The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(69)

The man rides past the boy, then stops, gets off his bike, and walks back to him. The man is neatly bearded, the sides of his head trimmed short, his eyes hidden behind Wayfarer sunglasses. In another era, he might be on his way to work at a trendy software company. In this era, he is sweaty and dirty and the barrel of an Uzi pokes out of his messenger bag.

The boy keeps his eyes on his own toes as the man approaches him.

“Are you Living?” the man says, stopping a safe distance away.

The boy shrugs.

“I guess that’s a yes. You alone?”

The boy nods.

The man examines him. The boy’s skin is pale, but only as pale as dark skin can be. “Do you talk?”

The boy keeps his head down. He doesn’t talk. He can, but he doesn’t. To talk is to let people inside, to share common ground and common language. Even if the words are hateful, talking is a connection, and it requires a tiny amount of trust. More than the boy has.

And yet the boy is lonely. And hungry. He looks up at the man.

“Jesus!” the man says, jumping back and reaching instinctively for his gun, then stopping himself. He looks closer at the boy’s eyes. Bright, shimmering yellow. Two golden rings. “Those aren’t Dead eyes,” he says. “What kind of eyes are those?”

The boy shrugs.

The man looks at the boy. He looks him up and down. “What’s your name?”

The boy shrugs.

The man thinks for a moment. “Why don’t you come with me.”

The boy studies the man’s face, searching for something to read. The man’s sunglasses are a wall over his soul.

Is he a good person? the boy asks us. Is most of him in you?

We don’t answer.

The boy reaches out and takes the man’s hand. The man smiles.

There is no room for the boy on the bike so the man walks with it beside him. The boy notes that this is kind. It will slow the man down and double the length of his journey, but he does it. The Dead feed their young so that their young can help them feed. There is no feeling, no bond, only numbers multiplying themselves. It has been a long time since the boy has encountered kindness.

The boy and the man walk in silence. The man glances at the boy from time to time. The boy can feel his gaze even through the sunglasses, a faint heat on the side of his face.

They emerge from the forest into a small highway town, houses sagging, grass on roofs, tree branches poking through windows. The sun is melting against the edge of the horizon, about to disappear.

“We’ll sleep here,” the man says, glancing at the boy again. They leave the crumbled highway and enter the crumbled town.

Next to the gas station, there is a tiny play area. One swing set and a jungle gym, its colorful paint all peeled off, a spidery dome of rusted steel bars. The man pries an armful of shingles off the side of the gas station and carries it back to the jungle gym, dumps it through the holes, and climbs inside.

“Safest place to have a fire,” he says, smiling at the boy. “No surprises in here.”

The boy crawls into the dome and sits in the weedy grass that’s growing through the sand. He watches the man coax the rotted shingles into a tiny, sad fire that’s mostly smoke. When he’s convinced that it won’t burn any better, the man sits back and finally takes off his sunglasses. He looks at the boy. The boy tries to read his eyes but their piercing focus makes him look away.

“Sorry for staring,” the man says, still staring. “I’ve never seen eyes like yours.”

The boy reaches into the man’s messenger bag. Underneath the gun and a big knife, there is a stick of beef jerky. He pulls it out and regards it warily. He has tried this before, but maybe now . . .

“Go ahead,” the man says. “If you’re hungry, go ahead.”

The boy takes a bite. He chews the cured, salted, chemically preserved meat. No trace of life energy, human or otherwise. He spits the meat into the gravel.

The man nods. “Thought so.”

The boy looks up, not understanding this comment.

“I’ve heard about ones like you. Mostly Dead? Sort of . . . stuck in between?”

The boy lowers his eyes to the fire.

The man rises to a crouch and hobbles around the smoldering pile of shingles, keeping his head down but still bumping a few of the jungle gym bars. He sits next to the boy. “It must be confusing. Your brain trying to tell you you’re a person even though there’s nothing in there. Just a bunch of impulses in an empty room.” He looks at the side of the boy’s cheek. “I feel like that sometimes.”

The boy looks into the fire while the man looks at his cheek, his neck. The fire’s core is a murky red glow behind all the smoke.

“But you know, you don’t need to worry about that,” the man says, his voice soft and deeply earnest. “Because you’re not really alive. Just try to remember that, okay? Everything is easier if you remember that.”

The boy turns to look at the man. The man smiles and puts one hand on the boy’s thigh. Then the other on his zipper.

The boy bites off the man’s ear.

The man screams and leaps to his feet. His head hits the bars with a ping and he falls face-first into the fire. He lies motionless while his beard burns like dry moss. The boy hikes up the man’s T-shirt and chews into the wells of life pulsing through deltoids, trapezius, latissimus, fascia.