The City of Mirrors: A Novel (Book Three of The Passage Trilogy)

by Justin Cronin

  “Sixty minutes,” Peter said. “Good luck.”

  They parted cleanly, no goodbyes.

  —

  Peter and Amy walked north along Fifth Avenue. Block by block, the vertical core of the city rose, fashioning narrow fjords between the buildings. In places the pavement was buckled with the roots of trees, in others collapsed into craters that varied in size from a few yards to the width of the street, forcing them to creep along the edge. As they moved up the island, Peter took note of the landmarks: the Empire State, dizzyingly tall, like a single imperious finger pointing to the sky; the Chrysler Building, with its curved crown of burnished metal; the library, sheathed in a feathery cloak of vines, its broad front steps guarded by a pair of pedestaled lions. At the corner of Forty-second and Fifth, the half-constructed tower Alicia had described came into view. The exposed girders of its upper floors possessed a reddish appearance—the product of decades of slow oxidation. An exterior elevator ascended to the top of the structure; from there, the crane rose another ten or fifteen stories, its horizontal boom parallel to the building’s west flank, high above Fifth Avenue.

  So far, they had seen no trace of Fanning’s virals—no scat or animal carcasses, no sounds of movement from the buildings. Except for pigeons, the city seemed dead. Each of them had a semiautomatic rifle and a pistol; Amy also carried the sword. She had offered it to Alicia, but the woman had refused. “Peter’s right,” Alicia said. “I’ve got no use for it. Just do me a favor and cut the bastard’s head off.”

  They approached from the west, via Forty-third to Vanderbilt; between the buildings, a view of Grand Central emerged. Compared to what was around it, the structure seemed modest in its dimensions, nestled like a heart in the bosom of the city. The streets around it were open to the sun, though an elevated roadway encircled the perimeter at balcony level, creating a zone of darkness beneath.

  Amy checked her watch: twenty minutes to go. “We need to scout that door,” she said.

  A risk, but Peter agreed. If they moved cautiously and kept low, maintaining an upward line of sight, they would be able to detect any virals beneath the overpass before they got too close.

  Which was, Peter later realized, precisely what Fanning had intended them to do: to look up. Never mind Alicia’s warnings not to underestimate their adversary. Never mind that the street was suspiciously carpeted in vines, or that with each step forward the air thickened with the damp, septic odor of an open sewer. Never mind the faint sound of rustling, which might have been caused by rats but wasn’t. One careless moment was all it took. They crept beneath the overpass, every ounce of their attention focused on the empty ceiling.

  Peter and Amy never even saw them coming.

  —

  Michael watched the numbers of the streets decline. A few were impassable, choked with vegetation or debris, others empty, as if forgotten by time. In some of the buildings, trees were growing; flocks of startled pigeons burst forth in their path, wheeling upward in huge, flapping clouds.

  At the corner of Eighteenth and Broadway, they paused to rest. Alicia was breathing hard, her face glazed with sweat. “How much farther?” Michael asked.

  She coughed and cleared her throat. “Eleven blocks.”

  “I can do this on my own, you know.”

  “Not a chance.”

  The crutch was too unstable; they left it behind and went on, Michael supporting Alicia from one side. A rifle dangled over her shoulder. Her steps were labored, more hobble than walk. From time to time, she issued a tiny gasp he knew she was trying to hide. The minutes dripped away. They came to a small shelter of elaborate iron scrollwork, painted white with pigeon guano. The smell of the sea had grown strong.

  “This is it,” she said.

  From his pack, Michael removed a lantern and lit the wick. As they descended the stairs, he detected small movements along the floor. He paused and raised the lantern. Rats were scurrying everywhere, long brown ropes of them hugging the edges of the walls.

  “Yuck,” he said.

  They reached the bottom. Arched brick columns supported the roof above the tracks. On the tiled wall, a sign in gold lettering read ASTOR PLACE.

  “Which direction?” Michael felt turned around in the dark.

  “This way. South.”

  He dropped onto the rail bed. Alicia handed him her rifle, and he helped her down. As they passed into the tunnel, the air became colder. Water sloshed at their feet. He counted their steps. At one hundred, the light of his lantern caught a frisson of movement: the hissing spray of water that shot from the edges of the bulkhead. He stepped forward and pressed his hand against the thick metal. Behind it lay untold tons of pressure, the weight of the sea, like an unfired cannon.

