Айзек Марион: The Living

“By the looks of it,” Rosy continues, “someone was trying to convert the stadium into something else. Some kind of communications facility, judging by the wiring, but they didn’t get very far.”

General Grigio looks at the American flags dangling from the rafters of the open roof. The sun has bleached them almost white.

“When the first platoon found the place, it was just that little building surrounded by a billion dollars worth of construction materials rotting in the rain. Sounds like Old Gov standard procedure, right? But whatever the place was meant to be, I think we’ll put it to better use.”

Julie’s father narrows his eyes, examining and considering, his mind reaching out to grasp some intuited opportunity.

Her mother shrinks inward. Her mother retreats.

Evening fades to night as Julie buzzes around the new house, already deep into her decoration plans. Her new bedroom resembles a prison cell, gray and empty except for the twin bed, but it has potential. She reminds herself that every room is the same empty box until someone starts living in it.

She descends to the main floor to find her mother, to see if she wants to go looting in the city, find some cute antiques and colorful rugs, maybe a slightly more flattering jumpsuit.

“Mom? Hey Mom!”

She passes her father coming up the stairs. He’s shaking his head and his lips are trembling, a state that only one person can put him in. Julie has seen him emerge from knife fights looking calmer than this, bloody but unperturbed. Only the woman he loves has the tools to cut him deep.

“Mom?” Julie calls in a lowered voice, moving from room to room. “Hello?”

She checks the kitchen. The bathroom. The empty white cube that will serve as the living room. She is about to go back upstairs to ask her father for clues when she hears a noise from somewhere below.

She hadn’t realized this place had a basement. The door is small, tucked away in a corner and painted the same color as the wall, nearly invisible when closed. But now it’s hanging open, and a noise is rolling up to her, rippling and shifting, refusing to cohere. Is it five songs playing at once? Is it ten people talking over each other? Is it howling wind or howling animals? It’s very faint, almost subliminal, but she feels it in her head like a fluff of white wool, dulling her thoughts the way road noise dulls music.

“Mom?”

It comes out a timid whisper. With a reluctance she doesn’t understand, she pushes herself closer, and perhaps the noise is just an acoustic oddity of the building’s shape because as she approaches the doorway the pressure in her head subsides, the noise clarifies, and by the time she’s at the threshold looking down into the shadows, it’s familiar. It’s the sound of her mother crying.

“Are you okay?” she calls down into those shadows, and her own voice breaks a little.

Because this sound scares her. She’s been hearing it more and more since the day they left New York. In the evenings, while helping her father with the perimeter check in some deserted nook off the highway, she would find her mother alone in the trees, eyes glistening as she watched the day die. At night, with the three of them nested like a set of measuring spoons in the canopied bed of the truck, she’d wake to stifled weeping behind her head. She thought it would stop when they finally found a home. She thought once her mother felt the sunlight, she would emerge from her long winter and begin to bloom again. But here she is in the basement, as far from the sun as she can get.

Julie takes a step into the stairwell and then stops. She doesn’t want to go down there. Her mother is down there, her mother needs her, but Julie is too scared. Too soft. Too weak to help anyone.

“Mom!” she pleads miserably.

Her only answer is her mother’s sobs, sinking again into that wooly noise as Julie backs away.

On this very same shelf, tucked in tight with Julie, we find a book of Nora Greene. In this book she is eighteen years old and she is walking through a city. She has walked through many cities, or the remains of them, and she has encountered many people. She has lived with them and worked with them, and some of them have been kind, but there is a search inside her that won’t let her rest. The moment she feels comfortable, the dream comes to drive her onward.

There’s a boy, and then there’s a wolf, and that’s all she ever remembers. But she always wakes up screaming. She packs her bags and leaves in the night and walks until she collapses.

This is Nora Greene’s life, for a time. Much has been stolen from her. A childhood, a family, and things she doesn’t remember. Books hidden behind shelves. Pages torn out roughly, leaving only the telltale tatters.

So she feels a strange thrill as the stadium comes into view, but she does not know why. How will this place be any different from the other encampments she’s visited on her endless southward trek? The oblong vault of bare gray concrete looks more like a sarcophagus than a city. The small plumes of smoke rising through the retracted roof are the only sign of habitation. So why does it feel like a discovery?

She has little difficulty with the immigration officer. A strong, healthy, mostly intact young woman unburdened by family attachments is a valuable asset to any enclave, and her combat skills only sweeten the deal. There was a time when her brown skin might have been an obstacle, but it’s been years since she’s encountered that particular malice. She remembers it from childhood, her family squirming beneath that skeptical scan almost everywhere they went, but these days it’s down to a few sideways glances. Whatever racial superstitions may still lurk in humanity’s brain stem, few people actually live by them. They can’t afford to.

She is ushered inside with promises of fast-tracked home placement, though she puts little faith in that. She has heard such promises before, back in the old world when people still bothered with child welfare, still defining family by blood over love, and her parents could put on a good show when they—

But no. Nora has no parents. Never did. She grew out of the ground. And she doesn’t need a home tonight. A bed will always present itself. Right now all she needs is a drink.

She makes a few inquiries, ascends a dizzying maze of apartments and catwalks, and steps through the thick oak door of the Orchard.

She takes a stool at the end of the bar. The LOTUS Feed flashes on the TV above her but she keeps her eyes down, too tired to handle that frenetic collage.

“What’s your poison?” the bartender asks with a note of irony she doesn’t understand.

Nora pulls a hundred dollar bill out of her bag. “Whiskey.”

The bartender looks embarrassed. “Oh…I thought you were local. There’s a ban on alcohol right now. We uh…we serve juice.”

She stares at him blankly.

“Some whiskey drinkers say grapefruit has a similar kick?”

“I’ve been on the road for two years,” Nora says. “I spent most of last week in the Gresham Patriots’ prison pit before they tried to sell me to the Nor-Cal Riders and I had to kill two people with a broken bong. I could really use something stronger than grapefruit.”

The bartender purses his lips. He looks around, then snatches the bill and disappears into the back room. He comes back with a pint glass of brown liquid and sets it in front of her.

“Enjoy your apple juice,” he says loudly.

She takes a sip. She smiles.

An hour later, the glass is almost empty. She has gone past the euphoria, past the reckless bliss, and is entering the uncertain realm of the deep drunk. She feels her mind loosening, liquefying. She watches people enter the bar and leave. The citizens of this tiny world, soon to be her neighbors. She sees a blond girl a few years younger than her with black clothes, black nails, bandaged wrists, eyes sunken and red. The girl looks angry and sad and familiar somehow. She is pleading with the bartender, holding out her glass like a beggar seeking alms. A trio of men in their twenties descend on her with hungry smiles, and the muscular, tattooed alpha tips a flask into her juice. Nora tries to speak to her, even just a hello, but nothing comes out. She closes her eyes—