The Living

by Isaac Marion

  “Whore,” he gurgles.

  With a snarl that’s been waiting seven years to come out, Julie kicks Balt in the face. Her boot catches his jutting chin and his head snaps back.

  It almost snaps off.

  Balt tips over the edge of the pit, and he’s gone.

  Nora stares at that yawning void, though she refuses to look down into it. She stares at Evan, though only at his hands. She feels Julie’s arms around her, and for a moment she thinks Julie needs help walking. Then she remembers that Julie loves her, and this is an embrace between friends surrounded by death, and Nora returns it as her eyes burn and blur.

  On the far end of the chamber, in the shadow of the stairwell, her brother watches. He doesn’t see violence and death. He sees risk and sacrifice. He sees love. And with our pages fluttering around him, a thought rings in his head:

  Violence is concentric. Every great war grows from a thousand small ones. End the war at the center and you’ve ended them all.

  How goes yours, Addis Greene? we ask him, for we are learning each other’s languages. Is anyone winning?

  Addis watches his sister and her friend break their embrace and help the big man to his feet. He watches them pull him to safety while the tall man and the others close in on the remaining troops.

  Does the world deserve forgiveness? Does it deserve another chance?

  Addis bites his trembling lip. He doesn’t answer.

  I

  It’s remarkable what the death of a leader does to fighters who don’t know why they’re fighting. If these men had some noble cause, Balt would be their martyr and they’d fight twice as hard. But since their cause is some barely conscious blend of greed and fear, his death only releases them from his spell. They freeze. They glance around as if wondering how they got here. Then they run.

  Kenerly’s army is unaffected by Kenerly’s death, because it’s not his army. These people are here for their own reasons, which have nothing to do with the charisma of one man. They chase the Cock Street Boys up the staircase without a backward glance, and suddenly it’s quiet.

  As I gasp for breath and test a few broken knuckles, a sound that reached my ears earlier finally registers in my brain.

  Julie’s scream.

  I rush to the edge of the pit. Nora is helping her to her feet—or maybe they’re embracing; my attention is on her leg, where each heartbeat pumps tablespoons of blood out of three deep gashes.

  “Are you okay?” Julie asks Nora.

  Nora laughs darkly. “Fuck you, Cabernet. Worry about your—”

  “Nora,” Julie insists, shaking her off and balancing on one leg. “Are you okay?”

  Nora looks at the floor, wipes her eyes, and nods. “Yeah. I think I’m okay.” She looks over her shoulder; her little brother stands in front of the stairs, watching us with that strange, appraising gaze.

  “Marcus is hurt,” Julie says, nodding toward M, who is upright but unsteady, pressing his hand to his side. “Go fix him up. I can handle my leg.”

  Nora hesitates. “Sit down and keep it elevated. R, make some bandages.” She rushes to help M.

  Julie finally looks at me. Her brows knit as she scans my body for injury, but most of the blood on my hands isn’t mine. I ease her to the floor and search the bodies for a reasonably clean shirt, then tear off three strips and wrap them around her wounds. She lets out of muffled shriek as I cinch them tight.

  “Jesus Christ that hurts. I think he chipped my fucking femur…”

  “Can you walk?”

  She takes a deep breath and puts an arm over my shoulder. We stand up together and she takes a few cautious steps. When the initial rush of agony passes, she lets go of me and shuffles to the edge of the BABL pit. She looks down into its funneling depths. A smear of blood runs down its side, bits of clothing and flesh hanging off the points of the copper studs. There probably wasn’t much left of Balt by the time he reached the bottom.

  Julie screws her eyes shut and unleashes a scream into the pit. Her veins bulge, her fists clench at her sides, her lips stretch back from her teeth. It’s not a scream of pain but of rage and disgust—for the man at the bottom of the pit and for the pit itself and for the insane world that built them both.

  Her voice breaks and she stumbles backward, spent. I catch her under the arms and hold her.

  “What now?” she mumbles.

