The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(103)

“Keep moving,” I say, already moving.

? ? ?

Our careful creep from the airfield to the city took over an hour. We make the return trip in twenty minutes. The plane’s cargo ramp closes behind us with a solid clack, but I don’t allow myself to feel safe. The image of the guards disappearing under a tide of corpses plays again in my head, and I keep it playing.

Abram heads for the cockpit and Julie and I go aft to check on our familial remains, but already I see trouble. There are dents and scratches all over the cabin, as if it recently housed a wild animal. My kids are peeking out from the restroom with fear in their eyes, and the object of this fear seems to be Julie’s mother, who sits cross-legged on the carpet, glowering at us.

“Mom,” Julie says, trying to keep her voice steady, “what did you do?”

Audrey is still chained to her chair, but the chair lies on its side next to her, detached from the floor. Her hands are a mess of dark blood, all the nails gone and much of the skin, her fingertips peeled to the bone.

Scattered on the carpet around her is a sizable collection of airplane parts.

Abram shouts something incoherent and I hear rapid footsteps from the front of the plane. Julie readies her pistol, but Abram ignores her and starts gathering the parts off the floor. Audrey lunges at him and Julie yanks her back by the collar.

“Chain that thing to something structural,” Abram says with controlled rage, “or I’ll debrain it with my bare hands.”

“What did she do?” Julie asks, wide-eyed.

“Tore apart the cockpit. Ripped the controls right off the rod.” He scoops as many parts as he can into his shirt and rushes back to the front.

“Mom,” Julie says miserably, holding tight to the cable leash. “Why would you do that?”

It’s impossible to decode the emotion on Audrey’s face, if it’s emotion at all. It looks like anger and defiance, and then with a slight change of angle, it becomes grief. Or it could be none of those. Just the random movements of a face with no one behind it.

Julie runs the cable directly through the floor hook where the chair latches in and cinches it short so that Audrey can just barely stand. Audrey watches impassively as her daughter locks her up, but Julie looks agonized. “I’m sorry, Mom,” she mumbles as if her mother is howling accusations. “I’m sorry.”

I decide to give them a moment. M and Nora are hovering over Abram, watching him reattach whatever can be reattached, mending snapped wires with electrical tape and broken parts with duct tape.

“Can we . . . help?” M offers.

Abram ignores him. The speed of his movements suggests the danger of our situation, and it occurs to me that every part of it was caused by two soft hearts: Julie’s and mine. Two long-shot bets against the hardness of reality. Should we feel foolish for this? For taking life-threatening risks for things more important than life?

I wander back to the center of the plane. Down the staircase. Out the cargo door. I walk along the towering behemoth that was once my home and emerge from the shadow of the wing into the orange evening sun. I lean my back against the nose wheel, watching the swarm of the Dead filter out of the streets and converge into one mass on the runway ahead. Perhaps they will answer the question for me.

“R!” Julie shouts down from the cockpit window. “What are you doing? Get back in!”

“Is it ready?” I call up to her. “Can we fly?”

“He’s still working on it but get in!”

I return my attention to the advancing horde. They’re close enough to make out individual faces now. All their identifying characteristics—skin color, eye color, even hair color in some dusty specimens—have been absorbed into the tide of gray, but traces of their personalities remain. A tattoo. A piercing. And of course, their clothing choices. Even in the ravages of death, they are full of history.

How can I remind them?

“R!”

Her voice floats down from miles above me, shrill and desperate.

I step out from the shadow of the nose cone and let the sun warm my face.

“Who are you?” I ask the Dead. “You were people. You still are people. Which ones?”

I don’t shout. I ask calmly like a friend at a pub table, the serious question that leads away from idle chatter and into real depth. Are they willing to follow me there? Or will they laugh me off, call me a buzzkill and then kill me?

“Who are you?” I say again, unable to keep some fear out of my voice as they lumber closer. “Think! Remember!”

I see a ripple in their faces. Hungry snarls flicker with uncertainty. I do something I doubt they’ve ever seen before: I take a step toward them.

“Who are you?”

They stop advancing. They look at the ground, then at the sky. There is . . . a moment. And then the ones bringing up the rear bump into the transfixed vanguard, and the moment ends. They remember one thing: that they’re hungry. They rush forward to devour my newly Living flesh.

And then they begin to fall. Whatever seeds I may have planted exit their heads in sprays of blood. Whatever thoughts may have been forming disintegrate as bullets sever neurons and disperse their electricity into the evening air.

M and Nora are kneeling on the wing. Nora’s shots are precise, each bullet finding a brain, picking off the ones closest to me. M’s AK-47 sprays more indiscriminately but kills just as well through sheer volume of bullets. A scream builds in my throat; I want to curse my friends, but I can’t. Their actions are rational. They live in this world and they want to stay here. They are not obligated to join me on this altar.