Bad Glass

by Richard E. Gropp

  I took a deep breath and forced myself to sit up straight. “What are you doing here?” I asked. “Did you follow me?”

  “I didn’t even know you were up here. Charlie wanted me to help look for his mom, and this is the first building I came to. I heard you cry out from the ground floor.”

  I didn’t remember crying out, but I wasn’t surprised. Maybe when that first spider had touched my cheek—my head in that hole, bristles brushing against my face as I stared up into the moving darkness. After a few more deep breaths, I shrugged out of Taylor’s jacket and got back to my feet.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I grunted, shaking my arms, trying to work blood back through my body. “It’s just the city,” I said, repeating her words. “Just the city.”

  I noticed the throbbing in my palm as we walked back to the house.

  We moved slowly. Amanda and Taylor were trying to comfort Charlie as we walked, flanking him on both sides, bracing him with gentle hands and quiet, indistinct words. His shoulders were slumped, practically radiating a sense of defeat. Mac and I stayed off to one side, trying to give them enough space and silence.

  We’d spent nearly two hours going room to room through those abandoned buildings, but there had been no sign of his mother. No hint that she’d ever been near the corner of Second Avenue and Sherman Street.

  Just that photo.

  I flexed my left hand and felt a burst of fire beneath my fingers. I looked and found a line of raw flesh bisecting my palm. The outer layers of skin were gone—a bloodred line stretching from beneath my pinkie all the way to the web of flesh bridging fingers and thumb.

  I stared at it for several seconds before finally placing the wound. Back in the apartment. I’d had my head in the hole, and when I’d pulled back, I’d felt my hand ripping free from the wall. But how? This was no cut, no abrasion.

  I flexed again, feeling the throb.

  The skin is gone, I realized. Left behind, inside the wall.

  Had it begun to take me? The wall? The city? If I’d stayed in that position, focused on my camera, would I have pulled back to find my hand sunk all the way through, my fingers poking out from drywall, joining the face—that horrible, conscious face—inside that claustrophobic prison?

  Again I flexed, and again I felt that throb.

  Is that what this is? I wondered, my stomach churning, upset with dread and revelation. Some type of dissolution of form? Boundaries fading and merging, absorbing and consuming?

  But how? And why?

  I continued to flex my hand, flexing and releasing all the way home.

  Photograph. October 19, 08:35 A.M. The warren:

  A cave dug into the side of a grassy hill. A slice of darkness, partially hidden beneath a pricker bush.

  At the top of the frame, autumn-red trees reach up from the far side of the hill, touching a clear blue sky. The top of a clock tower is visible above the highest branches; the clock is out of focus, the time illegible. There are two human-shaped shadows cast against the side of the hill, one on each side of the dark opening. The photographer’s shadow is on the left—arms steepled up into a pyramid—and a thin, armless apparition lurks to the right.

  The grass at the mouth of the opening is trampled into mud. Countless paw prints have warped the turf into textured stucco.

  There is nothing visible inside the cave. It is an entrance into pure, depthless black.

  I dreamed about the face and the spiders. Not the reality of the situation—I didn’t find myself back inside that apartment, seeing these things for the first time—instead, I dreamed about the photographs I’d taken. My precisely cropped, color-corrected images. The same ones I’d spent hours and hours tweaking and adjusting the night before.

  The pictures weren’t great—the light was too dim, the focus too soft—but I managed to salvage a trio of interesting shots: one taken between the walls, capturing the line of electric blue and that eerie face (the face just barely visible after extensive masking and gamma correction); a wide-angle shot showing the horde of spiders swarming out of the hole, cluttering the surrounding wall; and finally, a close-up of the spider with the human finger. In that last shot, the bizarre subject matter had to make up for a bad angle and weak, muted colors.

  After I retired for the night, these static images followed me down into sleep, changing and multiplying in my dreams.

