by Isaac Marion
She shrugs and looks back at Julie. “Hunting you? Why?”
“We think they know what we’re trying to do.”
A pause. “What are you trying to do?”
“I’m not sure. Fix the world?”
Nora’s face looks exactly like Julie’s last night on the phone with M, listening to the news she never thought she’d hear. “Really?” she says, the wine bottle dangling between her fingers.
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“We don’t know yet. We’re just going to try. We’ll figure it out while trying.”
At that moment the Jumbotron goes blank, and the stadium’s huge, ceiling-mounted speakers crackle to life. A familiar voice booms across the sky like an insane god.
“Julie. I know you’re here. This tantrum you are throwing will end now. I will not let you become your mother. Soft flesh is eaten by hard teeth. She died because she refused to harden.”
Down on the ground below, I can see the few remaining guards staring up at the speakers, looking at each other uneasily. They can hear it in his voice. Something is wrong with their commander in chief.
“Our world is under attack and this may be the last of our last days, but you are my priority. Julie. I can see you.”
As his words reverberate through the speakers I feel the chill of eyes on my back, and I turn around. On the far opposite side of the stadium, I can just make out the shape of a man standing behind the glass of the dark announcer’s booth, gripping a microphone. Julie stares bleakly across the distance.
“When every real thing decays there is nothing left but principle and I will hold to it. I’m going to reset things back to right. Wait, Julie. I’ll be there soon.”
The speakers click off.
Nora hands the wine bottle to Julie. “L’chaim,” she says quietly. Julie takes a drink. She hands it to me. I take a drink. The wine’s bright red spirits dance around in my stomach, oblivious to the somber stillness in the room.
“What now?” Nora says.
“I don’t know,” Julie snaps before Nora finishes asking. “I don’t know.” She grabs the bottle from me and takes another long pull.
I stand in front of the viewing window and gaze out over the streets and rooftops below, that microcosmic parody of urban contentment. I’m so weary of this place. These tight rooms and claustrophobic hallways. I need some air.
“Let’s go to the roof,” I say.
The girls both look at me. “Why?” Julie says.
“Because it’s . . . the only place left. And because I like it there.”
“You’ve never been there,” Julie says.
I look her in the eyes. “Yes I have.”
There is a long silence.
“Let’s go up,” Nora says, glancing uncertainly from Julie to me. “It’s probably the last place they’ll look, so it’ll at least . . . I don’t know . . . buy us some time.”
Without breaking eye contact with me, Julie nods. We travel through the dark corridors, which grow less and less crowd-friendly, more and more industrial as we go. Our path ends at a ladder. White light streams down from above.
“Can you climb this?” Nora asks me.
I grasp the ladder and tentatively pull myself up. My hands tremble on the cold steel, but the skill is there. I advance another rung, then look down at the girls. “Yes,” I say.
They come up behind me and I ascend, climbing a ladder, rung after rung like I’ve done it a hundred times. The feeling is exhilarating, even better than the escalators, my own numb hands drawing me up toward daylight.
We emerge from a hatch doorway, and we’re on the roof. The smooth panels shine white under the setting sun. Structural beams arch overhead like sculpture. And there’s the blanket, damp and maybe a little mildewy from weeks of rain, but laid out exactly as I remember it, bright red against the white roof.
“Oh Lord . . . ,” Nora whispers, looking out at the surrounding city. The ground below is alive with skeletons, now outnumbering Security by vast margins. Have we miscalculated? Have we erred? In my head I can hear Grigio exulting as they scale the walls and flood through the gates to kill every last person. You dreamers. You ridiculous children. You dancing grinning fuckups. Here is your bright future. Your earnest, saccharine hope. How does it taste dripping from the neck of everyone you love?
Perry! I call out into my head. Are you there? What do we do?
My voice echoes like a prayer in a dark cathedral. Perry is silent.
