The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(48)

M strides ahead and begins to mingle, shaking hands and slapping backs. The Dead stare at him with furrowed brows, like they don’t understand what he is. He still has some distance to go before all traces of his rot are rubbed out, but I have retained enough of my Dead senses to know he registers clearly as Living. So their uncertainty is not the age-old question of to eat or not to eat. It’s something more complex.

I follow M into the swaying, stinking crowd.

“Hey, R?”

I look back and see Julie and Nora lingering at the end of the hallway like kids on a dock, scared to jump in the lake.

“Are you sure about this?” Julie says.

“Maybe find some blood to smear on us?” Nora says with a cringe. “Like you did with Julie?”

I shake my head. “Wasn’t just the blood. It was me going with you. Won’t work anymore.”

“Why not?”

I shrug. “Because I’m not Dead anymore.”

I plunge into the crowd.

“You’re insane,” Abram shouts from his chosen position far back in the hallway. “Where are you even going?”

I point toward the distant end of the hall, over the heads of a thousand zombies. “Somewhere safe.”

I press further in. The Dead don’t respond to nudges or other polite requests, but M’s sheer mass allows him to part the crowd like jungle grass, and I follow in his wake. Julie and Nora stick close to my back, and while Julie is fighting hard to embrace her convictions and not be afraid of these creatures—these people—Nora is a little more transparent.

“Hello . . . ,” she greets them through gritted teeth. “How are you . . . please don’t eat me . . .”

“Let’s go, Daddy,” Sprout says. She tugs on his hand, but he remains rooted to the floor.

“Come on!” Julie calls back to him.

“I’m not dragging my daughter through a zombie horde.”

“Use your eyes, man. It’s okay.”

“You don’t know what they’re going to do.”

She throws up her hands. “You don’t know what anyone’s going to do! Any person in any crowd could be a murderer, a rapist, a suicide bomber. You dive in and hope for the best.”

Like her, I’m putting on a brave face, but I can’t pretend I’m not scared. Fighting off the plague didn’t make me immune to it. This was one of the first big questions among the Nearly Living—what happens if we’re bitten again?—but we didn’t have to wait long to find out. A suicidal runaway showed us the dismal answer: what happens now is what happened then. We rejoin the Dead. We lose it all. We start over.

Despite my long struggle, despite the Gleam and all the other mysteries of the cure, I am just as vulnerable as Julie. And just as dependent on the whim of the mob.

Once the restaurants end and the gates begin, the density thins and we pop out into an open area of benches and plastic trees. Further down the hall, another group hovers around a bagel stand, staring at the empty case and pretending to read the menu. Perhaps by accident, a woman stumbles behind the counter. The crowd instinctively forms a line. Before the man at the front can place his order, the newly hired cashier wanders off again, and the line disperses with a vague aura of disappointment.

I watch all this with great interest. Is it just the lingering echoes of old instincts, or a sign of recovery? A stiff body stretching its limbs, testing its reflexes? I remember my first real meal. I’d been trying for weeks. Every evening I’d shove bread in my mouth and force myself to swallow; sometimes I’d even manage to hold it down until Julie finished celebrating before I snuck off to the bathroom to vomit. I didn’t want her to share my worry that I wouldn’t survive my transformation. But then, after about a month, it happened. I felt a stirring of the old hunger. The kind that didn’t demand human sacrifice. I watched Julie frying potatoes from our garden, drowning them in hot sauce, and my stomach grumbled. I wanted food. I didn’t want to suck the lightning out of a human soul; I wanted to eat hash browns. And I ate them. It was another week before I could eat again, and even now my body remains distrustful of such simple, deathless nourishment, accepting it only when starvation is imminent. But that moment gave me hope that I didn’t know I lacked. It was a step.

Now I watch these bewildered corpses stumble through the motions of human gastronomy, and I pour my hope into them. I will them to take the next step.

“Where’d he go?” Julie says, standing on tiptoe to see through the crowd behind us. She hops up on a bench. “Abram? Sprout?”

I don’t need the bench to see that they’re no longer in the hall.

“Did they seriously ditch us?” She cups her hands to her mouth. “Abram!”

“Keep it down,” he says, emerging from a service door with his daughter in tow. “You’ll wake them up.”

Julie sighs. “I hope you feel stupid taking the long way around now that you see we’re all fine.”

“I don’t take risks with my family.” He fixes me with a stern glare. “Where’s your ‘safe space’?”

? ? ?

To Abram’s relief—and mine, if I’m being honest—our route doesn’t take us through the bagel crowd. The hall branches off to the right and I lead us into the elevated tunnel that connects Terminal A to Terminal B. Behind us, the overhead sign promises BAGGAGE CLAIM and RESTROOMS. The book store is called Young’s Bay Books. The intimidating tome in the bestseller kiosk is The Suggestible Universe: How Consciousness Shapes Reality. I smile, remembering the countless hours I spent staring at all the words in this airport, wondering what they were trying to tell me. My budding literacy has lifted a veil from the world, revealing the tips of a thousand icebergs. If I ever have another peaceful moment, I’ll dive deeper. I’ll sit in my favorite chair with my favorite mug of my favorite tea and I’ll read The Suggestible Universe cover to cover. Though I should probably start with the book next to it, Scary Jerry and the Skeleton King. Or maybe the one next to that: Goodnight Moon.