“Nothing,” I say. “Let’s go.”
WE RACE DOWN THE STEPS of Wayne County College like kids on the last day of the semester, a cold echo of those carefree summer rituals. I can hear the sounds of long-dead students, can almost feel them shoving past me. The squeals of young beauties in cocoons of affirmation, half-formed pupae who seem a different species entirely from the woman at my side, despite somehow being the same age. I hear the bass from tricked-out cars, simian boys equating volume with virility; shoving, laughing, boasting, belittling—everyone testing everyone, clawing and pecking for position. I see and hear it all through a haze of time, a blur of overlaid moments as the city churns around me. Across the street from the college—literally next door—is the Mortuary Institute of Detroit. A block away is a dilapidated building whose sign reads PERRY FUNERAL HOME—I blink and rub my eyes, but it’s really there.
Am I awake? Julie asked me, and I answered with blithe confidence. That confidence is gone.
I take some distant comfort from my trail of plastic troops. I pretend that I’m a soldier in an army in a country with a leader, that I have clear orders and good reasons to follow them. I revel in this certainty for perhaps a dozen blocks, then the sun disappears and my army fades into the dark.
“Shit,” I say under my breath.
Julie’s stolen flashlight casts a narrow beam and it’s not long before we’ve lost the trail. Audrey follows her daughter in a mostly placid state, but Julie keeps a two-handed grip on the pole to control her occasional lunges, sometimes away from Julie, sometimes toward her. If we keep going like this, it’s only a matter of time before something slips.
Julie pulls the pistol out of her waistband and fires into the air in a distinctive rhythm: Bang. Bang-bang. Then she watches the sky and listens.
A few seconds later, from somewhere across the river: Bang. Bang-bang.
Relief floods Julie’s face, and I realize this grim fugue of determination has not completely buried her personality. She’s in there, just as scared as I am, imagining the horror of spending a night in this haunted graveyard of a city.
Using the river as a reference, we work our way back to the main street and find our bike waiting where we left it, with a note on the seat under a chunk of concrete:
WENT BACK TO PLANE
COME HOME CRAZY BITCH
We both look at Audrey, then the bike, then each other.
“You drive,” Julie says. “I’ll sit on the tail and pin her between us.”
Audrey grinds her teeth in a confused, simmering fury.
I don’t need words to explain the flaw in this plan. I point at Audrey’s mouth, then at my neck.
Julie thinks for a moment, then hands me Audrey’s pole and dives into a heap of automotive wreckage. She emerges holding a bullet-pierced motorcycle helmet, shakes the ancient skull out of it, and shoves the battered white globe over her mother’s head. “No biting, Mom.”
Audrey’s gunmetal eyes are wide and fierce in the helmet’s view window.
Julie snaps the visor shut.
The three of us form a clownish sandwich on the bike, Julie clinging precariously to the rear edge and me humping the gas tank, cringing with every jolt in the road. I hear Audrey hissing inside her helmet, occasionally banging it against the back of my head, but Julie’s arms around my waist pin Audrey’s to her sides like a straightjacket. I ride as fast as I can with this awkward cargo, navigating by starlight and memory, and by the time the last glimmer of the sun goes black, we’re there.
Nora is out in the road, pacing and watching the horizon. She runs to meet us as we pull up to the plane, so fixated on Julie that she doesn’t seem to notice our guest.
“Something really terrible better have happened to you,” she says, shaking her head in a flurry of curls, “because if you just snuck away to fuck each other, I swear to God—oh.” She straightens up. “Who’s that?”
We dismount. Julie reattaches the pole to Audrey’s collar.
“Julie. Who the hell is—”
“Nora,” Julie says in a trembling laugh, unable to contain the surreality of it any longer, “it’s . . . this is . . . it’s my mom.”
She pulls the helmet off. Audrey grimaces at Nora, displaying her chipped yellow teeth. Nora stumbles a step back. I have no doubt she recognizes this face, if not from Julie’s old photo then from its uncanny resemblance to Julie herself, its youth bizarrely preserved even as traces of rot creep in at the edges. A specimen of early-forties beauty, pickled in the plague.
