Warm Bodies: A Novel

by Isaac Marion

  I slide the bottle a safe distance away from me.

  Julie chuckles and resumes eating. She pokes at it for a few minutes, ignoring my presence at the table. I’m about to make a doomed attempt at small talk when she looks up at me, all traces of joviality gone from her face, and says, “So, ‘R.’ Why are you keeping me here?”

  The question hits me like a surprise slap to the face. I look at the ceiling. I gesture around at the airport in general, toward the distant groans of my fellow Dead. “Keep you safe.”

  “Bullshit.”

  There is silence. She looks at me hard. My eyes retreat.

  “Listen,” she says. “I get that you saved my life back there in the city. And I guess I’m grateful for that. So, yeah. Thanks for saving my life. Or sparing my life. Whatever. But you walked me into this place, I’m sure you could walk me out. So again: why are you keeping me here?”

  Her eyes are like hot irons on the side of my face, and I realize I can’t escape. I put a hand on my chest, over my heart. My “heart.” Does that pitiful organ still represent anything? It lies motionless in my chest, pumping no blood, serving no purpose, and yet my feelings still seem to originate inside its cold walls. My muted sadness, my vague longing, my rare flickers of joy. They pool in the center of my chest and seep out from there, diluted and faint, but real.

  I press my hand against my heart. Then I reach slowly toward Julie, and press it against hers. Somehow, I manage to meet her eyes.

  She looks down at my hand, then gives me a dry stare. “Are you. Fucking. Kidding me.”

  I withdraw my hand and drop my eyes to the table, grateful that I’m incapable of blushing. “Need . . . to wait,” I mumble. “They . . . think you’re . . . new convert. They’ll notice.”

  “How long?”

  “Few . . . days. They’ll . . . forget.”

  “Jesus Christ,” she sighs, and covers her eyes with her hand, shaking her head.

  “You’ll . . . be okay,” I tell her. “Promise.”

  She ignores this. She pulls an iPod out of her pocket and stuffs the earbuds into her ears. She returns to her food, listening to music that’s just a faint hiss to me.

  This date is not going well. Once again the absurdity of my secret thoughts overwhelms me, and I want to crawl out of my skin, escape my ugly, awkward flesh and be a skeleton, naked and anonymous. I’m about to stand up and leave when Julie pulls a bud out of one ear and gives me a squinting, penetrating look. “You’re . . . different, aren’t you,” she says.

  I don’t respond.

  “Because I’ve never heard a zombie talk, other than ‘Brains!’ and all that silly groaning. And I’ve never seen a zombie take any interest in humans beyond eating them. I’ve definitely never had one buy me a drink. Are there . . . others like you?”

  Again I feel the urge to blush. “Don’t . . . know.”

  She pushes her noodles around the plate. “A few days,” she repeats.

  I nod.

  “What am I supposed to do here till it’s safe to run away? I hope you don’t expect me to just sit in your housejet taking blood baths all week.”

  I think for a moment. A rainbow of images floods my head, probably snippets of old movies I’ve seen, all sappy and romantic and utterly impossible. I have to get ahold of myself.

  “I’ll . . . entertain,” I say eventually, and offer an unconvincing smile. “Be our . . . guest.”

  She rolls her eyes and returns to her food. The second earbud is still sitting on the table. Without looking up from her plate she casually offers it to me. I stick it in my ear, and the voice of Paul McCartney drifts into my head, singing all those wistful antonyms, yes/no, high/low, hello/good-bye/hello.

  “You know John Lennon hated this song?” Julie says as it plays, speaking in my direction but not really addressing me. “He thought it was meaningless gibberish. Funny coming from the guy who wrote ‘I Am the Walrus.’”

  “Goo goo . . . g’joob,” I say.

  She stops, looks at me, tilts her head in pleasant surprise. “Yeah, exactly, right?” She takes a sip of the beer, forgetting the imprint of my lips on the bottle, and my eyes widen in brief panic. But nothing happens. Maybe my infection can’t travel through soft moments like these. Maybe it needs the violence of the bite.

