Айзек Марион - The Living

“ 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…”