  “How much time?” Alicia asked. She was leaning against the wall, scanning the tunnel with the rifle.

  They had used forty-five minutes. He stripped off his pack and removed his supplies. Alicia was keeping watch on the far end of the tunnel. He twisted the wires of the blasting caps together, then clipped the end to the cable from the spool. Keeping everything dry would be a challenge; he had to prevent water from contacting the fuses. He returned the dynamite to his pack and searched the door for something to hang it on. Its surface was absolutely smooth.

  “There,” Alicia said.

  Beside the bulkhead, a long rusty screw jutted from the wall. Michael hung his pack on it, handed Alicia the detonator, and began to pull out the cable from the spool.

  “Let’s go.”

  They emerged into the Astor Place station and scrambled onto the platform. Unspooling the cable behind them, they headed for the stairs and ascended to the first landing. A particle-filled daylight filtered down from street level. Kneeling, Michael placed the plunger on the floor, split the cable with his teeth, and threaded one wire into each of the two slotted screws on the top of the box. Alicia was sitting on the step below him, goggles pushed up onto her forehead, her rifle pointed into the blackness below. Circles of sweat drenched her shirt at the throat and armpits; her jaw was tight with pain. As he tightened the wing nuts, their eyes met.

  “That ought to do it,” Michael said.

  Ten minutes to go.

  —

  Amy in darkness: First came the pain, a sharp-edged thudding at the back of her skull. This was followed by the sensation of being dragged. Her thoughts refused to organize. Where was she? What had occurred? What force was pulling her along? Solitary pictures drifted by, pushed by mental winds: a television screen of spitting static; fat, feathered snowflakes descending from an inky sky; Carter’s garden, a carpet of living color; the tossing, blue-black sea. There was the floor—dirty, scuffed. Her tongue was dense and heavy in her mouth. She tried to make a sound, but none would come. The floor passed by in aortal jerks, timed to the rhythm of the tugging pressure on her wrists. The idea of resistance took hold, but when she attempted to move her limbs, she found she had no power to act; her body had been sundered from her will.

  She sensed, then saw, a light, a kind of filtered glowing, and in the next instant everything changed: how the air moved on her skin, the way sound behaved, her intuitive sense of the physical parameters around her. Noises expanded and leapt away; the air smelled different, less confined, with a biological tang.

  “Leave her there, please.”

  The voice—nonchalant, even a little bored—came from someplace ahead. The pressure on her wrists released; her face slammed into the floor. A hot, glowing ball ricocheted around the interior of her skull like an ember spat from a fire.

  “Gently, for God’s sake.”

  Consciousness ebbed, then, like a dark wave returning to shore, broke upon her again. She tasted blood in her mouth; she had bitten her tongue. The floor was cool against her cheek. The light, what was it? And the sound? A low-grade murmuring, not made by voices per se but by a volume of breathing bodies. She sensed the presence of faces. Faces and also hands, lurking in a fog. Her brain told her: Look harder, Amy. Focus you
r eyes and look.

  It wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all.

  She was surrounded by virals. The first layer was crouched around her at a distance of just a yard or two—jaws clicking, throats amphibiously bobbing, hooked fingers caressing the air with small, syncopated movements, as if tapping the keys of invisible pianos. This was bad, but not the worst of it. The room writhed and throbbed, a population of hundreds. They carpeted the walls. They gazed down from the balconies like spectators at a contest. They filled each nook and corner and perched atop every ledge. The space was squirming like a pit of snakes.

  “That all went rather smoothly,” the voice drolly continued. “I’m a little bit amazed, actually. I was worried that their enthusiasm might get the better of them. They do that.”

  She was still having difficulty bringing her mind and her body into alignment, to forge the proper chain of command. Everything seemed delayed and out of sync. The voice seemed to emanate from everywhere around her, as if the air were speaking. It flowed over and into her like slick oil, lodging with cloying, buttery sweetness at the back of her throat.

  “Would it be too obvious to say how long I’ve waited to meet you? But I have. Since the day Jonas told me of your existence, I’ve wondered, When will we meet? When will my Amy come to me?”

