The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(68)

“No idea.”

A rat wriggles out of a rib cage and crawls up onto one of the fresher corpses. It bites into the oozing nub of an earlobe. The corpse twitches.

Abram stands and marches stiffly back to the ladder, leaving me in total darkness. I hurry after him, trying to ignore the moist squirming behind me.

Sprout is waiting at the edge of the hatch, but I don’t see Julie until I emerge into daylight. She’s standing in front of a small cabinet in the far corner of the cabin, looking down at something. Reading something. A large pink card. She holds it behind her back as she turns to us. “What’d you find?”

“Nothing,” Abram says.

“Nothing?” She looks at me, sees the lingering horror on my face. “R, what did you—”

“What is that?” Abram says, striding toward her with his palm out. For some reason, Julie hesitates—just for a second, but I feel tiny questions rising like goosebumps.

“You tell me,” she says, handing him the card. “Looks like notes for a meeting or something.”

I move up behind Abram to read over his shoulder. The text is so thick with abbreviations and jargon that it hits my brain like monkey chatter, and for a moment I wonder if I’ve slipped back into illiteracy. But with great concentration, I’m able to parse it together.

Full sweeps, MT, ID, WY, 87 spcm. cllct

Roamers: ^fresh ^resil. ^cog. activity v. Hivers

Roamers Ornt. response rate: 45% Hivers: 5%

Rec. cease hive raids, incrs. street sweeps

Street sweeps avg. 10-30 spcm per day, ^60% over 3 mnth

Spcm. ids. indicate extended migration, up to 300 mi. v origin

Cause unknown but rec. capitalize

New Ornt. mthd “de-id” ^20% effct





65 spcm: X


12 spcm: 40% coop.

8 spcm: 76% coop.

2 spcm: 100% coop.

Rec. all facil. adopt “de-id” in comb. w. Detroit “de-edu” mthd, cont. study of NY “pink drink” mthd

Rec. close all Helena facils, trnsfr staff + spcm. to Detroit + NY, consolidate mthds + rsrcs

1 yr projection: 100% coop, begin mass prod.

Abram stares at the card for a lot longer than it should take to read it.

“Does any of that . . . mean anything to you?” Julie asks. Her tone contains more than simple incomprehension. A hint of sediment disturbed, of drowned thoughts rising.

Abram shakes his head. It’s unclear if he’s answering Julie or some shouting inner voice. He grabs Sprout’s hand and marches out of the cabin.

“Hey!” Julie chases him out. “Abram!”

The sun is a little lower, the sky a little paler. The trees look lifeless in the still air. Abram lifts Sprout onto his bike and climbs on behind her. He says it like a bitter concession: “I’ll fly the plane.”

Julie stops on the porch, cocking her head. “You will?”

“I’ll go to town till I find a safe place to settle. Maybe that’s a year from now on the other side of the world, maybe it’s tomorrow in Toronto. Either way, that’s where I get off, whether you’ve found your utopia or not. Is that clear?”

Julie doesn’t answer.

“Is that clear?”

“Yes,” she says. “It’s clear.”

Abram starts his bike, spins it around, and disappears into the trees.

We stand on the porch steps, listening to the engine noise dwindle. “What did you find down there?” Julie asks quietly.

The engine’s harsh growl gives way to the sounds of the forest. The birdsong fades to a few lonely calls as the sun slips below the trees.

“Corpses,” I reply, staring into the dark maw of the trail. “And nothing.”

“Oh.”

I look at her. “What did you find?”

Surprise and faint embarrassment flicker across her face, like I’ve snuck up behind her while she’s journaling. But the look is gone so quickly I can’t be sure I didn’t imagine it. “Just a piece of paper,” she says. “Just some words.”

She hops onto her bike and kicks it to life. I follow her into the woods.





WE


THE BOY is getting hungry.

He floats between states, almost perfectly balanced between Living and Dead, almost unreachable to the demands of either, but only almost. He has walked hundreds of miles without consuming any form of energy, and one can only defy physics for so long. His balance is beginning to tremble.

He doesn’t remember the last time he ate. His past is an unreadable mess, like a book shredded and glued back together. A big man and a tall man and a family of skeletons. Then other Dead people. A blur of blank faces and unfamiliar rooms. Passed from hand to hand, cared for, fed a few bits of meat, then forgotten in a dark hallway, picked up by someone else, fed, and forgotten.

We can’t decipher these soggy collages, so we skip ahead to the new pages, to where he smelled a new scent rippling through the airport, new sounds echoing through the halls, voices and laughter and scratchy old music. He saw the change around him, felt it creeping into him, and he pushed it out. It felt unearned, inadequate, like a father apologizing for a beating by offering a hug. He wasn’t ready to embrace this supposedly new world. He didn’t trust its open arms.

Now he is far away from that world, deep in the forest and more alone than he’s ever been, if loneliness can be measured in miles. This stretch of highway has been untouched for so long the forest has started to reclaim it, smoothing it back into the green expanse like a fading scar. Young pines shoot through the pavement as their parents’ roots break it up for them. Slabs, then shards, then pebbles, then sand. He can feel the looseness of things here, so far from the lattice of other minds. He sees vacillations in the corners of his eyes. Things that aren’t quite certain what they are; they are waiting for someone to tell them. In this place, he is prepared to see spherical doors and tetrahedral fires, crystal birds and hollow bears, but he is not expecting a man on a bicycle wearing a Sonic Youth T-shirt.