(Warm Bodies 02) The Burning World by Isaac Marion

Author:Isaac Marion
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

WE

THE BOY IS getting hungry.

He floats between states, almost perfectly balanced between Living and Dead, almost unreachable to the demands of either, but only almost. He has walked hundreds of miles without consuming any form of energy, and one can only defy physics for so long. His balance is beginning to tremble.

He doesn’t remember the last time he ate. His past is an unreadable mess, like a book shredded and glued back together. A big man and a tall man and a family of skeletons. Then other Dead people. A blur of blank faces and unfamiliar rooms. Passed from hand to hand, cared for, fed a few bits of meat, then forgotten in a dark hallway, picked up by someone else, fed, and forgotten.

We can’t decipher these soggy collages, so we skip ahead to the new pages, to where he smelled a new scent rippling through the airport, new sounds echoing through the halls, voices and laughter and scratchy old music. He saw the change around him, felt it creeping into him, and he pushed it out. It felt unearned, inadequate, like a father apologising for a beating by offering a hug. He wasn’t ready to embrace this supposedly new world. He didn’t trust its open arms.

Now he is far away from that world, deep in the forest and more alone than he’s ever been, if loneliness can be measured in miles. This stretch of highway has been untouched for so long the forest has started to reclaim it, smoothing it back into the green expanse like a fading scar. Young pines shoot through the pavement as their parents’ roots break it up for them. Slabs, then shards, then pebbles, then sand. He can feel the looseness of things here, so far from the lattice of other minds. He sees vacillations in the corners of his eyes. Things that aren’t quite certain what they are; they are waiting for someone to tell them. In this place, he is prepared to see spherical doors and tetrahedral fires, crystal birds and hollow bears, but he is not expecting a man on a bicycle wearing a Sonic Youth T-shirt.

The man rides past the boy, then stops, gets off his bike, and walks back to him. The man is neatly bearded, the sides of his head trimmed short, his eyes hidden behind Wayfarer sunglasses. In another era, he might be on his way to work at a trendy software company. In this era, he is sweaty and dirty and the barrel of an Uzi pokes out of his messenger bag.

The boy keeps his eyes on his own toes as the man approaches him.

“Are you Living?” the man says, stopping a safe distance away.

The boy shrugs.

“I guess that’s a yes. You alone?”

The boy nods.

The man examines him. The boy’s skin is pale, but only as pale as dark skin can be. “Do you talk?”

The boy keeps his head down. He doesn’t talk. He can, but he doesn’t. To talk is to let people inside, to share common ground and common language.

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