Warm Bodies (Warm Bodies, #1)

by Isaac Marion

Our wild bodies have finally been tamed.

Jets lie motionless on the concrete like beached whales, white and monumental. Moby Dick, conquered at last.

I am the lowest thing. I am the bottom of the universe.

I sigh inside, so exhausted by these ugly questions, but when did a monster ever deserve its privacy?

“How can you change? If we all start from the same blank slate, what makes you diverge?” “Maybe we’re not blank. Maybe the debris of our old lives still shapes us.”

Nora scribbles homework notes for about an hour, then clicks off the lamp and starts snoring like a small, delicate chain saw.

I want the pain of knowing them, and by extension myself: who and what I really am. Maybe with that scalpel, red-hot and sterilized in tears, I can begin to carve out the rot inside me.

I am alive.

I don’t want to hear music, I don’t want the sunrise to be pink. The world is a liar. Its ugliness is overwhelming; the scraps of beauty make it worse.

I just look at her, resting my chin in my hand, my elbow on the bar, smiling. Contentment. Is this what it might feel like?

Have you met him yet, Perry? Is he alive and well? Tell me he’s not just the mouth of the sky. Tell me there’s more looking down on us than that empty blue skull.

Grigio grits his teeth. “You are a dreamer. You are a child. You are your mother.”

Something unknown to us, something we’ve never seen. Memory can’t overtake the present; history has its limits. Are we all just Dark Age doctors, swearing by our leeches? We crave a greater science. We want to be proven wrong.

You dreamers. You ridiculous children. You dancing grinning fuckups. Here is your bright future. Your earnest, saccharine hope. How does it taste dripping from the neck of everyone you love?

I look into Julie’s face. Not just at it, but into it. Every pore, every freckle, every faint gossamer hair. And then the layers beneath them. The flesh and bones, the blood and brain, all the way down to the unknowable energy that swirls in her core, the life force, the soul, the fiery will that makes her more than meat, coursing through every cell and binding them together in millions to form her. Who is she, this girl? What is she? She is everything. Her body contains the history of life, remembered in chemicals. Her mind contains the history of the universe, remembered in pain, in joy and sadness, hate and hope and bad habits, every thought of God, past-present-future, remembered, felt, and hoped for all at once.

I have no answer for her. But I look into her face, her pale cheeks, her red lips bright with life and tender as an infant’s, and I understand that I love her. And if she is everything, maybe that’s answer enough.

There’s a shiver in our legs, a tremor like the Earth speeding up, spinning off into uncharted orbits. Scary, isn’t it? But what wonderful thing didn’t start out scary?

“I’m Nora,” she says, tugging at her curls. “My name is Mm . . . arcus,” he says, his voice a velvety rumble. “And you’re . . . the most beautiful woman . . . I’ve ever seen.”

We will exhume ourselves. We will fight the curse and break it. We will cry and bleed and lust and love, and we will cure death. We will be the cure. Because we want it.