’s trailer. Under his breath, inaudibly, he murmurs, “What is your job?”

When the exchange is complete and the doors are latched, the pastor turns without a word and heads back toward his Land Rover, but Abbot grabs his arm as he brushes past.

“Hey, Bark.”

Bark shakes him off with a sharp jerk and glares at him.

“I was raised Catholic,” Abbot says in a low, man-to-man tone. “I know the drill about the ‘sanctity of life,’ but come on. We’ve given you, what, six hundred by now? What the hell are you doing with all this rotten meat?”

“When we hit rock bottom,” Bark says, “when we’re utterly lost and broken, that’s when God can use us.”

Abbot rolls his neck and groans. “Don’t you people ever drop the act? Do you recite the gospels while you’re fucking your wife?”

Bark is already turning away but Abbot keeps pushing.

“I’m done humoring your bullshit! Turn around and start talking like a human being or this our last trade!”

Bark stops. He turns around and looks Abbot in the eye. “You want me to talk like a human being?” He cocks his head, sounding genuinely intrigued. “You mean you want me stop telling the truth? You want me to soften it and modernize it so everyone can be comfortable?” An unsettling smile is creeping into the rigid mask of his face. “You want me to say I don’t really believe any of this, that I’m just playing a role for money or power because that’s something you could comprehend, right? Is that about right?”

The mask has melted into a toothy grin. He takes a step toward Abbot and Abram is surprised to see Abbot step back.

“But see, I do believe it.” His voice is a fervent whisper. “All of it. And I don’t just believe it, I do it. Because a real man does what he believes. A real man doesn’t make excuses for the truth or sand off its sharp edges. A real man takes the truth and”—he makes a double fist and strikes his chest—“shoves it into his heart. And dies on it.”

Abbot watches him with a flat glare. Bark takes another step closer.

“I am not a human being.” He gestures down at his body with a grimace of revulsion. “I’m not this.” He extends his disgust to the surrounding forest. “I don’t live here.” He thumps a hand to his chest. “I’m spirit. I live with God. And he’s coming to take me home.”

He stares Abbot in the face for a moment, then abruptly steps back, tossing out his palms in an easy shrug. “No act, boss man. Just faith.” His smile is relaxed. “And faith doesn’t bargain.”

He hops in his SUV and slams the door. It lurches into the woods with a spray of gravel, and the trailer truck follows it.

Abbot’s face is a granite slab as he watches the vehicles disappear. “Roberts,” he grunts. “You got any scouting experience?”

Abram swallows again and this time it goes down, his autonomic reflexes finally regaining control. “Some,” he says. “I served on the Goldman and Citi acquisition teams.”

“Get a few guys and head into town. Snoop around. Go to church.”

“Yes sir. Anything specific I’m looking for?”

Abbot lights a cigarette. He breathes out a cloud and stares through it into the trees as the headlights fade from view. “These people have been waiting a long time for Armageddon, and I’m sensing some impatience. I want to know what they’re up to.”

As Abbot is speaking, Abram’s desperate brain lapses into a flicker of microsleep. His daughter is wandering off into the forest but he doesn’t run after her, he is occupied with some important task that requires his attention, he just needs another minute, just a few more seconds to finish and then—

“Yes sir,” he says, blinking hard.

Despite the agony in his head, he is fairly sure he said it without hesitation, the way Jim Roberts would say it. Jim Roberts would follow orders. Jim Roberts would do his job and get his pay and go home to his family, just like the man in the RV who is now sporting a beige jacket and studying the company handbook while his wife and children stare out the windows in mute horror.

Abram emerges from the forest and begins his trek across the plain. There are other men with him, but we are not interested in them. Their stories are dull and small, but Abram has ties to more lives than he knows. Many of them, like Jim Roberts, are snarling at him from the depths of the Lower, and these he hears clearly. But other voices come from above, and these he ignores, even though they are louder, stronger, and far more beautiful. Even though—or because—they are voices of love.

You are not this man, one of them whispers. You are not this mask. When you find her, will you be able to take it off?

The grass is silver in the moonlight and it clings to his feet, whispering warnings as it rustles in the wind. He kicks it and stomps it down, keeping his eyes straight ahead, locked on the lightless outline of the town on the hill.

In the back of a filthy horse trailer, a Dead woman shivers. The sensation of cold surprises her, as have so many others in these last few days. The sensation of longing. Regret. Hope and fear. She presses her face to the window slits and her eyes scan the night, darting from shadow to shadow.

Where is she?

The inside of her head, so cold and silent for so many years, is filling with a trickle of warmth. A single thought repeats like a steady drip:

Where is my daughter?

She keeps searching as the men load her out of the trailer. As they drag her into a dim, echoing warehouse. As they prod her into a cage. She searches the faces around her, the stern grimaces of the Living, the slack confusion of the Dead, but she finds nothing resembling what she sees in her daughter’s face. She finds nothing at all like love.

Where is my daughter?

It is thus far a simple thought, lacking much context. Most of what she remembers comes to her second-hand, from the stories her daughter told her. Her daughter’s name. Her own name. Vignettes of their shared history. But she believes these stories, and she is slowly making them real. Each word wipes a little soot from the scorched photo of her life, and to her great surprise, she wants to see more.

She wants to see who she is, even if it’s an ugly portrait. Even if it’s despair and surrender and betrayal. She wants another chance, even if it’s brief. Her chest clenches with this longing as the cool night air passes through it, caressing her desiccated heart.

“Ju…lie,” she whispers, a feeble breath lost in the groans around her. “Help me.”

WE

NORA GREENE LISTENS to the band play a song about dying. Or surrendering. Or accepting fate. She’s not sure what most of the songs mean; the lyrics dance circles in her head, just out of reach. But they do rhyme, and their melody is sweet, like songs from the old days.

She did not like the sermon. It was loud and muscular and simmering with hate, and she struggled to reconcile it with the gentle conviction of her new companions. She watched Peter and Miriam as the sermon raged on, and she could see a tension in them too. They smiled at the pastor’s jokes, but they didn’t laugh. They nodded at his pithy aphorisms, but they didn’t shout amen. They shifted in their seats and shot glances at Nora, and she kept waiting for them to lean in and whisper, It’s not normally like this! But they held their ground. They pursed their lips and flexed their jaws and nodded.

And then the pastor left the stage, and the music started again. And the music is nice. The music washes away the sermon’s lingering stink, and Nora thinks of her mother’s church, its hellfire homilies followed by lovely chorales, and then fellowship in the foyer, tea and jelly donuts, and the weekly potluck dinners—and yes, the study sessions after the meal, the scripture, the guilt, the confusion—but then card games! Laughter! Homemade dessert! She thinks maybe she thinks too much. Maybe she should close her eyes and plunge into this warm pool.

But as she is bracing for that plunge, someone sits in the empty seat next to her.

Miriam peeks around Nora’s head to see who it is, then frowns warily. She mumbles something to Peter, but Nora isn’t listening. She is trying to decide what to feel as she stares at the side of her friend’s face.

Julie doesn’t speak. She doesn’t even look at Nora. She watches the band play, but Nora is fairly sure the wetness in her eyes isn’t from the music. Nora is disarmed. She forgets her urge to run.

They listen to two more songs together, eyes locked firmly ahead. The first is about war, judgement, the earth burning away. The second mentions blood sixteen times. Both have joyous melodies.

When the third song begins—something about the depravity of the flesh—Julie finally looks at Nora. There is hurt and confusion in her red, round eyes, and Nora feels things she can’t process in this place. She gets up and rushes outside.

She stands in the empty town square and looks up at the stars. Why do they look so big? Like fat globes of white fire?

Julie stops beside her and follows her gaze skyward. The music is muffled now, reduced to a slow swirl of soothing tones. It’s far lovelier without the words.

“Remember when we camped on the stadium roof?” Julie says. “You and me and Perry and the guys from the foster home?”

Nora doesn’t respond. She scans the sky for Orion, for Venus, something familiar to make the world sane again.

“And Perry made a campfire and I tried to roast Carbtein and it just exploded? And the coals slid off the roof onto the gate guards and they thought they were under attack?”

Even the moon looks alien, menacing the earth with its razor sharp sickle.

“And then we got really high and started making up new constellations?”

Nora sighs and stops searching. “Phallus Minor,” she murmurs. “The Little Dick.”

Julie points at a curving cluster on the western horizon. “Is that yours there? Whorion?”

A small smile forces itself onto Nora’s face. “We were so mature.”

Julie lets out a wistful sigh. “I can’t believe I’m saying this about those years but…simpler times.”

“Twelve-year-old Julie would have clawed your eyes out for that condescension.”

Julie shakes her head. “Fucking kids. We really thought we’d seen it all.”

“We’d seen a lot,” Nora says, dropping her eyes to the ground. “But yeah…there was more.”

Julie turns to face her, and Nora forces herself to meet her gaze. “Do you want to talk?” Julie asks her.

Nora shakes her head.

“Okay.” Julie glances back at the church. A tall figure with bad posture is silhouetted in the doorway. “I don’t either. Let’s go for a walk.”

“Where?”

Julie turns her back on the tall figure, and it wanders off into the dark. “Introduce me to your brother.”

Nora’s earlier anxiety feels foolish as the kindly old matron of Redemption Hall welcomes them at the door. She leads them to a padded room full of Mostly Dead children, some free to roam, others strapped to their bunk beds. Addis has not been carved up by scientists or used for target practice. He’s sitting on the floor with the other children, playing quietly with a pile of toys. Or rather, picking them up and examining them like an archaeologist identifying ancient tools.

“Addis,” she says, “this is Julie. My best friend.” She takes a deep breath. “Julie…this is my brother.”

Julie crouches down and smiles, her throat clenching with emotion. “Hey, Addis.”

He looks up from his study of the toys and begins to study Julie. He stares at her very hard, until she starts to squirm. Then he smiles.

“Whoa!” Nora says, shooting Julie a wide-eyed glance. “That’s a first.”

“He’s gloating,” Julie says. “He destroyed me in that staring contest. Not that I stood a chance against those eyes.”

But Addis is not gloating. He is not playing a game. He’s not smiling because he’s in a good mood or because Julie is pretty and speaks to him with respect. He’s smiling because he knows her. Because he remembers a day long ago when her voice reached out to him, echoing through empty streets and piercing the fog of his fever, a ringing rebuttal to the skeletons all around him: You’re not dead.

“Those damn yellow eyes…” Julie mumbles. “What do they mean, Addis?”

The matron sidles up to Nora and clears her throat. Julie blinks out of her reverie and stands up.

“Sorry,” the old woman says, “but we’re settling in for the night and we need to find Addis a bed.”

“Can’t he just stay with me at the Hostel?” Nora asks. “You can cuff him to my wrist. He won’t hurt anyone.”

“I’m so sorry, dear,” the matron says with a sympathetic smile. “I’m sure Addis wouldn’t cause any trouble, but we just can’t take the chance of having the Dead loose in the community at night, no matter how close to cured they are. You understand.”

Nora nods reluctantly. “Yeah.”

“He’ll be safe at Redemption Hall. Our Dead brothers and sisters are as much a part of God’s plan as we are.”

“Yeah.” She ruffles Addis’s hair. “I’ll see you in the morning, Adderall. Be good, okay?”

Addis watches them leave. Julie shoots him a final glance as she closes the door. He smiles again.

Nora and Julie walk in silence. At the bottom of the hill sits the guest housing: a huge, dilapidated manor that Peter and Miriam called the Hostel.

We’re all tourists on this planet, Peter explained. We should never think of it as home.

All the other tourists are still at the service, or perhaps at the “after party” to discuss the sermon, so the house is empty. Nora and Julie’s footsteps echo in the unfurnished rooms. The floorboards groan like weary old men. Finally, Nora unties the knot in her throat.

“Are you here alone?”

They have stopped at the bottom of the narrow staircase leading to Nora’s room. Julie shakes her head.

“Where are they?”

“They’re here.”

“Is…” She pauses, tenses, forces through another knot. “Is he okay?”

“He’s okay.”

Nora nods to herself. “Where’s R?”

“Here. Somewhere.”

Nora studies her friend for a moment. “You were crying.”

“Yeah.”

