Isaac Marion - Warm Bodies - A Novel

Trina twists her head around to gaze at me longingly.

‘Sorry!’ the boy calls from across the street.

I give him an easy wave, no problem.

A young girl emerges from the doorway and stands next to him, sticking out her belly and watching me with big dark eyes. Her hair is black, the boy’s is curly blond. They are both around six.

‘Don’t tell our mom?’ she asks.

I shake my head, swallowing back a sudden reflux of emotions. The sound of these kids’ voices, their perfect childish diction . . .

‘Do you . . . know Julie?’ I ask them.

‘Julie Cabernet?’ the boy says.

‘Julie Gri . . . gio.’

‘We like Julie Cabernet a lot. She reads to us every Wednesday.’

‘Stories!’ the girl adds.

I don’t recognise this name, but some scrap of memory perks at the sound of it. ‘Do you know . . . where she lives?’

‘Daisy Street,’ the boy says.

‘No, Flower Street! It’s a flower!’

‘A daisy is a flower.’

‘Oh.’

‘She lives on a corner. It’s Daisy Street and Devil Avenue.’

‘Cow Avenue!’

‘It’s not a cow, it’s the Devil. Cows and the Devil both have horns.’

‘Oh.’

‘Thanks,’ I tell the kids and turn to leave.

‘Are you a zombie?’ the girl asks in a shy squeak.

I freeze. She waits for my answer, twisting left and right on her heels. I relax, smile at the girl and shrug. ‘Julie . . . doesn’t think so.’

An angry voice from a fifth-floor window yells something about curfew and shutting the door and not talking to strangers, so I wave to the kids and hurry off towards Daisy and Devil. The sun is down and the sky is rust. A distant loudspeaker blares out a sequence of numbers, and most of the windows around me go dark. I loosen my tie and start to run.

The intensity of Julie’s scent doubles with each block. As the first few stars appear in the Stadium’s oval sky, I turn a corner and halt below a solitary edifice of white aluminium siding. Most of the buildings seem to be multi-family apartment complexes, but this one is smaller, narrower, and separated from its tightly packed neighbours by an awkward distance. Four storeys tall but barely two rooms wide, it looks like a cross between a town house and a prison watchtower. The windows are all dark except for a third-floor balcony jutting out from the side of the house. The balcony seems incongruously romantic on this austere structure, until I notice the swivel-mounted sniper rifles on each corner.

Lurking behind a stack of crates in the AstroTurf backyard, I hear voices inside the house. I close my eyes, luxuriating in their sweet timbres and tart rhythms. I hear Julie. Julie and another girl, discussing something in tones that jitter and syncopate like jazz. I find myself swaying slightly, dancing to their conversational beat.

Eventually the talk trails off, and Julie emerges onto the balcony. It’s only been one day since she left, but the sense of reunion that surges in me is decades strong. She rests her elbows on the railing, looking cold in just a loose black T-shirt over bare legs. ‘Well, here I am again,’ she says, apparently to no one but the air. ‘Dad clapped me on the back when I walked in the door. Actually clapped me on the back, like a fucking football coach. All he said was, “So glad you’re okay,” then he ran off to some project meeting or something. I can’t believe how much he’s . . . I mean, he was never exactly cuddly, but . . .’ I hear a tiny click and she doesn’t speak for a moment. Then another click. ‘Until I called him he had to have assumed I was dead, right? Yeah, he sent out the search parties, but how often do people really come back from stuff like this? So to him . . . I was dead. And maybe I’m being too harsh but I absolutely can’t picture him crying over it. Whoever told him the news, they probably clapped each other on the back and said, “Soldier on, soldier,” and then went back to work.’ She stares at the ground as if she’s seeing through it, down into the hellish core of the Earth. ‘What’s wrong with people?’ she says, almost too quiet for me to hear. ‘Were they born with parts missing or did it all fall out somewhere along the way?’

She is silent for a while, and I’m about to show myself when she suddenly laughs, closing her eyes and shaking her head. ‘I actually miss that stupid . . . I miss R! I know that’s crazy, but is it really that crazy? Just because he’s . . . whatever he is? I mean, isn’t “zombie” just a silly name we came up with for a state of being we don’t understand? What’s in a name, right? If we were . . . If there was some kind of . . .’ She trails off, then stops and raises a mini-cassette recorder to eye level, glaring at it. ‘Fuck this thing,’ she mumbles to herself. ‘Tape journaling . . . not for me.’ She fast-pitches it off the balcony. It bounces off a supply crate and lands at my feet. I pick it up, tuck it into my shirt pocket and press my hand against it, feeling its corners dig into my chest. If I ever return to my 747, this memento will go in the stack closest to where I sleep.

Julie hops onto the balcony railing and sits with her back to me, scribbling in her battered old Moleskine.

Journal or poetry?

Both, silly.

Am I in it?

I step out from the shadows. ‘Julie,’ I whisper.

She doesn’t startle. She turns slowly, and a smile melts across her face like a slow spring thaw. ‘Oh . . . my God,’ she half giggles, then hops off the railing and spins around to face me. ‘R! You’re here! Oh my God!’

I grin. ‘Hello.’

‘What are you doing here?’ she hisses, trying to keep her voice down.

I shrug, deciding that this gesture, while easy to abuse, does have its place. It may even be vital vocabulary in a world as unspeakable as ours.

‘Came to . . . see you.’

‘But I had to go home, remember? You were supposed to say goodbye.’

‘Don’t know why you . . . say goodbye. I say . . . hello.’

Her lip quivers between reactions, but she ends up with a reluctant smile. ‘God, you’re a cheeseball. But seriously, R—’

‘Jules!’ a voice calls from inside the house. ‘Come here, I wanna show you something.’

‘One sec, Nora,’ Julie calls back. She looks down at me. ‘This is crazy, okay? You’re going to get killed. It doesn’t matter how changed you are, the people in charge here won’t care, they won’t listen, they’ll just shoot you. Do you understand?’

I nod. ‘Yes.’

I start climbing up the drainpipe.

‘Jesus, R! Are you listening to me?’

I get about three feet off the ground before I realise that although I’m now capable of running, speaking and maybe falling in love, climbing is still down the road for me. I lose my grip on the pipe and fall flat on my back. Julie covers her mouth, but some laughter slips through.

‘Hey, Cabernet!’ Nora calls again. ‘What’s going on? Are you talking to somebody?’

‘Hang on, okay? I’m just doing a tape journal.’

I stand up and dust myself off. I look up at Julie. Her brows are tight and she bites her lip. ‘R . . .’ she says miserably. ‘You can’t . . .’

The balcony door swings open and Nora appears, her curls just as thick and wild as they were in my visions, all those years ago. I’ve never seen her standing, and she’s surprisingly tall, at least half a foot above Julie, long brown legs bare under a camouflage skirt. I had assumed she and Julie were classmates, but now I realise Nora is a few years older, maybe in her mid-twenties.

‘What are you—’ she starts, then she sees me, and her eyebrows go up. ‘Oh my holy Lord. Is that him?’

Julie sighs. ‘Nora, this is R. R . . . Nora.’

Nora stares at me like I’m Sasquatch, the Yeti, maybe a unicorn. ‘Um . . . nice to meet you . . . R.’