The Living

by Isaac Marion

  “Fight your doubt.” He crouches down and touches Miriam’s cheek, squeezes Peter’s shoulder. “Don’t let it wash you away.”

  He holds their gaze until they give him small, timid nods, then he stands again and stares at the blank white wall. “What we’re doing is right. We’re following the truth like no church ever has. All the way to its conclusion.”

  I

  Like me, Citi Stadium has lived three lives. It was born as the ultimate expression of the spirit of its era: size, strength, and heedless excess, a sprawling expanse of concrete that smothered six square blocks and could host a football game on one end and a pyrotechnic political rally on the other. Then its life of flamboyance came to a violent end, and it became a grim, gray tomb for people waiting to die.

  Now, after a flicker of hope, it’s becoming something else.

  From a hill on the edge of the suburbs, I can see the signs of its transformation. Construction scaffolds creep up its walls like dark veins. Oily fumes rise through its open roof. And there’s a new structure sticking up from one half of that roof, a huge, pale lump that I can’t quite identify, like a tumor on a giant’s lip.

  Axiom egressed from New York on the city’s dying breath. It floated across the country on a malign breeze. And now it’s here in the city I tried to call home, busily replicating in the cells of its new host. As Julie and I descend the grassy slopes toward the edge of downtown Post, I hear shouts and revving engines, the occasional gunshot. The ruins are crawling with activity, but it doesn’t feel like life. It feels like decomposition.

  I see soldiers rounding up the Dead, herding them into fenced-off holding pens. I see soldiers rounding up the Living, herding them into fenced-off refugee camps. Main Street is a solid line of people all the way to the stadium gates; it resembles a protest but it’s the opposite. This mob has gathered to await their government’s pleasure, to be assigned work and housing and to cheer for the troops overrunning their streets. Most will end up in the camps or tenements; some will be brought into the stadium to serve in slightly higher capacities. None will have any idea who or what or why they serve. They will wonder in brief moments, perhaps grumble aloud when drunk or stoned, then sleep it off and return to work with all the old adages ringing in their heads: The way things are. Same shit, different day. Nothing new under the sun.

  Black helicopters buzz over the stadium like flies on meat. Unlike me, this place has not found hope in its third life. At least not yet.

  • • •

  A wind is rising. I tug at my collar to let it cool my sweaty neck, but the tie is like the knot on a balloon, sealing all that damp air inside. We keep to the side streets, avoiding the active areas, but we still encounter a few stray soldiers here and there. I straighten my posture and flash them an insane grin, and they nod nervously and move on. It’s easy at a distance. My big acting challenge is a few blocks ahead.

  I glance at Julie and my eyes stick. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her clean. Her skin glows. Her hair is silky gold, tied back in a stubby ponytail, and her clothes—olive drab shorts and a light gray tank top—have a look of military purpose. Like my beard stubble, they don’t quite fit the character she’ll be playing—a stretchy red dress would be more convincing—but the shorts are short and the top is tight and Julie makes any outfit distracting.

  “Should probably do this now,” I mumble, pulling the zip-tie out of my pocket.

  She nods and holds her wrists out to me. I avoid her gaze as I cinch them together, but when I look up, she’s smirking.

  “I never thought you’d be a kinky one,” she says.

  I try to ignore her but I feel a faint flush. “You’re sure you’re okay with this?”

  “It’s a story they understand, right? I don’t care. I just want to get this done.” She blows a strand of hair out of her face. “And I trust you.”

  Casual. Off-hand. I forbid myself to grin.

  “Okay. But I’m going to improvise…and it might get ugly. So promise you’ll forget whatever I say.”

  She uses her thumbs to cross her heart.

  “Say it.”

  She smiles. “I promise.”

  • • •

  The closer we get to the stadium gate, the greater the tension in the immigration line. These people have probably been camped here for days, waiting for their big moment at the gate, and their desperation shows in wide eyes and clenched fists. I wonder where they came from and what they’re expecting to find here. I wonder what they’ve been promised by the fever dream flashing on their televisions.