Nora sighs and heads up the stairs. “Come on. There’s an open bed.”

What was once a large master bedroom has been converted into a sort of boarding school barracks. Rows of single beds run along the walls, thin pillows and blue wool blankets. No other furnishings whatsoever. It’s too hot for the blankets so they lie on top of them, staring at the cracks in the ceiling.

“You sure you don’t want to talk about it?” Julie says.

“Honestly,” Nora says, still fighting the knot, “I don’t know what I want yet.”

“All right. I’ll go first then.” Julie folds her hands on her stomach. “R just told me everything.”

Nora turns her head on the pillow, trying to read Julie’s face, but her eyes are far away.

“Who he was before. What he did.”

“And?” Nora says quietly.

“And it was bad.”

“Worse than eating your boyfriend?”

“Somehow…yeah.”

“Wow.”

“Because there isn’t any plague to blame for this stuff. It was just him. His choices. His character.”

They’re silent for a moment. Nora considers asking for specifics but decides she doesn’t need them. “I don’t know, Jules,” she says. “I feel like that doesn’t add up.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…R may be awkward and kind of a whiny bitch…but if there’s one thing he’s got going for him, I’d have to say it’s his character.”

Julie glances over at her. “You think so?”

“Have you ever seen anyone try harder to be a good person? Everything’s a moral puzzle with him. He agonizes over every step. It’s fucking annoying, to be honest.”

Julie looks back at the ceiling. “That’s what I don’t understand. How could he be a monster for so long and then become who he is now? Is it just the magic reset of being Dead? Did he…cheat his way into a new life?”

“I’m sure that’ll be a big topic in post-plague philosophy,” Nora says. “But I don’t think that’s it. I think there are lots of ways to reset. I mean, how did you do it?”

“Me?”

“Seven years ago you were an insufferable emo kid who thought the whole world was built for your torment. You walked around flashing your wrist scars like they were badges of courage.”

Julie grimaces.

“You actually listed off all the bad shit you’d been through to see how it compared to mine, like it was a fucking contest. Like whoever had the most trauma had the most authority on life.”

“Please stop before I puke,” Julie mutters.

“My point is…you used to be the worst. And now you’re my favorite person. Now you’re kind and caring and fucking hilarious, and you take everything seriously except yourself. You love the world, and you fight for it.” She rolls onto her side and looks right at Julie. “And you fight for your friends. When they’re falling apart, you chase them across the country to catch the pieces.”

Julie keeps her eyes on the ceiling. They are glistening again.

“So how did you do it?” Nora asks her. “How’d you break all that bad momentum and become who you are now?”

Julie wipes her eyes and looks up at the ceiling with a faint smile. “I think it was you.”

Nora frowns. “Me?”

“I think meeting you was my reset.”

Nora snorts, but there’s affection in it. “How?”

“You were solid. Rational. You were immune to my melodrama but still…human. The opposite of my mom without being like my dad.”

Nora listens in cautious silence.

“You shook me out of myself. Knocked me off my course.” Julie chuckles. “Maybe literally, when you punched me in the face.”

Nora can’t help smiling. “Well…you’re welcome.” She swallows another knot and takes a steadying breath. “But we’re…we’re not talking about me, remember?”

Julie rubs her palms into her damp eyes, trying to smother the itch. “So you think it doesn’t matter who R used to be. Even if he was a fanatic and a warlord. Even if he helped create all the shit we’re fighting.”

Nora hesitates. It’s getting harder to resist demanding details, but she tries to keep herself on track. “It does matter. Whatever he was, it’s a part of him.” She weighs her words carefully. “But what matters more…is who he is now, right? What he built with those parts?”

Julie is silent.

“Maybe that’s why he tries so hard. Because he knows what it’s like on the other side.”

Julie sits up, cross-legged on the wool blanket, and twists a chunk of her hair into a knotted braid. “So you think I should forgive him.”

“I don’t know if you should or shouldn’t. But I think I would.”

Julie takes a deep breath and exhales, releasing the braid to unravel. “So does that mean you forgive Marcus?”

Nora opens her mouth, then clamps it shut. Her wisdom doesn’t sound as wise when it’s reflected back at her.

“Does it mean you’re ready to go with us?”

Distant voices float through the open windows. The tourists are returning. Nora rolls onto her back and studies the topography of the ceiling. Cracks like canyons, water stains like lakes, black forests of mold.

“Nora,” Julie persists. “Are you ready to go home? So we can do what we need to do?”

Nora listens to the approaching murmur of laughter and conversation. When the tourists enter the house, it rises through the floorboards like music, and if it had lyrics, they would be about about belonging together, marching together, safe and full of conviction.

“Are you?” Nora asks quietly.

Julie turns to look out the window. She squints into the muggy night air, a rippling blackness like molten tar. “I don’t know what I’ll feel the next time I look at R. I don’t know what I’ll do when I find my mom.” She takes a shuddering breath and straightens her spine. “And I don’t know know what’ll happen in Post, or if any of us will be alive next week.” She chuckles darkly. “So fuck no, I’m not ready. For any of this. But I know I have to do it.”

Nora sees conviction in her friend’s face, and it’s a different kind than the fervent intensity of her new Ardent companions. It’s not a graft; it’s old-growth, weathered and real, sprouting from her own experiences with no outside framework to prop it up. The laughter downstairs suddenly sounds thin, like something recorded long ago and replayed too many times.

“What if I wanted to stay here awhile?” Nora says in spite of the sinking in her stomach. “To take care of Addis.”

“Nora,” Julie says, twisting around to face her. “We can’t do this without you. I can’t.”

“Why not?” Nora half-whispers. “Why am I so damn important?”

“Because you’re my friend—no, fuck blood, you’re my family.”

Nora blinks. Her throat spasms.

“And wherever this nightmare’s taking us, we should go there together.”

Footsteps pound up the stairs behind an eruption of laughter. Julie gives Nora a final pleading look, then drops onto her pillow and pretends to be asleep. The tourists barely lower their volume. It doesn’t matter. Nora will not sleep tonight. She will lie on top of the blanket, sweating in the dark heat, watching black clouds of choices swirl behind her eyelids.

I

IN DOWNTOWN MISSOULA, across the street from the ice cream parlor, there is a religion store. It sells books of theology, guides for righteous living, and thirty-six different versions of the Bible. There are paintings and plaques bearing scripture, paraphrases of scripture, and modern aphorisms mistaken for scripture. And there are weapons. The sign calls them “disciplinary aids,” but when I see a rack of wooden clubs and rods hanging from leather straps, I find it hard not to think of a castle’s armory. Or its dungeon.

My father reaches for a long, flat club that resembles a cricket bat. I can’t read the words carved into its surface, but I can tell by their medieval script that they are scripture. My father has never hit me before, but something is different today. His anger usually blazes for a few minutes, then dissipates into the air, but today he found somewhere to channel it. Today he grabbed my hand and dragged me to this store with a purpose in his eyes, and now he studies the club with grim satisfaction, like he’s finally found an answer to some shouting inner voice.

It is a weapon against sin, he tells me as we leave the store. Against rebellion and ungodly passion. I try to believe this as it strikes me over and over, embossing scripture into my reddening skin. I try to understand what I’ve done wrong so I can repent of it, but it eludes me. It will be years before I can grasp the intangible abstraction of sin, and by then my father will have moved beyond this wooden club. He will not bother to dig it out of the closet when his hands are already clenched. Punishment needs no special ceremony; it surrounds us always like our guilt, eager and pulsing.

“It feels good, doesn’t it?” Paul Bark says, watching from the corner of the room as I endure the pain I’ve earned. I’m not sure if he’s addressing me or my father. “We all have it in us.”

Then the pain is gone, and so is my father. He sits slumped in his recliner, black phlegm running down his chin, his final cigarette scorching his fingertips. Year after year his smoke rose up to Heaven. He sacrificed himself on a thousand tiny pyres.

“We all need something to hate,” Paul says, “and what’s nobler than hating yourself?” We are standing outside the house, watching it burn. “You don’t have to die to be a martyr.”

He nudges me forward. My skin blisters.

“I hope you’re not buying this hairshirt bullshit,” my grandfather says, clamping a sharp hand on my shoulder. “Why fight yourself when you can fight for yourself?”

I follow him along the edge of the stadium roof, open to reveal the teeming masses below, the farms and gardens and apartment towers and the swarms of soldiers patrolling them. I see Ella Desconsado coughing in her bedroom. I see Wally and David and Marie assembling rifle parts. I see the once hopeful Nearly Living, hopeless and nearly dead.

“No one’s tallying your deeds. No one’s watching. It’s just you and yours, here and gone, so take what you can while you can.”

I’m sitting in a metal chair in a dark locker room, and he crouches down to leer at me, his rancid breath hissing through gapped teeth. “You know none of this is real, don’t you? The world’s a dream. It’s your dream. And do you feel guilty for what happens in your dreams? When you kill and steal and fuck the forbidden fruit?”

He runs his leathery fingers along Julie’s arm. She is slumped in the chair next to me, collared and wrapped in cables, her hair covering her face, blood dripping from her mouth.

“You know the world will disappear without a trace the moment you wake up, so you might as well have your fun with it.” He lifts Julie’s chin. “Like you did with her.”

I grab his wrist. I wrench his hand away from Julie and it snaps off; a brittle crack and puff of dust. He looks at the dry stump with a bemused smile.

I hear Paul Bark’s laughter as I struggle to untie Julie. “Do you really think she still loves you? How could you imagine you deserve such grace?”

I fumble with the cables. My fingers are slick with her blood. Her eyes slide open and watch me through the gaps in her hair, but I can’t read what’s behind them.

Paul Bark says: “Haven’t you learned we deserve nothing?”

I spin around, gritting my teeth, and Paul smirks at me from the shadows. “What now, Brother Atvist? Have you got a new sermon for us?”

I open my mouth—but there is no air in my lungs. My roar of defiance leaks out in a groan.

I wake up.

I am curled into a ball, trembling with rage. I fill my lungs till they hurt and I scream into my knees, throat straining, veins bulging. It’s the loudest sound I’ve made in at least two lifetimes.

I uncoil and scramble to my feet. I’m in a small, dark chamber with rusted metal walls; the air smells of dried blood and decay, and I think I must not be awake after all. Another nightmare. My twisted little brain, half-rotted and hateful. Is this what Julie experiences every night? An endless procession of horrors and accusers? And worse yet, is that why I love her? Because we share the same sickness?

My hand touches the cold steel, and reality seeps in. I’m not in Hell. I’m in a train. An empty freight car—it must have been hauling meat. A white bar of daylight glows through the half-open door.

Last night returns in red-orange flickers: wandering through the empty streets of this half-abandoned town, breaking shop windows, kicking down doors, searching for a violence strong enough to squeeze the poison from my veins. I don’t remember how it ended. How I found my way to this metal box and somehow managed to sleep. I only know I couldn’t sleep in the RV, alone in a bed I’ve shared with Julie, waiting for her to slip in next to me and feeling my guts twist tighter with every hour she didn’t.

I stumble out of the train into a dim gray oven. Cast-iron clouds diffuse the heat, baking me from all directions while the humidity threatens to drown me. Where am I? What country is this? What planet?

I walk for a few minutes before realizing I actually don’t know where I am. The train must have moved in the night. The same wooded hill looms up ahead, but there is no station platform and no sign of the Fire Church’s quaint little compound. A gravel road leads from the tracks to the hill, so I follow it.

Soon I’m surrounded by trees, but I hear noise up ahead: the rumble of big engines and occasional shouted commands. As the woods open into a clearing I feel an instinct to proceed with stealth, but I’m too angry to obey it. My stomach is burning, I have swallowed caustic chemicals, and if anyone stops me I will puke fire in their faces and stand tall for the consequences.

I stroll into the clearing like I belong there—and maybe I do. No one takes note of my presence. A few dozen young men mill around the field of dried mud, loading fuel cans and what looks like bundles of riot gear into the backs of trucks. The trucks are hitched to freight trailers, but these are not the standard highway haulers. The trucks are armored bricks on solid-rubber wheels, the kind once used to move cash between banks. The trailers themselves look reinforced as well, though they’re riddled with outward dents like they’ve been carrying loose boulders.

