Bad Glass Page 36

  He turned back toward me. “That makes sense, right?” he pleaded. His brow crinkled down into a narrow chevron, and his eyes collapsed into slits.

  “I don’t know, Floyd,” I said, pulling him back a step. I urged him down the tunnel, back toward Charlie and Taylor. “I don’t know what’s possible in this place. But I know what’s healthy, and this,” I said, gesturing around the tunnel, “isn’t healthy. We have to get out of here. We have to find our way back up to the surface.”

  He gave me a brief nod, then turned and once again started forward.

  I stood there for a moment as he walked away, peering into the darkness behind us. There was nothing there. Nothing but dirt and rock.

  The tunnel ended at another basement.

  The basement in which we’d found Danny and his soldiers had been dark and damp, dingy concrete. This one was different. This one was brightly lit and clean, an underground hallway painted beige, with rows of flickering fluorescents in the ceiling. The floor was linoleum. There were mounds of dirt piled around the mouth of the tunnel, and a single line of footprints led the way down the corridor. Otherwise the floor was spotless, glossy clean, reflecting the overhead lights.

  We paused just outside the tunnel. I held my breath and listened. Except for the buzz of the fluorescents, the building was quiet. There was the smell of cleaning supplies in the air. Disinfectants, wax. I wondered who was keeping the floors so sparkling clean.

  Taylor cleared her throat and pointed to the wall, just outside the tunnel’s opening. There was a single word painted there, in faded red paint—UP—and an arrow pointing toward the ceiling. It was a small sampling, just two letters, but I was sure it was the Poet’s work. I could imagine her here, her face hidden behind that black leather mask, spray-painting those letters. Cobb Gilles would have been standing at her shoulder, watching, waiting, protecting. When? When had they been here?

  “They’ve got power,” Charlie said, stating the obvious. “Just like the research facility.” There was excitement in his voice. “The government must be keeping it running.”

  “Well, somebody’s keeping it running,” Floyd said. His voice was slurred slightly. When I turned to face him, he was tossing an empty pill bottle back through the mouth of the tunnel, back into the darkness. He still had that nervous smile on his lips. “Maybe just a generator. Somebody with their own purpose, their own vision. There’s plenty of shit in this city. It’s not just the government.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “Let’s just get the fuck out of here.”

  I started down the hallway, trying to avoid the footprints that were already there, smeared like black ink across the floor. They were abstract Rorschachs—I saw a butterfly there, a nuclear mushroom cloud, a crying face. Taylor, Charlie, and Floyd followed.

  After a moment, I heard Taylor’s voice behind me, tentative and quiet. “Is this the research building?” she asked. “It … it seems familiar.” Her voice sounded tortured and confused, as if she were drunk and straining to make sense of something just outside her realm of comprehension.

  I pulled to a stop. The hallway swam around me for a moment.

  “No,” Charlie said. Then, confused: “Or … fuck.”

  I turned. Charlie was standing in the middle of the hallway, spinning, confused, on his heel. He no longer had his shovel; he must have discarded it in the tunnel. “I mean, it was different, right?” he asked. “A different color? A different sound?” He raised his hand to his forehead and crinkled his brow, thinking, but struggling at it.

  I looked at the doors to my right: B24, B22. And on my left: B23, B21.

  “I don’t know, Charlie,” I said. “This place does look familiar, but I … I just don’t know.”

  I tried to remember that other place: the building, Devon, Charlie’s parents’ lab, the laser apparatus. It seemed so indistinct, like someone else’s photograph, viewed a long time ago, or maybe a video I’d seen on the Web, seen and then forgotten. And here, all we had was … what? I looked up—nothing but buzzing fluorescents above our heads—then back down the way we had come, toward the tunnel’s empty mouth. And still there was that single set of footprints on the floor behind us, just one, despite the passage of our muddy feet. Nothing had changed. The world remained static.

  Moving through this world without leaving footprints—that’s what we are, I thought. Nothing we do makes even the slightest impression. There’s nothing important we can ever really change.