I watch the skeletons kill and devour another soldier, then I turn away. I block out the screams, the explosions, the compressed pops of sniper fire from the tier just below us. I block out the skeletons’ hum, even though it’s now an immense chorus, howling in stereo from every direction. I block all this out and sit on the red blanket. While Nora paces the roof watching the battle, Julie walks slowly to the blanket and sits next to me. She tucks her knees against her chest, and we both look out at the horizon. We can see the mountains. They’re blue like the ocean. They’re lovely.
“This plague . . . ,” Julie says in a very soft voice. “This curse . . . I have an idea where it came from.”
The clouds are thin and pink overhead, stretched out into delicately textured swirls. A bracing cold wind whips across the roof and makes us squint.
“I don’t think it’s from any spell or virus or nuclear rays. I think it’s from a deeper place. I think we brought it here.”
Our shoulders are pressed together. She is cool to the touch. As if her warmth is retreating, curling deep inside her to escape the extinguishing wind.
“I think we crushed ourselves down over the centuries. Buried ourselves under greed and hate and whatever other sins we could find until our souls finally hit the rock bottom of the universe. And then they scraped a hole through it, into some . . . dark place.”
I hear pigeons cooing somewhere in the eaves. Starlings zip and dive against the distant sky, pretty much unaffected by the end of our silly civilization.
“We released it. We poked through the seabed and the oil erupted, painted us black, pulled our inner sickness out for everyone to see. Now here we are in this dry corpse of a world, rotting on our feet till there’s nothing left but bones and the buzz of flies.”
The roof shudders under us. With a low, grinding rumble, the entire expanse of steel begins to move, sliding shut to shield the people inside from what is quickly becoming a full-scale invasion. As it booms closed, footsteps clang toward us from the ladder. Nora pulls Grigio’s pistol out of her purse and rushes to the hatch.
“What do we do, R?” Julie finally looks at me. Her voice is shaky, her eyes are raw, but she doesn’t surrender to tears. “Are we stupid to think we can do anything? You made me start hoping again, but here we are, and I think we’re about to die. So what do we do?”
I look into Julie’s face. Not just at it, but into it. Every pore, every freckle, every faint gossamer hair. And then the layers beneath them. The flesh and bones, the blood and brain, all the way down to the unknowable energy that swirls in her core, the life force, the soul, the fiery will that makes her more than meat, coursing through every cell and binding them together in millions to form her. Who is she, this girl? What is she? She is everything. Her body contains the history of life, remembered in chemicals. Her mind contains the history of the universe, remembered in pain, in joy and sadness, hate and hope and bad habits, every thought of God, past-present-future, remembered, felt, and hoped for all at once.
“What do we do?” she pleads, confounding me with her eyes, the vast oceans in her irises. “What do we have left?”
I have no answer for her. But I look into her face, her pale cheeks, her red lips bright with life and tender as an infant’s, and I understand that I love her. And if she is everything, maybe that’s answer enough.
I pull Julie into me and kiss her.
I press her lips against mine. I pull her body against mine. She wraps her arms around my neck and squeezes me hard.
We kiss with our eyes open, staring into each other’s pupils and the depths inside them. Our tongues taste each other, our saliva flows, and Julie bites my lip. I feel the death in me stirring, the anti-life surging toward her glowing cells to darken them. But as it reaches the threshold, I halt it. I hold it back and hammer it down, and I feel Julie doing the same. We hold this thrashing monster between us in a relentless grip, we bear down on it together with determination and rage, and something happens. It changes. It warps and squirms and twists inside-out. It becomes something altogether different. Something new.
A surge of ecstatic agony rushes through me, and we fall back from each other with a gasp. My eyes are aching with some deep, twisting pain. I look at Julie’s and see that her irises are shimmering. The fibers twitch, and their hue begins to change. Vivid sky blue fades to pewter gray—but then hesitates, flickers, and flashes back as gold. A brilliant shade of solar yellow that I have never seen before on any human being. As this happens, my sinuses ignite with a new smell, something similar to the life energy of the Living but also vastly different. It’s coming from Julie, it’s her scent, but it’s also mine. It rushes out from us like an explosion of pheromones, so potent I can almost see it.
“What . . . ,” Julie whispers, staring at me with her mouth slightly open, “just happened?”