  I spent the entire night tweaking dream photos, watching as spiders took life, stepped out of my pictures, and crawled across the computer screen while I tried desperately to capture and freeze them in place with my trackpad. I was trying to create the perfect photograph, I knew, the one that would make me famous, the one that would save me from a life of accounting. But the spiders refused to hold still. And as the night wore on, I grew increasingly frustrated.

  When Amanda touched my shoulder, I jolted upright, coming fully awake.

  “Shhhhh!” Her pale skin and blond hair glowed in a trickle of predawn violet. “It’s early,” she said. “Everyone’s asleep.”

  I nodded and stifled a cough, then scooted up into a sitting position.

  I was still camped out on the living-room sofa. The photo of Charlie’s mother had brought the entire house to a screeching halt, filling the rooms with a funereal stillness and putting my move on hold.

  It had been a difficult evening. As soon as we got back home from Sherman and Second Avenue, Charlie had retreated to his room upstairs. The rest of us—including Devon, Floyd, and Sabine—had gathered in the living room, unsure how to respond to Charlie’s pain. Should we offer him comfort? Give him time to think and heal? Ultimately, we decided to just let him be.

  There was no pot that night and no laughter, and dinner proved a rather subdued affair. After we finished eating, Taylor disappeared upstairs with a plate of food. She stayed up there for the rest of the night.

  I, for my part, made my own retreat, cracking open my notebook computer and immersing myself in Photoshop.

  “What time is it?” I asked Amanda. My sleep had been fitful, and I was still confused, disoriented. It took me a moment to place my location. Not California … Spokane. The city.

  “Seven. Seven-fifteen.” Amanda sat down on the sofa and turned toward the window. In profile, I could see the skin hunched up on her forehead and the worried downward curve of her lips. “Just before sunrise.”

  I waited for her to continue. The look on her face was the look of someone staring out over the edge of a building, gathering up the courage to jump.

  She took a deep breath. “They were out there again last night,” she said. “The dogs. The wolves. They’re looking for something. They’re doing … something. I know it. I just know.”

  “What are they doing?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t have the specifics, but it’s got to do with the city. It’s got to do with what’s happening here.”

  I nodded. There was a certainty to her voice—a desperate, beleaguered certainty. Confronted with that, there was absolutely nothing I could say.

  “I have to find them,” she said. “You … you have to help me find them.” She fixed me with sad, pleading eyes; where before I had found innocent, bubbly curiosity, there was now nothing but desperation. She was exhausted. Dispirited. Emotionally drained.

  “Okay,” I said. “Just tell me what to do.”

  We left the house just as the sun touched the horizon. The day was cold, and our breath hung frozen in the air. I regretted not grabbing my gloves and an extra sweatshirt.

  “Why me?” I asked as we headed west on the residential street. “Why didn’t you want to take Mac?”

  “He doesn’t see them,” she said, watching her feet. “I’ve dragged him to the window, pointed them out—clear as day—but he just doesn’t see.” She glanced up, fixing me with bright blue eyes. “Christ, I thought I was crazy! I thought I was suffering a psychotic breakdown, seeing things that just weren’t there. But that’s not true, is it? You saw them, too.
They’re real … Right?”

  “I saw something. A pack of canines. Only different. Their paws …”

  At my words, Amanda’s face brightened noticeably, relief breaking through that mask of exhaustion. “Right! Exactly.”

  “How many times have you seen them?”

  “I don’t know. A couple dozen?” She shrugged. “The first time was at the park, right before the evacuation. I was looking for my own dog, Sasha. She escaped from the backyard—I was living in a house close to the university back then. The city was crazy—everyone confused and terrified, no idea what was going on. But the park was empty. We used to walk there a couple of times a week, Sasha and me, and I figured that that’s where she’d end up.”

