The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

  Caleb looked at his family a final time. He felt a gap widening, as if he were viewing them from the end of a lengthening tunnel.

  I love you, Pim signed.

  I love you, too.

  He jogged away.

  From Boerne, Greer took the wheel. They were driving into the sun now. Michael was in the passenger seat, Peter in the back with Amy.

  They saw no other vehicles, no signs of life at all. The world seemed dead, an alien landscape. The shadows of the hills were lengthening; evening was coming on. Greer, squinting into the harsh light, wore a look of great intensity—his arms and back rigid as wood, his fingers clenching the wheel. Peter saw the muscles of his jaw bunching; the man was grinding his teeth.

  They passed through Comfort. The ruins of ancient buildings—restaurants, gas stations, hotels—lined the highway, sand-scoured and scavenged to the bones. They came to the settlement on the west side of the city, away from the wreckage of the old world. Like Boerne, the town was abandoned; they didn’t stop.

  Fifteen miles to go.

  Sara and the others met Jenny at the door to the hospital. The woman was on the verge of wild-eyed panic.

  “What’s going on? There are soldiers everywhere. A Humvee just rolled by with a bullhorn, telling everybody to take shelter.”

  “There’s an attack coming. We have to get these people to the basement. How many patients are on the wards?”

  “What do you mean, an attack?”

  “I mean virals, Jenny.”

  The woman blanched but said nothing.

  “Listen to me.” Sara took Jenny’s hands and made the woman look at her. “We don’t have a lot of time here. How many?”

  Jenny gave her head a little shake, as if trying to focus her thoughts. “Fifteen?”

  “Any children?”

  “Just a couple. One boy has pneumonia, the other a broken wrist we just set. We’ve got one woman in labor, but she’s early.”

  “Where’s Hannah?”

  Hannah was Jenny’s daughter, a girl of thirteen; her son was grown and gone. Jenny and her husband had long since parted ways.

  “Home, I think?”

  “Run and get her. I can handle the situation until you’re back.”

  “God, Sara.”

  “Just be quick.”

  Jenny darted from the building. Pim, holding Theo, was standing with the girls. Sara crouched before them. “I need you to go with your Auntie Pim now.”

  Elle looked was fearful and lost; snot was running from her nose. Sara wiped it with the bottom edge of her shirt.

  “Where are we going?” the girl asked woefully.

  People were scurrying past—nurses, doctors, orderlies with stretchers. Sara glanced up at Pim, then looked at her granddaughter again. “Downstairs to the basement,” Sara answered. “You’ll be safe there.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “It’s just for a little while.”

  She hugged Elle, then her sister; Pim led the girls to the stairs. As they descended, Sara turned to her husband. She recognized the look on his face. It was the same one he’d worn the night after Bill had been killed, when he’d shown her the note.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’ve got things in hand here. Go before I change my mind.”

  No more words were necessary. Hollis kissed her and strode out the door.

  They turned off Highway 10. From here, it was a straight shot south on a gravel road to the city. The truck shook fiercely as they pounded through the potholes. Wind whipped through the open windows; the sun, coming across their right shoulders, was low and bright.

  “Michael, take the wheel and keep it steady.” Greer reached below his seat. “Peter, give her this.”

  Peter leaned forward to receive the pistol. A round was already chambered.

  “You won’t have time to aim,” he said to Amy. “Just point and shoot, like you’re pointing your finger.”

  She took the gun from him. Her expression was uncertain, yet her grip seemed firm.

  “You have fifteen rounds. You’ll have to be close—don’t try to shoot them from a distance.”

  “Unlock the shotgun,” Greer said.

  Michael freed the weapon. An extended magazine tube ran below the barrel, holding eight shells. “What’s in here?” he asked Greer.

  “Slugs, big ones. No room for slop, but it’ll put one down fast.”

  The shape of the city emerged in the distance. Standing on the hill, it looked as small as a toy.

  “This is going to be tight,” Greer said.

  The last patients were being brought down from the main floor. Jenny stood at the door of the hardbox with a clipboard, checking names off a list, while Sara and the nursing staff moved among the cots, doing their best to make sure everyone was comfortable.

