Everyone has a place. We saw it all in the deep dark.
The voice becomes less and less Mr. Atvist as I get closer to the dome. I can feel his fury as he sinks back into the group, losing his precious, peerless self in the noise of all his peers.
The earth swallowed us. We sank beneath the city and the city closed over us.
It’s not really addressing me anymore; its attention has wandered into some obscure reminiscence, like an old man lost in dementia.
We raged as we died. We had beaten all our enemies but we were still going to lose. It wasn’t fair. The earth had no right to ignore our success.
“Oh my God,” Julie says. She is looking over the edge at the war on the ground. I can hear it—the guns, the explosions, the screams of the Living and the dry roars of the Dead—but I decline to look. I can feel the Boneys’ hum rising up the walls as they climb, but my eyes are locked on the dome. The doorway ahead. A keypad just like the ones in Freedom Tower.
We died with the earth smothering our protests, filling our mouths with soil, and our rage was so strong that when we awoke from death, we still remembered. We refused to disappear.
I punch in the Atvist family code, that vestigial fragment of my DNA lingering in this ever-evolving monster. The door clicks open.
But we were buried, crushed inside the earth. We felt the hunger but we couldn’t satisfy it. We seethed and struggled. Our teeth gnashed on rocks, and the dirt pressed into our eyes. Months passed. Then years. We went mad and then sane again, and finally we saw the truth.
I step inside the dome. My footsteps echo flat and strange off its misshapen walls.
We saw the natural order of everything, like the strata of earth that surrounded us, timeless and inescapable. We saw the line of our ancestors and the history of civilization, from chieftain to king to president to us. We saw the gears of the machine and how smoothly they turned, and we knew it was our job to keep it running.
The dome has no functional spaces. No offices or living quarters. It’s an ornate empty shell. The only notable feature is a jarring incongruity amongst all the faux-marble classicism: a rusty red shipping container, resting in the center of the space like an artifact in a museum.
We had to come back. We had to do our job. So instead of starving, we conquered the hunger and twisted it into power. We heard other voices like ours and we seized them. And as we rotted away, we grew stronger. We shed the weight of our flesh and began to dig.
I can feel the presence of my friends behind me, but they’re silent. Can they hear the voices? Can they hear the buzz inside the shipping container, like an enraged nest of wasps?
My skin crawls as I reach out and lift the container’s door latch. The door swings open with a squeal of long disuse.
Bones pour out around my feet.
The container is full of them. Not full skeletons, just white and brown fragments, rising waist-high all the way to the back of the box. I feel them vibrating around my ankles, disembodied hands grasping, unpaired jawbones trying to bite. The whole heap rattles and chatters and buzzes and hisses; acrid dust rises from it and blows into my face, and I want to cough and vomit but I’m paralyzed with disgust.
Look what I built! my grandfather crows, oblivious to all the other voices shouting over him and each other. I carved my name on the world! No one will ever forget me!
He sounds distant, muffled, buried somewhere in that dusty pile.
Now it’s your turn, kid! Come claim your inheritance!
A thought flashes in my brain like a small explosion—my father. My weak, violent, fanatical father…he rejected this offer. As broken as he was, he took that one step off the path his father laid out for him. One step away from that whirlwind of bones and the grunting brutes at its center. He never got far in his miserable little life, but he took that step, and my life began where it landed.
I am not a lone aberration in a heritage of cruelty. I am another step.
Tears flood my eyes as I turn to face the people I love. They watch me with horror and confusion. Everyone except Addis, who lingers in the shadows, waiting with what looks like expectation in those strange yellow eyes. I catch movement above me and I look up. A security camera stares down at me and past me into the rusty metal box that is Axiom’s executive suite. As I gaze into the black depths of its lens, the camera nods up and down.
You’re on, Tomsen is telling me. Say what you came to say.
Julie once said she could tell me anything because I just sit there and listen. I’ve always been a good listener. Even before my undead impediments, I preferred to let others do the talking while I relaxed in the safety of silence. But life isn’t a story that the world is telling me. Life is a conversation, and I’ve been listening long enough. It’s time for me to speak.
WE
THE SHORT MAN is sitting in his living room, ensconced in his plush recliner. He has not moved from this chair in a very long time. The room gets dark, then bright, then dark again as the days pass. Sometimes he closes his eyes at night, but he doesn’t sleep. He thinks. He wants. He waits.
And he watches television. He was unhappy when the LOTUS Feed became an endless Axiom infomercial. He doesn’t like this new show. He didn’t exactly “like” the old one either; no one really enjoys the Feed, they watch because it’s less horrific than silence. But that balance has almost tipped for the short man. Sometimes, when the noises get too loud and the images too frenzied, he considers getting up. He considers walking outside to see what everyone’s doing—his neighborhood has been busy lately. He even considers talking to some of these people who are standing around him in his house, wandering from room to room or just sitting next to him. But so far, the best he’s managed is to close his eyes.
His eyes have been closed for about an hour when he hears a stirring around him. He opens them and sees that he has more guests. People are coming in from the street, crowding into his living room until there’s only room to stand. For an instant, he imagines drinks in their hands, music on the stereo, laughter, joy—a party!—and his blank face warms with a smile. Then the image fades. He does not know these people. They do not know each other. So why are they all together?
He looks at the TV.
Something is different.
Instead of the glossy stock footage of the classic Feed or the garish intensity of Axiom ads, there is a grainy, poorly lit shot of a tall man in a cavernous room. The man stares into the camera, and the shot holds on his face. It doesn’t cut between five different angles or zoom in and out or insert bursts of music and sound effects. It just watches his bruised, bloody, trembling face.
The short man realizes he knows this person. The tall man was his neighbor. So was the short girl standing next to him. He remembers them sitting on the floor in front of his chair and talking to him. Introducing themselves. Their names were…
The short man’s eyes widen. Does he actually remember their names?
One was…Julie.
The other, just a strange sound…Arr.
And they asked him his name. And he said…
“B.”