The Living

by Isaac Marion

  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.”

  Juli
e 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 n
umbing 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.