  We rounded a corner and headed south. As Amanda talked, the Riverfront Park clock tower rose into view, peeking up over the line of buildings at the river’s edge. “There were three of them, and they started following me … just these huge canines. I was on one of the paths, moving through the center of the park, and they were about a hundred feet away. At first, I didn’t notice anything wrong with them. They were just dogs, German shepherds, maybe—too fluffy to be Great Danes, although that’s about the right size. They kept pace with me, following along in a stand of trees.” She shrugged, dismissing her initial impressions as no big deal. “I was a bit scared, but they didn’t act threatening. No barking and growling. No posturing. They seemed content to just follow … but they moved so smoothly, almost like they were floating over the ground. Not like dogs at all.

  “I stopped, and they stopped. They didn’t circle around and sniff, doing all of the little things that dogs do. Instead, they just froze in their tracks—three dogs, lined up single file. Staring at me. Just … staring—like I was the most important thing in the universe.”

  Amanda stopped and turned toward me, a confused look on her face. “They were so still. And even though they were pretty far away, I swear I could see the look in their eyes. So focused!” She shifted her feet, swaying awkwardly, then lowered her eyes. “I stood still for a while, watching and waiting, and finally, after about a minute, the dog at the front of the pack raised his paw and leaned up against a tree.” She shook her head. “And it wasn’t a canine movement at all. It was like something a human would do—resting his palm against a wall, taking the weight off of his feet.

  “And that’s when I noticed the odd legs.” She raised her hand and pushed her palm all the way forward, trying to illustrate. “Not normal canine joints; these dogs had an extra bend, like a knuckle. And this dog was using it like a human hand! It was eerie. Eerie and far too human. I got out of there as fast as I could.

  “It’s not that I was scared,” she added, shaking her head. “Not really. Surprised and confused, maybe, but not scared. I was just … just … profoundly unsettled.” She glanced back up into my eyes, and I could tell she was happy with that word—unsettled—happy she’d been able to provide such an accurate description of her state of mind.

  “And you’ve seen them a couple of dozen times since?” I asked.

  She nodded, then turned and resumed walking. I hurried to keep up. “I saw them a lot at my old place, a house I shared with a couple of other students, out east. And as soon as I moved in with Taylor, I started seeing them there, too, in the backyard or on the street out front. A couple of times a week, at least. I asked Taylor and some of the others if they’d seen anything doglike and strange—trying to be coy about it, trying to hide my insanity, if indeed that’s what it was—but they hadn’t. I was the only one.” She glanced over at me and smiled, moving close to grasp my hand—the uninjured one. “And now you! Thank God! Now I’ve got you.”

  Her grip on my hand was unnerving. I could feel the intensity of her relief—all that bottled up desperation channeled into a strong clench. She was hanging on to me for dear life.

  “Why didn’t you leave?” I asked. “Why didn’t you evacuate with everyone else?”

  “Sasha,” she said. “At least …” She trailed off, a confused look appearing on her face. “I know she’s out there somewhere—I’ve been looking. But that can’t be it, can it? Waiting around for a missing dog? I was studying psychology before all of this started, so I know that there’s probably something more—some deep-seated reason buried in my unconscious mind. Maybe it’s just that I don’t have anywhere else I want to go?” She looked at me questioningly, like I might actually be able to give her an answer. Then she released my hand and shook her head. “Everyone else in my life—my friends, my housemates—they all just went home, back to their parents, their hometowns. But I didn’t want that. I really didn’t want that. I think, given the choice, I’d prefer Sasha.”

  “Even if this place is driving you mad?”

  “But it’s not,” she said, flashing me a broad smile. “I know that now. They’re there, right? You’ve seen them, too.”

  I nodded, even though I wasn’t quite sure. Were we seeing the same thing? I’d seen a swarm of animals in the middle of the night. What she’d seen … it seemed like something different, something more. I could tell.

  In those animals, she’d found meaning. She’d found some type of promise, something that drove her, that dragged her out of bed in the middle of the night and carried her here. With me.

