The Living

by Isaac Marion

  Abbot’s eyes narrow. “Executive is prioritizing the pirate broadcast. We can’t get into the basement, but we have pitchmen on the roof waiting to do damage control once we clear the terrorists.”

  Abram can’t hide the incredulity in his voice. “Sir…Goldman’s cutting the gate. If the Boneys get inside, they’ll gut this place in an hour.”

  “It’s just one branch,” Abbot says. “We have dozens.” There’s a stiffness in his voice that Abram hasn’t heard before, a reduction in personality, like he’s fighting his own thoughts—Path Narrowing. “But if we don’t stop this broadcast, we might not have any.”

  Abbot’s walkie crackles, receiving that very broadcast on Fed FM.

  “My name…is R.”

  Gentle and hesitant. Weak and uncertain. If that voice ever convinces anyone of anything, Abram will give up on understanding the world. So why does Abbot look so worried?

  “I was an Atvist. My grandfather founded the Axiom Group.”

  The voice is a little firmer now.

  “His grandfather?” Abram says. “What’s he talking about?”

  Abbot’s face is pale.

  “Sir?”

  “Move,” Abbot growls, and runs toward the tunnel into the walls.

  • • •

  “This is Axiom’s Executive branch,” R says as they race up the stairwell. “This is where your orders come from.”

  What could “this” possibly refer to? Did he take the executives hostage? Abram glances through the doorways of each landing, searching for the glow of a screen, but the wall is a dark, dead place.

  Abbot radios for backup. Four men join them on the fourth floor—or is it the fifth? Abram feels disoriented. He feels places and people overlapping like the pages of different books, wet and translucent and blending together.

  “Their troops are probably on their way here right now,” R says, and the soldiers chuckle darkly, but Abram’s face is blank. A memory flickers in his head. Men in beige jackets pointing guns at his daughter outside the flaming wreckage of his old truck. Are these the very same men? Of course not. Those men are dead, like Jim Roberts, the man whose name Abram wears like an animal’s hide.

  “You don’t have to be what you are,” R says. “Even the Dead can heal.”

  Abram feels the balloon in his brain stretching again. But before it can burst and flood him with toxic bile, he hears that other voice, far closer and clearer than R’s staticky monologue.

  You thought you had to do it, Abram. So did Kenrei.

  He flinches at the sound of her name. He thought he’d never hear it again.

  You did it because you loved her, and that’s how it’s written on her final page. So let her go. Let the rules change.

  He feels the balloon shrink a little, as if someone has sucked out some poison.

  Who are you? Abram demands, and it’s strange to hear a tremor in the voice of his own thoughts.

  Do you really not know?

  He grits his teeth. He tries to pull himself together as the other men push through a door and daylight floods the stairwell. He steps out onto the stadium roof and into a wind so fierce he wonders if it’s another hurricane. But the sky is blue. The wind is hot and dry. He’s never seen weather like this.

  He has seen the dome, but only from the ground, and even from that distance it seemed a tacky pastiche. Up close it’s fully ludicrous, a giant plastic playhouse dumped crookedly on a roof that can barely support it. But he’s surprised that he’s surprised. Especially when he sees the three pitchmen waiting around the back, grinning in their colorful costumes. Did he ever really believe he was working for men of sanity?

  The pitchmen don’t say a word. They gesture to the door. Even Abbot shrinks away from them as he slips inside.

  The dome is unlit, but shafts of light pour through the little arch windows and leak through cracks in the fiberglass walls. Abram feels dizzy in the surreal structure. Walking in a space that was designed as a ceiling creates a sense of floating. It doesn’t help that the whole thing heaves with each gust of wind. He reaches out to steady himself on the freight container that inexplicably dominates the room, but when his hand touches the metal he feels something crawling up his arm. A vibration, or maybe an electric current, humming through his shoulder and into his neck. It creeps around his skull and starts to cohere into voices and he jerks his hand away.

  “Roberts,” Abbot hisses, elbowing him in the ribs. “Focus.” He jabs two fingers at his eyes and then forward.

