The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(53)

A higher pitched rattle of gunfire joins the heavy thump of the chain gun and I see Julie standing behind a second-floor window, firing M’s AK-47 through the glass. She probably knows this is useless against an armored attack chopper, but these are the gestures we make when useful actions run out. Her bullets chip the chopper’s paint and make white spots on the windshield, damaging its resale value but little else. The gunner ignores her until she manages to ping a shot off a rotor blade, then the chain gun rises and Julie runs for cover as it strafes across her floor, filling the air with broken glass and upholstery fluff. Satisfied that he’s made his point, the gunner returns his attention to the Dead.

I drag my kids toward the safety of the terminal door, determined to save at least these two, and just as I’m reaching out to open it, I hear a cry. A raw, plaintive noise almost like the howl of a dog, inarticulate but trembling with emotion. I look up.

My wife is on the control tower balcony, directly above the helicopter, leaning against the railing. Her eyes are on me, and I realize the noise I heard was her calling to me, the sound of a person trying to reach another person without words or a name. But she doesn’t need words now. She cries out again, and the anguish in it makes the meaning clear.

Good-bye.

She jumps off the tower. She falls facedown, arms spread wide, hair fluttering up toward the clear summer sky, and when she hits the blurring disc of the rotors, she vanishes. Lukewarm liquid sprays across my face. I hear the wet slap of heavier bits raining down all over the tarmac, but the sound is mercifully muffled by the screech of the helicopter tearing itself apart. Its bent rotor rattles horribly for an instant, then something snaps. The chopper flips and twists and flings itself into the concrete base of the terminal building. It doesn’t explode. Its impact is less than satisfying. It hits the wall with a dull crunch, then falls to the pavement in a mangled heap.

Everything goes silent. The fury abruptly drains out of the remaining Dead, their shoulders falling back into their customary slouch. But while their rage sags, mine swells, stretching my seams to bursting. My eyes take in the carnage around me, flicking from corpse to corpse, their gazes fixed on the dreaded mouth of the sky as their brains ooze through the backs of their heads. All their struggles disregarded, all forward steps ignored, erased in a few minutes by a few little bits of lead. And scattered all around them, on the ground and on my clothes and in my eyes, the remains of a woman who never told me her name. A woman I bumped into in a dream and married without ever exchanging a word, paired as a unit by the decree of a formula that neither of us understood. She should mean nothing to me. I knew nothing about who she was behind her blank stare or who she would have become if given the chance. And perhaps that’s it. She was trying to become something beautiful, and these cruel and stupid children have cut open her chrysalis simply because they could.

I run to the helicopter. I wrench open the cockpit door and seize the pilot by his jacket, pulling him against his seat straps. “Why?” I growl, inches from his face.

His eyes take a moment to focus on me. In my periphery I see a twisted piece of steel sticking out of his side and his copilot dead in the other seat, but I’m focused on the pilot’s face, mostly blank now but still retaining the lines of that smirk I saw through the windshield as he savored the killing of weaker things.

“Why are you doing this?” I say from some hot, dark boiler room in my mind. “Why won’t you stop?”

He opens his mouth. A ragged wheeze comes out. His eyes seem to be looking past me.

“Why?” I shout, shaking him against the seat. “What’s your goal? Who are your leaders?”

I feel something beyond rage thrumming inside me. The noise from the basement. The rattling door.

“Where is Atvist?” I scream into his face and grab the piece of steel and rip it out of his chest. The door in me is straining against its locks, and through the crack I can see fire and burnt flesh and squirming masses of worms.

I thrust my hand into his gaping wound and dig until I find his lung. “Tell me!”

I squeeze his lung, forcing puffs of air through his throat.

“Tell me!”

I hear footsteps behind me, and the burning red murk clears from my vision. I become aware that I am screaming at a dead man, and my fist is inside his chest, and my friends are watching in horrified silence.

I drive the piece of steel into the dead man’s skull, then slowly stand up and turn around, wiping my hand on my pants. Julie, M, and Nora stare at me with wide eyes. Abram waits in the terminal doorway with his daughter, looking more impressed than disturbed. I feel an urge to apologize, to offer some unlikely excuse for what they just witnessed, but I’m too full of disgust. Some for myself, but more for everything else. My disgust for the world is so deep, my own portion sinks into it with barely a ripple.

“We need to go,” I say, staring at the ground.

There is a long silence, broken only by the soft groans of the Dead. They shuffle around like sleepwalkers, eyes on the pavement and the carpet of corpses that covers it, seemingly unaware of our presence, stuffed back into some deep hole where not even the smell of life can reach them.

“Go where?” Julie asks quietly.

“Out into the world. There’s nothing left here.”

“What’s out in the world?”

“We don’t know. That’s why we need to go.”