  The gate is open. One trio of soldiers interviews applicants while another points rifles at them. With a grimace, I knock on my basement door. One last job, I tell the basement’s occupant. Time to pay our debts.

  The door opens. The wretch smiles.

  Dragging Julie by the wrists, I shove my way into the front of the line.

  “Hey!” shouts a grizzled man with two kids clinging to his legs. He grabs my shirt and I give him a fierce backhand; he collapses while his kids scream. I hear Julie mumbling, “Jesus,” but I stride forward, chest out, grinning.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” one of the guards says, putting a hand out. “What’s this about? Who are you”—he glances at my tie and falters slightly—“sir?”

  I infuse my grin with murder. “If you have to ask who I am, I think you won’t be working here long. I haven’t made it to many meetings lately but I expect a basic awareness of Executive hierarchy, even from front desk girls like you.”

  He hesitates. “Sorry, sir, I’m new to the company and communication’s been—”

  “Shut up,” I say pleasantly. “I don’t care. I’m Mr. Atvist’s grandson. Get out of my way.”

  I step forward, but the guards don’t part for me. They look nervous, but they watch the officer for a signal.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he says, “I just—I have orders to—”

  “Who do you think gave those orders?” I snap, stepping into his personal space.

  He swallows, then points at Julie. “But…who’s that?”

  I shove Julie in front of me, toward the gate. “That’s my birthday present.”

  He eyes Julie and I see lust and envy filling the space reserved for reason. He nods and reaches for a clipboard. “I’ll just need to check your—”

  I move in close to his face, making the veins of my neck bulge. “Listen to me, kid. My family conquered New York and stuck our crown on the tallest building in America. We pissed the Atvist name all over this country, and I’m not having this conversation with whoever the fuck you are.”

  He reflexively steps back. “Sir, I just—”

  I put my face inches from his in that bizarre old ritual of domination, proving my superior manhood by threatening to kiss him. “Disappear quickly,” I growl, “and maybe I won’t remember you.”

  He drops his eyes. He waves to the guards. They step aside for us.

  With a decisive nod, I prod Julie into the lobby, and in the darkness of the entry tunnel, I stuff the wretch back into the basement, shuddering with revulsion.

  “Wow,” Julie says. “‘Just…wow.”

  “Please don’t,” I mutter.

  “‘That’s my birthday present’? Where’d you dig up that one?”

  “Julie. You promised.”

  “I know, I know.” She chuckles and shakes her head. “But I’m gonna need a minute.”

  I glance around for something to cut her zip-tie and end my humiliation—and it really is just mine; Julie is too self-assured to be affected by fake degradation. She seems to be having fun.

  “Were you really like that?” she says through clamped teeth as she bites the end of the zip-tie and cinches it tight. “How could you have been like that?” She slams her elbows against her waist, forcing her arms apart, and the tie snaps.

&nb
sp; “I wasn’t…quite that bad,” I reply. “But I would’ve been if I’d stayed in that world.”

  She rubs her wrists and stares down the tunnel at the roiling crowds inside. “We have to destroy it.”

  • • •

  As much as I agree with Julie’s lethal intent, our ambitions today are more measured. We can’t topple Axiom and erase all its influence with one little bomb. We’re just here to break the silence. To show the world the dirt on its face and hope it has the sense to clean itself.

  Our plan was simple, but I can already smell complications as we emerge from the tunnel into the stadium’s narrow streets, now so densely populated they’re almost solid. I can’t seem to find my bearings in the grid; all the familiar landmarks are gone or changed. A building that might be the Agriculture hothouse is covered in black plastic sheeting for no conceivable reason. The open space where I expected to find the cattle pens now houses some kind of assembly line manned by sweating, sunburned children. All of the street signs are gone.

  “What the hell are they trying to do?” Julie wonders aloud, taking in the inexplicable renovations.

