The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(28)
I am full of dread because I know I’m going to kill this man. It’s required by Newtonian law, a reaction to his action, impossible to prevent. I ascend the rubble heap and seize his head and smash his face into a concrete corner and he dies in a bubbling foam of blood. The next man who comes at me doesn’t die but is certainly maimed when I throw him against a slab and hammer my fist into his shoulder joint, snapping the ligaments and effectively severing his arm. Thick limbs wrap around my throat and lift me off the ground, but my brain seems to have a course of action ready for every scenario; a well-aimed elbow breaks the man’s ribs and hopefully punctures his lung, and his grip melts off me.
A very distant voice asks: What am I doing? How am I doing it? Who is the man who acquired these skills and the reptilian coldness to use them?
Finally, someone relieves me of my momentum. The butt of a gun cracks into the side of my head and the already slow world spins into a rippling sludge. I am aware of myself falling, but I feel nothing when my face hits the pavement next to Julie’s. Our eyes meet, hers red and wet, mine simply open, staring. Where is the gold? Where is the impossible solar yellow that told us things were different, that we had changed and the world would change with us?
Dark spots begin to splatter across my vision. I try to speak to her: Keep breathing. We’re going to be okay. But my lips won’t obey. I try to say it with my eyes. I keep trying until my eyes roll up.
WE
WE DO NOT need to move. We are already everywhere. But omnipresence can be dull, so we indulge in locality. We condense ourself into points and roam the earth like those quaint old notions of spirits: ghosts, angels, and other things in white sheets.
We have little interest in the world itself, the actual matter and space. We are here for the story, for the landscape of consciousness overlying the dust and rock. In that landscape, sharp peaks are jutting up from the plains. There are quakes and floods and hurricanes, and rivers of magma press against the surface. That landscape is changing, and change demands our attention.
So we move. We drift through the upheaval of a city in crisis, remembering the scent of smoke, the pain of fire, the sorrow of loss.
Everywhere, men in beige jackets are herding people back into their homes, assuring them that they have it all under control and everything will return to normalcy, that cozy dream that’s buried a thousand revolutions.
In their panic, most of the people do as they’re told. They see confident men issuing clear instructions and they don’t much care who those men are or what the instructions entail. They just want to keep their families safe. They just want to survive the night. There will be time for questions later, on some distant morning when the fires are out and they’re no longer scared or hurt or hungry.
But the men in beige jackets are encountering one unexpected variable. A single ripple in this calm sea of compliance. There are certain individuals scattered throughout the crowds who do not react predictably. Their minds lack the key for the codes being shouted at them, so they do not respond to instructions or assurances, no matter how confidently delivered. They stand motionless in the streets, watching the men in beige jackets roar commands that blend into the promises pouring from the stadium PA, and they do not respond.
The men in beige jackets move closer in order to become more forceful, and that’s when they notice that something is different about these individuals. The tint of their skin. The slowness of their movements. The scar tissue in the shape of bullet holes, knife slashes, and wide patches of regenerated rot. But mostly their eyes. Many different hues, alike in defiance.
We drift toward a building that radiates pain, but as we get closer we notice other accumulations. Plague and its opposite: golden flickers of cure. Something like a smile spreads through our vastness.
“You’ll be okay,” Nora Greene tells a man with three shards of concrete sticking out of his back. “They’re not deep. I’ll be back in a second to patch you up.”
“Wait,” he gasps as she moves away. “Don’t leave me.”
“God, you’re needy. This is why we never would’ve worked.”
“Nora.”
“You’re going to be fine, Evan. Just stay calm. I’ll be right back.”
She darts away from his bed to attend to another patient. The warehouse once seemed awkwardly large for this miniature ER, but now every inch of empty space has been filled with the wounded. Their accommodations follow a steady grade of increasing desperation, from proper electric hospital beds to stained twin mattresses to wool blankets thrown on the concrete floor. We jump from nurse to nurse—there are few proper doctors in this age of austerity—and then return to Nora, following her as she bandages the living and comforts the dying. A group of civilians stands in a corner, waiting for the signal that it’s time to say their good-byes and then shoot their loved ones in the head, but sometimes they can’t do it and the task falls to Nora. A Colt .45 sticks out of the waistband of her scrubs, an instrument as essential to modern medicine as a scalpel.
In all the blood and screaming, no one is paying attention to the rows of special patients whose beds line the walls. Many of these have far more serious injuries—missing limbs, gaping holes—but their wounds don’t bleed. These patients sit up in their beds and observe the chaos with wide eyes. The Living do everything so vibrantly, the Dead think. Their blood sprays like party champagne, they hoot and howl like a gospel choir. Even in their agony, they are enviable.