The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(38)

“The usual. Monsters attack, people die, families get separated. I wandered around on my own for a while, tried to find them, then Axiom picked me up. The old Axiom, back when they were just your standard corporate militia trying to carve out a market.”

I lean forward. “What are they now?”

He looks annoyed by the question. “Something different.”

“Are they human?”

He shoots me a glance that says I’ve secured my status as an idiot. “What the fuck else would they be?”

Julie tries to steer us back on course. “So you grew up with them? In their custody?”

He hesitates, then chuckles and turns back to the road. “I guess you could say that. Feral child raised by wolves.”

“So why’d you turn on them?” Nora says, folding her arms. “Why are you helping us?”

Ahead, one of the city’s many stacks of flattened cars has tipped over, blocking the road. Abram engages the four-wheel drive and guides the truck over a pile of two-dimensional coupes, crushed like beer cans for a recycling day that will never come.

“The short answer is, I thought I’d found my family.” The wipers clear the windshield and then the rain covers it. The world flashes from soft blur to hideous clarity and back again. “I’d picked up some clues over the years that pointed toward Cascadia, so when I heard we were moving on Post, I requested the assignment. I knew it was a long shot, even with free access to hundreds of prisoners—sorry, I mean guests—and after a few days I was about to let it drop. But then this guy . . .” He jabs a thumb toward me. “This guy says his name. Looks right at me and says ‘Perry.’?”

The truck falls into grim silence.

“Don’t worry,” he adds, “I know he’s dead.”

“How?” Julie says in a small voice.

“Would my face have sent you into shock if he was alive? The message was pretty clear.”

More silence. I brace myself for him to ask the terrible question: How did he die? But for the moment, he spares me.

“I assume my parents are dead too,” he says, staring through the windshield.

Julie nods.

Abram’s lips are a thin line. “So it’s down to me.”

We have ascended the hill up to the freeway and Citi Stadium is now visible on the horizon behind us. I watch it recede in the rear window, fading into a gray mirage behind sheets of rain.

“What’s the long answer?” Nora says.

Abram doesn’t reply.

“You betrayed Axiom and fucked up your life just to talk to someone who might know your brother?”

I watch his eyes in the mirror. They are familiar. Narrow-set and brown like Perry’s. But a few extra years have hardened them by centuries. “No,” he says, and takes a small, unmarked exit down into a wooded valley.

? ? ?

The street is buried in a thick layer of rotting leaves. The headlights slide across decrepit houses with boarded windows and gutted cars sinking into the rising grass, the kind of homes that probably looked like this even before the apocalypse.

“Where are we going?” Julie asks.

“That’s enough questions for a while,” Abram says.

At the end of the street, past a dead-end sign riddled with bullet holes, there are signs of life. Men in beige jackets move through the dark in the pale glow of headlamps on low settings.

“Are those—”

“I said shut up.”

“Hey,” I interject, leaning forward, but the gesture feels perfunctory. Julie looks at the side of Abram’s face with a kind of injured dismay. No, this is not the boy she once loved. Not even an echo of him.

As we approach the camp’s entrance, a man emerges from a small tent and lights a cigarette, takes a drag, and waits while Abram rolls down his window.

“078-05-1120,” Abram says in the bored tone of well-worn procedure.

The guard checks a list on a notepad, nods, then shines his headlamp into the backseat. “Who’re they?”

“New hires from Goldman. No numbers yet.”

He waves us through with his cigarette, leaving a spiral of smoke in the air, and we drive into the camp.

Our high beams pierce deep into the shadows, revealing what the camp’s conspicuous lack of lighting kept hidden. The property must have been some big family’s country commune. Six houses on one lot, with a barn and a few cabins in the field out back. Mom and Dad and the kids and their kids and maybe even their kids’ kids, all holed up at the end of this street deep in the woods, where no one could disturb their private party with news of the world and its wicked ways. How surprised they must have been to learn that the pot continued to boil even after they left the kitchen. How shocked to see that scalding tide reaching all the way to their door.

Now the farm is occupied by a new family with a more active approach to society’s imperfections. All the houses and cabins appear to be barracks; Axiom soldiers pop in and out of them on various errands, delivering or receiving weapons and equipment. Beyond the houses, dozens of tents spread across a muddy field like a music festival campground, a miserable Woodstock of war.

“What are we doing here?” Nora whispers, despite Abram’s instructions. “Won’t they be looking for us?”

“The jamming’s heavy around here. Walkies get barely half-mile range. The camp won’t know what happened till a messenger arrives.”