The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(107)

Struggling to find the peace this should bring me, I move to the western window and watch the sun fall into the ocean, breaking into a thousand pieces on the water. For a moment, I feel it. A sense of ground swept clean, of new possibilities poking through the loam. Then, as I always do, I keep looking, and I find something that kills my reverie. I blink and I squint, but it doesn’t disappear. I run to the plane’s midsection, the window closest to the wing, and I look out at the engines.

A man looks back at me.

“Abram?” I shout toward the cockpit.

Abram doesn’t respond. Perhaps he has no room in his head for what I want to tell him. And how can I tell him? How can I express to him this absurdity: that there’s a huge, musclebound Dead man clinging to one of the engine posts. His blue-gray skin is covered in frost, but he’s not frozen solid. He’s moving. He’s inching forward.

“Abram!”

I hear him grumble and stir in the cockpit; I hear his belt unlatch, but the Dead man has grasped the rim of the engine. He is pulling himself toward some inscrutable goal, perhaps the scent of the tiny family in the cockpit ahead, willfully unaware of the chasm of sky between them.

Abram steps out of the cockpit. He registers the urgency on my face and opens his mouth to ask. Then the man slips over the rim of the engine.

There are two explosions. The first is a reddish-black burst from the back of the engine as the bodybuilder’s hard-earned mass is spread across Long Island like crop duster spray. The second is an eruption of fire that completely engulfs the wing, and when it clears, the engine is gone. So is a large chunk of the wing. Burning fuel streams from the hole in long snakes of flame.

As the plane begins to bank, as Abram disappears into the cockpit and everyone else rushes up from the rear, shouting and screaming, my mind is stuck on the least useful thought:

We never named it. I grew the seeds of my third life in this plane. Julie and I closed our vast distance in it. It rescued us and carried us around the country, and we never gave it a name.

Everyone is cramming into the cockpit, asking what to do, and Abram is shouting that there’s nothing we can do, we’re going down hard, sit down and buckle up and secure your own before helping others, all a soft, slow slur in the back of my awareness.

Julie was good at this. Granting life to inanimate objects. She turned a Mercedes into Mercey. What would she call a 747?

I topple across the aisle as Abram overcorrects the bank, trying to take some weight off the wounded wing.

David.

I smile to myself, falling into a chair next to Julie. “David Boeing,” I tell her, barely able to contain my pleasure.

“What?” she shrieks.

“I’m naming the plane. It’s David Boeing.”

She looks at me with total incomprehension, but I’m still smiling. It’s good. Maybe I can do this too.

“R,” she says, and I suddenly realize that I misread her face. It’s not incomprehension but the opposite. It’s the grim understanding from which I’m hiding.

“R, if we—”

“Please don’t,” I blurt.

She chokes it back. She jumps out of her seat and braces against the cockpit doorway as the plane bucks and shakes. “I’m sorry,” she says, turning her watery eyes from Abram to Sprout. “I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t care,” Abram says through his teeth as he battles the wild controls.

Julie pulls herself away from Sprout’s panicked gaze and stumbles back down the aisle.

“Buckle up, Jules!” Nora shouts, one hand on M’s shoulder as he clings to his seat with rigor mortis stiffness, his face ashen, eyes wide, looking more corpselike than I’ve ever seen him. He stayed relatively composed for our first crash landing, but that one was soft. This one will be hard, if it’s a landing at all. This one may call for screams.

Julie grabs my hand and pulls me to the back of the plane where her mother sits on the floor, clinging to her cable for an anchor while the plane rocks and bounces.

“Hold on, Mom,” Julie says. “Please hold on.”

She slips into the last remaining row of seats and takes a deep, slow breath, then looks at me with sudden calm. “Sit with me?”

I sit with her. The oxygen masks dangle in front of us but we don’t bother. We look out the window at the rapidly approaching shore of what my basement memories call East Atlantic Beach. Beyond that, JFK International Airport, and everywhere around it . . .

Madness. Monsters. A city full of death. Even if we survive this plunge, it’s hard to see a future.

“Stop it,” Julie says, watching the side of my face as the runway approaches at a wild angle. “Be with me.”

I look into her glistening eyes and the roaring around me goes quiet. Strange, how complications melt away in the face of disaster. How all the fear and shame and tangled knots of logic suddenly dissolve in the heat, leaving only a core of love that cares nothing for the noise in our heads, that dismisses our arguments and ignores our hesitations. A love that simply is.

In this moment, however brief it might be, everything is clear. Julie kisses me and I kiss her back, ordering myself not to pull away, ever, because whatever might be ending today, this is how I want it to end.

My eyes are closed, all senses focused on her, so there is no terrible buildup to the impact. I am kissing Julie, I am kissing Julie, I am—