The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(5)
“Who is it?” I wonder aloud.
“Nobody we know.”
“Goldman Dome?”
“Working aircraft are practically mythical these days. If Goldman had helicopters, they would’ve told us.”
The choppers roar over our heads and into the city. I am still new to Julie’s world and not well-informed on the current political landscape, but I know the Dead are not the only threat, and unexpected visitors are rarely a welcome sight.
Julie pulls out her walkie and dials in Nora’s channel. “Nora, it’s Julie. Come in?”
Instead of traditional radio static, soft and organic, the walkie emits a distorted shriek. I don’t need to ask Julie for a refresher to recall this piece of history: the BABL signal. The old government’s last desperate attempt to preserve the nation’s unity by smothering every argument. I can just barely hear Nora through the jammer’s wall of noise, the ghost of a bygone era refusing to release its grip.
“—you hear me?”
“Barely,” Julie says, and I wince as she raises the volume. “Did you see those choppers?”
“I’m at work but I—eard them.”
“What’s going on?”
“No idea. Rosso—alled a meet—ill you—there?”
“We’re on our way.”
“I’m at—ork, come—me before—eeting—want to show—omething—”
The sound of nails on a chalkboard enters the mix, and Julie cringes away from the walkie. “Nora, the jamming’s too bad, I think there’s a surge.”
“—amn—ucking surges—”
“I’ll see you soon. Cabernet out.”
She drops the walkie and watches the helicopters descend into the streets around the dome. “Maybe Goldman’s scouts salvaged them from an old base?” she offers feebly.
We plunge into the city, the corpse of a forgotten metropolis that most people call Post and a few thousand call home. The choppers disappear behind crumbling high-rises.
? ? ?
The cleanup crew has done a good job erasing the mess my old friends made of the city. All the bones and bodies have been cleared, the craters have been filled, and the walls of Corridor 1 are almost finished, leaving a clear and relatively safe highway to the stadium. But far more significant is the construction on Corridor 2, which has resumed from both ends after years of stagnation. The two largest enclaves in Cascadia are reaching across the miles that separate them. In practice, the merger is about nothing more meaningful than the safe exchange of resources, but I allow myself to imagine neurons in the brain of humanity attempting to forge a synapse.
One connection after the other. This is how we learn.
I pull into the stadium parking lot and find a spot between two Hummers, sliding in with only a few scrapes. As we head toward the gate, I glance back at our flamboyant red roadster and my brows knit with sympathy. It looks distinctly uncomfortable huddled between those two olive drab hulks. But despite Julie’s tendency to humanize the inanimate, despite assigning it a name and a personality—the strong, silent type—Mercey is just a car, and its “discomfort” is just a projection of mine. Like that shiny red classic surrounded by armored trucks, I have struggled to find my place in this sensible society. The incongruity runs through every layer of who and what I am, but it starts on the outermost surface: my clothes.
Fashion has been a problem for me.
At first, Julie tried to persuade me to keep dressing sharp. My original graveclothes clearly had to go—no amount of laundering could remove their grisly history—but she begged me to keep the red tie, which was still in surprisingly good condition.
“It’s a statement,” she said. “It says there’s more to you than work and war.”
“I’m not ready to make a statement,” I said, shrinking under the incredulous stares of the soldiers, and eventually she relented. She took me shopping. We sifted through the rubble of a bomb-blasted Target and I emerged from a dressing room in brown canvas pants, a gray Henley, and the same black boots I died in—always an odd pairing with my old business wear but perfect for this grim ensemble.
“Fine,” Julie sighed. “You look fine.”
Despite the resignation it indicates, my neutral appearance is a comfort as we approach the stadium gate. Dressing vibrantly takes a courage I don’t yet have. After all those years prowling the outskirts of humanity, all I want now is to blend in.
“Hi, Ted,” Julie says, nodding to the immigration officer.
“Hi, Ted,” I say, trying to make my tone deliver all the signals required for my presence here. Remorse. Harmlessness. Tentative camaraderie.
Ted says nothing, which is probably the best I can hope for. He opens the gate, and we enter the stadium.
? ? ?
Dog shit on lumpy asphalt. Makeshift pens of bony goats and cattle. The filthy faces of children peering from overgrown shanties that wobble like houses of cards, held barely upright by a web of cables anchored to the stadium walls. Julie and I broke no evil spell when we kissed. No purifying wave of magic washed the stadium white and transformed its gargoyles into angels. One might even say we had the opposite effect, because the streets are now crawling with corpses. The “Nearly Living” as I’ve heard some optimists calling them. Not the classically murderous All Dead, not the lost and searching Mostly Dead like our friend B, but not yet fully alive like I allegedly am. Our purgatory is an endless wall of gray paint swatches, and it takes a sharp eye to spot the difference between “Stone” and “Slate,” “Fog” and “Smoke.”