  We rounded a corner, and Amanda raised her hand, pointing to a slash of green on the other side of the river. I recognized the empty pathways and rolling, leaf-scattered hills from my first day in the city, when Weasel had pointed them out to me.

  Riverfront Park.

  Riverfront Park was a small park, just a couple of blocks of greenery trapped in the middle of downtown. It would have been a crowded place back before the quarantine, or so I imagined. There would have been families here—when the weather was nice—and come noon, there would have been office workers with bagged lunches and buskers performing for change. But now there was nothing. Just Amanda and me and the sound of the wind playing through the trees.

  An offshoot of the Spokane River stretched around the south end of the park, a wide, slow-moving trough that transformed the land into a thumb-shaped peninsula. The clock tower was on the tip of the thumb, looming up over the east end of the park.

  It was peaceful here. Now that the city was dead, there was nothing to drown out the muted roar of the river and the desolate whisper of the wind.

  As soon as we crossed the river and entered the park, Amanda pulled to a stop and looked around in amazement. “It used to be so tame,” she said, a quiet awe in her voice, “so manicured.” I could see what she meant. The once neatly trimmed grass now stood knee-high and half dead, with drifts of winter-brown leaves cluttering up every open space.

  I grabbed my camera, reslung my backpack, and started up the nearest hill. Amanda followed, craning her neck and looking around for any sign of her mysterious dogs.

  At the top of the hill, I took a series of panoramic shots, trying to capture the park in the foreground and the city on the horizon. The early-morning light made the remaining grass glow a bright, vibrant green, providing a great contrast to the gray streets and buildings. Unfortunately, the hill was too small and the surrounding buildings too high, so instead of catching city blocks stretching out into the distance, all I got were walls hemming us in. Like we were standing on the floor of an immense gray-walled box.

  “Over there!” Amanda hissed. “In the trees!” I lowered the camera and found her pointing toward a patch of woods to the south. Her eyes were wide, and her voice quavered with excitement.

  “Where?” I asked, but she was already running, kicking up dead leaves as she slid down the hill. “Amanda, wait! It might not be safe.” I looped the camera strap around my neck and followed her down.

  She entered the trees twenty yards ahead of me, immediately disappearing from sight. I plowed in behind her, then stopped, listening for movement.

  “Amanda!”

  There was sound everywhere: the subdued hiss of something sliding through the bushes to
my left; then to my right, the brittle snap of a dead branch directly ahead. I couldn’t see much of anything. Low bushes had grown out of control between the trees, and I watched as a sea of leaves rippled around me. The wind, I told myself. Just the wind.

  And then the growling began. All around. Low and guttural.

  “Amanda?” I hissed. I’m not sure why I felt the need to whisper. Anything she could hear, they could most definitely hear.

  There was no response.

  I started moving forward through the bushes, holding a hand out in front of me to push aside the encroaching branches. I hadn’t taken more than three steps when I felt a weight against my leg—a push, nudging me forward. I stumbled over my own feet, my heart breaking rhythm inside my chest. I barely managed to catch myself. There was movement all around—the dry rustle of leaves—and the thick, dark smell of animal musk. I glanced back, but something darted in from up ahead, catching my hand in a quick, hard grip. It was an intense pressure, engulfing my palm, and a wet growl vibrated up through my flesh and bone.

  I tried to pull my hand back, and a gray muzzle came into view; black lips and pink gums were wrapped around my fist. I could see yellow plaque-stained teeth. I could see blood welling up between those teeth and my hand.

  I panicked and surged forward, trying to get away. My shins hit canine flesh with a dull thud, and I collapsed forward onto my knees. Onto the dog. I felt a sudden expulsion of breath puff out around my hand, and I somersaulted forward. My hand finally came free.

  A loud growl swelled up from the trees behind me, radiating out of the ground cover. Then a half dozen dogs exploded from the brush, teeth bared and saliva flying. I scrambled up to my feet and started to run, bouncing off trees and stumbling over branches and roots.