The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(85)
She leaps to her feet and marches toward the building. Gritting my teeth, I go after her, attempting to channel Abram Kelvin and Evan Kenerly and all their militant paranoia, scanning windows for snipers and maximizing my situational awareness. But everything is quiet.
Julie stops in front of the entrance. The entrance is a staircase. A steep, narrow well leading down into darkness.
She descends.
“Julie, wait!”
Her legs sink into the shadows, then her waist, then her shoulders.
“Julie!”
For an instant her head is disembodied, a mass of golden hair floating on a black pond. Then the blackness swallows it.
I TEETER ON THE EDGE of the staircase, frozen in irrational panic. I can’t see the bottom. It’s just a flight of stairs, just the storage basement of some dull municipal building, but it stretches. It deepens and steepens until it’s no longer a staircase but a bottomless well, its slick stone walls lined with hideous books, blood writing and claw etchings, cold and damp and—
I don’t want to go down there. But Julie is down there. Whatever it is I’m afraid of, she’s alone with it.
I plunge into the depths.
My legs buckle under me when I reach the bottom, finding solid floor where they expected another stair. A memory from childhood, step after stumbling step, learning the art of walking—except it’s not from childhood. Long legs in black slacks, stumbling through a forest, away from a dead woman—
“Julie!” I hiss.
“What?” Her voice echoes back to me through the narrow tunnel, soft and toneless like the mutterings of a sleepwalker. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I notice a pale glow bobbing ahead.
I run up alongside her. She holds a flashlight limply, illuminating her feet and not much else.
I decide to try an indirect route. “Where’d you get the flashlight?”
“It was Abram’s.”
She keeps a brisk pace, just short of a run, her eyes fixed on the pavement that passes through her oval of light.
“You stole his flashlight?”
“Sometimes I steal things.”
I hesitate. “Why?”
“Because the world steals from me. It takes everything.” She blinks twice, and I notice her eyes are wet, despite their blank stare. “Feels good to be on the other end for once.”
She stops. The passage has opened up into some sort of basement storage area. Stacks of boxes aged into brittle papyrus, ancient beige computer monitors—the typical contents of an office building, with one notable exception: a rolling steel tray piled with scalpels and hooks and scissors and saws, all sticky with dark fluid. The floor is thick with dust except for a trail of footprints that leads to an upward staircase.
Julie draws her shotgun from its plaid holster. There’s a door at the top of the stairs, and I’m about to make another plea for caution but she doesn’t even pause. She kicks the push bar, the door flies open, and she rushes through in a tactical crouch, her gun braced in low ready position.
I lumber in behind her, unarmed, untrained, unprepared. But no high school combat class would have prepared me for this.
We are in what appears to be the library of a university. A soaring ceiling, stained glass windows, tables and shelves of dark oak. It was majestic once, a profound place for profound pursuits, but its grandeur has been destroyed—not by age and decay but by utilitarianism. Fluorescent lights in aluminum cases hang from the ceiling to obviate the bronze lamps on the walls. Rich wooden tables have been supplemented by rows of folding metal ones, their white Formica tops mocking the antiquity around them. And of course the stained glass windows are protected by sheets of plastic.
But perhaps I’m burying the lead. Perhaps I’m avoiding the room’s more salient features because I’m weary of processing such images. Perhaps a detour into decor is a needed respite from the hair-tearing insanity of this world.
Because the library is full of zombies. At least two hundred of them, naked, their necks locked in rubber collars, steel cables fastened to walls, shelves, anything solid enough to hold them as they writhe and lunge, although many are eerily calm. The tables are littered with an incongruous assortment of equipment: glittering steel implements of medicine or torture sit alongside portable stereos, makeup kits, televisions, toys, and jars of fresh human fingers.
The dangling fluorescents are turned off; the only light comes through the stained glass, a dismal blue glow that leaves the huge chamber thick with shadows. Julie begins a perimeter check and I follow her. The Dead are everywhere. Not just the crowd in the reading area but lone specimens tucked away in the aisles like backups. My estimate climbs toward three hundred, diverse in age, race, and sex, but with one trait in common: freshness. Most are wholly unspoiled, with only the leaden eyes and pitiful groans to give away their status. A few have injuries—bullet holes, bites, a missing limb or two—but their flesh is always pale and smooth, like they died yesterday.
Julie prowls along the walls, methodically scanning the aisles. Her face has slipped into yet another mask that’s unfamiliar to me: the grim efficiency of a soldier. I think of the night we sat on the roof of our new suburban home and traded stories from our youths. All I had to offer were vague vignettes from my early corpsehood, lacking context or continuity—trying to eat a deer, walking with a boy, watching a girl sing a song—but her memories were colorful and crisp, like she’d kept them all these years in a climate-controlled vault. Her life in Brooklyn, watching the waters rise, the tanks in the street, but also stickball games and schoolyard crushes and some lingering aromas of happiness. Wine parties on the apartment’s tarry rooftop. Her mother laughing in a white dress, throwing empty bottles at the abandoned building next door and screaming with delight when she hit a window. Lawrence and Ella making out on the fire escape. Even her father cracking a smile, chugging a priceless vintage and belting a few bars from one of his band’s songs . . .