  I couldn’t think, and it wasn’t just the drugs or my injured head. It was the world. It was this place.

  Charlie dropped his hand from his forehead, and his face widened with sudden surprise—a dawning moment of clarity—then he sprinted past me, down the corridor. After a moment, I got my feet unstuck from the floor and hurried to follow.

  At that point, I don’t know. In that place …

  There was a sound now at the far end of the corridor. Maybe it had been there all along and I just hadn’t noticed. But that seemed unlikely.

  Footsteps, echoing. A whir and a hum.

  Taylor caught up to me and grabbed my arm. I looked back at her worried face, but I didn’t stop running. “Don’t let him go,” she said as we continued to chase Charlie down the hallway. Her voice was pleading but confused. She was just as lost as I was, bogged down in this sea of incoherence, this maze of overwhelming impressions. Bright lights overhead. Hard and shiny floor. And the feeling that something was wrong, the feeling that we were completely, irrevocably lost.

  I shook my head. I don’t know why. I don’t know if I was trying to shake the cobwebs from my mind or if it was a response to Taylor’s request. And if so, what was I trying to say? No, I won’t let him go? No, I don’t understand? Or no, he’s gone and I can’t do a goddamned thing about it?

  Charlie reached B13 and, without slowing down, twisted the doorknob and bolted inside. Taylor and I reached the door a couple of seconds later. We nearly ran into Devon’s outstretched hand.

  Devon. He was standing there, just inside the threshold, blocking our way. There was a smile on his face; it was a self-righteous, victorious smile, and it filled me with dread. He knew too much. Here, in this city, no one knew enough to wear that kind of smile. His palm was up, keeping us out of the room, and he shook his head: No.

  I was about to press my way through, but Taylor let out a loud gasp, and her hand tightened on my forearm. I glanced down and saw her peering deeper into the room. I followed her eyes.

  Charlie was standing fifteen feet away, next to the laser apparatus. There were two other people in the room with him. I recognized his mother from the emailed picture. In that picture, she’d been scared and confused, peering back over her shoulder; there was absolutely none of that now. The man must have been his father. Charlie’s back was to us, but his parents were smiling. His father had a good grip on his son’s biceps, holding him at arm’s length and beaming with pride.

  As we watched, Charlie’s mother moved in and encompassed him in a tight hug. A second later, his father’s arms collapsed and they all pulled near. They stood like that for a time, clenched in a three-way embrace. Then Charlie’s shoulders began to shake gently.

  There was no sound in the room. Even the hum of the laser—still spitting out its bursts of bright green light—had gone silent.

  I once again moved to push Devon aside, but Taylor held me back. I glanced back down at her face. There was a smile on her lips, warm and heartfelt. “Give him this,” she whispered. “For a moment, at least.”

  So I grunted and rocked back on my heels. After a moment, watching this heartfelt reunion, I lifted the camera from my chest and started taking pictures. I felt like a voyeur—more so than usual—but I didn’t stop.

  Photograph. Undated. Charlie and his parents:

  Through the top half of an open door: three people huddled together in the middle of a brightly lit room.

  It is a man, a woman, and a teenager nearing the end of his adolescence. All three are
black—the man a lighter shade than the woman and the teen. The man and woman are dressed in light professional clothing. The teenager is decked out in a ragged ski jacket, dirty pants, and mud-spattered boots.

  The man’s face is the only one we can see—the teenager has his back to the camera; the woman’s face is buried against his shoulder. The man’s eyes are closed, and he is smiling warmly.

  They are standing next to an elaborate piece of lab equipment mounted atop a sawhorse. There’s speckled linoleum beneath their feet and a pair of computer monitors on a table at their side.

  A blurred figure stands in the foreground, just inside the door. On the left-hand side of the frame: a single eye—barely visible—and the corner of a smile. At the bottom of the frame: an arm, spanning the width of the threshold.

  The blurred figure is set firmly between the camera and the huddled group. It is an obstacle, separating the viewer from the subject.

