The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

  “I didn’t know we had one of those.”

  Greer handed him Winfield’s pistol. “I’ll explain on the way.”

  Peter, Apgar, and Chase were looking over Michael’s passenger manifest when shouts erupted in the hall: “Put it down! Put it down!”

  A crash; a gunshot.

  Peter reached into his desk for the pistol he kept there. “Gunnar, what have you got?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Ford?”

  The man shook his head.

  “Get behind my desk.”

  The handle of the door jiggled. Peter and Apgar took positions against the wall on either side. The wood shuddered: somebody was kicking it.

  The door blew open.

  As the first man entered, Apgar tackled him from beind. A shotgun skittered away. Apgar pinned him with his knees, one hand on his throat, the other lifted, ready to strike. He stopped.

  “Greer?”

  “Hello, General.”

  “Michael,” Peter said, lowering his gun, “what the fuck.”

  Three soldiers charged into the room, rifles drawn.

  “Hold your fire!” Peter yelled.

  With visible uncertainty, the soldiers complied.

  “What was that gunshot outside, Michael?”

  The man waved casually. “Oh, he missed. We’re fine.”

  Peter was shaking with anger. “You three,” he said to the soldiers, “clear the room.”

  They made their departure. Apgar climbed off Greer. Chase, meanwhile, had come out from behind Peter’s desk.

  Michael gestured in Chase’s direction. “Is he okay?”

  “In what sense?”

  “I mean does he know?”

  “Yeah,” Chase said tersely, “I know.”

  Peter was still furious. “The two of you, what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Under the circumstances, we thought a direct approach was best,” Greer replied. “We have a vehicle outside. We need you to come with us, Peter, and we need to leave right now.”

  Peter’s patience was at its end. “I’m not going anywhere. You don’t start talking sense, I’ll toss your asses in the stockade myself and throw away the key.”

  “I’m afraid the situation has changed.”

  “So the virals aren’t coming back after all? This is all some kind of joke?”

  “I’m afraid it’s the opposite,” Greer said. “They’re already here.”

  53

  Amy was going to miss this place.

  They had decided to leave the rest of their chores undone for the day. There seemed no point in finishing them now. Sometimes, Carter told her, you got to let a garden tend itself.

  She felt sick, almost feverish. Could she control it? Would she kill him? And what of the water?

  You got to do it the way Zero done, Carter had told her. Ain’t no other way to go back to the way you were.

  The girls were watching a movie in the house. It was one Amy remembered, from being just a girl herself: The Wizard of Oz. The movie had terrified her—the tornado, the field of poppies, the wicked witch with her sickly green skin and battalion of airborne monkeys in bellman’s hats—but she had also loved it. Amy had watched it in the motel where she and her mother had lived. Her mother would put on her little skirt and stretchy top to go out to the highway, and before she left she’d sit Amy down in front of the television with something to eat, something greasy in a bag, and tell her: You sit tight now. Mama will be back soon. Don’t you open that door for nobody. Amy could see the guilt in her mother’s eyes—she understood that leaving a child by herself wasn’t something her mother was supposed to do—and Amy’s heart always went out to her, because she loved her, and the woman was so remorseful and sad all the time, as if life was a series of disappointments she could do nothing to stop. Sometimes her mother could barely get out of bed all day, and then night would fall, and the skirt and the top and the television would go on, and she’d leave Amy alone again.

  The night of The Wizard of Oz had been their last in the motel, or so Amy recalled. She’d watched cartoons for a while and, when these were over, a game show, and then she flipped around the dial until the movie caught her eye. The colors were odd, too vivid. That was the first thing she noticed. Lying on the bed, which smelled like her mother—a mélange of sweat, and perfume, and something distinctly her own—Amy settled in to watch. She entered the story when Dorothy, having rescued her dog from the clutches of the evil Miss Gulch, was racing from the storm. The tornado whisked her away; she found herself in the land of the Munchkins, who sang about their happy lives. But, of course, there was the problem of the feet—the feet of the Wicked Witch of the East, sticking out from beneath Dorothy’s tornado-driven house.