  My brain races to find its track, to remember what we’re here to do, but while it’s still rebooting, Tomsen steps up next to us with the briefcase in hand.

  “Now this!” she says cheerfully, and tosses it into the pit.

  “Wait!” Julie gasps, snapping out of her daze and reaching out in a futile attempt to grab the case. We watch in horror as it bounces down the funnel with a series of bell-like clangs and disappears into the shadows.

  “What the fuck, Tomsen?” Nora says, running to join us. “Did you just blow us up?”

  I’m relieved to see M hobbling along behind Nora, clutching his bandaged midsection, but my relief might be short-lived if Tomsen just lost her mind.

  “It was designed to be a suicide bomb,” she says, “but I added a timer circuit so we don’t have to die!” She beams like a kid showing off her science project.

  “Okay but…how much time?” Nora says.

  “Enough for us to get away, but not enough for anyone to fish out the bomb. It’s perfect! I’m so excited!”

  “Huntress,” Julie says, grabbing her shoulders. “How much time?”

  Tomsen’s giddy smile falters and she cocks her head. “Fifteen minutes?”

  Julie claps a hand over her face.

  “Is that…not perfect?” Tomsen asks.

  M sighs. “We’re gonna have to run again, aren’t we?”

  “We needed to use this place before we destroyed it,” I tell Tomsen. “We needed to show the world what’s happening here.”

  Her face brightens. “Oh! We’re already doing that. See?”

  She points to the control station. All the editing monitors now display security camera views of various locations in the stadium. The big screen at the top, the one that was showing the Fed TV broadcast, is now showing…us.

  Four blood-smeared adults and a debatably Dead child, surrounded by bodies on the rim of a bottomless pit.

  “Are you saying,” Julie says under her breath, “that we’re broadcasting to the whole country…right now?”

  “Exactly! We have been for about ten minutes.”

  A profoundly uncomfortable silence fills the room.

  Slowly, with wide eyes, we turn to face the camera.

  “Everyone’s watching,” Tomsen says, “and listening, and they’re probably getting pretty confused by now, so maybe you should say something.”

  Julie gives the camera a cringing smile. “Um…hi.”

  Tomsen runs back to the control station. “Go ahead. Tell and show. Give them a tour of Hell. I’ll keep the cameras on you from here. But hurry, okay? Because…fourteen minutes.” She grins and flashes a thumbs-up.

  I stare into the glass eye of the camera and I feel it growing, filling my vision like a dark planet. It can’t really be the whole world in there. It’s just this country. And maybe Canada. And maybe Central America if the technology is as advanced as it looks. But there’s no way it reaches the eastern hemisphere. Unless there are relay stations…?

  “R?” Julie whispers, reading the tremors on my face. “Do you have something to say?”

  I open my mouth. “My name is—”

  My voice sounds too loud, like I’m in a small bedroom shouting into a megaphone. I shut my mouth, startled. I take a deep breath, hoping the words will come when I release it, but someone interrupts me. That voice in my limbic cortex, bitter and wry like a heckler in the back row of my mind.

  Let’s hear it, kid. Let’s see you cha
nge the world with an idea.

  I grimace. I take a step back.

  Let’s see you tell hungry people that there’s more to life than food. Let’s see you convince these weaklings that they don’t need a strongman to lead them. Let’s hear some poems about hope while an army of death swarms their homes.

  It’s him. It’s not just his raspy timbre in a roar of other voices; it’s him. He surges out of the noise, pulling his scattered identity together and reaching for my throat.

  My throat is tight. I can’t speak.

  What’s the matter, Recessive Atvist? What’s wrong, Recreant Atvist? Did you forget your big speech or did you never have one? Did you come all this way to stand in front of the world only to realize you’ve got nothing to say?

  The black worms are sliding through my grip, spreading out from my wound and wrapping around my neck like a noose. I can’t breathe. I see Julie’s worried eyes on me and I remember what I said to her the last time her asthma attacked. Think about breathing. The pleasure of it. The privilege. I try to follow my own advice, repeating it like a mantra, but he interrupts me again.

