The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(58)

We follow the boy as we follow everyone, spinning around and through him, skimming the pages of his life’s brief novella, but we follow him a little closer than others. He is interesting. He looks seven but is much older, a boy bottled and cellared, aging in strange ways that even we cannot predict. Death has halted his life but it has failed to erase him. He has wrestled it into unexpected shapes, used it as a knife to open secret boxes, and we are not quite sure what he is.

I remember this road, he thinks. This is the right way.

The boy remembers more than most of the Dead. Not facts, exactly, but the amorphous truths behind them. He doesn’t know his name, but he knows who he is. He doesn’t know where he’s going, but he is not lost. The world unfolds before him like a four-dimensional map, its lines bending and peeling off the paper, outer and inner realities weaving into one.

What happened here? he asks us as he passes through a ruined city in a stretch of land once called Idaho. What made them leave?

We don’t answer.

He passes a bullet-riddled Geo coupe and lets his eyes wander over the corpses of the family inside, fresh enough that the mother’s scalp still has its ponytail.

Did anyone try to help them?

We know, but we don’t answer.

Were they good people? How much of them is in you?

The boy asks us many questions while he walks, but we hold our silence. We spoke to him once, long ago, when his pain reached out and seized us by the throat. It had been years since we felt a grip so strong, and he squeezed a few words from us. But now we hold our silence. The chasm is still too wide for whispers, and we do not like to shout.

The boy accepts this and keeps walking. He is used to silence. He has been alone a long time.

At the outer edge of the city, the highway forks north and south, and the boy pauses to consult his strange map. Then he notices a sound rising into the silence. He has never heard it before. A soft roar like a distant avalanche. He looks up. The sun beats down into his eyes, flashing on his bright gold irises. He doesn’t squint. His wide pupils suck in the light and break it apart; he sees all its colors, its waves and its particles, and inside this tetrachromatic rainbow, he sees an airplane.

He has seen airplanes before. He has spent the last seven years staring at them, dreaming about them, willing their dusty fuselages to move, but he has never seen one in flight. He watches the tiny black shape etch a white line through the sky and he wonders who’s up there. He wonders where they’re going. Then he looks down at the road and keeps walking.





I


FOR A WHILE, I watch the clouds. Then I watch Julie watching them. I let the surreal landscape outside the window blur and I shift my focus to the back of Julie’s head, her unwashed hair matted with oil and dirt, sweat and blood, the residues of everything she’s gone through since her last shower a week ago, that distant age of unimaginable luxuries.

Slowly, quietly, I inhale the warm air rising from her head. I don’t expect much from my numb nose. The Dead are a practical people, and the senses of smell and taste are frivolous affectations that we discard to make room for more functional tools. I have noticed a subtle shift since my return to life—my ability to detect Living flesh has dulled, and suggestions of natural aromas occasionally prickle my nose—but I am still a jammed radio, stuck on one frequency while all others drown in static.

My first sniff brings nothing but the sensation of air passing through my nostrils. I try again, and this time I get a trace of her, a distant note of that mysterious, earthy bouquet found nowhere but in a woman’s hair—she turns around.

“Did you just smell me?”

I jerk my head away and stare straight ahead. “Sorry.”

“Don’t smell me. I smell like shit.”

I glance sideways at her. “You don’t, though.”

“I can smell myself, and I smell like shit.”

“You don’t.”

“Okay, Grenouille, what do I smell like?”

“Like . . . you.” I lean in and inhale with melodramatic rapture.

She laughs and shoves me away. “You fucking creep.”

Still smiling, I look past her at the sky. It hits me again that we are flying. Perhaps for the first time in years, there are human beings above the clouds, swimming in the blue void between Heaven and Earth, taunting the gods.

Julie follows my gaze to the window. “Remember when I asked if we’d ever see jets in the sky again? When the cure was just starting and we were fantasizing about the future?”

I nod.

“You said yes.” She grabs my hand on the armrest. “I know it’s just an airplane, it’s not like this means civilization is back, but . . . I don’t know. When I look out there, it feels like a victory.”

“We’re inside the Etch A Sketch,” I say, squeezing her hand. “What should we draw?”

Her smile falters. The air between us cools, and I realize I’ve done it again. I’ve referenced a memory that isn’t mine. A moment on the stadium roof when Julie shared her dreams with a boy who wasn’t me. What I did to her childhood sweetheart isn’t news; she knows how I know what I know, but it’s a scar on the skin of our relationship that we have silently agreed not to mention.

“Get out,” she says, disengaging my hand from hers. “I have to pee.”