  It went on from there. Her attention was complete. She understood Dorothy’s desire to go home. That was the heart of the story, and it made sense to Amy. She hadn’t been home in a long time; she barely remembered it, just a shadowy sense of certain rooms. As the movie drew to a close, and Dorothy clicked her heels together and awoke in the bosom of her family, Amy decided to try this. She had no ruby slippers, but her mother had a pair of boots, very tall, with pointed heels. Amy slid them on. They rose up her skinny, little-girl legs nearly to her crotch; the heels were very high, making it difficult to walk. She took tender steps around the room to get the hang of it, and when she felt comfortable she closed her eyes and tapped the heels together, three times. There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …

  So convinced was she of the magical power of this gesture that when she opened her eyes she was shocked to discover that nothing had happened. She was still in the motel, with its dirty carpet and dull immovable furniture. She yanked off the boots, hurled them across the room, threw herself down on the bed, and began to cry. She must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she saw was her mother’s frightened face, looming over her. She was shaking Amy roughly by the shoulder; her top was stained and torn. Come on now, honey, her mother said. Wake up now, baby. We got to go, right now.

  Carter was skimming the pool. The first leaves were falling, crisp and brown.

  “I thought we were taking the day off,” Amy said.

  “We are. Just got to get these here. Bothers me seeing them.”

  She was sitting on the patio. Inside, the girls had reached the part of the movie where Dorothy and her companions entered the Emerald City.

  “They should turn it down a bit,” Carter remarked. He was dragging the skimmer along the edges, trying to work some small bit of debris into the net. “Girls are going to wreck their ears.”

  Yes, she would miss it here. The softness of the place, its cool feeling of green. The small tasks that filled their days of waiting. Carter lay the skimmer on the pool deck and took a chair across from her. They listened to the movie for a while. When the Wicked Witch melted, the girls erupted in happy shrieks.

  “How many times they watch that?” Carter asked.

  “Oh, quite a few.”

  “When I was a boy, seemed like it was on TV about half the time. Scared the wits out of me.” Carter paused. “I always did like that movie, though.”

  They loaded the Humvee with cans of fuel. Sitting in the cargo compartment were plastic bins of supplies Greer had brought with him—rope and tackle, a spinner net, a pair of wrenches, blankets, a simple cotton frock.

  “I’d be happier if we could bring Sara along,” Peter said. “She’d know better than any of us what to do.”

  Greer heaved a jug over the tailgate. “Not a good idea at this point. We need to keep the number of people to a minimum.”

  “We have to get word out to the townships,” Peter told Apgar. “People need to take shelter. Basements, interior rooms, whatever they’ve got. In the morning, we can send out vehicles to bring as many back as we can.”

  “I’ll see to it.”

  Peter glanced at Chase. “Ford? You’re got the chair.”

 
; “Understood.”

  Peter addressed Apgar again: “My son and his family—”

  The general didn’t let him finish. “I’ll radio the detachment in Luckenbach. We’ll get some men out there.”

  “Caleb’s got a hardbox on the property.”

  “I’ll pass that along.”

  Greer was waiting at the wheel, Michael riding shotgun. Peter climbed in back.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  It was 1830. The sun would set in two hours.

  54

  Sara and Hollis were making good time. They had entered the zone everybody called the Gap—a stretch of empty road between Ingram and Hunt Township. They were hugging the Guadalupe now, which gurgled pleasantly in the shallows. Fat live oaks stretched their canopies over the roadway; then they came to an open stretch, the low sun in their faces, then more trees and shade.

  “I think this guy needs a break,” Sara said.

  They dismounted and led the horses to the edge of the river. Standing on the bank, Hollis’s mare dipped her long face to the water without hesitation, but the gelding seemed uncertain. Sara removed her boots, rolled up her pants, and led him into the shallows to drink. The water was wonderfully cold, the river bottom made of smooth limestone, firm underfoot.