  There they are.

  The dome is thick with shadows, but Abram can see his former travel partners in the dusty shafts of daylight. He starts to catalogue them by features—the black girl, the big guy, the blond bitch, the lanky fucker—but his mind surprises him with names.

  Nora. Marcus. Julie. R.

  They look like they’ve been through Hell. Abram saw some of it on the screens. He saw Marcus take a knife in the ribs. He saw Julie take it in the leg while trying to protect Marcus. And now they’re all here, bloody and gaunt, knowing full well that Axiom is coming for them and apparently not caring.

  It is hard to call this weakness.

  “Some people think the plague came from outside, like a foreign invader,” R is saying to the camera. “They think it can be stopped with walls and guns and quarantines…”

  “Drop your weapons!” Abbot shouts, rushing out from behind the container with the four soldiers at his back. Marcus and Nora start to raise their pistols but Abbot fires an inch over Nora’s head, sending a tuft of hair flying. “Don’t do it, dumb-fucks! Drop ’em!”

  Nora and Marcus drop their weapons. Abbot nods to his men and they move forward to secure the prisoners.

  But R…

  R is still talking, like a man in a dream, unaware of anything around him. Like a little boy smiling at a girl on a playground, oblivious to the dark clouds on the horizon.

  “I think we’re born with it and we die with it, and no one is ever cured. But that doesn’t mean it has to kill us!”

  Abbot sighs. “You’re never gonna shut up, are you?”

  He fires.

  R lurches forward but doesn’t fall. He doesn’t even turn around to see who shot him. He laughs, and it’s a joyful sound, like he’s discovered something too beautiful to believe.

  “We don’t have to let it win.” He turns away from the camera and takes an unsteady step toward Julie, whose blood-speckled face is frozen in shock. “We can fight it and hold it off.”

  Julie is shaking her head, eyes filling with tears as R touches her cheek.

  “Maybe just long enough to live a good life.”

  His knees buckle. His eyes roll up. He collapses in a puddle of bright red blood.

  Julie releases a scream that sounds like “no.” It rises until her voice breaks. She drops to her knees and grabs R by the shoulders.

  Abram is staring at the blood. There’s blood everywhere. There always is, wherever he goes. It oozes from Julie’s leg and from Marcus’s side and from R’s chest. It gushes from his wife’s forehead, and from his brother’s and his father’s and his mother’s, however and wherever they died.

  And it seeps from three claw marks on his daughter’s cheek as she stands in the doorway of the dome, staring at him with two horrified eyes, one brown, the other yellow, uncovered and blazing with its strange and terrible fire.

  The other two children rush in behind her and slam the door like they’re being pursued, but Abram doesn’t see whatever’s pursuing them. He sees only his daughter’s eyes as they move from the dying man on the floor to the gun in Abram’s hand.

  “Daddy?” she says, incredulous and dismayed, and he finishes her accusation in his mind. Is this what you meant by waiting for the right moment? Stalling, bargaining, compromising, conceding, standing back and keeping silent while brave fools take the
bullets?

  Abbot is signaling to the pitchmen, giving them the all-clear so they can retake the stage and address the world and undo whatever damage this fool might have done with his words. But as that grinning trio steps into the dome, Julie leaps to her feet, fists clenched at her sides, and stares into the camera with savage intensity.

  “Come here,” she growls. “All of you.”

  Abbot raises his gun, then hesitates, cocks his head, turns to Abram. “You do this one, Roberts.”

  “I know you’re out there,” Julie says to the camera, trembling with rage. “I’ve seen you filling up the towns, watching your TVs like you’re waiting for something…”

  “Roberts,” Abbot says. “You put a bullet in her head, and you’re off probation. You get a job, a home, a comfortable life for you and your daughter.”

  Abram’s rifle becomes buoyant in his hands. It begins to rise.

  “Well it’s happening now,” Julie tells the Dead. “The world is ready for you. We want you back.” Tears are streaming from her eyes. “Help us!”

  “Roberts!” Abbot snarls. “Shoot that bitch, now!”