  “Anyway,” she says, “it’s a little too chipper for me right now.” She skips the song. I hear a brief snippet of Ava Gardner singing “Bill,” then she skips a few more times, lands on an unfamiliar pop song, and cranks the volume. I’m distantly aware of the music—one of those dark, dissonant, brutally clanging chants that dominated the airwaves during the last gasps of civilization—but I have tuned out. I watch Julie bob her head from side to side with eyes closed. Even now, here, in the darkest and strangest of places with the most macabre of company, this music moves her and her life pulses hard. I smell it again, a white glowing vapor wafting out from under my black blood. And even for Julie’s safety, I can’t bring myself to smother it.

  What is wrong with me? I stare at my hand, at its pale gray flesh, cool and stiff, and I dream it pink, warm and supple, able to guide and build and caress. I dream my necrotic cells shrugging off their lethargy, inflating and lighting up like Christmas deep in my dark core. Am I inventing all this like the beer buzz? A placebo? An optimistic illusion? Either way, I feel the flatline of my existence disrupting, forming heartbeat hills and valleys.

  “YOU NEED to corner sharper. You keep almost running off the road when you turn right.”

  I crank the skinny leather wheel and drop my foot onto the accelerator. The Mercedes lurches forward, throwing our heads back.

  “God you’re a leadfoot. Can you go easier on the gas?”

  I come to a jerky stop, forget to push in the clutch, and the engine dies. Julie rolls her eyes and forces patience into her voice. “Okay, look.” She restarts the engine, scoots over, and snakes her legs across mine, placing her feet on my feet. Under her pressure, I smoothly exchange gas for clutch, and the car glides forward. “Like that,” she says, and returns to her seat. I release a satisfied wheeze.

  We are cruising the tarmac, taxiing to and fro under the mild afternoon sun. Our hair ruffles in the breeze. Here in this moment, in this candy-red ’64 roadster with this beautiful young woman, I can’t help inserting myself into other, more classically filmic lives. My mind drifts, and I lose what little focus I’ve been able to maintain. I veer off the runway and clip the bumper of a stair truck, knocking the Boneys’ church circle out of alignment. The jolt throws our heads to the side, and I hear my children’s necks snap in the backseat. They groan in protest and I shush them. I’m already embarrassed; I don’t need my kids rubbing it in.

  Julie examines our dented front end and shakes her head. “Damn it, R. This was a beautiful car.”

  My son lunges forward in another clumsy attempt to eat Julie’s shoulder, and I reach back and smack him. He slumps into the seat with his arms crossed, pouting.

  “No biting!” Julie scolds, still inspecting the car’s damage.

  I don’t know why I decided to bring my kids to today’s driving lesson. Julie has been attempting to teach me for a few days now, and today I just felt some obscure urge to father. To pass on knowledge. I’m aware it’s not exactly safe. My kids are too young to recognize Living speech patterns, much less savor them like I do, and I’ve refreshed Julie’s gruesome camouflage several times, but at close range her true nature still seeps into the air. Every now and then my kids smell it, and their slowly developing instincts take hold. I try to discipline them lovingly.

  As we circle back toward our home terminal, I notice the congregation emerging from a cargo-loading gate. Like an inverted funeral procession, the Dead march out in a solemn line, taking slow, plodding steps toward the church. A clutch of Boneys leads the pilgrimage, moving forward with far more purpose than any of the fleshclad. They are the few among us who always seem to know exactly where they’re going and what they’re doing. They don’t wav
er, they don’t pause or change course, and their bodies no longer either grow or decay. They are static. One of them looks directly at me, and I recall a Dark Ages etching I’ve seen somewhere, a rotting corpse sneering at a plump young virgin.

  Quod tu es, ego fui, quod ego sum, tu eris.

  What you are, I once was.

  What I am, you will become.

  I break away from the skeleton’s hollow stare. As we cruise past their line, some of the Fleshies glance at us with disinterest, and I see my wife among them. She is walking alongside a male, her hand woven into his. My kids spot her in the crowd and stand up on the backseat, waving and grunting loudly. Julie follows their gaze and sees my wife wave back at them. Julie looks at me. “Is that like . . . your wife?”

  I don’t respond. I look at my wife, expecting some kind of rebuke. But there is almost no recognition in her eyes. She looks at the car. She looks at me. She looks straight ahead and keeps walking, hand in hand with another man.

  “Is that your wife?” Julie asks again, more forcefully. I nod. “Who’s that . . . guy she’s with?” I shrug. “Is she cheating on you or something?” I shrug. “This doesn’t bother you?”

  I shrug.

