The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

  By the time Lucius had returned to Kerrville, the following spring, he knew he could no longer dwell among people. The meaning of that night was clear; he had been called to a solitary existence. Alone, he had constructed his modest hut along the river only to feel the pull of something deeper, summoning him into the wilderness. Lucius, lay yourself bare. Put down your lendings; cast aside all worldly comforts that you may know me. With nothing but a blade and the clothes on his back, he had ventured into the dry hills and beyond, no destination but the deepest solitude he could find so that his life might find its true shape. Days without food, his feet torn and bloody, tongue thick in his mouth from thirst: as the weeks went by, with only the rattlesnakes and cacti and scorching sun for company, he had begun to hallucinate. A stand of saguaros became rows of soldiers at attention; lakes of water appeared where there were none; a line of mountains took the form of a walled city in the distance. He experienced these apparitions uncritically, with no awareness of their falsehood; they were real because he believed them to be so. Likewise did the past and present blend in his mind. At times he was Lucius Greer, major of the Expeditionary; at others, a prisoner of the stockade; at still others, a young recruit, or even his boyhood self.

  For weeks he wandered in this condition, a being of multiple worlds. Then one day he awoke to discover himself lying in a gulley beneath an obliterating midday sun. His body was grotesquely emaciated, covered with scratches and sores; his fingers were bloody, some of the nails torn away. What had happened? Had he done this to himself? He possessed no recollection, only a sudden, overwhelming awareness of the image that had come to him during the night.

  Lucius had received a vision.

  He had no sense of where he was, only that he needed to walk north. Six hours later, he found himself on the Kerrville Road. Mad with thirst and hunger, he continued to walk until just before nightfall, when he saw the sign with the red X. The hardbox was amply stocked: food, water, clothes, gas, weapons and ammo, even a generator. Most welcome of all to his eyes was the Humvee. He washed and cleaned his wounds and spent the night on a soft cot, and in the morning he fueled up the vehicle, charged the battery and filled the tires, and headed east, reaching Kerrville on the morning of the second day.

  At the edge of the Orange Zone he abandoned the Humvee and made his way into the city on foot. There, in a dark room in H-town, among men he did not know and whose names were never offered, he sold three of the carbines from the hardbox to buy a horse and other supplies. By the time he arrived at his hut, night was falling. It stood modestly among the cottonwoods and swamp oaks at the edge of the river, just one room with a packed-dirt floor, yet the sight of it filled his heart with the warmth of return. How long had he been away? It seemed like years, whole decades of life, and yet it was just a matter of months. Time had come full circle; Lucius was home.

  He unsaddled, tied up his horse, and entered the hut. A nest of fluff and twigs on the bed indicated where something had made its home in his absence, but the sparse interior was otherwise unaltered. He lit the lantern and sat at the table. At his feet was the duffel bag of supplies: the Remington, a box of cartridges, fresh socks, soap, a straight razor, matches, a hand mirror, a half dozen quill pens, three bottles of dewberry ink, and sheets of thick, fibrous paper. At the river he filled his washbasin, then returned to the house. The image in the mirror was neither more nor less shocking than he expected: cheeks cratered, eyes sunk way back in his skull, skin scorched and blistered, a tangle of madman’s hair. The lower half of his face was buried beneath a beard that a family of mice would gladly live in. He had just turned fifty-two; the man in the mirror was an easy sixty-five.

  Well, he said to himself, if he was going to be a soldier again, even an old, broken-down one, he damn well ought to look the part. Lucius hacked away at the worst of his hair and beard, then used the straight razor and soap to shave himself clean. He tossed the soapy water out the door and returned to the table, where he’d laid out his paper and pens.

  Lucius closed his eyes. The mental picture that had come to him that night in the gully wasn’t like the hallucinations that had dogged him during his sojourn in the desert. It was more like a memory of something lived. He brought its details into focus, his mind’s eye roaming its visual expanse. How could he ever hope to capture something so magnificent with his amateur’s hand? But he would have to try.