  This pseudo-city once felt cramped, but now I feel lost in a labyrinth of plywood and trash. Julie gives up on landmarks and looks to the stadium’s retracted roof panels, using stains and broken girders like a sailor uses the stars. She navigates to a tiny “house” of rusty metal sheets and knocks on the door. There’s no answer, so she opens it, and we step inside.

  Once, this was the home of Lawrence Rosso and Ella Desconsado. I remember it through two sets of eyes. Through Perry’s, it was a place of sorrow and decline. He browsed Rosso’s old books, searching for clues to blurry riddles. He watched Julie and Ella pretend to enjoy their dinner, he watched Rosso pretend to enjoy their conversations, he watched everyone around him fight to stay afloat, and he muttered, Fools, while he let himself sink.

  Perry discarded his life here. I picked it up, dusted it off, and resumed it. Through my eyes, this is a place of rising, not sinking. A place of rebirth. It’s where I began my efforts to reenter Living society, where I sat at Ella’s table and tasted my first home-cooked meal, where I practiced my small talk and my big talk, where I drank tea in Rosso’s reading room and discoursed late into the night, both of us bloviating on topics mundane and esoteric. In this house as I remember it, no one was pretending. We may have been fools, but we were earnest fools. We believed in every mad act.

  Lawrence Rosso is gone now. The house is dark except for one lamp in the living room, where his widow rocks slowly in a creaking recliner, a pen gripped in her veiny fingers, moving across the pages of a diary. She looks up as we enter, and I barely recognize her. That incongruous youthful vitality has drained from her face. She finally looks her age.

  I can tell by her squint that we are just blurs at this distance, and I can tell by her scowl who she thinks those blurs are.

  “What the fuck do you want?” she snaps. “Doesn’t Balt have anything better to do than bother sick old ladies? Tell him and his bosses to—” She cuts off in a fit of coughing.

  “Ella,” Julie says.

  Ella goes still. Her fit subsides. Julie steps into the lamplight and crouches down next to the old woman’s chair. She smiles, and her voice quavers as she says, “I’m back, Ella.”

  Ella reaches out with trembling fingers. She touches Julie’s cheek, as if testing a mirage. Her eyes roam across Julie’s many cuts and bruises and come to rest on her finger stump.

  Julie pulls it away. She tries to maintain her smile, though her eyes are glistening. “It’s been a rough month, hasn’t it?”

  Ella grabs her, pulls her into a tight embrace, and they let the tears flow. I keep a respectful distance, but I can’t help joining them in this release. It feels good to cry. It feels curative, like washing out a wound.

  “Where did you go?” Ella says, straightening up and wiping her eyes. “What happened to you?”

  “It’s a really long story,” Julie says.

  “But what are you doing here?” Ella is regaining her composure, and the anger of a few minutes ago comes flooding back. “Why on earth would you come back to this shit hole? Do you have any idea what’s happening?”

  “Tell us,” Julie says.

  Ella springs out of her chair and paces the room, not quite as infirm as she looked. “Well, where to begin?” she says venomously, and counts off on her fingers, starting with the thumb. “They’ve converted all the gardens and livestock pens into munition factories. No mention of where our food’s going to come from when the warehouse is empty.” She adds the index to the thumb, making a gun. “They’ve sent ‘acquisition teams’ to invade Portland, even though they’re barely holding Post together.” Now the middle finger, and an extra surge of vitriol. “They’ve put ‘Captain Balt’ in charge of Security”—she lowers the other fingers, leaving the middle one stiff—“so that’s been fun.”

  Julie shakes her head.

  “But Julie…it gets crazier.” Her venom congeals into fear. “They’re doing something with the Dead. They’re changing them, making them docile, and they’re giving them jobs. They have these facilities…”

  “We know that part,” Julie says. “We’ve toured a few of those facilities.”

  “But do you know it’s not just zombies now? Do you know they’re using anyone they get ahold of, Living or Dead? Turning them into these ‘human resources’?”

  Julie and I look at each other sharply.

