Айзек Марион - The Living

“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.