  After the horses had drunk their fill, Sara and Hollis took a moment to let the animals wander. The two of them sat on a rocky outcrop that jutted over the edge of the water. The vegetation on the banks was thick—willows, pecans, oaks, a scrub of mesquites and prickly pears. Evening insects were hatching from the water in ascending motes of light. A hundred yards upstream, the river paused in a wide, deep pool.

  “It’s so peaceful out here,” Sara said.

  Hollis nodded, his face full of contentment.

  “I think I could get used to this.”

  She was thinking of a certain place in the past. It was many years ago, when she and Hollis and all the others had traveled east with Amy to Colorado. Theo and Maus were gone by this time, left behind at the farmstead so Maus could have her baby. They’d crossed the La Sal Range and descended to a wide valley of tall grass and blue skies and stopped to rest. In the distance, snowcapped, the peaks of the Rockies loomed, though the air was still mild. Sitting in the shade of a maple tree, Sara had experienced a feeling she’d never really had before—a sense of the world’s beauty. Because it really was beautiful. The trees, the light, the way the grass moved in the breeze, the mountains’ glinting faces of ice: how had she failed to notice these things before? And if she had, why had they seemed different, more ordinary, less charged with life? She had fallen in love with Hollis, and she understood, sitting under the maple tree with her friends around her—Michael had, in fact, fallen asleep, hugging his shotgun over his chest like a child’s stuffed animal—that Hollis was the reason. It was love, and only love, that opened your eyes.

  “We better go,” Hollis said. “It’ll be dark soon.”

  They gathered the horses and rode on.

  General Gunnar Apgar, standing at the top of the wall, watched the shadows stretching over the valley.

  He glanced at his watch: 2015 hours. Sunset was minutes away. The last transports bringing workers in from the fields were churning up the hill. All of his men had taken up positions along the top of the wall. They had new guns and fresh ammunition, but their numbers were small—far too few to watch every inch of a six-mile perimeter, let alone defend it.

  Apgar wasn’t a religious man. Many years had passed since a prayer had found his lips. Though it made him feel a little foolish, he decided to say one now. God, he thought, if you’re listening, sorry about the language, but if it’s not too much trouble, please let this all be bullshit.

  Footsteps banged down the catwalk toward him.

  “What is it, Corporal?”

  The soldier’s name was Ratcliffe—a radio operator. He was badly winded from his run up the stairs. He bent at the waist and put his hands on his knees, taking in great gulps of air between words. “General, sir, we got the message out like you said.”

  “How about Luckenbach?”

  Ratcliffe nodded quickly, still looking at the ground. “Yeah, they’re sending a squad.” He paused and coughed. “But that’s the thing. They were the only ones who answered.”

  “Catch your breath, Corporal.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  “Now tell me what you’re talking about.”

  The soldier drew himself erect. “It’s just like I said. Hunt, Comfort, Boerne, Rosenberg—we’re not getting anything back. No acknowledgment, nothing. Every station except Luckenbach is off-line.”

  The last bus was passing through the gate. Below, in the staging area, workers were filing off. Some were talking, telling jokes and laughing; others separated themselves quickly from the group and marched away, headed home for the night.

  “Thanks for passing that along, Corporal.”

  Apgar watched him totter away before turning to look over the valley again. A curtain of darkness was sweeping over the fields. Well, he thought, I guess that’s that. It would have been nice if it could have lasted longer. He descended the stairs and walked to the base of the gate. Two soldiers were waiting with a civilian, a man of about forty, dressed in stained coveralls and holding a wrench the size of a sledgehammer.

  The man spat a wad of something onto the ground. “Gate should be working fine now, General. I got everything well greased, too. The thing will be quiet as a cat.”

  Apgar looked at one of the soldiers. “Are all the transports in?”

  “As far as we know.”

  He tipped his face to the sky; the first stars had appeared, winking from the darkness.

  “Okay, gentlemen,” he said. “Let’s lock it up.”

  Caleb was sitting on the front stoop, watching the night come on.