I think of a circus backlot. The trampled field of crew trucks, generators chugging inside sooty white trailers, gnarled carnies sucking cigarettes by the outhouses, a grimy reality behind all the whimsical lights and color. But where is the bigtop in this image? Is it God’s House at the top of the hill? Or is it the strange structure at the center of these trucks? I see nothing familiar in its outline; it’s not the usual repurposing of an old-world building for new-world needs, schools into barracks, stadiums into fortresses. Whatever it is, it appears to be built from scratch for a purpose I can’t imagine: a squat mass of thick steel sheets, the kind used to cover holes for road work, welded together to form…a box. A windowless, featureless box the size of a department store.

And what is that sound inside this box? What subtle undertone do I hear beneath the engine noise and shouting?

“Hi!”

I whirl around to find the young man from the train grinning at me. He sticks out his hand.

“We met earlier. I’m Lindh.”

I look at his hand until he lowers it.

“Listen,” he says, “I feel convicted about the way I treated you yesterday. I was rude.”

I shrug.

“I could sense you were closed off, so I think I withdrew some of my hospitality, but today you seem a little more…open?”

I can hear “vulnerable” humming just beneath this. Oh, Paul taught them well. I give Lindh an acidic smile, but he keeps going.

“Can I get you a coffee and share a little about our community?”

“Where are my friends?” I say, forcing myself not to growl.

“Okay, sure,” he says with an agreeable nod. “I actually just saw them walking with Nora and wondered where you were. Everyone’s heading up to God’s House for the special service.”

“Special service?”

“Pastor Bark is revealing our new calling. God is moving in a big way. Mind if I walk with you?”

I brush past him and plunge back into the woods, ignoring his earnest pleas, rushing to put this armored circus and its unnerving noises out of my boiling thoughts.

The road emerges from the forest behind a building that might be a hospital. I hear more strange noises from inside it, groans and muffled screams, but I’m drawn to the louder ones ahead: the tense burbling of a large crowd.

Stepping onto the main street is like falling into a river. The cheery procession from the town below catches me and carries me along, bouncing and spinning me like a leaf until I’m sucked into the drain of the church’s front doors. I try to hide in the back again, but the current drags me forward. By the time I manage to find a seat, I’m only ten rows from the front. I lean forward and hold my face in my hands, watching through my fingers as Pastor Bark takes the stage.

“Hello, Ardents,” he says into his headset. “Are you hungry? Are you ready for some meat?”

Hoots and murmurs from the congregation.

“Good, because we’re really going to get into it this morning. We’re at war, and there are no desk jobs in God’s army. All of us are in the shit!”

I scan the sea of faces around me. Are they here? Is she here? How do I address her now? Are we still lovers? Were we ever?

“But the tide is turning,” Paul says, spreading his arms wide. “I’m sure you’ve all heard the news by now, what God’s doing in the far east…”

A surge of applause.

“That’s right. Fire isn’t the only cleanser. Wind, water—all the elements serve God’s will. New York City, the biggest shit we ever took on God’s perfect world, has finally been flushed.”

He allows a moment for the cheering to subside.

“And with their den destroyed, guess who’s on the run? Guess who’s moving their whole parade of blasphemy right next door? That’s right. Our good friends, the Axiom Group.”

He paces the stage a few times, looking pensively at his feet, a signal that the interactive phase is over and it’s time to listen in earnest.

“Ardents,” he says, “we are approaching a moment of testing. And I’m here to tell you, I’m worried we won’t pass.” He runs his eyes across the congregation, nodding. “I am. I really am. Because we’ve grown complacent.” His voice abruptly jumps to a shout. “We’ve grown soft. Despite all our prayers for God to take us home, we’ve gotten comfortable here, wallowing in our disease. And I can hear you saying, ‘But Pastor Bark, we surrendered four towns last year! We gathered hundreds of souls into our flock! I think we’re doing pretty good!’ And to that I say fuck ‘pretty good.’”

He looks around as if waiting to be challenged, then nods, that’s what I thought.

“While we were out there burning half-abandoned backwaters that no one but God will even notice, Babylon’s been rising right down the street from us. We’ve allowed not one but two new enclaves to grow in what was once an empty ruin. And not just tents around a campfire but thriving mini-metropolises with agriculture and industry and government.” He paces faster, shaking his head in disgust. “The Post stadiums carry all the DNA of civilization, and we’ve allowed it to grow unchecked, from a little cluster of cells to a massive, throbbing tumor. So my question for you this morning is…do we have the balls to cut it out?”

My eyes stop wandering. He has my attention now.

“Everything God hates is gathering in one place. He’s never given us a clearer command. Do we have enough faith to obey it?”

The congregation is quiet. I see some brows knitted in uncertainty.

“Now I know what you’re thinking…” He adopts a faintly effeminate tone. “‘But Pastor Bark, how would we surrender a fortified enclave? We don’t fight our war with weapons! Only God has the right to take life!’” He lets out a reluctant sigh, as if defeated by this weakling objector. “Well, you’re right. We’re not invaders. We can’t surrender Post unless God decides to open it to us.” His downcast frown rises into an enigmatic smirk. “But what if he’s already decided? What if he’s been holding out his hand this whole time, just waiting for us to bring him a sword?”

I hear no hoots or amens. Everyone hangs on his words, waiting for the payoff to this puzzling setup. But I am already halfway there, and I feel my skin prickling.

“Lot and Sodom,” he says. “Joshua and Jericho. Moses and Egypt and the ten fucking plagues. It won’t be the first time God used his children as vessels for his wrath.”

I hear myself whispering, “No…no…”

“My dear Ardents,” Paul says, beaming with pride, “we have fetched God a sword. We have gathered him an army.”

Silence.

“Not of flesh and blood, but of clean, hard bone. An army God himself raised from our departed brothers and sisters, just like he promised in Ezekiel 37.”

Comprehension spreads through the crowd in a slow murmur.

“Yes,” Paul says, nodding fervently. “Yes. As much as we might fear them, these creatures are God’s creation. They belong to him. They’re a force without mind or will and their movements are ordained by God alone. Like a hurricane.”

He stands in the center of the stage, gripping the narrow pulpit. The lights glisten on his sweaty forehead.

“So we’re going to bring that hurricane to the gates of Post, and we’re going to set it loose to do God’s will. We’re going to put a sword in God’s hand…” He juts his chin and nods a few times. “…and we’re going to stand back and watch him swing it.”

There is silence.

It lingers.

I see a flicker in Paul’s confidence. An encounter with a distant but shocking possibility: that he is alone in his madness. That he is the only one who hears this particular voice of God.

Then a man in the front row lets out a throaty howl, pumping a fist in the air, and it spreads through the congregation in a wave of applause, hesitant at first but quickly gaining assurance, and Paul’s eyes grow misty with the relief of confirmation.

I am surrounded by wide-eyed faces cheering for the death of thousands, and I begin to recognize some of them. There’s the boy who looked over my shoulder the night my angry scribbles leaked into reality. There’s the girl who got the maps and protocols from her firefighter uncle. There’s the boy who brought the gasoline. Most of the congregation is new, but these familiar faces hover around me like phantoms, aged but essentially unchanged, still pinched with pride and hatred and pride in their hatred.

“Paul!”

The cheering stops. I recognize my own voice in the echoes. Somehow, I have been transported to the center of the aisle. I appear to be walking toward the stage.

“How many years, Paul? Ten? Fifteen? How can you still be the same?”

Paul watches my approach with a cautious blankness, waiting for more information before choosing a reaction. He doesn’t recognize me. I don’t care.

“How have you not moved past this? How have you not realized we were wrong?”

I stop in front of the stage, hands clenched at my sides. Paul leans down and squints at me like I’m a hallucination. “Brother Atvist?” he whispers.

My shoulders hunch at the sound of the name. I look behind me. The whole congregation is watching, but I feel one stare burning hotter than the rest, blue eyes cutting through the crowd like a gas torch. She is sitting in the back row next to Nora, watching this sweet reunion with my childhood friend.

What is she thinking? What dark visions does she see when she looks at me now?

I pull my eyes away from her and narrow them on Paul. I leap onto the stage and grab him by his bristly shirt and shove him back through the curtain. He is still too stunned to resist. We emerge from the thick purple cloth into a typical theater backstage: cables snaking over black plywood floors, lighting rigs climbing up the walls—same as any other big show.

“You can’t do this,” I growl, releasing my grip on his shirt. “There are thousands of people in Post.”

But he doesn’t hear me. His eyes rove across my face, wide and rapt. “You’ve barely aged,” he says, tilting his head. “What happened to you? Did God take you up like Elijah?”

“God didn’t take me anywhere. I found my own way into Hell.”

“What—”

“It doesn’t matter, Paul, I’m alive, and I’m…” I bite back the flood of words. I need to let him process his shock and get over the mystery of my appearance so he can actually hear me. “…I’m here.”

I leave it there and wait.

“You’re here,” he says, nodding. Then without any further analysis, a smile flickers through his confusion. Not smug, not cruel…hopeful. “Are you here to help finish what we started?” The smile broadens, lighting up his eyes. “Will you help me spread the Fire?”

And suddenly I see him. He’s peering out at me through the eyeholes of this leathery suit of armor. The kid I grew up with, played pretend with, went to church with, feared the world with, feared our parents with, feared Hell with, feared our own bodies and minds until we detached ourselves from both. Another kind of Orientation.

My anger collapses.

“Paul,” I mutter, shaking my head. “It’s all wrong.”

“We’re so close now!” He grips my shoulders. “We’ve come so far since they took you from us!”

“They didn’t take me, Paul, I left. I got tired of waiting for permission to die. I decided to try living.”

“Can’t you feel it in the air? God’s finally going to move!”

There’s a strange glaze in his eyes, like he’s looking right through me, muting out my words, and I understand why. The math is simple: I was like him, so if something could change me then something could change him, unmake his world, blow down his fortress of belief and leave him exposed.

Unthinkable. Impossible. There must be some mistake.

“He’s going to set us free!” Paul gushes. “We just have to prove we really want him to!” He’s shaking me now. His eyes glisten. “I know it’s a hard doctrine, it’s hard to think about all those deaths, but who are we to doubt God’s will? Once we pass this final test…he’ll do it! He’ll burn this nightmare away and take us home!”

“Paul…” I firm my face and look up, meeting his feverish gaze. “The world is our home.”

He blinks at me and pulls back, holding me at arm’s length.

“Yes, there are nightmares in it,” I tell him. “Horror and grief. But I’ve found good things, too. Things to live for. People to live for. I’ve found love here…” My voice cracks. “…and it’s beautiful.” My eyes burn but I keep them open. “It’s true, even when it changes. Even when it ends.”

Paul’s face is contracting inward, his body stiffening, recoiling. “There were rumors,” he says in a suddenly lowered rumble. “About your family…connections to Axiom leadership…” His eyes narrow to slits, cutting off my view of what’s inside. “What have you been doing all these years since you left us?”

I hear footsteps. I glance behind me. The young man from the armored circus—Lindh—is standing just inside the curtain, breathing heavily. “Pastor Bark,” he gasps, “we have a problem.”

But Paul ignores Lindh like he ignored me. “Have you been led astray, Brother Atvist? Did you let the world corrupt you?” His face is contorting with anger and perhaps a little relief; the uncertain hope is gone from his voice and the theatrical bombast is back. “Did you come to help spread the Fire, or to sow doubt and dissension? Why are you here, Brother Atvist?”

Lindh rushes to his side and whispers something in his ear. Paul’s eyes widen. His scarred face reddens. “You brought them here?” he asks me, but it’s more a gasp of disbelief than a question.

I frown. “Brought them? What are you—”

He advances toward me. He is half a foot shorter, but his body is a tight coil of rage. I back away from him. I feel the curtain slide around my shoulders and I’m on the stage again, the blinding lights, Paul’s voice booming through the PA. It suddenly occurs to me that our entire conversation was probably picked up by his headset. My eyes dart through the crowd, looking for Julie, but Paul is still advancing toward me.

“Some of you may remember this man,” he bellows to the congregation, “but he is no longer the man we knew. He has left our fellowship and turned his back on the Fire and he has fucking betrayed us!”