For the first time since we sat down on this blanket, I look around and see my surroundings. Something has changed on the ground below. The armies of skeletons have stopped advancing. They stand completely motionless. And it’s hard to tell from this distance, but they all seem to be looking directly at us.
“Julie!”
The voice shatters the unearthly stillness. There is Grigio, standing in front of the ladder hatch while Rosso clambers up behind him, breathing hard and keeping his eyes on the general. Nora sits slumped against the hatch with her hands cuffed to the ladder, her bare legs sprawled against the cold steel roof. Her gun lies at Grigio’s feet, just out of reach.
Grigio’s jaw muscles look tight enough to burst. When Julie turns and he sees her changed eyes, his entire body clenches. I can hear his teeth grinding.
“Colonel Rosso,” he says in the driest voice I have ever heard. “Shoot them.”
His face is ashen, the skin dry and flaky.
“Dad,” Julie says.
“Shoot them.”
Rosso glances from Julie to her father. “Sir, she’s not infected.”
“Shoot them.”
“She’s not infected, sir. I’m not even so sure the boy is infected. Look at their eyes, they’re—”
“They’re infected!” Grigio barks. I can see the shape of his teeth under his pursed lips. “This is how the infection travels! This is how it works! There is no—” He chokes off his words as if deciding he’s said enough.
“Sir . . . ,” Rosso says.
Grigio draws his pistol and points it at his daughter.
“John!” Rosso grabs Grigio’s arm and wrenches it down, grappling for the gun. With trained precision Grigio twists Rosso’s wrist and snaps it, then jabs him hard in the ribs. The old man falls to his knees.
“Dad, stop!” Julie screams, and he replies by cocking the gun and taking aim once again. His face is empty now, expressing absolutely nothing. Just skin stretched over a skull.
Rosso stabs a knife into his ankle.
Grigio doesn’t cry out or visibly react. But his leg gives under him, and he topples backward. He slides down the roof’s steep slope, rolling and twisting, fingers grasping for purchase on the smooth steel. His gun spins past him and drops over the edge, and he nearly follows it—but he stops. His hands cling to the rim of the roof as the rest of him dangles over the drop. All I can see are his white-knuckled fingers and his face, tight with exertion but still eerily impassive.
Julie runs to help him, but the slope is too steep and she starts to slip. She crouches there and stares at her father, helpless.
Then a curious thing happens. As Grigio’s skinny hands clutch the roof edge, another set of fingers rises up and clamps down over his. But these fingers have no flesh. Just dry bone, yellowed and browned by dust and age and ancient blood from ancient murders. They grip the roof, digging into the steel, and hoist up a grinning, humming skeleton.
It is not fast. It doesn’t leap or sprint. It moves leisurely, lacking the relentless, bloodthirsty drive that pursued us through the city. And despite the desperation of that pursuit, it seems in no hurry now to get to me or Julie. It doesn’t even seem to notice us. It bends over to hook its claws into Grigio’s shirt and drags him up onto the ledge. Grigio struggles to stand, and the skeleton hauls him to his feet.
Grigio and the skeleton regard each other, their faces inches apart.
“Rosy!” Julie screams. “Fucking shoot it!”
Rosso is struggling for breath, clutching his wrist and ribs, unable to move. He gives Julie a look that pleads forgiveness, not just for this failure but for all the failures leading to it. All the years of knowing and not acting.
The skeleton takes hold of Grigio’s arm gently, tenderly, as if leading him into a dance. Then it pulls him close, gazes into his eyes, and bites a chunk out of his shoulder.
Julie shrieks, but everyone else is dumbstruck. Grigio doesn’t fight. His eyes are wide and feverish, but his face is a blank mask as the creature chews into him, taking slow, almost sensual bites. Pieces of flesh fall through its hollow jaw and hit the roof.
I am transfixed. I stare at Grigio and the skeleton in rapt horror, trying to grasp what I’m witnessing. They are perched there on the edge of the roof, silhouetted against a smoldering sky of pink clouds and sickly orange haze, and in that otherworldly light, their figures are indistinguishable. Bones devouring bones.
