Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
Might even merge with them—under some circumstances.
Whitlow had seen that happen 634 years ago, in Grenada. Had conditions worked out, had he—masquerading as a Jewish dealer in antiquities—managed then to capture his chosen prey, there would have been no need for all these subsequent centuries.
The mummer called Sepulcher was one of his, and had alerted him to the existence of a Shifter named Jack, whereabouts otherwise uncertain. That was Glaucous’s prey.
And now, another scout was telling tales. Six blocks east, the thin, angular woman named Florinda stood in the shadow of an awning over the entrance to a small bookstore. She was speaking with a plump older woman with white hair and a round, finely wrinkled smoker’s face. Florinda sensed Whitlow’s approach and craned her head until her neck corded like rope. Her eyes opened wide, startled, expectant. As Whitlow and Florinda spoke, the white-haired old woman mumbled and stared blankly at the street. Afterward, Whitlow paid Florinda in her most desired coin.
And that night, as she lay beneath a freeway overpass, drifting in and out of drugged sleep—rain pattering on her blue tarp, and the first few, distant flashes of lightning picking out her sweet, cooling, smoothing face—she slipped free of all this world’s lines and binding threads. In his tiny studio apartment, Whitlow pushed back his head, closed his eyes, and smiled as if at a beautiful passage of music, waiting for the storm to gather strength and take a shape—a familiar, feminine shape.
Only days until the end.
And always the unanswered question: Why do our giants bother with such tiny grains? We swirl all pointless and ignorant in the great wet surge of worlds.
Why care at all?
CHAPTER 32
Queen Anne
Jack sat in the dark at the small kitchen table, warm cup of tea in hand, but tea this early morning provided no comfort. Burke was late; maybe he had hooked up with his waitstaff friends and gone clubbing.
Except for a heavy rain and flashes of lightning to the south, quiet. He looked at the clock on the stove. TwoA.M .
Burke kept a phone under a pillow behind the couch. He often slept through the day but was superstitious about turning off the ringer; hence, the pillow.
Jack fingered the piece of newsprint. The 206 prefix would be a local call. No additional charges on Burke’s precious phone. The worst that could happen, he might connect with a lonely crank and they would compare the dismal weather and their boring nightmares. That in itself might not be a bad thing—a sympathetic ear.
He reached under the couch to remove the pillow and retrieve the phone. The answering machine mounted beside the cradle blinked red: forty old messages and two new ones. Burke was superstitious about erasing old messages. The first new message was from someone named Kylie at the Herb Farm. The second was from Ellen.
“This is for Jack. My apologies. That was a bad start. I thought it would be fun to talk things over with the girls. Your exit was impressive. Could you do it again—on cue?” She sighed. “I found the newspaper, Jack. This must be a difficult time for you. Don’t be rash. Please. Call me immediately. Whatever you do, do not—”
The machine beeped, its memory full. He touched the box in his pocket. Three numbers to choose from. Harborview, the classified ad—or Ellen. More out of embarrassment than anger, he did not want to speak to Ellen now. He stared at the western corner of the living room. Two walls meet the ceiling. Three lines make a corner. Push the corner out like a rope, to infinity…twist all the lines together…much stronger.
Which path, which consequence?
Now you’re just being irrational. Make up your mind.
He jerked as if someone had puffed into his ear.
Get it over with. There’s work to do, and either you’re going to help or you’re not. Just dosomething.
He picked up the phone and dialed the first number that came to his fingers. Naturally enough, it was the number in the ad—and he was calling a complete stranger at two in the morning. Somehow it felt right—a sweet pathway.All would be well. It was picked up at the other end before the first ring had finished. “City desk,” a husky voice said.
“Journal of Oneiric Fancies.”
“Is this the number to call…about dreams?”
“Does it sound like it is?”
“I have the wrong number—I’m sorry.”
“Explain yourself. It’s still early.”
“I need to know about the Kalpa,” he said. He sucked in his breath and masked the mouthpiece with his hand, startled by that word—that place.
“Name and address, please.” The voice was raspy, confident—not a bit sleepy.
“Beg pardon?”
“You asked about the Kalpa,” the voice said.
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“Are there lapses? Lost moments?”
“I think so.”
“How often do your dreams occur, where and when—petty details.”
“I’ve seen a doctor—”
“No doctors. I need details. My pen is poised.”
“Is this some sort of a business? Who are you?”
“My name is Maxwell Glaucous. My partner is Penelope Katesbury. We answer calls and sometimes we answer questions. Time is short. Now…your name and call number, please.”
