The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(82)

The boy shrugs.

“Do you want to come with us?”

The boy thinks. His mind starts to form questions for us, specific and insistent, but he drops them. Instead, he reaches into the Library. He closes his eyes and skims our countless pages, a brief but vast fluttering. He gains something. An obscure insight. A word within an infinite crossword. He nods to the green-eyed man.

“My name’s Gael,” the man says. The boy notices a lilt in his voice, an echo of distant places. “This is Gebre.”

“Maybe we’ll talk later,” Gebre says. “When you’re ready.” His accent is exotic too, yet familiar. “For now, would you like a snack? You hungry?”

The boy shakes his head.

“Thirsty?” He pulls a water bottle from the back of the truck and offers it to the boy. The boy takes it. He stares at the liquid sloshing inside it, and then at the microorganisms sloshing inside the liquid, billions of little diamonds and helixes living unfathomable lives in an unknowable world. He takes a sip and feels them slide down his dry throat, becoming part of him. He climbs into the van with Gael and Gebre.





I


PAUL.

I am sitting on the roof with my friend Paul Bark, smoking a cigarette that I stole from my father. I don’t enjoy it; I can feel it burning my insides, but that’s the point. When I asked my father why he keeps a habit that will kill him, he took a deep drag and breathed out a scripture:

“?‘He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.’?”

I didn’t understand then, but I do now. I suck in a lungful and resist the urge to cough until it fades to a dull ache. It feels good to hate my life. It feels safe. If death is what I want, then nothing can ever hurt me.

“What’s your mom doing?” Paul says.

In the lawn below, my mother is pruning a rosebush. Its blooms are impossibly red against their dull green stems, like puddles of pure hue leaking in from some other realm. There are flowers all over the yard despite the blistering heat. She hauls in a whole extra water cart every week just for them.

“Why does she waste all that effort on a stupid garden?” Paul says. “Doesn’t she believe in the Last Sunset?” He sounds angry, like he always does at the thought of unbelief, and I remember a game we once played when we were younger, pretending our bikes were dragons and his house was a castle we had to conquer.

“Tear down the walls of Jericho!” he had shouted gleefully as we circled the little cabin. “The Lord ordains their destruction!”

My bike slipped in the gravel and I crashed. “Piece of crap bike,” I said, kicking the tire.

Paul looked betrayed. “It’s not a bike, it’s a dragon! The Canaanites killed your dragon!”

“I cut my knee. I’m going inside.”

“No! You can’t!” There had been anger in his voice but also panic. “You’re ruining it!”

Now he glares at my mother’s rosebushes like they’re ruining a much bigger game. They trouble me too, because my mother does believe. She believes as strongly as anyone. And yet she plants flowers. She feeds refugees. Some deep, instinctive spring bubbles through the bedrock of her beliefs, and she does these senseless things.

“She’s a woman,” I tell my friend. “She likes flowers. She’s not thinking about what it means.”

Paul frowns. “?‘Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.’?”

“I know the scriptures, Paul.”

“But does she?” He jabs a hand at the frail woman in dirty coveralls tending her vibrant pets. “Are any of our parents strong enough to live the hard truth? Or are they trying to make it softer?”

She prunes the leaves off a particularly bright bloom, and it’s hard not to see love in the smile it brings to her face.

“You heard the sermon last night,” Paul says. “The world wasn’t made to be loved. It was made to test us. ‘Not a home but a battlefield.’?”

I take the last puff of the cigarette and flick it away. The dry grass smolders.

? ? ?

I wake to the roiling red of the sun against my eyelids. I open them and glance around, gripped by a sudden guilty fear, but no one is watching me. No one can see the young man growing inside my head. I have woken from a nap in the sun, my friends are all around me—I have done nothing wrong.

I straighten, rubbing reality back into my skull. The air is hot. The city is quiet. Abram is clattering around in the nose of an ancient plane. M is sawing something.

“Marcus,” Nora says. She’s sitting on the runway with her legs crossed in front of her, her back against the plane’s tire, watching Sprout play with a screwdriver.

M pauses his work, leaving the square of aluminum dangling from the bottom of the plane. He looks down at Nora from his perch on the landing gear. “Yeah?”

“How much have you filled in?”

“Filled in?”

“Do you have a whole life now or is it still just sketches?”

I hear a raven croak in the distance. I wonder what it eats in this barren urban desert.

“It’s sketches,” M says. “But a lot of them. Like the ones for movies.”