  “They’re making more arrests every week than John and Lawrence did in seven years, but they don’t even use the prisons anymore. Everyone goes straight to—”

  “Where?” Julie says sharply. “Where are the facilities?”

  Ella’s face crumples as understanding creeps in. “Oh,” she says. “Oh no. Nora?”

  “Ella, where are they?”

  “They’re in the schools—I mean the Morgue. Or where the Morgue used to be.”

  Julie stands up. She grabs Ella’s hand and squeezes. “We have to go.”

  Ella looks frightened. “What are you going to do?”

  “We’re going to get Nora out of there and end this bullshit.”

  Ella raises her eyebrows. “All of it?”

  Julie steps back and links her arm in mine, looks up at me, then down at my briefcase. “As much as we can.”

  WE

  Addis has experienced most varieties of pain. He has been cold, hungry, bruised, burned, and impaled by a spear of bone. But none of those simple signals ever troubled him as much as the torment of a fever. Physical pain can be isolated and ignored; a fever makes pain your whole reality, a distorted universe of nauseous colors and warped physics. A little taste of insanity.

  He feels himself sinking into that universe now, through the floor of the Orientation building and down into some shuddering esophagus. The “school” in New York was just an antechamber. Now he’s inside.

  He can’t begin to identify all the things stuck into his body. He can’t find categories in which to place the sounds and images, so they slip past his brain into deeper lakes of consciousness. They reach all the way to us. Black droplets of sickness splash up from the Lower and stain our books. Our pages curl, our words blur, whole pages become illegible.

  We have never seen this before. We didn’t know there was a poison that could penetrate so deep. No mere machinery could do this; no amount of chemicals and psychological torture could stain the very roots of consciousness.

  What did those old men discover while their bones buzzed in the dirt? What deep well did they tap?

  Addis sees other people around him. Many are strangers, but a few he recognizes. Joan and Alex, his friends. Nora, his sister. And a big man who was once a monster and now insists he’s not. All strapped into chairs, stuck full of tubes pumping pink syrup from someplace he can’t see. All shaking, shuddering, eyes wide o
r squeezed shut. They are sinking faster than Addis. He has wrestled the plague before and managed to pin it down, and though this is a new and more insidious strain, he has a resistance that slows its advance. But the others…

  A long moan rises from Alex’s throat.

  Joan is crying.

  “Addis!” Nora screams through gritted teeth. He looks at her, but her eyes are shut. Sweat pours from her forehead. “Addis!”

  Addis is a child, and so his life has been passive. He’s been nourished, taught, and protected, and he’s been neglected, abused, and abandoned. He has been either a beneficiary or a victim of other people’s actions; he has rarely ever acted. So he assumes his sister is calling out to make sure he’s okay, but as her screams continue with increasing panic, it hits him in a horrible, disorienting flash—she isn’t screaming because she wants to help him. She is screaming for his help.

  The world is upside-down. Everything is slipping.

  On the far end of this shadowy warehouse, a door creaks open. Two men push a girl inside. Addis’s eyes strain toward her, fighting their way past all the video screens and flashing lights. Happiness and despair squeeze into one emotion.

  “Where’s my dad?” Sprout shrieks at her captors. “My dad said he’d be right back!”

  “Your father’s busy right now,” says a man in a white coat.

  “But he said to stay at the home and wait for him!”

  The man reaches down and ruffles her hair. “Sometimes grownups don’t know how to say what they really mean. So we have to read their actions.”

  Sprout scowls up at him. “He doesn’t want me to be here!”

  The man shrugs. “Your father wants you to be safe.” He waves a hand around the facility. “This is where we make people safe.”

  I

  How long ago was it that a man in clothes like mine opened a briefcase like this and destroyed a chunk of this city? I don’t know exactly. Weeks, not months, but Axiom has already erased all memory of it. The buildings they destroyed are raised and repaired, cinched back into the grid with new support cables. There was no tragic disaster. No peaceful former leadership. No thrilling glimpse of a world without the plague. No past, no future—just the way things are.