“Mom,” Julie says, “this is Nora. She’s the best person I’ve ever met. Please be nice to her.”
“Hi,” Nora whispers almost inaudibly, her face frozen in shock.
Abram climbs down the ladder with his bag of tools. He watches us.
“How?” Nora manages to squeak out.
“We found a . . . facility,” Julie says, and begins leading Audrey toward the plane. “Hundreds of zombies chained up. Looked like some kind of experiment, like a bigger version of what we saw in Abram’s cabin.” She glances at Abram. “Do you know anything about this?”
Abram doesn’t answer.
“What kind of zombies?” Nora says, her curiosity starting to overcome her shock. “Nearlies?”
“We didn’t have time to check the others. But Mom’s . . . well . . .”
Audrey begins to struggle, clutching at her collar and making guttural choking sounds.
“Mostly,” Nora says. “Maybe All.”
Julie says nothing. We pass Abram, who stays where he is, still holding his tongue. When we reach the cargo ramp, he finally releases it.
“Just to make sure I’m understanding you . . .” His tone is level. “. . . you want to bring an adult zombie onboard this airplane. In addition to the two juveniles we’re already carrying. So that’s a total of three flesh-eating corpses sharing this airplane with us. Do I have that right?”
Julie looks at him. “She’s my mother.”
Abram lets out a long, weary sigh. “I’m done.” He takes Sprout’s hand, throws the duffel over his shoulder, and heads toward our bike.
“Hey,” Julie says. “She’s completely locked up, she can’t hurt anyone.”
Abram keeps walking.
“Hey!” She hands Audrey’s pole to me and walks after him. “Where are you going?”
Nora looks at me and rolls her eyes, here we go again, but no, this is not the same argument between the same two people. After what Julie has just experienced, there are no parameters to what might happen here, only desperate, unpredictable momentum, rolling, slipping, falling.
“Abram!”
He stops and turns. He doesn’t look angry, just tired, a worn-out high-school teacher who’s had enough of the hormonal drama, every day a new pregnancy, a new suicide, a new shooting. “I don’t know where we’re going,” he says. “Maybe Pittsburgh. Maybe Austin. All I know is I’m done with crazy people.”
“So you’re going to cross a deadly wasteland on a motorcycle when you have a private jet sitting here waiting for you? Who’s the crazy one?”
He chuckles and resumes walking, shaking his head. “Not worth it.”
“God damn it, Abram, we need you! You can’t just leave us stranded here!”
“You have the bikes; do your revolution by motorcycle. It worked for Che Guevara.”
Julie stops and stares at his back as he approaches the bike. “You just don’t care, do you?” She sounds genuinely amazed. “About anything.”
He starts tying his duffel onto the bike. “And what should I care about?”
“People? The world you’re living in? The future you’re helping create?”
Abram tips his head back and laughs. “You want to know why I’m done with you people?” He turns around. “Because people who talk like that are the ones who get you killed in a world like this. Che Guevara talked like that. Lenin and Mao talked like that. All those doe-eyed idealists watching the future through a telescope while they trampled
over the present. There’s no bigger threat to the world than people who think they can improve it.”
He lifts Sprout onto the back of the bike. She looks back at Julie with sadness and fear, but Julie looks right past her, boring into the back of Abram’s head.
“How about this, then?” she says. “How about you fly the plane or I shoot you.”
Abram turns around, chuckling, and finds himself looking into a gun barrel.
“How about I don’t give a shit about the world,” Julie says, gripping the pistol in both hands. “How about I want you to fly us to Iceland so I can get help for my mom, because she’s my family and fuck everyone else.”
Abram’s smile is amused but weary. “Cute,” he says, and turns to mount his bike.
“I will shoot you, Abram.”
He shakes his head as he climbs on. “No, you’ll stand there saying you’ll shoot me, because you love to talk about things you know will never hap—”
Julie shoots him.
He falls off the bike and lands on his knees, clutching his arm. Sprout screams.
“Shit, Jules,” Nora murmurs.