He shoves me in the chest. I stumble over the edge of the stage and land hard on my back; the stiff beige carpet knocks the wind out of me. As I struggle to inflate my lungs, two meaty hands clamp onto my shoulders and hoist me to my feet.

“Time to go, preacher boy,” M mutters in my ear.

I glance around, trying to get my bearings and make sense of this whirlwind, but M is dragging me toward the exit. I see Tomsen waiting there in the foyer, hopping from foot to foot.

“Now, now, now,” she hisses at us. “Are they coming with us or not?”

Julie steps into the foyer. Nora is behind her.

Nora looks at M. Rage foams up in her like a chemical reaction and M tenses, but she looks away and swallows hard and seems to contain it. With her head still down, eyes to the side, she jabs a finger at him and mumbles, “Deal with you later.”

But I’m only peripherally aware of their exchange. Julie is staring at me in a way I haven’t seen since we first met, when the question “What are you?” meant so much less. Her eyes roam my face like she’s searching for seams and zippers, and I want to grab her and kiss her and say You know me! with such conviction that she has no choice but to believe. But I say nothing.

“Can you guys do whatever this is later?” Tomsen says, glancing between the four of us. “They’re almost here.”

“Who?” I finally ask, but even as I ask it I hear the answer rising from somewhere outside, a rumbling hum like a bass chord with too many notes. It’s the sound of truck engines. Many, many truck engines.

“Your co-workers,” Tomsen says. “Former, I hope.”

Through the glass doors, I see a convoy of beige trucks cresting the hill in a cloud of dust. I see the jagged mandalas painted on their hoods.

“Julie?” Nora says, shooting her a meaningful look. “I think I’m ready.”

-

WE SKIRT THE TOWN SQUARE and run into the leaf-strewn side streets, and Julie doesn’t talk to me. She stays at the front with Nora and doesn’t look back. I remember the youthful fantasy of the crisis that solves everything, the asteroid or alien invasion that renders all conflicts moot with no need for painful resolutions. But does this curative effect still work when we’ve already been through the apocalypse? Has disaster lost its potency?

We pass the bookstore where we parked the RV but Nora seems to have another destination in mind. The humid heat makes my skin sticky before I even start to sweat. A few raindrops hit the back of my neck like a cold finger tapping a warning.

A familiar building looms ahead, mossy and half absorbed into the forest behind it: the hospital, or whatever function it might serve now, with its hidden gravel road to a secret in the woods. Nora crashes through the front door and whirls left and right. “Addis!” she shouts, storming from room to room, tripping over piles of toys and knocking aside strange medical instruments. “Addis!”

A heavy, windowless double door opens a crack and an elderly woman in a lab coat peeks out. “Ms. Greene? What’s the matter, dear?”

“Where is he?”

“Addis? He’s still sleeping, along with all the others. Please keep your voice down.”

“Addis doesn’t sleep,” Nora snaps. “He hasn’t slept once since—” She cuts off as she registers the lab coat, its spattering of mysterious stains. “What is that? What the fuck are you wearing?”

“I beg your pardon?”

A shudder runs down Nora’s body. A tremor of rage and shame, like she has just completed a puzzle to reveal an image of her house being robbed.

She shoves the door open so hard the woman tumbles over backward. I am momentarily horrified as her brittle body crashes into a table and tools rain down on her, but then my eyes take in the context of the room, and I understand.

An echoing open space lit by the feeble glow of tiny windows. Dangling bulbs whose light doesn’t reach the ceiling. A few work stations with implements that aren’t quite medical or scientific: radios and stacks of photos, odd wooden rods and toy-like knitted things, like aids for some obscure form of therapy. And all along the walls, pacing slowly in chain-link cages: the patients.

Julie speaks for the first time, a bleak murmur. “Everywhere we go. Over and over.”

The patients are Dead, of course, hundreds of them, apparently sorted by decomposition levels. Nearest to us are the fresh ones: men, women, and children who look confused and hungry but otherwise normal in the dim light. In the middle: battered wrecks with dangling guts, gaping holes, missing eyes and faces—though no missing limbs, I notice. And at the back, hunching and lurching in the shadows like emaciated apes…the transitionals. Hairless, eyeless, naked and withered, hanging over the abyss and preparing to cut the rope.

How versatile the plague is. What a variety of tools one can mold from its cold clay. Whichever direction your particular madness drives you, whether to build misery or demolish joy, the plague is ready to serve.

“Addis!” Nora shrieks, running to a cage near the front. I see the boy inside, huddled in a corner while the adults stumble around in an agitated mob. A collective groan rises as the scent of life wafts through the space. One by one, the cages begin to rattle.

“Addis!” Nora yanks on the gate, trying to snap the padlock. She glances back at the doorway, but the old woman is gone. Nora forces a wordless scream through gritted teeth as she tries to snap steel.

“Nora,” Tomsen says, tapping her tool kit against Nora’s arm. “I can do it.” Without waiting for Nora’s response, she nudges her aside and crouches down to pick the lock. “But once I’ve done it,” she adds as she works, “a lot of bad things are going to happen very quickly so you should all get ready to—oh.” The lock clicks. “I’m getting good at that.”

The gate swings open and the Dead spill out. But before Nora can plunge into the mob, M rushes past her, holding a workstation table in front of him like a bulldozer blade. He plows the Dead back into the cage and pins them against the wall while Addis crawls through their kicking legs. M gives a last hard shove and drops the table, backs out of the cage and slams the door shut.

Nora and Addis both stare at him as he pauses to catch his breath. I wonder if Nora’s about to thank him, but no, this day won’t allow any such warmth. I knew from the moment I woke up: this day wants to be war.

A series of barked commands echo through the streets outside, and the air erupts with gunfire.

“What the hell is happening?” Nora yells to the ceiling.

“Guessing Axiom overheard the sermon,” Tomsen says. “Guessing they’re cracking down on religious liberty. Guessing we’re surrounded.”

Julie is shaking her head, lost in some private lament. She doesn’t even look up when the doors fling open and men in riot gear pour into the room. I grab her hand and run for the back exit, preparing to dodge bullets, but no one shoots at us. No one even chases us. I realize these people aren’t Axiom troops; they’re Ardents—but what are they doing? Why are they jabbing poles at their Dead prisoners and banging on their cages? Why are they wasting time teasing zombies while their town is under attack?

Just before I run out, I catch a glimpse of a cage door opening.

God’s House is emptying like a high school party busted by the cops. There are more direct comparisons involving cult compounds and federal agents, but this is the one that sticks in my mind. A mob of drunk, surly teenagers shouting empty threats while bored officers duck them into cruisers.

And Paul Bark, the nerd that would be prom king, shouting louder than anyone.

“You think your little pistols can stop God’s plan? Nothing has ever happened that God didn’t want to happen! God gets what he wants!”

I watch from behind abandoned cars and dumpsters as we sneak our way toward the RV. The bookstore that seemed so secluded when we parked behind it is now on the crackling edge of this conflagration. We advance in quick bursts, dashing between buildings in groups of two, hoping Axiom is too busy containing the church to worry about a few stragglers.

“Do you really want to fuck with the guy who invented Hell?” Paul is almost screaming now. “Do you really want to fuck with his servants?” His hands are raised over his head while a soldier prods him toward a Hummer, but he makes it look like a charismatic stage gesture. “Our God burns babies in his divine justice and we praise him all the more! We are harder than you pussies can imagine! We—”

He stops walking. To my amazement, he stops talking. The soldier jabs him in the back with his rifle but Paul doesn’t move. A strangely serene smile replaces his fiery glare.

“We bathe in God’s wrath every day,” he says, still projecting but softer now. “We are always braced and ready for it. Are you?”

There’s a gunshot. A scream. I see a soldier grappling with a shriveled human form, then he disappears into a surging swarm of them. The Dead flood the square from every street and alley, a rushing river of mutilated flesh, starving eyes, gnashing teeth.

I am standing in the middle of an intersection, and I hear my friends hissing at me from the other side, but I can’t move. I watch Paul Bark run away. I watch the rest of the congregation scatter. I see guns firing, some at the Ardents, others at the more immediate threat. The rain makes a soft patter as it falls in misty sheets.

“R!”

I blink water out of my eyes. Julie is pulling on my arm, trying to drag me across the street. But then M and Tomsen and Nora and Addis are running back toward us, away from an oncoming parade of disemboweled horrors. There is no clear direction to run. The Dead are everywhere.

Bullets zip through the space between us and slap into the nearest corpses and I see my friends flinging themselves backward to avoid the line of fire. Julie yanks me to the ground. We crawl out of the street and huddle against a wall until the shooting moves elsewhere, and when we stand up again, I can’t see the others.

“Nora!” Julie shouts, but if Nora replies, it’s lost in the gunfire and rain. The rain is not soft anymore. It’s becoming a roar.

“Nora!”

The Dead appear to be ignoring us, too focused on the men shooting at them, but the riot around us is impenetrable. Julie is on her tip-toes, scanning frantically, but her eyes barely reach the average chest. In another life we’d be at a concert, and she would struggle to see the band until I lift her up on my shoulders, and then she’d bend down and kiss my forehead and pump her fists to the beat. In this life, she screams her friend’s name and claws at the tall zombie blocking her view. When he spins around and snarls at her, I smash his face with my elbow and he collapses, drastically reduced in stature.

“Hold on,” I tell her. I stretch to my full height and skim the top of the crowd. The soldiers have formed a perimeter around their vehicles and managed to keep the center clear. Some of the more sentient Dead are starting to notice the rising piles of corpses and are turning around and retreating like creatures who value their existence. The shriveled black transitionals still provide a steady stream of targets, hissing and wheezing and clawing the air with skinless fingertips, but there is enough breathing room that some of the soldiers have run off in pursuit of the fleeing Ardents.

I observe all this as black-and-white static around the bright red center of my attention.

“Do you see them?” Julie says, reading the alarm in my face.

I see them.

M’s polished dome towers above the crowd. Nora’s buoyant hair bobs next to it. The swirling currents of bullets and teeth have pushed them inside Axiom’s perimeter, and they shuffle toward a van with guns at their backs.

Bracing myself for Julie’s reaction, I deliver my report: “Captured.”

“No.” She grinds her teeth, straining to see for herself. “God damn it, no!”

I can’t say I’m surprised when she charges in after them.

-

I PROTECT JULIE and Julie protects me. This has always been the bargain. When a man twice her size goes in for the kill, I smash his face, and when my wandering mind leaves my body unoccupied, she drags me away from the bullets. It’s a good arrangement, and I believe it still holds, but this would be a very bad time to test it. As we shove our way through the stampede of the Dead, I remind myself for the hundredth time that I’m not immune to the invisible venom that’s coursing through their teeth. All it takes is a nip. One moment of distraction and my new life ends, erased and reset to gray like a shaken Etch-A-Sketch.

Let it happen, the wretch mumbles. Get us out of this mess you’ve made, all this pain and guilt and embarrassment. Wasn’t it easier in the gray?

I’m not finished, I tell him. I have to fix what we broke.

You tried, he sighs. It was too hard.

I squeeze my eyes shut to slam the basement door, and when I open them a second later, a Dead man is lunging for my throat. I fling him into the mud and stomp a boot into his kneecaps while the wretch chuckles sourly.

Normally I’d be more aggressive, smashing skulls and stomping brains, but knowing that these corpses still have people in them complicates combat. Most look like they don’t even want to be here; I see more confusion than hunger and some are trying to turn back, but the oily black proto-Boneys push forward with such ferocity it sweeps them up in the current.

In prison and afterward, I learned countless ways to kill with my hands. I resist them now. The Dead are focused on Axiom, so a well-placed kick to the back is all it takes to move them. But when we break through into the square…what then? Does Julie have a plan? It’s hard to imagine any outcome better than joining our friends in captivity. Maybe that’s all she wants.

A burst of gunfire goes off close enough to muffle my hearing. We are suddenly an island in a lake of fallen bodies.

“Stop right there.”

The voice brings a crazed chuckle to my throat. In my mind this man was gone; I wished him well and cut him loose to live out his days in the empty isolation he craved. But here he is again, standing at the mouth of an alley with two other men in beige jackets, rifle raised, eyes empty.

