Isaac Marion - Warm Bodies - A Novel

When Julie comes back with the food, I borrow her spoon and take a small bite of rice, smiling as I chew. As usual it goes down like styrofoam, but I do manage to swallow it. Julie and Nora look at each other, then at me.

‘How’s it taste?’ Julie asks tentatively.

I grimace.

‘Okay, but still, you haven’t eaten any people in a long time. And you’re still walking. Do you think you could ever wean yourself off . . . live foods?’

I give her a wry smile. ‘I guess . . . it’s possible.’

Julie grins at this. Half at my unexpected use of sarcasm, half at the implied hope behind it. Her whole face lights up in a way I’ve never seen before, so I hope I’m right. I hope it’s true. I hope I haven’t just learned how to lie.

Around 1 a.m., the girls start to yawn. There are canvas cots in the den, but no one feels like venturing out of Julie’s room. This gaudily painted little cube is like a warm bunker in the frozen emptiness of Antarctica. Nora takes the bed. Julie and I take the floor. Nora scribbles homework notes for about an hour, then clicks off the lamp and starts snoring like a small, delicate chainsaw. Julie and I lie on our backs under a thick blanket, using piles of her clothes for a mattress on the rock-hard floor. It’s a strange feeling, being so utterly surrounded by her. Her life scent is on everything. She’s on me and under me and next to me. It’s as if the entire room is made out of her.

‘R,’ she whispers, looking up at the ceiling. There are words and doodles smeared up there in glow-in-the-dark paint.

‘Yeah.’

‘I hate this place.’

‘I know.’

‘Take me somewhere else.’

I pause, looking up at the ceiling. I wish I could read what she’s written there. Instead, I pretend the letters are stars. The words, constellations.

‘Where do . . . want to go?’

‘I don’t know. Somewhere far away. Some distant continent where none of this is happening. Where people just live in peace.’

I fall silent.

‘One of Perry’s older friends used to be a pilot . . . we could take your housejet! It’d be like a flying Winnebago, we could go anywhere!’ She rolls onto her side and grins at me. ‘What do you think, R? We could go to the other side of the world.’

The excitement in her voice makes me wince. I hope she can’t see the grim light in my eyes. I don’t know for sure, but there is something in the air lately, a deathly stillness as I walk through the city and its outskirts, that tells me the days of running away from problems are over. There will be no more vacations, no road trips, no tropical getaways. The plague has covered the world.

‘You said . . .’ I begin, psyching myself up to express a complex thought. ‘You said . . . the . . .’

‘Come on,’ she encourages. ‘Use your words.’

‘You said . . . the plane’s not . . . its own world.’

Her grin falters. ‘What?’

‘Can’t . . . float above . . . the mess.’

She frowns. ‘I said that?’

‘Your dad . . . concrete box . . . walls and guns . . . Running away . . . no better . . . than hiding. Maybe worse.’

She thinks for a moment. ‘I know,’ she says, and I feel guilty for crashing her brief flight of fancy. ‘I know this. It’s what I’ve been telling myself for years, that there’s still hope, that we can turn things around somehow, blah fucking blah. It’s just . . . getting a lot harder to believe lately.’

‘I know,’ I say, trying to hide the cracks in my sincerity. ‘But can’t . . . give up.’

Her voice darkens. She calls my bluff. ‘Why are you so hopeful all of a sudden? What are you really thinking?’

I say nothing, but she reads my face like a front-page headline, the kind that announced the atomic bomb and the Titanic and all the World Wars in progressively smaller type.

‘There’s nowhere left, is there,’ she says.

Almost imperceptibly, I shake my head.

‘The whole world,’ she says. ‘You think it’s all dead? All overrun?’

‘Yes.’

‘How could you know that?’

‘I don’t. But . . . I feel.’

She lets out a long breath, staring at the toy planes dangling above us. ‘So what are we supposed to do?’

‘Have to . . . fix it.’

‘Fix what?’

‘Don’t know. Ev . . . rything.’

She props herself up on one elbow. ‘What are you talking about?’ Her voice is no longer quiet. Nora stirs and stops snoring. ‘Fix everything?’ Julie says, her eyes sparking in the dark. ‘How exactly are we supposed to do that? If you have some big revelation please share, ’cause it’s not like I don’t think about this literally all the time. It’s not like this hasn’t been burning my brain every morning and night since my mom left. How do we fix everything? It’s so broken. Everyone is dying, over and over again, in deeper and darker ways. What are we supposed to do? Do you know what’s causing it? This plague?’

I hesitate. ‘No.’

‘Then how can you do anything about it? I want to know, R. How are we supposed to “fix it”?’

I’m staring up at the ceiling. I’m staring at the verbal constellations, glimmering green in distant space. As I lie there, letting my mind rise into those imaginary heavens, two of the stars begin to change. They rotate, and focus, and their shapes clarify. They become . . . letters.

T

R

‘Tr—’ I whisper.

‘What?’

‘Truh—’ I repeat, trying to pronounce it. It’s a sound. It’s a syllable. The blurry constellation is becoming a word. ‘What is . . . that?’ I ask, pointing at the ceiling.

‘What? The quotes?’

I stand up and indicate the general area of the sentence. ‘This one.’

‘It’s a line from “Imagine”. The John Lennon song.’

‘Which . . . line?’

‘“It’s easy if you try.”’

I stand there for a minute, gazing up like an intrepid explorer of the cosmos. Then I lie down and fold my arms behind my head, eyes wide open. I don’t have the answers she’s asking for, but I can feel their existence. Faint points of light in the distant dark.

Slow steps. Mud under boots. Look nowhere else. Strange mantras loop through my head. Old bearded mutterings from dark alleys. Where are you going, Perry? Foolish child. Brainless boy. Where? Every day the universe grows larger, darker, colder. I stop in front of a black door. A girl lives here in this metal house. Do I love her? Hard to say any more. But she is all that’s left. The final red sun in an ever-expanding emptiness.

I walk into the house and find her sitting on the staircase, arms crossed over her knees. She puts a finger to her lips. ‘Dad,’ she whispers to me.

I glance up the staircase towards the general’s bedroom. I hear his voice slurring in the dimness.

‘This picture, Julie. The water park, remember the water park? Had to haul ten buckets up for just one slide. Twenty minutes of work for ten seconds of fun. Seemed worth it back then, didn’t it? I liked watching your face when you flew out of the tube. You looked just like her, even back then.’

Julie stands up quietly, moves towards the front door.

‘You’re all her, Julie. You aren’t me, you’re her. How could she do it?’

I open the door and back out. Julie follows me, soft steps, no sound.

‘How could she be so weak?’ the man says in a voice like steel melting. ‘How could she leave us here?’

We walk in silence. The drizzling rain beads in our hair and we shake it out like dogs. We come to Colonel Rosso’s house. Rosso’s wife opens the door, looks at Julie’s face, and hugs her. We walk inside into the warmth.