The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(12)

“Um, everyone is twenty thousand people,” Nora says. “The hall holds two hundred.”

“We’re patching the mics into the stadium PA. Only the reps will be able to participate, but everyone will be able to listen.”

Dread creeps into Julie’s face. “It’s that important?”

“Everything is that important. We’re all sharing this place and everyone deserves to know what’s happening. We’re done with secret bunker meetings. We’ve seen where that leads.”

The four of us watch him, waiting, and his tone deflates a little. “But yes. It’s that important.”

“Is the world ending again?” Julie asks, forcing a faint smile.

Rosso looks at her, stone-faced, considering the question with alarming seriousness. “Excuse me,” he says, and disappears into the crowd.





WE


WE DRIFT BENEATH THE CITY, floating through soil and stone, gazing up at the foundations of skyscrapers. They rise like exclamation points announcing the ascendancy of man, the end of a speech that seemed long and eloquent when we were up there writing it, but now, here astride the eons, more like a baby’s first grunt.

We love this baby, with all its spit and shit. It’s ours, it’s us, and we want it to grow up.

So we rise toward the city. We glide below its surface and through its countless graves, from grand cemeteries to backyard shoeboxes, caressing familiar bones but resisting their nostalgia. There’s a sense of urgency in the earth today, a seismic tension that tells us to keep moving, to keep watching, to gather all we can.

And we hear a voice.

“This is Major Evan Kenerly from Citi Stadium paging Goldman Dome, please pick up.”

The web of wires beneath the city is mostly inert: lines to communications towers that have all stopped speaking. But one of them—an old cable strung across the city like a child’s tin-can telephone—is still trying.

“Goldman Dome, please pick up.”

We follow this anxious voice as it races through the cable. We traverse the distance between one enclave and the other, running just below the walled street of their corridor project, beneath the pounding feet of the builders rushing back to their homes. We follow the signal up through the ground and into some deep basement of the dome, and here the signal stops. The cable is cut. The voice of Evan Kenerly disperses into ambient electrons.

We pause in this dark chamber, touching its cracked and sooty walls, its heaps of charred debris, skimming the pages of its history. Decades of men shouting into telephones and conducting joyless transactions, then decades of men planning wars and defenses and defenses of wars . . . and then this. Unfinished books ended in mid-sentence. No page of the Higher has ever been written here, just reams upon reams of sorrowful paperwork, anthologies of invoices bound in beige plastic—and something worse. Something moving in the halls around us. Heavy masses of Lower dreams, forming dents in the world’s thin shell.

We do not want to be here. We do not want to gather this.

We dive back into the comforting density of earth and retrace the cable to its source, hoping for brighter books. Whether it’s a city or an enclave or a family in a tent, we love every accretion of minds. Even the smallest node is a treasure, a mass of consciousness pumping out experience, perception, story—a beating heart in the corpse of the world.

We emerge from the ground in the center of the stadium, and familiarity trickles through us. Ah yes, some part of us whispers, and the rest of us partakes in the feeling. These streets. This place.

A young boy named Wally is standing in his yard with a dog named Buddy. Both are focused on a speaker that hangs from a power pole near his house. Are they listening to music? We would love to hear some music; the world hasn’t been this tuneless since the dawn of the Stone Age. But it’s not music. It’s an old man addressing a crowd, and his voice is like Evan Kenerly’s: anxious and atonal.

“For those of you listening outside, this is Lawrence Rosso, the officer formally known as General, speaking to you from the community center hall. I hope you can hear me okay, this is the first time we’ve—”

A squeal of feedback echoes through the stadium. The dog named Buddy flattens his ears.

“Sorry, folks. Bob, can you turn me down a little?”

A boy named David steps out of the house next door and a dog named Trina rushes over to greet Buddy.

“Hi Wally,” David says.

“Shh,” Wally says, not looking away from the speaker.

“Check. Check. Is that better?”

David’s twin sister, Marie, emerges from the doorway behind him. It has been six years and nine months since their cells diverged from their mother’s and their bodies began to form. It has been two years since David lost his memories of the womb and the darkness before it, the pain of birth and the strain of building a mind, and he is beginning to engage with the place in which he finds himself. Marie still remembers, which is why she stares at everything with the look of a visitor studying a strange world, but very soon she will surrender these pages to the Library, and we will savor them while she goes out to write more.

“What’s going on?” David asks his friend while the dogs sniff each other’s orifices.

“Didn’t your mom tell you?” Wally says. “It’s a big meeting and everyone gets to listen this time, even kids. So shut up.”