  Lucius began to draw.

  A rustling in the brush: Lucius drew the riflescope to his eye. There were four of them, rooting through the dirt, snuffling and grunting: three sows and a boar, reddish brown, with large, razor-sharp tusks. A hundred and fifty pounds of wild pig for the taking.

  He fired.

  While the sows scattered, the boar staggered forward, shuddered with a deep twitch, and went down on its front legs. Lucius held the image in his scope. Another twitch, deeper than the first, and the animal flopped on its side.

  Lucius scrambled down the ladder and went to where the animal lay in the grass. He rolled the boar onto the tarp, dragged it to the tree line, looped the animal’s hind legs together, set the hook, and began to hoist him up. When the boar’s head reached the height of Lucius’s chest, he tied off the rope, positioned the basin beneath the hog, drew his knife, and slashed the animal’s throat.

  A gush of hot blood splattered into the basin. The boar would produce as much as a gallon. When the boar had emptied out, Lucius funneled the blood into a plastic jug. With more time on his hands, he would have gutted and butchered the animal and smoked the meat for trade. But it was day fifty-eight, and Lucius needed to be on his way.

  He lowered the corpse to the ground—at least the coyotes would get the benefit—and returned to the hut. He had to admit it: the place looked like a madman lived there. A little over two years since Lucius had first put pen to paper, and now the walls were covered with the fruits of his labor. He’d branched out from ink to charcoal, graphite pencil, even paint, which cost a bundle. Some were better than others—viewing them in chronological order, one could trace his slow, at times frustratingly inept self-education as an artist. But the best ones satisfyingly captured the image Lucius carted around in his head all day like the notes of a song he couldn’t shake except by singing.

  Michael was the only person who’d seen the pictures. Lucius had kept his distance from everyone, but Michael had tracked him down through somebody on the trade, a friend of Lore’s. One evening over a year ago Lucius had returned from setting his traps to find an old pickup parked in his yard and Michael sitting on the open tailgate. Over the years Greer had known him, he had grown from a rather meek-looking boy to a well-made specimen of manhood in its prime: hard and sleek, with strong features and a certain severity around the eyes. The sort of companion you could count on in a bar fight that began with a punch to the nose and ending with running like hell.

  “Holy damn, Greer,” he said, “you look like shit on a biscuit. What does a man have to do to get a little hospitality around this place?”

  Lucius got the bottle. At first it wasn’t quite clear what Michael wanted. He seemed changed to Lucius, a little at loose ends, a bit sunk down into himself. One thing Michael had never been was quiet. Ideas and theories and various campaigns, however cockeyed and half-baked, shot from the man like bullets. The intensity was still there—you could practically warm your hands on the man’s skull—but it had a darker quality, the feel of something caged, as if Michael were chewing on something he didn’t have words for.

  Lucius had heard that Michael had quit the refinery, split from Lore, built some kind of boat and spent most of his time on it, sailing out alone into the Gulf. What the man was looking for in all that empty ocean, he never got around to saying, and Lucius didn’t press; how would he have explained his own hermitic existence? But over the course of the evening they passed together, getting drunker and drunker on a bottle of Dunk’s Special Recipe No. 3—Lucius wasn’t much of a drinker these days, though the stuff came in handy as a sol
vent—he came to think that Michael didn’t really have a reason for appearing at his doorstep beyond the basic human urge to be around another person. Both of them were doing their time in the wilderness, after all, and maybe what Michael really wanted, when you boiled away the bullshit, was a few hours in the company of someone who understood what he was going through—this profound impulse to be alone just when all of them should have all been dancing for joy and having babies and generally celebrating a world where death didn’t reach down from the trees and snatch you just for the hell of it.

  For a while they caught up on news of the others: Sara’s job at the hospital and her and Hollis’s long-awaited move out of the refugee camps into permanent housing; Lore’s promotion to crew chief at the refinery; Peter’s resignation from the Expeditionary to stay home with Caleb; Eustace’s decision, which surprised no one, to resign from the Expeditionary and return with Nina to Iowa. A tone of optimistic good cheer glazed the surface of the conversation, but it only went so deep, and Lucius wasn’t fooled; always lurking beneath the surface were the names they weren’t saying.

