The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(98)

“Welcome, brother,” Paul calls to the new prisoner.

The man glares down at me for a few seconds, his bald, craggy visage floating in the stars like a cruel god. “The fuck are you doing?” he says, and kicks me in the ribs. “Get off the damn floor. This is my cell now.”

I stand up. I sit on my cot and look at the man. Big. Muscular. Covered in tattoos. The usual snakes and skulls and eight balls, the clichés of a man who thinks darkness is crime and violence, not the void that lurks behind them.

“Shit,” he says, glancing from me to Paul. “You’re fuckin’ kids. What are you, eighteen?”

“Seventeen,” I reply.

“National Guard ain’t worrying about petty shit anymore. What’d punks like you do to get in here?”

“We burned down Helena.”

He looks at me, nonplussed.

“And Boise and Denver. They caught us halfway through Salt Lake City.”

The man looks at Paul. Paul smiles.

“We’ll finish that one later,” Paul says.

I lie back on my cot, folding my lifeless arms over my chest, returning my attention to the blood on the ceiling. Dark red like a fading sunset.

? ? ?

The basement door is unlocked and sits half open, and cold subterranean breezes whistle through the gap. My past no longer waits for dreams. It plays out in front of my open eyes, projected onto my waking life with such hideous clarity that I can hardly believe my friends don’t see it. But if they did, surely I would know it. Surely everything would change if they learned what’s inside this quiet, shrugging man.

“How much deeper does this get?” Julie asks Abram, grimacing as the water crests the top of her boots and pours inside.

“Don’t know,” he says. “Haven’t been down here in years.” He holds out a hand to catch some of the fat drops raining from the ceiling. “But that’s a million gallons of Allegheny River above us, so . . . how strong a swimmer are you?”

The walls of the tunnel are covered in fungal slime, and with the train tracks hidden beneath a foot of murky water, it’s hard to believe this was ever a gleaming urban artery, pumping the city’s lifeblood from head to foot and back again. In its current state, it looks more like a sewer drain.

“I’d worry less about the water,” he continues, “and more about the high voltage rail running through it. Hope today’s not the day they flip that breaker back on.”

“Daddy,” Sprout moans.

“For someone so obsessed with protecting his daughter,” Julie says, “you sure seem to forget she’s here a lot.”

Abram looks mildly chastened but says nothing.

“Or is the pleasure of being a dick just worth the collateral damage?”

“She’s fine.”

“Daddy, I’m scared,” Sprout says.

“It’s okay, honey,” Julie says, turning around and crouching down to Sprout’s eye level. “He was just joking and trying to scare us. He wouldn’t bring you down here if it wasn’t safe.”

Sprout’s eye narrows. “You can’t talk to me,” she says. “I don’t like you anymore.”

Julie flinches. She suddenly looks about the same age as the girl in front of her. “Sprout,” she says. “I’m so sorry I hurt your dad. I didn’t want to, but my mom is sick and I . . . I needed him to help her.”

Sprout’s glare doesn’t budge. “Are you going to hurt him again?”

“No! Of course not.”

“Then why do you keep pointing that gun at him?”

Julie’s face falters. “Because I need—I don’t know if he’s going to . . .”

“You can’t talk to me,” Sprout says, and splashes ahead to join her father.

Julie looks at the water around her ankles. She straightens up and catches me watching her; my heart lurches at the misery in her eyes before she quickly looks away.

It feels like days since we’ve made eye contact. We avoid it like we expect to be injured. When did we learn to fear each other? To flinch away from what we imagine the other is thinking, the cruelties we’ve written and placed in each other’s mouths?

I don’t know how to stop it. We are lost on old paths, caught in old snares. We should be walking side by side through these dark woods, but I feel our distance growing.

? ? ?

The water level rises until it’s almost a river itself, crawling beneath the Allegheny like its timid offspring. Train oil forms psychedelic rainbows on its surface, which spiral wildly as we slosh forward in silence. When the water is almost to Sprout’s waist, Abram tries to hoist her onto his shoulders—he gets her two feet off the ground before his injuries assert themselves and he drops her with a grunt of pain.

“It’s okay, Daddy,” she says, and takes his hand instead. “I’m okay.”

He grimaces, but he accepts this. He moves forward, gripping her hand stiffly. “You know, I’m mad at Julie too,” he says, “but she’s right. I wouldn’t bring you here if it wasn’t safe.”

Sprout watches the dripping ceiling. “It’s really safe?”

“Sure. When I was a kid, this is where I’d go to get away from people. When my performance was weak and my father-boss wrote me up for discipline, I’d run away and hide in these tunnels.” An unsettling wistfulness comes over his face. “I’d sleep on the First Street station bench, drink the drips from the ceiling . . . I’d hide for days sometimes, until I got too hungry.” He chuckles. “When I started seeing things, that’s when I knew I had to go back up.”