  “Stop shrugging, you asshole! I know you can talk; say something.”

  I think for a minute. Watching my wife fade into the distance, I put a hand on my heart. “Dead.” I wave a hand toward my wife. “Dead.” My eyes drift toward the sky and lose their focus. “Want it . . . to hurt. But . . . doesn’t.”

  Julie looks at me like she’s waiting for more, and I wonder if I’ve expressed anything at all with my halting, mumbled soliloquy. Are my words ever actually audible, or do they just echo in my head while people stare at me, waiting? I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I’m drowning in ellipses.

  Julie watches me a moment longer, then turns to face the windshield and the oncoming scenery. On our right: the dark openings of empty boarding tunnels, once alive with eager travelers on their way to see the world, expand their horizons, find love and fame and fortune. On our left: the blackened wreckage of a Dreamliner.

  “My boyfriend cheated on me once,” Julie tells the windshield. “There was this girl his dad was housing while the foster homes were being set up, and they got blackout drunk one night and it just happened. It was basically an accident, and he gave me the most sincere and moving confession of all time, swore to God he loved me so much and would do anything to convince me, blah blah blah, but it didn’t matter, I kept thinking about it and running it through my head and just burning with it. I cried every night for weeks. Practically wore the binary off all my saddest MP3s.” She is shaking her head slowly. Her eyes are far away. “Things are just . . . I feel things so hard sometimes. When that happened with Perry, I would have loved to be more . . . like you.”

  I study her. She runs a finger through her hair and twists it around a little. I notice faint scars on her wrists and forearms, thin lines too symmetrical to be accidents. She blinks and glances at me abruptly, as if I just woke her from a dream. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” she says, annoyed. “Anyway, lesson’s over for today. I’m tired.”

  Without further comment, I drive us home. I brake too late and park the car with the bumper two inches into the grille of a Miata. Julie sighs.

  • • •

  Later that evening we sit in the 747, cross-legged in the middle of the aisle. A plate of microwaved pad thai sits on the floor in front of Julie, cooling. I watch her in silence as she pokes at it. Even doing and saying nothing, she is entertaining to watch. She tilts her head, her eyes roam, she smiles and shifts her body. Her inner thoughts play across her face like rear-projection movies.

  “It’s too quiet in here,” she says, and stands up. She starts digging through my stacks of records. “What’s with all the vinyl? Couldn’t figure out how to work an iPod?”

  “Better . . . sound.”

  She laughs. “Oh, a purist, huh?”

  I make a spinning motion in the air with my finger. “More real. More . . . alive.”

  She nods. “Yeah, true. Lot more trouble though.” She flips through the stacks and frowns a little. “There’s nothing in here newer than like . . . 1999. Is that when you died or something?”

  I think about this for a moment, then shrug. It’s possible, but the truth is I have no idea when I died. One might try to guess my deathday by my current state of decay, but not all of us rot at the same rate. Some of us stay funeral-parlor fresh for years, and some of us wither to bones in a matter of months, our flesh sloughing away like dry sea foam. I don’t know what causes this inequity. Maybe our bodies follow our minds’ leads. Some resign themselves easily, others hold on hard.

  Another obstacle to estimating my age: I have no idea what year we’re in. 1999 could have been a decade ago or yesterday. One might try to deduce a timeline by looking at the crumbling streets, the toppled buildings, the rotting infrastructure, but just like us, every part of the world is decaying at its own pace. There are cities that could be mistaken for Aztec ruins, and there are cities that just emptied last week, TVs still awake all night roaring static, café omelets just starting to mold.

  What happened to the world was gradual. I’ve forgotten what it actually was, but I have faint, fetal memories of what it was like. A smoldering dread that never really caught fire till there wasn’t much left to burn. Each sequential step surprised us. Then one day we woke up, and everything was gone.

  “There you go again,” Julie says. “Drifting off. I’m so curious what you think about when you daze out like that.” I shrug, and she lets out an exasperated huff. “And there you go again, shrugging. Stop shrugging, shrugger! Answer my question. Why the stunted musical growth?”

  I start to shrug and then stop myself, with some difficulty. How can I possibly explain this to her in words? The slow death of Quixote. The abandoning of quests, the surrendering of desires, the settling in and settling down that is the inevitable fate of the Dead.