  That afternoon, he’d inspected the hardbox, which he hadn’t looked at in months. He’d built it only to please his father; it had seemed silly at the time. Tornadoes happened, yes, some people had even been killed, but what were the chances? Caleb had cleared the hatch of leaves and other debris and descended the ladder. The interior was cool and dark. A kerosene lantern and jugs of fuel stood along one wall; the hatch sealed from the inside with a pair of steel crossbars. When Caleb had shown the shelter to Pim, their second night at the farm, he’d felt a little embarrassed by the thing, which seemed like an expensive and unwarranted indulgence, completely out of step with the optimism of their enterprise. But Pim had taken it in stride. Your father knows a thing or two, she signed. Stop apologizing. I’m glad you took the time.

  Now, looking west, Caleb took measure of the sun. Its bottom edge was just kissing the top of the ridgeline. In its final moments, it appeared to accelerate, as it always did.

  Going, going, gone.

  He felt the air change. Everything around him seemed to stop. But in the next instant, something caught his eye—a rustling, high in a pecan tree at the edge of the woods. What was he seeing? Not birds; the motion was too heavy. He got to his feet. A second tree shuddered, then a third.

  He recalled a phrase from the past. When they come, they come from above.

  He had levered a round into the chamber of his rifle when, behind him, in the house, a voice cried out his name.

  “Hold up a second,” Hollis said.

  An Army truck was tipped on its side in the roadway; one of its back wheels was still spinning with a creaking sound.

  Sara quickly dismounted. “Somebody might be hurt.”

  Hollis followed her to the truck. The cab was empty.

  “Maybe they walked out of here,” Hollis said.

  “No, this just happened.” She looked down the road then pointed. “There.”

  The soldier was lying on his back. He was breathing in quick bursts, eyes open, staring at the sky. Sara dropped to her knees beside him. “Soldier, look at me. Can you speak?” He was acting like a man who was badly injured, yet there was no blood, no obvious sig
n of anything broken. The sleeves of his uniform bore the two stripes of a corporal. He rolled his face toward her, exposing a small wound, bright with blood, at the base of his throat.

  “Run,” he croaked.

  Caleb burst into the house. Pim was holding Theo, backing away from the door to Dory’s room; Bug and Elle were clustered at her legs.

  Kate’s voice: “Caleb, come quick!”

  Dory was thrashing on the bed, spittle spewing from her lips. With a sound like a sneeze, her teeth flew from her mouth. Kate was standing by the bed, holding the revolver.

  “Shoot her!” Caleb yelled.

  Kate seemed not to hear him. With a sickening crunch, Dory’s fingers elongated, gleaming claws extending from their tips. Her body had begun to glow. Her jaw unlocked; her mouth opened wide, revealing the picketed teeth.

  “Shoot her now!”

  Kate was frozen in place. As Caleb raised the rifle, Dory jolted upright, rolled into a crouch, and sprang toward the two of them. A confusion of bodies, Dory crashing into Kate, Kate crashing into Caleb; the rifle spat from his hand and skittered across the floor. On his hands and knees, Caleb scrambled toward it. He was yelling for Pim to run, though of course the woman couldn’t hear him. His hand found the weapon, and he rolled onto his back. Kate was was pushing herself backward toward the opposite wall; Dory stood above her, jaws flexing, fingers extended, strumming the air. Caleb lifted his back off the floor, widened his knees, and leveled the rifle at her with both hands.

  “Dory Tatum!”

  At the sound of her name, she stiffened, as if struck by a curious thought.

  “You’re Dory Tatum! Phil is your husband! Look at me!”

  She turned toward him, exposing her upper body. One shot, thought Caleb, taking the center of her chest into his sights, and then he squeezed the trigger.

  The soldier began to shake. The motion began at his fingers, which bent into clawlike shapes, like the talons of a hawk. A groan poured from deep in his throat. The shaking hardened into a whole-body convulsion, his spine arcing, spittle boiling to his lips. Sara was on her feet and backing away. She knew what she was seeing. It seemed impossible, and yet it was happening before her eyes. She sensed movement above her, yet she could not tear her eyes away from the soldier, whose transformation was occurring with unheard-of speed.