“My name is Jack. My phone number—”
“I have that. A call numberis what I am after. You have been issued a call number, have you not?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know.”
“There issuch a number, you havesuch a number,” the voice said with certainty. “Go find it, then call again, I suggest sooner rather than later. If someone else should learn about your lapses, it might not go well for you. We can help, however.”
“Do you know what’s wrong with me? Is it serious?”
“Certainly it’s serious. But there’s nothing wrong. It’s a marvel. You are blessed. Find your number and call us back.”
“Where would I look?”
“You have hosted a visitor. Look in his effects—whatever he’s left behind.” Glaucous coughed and hung up.
Jack sat for a moment, face red, both angry and curious—then walked on quivering legs to his small bedroom and pulled back the trunk.
The folio was gone. He stared in astonishment, then ransacked the room, looking under the bed, pulling back the sheets, the mattress, returning to the trunk. Nothing.
He felt in the shadows behind the trunk. His fingers swept out a small hexagonal piece of paper. He picked it up. The hexagon had been intricately folded, like origami or one of those mathematical puzzles kids learned how to make in school. It was clever, so tight he could not pry it open far enough to peer in. No loose bits. As far as he could tell, all the corners and edges met inside. You’d have to have very clever fingers indeed to fold a piece of paper that way.
“Stop it!” Jack shouted to the room’s still air. He squeezed the folded paper between his fingers from two opposite sides, then from another angle—trying all combinations to get it to pop open, to flower. Nothing. Then, tentatively:
They want a call number. The catalog number of your special volume. Whatever you do, don’t give that to them, under any circumstance.
“Why not?”
No answer.
“To hell with you.” He felt a growing pressure in the air, fogging his thoughts. Jack looked up. Someone was climbing the stairs. Footsteps outside—heavy thumps. He hoped it was Burke—someone to talk to. So much had happened today. The pressure increased. His head began to hurt. Anything to make it stop. The rain and wind blew harder.
The thumps slowed to the pace of an older person—a cautious person—not Burke, who was quick and athletic. Jack suddenly wanted to be anywhere but where he was. Then the sensation passed, painted over by another wave of pervasive sweetness. All would be well…
Across the curtains in the living room window, something big cast a shadow. The big shadow passed and a smaller shadow replaced it: short, broad, like a gnome.
A heavy fist slammed on the door, rattling the frame and the wall and shivering the curtains.
“It’s Glaucous, dear boy,” cried a rough voice—the same voice that had answered the phone. “I’ve brought my lady to meet you. Let’s find that number, shall we?” The fist slammed again and the voice added in an amused undertone, “Easy, dear.”
CHAPTER 33
The Green Warehouse
Ginny paced in front of the thick steel door. She laid her ear flat against the cold, thick-painted metal, listening to voices on the other side. Murmurs…rising and falling pitches, several women speaking with Bidewell.
She made out only a few phrases. “…all here. Gathered…” Then, Bidewell, “The girl doesn’t have it with her…” And another, deeper female voice, “Pawnshops, the usual…”
Ginny drew her brows together, then twisted her neck to look up. A thin blue-gray light seeped from the skylight into her makeshift living quarters, pressed between stacks of crates and cardboard boxes, all filled with books. Big drops of rain blundered with dull tunksagainst the wired glass in the high arched panes. A storm was gathering. She could feel the electricity, the moisture in the air. Two bolts of lightning struck nearby, flashing violet. An instant later thunderclaps shuddered the old warehouse and echoed from far skyscrapers.
She appraised the rumpled bedding on her cot, the chipped antique bureau pulled into place at the cot’s foot. This part of the warehouse was large, dusty, drafty.
Once, she had enjoyed rain, even thunderstorms; not now. But the storm wasn’t hunting her—not this time. The warehouse was protecting her.
No, this storm was after someone like her, someone else who had read an ad or seen a billboard alongside a highway and was about to make the mistake of his or her life—and Ginny thought she knew whom: the young man on the bicycle at the Busker Jam. She wanted desperately to warn him, find out what he knew. There wasn’t much time left for him, for her, for anyone. The storm was here.
All of us—cut loose and bumping into the end.
That image made her suck in her breath with a sad hiccup.
For a few moments she paced before the door, biting her thumbnail. All her nails had been chewed to the quick. Her mother had once told Virginia she would have pretty hands, if only she would stop chewing on them. Quickly bored with chewing, she twisted a strand of hair until it draped in an elongated ringlet over her nose.