  “My Amy.” Why was the voice calling her that? She discovered the sky. No, not the sky: the ceiling, far above, and on it the image of the stars with gilded figures floating among them.

  “Oh, you should have heard the man. How guilty he felt. How sorry he was. ‘Jesus, Tim, you should see her. She’s just a little kid. She doesn’t even have a proper last name. She’s just some girl from nowhere.’ ”

  The backward stars, thought Amy. As if the heavens were being viewed from without, or were reflected in a mirror. She felt her thoughts attaching to this notion, and as they did, new ideas began to form. As if stumbling from a dream, her mind began to open to her circumstances; memories were rising to the surface. An image entered her mind: Peter, his body airborne, crashing through a plate-glass window.

  A dark chuckle. “Not really funny, I suppose, when you put it in the context of a few billion corpses. Still, the whole thing was quite a performance. Jonas missed his true calling. He should have been an actor.”

  Fanning, she thought.

  The voice was Fanning.

  And everything came slamming back.

  “I waited so long, Amy.” A heavy sigh. “Always hoping that my Liz would be on the next train. Do you know what that’s like? But how could you. How could anyone?”

  She struggled onto all fours. She was in the west end of the hall. To her right, the ticket windows, barred like cells in a jail; to her left, the shadowy recesses of train platforms. Shrouded windows, both behind her and to her right, pulsed with a febrile glow. Ahead, at a distance of perhaps a hundred feet, stood the kiosk, topped by its pearlescent clocks. A man was standing there. An altogether unremarkable-looking man, wearing a dark suit. He was positioned in profile, back erect and chin tipped slightly upward, left hand tucked casually in the pocket of his suit coat, his attention aimed at the dark maws of the tunnels.

  “How alone she must have felt at the end, how afraid. No words of comfort. Not the touch of a hand for company.”

  Still he did not look at her. All around her, the virals trilled and stroked, flexed and snapped. She had the sense that they were kept at bay only by the thinnest of invisible barriers.

  “ ‘I have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.’ That’s T. S. Eliot, in case you were wondering. An oldie but a goodie. When it came to existential exhaustion, the man was one smart cookie.”

  Where was Peter? Had the virals killed him? What of Michael and Alicia? She thought: Water. She thought: Time. How much had passed? But the answer to this question was like an empty drawer in her brain. Moving just her eyes, she scanned for something to use as a weapon. But there was nothing, only the virals and the inverted heavens and her heart beating in her throat.

  “Oh, I had my books, my thoughts. I had my memories. But those things only take a man so far.” Fanning paused, then said, with more directness, “Consider this place, Amy. Imagine it as it once was. Everyone hurrying, rushing here, rushing there. The appointments. The assignations. The dinners with friends. How gloriously alive it was. All our lives, the one thing we never seem to have enough of is time. Time to work. Time to eat. Time to sleep. Time to love and be loved before it’s time to die.” He shrugged. “But I digress. You came to kill me, wasn’t it?”

  He turned to face her. His right hand, now revealed, held the sword.

  “Just to clear the decks, let me say that I don’t hold it against you in the least. Au contraire, mon amie. That’s French, by the way. Liz always said it was the mark of a truly cultured person. I never had much of a knack for languages, but with a century to kill, you get around to trying new things. Any preference? Italian, Russian, German, Dutch, Greek? How about Latin? We could do this whole thing in Norwegian if you’d like.”

  Close your mouth, Amy’s brain commanded her. Use the silence, because it’s all you have.

  Fanning’s face soured. “Well, your choice. I was only trying to make a little small talk.” He gave a backhanded wave. “Let’s have a look at you.”

  More hands upon her: a large, smooth male and a slightly smaller female, with a wispy diadem of white hair on her otherwise featureless skull. They seized her by the upper arms and whisked her forward, her feet skimming the tile, and dumped her unceremoniously to the floor.

  “I said gently, for fucksake!”

  Looming like a thundercloud, Fanning stood above her, his aura of merry confidence replaced by jaw-clenched rage.

  “You.” He pointed the sword at the large male. “Get over here.”