“I do not fucking believe this,” Julie says, staring at Abram Kelvin through mats of rain-soaked hair.

“Shut up,” Abram barks. “Hands against the wall.”

Gritting her teeth, Julie obeys. I do likewise, but I watch him over my shoulder.

“Cover me,” he tells the other soldiers, and they turn around to face the swarm. Abram pulls my hands behind my back and slaps cuffs on my wrists.

“You absolute motherfucker,” she hisses as the steel snaps into her flesh. “You can’t be back with them.”

“I’m with whoever I have to be,” he mutters.

“Abram.” The softness in my voice makes him pause. “We found Sprout.”

It’s like I’ve uttered a spell that freezes time.

“Where is she?”

“Let us go and we’ll show you.”

The swarm has thinned. All the fresher Dead have either fled or been killed. What remains is isolated groups of hobbling, flesh-coated skeletons, and the convoy is picking them off one by one. One of Abram’s partners turns and frowns. “You know these people, Roberts?”

“Met them this morning when I was scouting. They preached at me for a while.”

“Well move it along, man, we’re wrapping up here.”

Abram raises his rifle and jabs it at me. “Move.”

He stays behind us with the gun in my back while the other two walk a few paces in front, scanning the corpse-strewn streets.

“I’m not lying,” I tell him. “She’s with us.”

“I believe you,” he says under his breath. “And I’ll get her when we’re done here.”

“You don’t know where—”

“Could she possibly be in the big yellow parade float parked behind the bookstore? Not exactly a stealth transport.”

“Abram,” Julie says quietly, her anger melting into sheer confusion and hurt. “Why are you doing this?”

No reply. Boots squelching in blood-reddened mud.

“I could believe you’d ditch us in New York but not that you’d go back to them. You’re an asshole but you’re not an idiot.”

“It’s temporary,” he growls. “Means to an end.”

“What end? Finding Sprout? You found her! Drop these fuckers and let’s get out of here.”

Abram glances past her. The two soldiers are occupied with the surrounding situation; the hiss of the rain muffles our voices. “It’s not that simple.”

“Yeah, because it feels good to be back in the machine, doesn’t it? Nice and safe on the winning side?”

“Abram.” I stop marching and turn around. His eyes flash with warning but he doesn’t raise the gun. “Perry had to die before he understood why he was alive. Don’t wait as long as he did.”

“The fuck is going on back there?” one of the soldiers barks over his shoulder. “Move your prisoners, Roberts!”

“Your father wasn’t weak. He was good.” I look straight into his eyes. “And your brother wasn’t stupid for loving that girl on the playground.”

Abram’s eyes go wide. “Shut up and march!” he yelps, jabbing me in the ribs with the rifle barrel. I grimace but I stand my ground.

“Every good thing is worth fighting for. No matter how long it lasts.”

His eyes scan me up and down, his mind racing for explanations, but I’m not trying to shock him with my secret knowledge. I’m just trying to reach him however I can. I feel Julie’s eyes on me too, but I pretend not to notice. I turn and resume marching.

The “battle” has ended. Unleashing the Dead was an effective diversion and even managed to take out a few soldiers, but it bought the Fire Church twenty minutes at most. The troops dissolve their formation and climb into their vehicles. I see the prisoner van. The doors are still open and it looks like there’s room for us. I see our friends inside and they see us. I see Nora drop her head into her hands. I see M looking at his feet, eyes full of shame. I see Tomsen rubbing her scalp with manic intensity. And I see the boy, Addis, staring at me, through me.

A hard shove from behind. I stumble into a shadowed alleyway and Julie falls in after me.

Abram stands in the opening, silhouetted against the gray sky. “Two things before I never see you again. One”—he looks at me—“you’re fighting a giant. You can’t win. Get out of its way before it crushes you. And two”—he looks at Julie— “the Burners have your mother.”

And then he’s gone.

“What the fuck?” Julie says in a shaky whisper.

I twist around to look at my cuffs. The key is sticking out of the lock.

“He’s lying, right?” she says, still staring at the spot where he was standing. “She’s not really here, he just said that so we wouldn’t go after him, right?”

I present my cuffs to Julie. She sees the key. She unlocks me and I unlock her.

“What do we do?” she mutters to no one. “I don’t know what to do.”

I peek out from the alley. Knobby tires are grinding over corpses as the convoy pulls out of the square. Prisoner transports go straight down the hill while trucks and SUVs spread out in search of fugitive Ardents. I see Nora’s face in the rear window of the departing van. She sees us. She waves.

“This isn’t happening,” Julie snarls, digging her fingers into her scalp. “It can’t.”

Her eyes dart to the barrel of a shotgun poking up from a pile of corpses, and I recognize a dangerous threshold approaching. Julie is smart, and surprisingly rational for a self-proclaimed dreamer. But as I’ve witnessed more than once in others and myself, every cup has its brim.

She grabs the gun and runs after the van.

Nora is violently shaking her head, mouthing No! but I doubt Julie even sees her through the blur of tears. What do we do? What do I do?

I run after her.

Everything slows. I feel each second like heirloom china slipping through my fingers, precious and irreplaceable. Why? What does my mind know that I don’t? My surroundings snap into map-like clarity, every building and street etched in vibrating lines.

Ten feet ahead of me, framed by falling globes of water, Julie is running.

Forty feet ahead of her, the van and the rest of the convoy are approaching the crest of the hill.

Thirty feet ahead of the convoy, a freight door is sliding open on the front of a large warehouse.

A woman is staggering out from the shadows, naked and mutilated, eyes wide with fear.

Julie stumbles and stops. Her mouth opens, and it feels like minutes before the scream comes out.

“Mom!”

Audrey sees her daughter. She recognizes her daughter. She smiles and starts toward her. And then the shadows behind her fill with bodies, a dense mob of mangled corpses rushing into the street with the speed only starvation gives them in their dark inversion of biology.

I’ve never seen Julie run so fast. She’s halfway to her mother before I’ve processed what’s happening. The convoy revs forward and tries to plow through the mob; the Dead jam themselves into wheel wells and smash through windshields and I hear screeching tires and gunfire but I don’t pause to determine the convoy’s fate, even though it’s also my friends’. I run toward Julie as she runs toward her mother.

I see her shotgun flashing fire. I see it swinging to crack skulls or snap necks or simply push bodies back—whatever clears a path. She knows there’s no third life for these ruined creatures. She’s only ending their long nightmare. I’m right behind her now, and as she lowers her gun to grab her mother’s hand, I see the swarm closing in around her.

I release my restraints. I begin to kill.

Unarmed combat with the Dead is an absurd proposition. They feel no pain, their organs are irrelevant, and even broken bones are no obstacle for the force that animates their limbs—tissues stiffen around the break and they keep moving. But there are ways. I would quickly destroy my hands trying to punch through skulls, but I find that my elbows work nicely, especially once I’ve peeled them down to pointy shivs of bone.

Craniums crack like eggs on a pan. The feeling is hideous and more satisfying than I’d like to admit. Were Paul and Mr. Atvist right about the violence in everyone? Am I proving the wisdom of the devils that duel on my shoulders? I don’t care. All I want is to get Julie through this. I want to lift her out of this churning sea and set her safe on the shore, and once I’ve done that…

Two bloated, putrefying men get ahold of her shirt and yank her backwards. I rush up behind them and smash their heads together so hard they deform like rotten melons. Julie turns. She sees me. She and her mother are free of the swarm; the street is wide open ahead of them. I offer an encouraging smile and open my mouth to say something—

My teeth bite tinfoil, my nails scrape chalkboards, there are wasps in my hair, a cut cable in my neck, electricity knotting my nerves, splitting my bones, aluminum and bile in my mouth—it happened.

It happened.

Instant, unavoidable, like a drunk driver hurtling around a corner—how did it ever feel unlikely? How did the danger feel distant? A single glass-crack second and everything is gone.

I hear Julie screaming. I am sticky with cold gore; did she shoot the one that bit me? It doesn’t matter. The electricity is baking my blood into fat black worms and I feel them wriggling through my veins. It hurts. It shouldn’t be possible for anything to hurt this much; I should go into shock or black out completely, but I don’t. I feel every shrieking detail.

The first time I met the plague, I embraced it with a tired sigh. This time I know what I’m losing.

Julie is clinging to my shirt, sobbing, but there’s no time for any words worth saying. The bite is in my neck, inches from my brain—it will happen fast. Even if she can bring herself to shoot me, I won’t give her that trauma as my parting gift. I will exit the stage gracefully.

I pull her hands off me.

I take a step back.

I grant myself five seconds to look into her eyes. To let her see all the love I wanted to give her. To mourn for a future that died in its chrysalis.

Then I run into the forest.

WE

ABRAM IS BARELY LISTENING to the exchange between the soldiers and himself. Something about his prisoners escaping, how did that happen, which way did they go—he can’t find an excuse to go alone, so he suffers their presence. He drives to the bookstore, taking side streets to avoid the mess in the center of town, and he knows he should offer some explanation for this stop—There! They got in that RV!—but he’s too weighted with real emotion to play his role right now. He ignores their inquiries as he parks and gets out. He ignores the squawk of his walkie demanding backup for corpse control. He ignores everything as he approaches the RV.

He tries the door. It’s locked, but he hears movement inside. A scattering of tiny feet.

“Murasaki?” he says.

The movement stops.

“Sprout, is that you? Open the door.”

The soldiers’ voices become forceful enough to penetrate his awareness. “Roberts! Who the hell is Sprout? There’s no way your prisoners got this far on foot.”

“She’s not my prisoner,” Abram mumbles.

“Well whoever it is, shoot the lock and let’s get on with it. You heard the call for backup.”

A small, scared voice from inside: “Daddy? Who are those men?”

Abram grits his teeth. “They’re my friends, Sprout. We’re going to take you somewhere safe.”

“Where’s Julie? Where’s R?”

“It doesn’t matter where they are!” he snaps. “I’m your father and I’m here.”

“It’s your daughter?” one of the men groans. “What the fuck is this, man? Do I need to call Abbot?”

Abram’s hands clench around his rifle. Could he kill them? Was the blond bitch right? Now that he has what he came for, could he shoot his way through the whole convoy and run for the woods? But even if he could, would he do it in front of Sprout? He imagines her face smeared with their blood, her good eye wide and round with permanent shock, and he relaxes his grip on the gun. He thrusts an index finger back at the soldiers, one minute.

“It’s okay, little weed. Just open the door and we’ll go home together.”

Sprout pulls a gap in the window shade and peeks out at him. Her soft, round face, hardened barely at all since the day she emerged from her mother. She’s safe. He has not yet failed her completely.

But he has failed her. He can feel it. She watches him through the window, and though the hesitation is barely three seconds, it’s a tiny knife sliding into his ribs. Finally she opens the door and stands there, waiting. He wraps his arms around her and lifts her out, clutching her head against his neck. “My baby,” he murmurs, inhaling the clean scent of her sweat, remembering all those unwell nights, her flus and fevers and night terrors. “You’re safe now.”

He realizes she is stiff in his embrace. Her head is resting on his shoulder because he’s forcing it there. When he releases the pressure, she pulls back.

He sets her down with a ripple of shame and fear.

“Daddy,” Sprout says, staring at the two silently fuming soldiers. “They’re wearing those jackets. Are they going to hurt us? Are they—” Then she sees it. Abram squirms as she studies its contours, its logo, then looks up at him, confused and searching. His jacket is full of wasps and he wants to tear it off and throw it away—but not now. Later, when the right moment comes. When it’s safe.

“Let’s go, Mura,” he mumbles, leading her back to the Hummer with a hand on her back. He tries not to acknowledge that he’s avoiding her gaze.

“Are these yours too?” one of the men grumbles.

Abram looks up from fastening Sprout’s seatbelt and sees the men dragging a blond boy and a brown girl out of the RV. His heart twists.

“No,” he says. “Never seen them before.”

He feels far away, like the world is the surface of a lake fading from view as he sinks.

“Good. They look like prime material for Orientation.”

Abram clenches his jaw as they truss the kids’ wrists and ankles and toss them in the back of the truck like sheared sheep. He hears a voice in his head, and it’s not ours—in this moment, we have nothing to tell him that he’s not already telling himself. The voice is his own, though he barely recognizes its fragility.