  You don’t need to breathe, remember? You’re a corpse. You don’t need these people. You don’t need this fight. You’re dead, and everything is easy.

  Something sparks inside me, and my panic flares into anger. I feel my blood boiling, my face flushing red.

  Wheezing and clutching my throat, I stumble away from the camera toward the emergency exit on the other side of the pit.

  “R!” Julie says. “Where are you going?”

  I hear Nora’s voice behind me, nervous and thin. “Hey, uh…world? So, I don’t know if you caught this earlier, but in about fourteen minutes, BABL’s gonna be gone. You’ll be able to change the channel. But first we need to show you something, so, uh…stay tuned?”

  I hear the footsteps of my friends following me but they sound miles away. I shove the door open and find myself in a narrow shaft, not stairs but a ladder, rising toward a distant square of daylight.

  If down can be up then up can be down, my grandfather says, and do I detect a note of unease creeping into his snarl? Maybe you don’t want to climb this ladder. Maybe it’s safer down here. Didn’t you have a speech to make?

  I start climbing, ignoring both my grandfather and the screams of my broken knuckles. I hear Julie and M behind me making little agonized noises as they strain their own injuries and I want to tell them to turn back, to keep themselves safe…but no, I don’t want that. I want them by my side.

  The shaft emerges onto the stadium rooftop. The wind howls across its opening; I have to crouch to stay steady. It takes an effort to make myself turn and help Julie up, because everything in me is pointing ahead, toward the structure on the apex of the roof.

  Glimpsed from the outskirts of Post, it was an ambiguous lump. Now that I can see it clearly, I’m still no closer to understanding it. It appears to be the dome from Post’s city hall—not a recreation but the actual dome itself, torn off that building and dumped here on the stadium roof. Its cracked walls and bent pillars reveal stone-textured fiberglass and marble-patterned plastic, but despite the late era flimsiness of its construction, the stadium still sags under its weight. It doesn’t take an engineer to see that this thing will fall through any day. Perhaps any minute.

  I move toward the crooked, crumpled edifice with careful steps. The wind buffets me furiously, blowing my hair over my eyes and hissing in my ears, hot like an animal’s breath.

  You’ve come to work for us. This is the right thing. The only thing. We are unsurprised.

  The dome is modeled after the US Capitol’s grand old rotunda, but reduced to the size of a small house. At its crown is a statue of a woman in robes, and two flags have been drilled into her shoulders: Old Glory and the Axiom logo. She is a shrunken plastic replica of the capitol’s bronze colossus, a statue called Freedom that was forged and erected by slaves.

  Everyone has a place. We saw it all in the deep dark.

  The voice becomes less and less Mr. Atvist as I get closer to the dome. I can feel his fury as he sinks back into the group, losing his precious, peerless self in the noise of all his peers.

  The earth swallowed us. We sank beneath the city and the city closed over us.

  It’s not really addressing me anymore; its attention has wandered into some obscure reminiscence, like an old man lost in dementia.

  We raged as we died. We had beaten all our enemies but we were still going to lose. It wasn’t fair. The earth had no right to ignore our success.

  “Oh my God,” Julie says. She is looking over the edge at the war on the ground. I can hear it—the guns, the explosions, the screams of the Living and the dry roars of the Dead—but I decline to look. I can feel the Boneys’ hum rising up the walls as they climb, but my eyes are locked on the dome. The doorway ahead. A keypad just like the ones in Freedom Tower.

  We died with the earth smothering our protests, filling our mouths with soil, and our rage was so strong that when we awoke from death, we still remembered. We refused to disappear.

  I punch in the Atvist family code, that vestigial fragment of my DNA lingering in this ever-evolving monster. The door clicks open.

  But we were buried, crushed inside the earth. We felt the hunger but we couldn’t satisfy it. We seethed and struggled. Our teeth gnashed on rocks, and the dirt pressed into our eyes. Months passed. Then years. We went mad and then sane again, and finally we saw the truth.

