The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(126)

I sigh through my nose, smelling my own rotten breath. “Don’t. Not right now.”

“I just wonder if you know you have a choice. Everyone does.”

“If that were true, you wouldn’t be here.”

I watch her eyes withdraw from me. The tender curiosity gives way to the loathing that belongs there, and I feel myself relax.

With a stiff smile she starts touching me, and though I’m tired and sick and in pain, I respond. We kiss with flaky lips and acrid tongues. We rub ourselves raw. My stomach churns and my head pounds with each miserable thrust, but I continue. I am expected to continue. Expected by whom, I’m not sure, but I feel the imperative all around and inside me.

After much sweaty effort, I reach the goal. My brain gives up its reward grudgingly and in miserly portions, a few jolts of pleasure on par with a good sneeze, and as the sensation fades I grasp at it, reaching into the darkness of my mind to seize it and pull it back, unwilling to accept that this is all I get. But this is all I get.

I collapse onto the bed, eyes closed, mouth open. She is whispering something intended to be sensual, greatly overvaluing what we just did, but I am sinking through the bed. I am sinking through the floor and the ground and into a dark chamber full of dust and dead worms, endless shelves of damp, fungal books on paper and parchment and stone and clay, cuneiform lines and ochre smudges and unknowable pre-lingual scrapings.

I experience a different kind of climax. I vomit onto my pillow. Then I get up and go to work.

? ? ?

“I’m sick of it,” he says. “Working out of this old shit-hole surrounded by sandbags in the shadow of those midtown towers. Getting our asses kicked by a bunch of thugs in graffitied tanks. It’s fucking embarrassing.” He paces around the echoing expanse of his office, sipping Scotch from a crystal tumbler while I sit on the couch, swaying and sweating. “We need to expand.”

“Expand?” I swallow back the taste of acid. My face feels hot and sore. “I thought we’d already bit off too much.”

“No such thing as too much. You ever see a dog walk away from food? Everything in nature knows to keep eating.”

“We’re losing workforce. We can barely hold Manhattan. If the boroughs join together, they’ll outnumber us.”

“Which is exactly why we need to expand. Listen, I’ll tell you a secret.” He sits on the couch across from me and leans in close. “We’re going to take the west coast.”

His voice sounds muffled, like a radio fighting through static. I struggle to make my throat work. “We can’t do . . . how would we do that? How would we . . . maintain control across that much territory?”

He grins. “We’re going to take over the LOTUS Feed.”

“How?”

“We’ve been closing in on the source for years. We know it’s somewhere in South Cascadia. So we just flood the region with our people, acquire every enclave, and start squeezing heads until the secret squirts out. I guarantee within a year we’ll be shouting from the rooftop of BABL.”

The room is rippling like I’m underwater. My forehead is wet.

“Yes, we have our hands full with the boroughs right now. Things might get bad here. But if we control the Feed, we’ll be in every home and bar and bunker. We’ll be a familiar face and a household name, and we won’t have to fight anymore because they’ll give us what we want. Whatever we say will be the truth, because we’ll be the only voice.”

I open my mouth to ask a question or perhaps to express a doubt, but all that comes out is a retching noise.

His grin widens at my struggle. “Go ahead, R—. Puke on my floor. It’s an exciting moment and you’re a sensitive kid, so do what you have to do to get over it.”

I lean over the edge of the couch as my body prepares to accept his invitation.

“But when you get it all out, let’s talk specifics. I want you to head the first wave.”

I feel a vibration in the floor. It’s faint and my grandfather doesn’t react to it so I assume it’s just my throbbing head. The ripples in his liquor are harder to explain, but my stomach soon heaves these thoughts out of me.

? ? ?

I am not on Earth when it happens. I am a thousand feet above it in a twin-prop plane, swallowing a double dose of Dramamine. It’s been weeks since I’ve had a drink but I can’t shake this nausea. The company doctors chalk it up to anxiety, and that’s plausible enough. We are, after all, in the middle of losing a war.

Mr. Atvist is sending me west, and though I do have a mission, I suspect there’s a larger purpose to getting me out of New York. I suspect it has something to do with the fire and smoke rising from the streets of lower Manhattan. The reports of branches being broken. Executives being executed. The distant booms of tank shells. Mr. Atvist knows which way the wind is blowing, and he wants his heir elsewhere when the tree falls.

It’s tempting to feel touched by this gesture, to feel loved—no, I can’t even think the word without chuckling. I know what I am to my grandfather. I am not a person, I am Family. I am DNA and legacy, a vehicle to carry him into the future. Nothing more.

So when I see dust rising all over the city, when I see high-rises swaying like trees, the older ones breaking and buckling—when I press my face to the window and see the Atvist Building beginning to crumble and flood, I am not sure what to feel. When I hear his voice on the radio, fading into BABL’s bubbling screech but audible until the end, I am not sure how to take his words.