  Finally, after standing in his parents’ embrace for nearly a minute, Charlie looked back at the door. There were tears on his face as he gave us a smile. But the smile didn’t last long. It quivered and broke, and his eyes slowly drew wide.

  Then Devon blocked our view. This infiltrator—government agent, demon, whatever—once again flashed that victorious grin. Then he stepped back into the room and slammed the door shut in our faces.

  Taylor jumped, startled at the sudden violent gesture. Her eyes sprang wide, and her hands bolted to the doorknob. She worked at it violently, but to no avail. It didn’t even rattle. She let out a horrified squawk, completely incoherent. I stepped up to her side and started pounding at the door. It was like hitting the side of a building; it didn’t even shake in its frame.

  “Charlie!” Taylor called. No answer. “Charlie!”

  After nearly half a minute, she let out a devastated sob and gave the knob one last upward heave. It didn’t move. Her hands slipped from the knob and flailed in the air for a moment, then she pressed them flat against the door’s surface. Dejected, burned through all of her determination and anger, she lowered her forehead against the immovable panel and let out a pathetic sob.

  “I let him go,” she said, her voice choked. She pressed her face up against the door, hiding it from sight. “I … we could have stopped him, but I let him go.”

  There was silence for a moment—I didn’t know what to say, I never knew what to say, not when it came to Taylor, not anymore—then a loud peal of laughter rang out at our backs. I turned. It was Floyd, standing in the middle of the corridor, braying like a moron.

  “Fuck, I … I’m sorry,” he said, trying to rein it in. He seemed confused and genuinely abashed at the inappropriate laughter. He managed to hold it in for a moment, then it burst forth once again. So shrill. So totally out of place.

  The laughter echoed in the empty hallway, filling the space like blood pooling into a deep wound.

  Up.

  We found the stairwell and started to make our way up, toward the street.

  There was no longer any light here. No overhead fluorescents, just the thin beams of our flashlights. Charlie’s parents’ lab had been one floor down in the research facility, but there was no door on the first landing here and no door on the second. I leaned out into the center of the stairwell and peered up toward the top of the shaft. There was a dim light up there, at least ten floors above our heads. The research facility hadn’t been that tall.

  As we climbed, the light from my flashlight revealed more words spray painted on the wall.

  First: IN ITS PLACE. And then, on the next landing, OUT, followed by an arrow curving up toward the top of the stairs. As soon as he saw the word and the arrow, Floyd let out another shrill laugh.

  “There is no out,” he whispered, the laugh still in his voice. “It’s just this, right? This place. And us. And the stuff that followed us in.”

  “That’s enough, Floyd,” I growled. “You’re not helping any.”

  He laughed again, and I grabbed his forearm. He jumped at my touch and pulled away. There was fear in his eyes. And confusion.

  On the next landing, we found a door. It was the first door since the basement, at least six landings down. The door was steel gray and smeared with grime—smoke grime, the exhaust of machines, layered thick and sticky against the metal. I opened it and found a hallway on the other side.

  The hallway was a foreign place. Not the research facility; I was sure of that. It was no place I’d ever been. To the left, doorways stretched down both sides of the corridor, each about fifteen feet apart. About half of the doors were open, spilling muted red light onto the waxed floor. There was the smell of antiseptic in the air and, underneath it, a pungent touch of sweat and decay. It was a thick smell. I could almost feel it gathering on my skin, like pollen or lacquer.

  Taylor stepped past me and let out a surprised breath. “It’s the hospital,” she said. “ICU.” It took me a moment to parse the initials, at first hearing them as out-of-place words: “I see you.”

  I turned to the right, and sure enough, there was a nurses’ station just down the corridor, and a line of rolling gurneys pressed up against the wall. There was a whiteboard posted behind the desk, listing room numbers, patient names, and ailments. 503, MARTIN HELDER, CIRRHOSIS—LIVER FAILURE. 504, EUNICE WEST, ANEURYSM—SHUNT. 505, PETER WILMORE, TRAUMA—FRACTURED PELVIS, RUPTURED SPLEEN, BROKEN LEG/ARM. 506, RICHARD SCALLEY …

  It went on and on, scrawled in messy mismatched ink. Patients who were no longer in their rooms—the hospital now empty, evacuated and populated by nothing but silence.