  Sara came to the cot that held the pregnant woman Jenny had spoken of. She was young, with thick, dark hair. While Sara took her pulse, she looked quickly at the girl’s chart. A nurse had checked her an hour ago; her cervix had been barely dilated. Her name was Grace Alvado.

  “Grace, I’m Dr. Wilson. Is this your first baby?”

  “I was pregnant one other time, but it didn’t take.”

  “And how old are you?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  Sara stopped; the age was right. If this was the same Grace, Sara had last seen her when she was just a day old.

  “Are your parents Carlos and Sally Jiménez ?”

  “You knew my folks?”

  Sara almost smiled; she might have, on a different day. “This might surprise you, Grace, but I was there the day you were born.” She looked toward the girl’s companion, who was sitting on a packing crate on the other side of the cot. He was older, maybe forty, with a rough look to him, though like many new fathers he seemed a little overwhelmed by the sudden urgency of events after months of waiting.

  “Are you Mr. Alvado?”

  “Call me Jock. Everybody does.”

  “I need you to keep her relaxed, Jock. Deep breaths, and no pushing for now. Can you do that for me?”

  “I’ll try.”

  Jenny came up behind Sara. “Everybody’s in,” she said.

  Sara put her hand on Grace’s arm. “Just focus on having your baby, okay?”

  The basement door was made of heavy steel, set into walls of thick concrete. Sara was about to close it when the room plunged into darkness. An anxious murmuring, and then people began to shout.

  “Everybody, settle down, please!” Sara said.

  “What happened to the lights?” a voice cried from the darkness.

  “The Army’s just diverting current to the spots, that’s all.”

  “That means the virals are coming!”

  “We don’t know that. Everyone, just try to keep calm.”

  Jenny was standing beside her. “Is that really what they’re doing?” she asked quietly.

  “Do I know? Go check the storage room for lanterns and candles.”

  The woman returned a couple of minutes later. Lamps were lit and distributed around the space. The yells had fallen to whispers and, then, in the gloom, a tense silence.

  “Jenny, give me a hand.”

  The door weighed four hundred pounds. Sara and Jenny pulled it closed and turned the wheel to engage the bolts.

  A quarter of Apgar’s men had taken up positions within five hundred yards of the gate; the rest were spread at regular intervals along the walls and connected by radio. Caleb was in charge of a squad of twelve men. Six of them had been stationed at Luckenbach—part of a small contingent who’d made it to a hardbox as the garrison was overrun. No officers had survived, orphaning them in the chain of command. Now they were Caleb’s.

  A man came banging down the catwalk toward him. Hollis wore no uniform, but a standard-issue chest pack was cinched to his frame, holding half a dozen spare magazines and a long, sheathed knife. An M4 dangled from its sling across his br
oad frame, the muzzle pointed downward; a pistol was holstered to his thigh.

  He gave a crisp salute. “Private Wilson, sir.”

  It was absurd, Hollis speaking to him this way. He almost seemed like he was play-acting. “You’re kidding me.”

  “The women and children are secure. I was told to report to you.”

  His face was set in a way that Caleb had never seen before. This large, gentle man, collector of books and reader to children, had become a warrior.

  “I made a promise, Lieutenant,” Hollis reminded him. “I believe you were there at the time.”

  The spots came on, spilling a defensive perimeter of stark white light at the base of the wall. Radios began to crackle; a tremor of energy moved up and down the catwalk.

  A call went out: “Eyes up!”

  The clack of chambering rounds. Caleb pointed his rifle over the wall and flicked off the safety. He glanced to his right, where Hollis stood at the ready: feet wide, stock set, eyes trained down the barrel in perfect alignment. His body was somehow both tense and relaxed, purposeful and at ease with itself. It had the look of an old feeling stitched to the bones, summoned effortlessly to the surface when called upon.

  Where would the virals come from? How many would there be? His chest was opening and closing arrhythmically; his vision seemed unnaturally confined. He forced himself to take a long, deep breath. Don’t think, he told himself. There are times for thinking, but this isn’t one of them.

