I sink down next to her on the brown plaid cushion, wondering if she’s aware of the storm in my head, the lump in my throat. For as long as she’s known me, I’ve insisted I was no one. Now that I know I’m someone, she deserves to know who.
“I’ll . . . tell you . . .” My tongue fights the words like it’s my first day among the Living. “I’ll tell you . . . everything.”
Her eyes are guarded. She looks young, vulnerable, but not quite afraid. “Do you want to tell me everything?”
I hesitate. I let her see all my turmoil and terror. Then I say, “Yes.”
She nods. “Okay.” She leans her head against my shoulder. “But not now.”
“Not now?”
She releases a long, slow breath and closes her eyes. “Not now.”
Her face is pale with exhaustion. Her eyelids are puffy from recent rivers of tears. Of course not now. There will be time for confessions—and their consequences—on the long road ahead. For now I’ll let her rest. For now I’ll be grateful for her head on my shoulder, for each remaining moment of trust.
Behind us, the city shrinks against the sky like it’s melting in the sunset’s fire. I watch until it’s gone and imagine everything I did there melting away with it. Then I dismiss this useless fantasy. My past is not behind me. It’s in front of me, marching west with a vast army. And we are chasing it.
WE
THE EARTH TURNS EAST. But beneath the surface, there are different movements. Earth’s molten rivers flow on strange whims, sometimes counter to the crust, and as we float deep in its near-solar heat, we feel a shift. We are a prominence pushing up through the fabric of everything, and the earth responds to our pressure. The heart of the earth begins to flow west.
Thousands of human beings are flowing the same way. Some are fleeing a disaster. Some are obeying a voice they heard on a TV or a radio. Others, like the boy and his three friends, have no choice in the matter. They are sitting in the back of a bus, wrists cuffed in their laps, wondering where they’re going and what will happen to them when they get there. But these questions are low on the boy’s list. The more urgent ones are the ones he directs to us:
Can we change this?
His body is restrained but he runs free in the Library. He races down our halls and digs through our shelves, skimming pages of paper and crystal and warm living skin, the memories of countless lives throughout time.
What can we do while we’re young and small? How can we grow bigger?
He climbs our ladder of living bones, each rung a generation, and pulls out Higher books. He strains to read them but not even the authors know the language of these glossolalic poems, these sigils and hieroglyphs scrawled in strange ink, visible only to a rare kind of eye.
What can we become?
Packed into the back of a cargo trailer, cold and gray and confused, a woman in a dirty lab coat is asking similar questions, and she is not alone in her turmoil. She is surrounded by others like her, in this trailer and elsewhere, all across the unstable landmass once known as America. They gather in the streets of forgotten cities, in forests and in caves, standing motionless to suspend their hunger while they wait for the answers to come.
And how we wish we could give those answers. How we long to emerge from the hush of memory and shout into the present. To reveal our secrets to all these desperate searchers and finally tear the veil. But though a library brims with a thousand eloquent voices, it can’t speak a word until the world learns to read.
So we wait.
We wait with the Dead, moving through their ranks like spies or maybe allies, and we share their mood: restless, hungry, ready to go to war. It’s been years since any attempt to count them, and this is good, because the Living are fearful enough without knowing they’re outnumbered.
The Dead are a larger army than any ever assembled, and they follow no leader, fear no threat, and accept no bribe or compromise. The Dead are the silent majority, and should they ever decide to say something, it will be the new law of the land.
The mantle flows beneath their feet like the nudge of a warm hand, and one by one, they begin to wander west.
Acknowledgments
* * *
I’d like to thank the 108 billion people who lived and died throughout history to make this book—and other things—possible, and the even larger number of nonhuman creatures who helped. Much appreciated. I should also probably thank my editor, Emily Bestler, and my agent-editor, Joe Regal, and everyone else at their companies who guided this hubristic ship of a book away from various icebergs. Justin Guild helped me make David Boeing as realistic as possible within the needs of a ridiculous story. My sister Nurse Christa Wheeler answered many disturbing medical questions. Stephen McDonnell helped me build a horror that will lurk in the phone lines forever. The baristas at Fremont Coffee Company gave me a warm corner in which to write and caffeinate. Nathan Marion and Jared McSharry engaged me in the windy philosophical debates that shaped the ideas of this story. And final, ultimate thanks to my readers for their outrageously generous support—for spreading the word about this book, for handing out cards and putting up posters and other stunning displays of passion, and just for reading the damn thing. I’d be alone in my head without you.
A road trip across the wastelands of an unraveling world. A search for lost family and a cure for poisoned love. When the past finally erupts, R finds himself alone at the edges of his hard-won humanity. But all roads lead home, to a final confrontation with the avatars of the plague.
And in the ancient vastness of the Library, something is stirring. . . .
The story concludes with
THE LIVING
Get news on the Warm Bodies series at facebook.com/warmbodies
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ISAAC MARION grew up in northwestern Washington, where he worked as a medical supplier for hospice patients and a visitation supervisor for foster children before publishing his debut novel in 2010. Warm Bodies became a New York Times bestseller and inspired a major film adaptation. It has been translated into twenty-five languages. Isaac lives in Seattle with a cat and a few plants, writing fiction and music and taking pictures of everything.
Talk to Isaac on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, Snapchat, and isaacmarion.com.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Isaac Marion
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First Emily Bestler Books/Atria Books hardcover edition February 2017
and colophons are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
“Weather to Fly”: Words and Music by Guy Gar
vey, Craig Potter, Mark Potter, Peter Turner and Richard Jupp. Copyright © 2008 Salvation Music Ltd. All rights administered by Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music.
Excerpt(s) from The Plague by Albert Camus, translated by Stuart Gilbert, translation copyright © 1948, copyright renewed 1975 by Stuart Gilbert. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Interior illustrations adapted by Isaac Marion from sources in the public domain.
Jacket design by Faceout Studios
Jacket Images © Markus Gann/Shutterstock (Landscape); © Iakov Kalinin/Shutterstock (Green Field); © Adam Derewecki/Shutterstock (Shadows); © Sai Yeung Chan/Shutterstock (Downtown La); © David & Myrtille/Arcangel (Sky); © Dave Wall/Arcangel (Double Doors)
Author photograph by Juliann Itter
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Marion, Isaac, 1981– author.
Title: The burning world : a novel / by Isaac Marion.
Description: First Emily Bestler Books/Atria Books hardcover edition. | New York : Emily Bestler Books, 2017. | Series: The warm bodies series ; 3 Identifiers: LCCN 2016029760 (print) |
LCCN 2016037065 (ebook) | ISBN 9781476799711 (hardback) | ISBN 9781476799728 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781476799735 (ebook) |
Subjects: LCSH: Zombies—Fiction. | Paranormal romance stories. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Romance / Paranormal.
Classification: LCC PS3613.A7495 B87 2017 (print) | LCC PS3613.A7495 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029760
ISBN 978-1-4767-9971-1
ISBN 978-1-4767-9973-5 (ebook)
Isaac Marion, The Burning World
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