The Living

by Isaac Marion

  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:

  entering indiana

  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 you
r 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—”