Enough.
She lifted her fist to the huge sliding door. Before she could strike the first blow, the door groaned, then pulled aside wide enough for Bidewell to shove through a scrawny arm. With an emphatic grunt, he heaved the door back on its track until it bumped against a rubber stop. All the while, he carried on his former conversation. “We shall use the century rooms, I think. I’ve kept them empty and ready. If you’re sure you can find them all.”
In Bidewell’s private library, in the rear half of the warehouse, three women sat in high-backed reading chairs. White lightning flashed through a tall window covered with steel bars, carving brilliance on the ceiling-high shelves.
“We’ll find them,” one woman answered.
All the women were older than Ginny by three or more decades. One had short brown hair and green eyes and wore a long green coat and brown skirt; she had answered Bidewell. Ginny turned to examine the second woman, with long red hair and a pretty, round face. Though her gray eyes seemed confident, she picked at a brass button on her denim jacket and smoothed her cut velvet dress. Ginny’s heels scuffed on the old wooden floor as she faced the third woman. This one, dressed all in purple, a rich green scarf draped over her shoulders, was stout and older than all but Bidewell, and her eyes were bold and black. Ginny did not like the way this woman assessed her: unrolled, weighed, measured, ready to snip off a length.
She was not sure she liked anyof them.
Bidewell smiled, revealing strong teeth like mottled bone tiles. “Would you please join our group, Miss Virginia Carol?” he asked. “A little premature, perhaps. Dr. Sangloss is not yet here.”
Ginny remembered the doctor who treated her at the clinic, who told her about Bidewell and the green warehouse. Nothing surprised her now.
The pawnshop—her stone.
The women regarded her with wary curiosity, awaiting her reaction. I might bite. Who are they?
Another rumble of thunder.
The woman with the green coat got to her feet and extended her hand. “My name is Ellen,” she said. Ginny held back, but the woman advanced. Given no polite option, Ginny relented and shook with her. Ellen then introduced the redhead, whose name was Agazutta.
The stout woman with the appraising look was Farrah. She said, “The storm is just getting started, Virginia. This time, it’s not after you—not yet.”
“I know that,” Ginny said.
The stout woman continued. “We have an hour at most. We should have made our move sooner.”
“I’ve been slow, it’s true,” Bidewell confessed. “A little tired of late. Forgive me. We need you, Virginia, because none of us is a fate-shifter.”
“What’s a fate-shifter?” Ginny asked, and then it dawned on her. Her mouth opened. Her eyes narrowed. Suddenly, she was more than suspicious—she was frightened. She had never told anyone, for fear of losing that which she wasn’t even sure she had—and now others knew. That either made it real, a confirmation of years of frightened dreams and desperate hopes, or a shared delusion. A roomful of crazies, just like her.
Introductions over, Ellen held up a plastic bag and pulled out a crumpled tabloid, the Seattle Weekly.“I found this in my recycling bin,” she explained, and opened the paper on the wooden table to the classifieds. A small section had been torn out, about the size of one or two personals. “Virginia might know what it means.”
Ginny turned away, face red.
“No need to be frightened or ashamed,” Bidewell said.
“Of course not. Where isMiriam?” Agazutta asked, looking to the wooden door at the other end of the room.
Farrah continued to stare at Ginny, patient, implacable. Measuring. “The girl knows,” she said softly.
“She’s been there—and escaped.”
Ginny glared at her, then the others, helpless, defiant, like a deer surrounded by tigers. As if on cue, Minimus leaped onto the table and sat by the paper. He lifted a white paw and scratched madly at the tabloid, shredding it.
“There is the question these hunters always ask as they lure their young prey into a trap,” Bidewell said.
“Someone is about to answer.”
“A young man named Jack,” Ellen said. “Another like you, Virginia. A fate-shifter.”
“‘Do you dream of a city at the end of time?’” Ginny whispered.
“We know,” Farrah said. “Our time’s shorter than we thought. What can we do?”
The wooden door at the far end of the library opened and Miriam Sangloss entered. “Finally,” Agazutta said.
“Apologies.” Beneath a dripping brown slicker, Sangloss wore a short white lab coat, blue blouse, and jeans. Under her left arm she carried a black leatherette folio. “Sorry I’m late.” She removed her slicker and looked around the room, sensing the tension, then grimaced and added, in an aside to Ginny, “Glad to know somepeople take my advice.”