I’m sorry, R.

Audrey’s daughter is crying. Sobbing. She is screaming a single syllable over and over as she drags Audrey away from the noise of the massacre and into the surrounding trees.

“R! R!”

Was that the man’s name? The tall, quiet man who was never far from Julie’s side, always there to calm her rage or comfort her grief? The way he looked at her. The soft stare at the side of her face or the back of her head, a yearning to see inside. Audrey knows that look and she knows what it means. She remembers it from another man, another life, so many centuries ago.

“R!” her daughter shrieks a final time, then drops to her hands and knees in the mud. Her breathing sounds tight; there’s a whistle in it. Audrey remembers this too. An image of Julie as a little girl clutching her throat in a wild panic, her airways closing tighter with every terrified gasp. On some old instinct Audrey glances around for the cure, the thing that makes it stop, but she has nothing. She is naked.

She stumbles back out of the trees and digs through the pockets of a few dead Ardents, but she doesn’t find it. She feels the rain on her back. She feels it on her exposed organs, like a ghost’s cold fingers wrapping around her heart. She pulls the white overcoat off one of the corpses and returns to her daughter.

The whistling has stopped. Julie’s shoulders still heave with the strain, but her breaths are no longer gasps. Did Julie make it stop by herself? Without any outside cure? Audrey didn’t know that was possible. There is a lot Audrey doesn’t know. She wonders how much she will get to learn before the ice of the plague thaws and she floats further down the river.

“I can’t let him go, Mom.”

Julie’s voice is a throaty rasp. Her wet hair hangs into her face, her tears merging with the rivulets of rain.

“I don’t know what I’m doing. Everything’s fucked. But I can’t let him go.”

“Love,” Audrey mumbles.

Julie pushes herself upright and kneels there in the mud, staring up at her mother. “What did you say?”

Audrey looks away. She can’t find the thoughts to expound any further. All she has is the word.

“Love.”

Julie rubs her face in her hands, smearing mud across her cheeks. “I let you die, Mom.” Her eyes are red pools. Her shoulders are heaving again, but not from the asthma. “I let Dad die. And Perry, and Rosy. And now R is—” Her voice breaks. It drops to a whimper. “Don’t say ‘love’ to me.”

She is shivering. Audrey moves to drape the lab coat over her but Julie sweeps it off violently and springs to her feet. “No. No, Mom.” Her hands tremble as she wraps it around Audrey and jerks her arms through the sleeves. “You wear it.”

She zips it up with a hard yank, catching a little skin—Audrey feels the muted pinch—then looks back the way they came, toward the rain-drenched carnage unfolding in the town. Gunshots. Shouts. The roar of trucks patrolling the perimeter, rounding up the Living and the Dead. Audrey closes her eyes. The noise of war muffles and fades, giving way to a new sound deep in her head. The rustling of leaves. Pages. The whisper of many voices.

Julie grabs her hand and pulls her into the forest.

I

THE CROWS are watching me.

Rats peer at me from tangles of roots.

Insects squirm in the mud beneath me, poking at my back: Can we have you?

I hear rushing sounds. Wind. A river. The blood in my ears. Raindrops spatter against my face, pooling in my staring eyes and gaping mouth, but I don’t blink or swallow. My vision is a watery blur, beyond which is nothing but dark gray, like the light in the tunnel to Heaven has gone out.

Death is taking longer than I expected. Instead of rushing straight to my head, the black worms take leisurely detours through my body, saving the brain for last. Just like I taught them.

My left shoulder is gone. The arm will go next.

My veins constrict against the worms, slowing them down a little, but they squeeze in like oversized syringes, stretching and splitting me open. But it doesn’t hurt anymore. There is nothing so loud and passionate as agony. The sensation is closer to sadness, somehow localized in the flesh itself. The muscles are weary, unable to summon energy, their fibers saturated with the brine of despair. And then my arm is gone.

Will I lose everything all over again? Will I tumble all the way to the base of Mount Purgatory and rise from this mud erased? What broken samsara is this?

I blink the rain from my eyes and see the rats creeping out of their holes, inching closer. A bold crow pecks at my arm and glares at me with one glassy eye as if daring me to challenge its claim.

I drift through my layers of lives. I remember a typical night for the wretch. The curdled cocktail of exhaustion and insomnia. The writhing half-sleep filled with vague troubles and terrors. And then the morning, trussed up in the sheets, aware of the world like a deep-sea fish is aware of the sky, an unreachable abstraction miles above the darkness. The feeling that I could sink forever if nothing pulled me up.

And then the jolt of rage. The surge of defiance that galvanized my limbs and filled my lungs with breath. I won’t let you win, I’d snarl at that moaning, meaningless darkness. I won’t let you have my short time on earth.

I’ve been fighting the plague since the day I was born. Most battles I’ve lost, but some I’ve won, and that’s all the proof I need that it’s beatable.

I stand up.

The rats scatter and the crows fly off, squawking in outrage.

I shake the mud off my back and start walking. My arm swings limp from my torso. I feel the worms change course and head for my legs, rushing to quell this rebellion before it spreads. I clench a muscle that doesn’t exist, and I feel the worms slow again, caught in the tangle of my ribcage. I hold them there, striding briskly along the river like a man who knows where he’s going, though I’ve never been more lost.

The river is deep. It flows swiftly but its surface remains calm, disrupted only by the rain: fat drops that strike hard enough to splash. This river is familiar to me. Something about the smoothness of the water. The way the trees lean out over it like they’re trying to touch each other. Have I been here before? In dreams or in life?

The worms thrust forward and brush against my stomach. Numbness spreads like I’ve swallowed ice cubes, and I hear a familiar voice.

Eat.

A bitter chuckle escapes my throat. I’d forgotten all about that one. The voice that taught me the rules of my second life. The brute that barked relentlessly like a dog demanding dinner, until our desires finally merged.

Take. Eat. Fight. Win. Fuck. Kill. Survive.

It swells back into my mind like a loop that was muted but never stopped playing. It rises through the floor of the basement from some forgotten pit deeper than the foundation itself. Even the wretch recoils.

Take. Take. Take.

I grit my teeth and focus on the river. In my memory, the water was a sickly yellow-brown, as if tainted with chemicals. Now it’s blue-green nectar, like liquid sky and forest. The land has begun to purge itself. Could it be that time does more than corrupt? Is there nuance to the law of entropy?

I cling to this as I follow the river. It curves like a finger, beckoning me deeper into the woods, but it is not seductive. It is harsh and commanding, an official summons to be ignored at my peril. I walk with my head low, full of dread.

The sky dulls from silver to iron as night approaches. I have walked thousands of miles; I have circumnavigated the world, and all of it is this forest. This river. This pain and this fear. But then: something new. Something sticking out of the water. Not a tree. Not a rock. A sheet of metal, bent and rusted, a faded logo barely visible under the moss.

Does this river have a name? Does anyone know it’s here, tucked deep in this northwestern jungle? Maps are useless in a suggestible universe. Borders bend, dots drift, miles expand and contract. The land is dreaming, and I find it hard to say for certain that this river really exists. But in this moment, for me, it’s here. And this tail fin is here, rising out of the water. These wings are here, bent around two massive trees, prop blades embedded in their trunks. And this crumpled fuselage is here, half-buried in the mud, poking up from seven years of fallen leaves. A life I still can’t believe was mine. An accusation I can’t put to rest.

The worms creep down my side and into my hip.

I limp forward like an old man, each step a battle, feeling a strange certainty that my destination—whatever it might be—is just ahead. Just behind this curtain of branches. Through this wall of brush. Past this knotted tangle of thorny vines. I feel a sense of trespass, like I’m burrowing through primal layers into secret places not meant for man.

I stumble out of the thicket, bleeding from a hundred scratches, and I’m there. A secret, yes, but I’ve seen it before. A small clearing in the ancient cedars, almost completely lightless beneath their opaque canopy. The rain barely leaks through; the ground is slippery but firm. The river’s gurgle is the only sound in this damp, dark womb.

There is not much left of the bodies. Loose piles of bones, picked clean and scattered by animals, skulls peeking out from profusions of mushrooms. But the clothes are still there: four Axiom uniforms laid out in the rough shape of men, their synthetic fabrics still bright and crisp, insisting that nothing is wrong.

And the briefcase, of course. My mission. It lies exactly where my last life left it, its aluminum shell resisting the years, half-buried in rot but refusing to disappear.

It takes me a minute to find the red dress. Only a few scraps remain, draped over her crumbling ribcage. Her skull sneers at me like it did in life. The hole in her forehead is an all-seeing eye.

“Were you right about me?” I croak, struggling to find my voice. “Have I done more harm than good?”

Rosa doesn’t answer, but the river sounds like laughter. Raindrops work their way through the canopy and fall like giant tears.

“Please tell me.” My eyes are starting to blur again. “Should I let it end?”

The numbing pressure abandons my leg and begins climbing back up. The worms are tired of toying with me. They are going for the kill.

I look into the empty holes that once held beautiful eyes, and behind those, a mind I was afraid to touch. I never even learned her last name. But whoever she was, whatever madness brought her to Axiom and to me, she deserved better than this. Better than rotting unburied and unmourned in this inhuman vastness of trees.

As the worms creep into my throat, I pick up a scrap of metal and begin to dig.

It’s not a very good grave. I can’t manage the proper six feet with my crude shovel and vanishing limbs. But when I climb out of the hole and look back into its dark center, I can see it as a resting place. A closure. If not for her, then at least for me, because there must be some meaning to a ritual this ancient. Some way to bring dignity to death.

I gather her bones and drop them into the grave. I toss aside the shovel and scoop the earth with my bare hands, feeling its texture, the bits of roots and tiny organisms. I strain to recall what little I knew of this woman to write a eulogy for her in my mind, and as I search my memory, I feel a sense of expansion. My mind is a small room lined with bookcases, but when I reach into the shelves, I find no wall behind them. My thoughts push through my skull into some deeper space beyond.

And then voices. A crowd.

We will show you.

My feet slip in the mud, and I fall into the grave.

-

THE SHALLOW HOLE has become bottomless, expanding all around me into a vast darkness. But somewhere out in that nothingness, slowly moving closer, I see light and motion. A stream of colorful rectangles rushing past me as I fall.

Books.

A wall of books, an expanse, extending in all directions until it disappears into the shadows. All my dreams and nightmares and teasing glimpses of mysteries—I feel them adding to a sum.

I know this place.

Outside the cramped garret of my mind, past my impoverished collection of self-help bestsellers, movie-adapted pulp, and barely-opened classics propped up by beer bottles, there is a Library. A place I have sensed but never seen. A place that is not a place but a reality beyond atoms. And somehow…I am there.

I am no longer falling. I am standing on a balcony at the base of a towering shelf. The balcony runs out of sight in both directions, lit in dim orange patches by unseen lights. Beyond the railing: a dark gulf, then another wall of books. I look up. Another balcony, and another above that, and on and on until they disappear into the golden glow of some impossibly lofty skylight. The level where I stand is utilitarian: metal shelves, tile floors, the dull municipal efficiency of a small-town branch, but the architecture grows more beautiful with each floor until its ornate intricacies become a blur in the hazy heights. The desire I feel to explore those shelves is an exquisite agony—but there is no way up.

Not for you, the voices say. Not yet.

Who are they? Which members of my ever-expanding inner ensemble are these? There was a time when I heard the murmurings of the minds I’d eaten, a room full of weary souls reminiscing on the past. I hear these now, but they have joined a much larger chorus.

“When?” I ask them. The sound hits the silence like a boulder in a still pool; cascades of reverberation rush through the space.

Not alone. You’ll need help to climb. But to fall…? A note of sarcasm emerges from the chorus, an individual overtone that’s strangely familiar. You do that pretty well on your own.

A ladder appears at my feet, leading down to whatever’s below.

I peer over the balcony and feel the worms wriggle in my belly, my chest, my groin, spreading numbness that’s almost welcome. Below is like above, but reversed. Level after level, an endless succession of shelves and balconies, growing cruder and uglier until they vanish from view in the shadows.

Go, the voices say, and I feel a nudge at my back. You need to see it.

