And it goes higher. We are nowhere near the top. But the ladder is dissolving under me. I scramble upward until I’m climbing air; I stretch out with my mind, straining toward that distant, unfathomable ceiling—
I am lying on my back on a carpet of moss. Julie is next to me. We are gasping, shivering, laughing, crying. Our hands rest in the space between us, fingers woven together, squeezing with each spasming aftershock. A bird chirps. A fly buzzes. The canopy of leaves spins slowly overhead like a time-lapse film of stars.
I remember the worms in my neck. They squirm and squeal like spoiled children, but I contain them easily, clenched in a fist of will. They bore me. I dismiss them from my mind and watch the sun leak through the leaves, forming solid gold shafts in the dust we’ve stirred up.
I don’t know how long we lie there. The sun moves across the sky. Its rays wander lecherously down our bodies. Finally, when they begin to dim, Julie shatters the century-long stillness. She stands up. She puts her clothes on. Then she gathers up mine and drops them on my chest.
“R,” she says, her face still damp and flushed, glowing with a smile that I’ve never seen before, calm and happy and invincible. “Let’s go home.”
THREE
the rooftop
Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world. To those who can hear me, I say…
WE
WE FEEL PRESSURE. We feel strain. We feel rumbles and tremors and the rushing of rivers. Hills heave up from flatlands, mountains pierce peaceful fields. Earth bulges with potential, stretching and distorting its perfect sphere as it tries to decide what to be. Earth is a quantum particle. An indecisive electron waiting on its observers.
Two of its observers are called Gael and Gebre, and they are looking for someone they lost. Like all sane humans, they avoid the existential sinkhole of the Midwaste. They stick to the places with people. At major junctions they find guidance sprayed onto the pavement: skulls for the roads to nowhere, smiling faces for active arterials, the handful of highways that still have a pulse.
“Graffiti artists are the new Department of Transportation,” Gael chuckles as he guides the van toward the recommended lane. “The world’s upside-down. I love it!”
“Could be tricks,” Gebre says. “Or traps.”
Gael shrugs. “Anything could be anything. Why default to bad?”
“Well, historically…”—Gael groans—“…historically, vandals were lashing out at the society that excluded them. The last thing they wanted was to assist it.”
“History was a long time ago, love.” Gael gestures to the strange landscape around them, the murals on the road, the sculptures of stacked cars towering above the desert. “This is new territory.”
He hits the gas. The van roars over the big yellow smile and onto the highway.
It’s barely an hour before they see the first car. Then another, and another, until the lanes are full and brake lights begin to flare.
“Traffic!” Gael squeals with delight. “We’re in traffic!”
“I haven’t seen a jam like this in fifteen years,” Gebre says. “Where are they coming from?”
The answer to this question takes shape from town to town, from rest stop to truck stop to roadside diner as they work their way west.
They buy beers for Axiom troops from Chicago, who deserted in the night as grumbles rose to shouts.
They change a tire for youths from the UT-AZ Sovereignty, who hopped the fence of their feudal kingdom in search of the wider world.
They share intel with scouts from Montreal and Juarez, who climbed their border walls to investigate the cancer growing in the land between them.
And they listen quietly to people from the wilderness: families and tribes and underground enclaves who grew tired of isolation, who ventured from their hills and caves on some obscure impulse—some call it a pull, others a voice—in search of something they can’t name.
The long-sleeping continent is in motion. Gael and Gebre sense it too, this pull, this voice, but they force themselves to ignore it. They are looking for someone they lost.
“Have you seen any civilian transports?”
“Where does Axiom take Dead children?”
“Have you seen a boy with yellow eyes?”
The clues that emerge are less than conclusive. A man saw a caravan heading into Post. A woman saw helicopters circling around Portland. A little girl saw a ghost boy flying toward the sun.
“Well?” Gael says as they come to another crossroads: Portland or Post, both sprayed with smiles. “What do you think?”
Gebre sighs and leans against the steering wheel. “I think we should have discussed it further before deciding to adopt.”
“He was alone. He needed someone.”
“And so did we, I know, I know.”
They are on the outskirts of yet another empty town surrounded by crumbling factories. The highway splits off into the sagebrush hills, its two halves indistinguishable.
“Well, old man?” Gael persists. “Post or Portland? I defer to your ancient wisdom.”
Gebre rubs his goatee. “The Almanac said Post was ‘closed, hostile,’ which certainly sounds like Axiom…”
“But it said Portland was ‘no gov.’ Farming and barter markets…”
“Which sounds like something Axiom would love to invade…”
“Right. So it’s a variable. But if we go to Portland and he’s not there, we might still find something worth finding.”
“You mean our anarchist utopia?” Gebre says with an affectionate smirk.
Gael gestures toward the two sides of the crossroads, the highways like mirrored lines. “It’s a vacillation. It’s a potential reality waiting on our perception. What do we want to see?”
Gebre laughs. “Did you just reference The Suggestible Universe? I thought real physicists hated that pop-sci mysticism.”
Gael shrugs. “Dubious science. Intriguing metaphor.”
“Okay. Here goes.” Gebre takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. “I want to see a peaceful, Edenic commune. I want to see our little friend Rover, alive and Living.”
“And alone with no guards,” Gael adds.
“Alone with no guards,” Gebre agrees. Then he opens his eyes and hits the gas and the camper surges forward.
We watch the van dwindle into the distance. We savor the love inside it, subtle and nuanced but strong. And we are not the only ones observing this particle as it hurtles through the universe. Faces linger in the windows of obsolete factories—film stock, vinyl records, radios, paper; long-dead industries that are ready to revive. Eyes glimmer in the shadows with a dull metallic sheen, silver and lead with occasional glints of gold.
In this town, in the next town, in abandoned places from one coast to another, the Dead are waiting. It was months ago when they heard the first call, like an immense bell tolling across the world, announcing the arrival of…something. They woke from their sleep and cocked their heads, hearing a certain suspense in the bell’s lingering resonance. A promise of more to come.