Bidewell cleared a space on the table, pushing the shredded tabloid into a wastebasket. Sangloss laid down the folio and untied it. “I’m now a burglar,” she said, and explained how she had just ransacked a young man’s apartment in the Queen Anne neighborhood. “I got the address from his clinic record. I found this, but couldn’t find his sum-runner. He must have it with him.”
Again, Ginny blinked in surprise.
“They’ve collected him and his stone,” the redhead, Agazutta, said, and slapped her hand on the top of a chair.
“Perhaps not yet,” Miriam said. “But soon. He’s a very confused young man.”
“No more confused than the rest of us,” Farrah said.
The rain hissed on the roof. Minimus looked up, pupils round and deep. Bidewell turned to Ginny. “You should not be afraid of us, Miss Carol. We preserve and protect. The ones on the other end of that ad…” He shook his head. “They’re the monsters.”
“Now that that’sclear,” Miriam said, “let me show you what I found in Jack’s apartment.” She opened the folio and laid a short stack of sketched pages before Ginny. The topmost had been executed in watercolor, crayon, and dark pencil, with daubs and sweeps of pastel color. “Anything look familiar?”
Against her will, Ginny angled her head and looked down at the first drawing. Tiadba. The word—a name—just popped into her head. Remembering was difficult. My visitor…Tiadba has seen these. They look like ships surging into a heavy sea. They must be huge, all three of them…whatever they are. And now she’s sorry she ever left their protection.
“That’s a yes?” Miriam asked, eyes bright. She flipped to the next sheet. Ginny covered her mouth and looked away.
What had been sketched there, with crude skill and determination, was the last thing she would ever hope to see. A huge head rising on a weird scaffold over a rolling black land—tiny, fleeing figures giving it perspective. The head was big as a mountain, its one round, dead eye fixed on a distant point, stabbing a sharp gray beam through smoke and fog. A moan seized in her throat and turned into a fit of coughing. The Witness.
“Poor child,” said Farrah. “Get her some water, Conan.”
“I’m sorry,” Miriam said. “It does look grim, doesn’t it? I wish we could put all the pieces together. We’ve never actually seen these things.”
“Neither have I,” Ginny said. “Not personally…I mean.”
“In dreams,” Bidewell said. “Have you met the young man who drew these?”
Ginny shook her head. “Is he the one they’re collecting?”
“Let’s hope not,” Miriam said. “Ladies…”
They all stood.
“We need you to come with us,” Ellen told Ginny. “Conan will stay here, as always.”
“I have no choice,” Bidewell said.
“Where?” Ginny asked, glancing between them.
“We’ll follow the storm,” Miriam said. “Track the lightning. It’s going to get worse, and nobody knows what this young man will do. If he’s as talented as you, he might just survive until morning. Oh, and one more thing.” The doctor reached into her lab coat pocket and pulled out a package wrapped in brown paper. “I found this in a shop near the clinic. Paid quite a lot to convince the pawnbroker to part with it.”
CHAPTER 34
Jack’s thoughts fluttered like a bird in a net. Less than five minutes had passed since he’d made the call. He could climb off the balcony, swing to the porch below…run off down the alley. But a sugary warmth stopped him.
On the other side of the door: friends, thick and sweet as treacle. No need to flee, no need to fear. His feet would not move. Every path equal. Every outcome a good one.
“We are here!” Glaucous cried. “You called, and we are here to give you the answers you need.” Then, almost inaudibly, “I’m afraid I’ve stunned him. You may force entry, my dear.”
Even after the third heavy bang on the door—as if a concrete block were about to shiver the poor wood to splinters—Jack could feel excellent conclusions everywhere.
He recovered enough to step back. The fourth slam bent the door like a piece of cardboard and blew it from its hinges, twirling the jamb’s jagged splinter on a bent dead bolt. Wind blew into the living room. Somewhere, Jack’s rats squeaked. Despite the noise, the rush of wind, and the drops of rain, Jack did not feel afraid; his feet might as well have been glued to the thin carpet. A short, taut, bulky man in gray tweed entered and removed his flat cap with thick, ruddy fingers. His face was flat and pink as a doll’s, a hideous doll—and his eyes, small and efficient, swept the apartment and Jack with a minimum of motion. His instant smile was toothy and broad, like a Toby mug. He radiated sincerity and human kindness. “Good evening,” he insisted. His presence commanded respect—demanded cheer.
“Hello,” Jack said.
