The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(125)

I wriggle my arm free and fall to the pavement. I catch a glimpse of their faces pressed to the windows as the bus rolls past me, Joan and Alex and their new friend Sprout, and then they’re gone.

What must my children think of me? Since the day they were thrust into my care, I have abandoned them twice: first to go out into the world and follow my heart, to fall in love and learn how to live, and then because their needs overwhelmed me. Because I was too busy fighting myself to protect anyone else. And now that I’ve come back, now that I’m doing all I can to give them the life they deserve . . . nothing but terror and peril, again and again.

Is this the mind of every parent? This storm of guilt and uncertainty in spite of all good intentions? Did my own father feel this heartbreak as he sat in that chair sucking in smoke, feeling past generations of failure coursing through his veins? Wondering dimly what could break that heavy chain?

I hear Abram screaming obscenities as the bus disappears, as the guards back away with a gun pointed at each of us, as they climb into their Hummer and screech off after the bus. For a moment, all five of us stand motionless, trapped in the space between courage and suicide. Then I realize there are only four of us.

“Julie!”

I whirl around to find her running down a side street toward what must be the hospital. I should have expected this. She will run through the halls screaming her mother’s name until her bronchial tubes seize, until she collapses or the building does. The promise she made her mother is the very one her mother broke all those years ago, and I have no doubt she’ll throw her life away to keep it.

I run after her, my long legs eating up the distance. She sees me coming and looks ready to struggle, but then she notices I’m not stopping her. I’m not trying to talk sense into her or convince her to give up what I know she can’t. I’m just running alongside her, ready to catch her if she falls.

A hint of gratitude warms the panic in her face. Gratitude and more. Then a blur of white roars around the corner and we are underwater.

? ? ?

I’m spinning, rolling, battered by chunks of debris, then I’m scraping along the street like it’s a stony riverbed. The wave finally spreads itself thin enough for me to plant my feet and I stagger upright. The filthy froth boils against my thighs as I scan frantically for Julie.

I can’t find her.

I can’t find anyone. I have been washed into some unknown avenue in the shadow of some unknown high-rise, and I feel the weight of it pushing down on me, thousands of tons of concrete looming like a gravestone with no name. Here lies a body. Here lies nobody.

“Julie!”

We were side by side; how could we have drifted so far? Did she grab hold of something I missed or did she tumble far past me?

“Julie!” I call again but the wind stuffs it back in my mouth. I hear a crash behind me and I turn, and that’s when I see the wall.

I feel an insane urge to laugh.

Manhattan’s defense against the siege of inevitability is a layered hodgepodge of increasing desperation. The base is professional: six-foot slabs of concrete mortared tight at the seams. The middle looks like a volunteer effort: freeway barriers stacked atop the slabs, their gaps stuffed with sandbags. And the top: plywood and tin. Frantic gestures of a panicked populace, about as effective as superstition.

The crash I heard was this layer collapsing under another wind-blasted wave. The force of this rush pushes the freeway barriers off the slabs, and the New York Sea spills into the street, its raging whitecaps darkening as they scoop up decades of human grime.

I open my mouth to scream Julie’s name, and it fills with black soup.

I tumble and spin, hands and feet flailing for purchase, but this is not a preliminary wave testing the defenses. This is the flood. As I spin in this icy void, I feel the presence of the wretch in the basement, but to my surprise, he is not laughing. He is not gloating.

Is this it? he murmurs sadly. Is this all you do with our third chance? A few friends, a few kisses, a few boards to build a home?

The water isn’t deep, but my disorientation makes it an expanse without bottom or surface. Garbage wraps around me like tentacles, dragging me down toward some vast maw.

It’s not enough, he says. You’ve barely touched our debt.

But I am not listening to him. I’m thinking about Julie, hoping she’s far away yet wishing for her presence. All the endings I’ve imagined for my third life, no matter how dark and violent, involved her at my side when I closed my eyes. I never imagined it like this.

Something hits me hard, and as the black water fades to a deeper darkness, my thoughts become wordless. Simple impulses of love that I howl into infinite halls, hoping someone hears and writes them down.





THE END OF IT.

I wake up next to a woman. I’m not sure which one. My eyes burn and my head throbs; even the pricey stuff does it. No matter how much you pay for the drink, you pay again in the morning.

“Hi,” the woman whispers, and I recognize the voice. My assistant. “Are you alive?”

I groan.

“Are you working today?”

I groan louder.

“Do you ever stop?”

I turn my head on the pillow. My assistant is giving me that look again, the one that feels like a home invasion.

“There’s a war,” I say.

“Is there ever not?”