  Lucius had told nobody about Amy—only he knew the truth. On the matter of Alicia’s fate, Lucius had nothing to offer. Nor, apparently, did anybody else; the woman had vanished into the great Iowa emptiness. At the time, Lucius had been unconcerned—Alicia was like a comet, given to long, unannounced absences and blazing, unanticipated returns—but as the days went by with no sign of her, Michael trapped in his bed with his casted leg in a sling, Lucius watched the fact of her disappearance burning in his friend’s eyes like a long fuse looking for a bomb. You don’t get it, he told Lucius, practically levitating off his bed with frustration. This isn’t like the other times. Lucius didn’t bother to contradict him—the woman needed absolutely nobody—nor did he try to stop Michael when, twelve hours after the cast came off, the man saddled up and rode into a snowstorm to look for her—a highly questionable move, considering how much time had passed, and the fact that the man could barely walk. But Michael was Michael: you didn’t tell the man no, and there was something oddly personal about the whole thing, as if Alicia’s leaving was a message just for him. He returned five days later, half-frozen, having run a one-hundred-mile perimeter, and said no more about it, not that day or all the days after; he’d never even said her name.

  They had all loved her, but there existed a kind of person, Lucius knew, whose heart was unknowable, who was born to stand apart. Alicia had stepped into the ether, and with three years gone by, the question in Lucius’s mind wasn’t what had become of her but if she’d really been there in the first place.

  It was well past midnight, after the last glasses had been poured and tossed back, when Michael finally raised the subject that, in hindsight, had been plaguing him all night.

  “Do you really think they’re gone? The dracs, I mean.”

  “Why would you ask that?”

  Michael cocked an eyebrow. “Well, do you?”

  Lucius framed his answer carefully. “You were there—you saw what happened. Kill the Twelve and you kill the rest. If I’m not mistaken, that was your idea. It’s a little late to change your mind.”

  Michael glanced away and said nothing. Had the answer satisfied him?

  “You should come sailing with me sometime,” he said finally, brightening somewhat. “You’d really like it. It’s a big wide world out there. Like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

  Lucius smiled. Whatever was eating the man, he wasn’t ready to talk about it. “I’ll give it some thought.”

  “Consider it a standing invitation.” Michael got to his feet, one hand clutching the edge of the table for balance. “Well, I, for one, am completely hammered. If it’s all right with you, I think it’s time for me to go throw up and pass out in my truck.”

  Lucius gestured toward his narrow cot. “The bed’s yours if you want it.”

  “That’s sweet of you. Maybe when I get to know you better.”

  He stumbled to the door, where he turned to cast his bleary gaze around the tiny room.

  “You’re quite the artist, Major. Those are interesting pictures. You’ll have to tell me about them sometime.”

  And that was all; when Lucius awoke in the morning, Michael was gone. He thought he might see the man again, but no more visits were forthcoming; he supposed Michael had gotten what he was looking for, or else he’d decided that Lucius didn’t have it. Do you really think they’re gone … ? What would his friend have said if Lucius had actually answered his question?

  Lucius put these disconcerting thoughts aside. Leaving the jug of boar’s blood in the shade of the hut, he walked down the hillside to the river. The water of the Guadalupe was always cold, but here it was colder; where the river made a bend there was a deep hole—twenty feet to the bottom—fed by a natural spring. Tall banks of white limestone encircled the edge. Lucius stripped off his boots and trousers, grabbed the rope he’d left in place, took a deep breath, and dove in a clean arc into the water. With every foot of his descent the temperature dropped. The satchel, made of heavy canvas, was secured beneath an overhang, protected from the current. Lucius tied the rope to the satchel’s handle, tugged it free of the overhang, blew the air from his lungs, and ascended.

