The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(55)

M jabs a hand at the label on the barrels: a clock encircled by spinning arrows.

“How many more are there?” Abram says.

M shrugs. “A lot.”

Abram stares at the barrels with his mouth slightly open, searching for an argument. Then he sighs. “Get them. We’ll need every drop.”

The emergency-exit door bursts open and Julie steps out onto the wing. “Does that mean it works? It’ll fly?”

“It’s the 2035 model,” Abram replies wearily, “about as new as airliners get, and it looks like everything important is intact.” He wipes sweat off his forehead. “Needs a little service, but I think I can get it in the air.”

A look comes over Julie that I haven’t seen since that day on the stadium rooftop, when she saw that the corpse she just kissed was alive, and at least one thing in her dark world could change. She doesn’t say anything. She just stands there on the wing, bathing me in a luminous grin, and for a moment, as her hair flutters over her face and the sun turns her skin gold, all her scars and bruises are gone.

“I can get it in the air,” Abram cautions, “but I don’t know how long it’ll stay there.”

Without a word, still grinning, Julie pirouettes back into the plane and slams the door.

“I need about three hours,” he says to M and me, and we both blink away the hypnotic effect of Julie’s happiness. “Which is about how long it’ll take for Axiom to realize their pursuit team failed and send another one. So this might get sticky.”

“How can we help?” I ask, feeling Julie’s excitement and Abram’s fear mixing inside me like a bad drug interaction.

“We’re taking the world’s biggest gas hog on a cross-country joyride,” he says. “We need to lose as much weight as possible.”

M glances down at his massive girth. “I’ll . . . go get those barrels.”

“Take the seats out?” I ask Abram as M lumbers off.

“If we have time. But you can start by clearing all that shit out of the cabin.” He finally looks up from the panel and turns his inspection to me. “So you were a zombie. And you lived in this plane.”

I nod.

“What’s a zombie do with paintbrushes and books?”

I look down. “Didn’t do anything. Just didn’t want to forget.”

“Forget what?”

“That there used to be more than this.”

He looks at me blankly.

“And that maybe there can be again.”

He offers no reply or reaction to this. He turns away and resumes his work. I return to the plane and start cleaning.

? ? ?

I’ve never explained to Julie what all this junk means and she’s never asked, but she doesn’t move to join me as I shove piles of it out the emergency exits and watch it shatter and smash on the tarmac. She watches from a distance, as if afraid of interrupting a personal moment.

“It was an anchor,” I say as I toss an armful of snow globes and watch them burst like big raindrops. “Helped me hold on to the old world.” I pick up a heavy box of comic books, the closest I ever got to reading before I remembered how words work, and I pause to examine the top issue’s cover. A hardy gang of survivors surrounded by a horde of zombies, carelessly drawn ghouls distinguishable only by their wounds. A thousand individuals with histories and families, reduced to props for the dramas of a few attractive humans. I drop the box and watch the pages flutter, comics mixing with newspapers and fashion magazines, muscular men and skeletal women, monsters and heroes and increasingly hopeless headlines. “I don’t need it anymore.”

Julie moves to my side. She turns my face toward her and kisses me. Then she kicks an old computer monitor out the door and hoots “Woo!” as it explodes with a pleasant pop.

? ? ?

Nora offers to help us but I politely decline. Clearing out my former home is an emotional process and Julie is the only one I trust to treat my trash with respect. Nora shrugs and takes Sprout outside to watch her father while we dig through my surrogate memories, placeholders for my absent past.

We attack the mess with an everything-must-go gusto, but when I pick up the record player, Julie slaps the back of my head. “Are you crazy? Put that down and turn it on.”

“It’s heavy.”

“We’ve spent the last five days listening to nothing but military strategy, gunfire, and our own screams. I want to hear some music.” She puts on a record from the overhead bin. The opening horns of Sinatra’s “Come Fly with Me” burst onto the speakers and Julie beams. “I never thought we’d get to play this unironically.”

She DJs with dedication while we work, doing her best to keep things upbeat despite the general joylessness of my record collection. Without being conscious of it, I seem to have gathered two distinct genres in my musical salvages: warm, comforting relics from a simpler time, and bittersweet melancholia from the edge of the end. And since most of the classics are unplayably scratched, we quickly exhaust my supply of house-cleaning jams.

“I guess it’s back to Sinatra,” she says when Sgt. Pepper slips into its inner groove loop, howling its indecipherable incantations.

“Wait,” I say as she stops the record. I pull one of my old favorites from the pile and hand the sleeve to her as I slide the record onto the turntable.