Warm Bodies Read Online Free PDF Page B

comprehend this curdled mercy.
    ‘Why me?’ she demands, blinking an angry tear out of her eye. ‘Why did you save me ?’ She twists her back to me and curls up on the chair, wrapping her arms around her shoulders. ‘Out of everyone . . .’ she mumbles into the cushion. ‘Why me.’
    These are her first questions. Not the ones urgent for her own well-being, not the mystery of how I know her name or the terrifying prospect of what my plans for her might be; she doesn’t rush to satisfy those hungers. Her first questions are for others. For her friends, for her lover, wondering why she couldn’t take their place.
    I am the lowest thing. I am the bottom of the universe.
    I drop the photo onto the seat and look at the floor. ‘I’m . . . sorry,’ I say again, and leave the plane.
    When I emerge from the boarding tunnel, there are several Dead grouped near the doorway. They watch me without expressions. We stand there in silence, still as statues. Then I brush past them and wander off into the dark halls.
     

    The cracked pavement rumbles under our truck’s tyres. It abuses the old Ford’s creaky suspension, making a quiet roar like stifled rage. I look at my dad. He looks older than I remember. Weaker. He grips the steering wheel hard. His knuckles are white.
    ‘Dad?’ I say.
    ‘What, Perry.’
    ‘Where are we going to go?’
    ‘Someplace safe.’
    I watch him carefully. ‘Are there still safe places?’
    He hesitates, too long. ‘Someplace safer.’
    Behind us, in the valley where we used to swim and pick strawberries, eat pizza and go to movies, the valley where I was born and grew up and discovered everything that’s now inside me, plumes of smoke rise. The gas station where I bought Coke Slushies is on fire. The windows of my grade school are shattered. The kids in the public swimming pool are not swimming.
    ‘Dad?’ I say.
    ‘What.’
    ‘Is Mom coming back?’
    My dad finally looks at me, but says nothing.
    ‘As one of them?’
    He looks back at the road. ‘No.’
    ‘But I thought she would. I thought everyone comes back now.’
    ‘Perry,’ my dad says, and the word seems to barely escape his throat. ‘I fixed it. So she won’t.’
    The hard lines in his face fascinate and repel me. My voice cracks. ‘Why, Dad?’
    ‘Because she’s gone. No one comes back. Not really. Do you understand that?’
    The scrub brush and barren hills ahead start to blur in my vision. I try to focus on the windshield itself, the crushed bugs and tiny fractures. Those blur, too.
    ‘Just remember her,’ my dad says. ‘As much as you can, for as long as you can. That’s how she comes back. We make her live. Not some ridiculous curse.’
    I watch his face, trying to read the truth in his squinted eyes. I’ve never heard him talk like this.
    ‘Bodies are just meat,’ he says. ‘The part of her that matters most . . . we get to keep that.’
    ‘Julie.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Come here. Look at this.’
    The wind makes a ripping sound through the shattered plate glass of the hospital we’re salvaging. Julie steps to the window’s edge with me and looks down.
    ‘What’s it doing?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    On the snow-dusted street below, a single zombie walks in a loose circle. It bumps into a car and stumbles, slowly backs up against a wall, turns, shuffles in another direction. It makes no sound and doesn’t seem to be looking at anything. Julie and I watch it for a few minutes.
    ‘I don’t like this,’ she says.
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘It’s . . . sad.’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘What’s wrong with it?’
    ‘Don’t know.’
    It stops in the middle of the street, swaying slightly. Its face displays absolutely nothing. Just skin stretched over a skull.
    ‘I wonder how it feels,’ she says.
    ‘What?’
    ‘To be like them.’
    I watch the zombie. It starts swaying a little harder, then it collapses. It lies there on its side, staring at the frozen pavement.
    ‘What’s it . . . ?’ Julie starts, then stops. She