The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(47)

We pull up to the Arrivals gate and park the Porsche in a dark corner of the loading zone, hidden from view. This area is mostly clear, but the few vehicles abandoned here suggest stories almost too poignant to ponder. Who was the family who left their minivan and a trail of spilled luggage as they raced to catch the last flight out of America? Where was that flight going, and was it shot down when it got there? Did the owner of this plush pony on the curb grow into a strong and resourceful young woman, or is she now a smear of ash floating somewhere in the Atlantic?

I pull myself out of my morbid reverie. Abram is packing for both an indefinite camping trip and a possible battle. With his backpack from the camp slung over his shoulder, he digs through the Porsche’s trunk until he finds a duffel bag full of supplies and hands it to M, eyeing him cautiously. M responds to the scrutiny with a cheery grin, made somewhat unsettling by the scars on his lips.

There are enough weapons for everyone, but after giving a shotgun to Julie and a rifle to Nora and taking a bigger rifle for himself, he regards me hesitantly, holding out a small pistol.

I stare at the gun’s gleaming black grip. Muscle memory rushes into my hand. The reassuring weight of steel, the thrilling thrust of the recoil, the satisfying spray of—

“No thanks,” I say, demonstrating my hand’s unsteady tremble. “I’m still a little uncategorized.”

“If I really believed you were infected,” Abram says, “I’d be giving you the other end of this gun. A scar doesn’t prove anything.”

I shrug.

Abram holds the pistol out to M but M brushes past him, reaches into the Porsche’s gun rack, and pulls out an AK-47.

“More my size,” he says.

Abram looks dubious. “Do you know how to use that?”

M pops out the clip, checks the ammo, racks the bolt and dry fires, then pops the clip back in. “Yup.”

“He said he was a Marine, dumb-ass,” Nora says while performing a similar function check on her rifle.

“Just two years with the Corps,” M says. “But five with Gray River.”

Abram nods with faux admiration, returning the pistol to his duffel bag. “So you’re part of the Axiom family, then. I take it Gray River doesn’t offer a dental plan.”

“We won’t need the guns,” Julie says. “We shouldn’t even bring them, it sends the wrong message.”

Abram shakes his head.

I’m reluctant to contradict her, but my memories of this place are vivid. “Last time . . .”

“It was too soon. We didn’t give the cure time to spread. It’ll be different now.”

I don’t argue, but I’m not convinced. And Julie keeps her gun.

? ? ?

A tranquil airport is an unnatural thing. Airports were built for commotion, for the noise and effluvia of the global human enterprise. There is no place on Earth with a higher concentration of differences, every culture and language converging on this little building and mixing together, eating the same food and using the same toilets, piling their clothes side by side and stealing glances at each other’s belongings as they’re revealed on X-ray screens, squeezing hip to hip on cramped gate benches and inhaling each other’s odors, everyone alert, worried, striving—the world and all its conflicts, compressed to a tiny point.

Not anymore. All those volatile chemicals exploded long ago, leaving only an empty casing. We encounter not a single moving creature in the outer terminal, and my fear begins to move in a different direction: will this place even protect us? If the Dead are all gone, we’re no safer here than anywhere else. But my concerns are short-lived. We pass through the empty security lines and take a left toward Gate 12 and there they are, my old neighbors, milling around the food court in a slow, slumberous swarm. The fear center of my brain has never been more confused. Am I relieved or terrified?

Abram grips Sprout’s arm with one hand and aims his rifle with the other, keeping his back to the wall, but the rest of us move forward with weapons down, cautious but calm.

“Hey, guys!” M bellows with a friendly wave.

The horde goes still. A few snap their teeth at us once or twice, then resume their shambling. But most remain motionless, regarding us with inscrutable expressions. Their faces are worn and weary, their bodies slumped; their strange, leaden eyes stare at us with sorrowful longing, like beggars resigned to starvation. I feel a surge of emotion for these lost creatures, pity laced with love. I was one of them. I’m still one of them. Yet somehow I escaped this place, and they remain trapped.

There was a moment, sitting on a hill with Julie, when I thought freeing them would be a simple thing. Not easy, but simple. We would come here, we’d share what we’d learned and spread what we’d created, and they would see the light and be healed. Our effect on the Boneys had been immediate and dramatic. Those empty husks had sensed a shift in the atmosphere, an inconceivable alteration to the rigid rails of their reality, and they had fled, perhaps in search of more stable land, some new flat surface on which to rebuild their universe. But my fellow Fleshies? The Dead who had yet to cut that final thread? Our effect on them was subtler. Something has changed; the bullet-scarred giant by my side is proof of that, as is B and every patient in Nora’s Morgue. But our attempt to go forth and evangelize was disastrously naive.

They are not impressed. They are not convinced. They are waiting for something more.