The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(50)

M looks at me. I shrug. I look at Julie. She shrugs.

I notice that Abram hasn’t come inside yet. He’s still standing in the doorway with Sprout, running his eyes over the unaccountable oddness of my former home.

“This is where you want to hide?” he says.

I raise a hand to demonstrate the safety features of the aircraft. “One entrance. Emergency exits. Small windows.” He doesn’t respond, so I keep going. “High ground. Good visibility. Solar pow—”

“Watch Sprout,” he cuts me off, nudging his daughter forward. “I’m going to run a perimeter check.”

Sprout runs forward and stops at our row, staring at me expectantly. When I don’t react, she says, “Move please.”

I scoot out to the aisle seat and Sprout plops down next to Julie.

Julie shoots me a look of perplexed delight, holding back a laugh.

“You like Julie?” I ask the girl, and she nods earnestly. I smile. “Me too.”

I look back to the doorway to give Abram a few tips for his tour of the airport, but he’s already gone.

? ? ?

In less than ten minutes, everyone but me is asleep. It’s somewhere around noon, the sun is high and hot, but it was a very long night. Even M has managed to nod off with the effortless ease of the Living, while I sit patiently next to Sprout and Julie, listening to the chorus of snores. In almost every way, M seems to be falling back into human existence more quickly than I am, and I don’t understand why. He speaks well, his reflexes are sharp, and if his stories can be believed, he successfully made love with a Living woman—albeit a very desperate one—after only a month in the stadium. I had a head start, I was the one who pulled him into this race, but now he’s left me far behind. What is holding me back?

I get up and move toward the rear of the plane where I can express my restlessness without waking anyone. I sneak past Nora, who is stretched out across three seats with her feet sticking into the aisle. M would be more comfortable back here as well, but he has squeezed himself into one of business class’s plush thrones of isolation, perhaps sensing that Nora needed space.

As I near the end of the jet’s length, I suddenly remember one of my less whimsical collections. The last three rows are buried under piles of torn pants, bloody shirts, the occasional shoe with a foot in it. My dirty laundry covers the seats and spreads into the aisle, the college dorm of a promising young serial killer. I glance over my shoulder, feeling shivers of shame run down my back.

Whenever possible, I kept my victims’ clothes. In my half-asleep haze, I had some vague notion that this was a way to commemorate the people I consumed. To honor their noble sacrifice to my needs, which were of course nonnegotiable. It was certainly more thought than most zombies give to their predations, but I doubt anyone will commend me for it. I begin scooping up the clothes and stuffing them into the overhead luggage bins as a stew of disgust churns in my belly.

Something bumps against the bathroom door.

I freeze with a blood-crusted Christmas sweater dangling from my hands. A groan emanates from the left door and is answered by a slightly louder one from the right. I glance around for a weapon. I don’t see anything capable of cracking a skull, but I’ve done it with my bare hands plenty of times; people don’t realize how easy it is, you just have to—

I halt my thoughts. I unclench my fists. I remind myself that killing is no longer how I introduce myself to strangers.

“Hello?” I say softly, and the noise in the bathrooms stops. The latches on both doors say OCCUPIED, and it strikes me as odd that a zombie would bother to lock anything. I rap a knuckle on the left door. “I don’t want to hurt you. You don’t want to hurt me. Will you come out?”

The red OCCUPIED slides into a green VACANT. The door opens a crack, and I’m looking at a familiar face. A woman in her mid-twenties, brown hair, pale skin, eyes that could almost be a natural gray if not for their metallic sheen.

I back up to make room, and my “wife” emerges from the bathroom. Her receptionist’s outfit is filthy beyond belief, but my eyes ignore the countless bloodstains on the white button-up as they search for her name tag. It’s not there. Did she remove it? Why would she remove it?

“Name?” I ask her, slipping back into our primitive patois.

She shakes her head. What is the look on her face? Shame? Bitterness? Or just the confusion and fear of a traveler lost in a foreign land?

I hear a click behind me and the other bathroom opens. My “children” peek shyly around the doorway. At least they have names. I extracted them during that brief window when they appeared to be recovering, when the sun was rising and Sinatra was crooning and everything was going to be fine. Their skin isn’t bloodless but it’s still very pale, even Joan’s, whose pallor contrasts eerily with her dusky Arab features. They look alive but half-frozen. Their eyes are like their mother’s, stuck between states. They look the same as they did the day I abandoned them. The day Julie and I realized our ambitions were too big and decided we had to downsize.

Our house in the suburbs may be the front lines compared to life in the stadium, but it was still a retreat.

“Why are you here?” I ask my nameless wife.

She drops her eyes to the floor. “Want to . . . stop.”

At first I’m not sure what she means, but then I notice her condition. Patches of sunken flesh run down her neck and cheeks, soft depressions like bruises on a pear. Insufficiently embalmed with the energy of human life, her cells are finally accepting that they’re dead, deflating and dehydrating one by one. She is starving herself.