Through the frame of the broken door he saw a shadow loom, a heavy arm draw back, and at the end of the arm, an impossible hand—the hand of a comic book hero or villain, square-knuckled, fingers flexing with power and pain. The shadow drew into the light: a woman, very large. She rose up forever. Her face was the white of packed ice or bone china. Raindrops fell along the curves and dips of her whiteness, down to the tip of her blunt, large nose, where nostrils opened like black manholes. Her eyes opened to central, cataract blankness. A quick smile on her thick, greenish lips, glittering with moisture, revealed small, precisely socketed teeth. A scut of hair splayed out beneath her flat, ludicrous hat like dead gray moss.
The rats shrieked like terrified children. Both Glaucous and his companion had to be imaginary, Jack was certain. They had to be symptoms of the final and fatal dropping of all his marbles.
“Shall we come in?” Glaucous asked, though he was already through the opening. Jack used all his will to back off another step. He could almost hear the awful sweet glue pulling up beneath his soles.
The huge woman stooped to pass through.
“This is my partner,” Glaucous said. “Her name is Penelope.”
Jack sucked in his breath and half twisted, but the gnome’s sorrowful disappointment held him. Things seemed to fall into place; gusts of air, flits of dust, turns of tiny events conspired to hold him steady. That was interesting. That interested Jack no end.
Glaucous turned to say something more to his partner.
Jack unexpectedly broke loose. Momentarily free of the glue, nothing could have prepared him for the dread the pair exhaled, like the halves of a hideous bellows; they wheezed out terror. Without a thought, he dashed between world-lines, intruding on other selves—an unnoticed melding of ghost-soul upon ghost.
Yet something reached through and snaggedhim.
Glaucous pulled the adjacent world-lines in towardhis own—changed circumstance directly rather than fleeing it. Jack had never heard of such a thing—but then, he was young. He focused on the man’s power, his skill, trying to feel his way through to any possibility of shaking loose again. Glaucous was strong, but Jack was stronger at exploring all the available paths, despite the spreading treacle. He would not be held, even by these two; he would not be pinned.
Glaucous lowered his gaze. “You want to escape, but all ways seem good. Which way to turn? I am a happy fellow. All ways seem sweet to me—and thus, to you.” He flicked a round shoulder at his companion. “Penelope, he is not convinced. He wishes to leave us. Convince him.”
The large woman tilted her head back on her short neck and shrugged open her long brown raincoat, let it slide off. Her broad bare shoulders shone moist and dimpled like sweating dough. Jack could not look away.
Beneath the coat she wore no clothes, yet she was not naked. Dark masses covered her lumpish modesty. Her body was swathed in crawling clots of wasps—yellow jackets, thousands of them breaking and rippling in slow waves across her flaccid flesh, draped in buzzing shreds around knees and ankles, a living gown.
The one real horror of Jack’s existence, the one fate he could not elude: a swarm of angry, stinging insects. He had learned painfully that insect colonies and hives drew their own snarled road maps of fate, thousands of individual world-lines tangled like overcooked spaghetti, knots of furious determination. Wasps, bees, even ants—could fan out and block his decisions, mire his movement from strand to strand among the world’s infinite fates.
Wasps had helped teach him the limits of his talent, and had also sensitized him to their venom: one more sting would be enough.
They know what I am!
The wasps rose like black mist, evaporating from the woman’s body, zipping around the room. Revealed, Penelope was a stack of lumps, rolling heaves set upon legs like trees. She was not shy; her vacant smile did not change as wasps filled the apartment.
There was no way he could escape all the swooping, darting insects.
“Penelope, dear, let us do what we do best,” said Glaucous. “Let us help this poor young man.”
For a creature of her size, Penelope was swift, but Glaucous was even swifter. The room filled with grabbing hands and buzzing wings, small, hard, striped abdomens thrusting long stingers, faceted black eyes searching and hating until insects and humans seemed to become one. A noise like giant cards being shuffled, slapping, slamming, snappinginto place. Jack moved.
Before Glaucous could grab him with his outsized hands, Jack came unstuck from the treacle and dread and jumped across hundreds, thousands, of fates, whole cords of fates at once, the greatest effort he had ever made, greater by far than the effort in Ellen’s house—just to escape those awful stingers. Glaucous stared down at the young man lying limp on the floor, and a fissure of doubt appeared in his squat, craggy features. He remembered how wretched and disheveled the old crookback’s dying birds had looked as he tossed them into the road one by one for the rats to gnaw.
“Has he fled?” Glaucous asked, bending over the body.