  Abram points his rifle at Julie, but he’s not looking at her. His daughter’s eyes hold him like a vise.

  “Dad,” she says, stepping toward him. She shakes her head with such gravity that he barely recognizes the little girl he raised. The toddler who begged for late-night stories to clear away her nightmares. The baby whose sun yellow eye seemed to burn right through him until he could no longer stand it. “No more,” she says, and he’s amazed at the authority in her tiny voice, not just a plea but a command. “No more.”

  Abram looks away.

  “The gate’s wide open for you,” Julie tells the Dead. “Come home!”

  Abram fires.

  Team Manager Abbot looks perplexed. He wears the expression of a man searching for answers. We can feel him reaching into our shelves, digging for older stories from better times, some sort of context for how he came to this moment. His eyes are wide with confusion, and one of them is a tunnel through his head. For an instant, sunlight shines through it. Then it fills with blood.

  Abram is aware of a hulking form rushing toward him from the shadows, but he doesn’t turn. He kills the soldier guarding Nora. He kills the soldier guarding Marcus. He takes a few bullets from the remaining two soldiers, but he kills them too. Only then does he address the man in the black tie, turning just in time to feel his ribs shatter as the man crashes into him.

  He hits the ground. Fists as unyielding as granite pummel his body, snapping bones, spattering blood. He raises his arms to shield his face, and his eyes lock with his assailant’s. What he sees makes his arms sag.

  A vivid blue contact lens has slipped to the side of the man’s eye, and what’s underneath is not a gray iris but no iris at all. It’s a hole, like the hollow gaze of ancient statues, leading back into the cave of his skull.

  Crouched over Abram like a rabid animal, the thing in the black tie bares its teeth and takes a greedy bite of his neck.

  Numbness creeps from the wound, and understanding comes with it. This is what he spent his life working for. This and the heap of bones in that box, now spilling out onto the floor and rattling toward his face. A beast that can’t be bargained with, appeased, or avoided. A beast that has to be fought.

  He searches for his daughter in the mess of running feet and dying bodies that litter the floor. He sees her; she’s screaming, crying, but she looks tall and powerful from down here. So does Julie as she raises Abbot’s revolver, and Abram thinks, Do it. I let them kill your lover. This is the paycheck I’ve earned.

  But Julie doesn’t point it at him. She doesn’t take her deserved revenge or deliver her verdict on his life. She points it at the creature that’s eating him and blows its head into dusty fragments.

  “We apologize for this disruption,” Blue Tie is telling the camera. “If you found any of the preceding content confusing or upsetting, please disregard those feelings at this time.”

  “We invite you to feel calm,” Yellow Tie says with a comforting smile. “Normal programming will resume in a—”

  Julie shoots her through the mouth. Yellow Tie’s bright grin becomes a dark hole. The contents of her skull burst out the back of it, brittle and bloodless like freeze-dried meat.

  Blue Tie’s face bends into a frown, a man mildly inconvenienced. “Your behavior may be negatively affecting—”

  Marcus rips his head off. He cracks it open on his knee and raises it to the camera, displaying the crystallized brain inside. Blue Tie’s face is peeling around the edges, just barely clinging to the skull, but still grinning. Marcus gives the camera a shrug as if to say Your call, folks, and tosses the head aside.

  And it’s done. For a moment at least, they’re safe.

  The wind finds its way through the arch windows and stirs the strange debris on the floor, the fragments of the pitchmen and the buzzing bones of their bosses. Julie’s eyes are wide and blank as she watches Nora tear open R’s shirt and begin to examine his wound. And then Julie turns her gaze to Abram. It’s a cursory glance, a quick assessment of his bites and bullet holes and the blood pouring from them, but it baffles him. In the midst of all this pain and terror, while her lover bleeds out in front of her, she spares a moment for the person who helped make all this happen, a person who’s a stranger at best, an enemy at worst.

  Why?

  “Sprout,” she says, emerging from her shock just enough to soften her voice. “Your dad’s going away.”

