The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(25)

“What is this place?” he says, glancing into the shadows around them. “How’d you know this was down here?”

The man at the panel notices something in front of him and his eyes dart up to the camera, the fish-eye lens warping his face into a bulbous horror. He pulls a cable out of a nearby jack and the image goes black again.

“What the hell’s going on . . . ?” Julie says.

A harsh squeal erupts from all the TVs, and while everyone covers their ears, something flashes on the screen. It’s there for barely a single frame, too brief for me to fully grasp, but my brain rings like a gong. I see the door again, its rusty metal corners poking out behind crumbling plaster. I hear the drone behind the door, the churning throb of sub-audible bass rumbling up from the basement, rattling the door in its frame, sending chips of plaster flying off like popcorn.

My eyes squeeze shut. My mind is dark and the image blinks in the shadows with maddening brevity, its contours just out of reach, teasing me. I feel my hand moving.

“R . . . ?”

I grab a martini glass and smash it against the bar. I grip the stem like a dagger.

“R! What the fuck!”

I hear the scrape of her stool as she jumps away from me. I’m frightening her. I was so sure I’d never frighten her again. Memories of airports and screams and smears of black blood fill my head as my hand moves.

Jagged concentric shapes. Angles swallowing angles. A grotesque mandala with nothing in its center.

I open my eyes.

I have carved a design—a logo—into the surface of the bar. Its deep lines cut through lovers’ initials.

The door rattles.

“Atvist,” my mouth says.

The door cracks open.





A TALL BUILDING. A dim room. An old man. A grin.

A briefcase. A plan. I hesitate. I accept.

I board a plane. I watch a screen. A nature show. A worm and a wasp. I watch. I recoil. I keep watching.

The worm burrows into the wasp. The worm seizes its brain. Tells it where to fly. Feeds on its guts. Builds a home out of its corpse. The worm is small, clever, twisted, mad. The worm wins. The worm knows no beauty, no pleasure, no purpose. The worm knows nothing but what it does. The worm wins and the worm feasts. Wasps, wolves, poets, presidents. The worm feasts.

“Trust me, kid.” Brown teeth. Spotted gums. A bony hand on my shoulder. “I know my business.”

? ? ?

“R!”

The sting of a slap. Frightened blue eyes searching for mine in the darkness. I slam the basement door shut and pull the Orchard back into view, and in all the shadowy fragments spinning through my mind, I see one clear imperative.

I shake Julie off me and I run.

“R, stop!”

I shove the heavy door open, knocking over two soldiers who topple back into the deck railing. Julie is in the doorway, calling to me, but I can’t stop. I run, stumbling, gripping the cables to keep from falling off the catwalk, slipping down the staircase and caroming off the walls, finally bursting out into the street. I feel my badly lubricated joints creaking, my stiff ligaments protesting as I push them into a sprint.

The surprising weight of the briefcase. The cold metal in my hands. The decision I insisted I hadn’t made.

I see the Armory door at the end of the street. Towers of metal and plywood loom over me like judges, but I’m so close. I can fix my mistake before anyone notices. I can—

A flash. A hammer of air.

I’m flying.

The moon glares down at me as I sail backward, arms spinning, a lazy summertime float down the river. Is this still your preferred position? the moon asks me. On your back and half-asleep, drifting away from the fight?

I hit the wall of an apartment and crash through the sheet metal into a child’s bedroom. A girl jumps up in her bed and I see her face contort into a squeal of terror, but it’s silent. I hear only the high ringing of a tuning fork. I free myself from the debris; I stumble back onto the street and into a silent nightmare.

Chunks of concrete rain from the sky, silently cratering the asphalt and punching holes through walls and roofs. Silent rockets streak out from a cloud of smoke and pinwheel madly through the stadium, blooming into silent fireballs that incinerate buildings and tear chunks out of the stadium wall. Support cables pop out of the concrete and rickety apartment towers sway. Silently, two of them fall, crashing into each other and splitting open in the middle, dumping streams of people out of their beds and onto the street. Those who survive the fall have just enough time to raise their hands in a futile defensive gesture before being buried under their own homes.

The darkness pulses red with countless fires. Crates of grenades go off in bursts of white flashes. I run past dead bodies that are beginning to twitch, but I leave it to someone else to decide their second fates. I can’t stop. I am running toward a smoking hole where I abandoned someone who believes in me, and as my hearing returns, I notice that I am screaming.





THE RAW EDGES of shattered concrete are still hot enough to burn my hands as I dig my way through the debris, but I feel the sensation more distantly than ever. I hear salvos of gunfire from somewhere in the wreckage, but this is not a battle, it’s just ammunition going off, bullets firing themselves without waiting for the trigger, as if they know what they were made to do and are eager to get on with it.

I heave aside a slab of concrete and slip through the gap into what’s left of the Armory. It’s dark, but cut electrical wires light the cavern in blue flashes, along with the dim red glow of burning supply crates.