The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(40)

We hesitate, trying to catch up with this turn of events, but a groan from Carol breaks the shock and we move. Before I close the cabin’s door, I glance back at the TV and see my own face looking back at me. I don’t remember this photo being taken, but my memory is porous even when I haven’t been shocked in and out of consciousness. Despite the harsh light of the flash, I look convincingly alive. My skin is pale but lacks the purple tint of the Nearly Living. My eyes are thoroughly normal. Brown like mud, like shit, like ninety-six percent of the world’s population last time such things were tallied. This is what I wanted, isn’t it? To be just another man living out his lifespan in a world where children suffer and women are beaten and wild animals sit at all the desks?

“When nails escape their holes,” the TV says, “the house falls apart. Find them and bring them back.”

A single frame of the Axiom logo flickers over my face, the screen glares red, and that grating alert tone rings out in the empty shed. Then regular programming resumes.

Happy kids on tire swings.

The green glass of Freedom Tower shining over a young New York.

A writhing worm.





I FIDGET IN THE FRONT seat as we flee the camp at a painfully relaxed idle. It’s like trying to play dead while a bear gnaws on my skull. I notice a few soldiers emerging from their tents and shining flashlights into each other’s faces, but by the time the search gains any momentum we’re already to the exit. I see the glow of a television flickering inside the guard’s tent and I tense, then I see the guard himself still standing outside, halfway through his cigarette. He nods to Abram and waves us through.

“Thank God for bad habits,” Julie mumbles, watching his cloud of smoke recede in the rear window.

Once we’re out of view of the camp, Abram hits the gas. The old engine rattles and backfires and the truck roars forward, spitting clumps of dead leaves behind us. Instead of going back up the hill to the freeway, he takes a road that runs alongside it, hidden from aerial eyes by a thick ceiling of trees.

“Where are we going?” Julie says, leaning into the front seat.

“I’ll figure that out later,” Abram says. “Right now we just need some distance.”

Julie nods. “Stay on this road; it’s the only one out here that’s cleared. Good cover for about five miles and then we can jump on the freeway.”

“Abram,” Nora says to the back of his head. “That stuff on the TV . . . was that really the LOTUS Feed?”

“It was the Feed we all know and love, it just has new producers.”

“So our pictures . . . that ‘arrest warrant’ or whatever it was . . .”

Abram nods. “It just went nationwide. You’re officially outlaws.”

The rough pavement fills the truck with a steady rushing noise like the cabin of an airliner. Abram’s daughter looks very frightened, wedged between Julie and Nora, and I wonder how much of this she understands.

“How did they do it?” Julie says after a minute of grim silence.

“Do what?”

“Fed TV, Fed FM . . . people have been trying to get ahold of the Feed ever since BABL went online, what, nineteen years ago?”

“Twenty.”

“So after twenty years of everyone in America trying to hack this broadcast, you people show up”—her voice trembles and begins to rise—“smash into our homes, take control of our city, and while you’re at it, you go ahead and grab the Holy Grail? The only unjammed frequency in the whole country?” She shakes her head. “How?”

I remember that brief interruption I observed on the bar’s TV. Security footage of the pitchmen’s assistants in some strange, dark chamber. A slow knock on the door in my head, tap . . . tap . . . tap . . .

“It’s in the stadium,” I blurt.

All eyes fall on me except Abram’s.

“The source of the Feed is in the stadium.” I see a trace of a bitter smile on Abram’s face, and I look right at him. “It’s what you really came for.”

He shrugs. “Well, we didn’t come for the nightlife.”

“Bullshit,” Julie says, squinting at him like this is some inscrutable joke. “People have been living in Citi for over a decade. We’ve turned the place inside out. You’re saying we were sitting on the LOTUS broadcast station that whole time and no one knew about it?”

“Someone knew about it.”

Julie’s indignation freezes. Her demeanor shifts. “What do you mean?” she says in a low voice.

Abram sighs. “Look, I’m not Executive. I’m not even Management, I just fly cargo and watch prisoners, so it’s not like I’m invited to the smoky room where the plots are hatched. But from what I’ve heard, about two months ago someone spliced a new message into the Feed.”

Julie stares at him.

“It was crude, obviously rushed, but whoever sent it knew the code, and so did we.”

“What did it say?” she asks quietly.

“That your stadium was under attack and we should come here to protect it. Because you had what we wanted.”

Julie closes her eyes. She takes the realization like a martyr taking a bullet, barely flinching, and I suppose after watching her father try to kill her and then surrender himself to be eaten, this desperate final act may come as no surprise. But the betrayal that preceded it . . . the years of knowing what they had and choosing not to share it . . . that part cuts through. I can see it digging deeper the longer she contemplates it.