The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(90)
“Well . . . ,” Gael says in a trembling breath as the large, meaty pancake recedes behind them. “Car plus cartoon character . . . I guess your name is Rover Fudd.”
Gebre buries his face in his hands, shaking his head slowly.
For the first time in the boy’s second life—seven years of violence and torpor in endless, numbing repetitions—the boy smiles. He thinks goodness must be more than just kindness. It must have a hard frame to hold it together. How can you stitch a wound if you faint at the sight of blood? How can you do good in a world you refuse to see? Perhaps goodness requires honesty, which requires courage, which requires strength, which requires . . .
He stops himself.
Perhaps goodness is complicated.
The road ahead disappears from view, plunging down into a darker, denser woodland, and the boy hears the roar of an engine struggling up the hill. Gael stops the van, assuming that the strangers will want to share news and field notes and maybe some coffee or booze, as is the custom on these lonely highways. But as the boy stares at the road’s vanishing point, an abrupt terminus like the edge of a cliff, he hears another noise approaching from below. Not an engine.
He straightens up on his bucket. He tugs on Gael’s sleeve.
“What’s wrong, Rover?” Gael says.
The boy’s eyes implore him through his sunglasses as the noise grows louder, but Gael and Gebre just watch him with curious smiles, deaf to what’s coming.
“Go,” the boy croaks through his long disused larynx.
Gael and Gebre stare at him in open-mouthed amazement.
“Hide,” the boy says.
“Rover!” Gael says. “You’re talking!”
And you’re not listening.
The noise is growing louder, cutting through the roar of the engine like a serrated blade.
The boy suddenly remembers there are chunks of plastic covering his face. Big slabs of black polycarbonate between him and everything else, stopping light from coming in and emotion from going out, walling him off from the world. No wonder they don’t understand.
He pulls the glasses off and drops them. He looks from Gael to Gebre with his bare yellow eyes.
“Get off the road,” he says.
They stare in silence for several seconds. Then without looking away from the boy’s eyes, perhaps unaware he’s doing it, Gael turns the wheel and eases the van onto the shoulder. The boy is wondering how to explain that this isn’t far enough, that they have to crash into the woods and run as far away as possible, when the approaching vehicle crests the hill.
It’s a boxy armored bank truck. It’s painted all white. It’s hauling a long cargo trailer reinforced with steel plates. And the trailer is humming.
There are many things to which we could compare this sound—dissonant choirs, furious wasps, the om of a dark meditation—but the boy thinks of a bomb. He thinks of the death spirits that live inside a bomb, the essences of its chemicals hissing and howling behind the bomb’s steel walls, demanding to be released on the world.
And then they’re gone. The armored car and its horrible cargo disappear into the forest, and the van is once again alone on a silent road.
Gael and Gebre seem completely unaware of the nightmare that just rolled past them. They spare barely a glance for the rude travelers who didn’t even offer a friendly wave. They are staring at the boy, at his glimmering gold eyes. He senses questions coming, and they’re the wrong questions, and his brief moment of feeling understood evaporates. He gets off his bucket and retreats to the back of the van. He hides among piles of blankets.
The world makes little sense to the boy. It makes less the more he studies it. It contains creatures that are nothing more than algorithms, echoes of a dead society that deserved to die, and someone is putting them to use. Someone is gathering them together, believing someone somehow will benefit.
Perhaps goodness is not complicated. Perhaps it’s imaginary. Or perhaps it’s just drowned in madness.
As Gael and Gebre pull back onto the road and continue their journey east, as the boy sulks in the shadows and contemplates questions too big for his age, he hears another drone. This one is soft and almost soothing. A long, slow sigh from somewhere above him. He pokes his head out the window and looks up, but the sky is empty. The plane has already passed.
I
THE RAIN.
The rain soaks through my clothes and the cold through my skin. I can feel it working its way through muscles and organs, all the way to my center, and I wonder, distantly and without much interest, if it will stop my heart.
The roof is slippery with mildew and rot everywhere except my path. I have worn it in over the years like animal trails in the forest, a channel of sagging shingles from my bedroom window to the chimney. I’m leaning against the chimney now, knees to my chest, watching the funeral from above like a cathedral gargoyle. I should be down there. I should be sitting in one of those folding chairs in my Sunday best, watching them lower her into the ground next to my grandmother, but I don’t know how to grieve correctly. If she’s in a better place, my grief is selfish. If this was God’s plan, my grief is mutinous. And what about my rage? To whom do I direct that? To the troubled man who killed her or to the God who wrote his trouble? To the performer or the playwright? Or to myself for asking such questions?
It’s good that I’m up here. The mourners below weep openly, following convention without a thought for the contradictions, and they would expect me to do the same. But I am too angry to cry. I am a wrung-out rag, twisted and dry. So I sit on the roof and let the rain do my grieving, falling from my eyelashes like surrogate tears.