The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(54)

Without meeting their eyes, I push past my friends and stop in front of Abram. “Axiom owns the coasts. What’s in between?”

He looks me up and down for a moment as if debating how seriously to take me. “Not much,” he says. “Exed cities. Empty territories. A few struggling enclaves, probably.”

“Probably?”

“It’s been a few years since I’ve heard any reports. Axiom mostly sticks to the coasts these days. But everyone knows—”

“No one knows anything,” I snap. “The world has grown. A city’s a country and a country’s a planet. There has to be something out there.”

They all watch me, taken aback by my sudden verbosity, but I’m so focused I forget to feel self-conscious.

“Something like what, exactly?” Nora says.

“People.” I finally allow myself to make eye contact, first with her, then Julie, then Abram. “Help. Maybe even answers.”

Julie begins to nod. “Axiom has our home and everything around it. They plan to keep spreading, and we can’t stop them ourselves.”

“I wasn’t planning on stopping them,” Abram says.

“Oh right, your cabin.” She holds his gaze with that eerily mature steel that lurks beneath her youthful flippancy. I feel a little thrill whenever it emerges. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe if you hide out long enough, Axiom will burn itself out. But my guess is they’ll burn the rest of the continent first. Is that what you want to give Sprout for her eighteenth birthday when you finally come out of your bunker? A scorched Earth run by madmen?”

“I’m not seeing many alternatives,” he says under his breath.

“Are you looking for them? There could be rebel armies, thriving enclaves, people spreading the cure . . . We have no idea what’s out there.”

Abram meets her steel with his own. He is looking at her so intently that he doesn’t notice Sprout wandering off.

“Daddy,” she says, climbing onto the 747’s tire. “Let’s go somewhere.”

“Mura, get down!” He rushes over and pulls her off. My own kids stare at the young girl, recognizing one of their own, though their eyes are still wide with the shock of seeing their mother aerosolized in front of them. I note with another pang of sadness that the blood spattered across their faces is red. Dark red, almost purple, but not black. She was so close.

“What are you even proposing?” Abram says without turning around. “Go exploring? Take a road trip? Are you forgetting that Axiom is right behind you? You got lucky twice but the minute we find out—” He stops, releases a weary breath. “The minute they find out what happened here, they’re going to get a lot more serious. We can’t run much longer.”

“Need to run faster,” I say.

He points to the wreck of the chopper. “That’s one of maybe ten helicopters remaining in America, and you know who has the rest.”

“How about a jet?”

He opens his mouth to scoff at this, then glances back at the enormous tire that his daughter is climbing again.

“You said you were a ‘large transport pilot,’?” Julie says. “Can you fly a 747?”

His eyes travel up the landing gear and over the clownishly bulbous nose of one of the largest commercial airliners ever built. He chuckles. “Fucking thing’s so big I forgot it was a plane.”

“Can you fly it?”

He studies it for a moment, mumbling to himself. “Looks like civil-military . . . late model . . . probably close enough to the C-17 . . .” He glances sideways at Julie. “I can fly it if it flies, but that’s a big ‘if.’ Everything else here is wrecked or gutted.”

“It has power,” I offer.

“There’s fuel in the Iceland Air hangar,” M says, then puts a hand to the side of his mouth and whispers to Nora, “I used to huff it.”

Nora smiles. “Good shit?”

“Good shit.”

Abram watches the Dead stumble over the corpses littering the tarmac. He looks at the two fresh ones in the helicopter, wearing the same beige jackets he is. He looks at his daughter, sitting eye level with him on the tire, her worried face showing a rare glow of excitement.

“I’ll give it a preflight check,” he says, keeping his voice carefully neutral. “But don’t get your hopes up.”

? ? ?

While Abram inspects the plane’s vital organs, M leads me to his secret stash: a pyramid of fuel drums hidden under a tarp, though I doubt it was the tarp that kept his treasure safe. The airport in general has been largely untouched by post-apocalyptic desperation, still lush with low-hanging fruit like solar panels, cars that run, and perhaps a plane that flies. I suspect it was me and my fellow Dead, gathered here in such uncommon density, who kept the looters away all these years. Thousands of security guards working around the clock—with occasional lunch breaks.

We load as many barrels as we can onto a luggage transport and drive them to the plane. Abram is crouched on the wing, inspecting the flaps, and we watch him for a few minutes before he notices us.

“Is it stabilized?” he asks, clearly grasping at straws. The world had decades to prepare for the apocalypse and preserving the fuel was priority one. Finding perishable gas is about as likely as finding whale oil.