The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(102)

“What are you doing to them?” I ask the man, whose tie is the same blood red as the one hanging in the closet of the house—mine and Julie’s house—at the end of a quiet street.

“The Dead are blank,” he says. “They are suggestible and malleable. We are bending them into useful shapes.”

“You’re making slaves.”

He gestures to the pit of seething bodies and they surge toward his hand, piling on top of each other to reach the grate door and rattling it furiously. “Look at them,” he says, inverting his grin into an exaggerated frown. “They have no culture, no religion, no nationality—nothing. They are raw material, and someone has to tell them what to be.” He turns his frown upside down and gestures to the dim swarms around us. “We tell them to be this.”

“What are you?” I demand, staring hard at his smooth, unblemished face.

His eyes meet mine with unusual directness. “I feel fantastic.” His grin stretches so wide I expect it to split. “I know why I’m here. I know what I’ll do every day. I have answered every question and solved every problem. Everything is clear.”

“R.” A soft voice at my back, tugging at me. “There’s nothing we can do here. Let’s go before he calls the real guards.”

“I have already notified Regional Security,” the man assures her in comforting tones. “They will be with you shortly.”

“R, let’s go!”

I stare at the churning mass of Dead in the pit, all confused violence and desperate hunger. Do I have anything better to offer them? Can I really point to my new life of pain and terror and say, See what you’re missing? My eyes roam the quietly shuffling ranks of well-fed working Dead. No groans, no wheezes, no anxious teeth snapping. They’re adrift in an even dimmer dream, wrapped in gray wool and buried in soft dust.

Should I let them stay?

My friends run toward the elevator. I follow for a few steps, then I stop. I go back to the pit.

“Have you decided to reconsider our offer?” Red Tie asks me through that taut, joyless rictus.

I answer his question and mine with the same reply: “No.”

I pull open the latch on the grating door and I run.

“Where’d you go?” Julie says as I slip into the elevator. “You were behind us and then you weren’t.”

I push the door-close button repeatedly.

“R . . . ?” she says with rising concern.

“I did something . . . impulsive,” I say under my breath.

A chorus of hungry groans fills the factory as the doors slide shut.





THE ELEVATOR MUSIC has shorted out again. I stare at the ceiling speaker, willing it to flood this steel cube with some watery post-culture blasphemy, because even a major-key lounge rendition of “Another Brick in the Wall” would be preferable to the snarls filtering down around us.

M looks at me and sighs. “You let them out, didn’t you?”

I give him a cringing grin.

Nora puts a hand over her face.

I expect a more violent reaction from Abram, but he looks faraway, staring at the door like it’s a window to a distant vista.

“It’s okay,” Julie says, nodding to herself. “They’re twenty floors up. We’ll run out of here and leave them to wreck the place. It’s okay.”

The groans aren’t fading as quickly as they should be. The big elevator is excruciatingly slow, and even as we approach the bottom we can still hear the scrapes and grunts.

“It’s okay,” Julie says again, still nodding.

The doors open on the dark expanse of the lobby, and as we run for the exit, all four of the staircase doors burst open. The Dead pour out like liquid, not so much descending the stairs as free-falling down them, rolling and tumbling and trampling each other in their pursuit of our life scent.

Perhaps “impulsive” was too kind a word for my actions.

The guards at the front doors still make no attempt to stop us. Still a few bugs in the “process.” Abram juts his elbows to shield his daughter as he carries her like a baby, ignoring the agony of his injuries, but we brush past the guards without resistance. And then the All Dead swarm over them, uninterested in their flesh but killing them all the same in their mindless stampede.

We take the bridge and the scenario repeats with the bridge guards, but this time we’re farther away. Starvation has a way of rousing the Dead from their apathy, quickening their pace from shamble to jog, but a rotting corpse, no matter how motivated, will never be a sprinter. By the time we’re over the river we’ve put a safe distance between us and them, and we slow down to catch our breath.

“Fuck you, Archie,” M gasps, leaning against his knees. “And fuck running. And fuck”—he sucks in a deep breath—“needing to breathe.”

“Abram,” Julie says. “What’s Regional Security?”

Abram is gazing at downtown Pittsburgh with that glassy distance in his eyes.

“Hey!” Julie says, snapping her fingers at him. “What are we dealing with? Where will they be coming from?”

“I don’t know,” he murmurs without looking at her. “Everything’s different.”

I glance back at the bridge and find the Dead already uncomfortably close. In what felt like a few seconds, they have devoured most of our distance. This is, of course, the unique danger of the Dead. Their slowness lulls you. You think you’re safe. You stop to rest, maybe start arguing, lost in some heated personal drama, and while your complex minds are weaving their tangled threads, the Dead are just walking, slow and steady and unconflicted.