  I stepped toward the nurses’ station and then stopped.

  “Fifth floor,” Taylor said at my back. There was absolutely no emotion in her voice, just muted, disconcerting calm. “We could find a window and jump out. Like that soldier. Remember the soldier?”

  I nodded. I remembered the soldier. Flying through the hospital window, falling through the air, hitting the concrete parking lot and bouncing. Then rising up on injured legs and lurching forward mindlessly.

  “There’s got to be an exit,” I said, standing motionless in the middle of the corridor. My body felt heavy, exhausted, and I didn’t want to move. “Another stairwell, maybe, with an exit on the first floor. Or we could make a rope, lower ourselves to the street.”

  I saw her nod out of the corner of my eye. Then she turned and peered down the corridor, first to the left, then to the right.

  “Where’s Floyd?” she asked. “Where’d he go?”

  My stomach dropped. I turned and found the corridor empty. It was just Taylor and me, the stairwell door shut at our backs. Floyd was gone. He’d disappeared.

  Frantic, I pointed her down the corridor to our right, then headed left on my own, peering into each of the rooms in turn.

  It didn’t take long to find Floyd. He was in the third room down.

  It was a standard double-occupancy hospital room. The bed closest to the door was hidden behind a curtain, and I found Floyd seated on the second. He was perched motionless on its far edge, facing the window. The sky outside was bright red. While we’d been underground, night had become day, and the sky had lit up once again—with spores or blood, I didn’t know.

  “Floyd?” I prompted.

  He didn’t respond.

  I crossed to the foot of the bed and looked at his face. He blinked and continued to stare at the window. He seemed to know I was there, but he didn’t engage, didn’t acknowledge my presence. I didn’t press it. I didn’t try to force his attention, didn’t grab his shoulders and start shaking, didn’t slap his face and shout bracing words.

  I stepped up to the window and peered out at the city.

  It was an unfamiliar landscape—still Spokane but worse, battered and beaten. I-90 was visible a couple of blocks away, to the north, but it had suffered. Chunks of concrete had collapsed from its edge, diminishing its surface, and the entire Monroe overpass had fallen to the street below, leaving a wide gap in the interstate’s length, filled w
ith boulders and jagged lengths of rebar. And the destruction didn’t look recent. All the buildings in sight had taken damage. Collapsed walls lay across sidewalks and streets, road surfaces had buckled and crumbled, streams of muddy water wended their way through eroded asphalt.

  Time had passed somehow. The city had aged. And it had aged badly.

  The sky was deep red, roiling in violent waves. That’s not spores, I thought, not light reflecting off of the atmosphere. That’s not even sky. It’s something else. Something above us, waiting to fall.

  There was smoke in the distance, up north—several columns, billowing thick and black.

  “I’m right, aren’t I?” Floyd asked, his voice slow and emotionless. I turned and looked at him. His face was impassive, but his eyes swam, refusing to spill but filled with tears. “He’s here. This is hell and he’s here, waiting for me. Just out of sight. Always here, around the next corner. And there’s no escaping it … no way out.”

  Floyd slowly lowered himself onto his side, briefly curling his legs into a loose fetal position at the edge of the mattress. Then he rolled onto his back and settled his head on the pillow, fixing his eyes on the blank ceiling.

  I looked up and saw Taylor standing in the doorway. There was relief on her face as she regarded Floyd. Then she saw the window.

  She made her way to my side and peered out at the devastated landscape. She didn’t look for long; she turned away from the window and lowered herself onto the edge of the bed, taking a seat next to Floyd’s knees. She was sitting in the exact same position in which I’d first found Floyd. Her shoulders were slumped, her face expressionless.

  “I can’t do this, Dean,” she said. “I can’t be here anymore.”