  A spark of hesitation in the creature’s eyes—or did she imagine this? The viral scuttled forward. It dropped to its knees at Fanning’s feet and bowed its head submissively, like a subdued dog.

  Fanning raised his voice to the room. “Everyone, are you listening? Are you hearing my words, goddamnit? This woman is our guest! She is not a piece of luggage for you to toss around as you please! I expect you to treat her with respect!”

  As he raised the sword, Amy covered her head. A crack, followed by a grinding sound and then the thump of something heavy hitting the floor. A wet stickiness splashed the side of her face and, with it, a rotten smell, as if a door had blown open onto a room of corpses.

  “Oh, for the love of God.”

  The viral was still on its knees, its headless torso folded forward to the floor. Dark, rhythmic spurts were convulsing from its severed neck, forming a glossy pool on the floor. Fanning was staring at the front of his pants with revulsion. His suit, Amy realized, was rotten and threadbare. It hung on his body with the unstructured looseness of rags.

  “Look at this,” he moaned. “This is never going to come out. They’re like pets, the mess they make. And the stink. Just god-awful.”

  It was absurd, all of it. What had she expected? Not this. Not this whirlwind of instantly changeable moods and thoughts. This man before her: there was something almost pathetic about him.

  “Well, now,” he said, and smiled nonsensically. “Let’s get you to your feet, shall we?”

  She was hauled upright. Fanning stepped forward; from his pocket he produced a handkerchief, flapped it open with a flourish, and dabbed the blood from her face. His eyes seemed both close and far away, peculiarly magnified, as if she were observing them through a telescope. On his cheeks and chin was a dusting of whitish beard; his teeth were gray, dead-looking. He hummed tunelessly as he went about this chore, then took a step back, lips pursed, brow furrowed, examining his handiwork with a slow nod.

  “Much better.” He regarded her at uncomfortable length, then declared, “I have to say, there’s something very appealing about you. A certain innocence. Though I’m guessing there’s more there t
han meets the eye.”

  “Where’s Peter?”

  His eyes widened. “She speaks! I was beginning to wonder.” Then, dismissively: “Not to worry about your friend. Delayed in traffic, I expect. As for me, I’m glad the two of us can have this chance to talk amongst ourselves. I hope this doesn’t seem too forward, but I feel a certain kinship with you, Amy. Our journeys are not so very different when you think about it. But first: where, pray tell, is my friend Alicia? This specimen of overgrown table cutlery tells me she’s around here someplace.”

  Amy didn’t answer.

  “Nothing to share on the subject? Have it your way. Do you know what you are, Amy? I’ve given it a lot of thought.”

  Let him talk, she told herself. Time was what she needed. Let him use the minutes.

  “You’re…an apology.”

  Fanning said nothing further. The virals held her fast. He stepped away toward the train tunnels, where he resumed his original position, gazing forlornly into the blackness.

  “For a long time, I wanted to kill you. Well, perhaps not ‘wanted.’ You can’t help being what you are, any more than I can. It wasn’t anything personal. You were merely a symbol, a stand-in for the thing I hated most.” He turned the sword in his hand, studying the blade. “Imagine it, Amy. Imagine the folly of the man. He actually believed he could make everything all right, that he could atone for his crimes. But he couldn’t. Not after what he did to Liz. To me, to you.” He looked up. “She was nothing to me, the other one. Just some woman in a bar, looking for a night of fun, a bit of company in her lonely little life. I regret that intensely.”

  Amy waited.

  “I thought I could forget about it. But that was the night. I see that now. It was the night the truth of the world opened to me. It wasn’t the woman that did it. No, it was the child. The little girl in the crib. Do you know that I can still smell her, Amy? That sweet soft odor that all babies have. It’s practically holy. Her little fingers and toes, the smoothness of her skin. Her whole life was in her eyes. All of us begin that way. You, me, everyone. Full of love, full of hope. I could see it: she trusted me. Her mother lay dead on the kitchen floor, but here was this man, come to answer her cries. Would I give her a bottle? Change her diaper? Perhaps I would pick her up, take her on my lap and read her a story. She had no idea what I’d done, what I was. I felt so sorry for her. But that wasn’t the reason. I felt sorry because she’d had to be born in the first place. I should have killed her right then. It would have been a mercy.”