She is in a restaurant high above the earth, sitting across a table from a boy-shaped void, and the void reaches toward her and says—
She opens her eyes with a start. She looks down. She has scraped a hole through her coaster and shredded her napkin into confetti. Her pocket knife is in her hand and she has carved things into the bar, random shapes and letters that would disappear into the rest of the graffiti except for their freshness, a trail of gibberish leading over the bar’s edge and under it to a single legible word, a name—
She gouges at it with the knife until she can’t read it anymore and then stands up. The bar is busy now and no one is paying her any attention except the blond girl. The girl’s bloodshot eyes cling to Nora’s as the tattooed man pours more liquor into her juice, and Nora sees things she recognizes in that gaze. A loss locked away. A desperation restrained and hidden, writhing within the straightjacket of her body.
This girl has much to suffer before she reaches Nora’s age. But if she makes it through all those hard years…she’ll stand on the glorious plateau where Nora is now.
Nora chuckles like bubbling acid. She tastes it in her throat. Her emptiness suddenly descends from her chest to her groin, impelling her forward, and she finds no reason to resist. She locks eyes with a man and draws him to her—it might as well be one of the tattooed man’s cronies, the only help she can offer the girl tonight, reducing her trouble by one.
His pickup routine rolls over her in puffs of sour breath until she stops it with a finger to his lips, grabs him by the collar, and drags him out of the bar.
A body. A bed. She keeps it simple, stripped of all detail and context, and when she puts it like that, it doesn’t sound so bad. She has become very good at editing her thoughts.
But only when she’s awake. In her sleep she has no defenses. Her grip slackens and she floats into darkness, at the mercy of her mind.
In her sleep there’s a boy playing in a sandbox—not a void, a boy, though she can’t see his face, just his puff of black hair, his tiny hands working the sand—and from the woods behind the playground comes a wolf, trotting toward him with no hesitation, as if it came here from far away knowing exactly what it would find, and Nora screams but the boy doesn’t turn, doesn’t even look up as the wolf lunges. He never turns. He never looks up. Because he didn’t.
This boy is not bound to a book. His pages are loose and scattered across the shelves. Some of them have slipped into Nora’s. Others are still floating, carried deeper into the Library on subtle gusts of breath.
The boy is fourteen years old, but not really. Age is a line of progress, a marker of experience, and what can it mean for a mind that’s asleep? A mind stripped of self, robbed of history, set adrift in the fog of the plague?
The boy is small; he looks no older than seven. He does not grow. He does not heal. The puncture in his shoulder and the bite just above it have long since dried up, but they do not close. His cells are caught between forces, pulling toward life while the plague pulls toward rot, locked in a struggle he doesn’t understand.
What would it mean to win? Is it even a prize he wants?
All he knows for sure is he doesn’t want to lose. He has seen people lose. It begins in their eyes, a cooling of fire, a sagging of strength, a decision to stop fighting. Then it spreads. Their flesh withers and peels. Their faces become masks, lipless, eyeless, identical. Some surrender immediately, rotting to bones in just a few days. Others manage to last months or even a year before the plague overtakes them.
The boy has held it tight, thrashing in his grip, for over seven years.
He awoke in the city with the big man watching him. Blood on the big man’s mouth…whose? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. The boy was a single neuron, unable to form a synapse, sparking uselessly into empty space.
The big man took his hand and led him off with the others, and the boy didn’t resist. The big man killed people and fed the boy their meat and the boy didn’t resist. And when the big man forgot who the boy was and wandered off alone, the skeletons gave him to new parents and the boy didn’t resist.
All of this was congruent with the life he’d known before. A life of unkindness, abandonment, daily hurts and horrors. All of this seemed natural enough, and he accepted it with the same downcast nod he always had.
He does not fight the world outside. He saves his strength for the fight inside him, to keep the plague at bay. Because he feels that his life is not over. He won’t let it end in this airport, wandering in the dark with a thousand rotting corpses.
There is something more he has to do.
He looks down at the cardboard box he’s carrying. It is filled with photos of the Living. He pulls out a child smelling a flower. He pulls out two lovers watching a sunset. He pulls out a happy family and he tapes them to the wall. He is doing this because his friends asked him to. The blond boy and the brown girl. They were here when he first arrived, and they welcomed him. They shared the toys they’d collected, paperweights and staplers. They showed him where the meat is kept. And most importantly, they remembered him. When his new parents wandered off, as they always eventually did, his friends were there, the only constant in the drift of his existence.
But now even that constant is changing. His friends have found words and names. Their skin is warming. Their eyes are flushing with color. They tell him everything is changing. They say they’re going to fix the world, and it’s going to start right here in the airport. The Living bring the photos like charity donations, and the children tape them up around the airport, hoping to catch the eyes of the wandering Dead. They are supposed to be reminders, triggers, sparks. The Dead gather around them like televisions, releasing bittersweet sighs and groans.
It will not be enough.
The boy can feel this with certainty. Whatever tide may be rising, this is just the first wave. It will recede before it returns.
“All done!”
“Okay. Let’s go get more.”
As his friends’ voices echo down the corridor, the airport power comes on. Lights flicker and music crackles, a jubilant sense of revival. But it will die again in an hour or two. It’s a trick, like cruel parents teasing a gullible child. The world is full of traps like this. The boy is wary.
His friends emerge from the corridor, flying off the conveyer belt in a full sprint, and he’s struck again by the change.
Joan.
Alex.
They almost look alive. For a moment he can feel that life in himself, radiating off his friends like heat from a fire, warming his charcoal skin to brown. But the sensation will fade when they’re gone. And eventually it will fade in them too.
“All done,” he says, holding his box close to his chest.
His friends nod and run off to get more photos. The boy looks down into his box. It is still half-full of those sugary talismans of hope.
“All done,” he murmurs, and drops the box to the floor.
He feels inertia inside him, like he’s standing on a conveyor, gliding down a hallway whose end is too far to see.
Someone loved him once.
In the cold fog of his mind, this fact gleams like a distant beacon. He doesn’t know who this person was, if they’re still alive, or if they could still love whatever he’s become. But he can feel this person’s presence, the lingering warmth of a hand pulled away.
The boy walks out of the terminal. He walks across the tarmac, his bare feet so thickly callused that shards of glass don’t pierce them. He walks into the surrounding forest, and as the darkness surrounds him and the fear and loneliness rises, he calls out to us in the depths of the Library: