Nora slides the rear window open. “Pull over. We’re coming inside.”
“I don’t like our distance yet,” Abram says without taking his eyes off the road. “Hold on a couple more miles.”
“Hey. We’re in the Dead part of town. I feel like shark chum back here. Pull over.”
He drives a couple more blocks, then pulls into a parking garage entrance. I see him listening carefully as we climb out of the truck, and I wonder what he’s more afraid to hear: the hungry groans of my people or the propeller drones of his?
Julie hops into the passenger seat without pausing to consider legroom issues. “So,” she says, peering intently at Abram as Nora and I fold our long limbs into the barely-there backseat. “Are you ready for that chat?”
Abram lets out a slow breath. “Everybody buckled in?”
Nora’s knees are pressed into her chest. Mine are against my chin.
“We’re certainly not going anywhere if we crash,” Nora says.
Abram pulls out of the garage and heads south toward the freeway, weaving steadily through the rough terrain of vehicular debris. The rain pelts the windshield in fat, splattering drops.
“Perry didn’t have a brother,” Julie says.
“He wouldn’t remember me much. He was only five when he saw me last, and our mother never liked to talk about people we’d lost. Said we should stay in the present.” He smirks. “Very convenient philosophy when you misplace a son.”
Julie hesitates. “What happened?”
“The usual. Monsters attack, people die, families get separated. I wandered around on my own for a while, tried to find them, then Axiom picked me up. The old Axiom, back when they were just your standard corporate militia trying to carve out a market.”
I lean forward. “What are they now?”
He looks annoyed by the question. “Something different.”
“Are they human?”
He shoots me a glance that says I’ve secured my status as an idiot. “What the fuck else would they be?”
Julie tries to steer us back on course. “So you grew up with them? In their custody?”
He hesitates, then chuckles and turns back to the road. “I guess you could say that. Feral child raised by wolves.”
“So why’d you turn on them?” Nora says, folding her arms. “Why are you helping us?”
Ahead, one of the city’s many stacks of flattened cars has tipped over, blocking the road. Abram engages the four-wheel drive and guides the truck over a pile of two-dimensional coupes, crushed like beer cans for a recycling day that will never come.
“The short answer is, I thought I’d found my family.” The wipers clear the windshield and then the rain covers it. The world flashes from soft blur to hideous clarity and back again. “I’d picked up some clues over the years that pointed toward Cascadia, so when I heard we were moving on Post, I requested the assignment. I knew it was a long shot, even with free access to hundreds of prisoners—sorry, I mean guests—and after a few days I was about to let it drop. But then this guy . . .” He jabs a thumb toward me. “This guy says his name. Looks right at me and says ‘Perry.’?”
The truck falls into grim silence.
“Don’t worry,” he adds, “I know he’s dead.”
“How?” Julie says in a small voice.
“Would my face have sent you into shock if he was alive? The message was pretty clear.”
More silence. I brace myself for him to ask the terrible question: How did he die? But for the moment, he spares me.
“I assume my parents are dead too,” he says, staring through the windshield.
Julie nods.
Abram’s lips are a thin line. “So it’s down to me.”
We have ascended the hill up to the freeway and Citi Stadium is now visible on the horizon behind us. I watch it recede in the rear window, fading into a gray mirage behind sheets of rain.
“What’s the long answer?” Nora says.
Abram doesn’t reply.
“You betrayed Axiom and fucked up your life just to talk to someone who might know your brother?”
I watch his eyes in the mirror. They are familiar. Narrow-set and brown like Perry’s. But a few extra years have hardened them by centuries. “No,” he says, and takes a small, unmarked exit down into a wooded valley.
? ? ?
The street is buried in a thick layer of rotting leaves. The headlights slide across decrepit houses with boarded windows and gutted cars sinking into the rising grass, the kind of homes that probably looked like this even before the apocalypse.
“Where are we going?” Julie asks.
“That’s enough questions for a while,” Abram says.
At the end of the street, past a dead-end sign riddled with bullet holes, there are signs of life. Men in beige jackets move through the dark in the pale glow of headlamps on low settings.
“Are those—”
“I said shut up.”
“Hey,” I interject, leaning forward, but the gesture feels perfunctory. Julie looks at the side of Abram’s face with a kind of injured dismay. No, this is not the boy she once loved. Not even an echo of him.