“See what?”

That familiar overtone again, wryly amused, but warm. You’ll see.

I climb onto the ladder. It’s white and smooth, with organic contours—the ladder is made of bones. Not the dry, brittle remains I’m used to but supple and warm to the touch. The ladder is alive.

I descend.

It’s exactly like Julie’s dream. I can feel the books around me; I can read them without touching them; they jitter and dance in their shelves, pages fluttering open and spewing their words into my mind. But this is not the rich perfume Julie enjoyed. She was ascending toward those luminous heights; I am sinking to the basement. My perfume is dust and dried blood, wet fur and fear sweat.

“What am I looking for?” I ask the voices.

The plain metal balconies become crude plywood carpentry, then raw timber tied with rope, then stone ledges, then nothing. I pass level after level of inaccessible books, abandoned and forgotten but still here, moldering in the depths.

Nothing in particular, the voice replies.

I catch familiar faces in the swamp of words. Disjointed excerpts of lives I’ve known, but only the darkest passages down here, morbid cuttings tucked in amongst medieval prison records and lists of smallpox deaths.

I see a girl who looks like Tomsen watching her father shudder and cough, dying from some treatable disease while her screams for help disappear into radio static. I see M shoving a smaller kid’s face into the pavement and holding back tears while his brothers cheer. I see him pointing a gun at a family while his girlfriend takes their food. I see him sinking his teeth into a boy. I see Nora watching him sink his teeth into a boy. I see Nora wandering alone, freezing and starving. I see her holding a knife to her wrists every night, asking why not and scrambling for an answer. I see Julie’s wrists, the blood and then the bandages. I see her staring dead-eyed at her mother’s mock funeral, her father dropping the empty dress into the grave. I see her writing a list on a painter’s canvas of everyone she’s killed, mostly just descriptions since she rarely got their names—fat man with tattoo, bald man with scars, cute boy with knife—and I see her covering it over with blue and black paint.

I see her meeting me.

I see her watching her friends butchered all around her. I see her father’s gun pointed at her head, his eyes glassy and cold before a demon peels him apart.

I see the man she’d decided to trust revealing that he’s a demon too.

“Whatever it is you’re trying to show me,” I whisper into the gloom, “I don’t want to see it.”

I try to halt my descent but my numb legs continue on reflex, as if they never needed my input. I am a half-dissolved torso falling like a leaf.

“I don’t want to see it!” I scream up toward the skylight, just a tiny white spot now, but no one answers.

I see a boy who looks like my father touching the blood on his lip. My grandfather sneering down at him, shaking his head in disgust. My great-grandfather doing the same to a boy who looks like my grandfather. Wads of dusty parchment, sheafs of papyrus, clay tablets. They hum and shake, angry and insistent, vomiting their words into my mind: Learn the way of things. Do as was done.

I squeeze my eyes shut and grip my head in my hands. I can feel the worms hammering at the gates of my brain.

Are you seeing it, corpse?

My eyes snap open. The overtone has become the fundamental; the chorus has receded to a supportive hum for the unadorned voice of a single young man.

I choke on his name. “Perry?”

A feeling of warm water pools in my chest—a ghost is smiling. It’s good to be known, R.

My feet refuse to stop. I sink lower. To my surprise, there’s a bottom; I see it in that vague orange glow, a floor hidden beneath drifts of dust and scattered pages, but I don’t stop there. The ladder continues through a hatch in the floor, down into the basement.

You’re so much like I was, Perry says to me. So concerned with with your worth and your purpose, your very right to exist. Do you really think your bumbling human errors—no matter how colorful—disqualify you from life? Or even happiness? Look around you!

The basement is a cavern, a dank stone shaft like an immense well, the air cold and fetid, thick with mold and methane and unknown Precambrian scents blowing up from the darkness below. Its walls are honeycombed with holes and the holes are filled with language: pre-lingual symbolism in bent sticks and notched bones, forcing stories into my head with even greater violence than the books above.

An ape hunches over its meal, eyes darting left and right, angry and afraid. It pisses on a nearby rock, just to be sure, then returns to the food at its feet: the juicy face meat of a rival troop’s young. A thousand insects crawl in the ape’s fur, unaware that the ape is an ape or that it’s alive or that they are, unaware of anything beyond the chemicals that tell them when to bite, when to suck, when to excrete eggs and die.

Life is a long ladder, Perry says. We climbed from deep pits. The lowest thought of the basest human is a staggering achievement.

I sink deeper and even the dim lights fade. The darkness is complete, frozen and airless, but the stories continue, reduced to almost nothing: microbial etchings of binary narratives, hungry/fed, living/dead.

But there’s more than this, Perry tells me. There are Higher shelves.

My feet finally allow me to stop. I hover in the smothering blackness and I look up. The skylight is a dim speck, a distant star.

“They’re so far away.”

My voice sounds muffled, like I’ve been buried. It trembles with a purity of sadness that I’ve never felt before, the simple core of loneliness inside every elaborate grief.

Some of you is up there, R. Some of me, too. We’ve lived most of our lives in the Lower, but we have a few scenes in those lovely books. Everyone does.

The worms surround my brain, gnawing at its walls. My body is gone; my face and skull are gone; I am a wrinkled gray planet adrift in space.

It’s easier to fall than to climb, and yet against all logic, life keeps rising. The line wavers, but the trajectory is upward.

I can feel the worms’ outrage at being detained. Their tails thrash as they strain toward my center.

So what’s your choice, R? Where will you shelve the last book of your life? Down here in the pit with the primordial slimes?

I close my eyes. I grit my teeth.

Or up there in the light?

Somewhere inside me, far deeper than my lungs and larynx, a scream rises. It rips up from miles beneath my basement, a sound so fierce it scares the brute out of its pit, it sends the wretch running, it roars up the staircase and down the hall and bursts out of my mouth, and the worms fall still.

I clench that invisible muscle hard enough to tear it, and the worms slide backward. Squealing with indignation, they peel away from my brain, squeezing down through my jaws and jugular and finally, back into the bite itself. I compress them into a dark, tumorous mass beneath the Dead man’s toothmarks, and I hold them there.

Perry smiles again, and his warmth spreads through me. My limbs tingle and return. My hands twitch and ball into fists.

Good, Perry says, and the chorus surges in around him, absorbing his voice into its vast and complex harmony. Now you know what to do.

In a shallow grave deep in the forest, I open my eyes. I dig my fingers into the mud. I climb out.

I

THE CHURCH is empty. The speakers hiss, waiting to amplify whoever steps to the mic.

The houses are empty. The doors are open, so I search each one. They looked vacant before—no decorations, no furniture, blankets on the floor for beds—but now even their squatters have moved on.

The RV is empty. My kids are gone. But this is a relief. Better they be locked up in a van on their way to Post than somewhere on the streets of this town.

Because the streets are not empty. The streets are full of corpses steaming in the morning sun. I step gingerly between them, fighting my way through a squawking murder of crows as I scan the withered faces, desperately hoping not to recognize any.

Only morbid curiosity brings me to the circus in the woods. Deep tire tracks mark the escape routes of the armored trucks and their trailers. And of course, the metal building is empty. The daylight leaking through its entry is the only illumination for its windowless interior, but there is nothing to see. It’s an empty box. The only hints of what it held are the scratches on the walls, the broken teeth and chips of bone, the strange, pointy footprints in the bare earth floor.

No one will ever bury this town’s corpses. No one will ever inhabit its sorrowful homes. Future generations will steer wide of this nameless place, whispering of ghosts and curses.

I suddenly remember that I’m carrying something. It was dented and corroded but the Atvist code still opened it. The musty documents inside are unreadable, but they never said anything to begin with. The case’s true contents are hidden under its false bottom. A gift for some unlucky Cascadian enclave, a box of death for the first one to resist.

I feel an urge to use it now. To “surrender” this town and blast its rot from the earth. But there is only one good deed this weapon can do, and only one place to do it.

“Julie!”

My hoarse voice echoes down the streets of the town square. I suck in a deep lungful and shred my throat on her name.

“Julie!”

Another personal volume record, but my only answer is the angry crows.

She is not here. No one is.

I walk to the highway and head toward the coast, leaving the birds to their grim festivities.

The bite in my neck throbs. My grip remains fierce, holding the worms in place, but no matter how hard I squeeze I can’t crush them. They writhe in my blood, bellowing demands like powerful old men unaccustomed to refusal.

How long can I hold them? I am a single guard transporting a bus full of prisoners, and it’s only a matter of time before they overpower me. I need backup.

Perry? I whisper into my mind. Can you help me?

I know it’s a foolish request, but I’m desperate.

Can you show me where she is?

I imagine him pretending not to hear, as if to save us both the embarrassment. Wherever and whatever Perry is, he is not my personal assistant. He did not emerge from that cosmic chorus to be my GPS.

This journey is mine.

The trees that surround the highway grow taller as I move west, until the sky is just a narrow inverted river winding above my head. The sun coaxes languid ghosts of steam out of the wet earth. It strikes my neck and warms the bite; the worms shrink to the corners of their cage.

I walk just short of a run and soon I’m breathing hard. Each inhalation brings a rich bouquet: pine and cedar oils, grass like green tea, and the more complex scents of more complex living things. The sweat and dander of wolves and deer, rats and wildcats, dusty birds and the subtle bitterness of the insects they eat. All the creatures carrying on behind our stage, absent from our dramas, too pure for our plagues.

Lost in hermetic contemplations, it doesn’t strike me as odd that my once useless nose has gained bloodhound sensitivity. My body and mind have taken many forms throughout my many lives. I am a walking canvas for reality’s new rules.

And somewhere beneath all that piney, musky redolence, I smell Julie.

Not the generic scent of biological life, that cheap and consumable commodity—the scent of her, distinct among a billion others.

I leap off the highway and scramble up the embankment and crash into the forest. I make a token effort to shield my face from the trees but their claws rake me mercilessly. Go back, they tell me. You’re a fool. There is nothing for you here.

I swat their branches aside. I kick through thorny vines that wrap around my ankles. Julie’s scent grows stronger, a tendril of rich perfume guiding me through the woods.

Get out of our world, the trees snarl. You don’t belong here.

They’re right, of course, but I don’t belong anywhere. So I guess that means I belong everywhere.

I burst through a knotted mass of brush and stumble forward into daylight.

A meadow.

Tiny daisies dot the lush field. That uncharted river gurgles in the trees. Julie and her mother sit in a circle of flattened grass, like they planned a picnic and forgot everything but each other. They haven’t noticed me. I stay where I am, absorbing the painterly beauty of the scene, its classicism marred only by the black blood on Julie’s tank top. She sits cross-legged next to her mother, speaking softly while Audrey rocks back and forth, hugging her knees to her chest, draped in a baggy white overcoat. Both of them are filthy and ragged, but the sun glows in their matted hair.

Julie sees me. Her eyes are raw, drained of tears, and her reaction is muted. She stands up. She takes a step toward me. She looks at the bite in my neck, then the cuts on my hands, ears, face, the warm dew of blood seeping out of me.

She whispers, “Are you alive?”

I nod.

“Say it.”

“I’m alive.”

She blinks a few times, lets out a shuddering breath that might be relief or something beyond it, but no smile, no embrace.

She sits down next to her mother. “Mom,” she says. “Do you remember R?”

Audrey nods. Her skin is pale but no longer gray, closer to porcelain than concrete. Her eyes are leaden when shadowed but there’s a glint of blue when the sun hits them. “I remember R,” she says, straining only a little to find the syllables. “He loves you. You love him.”

A wall of tension appears between Julie and me, but it feels trivial in this sacred meadow. It collapses. Without meeting my eyes, Julie pats the grass. I step into the circle and sit.

Something is happening in her mother. Beyond the physical signs, there’s an electricity in her aura. Her fingers twitch. Her eyes scan from side to side. I think of Nora’s patient, Mrs. A, lying on a table in a pool of her own blood, reviving herself and killing herself with each hard-won breath. I remember the ferocity in that woman’s eyes as she fought to exhume her soul just in time to send it on. I wonder if Julie is ready.

“I remember…” Audrey continues, squinting at the ground, “…someone who loved me. Who I loved.” She looks up. “Where’s…John?”

