The Living by Isaac Marion

Author:Isaac Marion
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Zombies, Warm Bodies
Publisher: Zola Books
Published: 2018-11-13T00:04:54+00:00

We skirt the town square and run into the leaf-strewn side streets, and Julie doesn’t talk to me. She stays at the front with Nora and doesn’t look back. I remember the youthful fantasy of the crisis that solves everything, the asteroid or alien invasion that renders all conflicts moot with no need for painful resolutions. But does this curative effect still work when we’ve already been through the apocalypse? Has disaster lost its potency?

We pass the bookstore where we parked the RV but Nora seems to have another destination in mind. The humid heat makes my skin sticky before I even start to sweat. A few raindrops hit the back of my neck like a cold finger tapping a warning.

A familiar building looms ahead, mossy and half absorbed into the forest behind it: the hospital, or whatever function it might serve now, with its hidden gravel road to a secret in the woods. Nora crashes through the front door and whirls left and right. “Addis!” she shouts, storming from room to room, tripping over piles of toys and knocking aside strange medical instruments. “Addis!”

A heavy, windowless double door opens a crack and an elderly woman in a lab coat peeks out. “Ms. Greene? What’s the matter, dear?”

“Where is he?”

“Addis? He’s still sleeping, along with all the others. Please keep your voice down.”

“Addis doesn’t sleep,” Nora snaps. “He hasn’t slept once since—” She cuts off as she registers the lab coat, its spattering of mysterious stains. “What is that? What the fuck are you wearing?”

“I beg your pardon?”

A shudder runs down Nora’s body. A tremor of rage and shame, like she has just completed a puzzle to reveal an image of her house being robbed.

She shoves the door open so hard the woman tumbles over backward. I am momentarily horrified as her brittle body crashes into a table and tools rain down on her, but then my eyes take in the context of the room, and I understand.

An echoing open space lit by the feeble glow of tiny windows. Dangling bulbs whose light doesn’t reach the ceiling. A few work stations with implements that aren’t quite medical or scientific: radios and stacks of photos, odd wooden rods and toy-like knitted things, like aids for some obscure form of therapy. And all along the walls, pacing slowly in chain-link cages: the patients.

Julie speaks for the first time, a bleak murmur. “Everywhere we go. Over and over.”

The patients are Dead, of course, hundreds of them, apparently sorted by decomposition levels. Nearest to us are the fresh ones: men, women, and children who look confused and hungry but otherwise normal in the dim light. In the middle: battered wrecks with dangling guts, gaping holes, missing eyes and faces—though no missing limbs, I notice. And at the back, hunching and lurching in the shadows like emaciated apes…the transitionals. Hairless, eyeless, naked and withered, hanging over the abyss and preparing to cut the rope.

How versatile the plague is. What a variety of tools one can mold from its cold clay.

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