  “We don’t . . . think . . . new things,” I begin, straining to kick through my short-sheeted diction. “I . . . find things . . . sometimes. But we don’t . . . seek.”

  “Really,” Julie says. “Well that’s a fucking tragedy.” She continues to dig through my records, but her tone starts to escalate as she speaks. “You don’t think about new things? You don’t ‘seek’? What’s that even mean? You don’t seek what? Music? Music is life! It’s physical emotion—you can touch it! It’s neon ecto-energy sucked out of spirits and switched into sound waves for your ears to swallow. Are you telling me, what, that it’s boring? You don’t have time for it?”

  There is nothing I can say to this. I find myself praying to the ghastly mouth of the open sky that Julie never changes. That she never wakes up one day to find herself older and wiser.

  “Anyway, you’ve still got some good stuff in here,” she says, letting her indignation deflate. “Great stuff, really. Here, let’s do this one again. Can’t go wrong with Frank.” She puts on a record and returns to her pad thai. “The Lady Is a Tramp” fills the plane’s cabin, and she gives me a crooked little smile. “My theme song,” she says, and stuffs her mouth full of noodles.

  Out of morbid curiosity, I pull one off her plate and chew it. There is no taste at all. It’s like imaginary food, like chewing air. I turn my head and spit it into my palm. Julie doesn’t notice. She seems far away again, and I watch the colors and shapes of her thought-film flickering behind her face. After a few minutes, she swallows a bite and looks up at me.

  “R,” she says in a tone of casual curiosity. “Who did you kill?”

  I stiffen. The music fades out of my awareness.

  “In that high-rise. Before you saved me. I saw the blood on your face. Whose was it?”

  I just look at her. Why does she have to ask me this. Why can’t her memories fade to black like mine. Why can’t she just live with me alone in the dark, swimming in the abyss of inked-out h
istory.

  “I just need to know who it was.” Her expression betrays nothing. Her eyes are locked on mine, unblinking.

  “No one,” I mumble. “Some . . . kid.”

  “There’s this theory that you guys eat brains because you get to relive the person’s life. True?”

  I shrug, trying not to squirm. I feel like a toddler caught finger-painting the walls. Or killing dozens of people.

  “Who was it?” she presses. “Don’t you remember?”

  I consider lying. I remember a few faces from that room; I could roll the dice and just pick one, probably some random recruit she didn’t even know, and she would let it go and never bring it up again. But I can’t do it. I can’t lie to her any more than I can spit out the indigestible truth. I’m trapped.

  Julie lets her eyes auger into me for a long minute, then she falters. “Was it Berg?” she offers, so quietly she’s almost talking to herself. “The kid with the acne? I bet it was Berg. That guy was a dick. He called Nora a mulatto and he was staring at my ass that entire salvage. Which Perry didn’t even notice, of course. If it was Berg, I’m almost glad you got him.”

  I try to catch her gaze to make sense of this reversal, but now she’s the one avoiding eye contact. “Anyway,” she says, “whoever killed Perry . . . I just want you to know I don’t blame them for it.”

  I tense again. “You . . . don’t?”

  “No. I mean, I think I get it. You don’t have a choice, right? And to be honest . . . I’d never say this to anyone, but . . .” She stirs her food. “It’s kind of a relief that it finally happened.”

  I frown. “What?”

  “To be able to finally stop dreading it.”

  “Perry . . . dying?”

  I instantly regret speaking his name. Rolling off my tongue, the syllables taste like his blood.

  Julie nods, still looking at her plate. When she speaks again her voice is soft and faint, the voice of memories longing to be forgotten. “Something . . . happened to him. A lot of things, actually. I guess there came a point where he just couldn’t absorb any more, so he flipped over into a different person. He was this brilliant, fiery kid, so weird and funny and full of dreams, and then . . . just quit all his plans, joined Security . . . it was scary how fast he changed. He said he was doing everything for me, that it was time for him to grow up and face reality, take responsibility and all that. But everything I loved about him—everything that made him who he was—just started rotting. He gave up, basically. Quit his life. Real death was just the next logical step.” She pushes her plate aside. “We talked about dying all the time. He just kept bringing it up. In the middle of a wild make-out session he’d stop and be like, ‘Julie, what do you think the average life expectancy is these days?’ Or, ‘Julie, when I die, will you be the one to debrain me?’ Height of romance, right?”