Айзек Марион - The Living

A call.

My eyes drift across the city to the forest that surrounds it, thick and ancient and full of secrets.

“Julie,” I say, grabbing her hand and squeezing hard. “It’ll be okay.”

There are people walking out of the forest. Up and down the length of it, from one end of Post to the other, they emerge from highways, freeways, rural backroads, and from the trees themselves, pooling together into a crowd so vast my brain struggles to find a comparison. I flip through images of rallies, protests, festivals, and wars, but nothing comes close.

Thousands. Hundreds of thousands.

Millions.

Julie once told me the entire population of America amounted to maybe three million. But whoever took that census wasn’t counting the Dead.

“What…” Julie gasps, searching for words the way I’m searching for pictures. “What is…where are…oh my God .”

Even from my rooftop perch, I recognize my people. The tattered clothing. The swaying and stumbling. The crowd doesn’t march; it doesn’t form ranks and advance in lock-step. It moves with a swirling fluidity, like a natural phenomenon, each person on their own path, wandering away and then returning but steadily moving forward. I stop picturing armies and start picturing waves and sand. Wind and clouds. A fog of quantum particles condensing into a shape.

“Is this happening?” Julie says in a wild, breathless giggle. “Did my message…are they really…is this happening ?”

She’s not the only one unraveled by the sight. As the armies around the stadium become aware of their surroundings, the battle grinds to a halt. First the Living soldiers freeze, the shock overwhelming their combat instincts, and then, to my amazement, the Boneys freeze with them. They don’t take advantage of the troops’ sudden vulnerability. They wait, poised to attack but not attacking, their own instincts derailed by the unexpected behavior of their prey. They have no category for this. No prepared response. They watch the men like cats watching stunned mice, waiting for the hunt to resume.

But it doesn’t. While the Boneys wait, fixated on their targets, the Dead sweep in around them, outnumbering them on a scale so large it’s comical. More images flutter through my head—a house sucked up by a tornado, a sand castle caught in the tide—but the one I like best is a virus. Jagged, alien things invading humanity’s bloodstream, only to be surrounded and absorbed by our antibodies.

It takes only a moment. There are several dozen Fleshies for each and every Boney, pinning them in on all sides, so it happens all at once. The Dead seize their future selves and simply dismantle them. They remove limbs and toss aside heads. It’s somehow nonviolent, not so much a battle as a decision. Thousands of skulls hiss and chatter on the ground, but they have no words to express their will and no hands with which to enforce it.

Slowly, the Living soldiers thaw from their shock. The Dead watch them placidly, waiting for them to decide their response, but even the most mind-numbed Axiom soldier can see there’s only one.

Guns clatter to the ground.

Those who can still recognize absurdity put their hands up with grim smiles. A funny thing, to surrender to people without weapons, an unarmed army asserting its will through sheer presence. A silent majority that’s finally making noise.

What will it say when it finds words?

“Hey!” Nora shouts over the rising wind. “We need to go!”

I follow her gaze to the source of her concern. The skeletons around the dome are waking up. Their hum sputters and chokes like a flooded wasp nest. Their bones rattle; their jaws snap; they begin to move toward us.

Then the wind rises, and they blow away.

Despite their savage strength, despite the primal forces that drive them, they are still just hollow bones, and all it takes is a strong gust to reveal their lack of substance. They topple over the edge of the roof, carried aloft like dead leaves, and their hideous hum disappears.

The wind subsides. The roof is silent.

I explode with laughter.

My friends stare at me. My wound screams in protest as my chest convulses, but I can’t stop. I don’t want to stop. I stand up and pace the roof, clutching my sides. Tears stream from my eyes, a different flavor than the ones I’m used to, not the bitterness of loss but something piquant and sweet. I hear those distant bells ringing, but it’s not quite a sound; it sits between the senses like this new texture in the wind, this new color in my voice—even the light smells different.

My laughter subsides when my eyes land on Abram’s broken body, but I don’t erase my smile. Because his daughter is smiling too. Sitting by his side with a hand on his upturned palm, small and soft on her father’s scarred leather, she grins through the tears and snot.

“See, Dad?” she says, squeezing his palm. “See what we did?”

M watches the body carefully, his gun at the ready, but Abram remains at peace. No twitching. No groaning. Just rest.

Every choice has a price. We all owe a debt to this world for the things we take from it, right or wrong, cruel or kind. But these laws are soft, these laws are alive, and sometimes a debt is forgiven.

I feel a gentle weariness. I sit with my friends on the edge of the roof and take in the incredible view.

Like New York, the city of Post has been flooded. But this ocean is human. It fills every street, park, and parking lot—enough people to fully repopulate Post and much of the surrounding region. And this ocean is sparkling in the sun. The Gleam passes over it in waves of tiny lights. I can’t see its effects from this distance, so I turn to Addis. His yellow eyes are as wide as his grin. Sprout is squinting her left eye shut like her right is a telescope, hidden so long for the comfort of the world around her, now free to roam whatever strange vistas it sees.

“What’s happening down there?” I ask them.

“This!” Joan giggles, and points to a sunken patch of rot on her arm. A flash of light, and it’s gone.

“Dad, look!” Alex says as his chest flashes with inner illumination. He takes a deep breath and lets it out with a ta-da smile.

Julie grabs my hand. Her face is glowing with a light of its own. “I thought you said we can’t cure the plague.”

A sting in my neck. A sharp, cold rush. I clap my hand to the spot and find that the flesh is smooth. The bite is gone. If the black worms are still there, they’re sealed between the strata of my lives, dried up and buried like fossils of an earlier age.

“We can’t cure it,” I tell Julie. “But we can fight it.”

I kiss her, this person I love, this person who loves me. The wind blows our hair across our faces, hiding us from the world, and though we’re surrounded by our friends, I can almost believe we’re alone in a sun-soaked grove of trees. I barely feel the rumble behind us. I hardly hear the wrenching metal. I don’t bother to look back as the plastic dome and its obsolete flags break through the roof and fall.

THE CITY IS ALMOST QUIET AGAIN.

Gulls call from nearby shorelines. Honeybees drone in the wildflowers that fill the cabs of old convertibles. A few of the Nearly Living still roam the streets, lost on inner pathways, but most have disappeared into the buildings or moved on to the next town, eager to find places to live.

Birds chirp. Insects click. The wind has dropped to a whisper.

The loudest sound by far is the megaphone on the roof of an overturned armored truck, squawking with rising desperation.