The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

  “That she does,” Carter answered.

  “Always putting them in her hair. Her sister’s, too.”

  “Miss Riley. Cute as a bug, that one.”

  A soft night was coming on between the branches of the trees. Rachel pointed her face to the sky.

  “I have so many memories, Anthony. Sometimes it’s all so hard to sort out.”

  “Things will come to you,” he assured her.

  “I remember the pool.”

  It was happening. Carter crouched beside her.

  “That morning, how terrible everything was. The air so raw.” She took a long, mournful breath. “I was so sad. So incredibly sad. Like a great black ocean and there you are, floating in it, drifting, no land anywhere, nothing to want or hope for. It’s just you and the water and the darkness and you know it will always be like that, forever and ever.”

  She fell silent, lost in these old, troubled thoughts. The air had cooled; the lights of the city, coming on, reflected off the cloud deck, making a pale glow. Then:

  “That was when I saw you. You were in the yard with Haley. Just …” She shrugged. “Showing her something. A toad, maybe. A flower. You were always doing that, showing her little things to make her happy.” She shook her head slowly. “But that was the thing. I knew it was you, I believed it was you. But that wasn’t who I saw.”

  She was staring at the ground, dry-eyed, beyond feeling. It would all pour forth now, the memories, the pain, the horrors of that day.

  “It was Death, Anthony.”

  Carter waited.

  “I know that’s an old idea. A crazy idea. And you so sweet to me, to all of us. But I saw you standing there with Haley and I thought, Death has come. He’s here, he’s outside right now with my little girl. It’s all a mistake, a horrible mistake, I’m the one he wants. I’m the one who needs to die.”

  The day was fading, colors draining, the sky releasing the last of its light. She raised her face; her eyes were beseeching, moist and wide.

  “That’s why I did what I did, Anthony. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right, I know that. There are things that can never be forgiven. But that is why.”

  Rachel had begun to cry. Carter put his arms around her as she collapsed into his weight. Her skin was warm and sweet-smelling, just a hint of her perfume lingering. How small she was, and he not a big man in the slightest. She might have been a bird there, just a little bit of a thing cupped in his hand.

  The girls were laughing in the house.

  “Oh God, I left them,” Rachel sobbed. She was clutching his shirt in her fists. “How could I leave them? My babies. My beautiful baby girls.”

  “Hush now,” he said. “Time to let go of all the old things.”

  They stayed like that for a time, holding each other. Night had descended in full; the air was still and moist with dew. The little girls were singing. The song was sweet and wordless, like the songs of birds.

  “They waitin’ on you,” said Carter.

  She shook her head against his chest. “I can’t face them. I can’t.”

  “You be strong, Rachel. Be strong for your babies.”

  She let him slowly draw her to her feet and took his arm, gripping it tightly with both hands, just above the elbow. With small steps, Carter led her around the pool toward the back door. The house was dark. Carter had expected it to be this way but could not say why that should be so. It was simply a part, another part, of the way things were in this place.

  They stopped before the door. From deep in the house, more laughter and the creaking of springs: the girls were jumping on the beds.

  “Aren’t you going to open it?” Rachel asked.

  Carter didn’t answer. Rachel looked at him closely; something shifted in her face. She understood that he would not be going with her.

  “Have to be this way,” he explained. “You go on, now. Tell them hello for me, won’t you? Tell them I’ve been thinking on them, every day.”

  She regarded the knob with a deep tentativeness. Inside, the girls were laughing with wild delight.

  “Mr. Carter—”

  “Anthony.”

  She placed a palm upon his cheek. She was crying again; come to think of it, Carter was crying a little himself. When she kissed him, he tasted not just the softness of her mouth and the warmth of her breath but also the saltiness of their tears conjoining—not a taste of sorrow strictly speaking, though there was sorrow in it.

  “God bless you, too, Anthony.”

  And before he knew it—before the feel of her kiss had faded from his lips—the door had opened and she was gone.

  76

  2030 hours: the light was almost gone, the convoy moving at a creep.

  They were in a coastal tableland of tangled scrub, the road pocked with potholes in places, in others rippled like a washboard. Chase was driving, his gaze intent as he fought the wheel. Amy was riding in back.