Julie’s lips tremble. “He’s gone, Mom. Dad’s gone.”

Audrey lowers her eyes again and watches an ant navigate a blade of grass. She shakes her head. “Not gone. I hear him.”

“What?” Julie says, her voice cracking.

Audrey’s face is tense like she’s listening to an infinitesimal sound, the breath of an ant or the hum of the planets. “Parts of him,” she says. “Scattered through…the books.”

Julie is not as drained as I thought. Her eyes well up with some hidden reserve of tears.

“I’m…reading,” Audrey says. “Books about him. And you. All the years after I…” Her eyes rise to meet her daughter’s and she has tears of her own. “Julie…” Her voice spasms. “I’m so sorry.”

Julie finally breaks. She buries her head in her mother’s lap and sobs.

“I couldn’t hold on,” Audrey whispers. “Not even for you.” Her words come almost smoothly now. What a force she must have been in life, that it all comes back so quickly. “So many reasons to fight…but I couldn’t see them.”

Julie pulls back to look at her, a spike of anger jabbing into her grief. “So you did do it on purpose?” She makes no attempt to stop the quaver in her voice. “You weren’t just stupid? You really walked out there to die?”

“Julie…” Audrey reaches out to touch her hair but Julie pulls away, sitting up straight, her face reddening.

“How?” she demands. “How could you do it? You ruined Dad! I couldn’t hold him together. I couldn’t hold myself together!” She thrusts out her palms, exposing the scars that criss-cross her arms and wrists, none quite deep enough to be a true invitation to death but each one a conversation with it. Shallow cuts to distract from a deep one.

Audrey stares at her daughter’s wounds. Her tears begin to flow freely, falling into Julie’s hands like raindrops.

“How could you do it, Mom?” Her rage sputters down to a whimper. “How could you make that choice? To just walk out and leave us there?”

Audrey shakes her bowed head, dropping her eyes from Julie’s arms to the ground. “It wasn’t a choice,” she says. “It just happened. Like falling asleep when you’re very, very tired.”

Julie watches Audrey’s tears fall into the grass. Slowly, her face softens. Her stiff spine sags. She leans back into her mother.

Audrey holds her daughter’s head against her chest. A tiny sound leaks from her throat, wet, broken, maybe words, maybe just breath. But if it’s words, they might be, “Thank you.”

The two of them remain like this for a moment. Then Audrey’s body shudders, and she begins to speak again. “You were always stronger than me,” she murmurs. “And your father. You were stronger than anyone I knew. I hope you see that.” She strokes her daughter’s hair in slow, rhythmic motions. “I hope you take that with you.”

Julie straightens abruptly and feels her cheek. There’s a smear of blood on it. Bright red spots are blooming through Audrey’s coat.

“No,” Julie moans, shaking her head. “No, Mom, not yet.”

Audrey takes Julie’s hand and presses it against her heart.

“Mom, wait! Please not yet!”

“Julie.” A bittersweet smile touches her face. “I died a long time ago. I only came back to tell you…that you did all you could. That you deserve to live.”

Julie throws herself against her mother and empties deep wells. Her tiny body shakes with rattling sobs.

Audrey rests her head on Julie’s shoulder. She looks weary and old, like her years are returning as the plague departs. But the gray in her eyes is gone. I see their true color for the first time, blue like her daughter’s but lighter, a clear sky to Julie’s deep water. Her body begins to sag, and Julie shifts to support her. “They’re waiting for us,” Audrey says. “Everyone’s waiting.”

She slumps against her daughter.

A distant bird trills.

Leaves whisper in subtle breezes.

Blades of grass tick as they straighten, shrugging off the weight of yesterday’s rain.

Water trickles in the soil. Roots drink. Earth hums.

Silence.

Julie clings to her mother’s body until her shoulders finally stop shaking. Then she lowers its limp weight to the ground.

“She never wanted to be buried,” she mumbles. “I always figured cremation, but…she said to leave her here.”

She folds the body’s arms over its chest and straightens its legs, like tucking a child into bed.

“Said she wanted to be like the sun. Give her life to the grass and animals.” She brushes the hair off the body’s forehead. “She said, ‘I want to be heat and light.’”

Audrey’s body looks serene. A trace of her last smile remains on its lips. But Julie addresses her farewell to the sky, squinting into the noonday radiance. “Goodbye, Mom.”

She stands. She looks at me. Her eyes are red and raw, the irises like sapphires stuck into bullet wounds. She turns away and walks into the forest.

-

I trail her at a distance, unsure of my welcome but unwilling to lose her again. She pushes ahead with fierce strides, slapping branches out of her face, following a narrow deer path without any concern for where it leads. I think of her mad plunge into the ruins of Detroit. Her brazen defiance of every mortal threat she encounters. Beneath all her passion for humanity lurks an ambivalence toward herself. She tosses her life from hand to hand, not quite throwing it away but daring fate to take it. What will she do now, after all this? Has she ever carried this much weight?

I begin to shrink the distance between us, wondering if she’ll let me near enough to help.

We have entered an older part of the forest. Instead of the squabbling of greedy birds and insects, there is solemn silence. Instead of a tangle of unruly scrub brush, its floor is moss and layered loam. We are surrounded by creatures that have outlived empires. Gnarled oaks and towering redwoods whose inner rings inhaled the last breath of Christ and the smoke of Alexandria. How foolish we must look to them.

I hear a wheeze creeping into her breathing.

“Julie,” I say, only a few feet away now. “Stop.”

She stops. She stands with her back to me in a wide patch of moss. I reach out and touch her arm; she doesn’t turn, but she doesn’t pull away. I wrap my arms around her shoulders and move in close behind her. “I’m sorry,” I murmur into her hair, meaning so many things.

She says nothing. She just stands there, breathing, so I do the same, drinking in the scent that I’ve been chasing for so long. It has always been a mystery to me. I can’t fathom what composes it. The smells one expects from a human body are not pleasant—sweat and bacteria, mucus and sebum, a bitter cocktail of secretions and excretions. So why does Julie smell sweet? Where does the cinnamon come from? This rich blend of vetiver and honeysuckle, that subtle hint of pepper? Can it really be her body producing this perfume? When I inhale the warm air that rises from her head, is it her soul I’m smelling?

“Julie,” I say again, but I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know how else to console her. I don’t know any more ways to ask forgiveness or to show her she can trust me. I have never felt so stripped. “Julie, I want to—”

She turns around and grabs my face and kisses me. The wheels in my brain stop spinning. Her arms are around my neck, pulling me down and herself up so we can meet in the middle, and this is no quick peck just to tell me to hold on; this is no calculated signal—this is desire. I’m too startled to match her intensity; her lips crush mine against my teeth; her tongue pins mine to the floor of my mouth. My hands twitch a few inches from her body, unsure where they belong.

She pulls back, just far enough to look me in the eyes. There is more than grief in her gaze. I see a startling joy spreading through her tears. “We deserve to live,” she tells me, and she waits.

I feel wet warmth pooling in my eyes. Slowly, I nod. “We deserve to live.”

I pull her tight against me and we drop to the mossy ground.

With her fingers digging into my back, she claws the tattered remains of my shirt over my head, revealing my desolate landscape of bruises, scratches, scars. I roll her on top of me and she raises her arms and arches her back, an invitation. I slide her filthy tank-top up her stomach and past her ribs and over her breasts, and we pause, watching each other’s ribcages rise and fall. She smiles. She runs her fingers down my chest to the cavity under my sternum where my hearts beats visibly. She bends down and presses her face against it, wipes her tears on my chest, and kisses my pounding pulse.

My body jolts with a kind of electricity I’ve never felt. I see it in my mind as rose-hued lightning, coursing through my flesh and soothing it, healing it and making it strong. None of my memories contain any such power. Sex in my first life was a means to an end—my partners and I tolerated each other, sometimes even respected and appreciated each other, but what drew us together was the experience we could create. Skin was skin. It didn’t much matter who was wearing it.

Watching Julie slide my pants down with a nervous smile, never breaking eye contact, I am overwhelmed by the reality of her. An essence I know so well and crave so badly that her skin is just a veil around it—smooth, voluptuous, and beautiful, but secondary.

Her veil touches mine. The light behind it rushes into me through the wires of our nerves. My muscles go rigid; my limbs spasm; it’s euphoric electrocution. Her mouth wraps around me and brings me into the very center of her self, my most sensitive part surrounded by her eyes, her ears, her brain, caressed by her organs of speech and expression—can anything be more intimate?

Yes. Always yes. There is no limit; the Library has no ceiling. Our clothes are gone and we are naked under the ancient trees. We are dirty and hurt from weeks, months, years of struggle—sweaty and sticky, smudged with mud and blood, and perhaps we smell terrible and should be disgusted, but we are not interested in what we should be. I breathe Julie’s scent and taste the story of her body as I lick her deepest places, and I’m unable to imagine feeling anything but privilege.

Her moans are low and throaty, then high and cracking, exquisitely physical in their smoky timbre, and then she stops me. She grips the sides of my face and pulls it back up to hers. She looks in my eyes and smiles, then bubbles into laughter. It gushes out of her like an overflowing fountain, breathless and ecstatic and distantly incredulous that this is really happening, that we are really here, after all this time and torment, fucking in a forest.

She grabs my absurdly hard, fiercely alive cock, and she welcomes me inside.

I have always found it troubling that pain and pleasure make the same sounds. It seems a red flag for the sanity of our species. Why is our love aurally indistinguishable from violence? Why express euphoria with an anguished wail? Why this need to paint even the most basic human joy with a glaze of suffering?

These are not the sounds Julie and I make. Her gasps are warm, her screams are in a major key, and my groans are unmistakably enthused. When it’s too much to express, we laugh. Not a laugh of nervousness, embarrassment, or distancing irony, but something rapturous and paired with tears, that universal fluid of emotional overflow. What a strange miracle, to merge with another person. To be so fully entwined that every movement is linked in synchrony, every thought understood by subtle signals and murmured words, like two voices in the same head moving the limbs of one body, climbing toward some breathtaking plateau.

And what a strange mutation, to be a man with three lives. To have smashed myself against the rocks of the world and then started over, a newborn with a weathered soul. I have all the technique of a sexual veteran with all the raw wonder of a virgin. I am beginning to understand what my old lives are for. How experience—good and bad—is the cement that fills my gaps and shores up my trembling frame. Without it, I wouldn’t be a person. I wouldn’t know who this woman is or how she fits into the craggy landscape of my life.

I wouldn’t know how much I love her.

The forest fades as we climb. A glow washes it white, not the sun but something like it, blazing down from the remote ceiling of the Library. I sense Julie getting close and I release my control; a flood of hot light rushes up from the depths.

I lock eyes with her as we climax. They are fractal blue spirals of mad, impossible beauty, and I see my astonishment mirrored in them. We have become buoyant; we hurtle up toward the distant reaches of those Higher shelves, each level lovelier than the last, intricate filigree and dizzying arabesques, pearl and silver and teak and gold, and the books—bound in glass, in crystal, in living flesh and light, dousing us with sprays of bright memory, the bliss of a trillion lives, every generation of every creature that could ever feel ecstasy.

And it goes higher. We are nowhere near the top. But the ladder is dissolving under me. I scramble upward until I’m climbing air; I stretch out with my mind, straining toward that distant, unfathomable ceiling—

I am lying on my back on a carpet of moss. Julie is next to me. We are gasping, shivering, laughing, crying. Our hands rest in the space between us, fingers woven together, squeezing with each spasming aftershock. A bird chirps. A fly buzzes. The canopy of leaves spins slowly overhead like a time-lapse film of stars.

I remember the worms in my neck. They squirm and squeal like spoiled children, but I contain them easily, clenched in a fist of will. They bore me. I dismiss them from my mind and watch the sun leak through the leaves, forming solid gold shafts in the dust we’ve stirred up.

I don’t know how long we lie there. The sun moves across the sky. Its rays wander lecherously down our bodies. Finally, when they begin to dim, Julie shatters the century-long stillness. She stands up. She puts her clothes on. Then she gathers up mine and drops them on my chest.

“R,” she says, her face still damp and flushed, glowing with a smile that I’ve never seen before, calm and happy and invincible. “Let’s go home.”