Abram pulls himself up, pale with pain and surprise. His hand drifts toward a pouch on the side of his duffel; I open my mouth to warn Julie but she’s watching him with no apparent concern. His hand comes out empty.
“You stole my Ruger,” he says with muted amazement.
“Fly the plane,” Julie says.
He stares at her for a moment, then makes a grab for the rifle on his back.
Julie shoots him in the shoulder.
“Julie!” Sprout sobs, gaping at her in disbelief.
Julie’s eyes dart toward Sprout and her face flickers; I glimpse shame and horror as full awareness hits her. But she hardens again.
“Fly the plane.”
Abram examines his wounds—a deep graze across his left tricep and a clean shot through the trapezoid—and as blood soaks the sleeve of his beige jacket, the shock on his face slowly becomes something else. A faint smile, not patronizing this time, not mocking, not even angry. He looks at Julie like he’s meeting her for the first time.
“Well all right then,” he says.
He marches up the ramp with Julie’s gun at his back.
Julie doesn’t look at any of us. We don’t look at each other. We board the plane in frightened silence, like hostages, and I haul the ghost of Julie’s mother by the neck, seeing nothing in her eyes but death.
WE
“LET’S PLAY a game,” Gael says.
“Which one?” Gebre says.
“Let’s play Road Name.”
“What’s that?”
“You take the name of the first wrecked car you see, then a cartoon character from the first roadkill you see, combine them however you like, and that’s your road name.”
The boy sits on a plastic bucket between the van’s driver and passenger seats, staring at the highway ahead. The morning sun is streaming through the trees and bathing everything in an ethereal glow, but by the time it reaches him through the dirty windshield and his scratched sunglasses, it is cloudy and dim.
“I’m playing for our little mate here,” Gael says, smiling at the boy. “Because we need something to call him other than ‘mate.’ Right, mate?”
We watch the boy’s thoughts as he weighs these two men. Their intentions, their motivations. A brain is built to learn from experience—if fire burns, don’t touch fire—and if his does its job, he will never trust people again. And yet the brain is not a simple machine. It is a concentric infinity of wheels within wheels, and it fights against its own functions toward goals it barely comprehends.
“Honda Fit!” Gebre blurts as they approach a car with its nose buried in the ditch. It’s Gael’s turn to drive, so Gebre has the scouting advantage. “And roadkill! A pigeon, I think. They must have swerved to miss it . . .” He cranes his neck to watch the bird’s dried remains disappear. “I guess that’s the reward for kindness these days.”
“Geb,” Gael says.
“Anyway. Honda Fit plus a bird, so . . . I guess I’m Tweety Fit?”
“You can mix it however you want. Doesn’t have to be whole words.”
Gebre thinks a moment. “Fonda Titty.”
“Sure you are,” Gael chuckles. “But that’s good. Okay, mate, our turn.”
They have been driving for three days. The boy records the patterns around him deep in the back of his mind. Bright then dark. Warm then cold. The opening then closing of dandelions. The desperate scramble then sated stillness of insects. And the ebb and flow of conversation in the van, from idle chatter to heavy debates to long, unreadable silences. They have offered him food and he has refused. They have seen him sitting alert on his bucket while they fall asleep in the pop-top bed, and they have woken to find him unmoved, staring up at them from his bucket, waiting. He wonders why they pretend not to know what he is.
“There!” Gael says, pointing to an SUV stalled in the middle of the road with cut tires and broken windows. “Land Rover. Okay, mate, keep your eyes peeled for some roadkill and we’ll make you a lovely new—”
The boy’s arm darts out, startling Gael into silence. His finger is pointing to something on the road ahead. The merriment drains from Gael’s face.
“Bloody hell,” he whispers.
The boy watches him expectantly. Gael assumes he is too innocent to have understood what he saw and is just eager to hear his road name. Gael doesn’t know him like we do. The boy knows exactly what he saw; he’s just waiting to see how this man responds to the daily horror of reality. Will he firm his face and wade straight in? Or will he cough uncomfortably and suggest a new game?
“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 e
yes, 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.