  He climbed out on the opposite shore, walked downstream to a shallow spot, crossed the river again, and followed a path to the top of the limestone wall. There he sat at the edge, took the rope in his hands, and hauled up the satchel.

  He dressed again and carried the satchel back to the hut. There, at the table, he removed the contents: eight more jugs, for nine gallons total—the same amount of blood, more or less, that coursed through the circulatory systems of half a dozen human adults.

  Once it was out of the river, his prize would quickly spoil. He strung the jugs together and gathered his supplies—three days’ worth of food and water, the rifle and ammo, a blade, a lantern, a length of sturdy rope—and carried them out to the paddock. Not even 0700, but already the sun was blazing. He saddled his horse, slid the rifle into its holder, and slung the rest over the horse’s withers. He never bothered with a bedroll; he’d be riding through the night, arriving in Houston on the morning of the sixtieth day.

  With a tap of his heels to the horse’s flanks, he was off.

  4

  Gulf of Mexico

  Twenty-two Nautical Miles South-southeast of Galveston Island

  0430: Michael Fisher awoke to the pattering of rain on his face.

  He drew his back upright against the transom. No stars but, to the east, a narrow transect of ditchwater dawn light hovered between the horizon and the clouds. The air was dead calm, though this wouldn’t last; Michael knew a storm when he smelled one.

  He unfastened his shorts, jutted his pelvis over the stern, and released a urine stream of satisfying volume and duration into waters of the Gulf. He wasn’t especially hungry, hunger being something he’d taught his body to ignore, but he took a moment to go below and mix a batch of powdered protein and drink it down in six throat-pumping gulps. Unless he was mistaken, and he almost never was, the morning would bring its share of excitement; best to face it with a full belly..

  He was back on deck when the first jag of lightning forked the horizon. Fifteen seconds later, the thunder arrived in a long, rolling peal, like a grumpy god clearing its throat. The air had picked up, too, in the disorganized manner of an approaching squall. Michael unhooked the self-steerer and took the tiller in his fist as the rain arrived in earnest: a hot, needling, tropical rain that soaked him in a second. About the weather, Michael lacked any strong opinion. Like everything else, it was what it was, and if this was to be the storm that finally sent him to the bottom, well, it wasn’t like he hadn’t asked for it.

  Really? Alone? In that thing? Are you crazy? Sometimes the questions were kindly meant, an expression of genuine concern; even total strangers tried to talk him out of it. But more often than not, the speaker was already writing him off. If the sea didn’t kill him,
the barrier would—that blockade of floating explosives said to encircle the continent. Who in his right mind would tempt fate like that? And especially now, when not a single viral had been seen for, what, going on thirty-six months? Wasn’t a whole continent sufficient space for a restless soul to roam around in?

  Fair enough, but not every choice came down to logic; a lot came from the gut. What Michael’s gut was telling him was that the barrier didn’t exist, that it had never existed. He was raising his middle finger to history, a hundred years of humanity saying, Not me, no way, you go on ahead without me. That or playing Russian roulette. Which, given his family history,wasn’t necessarily out of the question.

  His parents’ suicide wasn’t something he liked to think about, but of course he did. In some room in his brain, a movie of that morning’s events was constantly running. Their gray, empty faces, and the tautness of the ropes around their necks. The slight creaking sound they made. The elongated shapes of their bodies, the absolute, unoccupied looseness of them. The darkness of their toes, bloated with pooled blood. Michael’s initial reaction had been complete incomprehension: he’d stared at the bodies for a good thirty seconds, trying to parse the data, which came to him in a series of free-floating words he couldn’t stick together (Mom, Dad, hanging, rope, barn, dead), before an explosion of white-hot terror in his eleven-year-old brain sent him dashing forward to scoop their legs into his arms to push their bodies upward, all the while screaming Sara’s name so she could come and help him. They’d been dead for many hours; his efforts were pointless. Yet one had to try. A lot of life, Michael had learned, came down to trying to fix things that weren’t fixable.