The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(60)

This isn’t one of your memories, is it? I asked him in that dream that wasn’t a dream.

No, he replied. This is yours.

“What do you want?” Abram whispers, snapping me back to now. His copilot sleeps against the window with a channel of drool running down her chin.

“Where are—”

“Quiet,” he hisses, jerking a thumb toward Sprout.

“Sorry,” I say at the same volume.

He looks incredulous.

“Sorry,” I say in a barely-there whisper.

“Christ,” he sighs, “you’re definitely dumb enough to be a zombie.” He looks at his daughter and his attention drifts away from me. “She hasn’t slept in two days. Sometimes she stays awake so long she starts crying, like she’s so tired it hurts, but she won’t sleep. I don’t know . . .” He shakes his head and looks back at me. “So what do you want?”

“Where are we headed?”

He turns back to the windshield, the endless expanse of blue and white. “Canada.”

“Why Canada?”

“They exed later than we did. They might still have some meat on the bones.”

I nod. I can’t argue with the logic, but it doesn’t quite sit comfortably. I envisioned us searching the disgraced wreckage of America for some way to redeem it, not leaving it behind to rot. It’s an empty concept in a world whose political lines have washed out in the rain, but crossing the border feels like dodging the draft.

“I saw Canada’s bones once,” Julie says, and I glance back to the cabin. She’s still slouched in her seat, eyes open just a crack. “Didn’t look too meaty then, and that was almost eight years ago.”

“What’s your point?” Abram says in a slightly louder whisper. “You have somewhere better in mind?”

Julie opens her eyes and straightens up. “What about Iceland?”

“Iceland,” Abram repeats.

“It’s an island. One of the most isolated countries in the world. Never been in a war, almost no crime, totally self-sufficient on geothermal power. If anywhere survived the plague, it’d be them.”

“Except they didn’t survive. No one did. The last country to go was Sweden.”

“That’s just a rumor,” Julie says, growing more excited. “No one’s confirmed any overseas news in years.”

I feel my discomfort growing. How far are we planning to roam for the antidote to Axiom’s poison? Or have our goals already begun to shift?

“Iceland’s thousands of miles away,” Abram says, “and we have no satellite or radio navigation. We’d end up at the North Pole or the bottom of the Atlantic.”

“Canada’s far away too. If you can get us there, why not Iceland?”

Abram sighs and looks at me. “Will you tell your girlfriend to go back to sleep?”

“Hey,” Julie says, climbing out of her seat and standing indignantly in the aisle. “You’re the pilot, not the captain; you’re not running the show. We need to discuss stuff.”

Sprout stirs and whimpers. Abram freezes until she settles, then he steps out of the cockpit. He walks up very close to Julie and stares down at her.

“What stuff?” he says softly.

“All of it,” she says, returning his stare.

He ducks down to her eye level and speaks very slowly. “Canada? Is big. Canada is north. The compass says we’re going north, so pretty soon . . . we’ll be in Canada!”

I see Julie’s fists clenching, but she says nothing.

“It’s our best bet,” Abram says, dropping the baby talk with a hint of embarrassment. “Even if it’s empty, it’ll make a good place to hide. We’re going to Canada.” He returns to the cockpit, pauses in the doorway, and glances back at Julie. “Please keep your voice down. My daughter’s sleeping.”

He plops into the pilot seat and starts adjusting instruments.

Julie sits, folds her arms, and glares holes into the floor. I take my seat next to her and watch the back of Abram’s head. I find myself scouring my brain for any remaining fragments of Perry, something that might help me understand these people and this mess we’re plunging into, but I dig carefully and quietly. Other voices have moved into the space Perry left. My head is a dark house inhabited by strangers, and I don’t want to wake them up.





I AM STANDING in front of the door.

I am in a hallway. The walls are covered in gaudy printed wallpaper, a repeating pattern of a solitary house surrounded by trees, all of it scorched and peeling. From somewhere behind me, I hear the sounds of my life. The voices of my friends. I feel sunlight on my back, but it’s far away and cool. The hallway is long and empty, and at the end of it is the door.

The door is ancient. Crooked. A slab of rusty metal under layers of peeling paint. The plaster that once covered it lies in a pile at my feet. The door is free, exposed, unlocked. The knob protrudes toward me obscenely.

“Open it,” Perry says, standing at my side. I try to look at him but he turns his face, giving me only the back of his head. “This is your house,” he says through the hole I put in his skull, like a bloody, toothless mouth. “When are you going to move in?”

He gives the door a tug and it creaks open. I back away, horrified, expecting tentacles and swarms of locusts. But there’s only dust and silence. A flickering bulb taking weak stabs at the shadows. Steep stairs leading down.