Julie sprints to the hatch. She picks up Nora’s gun and points it at the skeleton. It finally looks at her, finally acknowledges our presence, and rears back its head to release a roar, a piercing blast like the trumpets at the end of time, rusted and broken and forever out of tune.
Julie fires. The first few shots miss completely, then a bullet snaps off a rib, a clavicle, a hip bone.
“Julie.”
She pauses, the gun trembling in her hands. Her father stares at her vacantly as the blood drains from his body. “I’m sorry,” he says in a quiet murmur.
“Dad, push it off you! Fight it!”
Grigio closes his eyes and says:
“No.”
The skeleton grins at Julie, and eats her father’s throat.
Julie screams with all the anguish and rage in her battered young heart and fires one more time. The creature’s skull vanishes in a burst of dust and bone shards. With its fingers still embedded in Grigio’s shoulders, it reels backward and tips off the edge of the roof.
Grigio goes with it.
They fall together, entangled, and Grigio’s body shudders in the air, convulsing. Converting. His remaining flesh peels away in the wind, dry scraps floating up like ashes, leaving the pale bones underneath, and there is a message in those bones that I’m finally able to read. A warning etched into each femur, each humerus, each grasping metacarpal:
This is the plague. This is the curse. So potent now, so deeply rooted and ravenous for souls, no longer content to wait for death. Now reaching out and simply taking what it wants.
But a decision has been made today. We will not be robbed. We will cling tight to what we have, no matter how hard the curse pulls. We will fight it.
On the ground below, the Boneys watch Grigio’s remains plummet to earth and shatter. They stare at the fragments in the dirt, those little white shards, broken and inconsequential. Then all at once, with movements devoid of purpose or intent . . . they wander off. Some walk in circles, some bump into each other, but little by little they disperse and disappear into the buildings and trees. I feel a tiny thrill creeping through me. What signal have they received? Between the fall of those bones and the strange new energy pulsing out from this rooftop like radio waves, is ther
e a notice blaring loud in their empty skulls? An announcement that their time is over?
Julie lets the gun fall from her fingers. She inches her way to the edge of the roof and crouches there, gazing down at the pile of bones below. Her eyes are red, but there are still no tears. The only sound on the roof is the wind, whipping at the tattered remnants of state and country flags. Rosso watches Julie for a moment, then unlocks Nora’s cuffs and helps her to her feet. Nora rubs her wrists and they share a look that makes words unnecessary.
Julie makes her way over to us with dazed, dragging steps. Rosso touches her shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Julie.”
She sniffs, staring down at her feet. “I’m okay.” Her voice is like her eyes, raw and wrung out. Now that I have the ability, I want to do her crying for her. Julie has become an orphan, but she is much more than the tragic waif that word implies. Her grief will catch up to her eventually and demand its due, but for the moment she is here with us, alive and standing.
Rosso brushes his left hand against her hair, tucking a lock behind her ear. She squeezes his callused palm against her cheek and offers a faint smile.
Rosso turns his attention to me. I can see his eyes flicking left and right, studying my irises. “Archie, was it?”
“Just R.”
He puts his hand out to me, and after a moment’s confusion, I put out mine. Rosso shakes my broken hand, enduring his broken wrist with a fierce grimace. “I don’t know exactly why,” he says, “but I’m thrilled to know you, R.”
He walks back to the hatch.
“Will we be having a community meeting tomorrow?” Nora asks.
“I’m going to announce it as soon as I get down this ladder. We have some urgent developments to address.” He looks out at the retreating skeletal army. “And I’d certainly love to hear your take on just what the hell happened today.”
“We might have some theories,” Nora says.
Rosso descends the ladder, gripping carefully with his left hand. Nora looks at Julie. Julie nods. Nora smiles at her, then at me, then disappears into the hatch.
We are alone on the rooftop. Julie squints up at me, studying me as if she’s never seen me before. Then her eyes widen, and she takes in a sharp breath. “Oh my God,” she says. “R, you’re . . .” She reaches up and peels the Band-Aid off my forehead. She touches the place where she stabbed me on the day we first met, ages ago, last month.
