The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(116)
The boy can feel the syrup in his own veins, interacting inscrutably with his lukewarm blood. He follows the tube from his arm to the bag, and then up to the ceiling where it joins all the others, dangling like jungle vines from a central hub, which feeds from a thick hose running out of the room. The boy wonders where it goes and what is in it. He wonders what these people want him to become.
The session pauses while the lab assistant struggles with the unruly student. In the stunning void of silence, the boy can hear the groans and howls of the less privileged individuals in nearby classrooms. Individuals too deep in the plague to operate in the world as people. These do not get desks. These do not get to watch television. These have lower potential, and will be Oriented for lower functions, according to the evident order of nature.
The door opens. A woman in a lab coat pushes two children inside. The boy stares at the children and they stare at him.
One of them smiles. A girl of about seven, her dusky skin barely touched by gray, her dark eyes flecked with gold like veins of ore promising a windfall.
She runs to the boy and hugs him and he remembers that her name is Joan.
Joan’s blond brother dances around the boy’s desk, touching the boy’s cheeks and laughing. “Found you, found you!” Alex says.
It is not the first time these children have found him. In a distant age, in a distant part of the world, they found him wandering deep in an airport basement and dragged him up to daylight. His friends, Joan and Alex. Two more good people.
The woman in the lab coat grabs them by their collars and drags them to their desks, shoves them down and jabs IV tubes into their arms. The session resumes. The storm of noise buffets their eyes and ears, but Joan and Alex seem to be ignoring it. They are distracted. They smile at the boy and he finds their joy infectious. He smiles back.
The pages on our Higher shelves rustle as they fill with new words. Simple sentences polished and gleaming.
I
HERE IT IS. The busy metropolis I’ve been waiting to see. No more quiet courtyards and hollow buildings and wind howling through ghostly streets. This is New York City. I watch it rush by through the SUV’s window, and the past and present overlap. Am I a prisoner, or is this just another commute? Another limo ride home after a long day at the Atvist Building? The sidewalks churn with pedestrians and the streets are packed with rush-hour traffic. There is energy and commerce, and when obscured by the window’s heavy tint, it almost looks like the old world. But when I roll the window down for an unfiltered view, discrepancies appear. Laundry flutters from high-rise windows, turning glittering business towers into Dickensian rookeries. Every park and square has been repurposed into some form of labor site: makeshift assembly lines and meat rendering stations, the occasional fenced holding area for hopeful immigrants. The lack of traffic noise seems strange—Where is the brass orchestra? That discordant symphony of horns?—until I notice that all the vehicles on the road are marked with the Axiom logo. Construction trucks and transport vans, moving in silent unanimity.
The window rolls up, dimming the harsh detail of the scene. Blue Tie catches my eye in the rearview mirror. “For optimal safety, windows should be kept up when driving through population areas. We experience difficulties with unsalaried employees.”
“Everyone has an opportunity to advance in this company,” Yellow Tie says, turning to smile at me over the seat, “with enough hard work and personal sacrifice.”
Black Tie says nothing. Black Tie stares at the side of Julie’s face, and she leans away from him as far as she can, almost ending up in my lap.
“You smell like shit,” she growls at him, then turns to the front seat to include the other two. “You smell like stale old-man shit covered up with air freshener. Where are you taking us?”
“432 Park Avenue is currently the tallest building in the western hemisphere,” Yellow Tie says with silky assurance. “With ninety floors of spacious condo units and every amenity you can imagine, it is truly the new standard of luxury living.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Julie shouts. “Do you even hear yourself?”
I am watching the river of people flowing by on each side of the street. Gaunt, exhausted faces, bodies either scrawny or obese, wrapped in tattered remnants of expensive clothes, logos obscured by rips and stains, all colors faded. Crude plywood patches cover the war-torn, quake-rattled buildings, repaired but not restored, storefronts fenced off and filled with obscure machines. The city buzzes like a factory, but where is the product? I see no abundance. No glow of hard-earned contentment on any of these faces. The factory’s product is more factories.
How did this happen? Not even the wretch in my basement wanted to live in a world like this. He wanted to feed on the fruits of society, not pave over the orchard. What was the moment that broke Axiom’s mind? I pry at my memories, but they refuse to open.
“Are you really going to take Park all the way there?” Julie says.
“It’s the most direct route,” Blue Tie says.
“The traffic is hell. Third is faster.”
Blue Tie glances at her in the mirror, then continues on Park. Julie sighs.
It gives me some small pleasure to remember that we’re both New Yorkers, for whatever that title is worth now. One bit of common ground in the vast gulf between her past and mine. I imagine her riding along to her father’s gigs downtown, sucking in the sights with her hungry young eyes, oh so eager to grow up. And later, visiting him at Fort Hamilton as the Borough Conflicts began to boil, a little less eager now. I see her at twelve years old, an image that comes to me with surprising detail: shorter, skinnier, with fewer scars on her soft cheeks, her tiny frame disappearing into baggy work clothes, walking alone over the Brooklyn Bridge while distant bomb smoke adds texture to the sunrise. The thought makes me smile until I remember that I was there too, perhaps looking down at her from some grim tower window, seeing just another pixel in the porn of my ambitions.