  A glowing point appeared in the distance, straight north. Adrenaline hit his heart; he hardened the stock against his shoulder. The light began to bob, then to separate like a dividing cell. Not virals: headlights.

  “Contact!” a voice yelled. “Thirty degrees right! Two hundred yards!”

  “Contact! Twenty left!”

  For the first time in over two decades, the horn began to wail.

  Greer shoved the accelerator to the floor. The speedometer leapt, the fields flying past in a blur, the engine roaring, the frame of the truck shuddering.

  “They’re dead behind us!” Michael yelled.

  Peter swiveled in his seat. Points of light were rising from the fields.

  “Look out!” Greer yelled.

  Peter turned around in time to see three virals leap into the headlights. Greer took aim and sliced through the pod. As bodies barreled over the hood, Peter slammed forward and bounced back into his seat. When he looked again, a single viral was clinging to the hood of the truck.

  Michael pointed the shotgun over the dash and fired.

  The glass exploded. Greer swerved to the left; Peter was thrown against the door, Amy on top of him. They were barreling through a bean field, moving laterally to the gate. Greer swerved the opposite way; the chassis tipped to the left, threatened to roll; then the wheels slammed down. Greer crested a rise and the truck went briefly airborne before spinning back onto the road. An ominous clunk from below; they began to decelerate.

  Peter yelled to Greer, “What’s wrong?”

  Smoke was pouring from the grille; the engine roared pointlessly. “We must have hit something—the transmission’s blown. On your right!”

  Peter turned, took the viral in his sights, and squeezed the trigger, missing cleanly. Again and again he fired. He had no idea if he was hitting anything. The slide locked back; the magazine was empty. The lighted perimeter was still a hundred yards away.

  “I’m out!” Michael yelled.

  As the truck floated to a halt, flares arced from the catwalk, dragging contrails of light and smoke above their heads. Peter turned to Amy. She was slumped against the door, the pistol, unfired, dangling in her hand.

  “Greer,” Peter said, “help me.”

  He pulled her from the cab. Her motions were as heavy and loose as a sleepwalker’s. The flares began their lazy, flickering descents. As Amy’s legs unfolded from the truck, Greer stepped around the front of the vehicle, shoving fresh shells into the shotgun’s magazine. He slapped the gun into Peter’s hand and slid his right shoulder under Amy’s arm to take her weight.

  “Cover us,” he said.

  Caleb helplessly watched the truck’s approach. The virals were still well out of reach for even the luckiest shot. Up and down the wall, voices were yelling to hold fire, to wait until they were in range.

  He saw the truck stop. Four figures emerged. At the rear of the group, one man turned and fired a shotgun into the heart of an approaching pod. One shot, two shots, three, flames blooming from the gun’s muzzle in the darkness.

  Caleb knew that man to be his father.

  He had stepped into the harness and clipped in before he was even aware he was doing it. The action was automatic; he had no plan, only instinct.

  “Caleb, what the hell are you doing?”

  Hollis was staring at him. Caleb hopped to the top of the rampart and turned his back toward the fields.

  “Tell Apgar we’ll need a squad at the pedestrian portal. Go.”

  Before Hollis could say anything else, Caleb pushed off. A long arc away from the wall and his boots touched concrete; he shoved himself away again. Two more pushes and he landed in the dirt. He unclipped and swung his rifle around.

  His father was running with the others up the hill, just inside the lighted perimeter. Virals were massing at the edges. Some were covering their eyes; others had crouched into low, ball-like shapes. A moment’s hesitation, their instincts warring inside them. Would the lights be enough to hold them back?

  The virals charged.

  The machine guns opened up; Caleb ducked reflexively as bullets whizzed over his head, slicing into the creatures with a wet, slapping pound. Blood splashed; flesh was cleaved from bone; whole pieces of the virals’ bodies winged away. They seemed not merely to die but to disintegrate. The machine guns pounded, round after round. A slaughter, yet always there were more, surging into the lights.

  “The portal!” Caleb called. He was running forward at a forty-five-degree angle to the wall, waving above his head. “Head for the portal!”