“He’s right there,” Penelope observed, waving a huge hand on which wasps still crawled. Glaucous regarded Jack doubtfully. Jack’s eyes opened wide, filled with empty terror. Glaucous reached down and felt the boy’s pockets. In the light jacket—a piece of folded paper. He reached in. A shock tingled up his arm and made his teeth clack. As his hand withdrew, the paper came with it.
No need for Whitlow to confirm they had the correct prey. But he did not dare remove the box. Stone and quarry must be delivered together.
CHAPTER 35
The first far strand Jack reached shocked him nearly senseless. Seattle was being rocked by an enormous earthquake. He moved off that path with hardly time to feel the uplifting slam and careened through a flash-blur kaleidoscope of alternatives until the colors dulled and the flickering slowed and he hammered up against something he had never experienced—not that he had experienced anyof this before: a barricade or glassy membrane. For an instant he could almost see through it—but something pulled him back, protecting—restraining.
What lay beyond that membrane was worse than where he was, and where he was…
His flight stopped. He was stunned—he needed time to recover. No world-line had ever been like this. It felt dead.At the first breath, soot and ashes seemed to fill his nose and lungs. The apartment building he and Burke had once called home had not changed in size and shape, but all vitality had been sucked from its walls and timbers. A sick unsure light fell through the broken window. Paint dropped in slow flakes from cracked wall-board. The moisture in the air did not refresh his parched throat; it seemed to burn like a mist of acid. Off balance, he kicked out one leg—and stepped on a carpet of steel syringes, hundreds scattered over the floor.
Something moved in the corner of his eye and he spun about, crunching needles—this Jack wore thick-soled boots. He saw no one, nothing alive. The rooms were empty, silent but for the patter of falling flakes of paint. He lifted his bare forearms and held them close, unbelieving—flesh pricked by needle tracks, scabbed over, painful.
Wherever he was, he was sure he had eluded Glaucous and his giant, doughy partner. But that did not encourage him. He had had a knack lately of going too far afield, of shifting not just his immediate fate, but the qualityof his intended world.
He had, for example, fled from Ellen—and ended up on the line where he felt compelled to dial the phone number in the newspaper ad, without sensing the downside. Not a good plan, not a good circumstance.
And now his fate had just turned much worse.
One requirement of his crazy ability—or symptom of his neurotic imaginings of power and control—had always been the conviction that he could tellwhen things were going to get worse, before they did. Without that precognition, his jumps would be random—of no value at all. Yet now he could detect nothing worse than where he already was—except what lay in wait behind the hard, translucent barricade: corruption itself, a festering discontent mixed with…what?
Emptiness?
“Anybody home?” he called, his voice a croak. “Burke?”
Small things scuttled in what had once been his bedroom. His rats? He crossed gingerly over the warped floor, scuffing through a tinkling scatter, crunching and breaking needles with a sound like falling icicles. Peered around the corner.
In the small room squatted the trunk that had been with him since the death of his father. The trunk where he kept his most valued possessions. Behind which he had found the folio. He touched his torn pocket. The box—still there.
Checking the solidity of the floor with a tapping boot, applying half his weight, then full pressure, he crossed the bedroom. The trunk’s boards had warped. He lifted the lid. The trunk was empty except for a gray, slushy film.
He let the lid fall and backed out of the room. On the back porch, Jack pushed open the sliding door—broken glass lined the frame—and stepped out. Across the street, all the buildings had collapsed into piles of gray and brown rubble from which beams and boards pointed up like dead fingers. Muddy water streamed down the gutters and over the cracked and heaved asphalt, pooling and swirling in the dips as if there had been a heavy rain and the drains were clogged. A dead-end place in a dead-end time. No hope as far as he could see, no life…and for how long? How long had this world been dead? Hours?
Years?
By the looks, the smell, it had never been truly alive.
Wherever and whatever it touches, it takes hold. You’ve seen it before. You will see it again…
Everywhere he stepped, in every room, needles had been carelessly cast aside. He pulled up the sleeve of the filthy jacket and stared again at the puncture marks. A fresh one oozed a serum-yellow drop. Jack could feel the drugs cloud his mind. He fought the lethargy, the hateful, bitter satisfaction of having just scored—and listened to the noises outside: wind, rain, water, the underlying rasp of falling dust and debris. The very air smelled sour as old vomit. How could anything live here? He needed to find a way down the stairs, away from this comatose neighborhood, across the city—maybe this was just a local phenomenon, an unfortunate slum.
