The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(26)
“Rosso!” I shout into the flickering darkness. “General Rosso!”
The path is littered with jagged concrete and spears of sheared rebar, but I start to run. I don’t get more than a few paces before I trip on something soft. An electric pop from an overhead wire illuminates a body with most of its flesh blasted away, revealing a scorched, cracked skeleton, identifiable only by the shredded tie around its neck.
Black Tie says nothing.
I push further in, past the garage and into Grigio’s beloved war room. In the sickly orange glow of a few burning tires, I find the other two pitchmen. Blue Tie grins up at me from the floor, his impossibly blue eyes attempting to establish trust with the ceiling while his mangled body slumps in a corner ten feet away. A steel beam runs through Yellow Tie’s skull from temple to temple, pinning her head to the floor, and I search her final expression for any hint of comprehension, any realization of error or betrayal, but it remains locked in that blandly cheerful mask.
What are these people?
A ragged gasp from somewhere in the shadows. I force myself to move.
He’s lying slumped against a pile of rubble. His chest isn’t shaped right and his gray jumpsuit has turned dark purple. Perhaps he has spilled wine on himself. Overindulged at a tasting party, embraced life a little too hard. He’ll have a headache in the morning but good stories to go with it. Julie and I will sit by his fireplace and listen, glancing at each other and smiling while Ella shakes her head in the kitchen. He is old but still vital, with plenty of days left to read his books and drink his wine and teach me how to be a person.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers as I kneel beside him.
“For what?”
Why is there a tremor in my voice? He’s just drunk.
“I wanted so badly . . . to see your life. You and Julie.” He coughs, and a fine spray of wine speckles my shirt. “I wanted to be there.”
Why do my eyes sting? Why is my vision getting blurry?
“But I’m excited, too.” He stares up at the patches of night sky visible through holes in the ceiling. “I’ve wondered for so long what comes next.”
Drunk people say the strangest things. I squint my eyes shut and warm liquid seeps out of them.
“Oh,” he says, and his tone suddenly shifts. I open my eyes and find his wide with awe, his mouth slightly agape. “I can see it.”
“Stop.” I grip his shoulders. “Wait.”
His eyes focus on me with a feverish intensity. “We’re so close, R. Show them.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying!”
His eyes drift to the ceiling again. His body begins to slacken. “It’s beautiful,” he says in a faint release of breath. “It’s everything.”
I watch his face for a while. I burn the image into my memory. I have never seen an expression like this. It says things that no one could ever articulate, no matter how vast their vocabulary or how limber their tongue. And in a moment, it will be gone.
I dig through the rubble. A grenade, a chainsaw—no. Something elegant. Respectful. If there is any respectful way to do this. The most important thing is that I do it soon. There can be no third life for this man’s broken body, and I won’t let him suffer the indignity of becoming like me.
I hear a gunshot. I assume it’s another burning ammo crate and ignore it, but then I hear a small, frail sob, and I turn. Ella is kneeling in front of her husband, her hair singed and wild, the knees of her pants torn and bloody. A revolver dangles from her finger and falls to the floor.
Some soft, whispering instinct tells me to move toward her. As soon as I’m near enough, she sags against my chest and lets the dam break.
? ? ?
I hear Julie’s voice as we approach the tunnel’s exit. She’s calling the names of all the people who matter to her. Nora’s. Ella’s. Rosso’s. Mine. I wonder if any of us will be of any comfort to her. I help Ella over the last jagged heap of debris and we stumble out into the chaos of the streets. Security teams rush from house to house, trying to establish some kind of order, but Medical is the star of tonight’s show. I catch a glimpse of Nora holding one end of a stretcher bearing a blood-smeared mess that looks like Kenerly. I catch her eyes for one second before she disappears around a corner, and the reeling shock in them tells me just how bad things are. But right now, the pain of hundreds of strangers barely even registers. I’m focused on the old woman crying on my arm and the young one running toward me with eyes full of dread.
“What happened?” Julie shouts. “What the hell happened, what is happening?”
She grabs my wrists and sucks in a breath to ask more unanswerable questions. I wrap my arms around her and pull her close. Through the crook of my elbow, she sees Ella sinking down onto an apartment stoop, she sees the tears running through the woman’s laugh lines, she sees the smoking crater in the stadium wall. She understands.
“No,” she says. “No.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper into her hair.
“No!” she screams, and wriggles violently out of my arms. “This is not happening. It’s not happening. No!”
She stands back from me and Ella, alone in the middle of the street, clenching her fists and grinding her teeth. She lost her mother long before I met her. Her father left slowly over many years, but the dirt on his grave has barely sprouted grass. And now this. Now Lawrence “Rosy” Rosso, her next-to-last fragment of family.