  Caleb dropped to one knee and began to fire. Did his father see him? Did he know who he was? The bolt locked back; thirty rounds, gone in a heartbeat. He dropped the magazine, reached into his chest pack for a fresh one, and shoved it into the receiver.

  Something crashed into him from behind. Breath, sight, thought: all left him. He felt himself sailing, almost hovering. This seemed extraordinary. In the midst of his flight, he had just enough time to marvel at the lightness of his body compared to other things. Then his body grew heavy again and he slammed into the ground. He was rolling down the incline, his rifle whipping around on its sling. He tried to control his body, its wild tumble down the hill. His hand found the lower unit of the rifle, but his index finger got tangled in the trigger guard. He rolled again, onto his chest, the rifle wedged between his body and the ground, and there was no stopping it; the gun went off.

  Pain! He came to rest on his back, the rifle lying over his chest. Had he shot himself? The ground was spinning under him; it refused to be still. He blinked into the spotlights. He didn’t feel the way he imagined a shot person would. The pain was in two places: his chest, which had received the explosive force of the rifle’s firing, and a spot on his forehead, near the outer edge of his right eyebrow. He reached up, expecting blood; his fingers came away dry. He understood what had happened. The ejecting cartridge, ricocheting off the ground, had pinged upward into his face, narrowly missing his eye. You are fucking lucky, Caleb Jaxon, he thought. I really hope nobody saw that.

  A shadow fell across him.

  Caleb raised the rifle, but as his left hand reached forward to balance the barrel he realized the mag well was empty; the magazine had been stripped away. He had, at various times of his life, imagined the moment of his own death. These imaginings had not included lying on his back with an empty rifle while a viral tore him to pieces. Perhaps, he considered, that’s the way it was for everybody: Bet you didn’t think of this. Caleb dropped the rifle. H
is only hope was his sidearm. Had he racked it? Had he remembered to free the safety? Would the gun even be there, or had it, like the rifle’s magazine, been stripped from his person? The shadow had taken the form of a human silhouette, but it wasn’t human, not at all. The head cocked. The claws extended. The lips retreated, revealing a dark cave dripping with teeth. The pistol was in Caleb’s hand and rising.

  A burst of blood; the creature curled around the hole at the center of its chest. With an almost tender gesture, it reached up with one clawed hand and touched the wound. It raised its face with a bland expression. Am I dead? Did you do that? But Caleb hadn’t; he hadn’t even pulled the trigger. The shot had come from over Caleb’s shoulder. For a second they studied one another, Caleb and this dying thing; then a second figure stepped from Caleb’s right, shoved the muzzle of a shotgun into the viral’s face, and fired.

  It was his father. With him was a woman, barefoot, in a plain frock, the kind the sisters wore. Her hair was the barest patina of darkness on her skull. In her outstretched hand, she held the pistol she had used to fire the first, fatal shot.

  Amy.

  “Peter …” she said. And melted to her knees.

  Then they were running.

  No words were passed that Caleb would later recall. His father was carrying Amy over his shoulder; two other men were with them; one of them had the shotgun his father had cast aside. The portal was open; a squad of six soldiers had formed a firing line in front of it.

  “Get down!”

  The voice was Hollis’s. All of them hit the dirt. Shots screamed past them, then ceased abruptly. Caleb lifted his face. Over the barrel of his rifle, Hollis was waving them on.

  “Run your asses off!”

  His father and Amy entered first, Caleb following. A barrage of gunfire erupted behind them. The soldiers were shouting to one another—On your left! On your right! Go, go!—firing their rifles as, one by one, they backed through the narrow doorway. Hollis was the last to enter. He dropped his rifle, swung the door around, and began to close it, clutching the wheel that, once turned, would set the bolts. Just as the lip of the door was about to make contact with the frame, it stopped.

  “Need some help here!”

  Hollis was bracing the door with his shoulder. Caleb sprang forward and pushed; others did the same. Still, the gap began to widen. An inch, then two more. Half a dozen men were piled against the door. Caleb swiveled his body so his back was braced against it and dug the heels of his boots into the earth. But the end was ordained; even if they could hold the door a few minutes longer, the virals’ strength would outlast them.