  Sprout is kneeling next to him. She doesn’t recoil as his blood reaches her knees and soaks into her jeans. “I know.”

  “If he ever really comes back…it’ll only be for a minute. He’s hurt too bad.”

  “I know.”

  Julie glances at R again. The dullness in her eyes is starting to melt. She holds the gun out to Sprout.

  “He’s your father. I can’t tell you what’s right.”

  Sprout nods, dislodging fresh tears. She takes the gun.

  “Abram,” Julie mumbles, struggling to meet his eyes. “Thank you.”

  And then she’s gone. But her words ring in Abram’s head like dissonant bells. Thank you? After all this—thank you? His mind spirals back to the first day he met these people, their bizarre gratitude as they fled the smoking ruins of the home he helped destroy. No hate, no spite, just an acknowledgement of a tiny kindness.

  What secret do these people know? Is it too late for him to learn it?

  “Dad?”

  His vision is dimming. The room is filling with black clouds.

  “Do it,” he croaks.

  Sprout shakes her head.

  “You have to. I’ll—” He cuts off in a fit of coughing, spattering her face with blood. “I’ll hurt you.”

  “But you won’t, Dad.” There’s an odd steel beneath her sniffling. A confidence that Abram doesn’t understand, the sound of hidden knowledge. “We’re going to change it.”

  Abram lets out a slow, ragged sigh. He doesn’t know or care what she means. He only cares that she’s with him, and that she will get through this. Someone will take the gun from her and do what has to be done, and eventually her tears will subside. She will move on. She will weather this loss like she has so many others, and despite all he’s done to them, these strange, good people will keep her safe. Or as safe as a kid can be while climbing trees and ladders.

  He feels layers of darkness splitting open as he sinks deeper. He tries to open his mouth to say one last thing, to tell his daughter something he’s always felt but never known how to say, but his lips won’t move, his breath won’t come, he can’t—

  Rest, Abram, says that calm, familiar voice. This isn’t the end.

  But I have to tell her.

  Rest with us, says his brother, his father, his mother, and all of us. We�
�ll help you find the words.

  Addis stands against the wall and watches. He sees the man-shaped thing try to eat Sprout’s father and he sees Julie shoot it. He sees its head vanish in a dry explosion, bits and pieces but no blood. And he sees the bite in Abram’s neck, the black worms wriggling toward his brain while his daughter waits with the gun. “We’re going to change it,” she tells him as he fades, and then she glances back at Addis.

  Addis swallows. His hands clench. Are we? Can we?

  A concussive thump jolts the floor. Not a grenade or a rocket or any of the other noises from the war outside. A resonant boom from deep underground.

  Below the plastic dome, below the stadium’s sagging roof, Huntress Tomsen dances in the street in the red glare of the fireball. She leaps and laughs as Julie’s metal house collapses. She whoops and waves her fists as it sinks into the earth, burying the smoldering remains of BABL. She dances like a demon, but every nerve is singing hymns. She can feel the fog of noise evaporating. She doesn’t need her radio to know the air is clear, but she pulls it out anyway, spins the dial away from Fed FM, and cranks the volume.

  Soft static. Background radiation from the birth of the universe, and nothing more. And then a click. A breath. A voice.

  Hello?

  “Hi!” she screams into the radio, but that’s all she can manage before it falls from her shaky hands. She’s too overwhelmed to converse right now, too jittery. It’s enough to know that she can. That everyone can.

  Her legs give out. She drops to the ashy pavement. “We did it, Dad,” she whispers, making no effort to wipe the tears from her eyes or the snot from her nose. “We can finally go home.”

  Addis reads all this in our fluttering pages. It joins the swirl of other moments circling his head. He has been tallying them for a long time, counting up good and bad, weighing the balance on some imaginary scale of justice, but he is suddenly ashamed of this petty bean-counting. His grand calculations shrink to a human scale as they play out on the stage in front of him. He sees people trying. He sees compassion and love and selfless sacrifice. He sees blood willingly shed and tears that are more than grief and people continuing to fight long after their strength is gone.