  I step inside the dome. My footsteps echo flat and strange off its misshapen walls.

  We saw the natural order of everything, like the strata of earth that surrounded us, timeless and inescapable. We saw the line of our ancestors and the history of civilization, from chieftain to king to president to us. We saw the gears of the machine and how smoothly they turned, and we knew it was our job to keep it running.

  The dome has no functional spaces. No offices or living quarters. It’s an ornate empty shell. The only notable feature is a jarring incongruity amongst all the faux-marble classicism: a rusty red shipping container, resting in the center of the space like an artifact in a museum.

  We had to come back. We had to do our job. So instead of starving, we conquered the hunger and twisted it into power. We heard other voices like ours and we seized them. And as we rotted away, we grew stronger. We shed the weight of our flesh and began to dig.

  I can feel the presence of my friends behind me, but they’re silent. Can they hear the voices? Can they hear the buzz inside the shipping container, like an enraged nest of wasps?

  My skin crawls as I reach out and lift the container’s door latch. The door swings open with a squeal of long disuse.

  Bones pour out around my feet.

  The container is full of them. Not full skeletons, just white and brown fragments, rising waist-high all the way to the back of the box. I feel them vibrating around my ankles, disembodied hands grasping, unpaired jawbones trying to bite. The whole heap rattles and chatters and buzzes and hisses; acrid dust rises from it and blows into my face, and I want to cough and vomit but I’m paralyzed with disgust.

  Look what I built! my grandfather crows, oblivious to all the other voices shouting over him and each other. I carved my name on the world! No one will ever forget me!

  He sounds distant, muffled, buried somewhere in that dusty pile.

  Now it’s your turn, kid! Come claim your inheritance!

  A thought flashes in my brain like a small explosion—my father. My weak, violent, fanatical father…he rejected this offer. As broken as he was, he took that one step off the path his father laid out for him. One step away from that whirlwind of bones and the grunting brutes at its center. He never got far in his miserable little life, but he took that step, and my life began where it landed.

  I am not a lone aberration in a heritage of cruelty. I am another step.

&n
bsp; Tears flood my eyes as I turn to face the people I love. They watch me with horror and confusion. Everyone except Addis, who lingers in the shadows, waiting with what looks like expectation in those strange yellow eyes. I catch movement above me and I look up. A security camera stares down at me and past me into the rusty metal box that is Axiom’s executive suite. As I gaze into the black depths of its lens, the camera nods up and down.

  You’re on, Tomsen is telling me. Say what you came to say.

  Julie once said she could tell me anything because I just sit there and listen. I’ve always been a good listener. Even before my undead impediments, I preferred to let others do the talking while I relaxed in the safety of silence. But life isn’t a story that the world is telling me. Life is a conversation, and I’ve been listening long enough. It’s time for me to speak.

  WE

  The short man is sitting in his living room, ensconced in his plush recliner. He has not moved from this chair in a very long time. The room gets dark, then bright, then dark again as the days pass. Sometimes he closes his eyes at night, but he doesn’t sleep. He thinks. He wants. He waits.

  And he watches television. He was unhappy when the LOTUS Feed became an endless Axiom infomercial. He doesn’t like this new show. He didn’t exactly “like” the old one either; no one really enjoys the Feed, they watch because it’s less horrific than silence. But that balance has almost tipped for the short man. Sometimes, when the noises get too loud and the images too frenzied, he considers getting up. He considers walking outside to see what everyone’s doing—his neighborhood has been busy lately. He even considers talking to some of these people who are standing around him in his house, wandering from room to room or just sitting next to him. But so far, the best he’s managed is to close his eyes.

  His eyes have been closed for about an hour when he hears a stirring around him. He opens them and sees that he has more guests. People are coming in from the street, crowding into his living room until there’s only room to stand. For an instant, he imagines drinks in their hands, music on the stereo, laughter, joy—a party!—and his blank face warms with a smile. Then the image fades. He does not know these people. They do not know each other. So why are they all together?