Nature made it clear who’s supposed to be in charge, they told him. When you go against nature, people get hurt.
After a few years of mental drills and Physical Disincentive, Abram understood. He found a wife who understood. He raised a daughter who understood. They accepted the work he had to do for them, and he accepted it too, and for a while the machine ran smoothly. Why did it break? What parts were missing?
He climbs into a bus, rank with the smell of the Dead in their varied states of decay. “Murasaki?”
The Dead watch him with an array of emotions that he refuses to see.
Another bus. “Mura?”
Another. “Sprout?”
“Hey!”
A harsh voice behind him. A man squinting up at him from the ground. Abram turns slowly.
“What are you doing?”
The man is young. Barely into his twenties. He carries a clipboard tucked under his arm, and Abram sees a list of names and numbers.
“Checking on the cargo,” Abram says.
“The cargo’s fine,” the young man says. “They’re all locked in and I check them every hour. Who told you to double up on me?”
“Just walking by, thought I heard something.”
“I watched you check four buses in a row.” The man’s expression cools from annoyance to suspicion. “Where’s the rest of your uniform?”
Abram doesn’t answer.
“Which bus are you on? Did you join up in Nashville?”
Abram glances left and right.
The man checks his clipboard. “What’s your SSN? I’m going to need you to—”
Abram’s elevated position puts the man’s face right at foot level, so his boot strikes it dead-center, obliterating the nose. He jumps down and grabs the man around the neck, clamping a hand over the mouth, and rushes him into the trees behind the service station. He flicks out his knife and presses it to the throat.
“What’s your name?” he asks, though he doesn’t want to know.
“Jim,” the man gurgles. “Jim Roberts.”
“What’s your SSN?”
The man hesitates, his mind racing with the implications of these questions, but Abram wiggles the blade enough to bite and the man’s reflexes take over. “559-94-2350!”
“I’m sorry,” Abram says, and he means it. A quick flick of the wrist, and Jim Roberts dies.
While Abram buries the body under a pile of dead leaves, we take a moment to skim this young man’s life. It contains little that anyone will want to learn. Another youth recruit raised in the subhuman nightmare of Path Narrowing and Physical Disincentive and a rotating roster of indistinguishable father-bosses, all his broken pieces compressed into a solid shape by endless heat and pressure. He was already a casualty long before this stranger cut his throat. We grieve for him now as we breathe him in.
Abram Kelvin emerges from the trees, wiping dirt and blood on his pants, adjusting his beige jacket and reciting his new SSN. If he doesn’t find her here, he will find her in the next caravan, or in Post itself, somewhere deep in the guts of Axiom’s new body. He will cut his way to her and pull her out.
From a great distance, he watches himself merge into the camp. He hears himself chatting with the troops, the old blustery tone and obfuscating jargon springing easily to his lips, and in spite of his loathing for the system that stole his life, he feels a familiar comfort as he slides back into its embrace. That sense of being aligned, defined, identified and indemnified by something bigger than himself. For a moment—just to help him blend in—he surrenders to the feeling. After all these days in the icy wilderness of self-determination, it’s like sinking into a warm bath. He grabs a water bottle from the well-stocked cooler and drinks until his stomach hurts. He pours a big bowl of stew from the catering cart and joins the men around the fire. He sounds so relaxed and natural while he probes for information that it’s hours before anyone even asks him his name.
“Roberts,” he says.
Don’t do this, the voice mutters deep in his head.
“Jim Roberts. Bookkeeping and Guest Supervision.”
This isn’t the way.
“So where’s our next stop?”
I
JULIE DOESN’T TALK about her nightmares. On the rare occasion she has a good dream, she will stumble through her deepest reserves of poetry to convey its surreal beauties, but she keeps the nightmares inside. So sometimes, lying awake next to her, I try to reconstruct them from what I see on her face. I translate her whimpers and grimaces and occasional screams into an impressionistic narrative, like a film without a story, just emotions in a sequence.
Most nights, it’s just another clumsy attempt to access her inner world, to understand her a little better. Tonight, it’s more urgent. Tonight, I feel like I’m divining my fate in these little sounds and movements. When I see tears in her closed eyes, I can’t help wondering if she’s already mourning me in her mind.
And then, in the gunmetal glow before dawn, there’s a shift.
Her anguish relaxes, smoothing into the natural expression of sleep, then further; arched brows and a subtle, parted smile. Bliss. Awe. Her whimpers become slow, steady sighs, like she’s bathing her lungs in perfume.
I didn’t expect this. My involvement in her dream now seems unlikely, but I watch with fascination and an ounce of cautious hope.
The rumble strip roars and Barbara swerves left, wobbling a bit before stabilizing. I glance down the hallway to the driver’s seat and see M blinking and slapping himself. Julie doesn’t stir, but her expression has faded back to neutral. I slide out of bed and join M up front.
“Morning,” I say, though it barely is.
He grunts, pulling the bag of frozen hash browns away from his cheek. The swelling has gone down some. His eyes are visible again, but they’re bleary and bloodshot. He looks less alive than he did when he was Dead.
“I’ll take a turn,” I offer. “Can’t sleep anyway.”
He hesitates like I’m asking him to break an oath.
“Marcus.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “Punishing yourself doesn’t help anyone. Just puts more pain in the world.”
He snorts. Then he sighs. Then he pulls over. We switch seats and I hit the gas, and I’ve driven several miles before I remember that I can’t drive.
I glance over at M to see if he’s impressed with my wheelmanship, but he has slipped out of his chair and settled down on the floor behind me, already snoring. I turn back to the road and enjoy it alone, flying through fields and forests as the horizon begins to glow.
I am gone for a while, watching the slow infusion of color into the sky, and when I come back, Julie is sitting next to me. I gesture to the steering wheel and raise my eyebrows. She smiles and nods, not bad. We watch the sunrise together.
“You’re up early,” I say after soaking in the silence for a while. Her hair is a little less crazed than usual. She looks tired, but not battered.
“I had a good dream,” she says, and there’s a note of wonder in her croaky voice, a sparkle in her crusted eyes as they wander the passing scenery. “An amazing dream.”
I watch her expectantly. This is new.
“I was in this huge library,” she says. “I was climbing a ladder, and the shelves went up for miles, farther than I could see. They went down too, but I was going up. And I wasn’t—” She pauses, laughs to herself, searching for the words. “I wasn’t really reading the books, but I could sort of sense what was in them. And the higher I went, the better they got. I could feel them getting more complex and meaningful, like I was going from kids’ books to pulp novels to classic masterpieces, and I was like…breathing them in. All those stories at once.” She laughs again, choked with conflicting emotions. “They were so beautiful. I can’t even explain it. Sad ones and happy ones, some that didn’t even make sense, but when I breathed them all together it was just…it was like this perfect perfume.”