  Peter radioed Greer, who was driving the tanker at the rear of the column. “How much farther?”

  “Six miles.”

  Six miles at twenty miles per hour. Behind them, the sun had been subsumed into a flat horizon, erasing all shadows.

  “We should see the channel bridge soon,” Greer added. “The isthmus is just south of there.”

  “Everyone, we need to push it,” Peter said.

  They accelerated to thirty-five. Peter swiveled in his seat to make sure the convoy was keeping pace. A gap opened, then narrowed. The cab of the Humvee flared as the first bus in line turned on its headlights.

  “How much faster should we go?” Chase asked.

  “Keep it there for now.”

  There was a hard bang as they rocketed through a deep hole.

  “Those buses are going to blow apart,” Chase said.

  A scrim of light appeared ahead: the moon. It lifted swiftly from the eastern horizon, plump and fiery. Simultaneously, the channel bridge rose up before them in distant silhouette—a stately, vaguely organic figure with its long scoops of wire slung from tall trestles. Peter took up the radio again.

  “Drivers, anybody seeing anything out there?”

  Negative. Negative. Negative.

  Through the windscreen of the pilothouse, Michael and Lore were watching the seawall doors. The portside door had opened without complaint; the starboard was the problem. At a 150-degree angle to the dock, the door had stopped cold. They’d been trying to open it the rest of the way for nearly two hours.

  “I’m out of ideas here,” Rand radioed from the quay. “I think that’s all we’re going to get.”

  “Will we clear it?” Lore asked. The door weighed forty tons.

  Michael didn’t know. “Rand, get down to engineering. I need you there.”

  “I’m sorry, Michael.”

  “You did your best. We’ll have to manage.” He hung the microphone back on the panel. “Fuck.”

  The lights on the panel went dead.

  Twenty-eight miles west, the same summer moon had risen over the Chevron Mariner. Its blazing orange light shone down upon the deck; it shimmered over the oily waters of the lagoon like a skin of flame.

  With a bang like a small explosion, the hatch detonated skyward. It seemed not so much to fly as to leap, soaring into the nighttime sky of its own volition. Up and up it sailed, spinning on its horizontal axis with a whizzing sound; then, like a man who’s lost his train of thought, it appeared to pause in midflight. For the thinnest moment, it neither rose nor fell; one might easily have been forgiven for thinking it was charged with some magical power, capable of thwarting gravity. But, not so: down it plunged, into the befouled waters.

  Then: Carter.

  He landed on the foredeck with a clang, absorbing the impact through his legs and simultaneously compressing his body to a squat: hips wide, head erect, one splayed hand touching the deck for balance, like an offensive tackle preparing for the snap. His nostrils flared to taste the air, which was imbued with the freshness of freedom. A breeze licked at his bo
dy with a tickling sensation. Sights and sounds bombarded his senses from all directions. He regarded the moon. His vision was such that he could detect the smallest features of its face—the cracks and crevices, craters and canyons—with an almost lurid quality of three dimensions. He felt the moon’s roundness, its great rocky weight, as if he were holding it in his arms.

  Time to be on his way.

  He made his way to the top of One Allen Center. High above the drowned city, Carter took measure of the buildings: their heights and handholds, the fjordlike gulfs between them. A route materialized in his mind; it had the force, the clarity of a premonition, or something absolutely known. A hundred yards to the first rooftop, perhaps another fifty to the second, a long two hundred to the third but with a drop of fifty feet that would expand his reach …

  He backed to the far edge of the platform. The key was, first, to create an accumulation of velocity, then to spring at precisely the right moment. He lowered to a runner’s crouch.

  Ten long strides and he was up. He soared through the moonlit heavens like a comet, a star unlocked. He made the first rooftop with room to spare. He landed, tucked, rolled; he came up running and launched again.

  He’d been saving up.

  In the cargo bay of the third vehicle in the convoy, among the other injured, Alicia lay immobilized. Thick rubber cords strapped her to her stretcher at the shoulders, waist, and knees; a fourth lay across her forehead. Her right leg was splinted from ankle to hip; one arm, her right, was pinned across her chest. Various other parts of her were bandaged, stitched, bound.

  Inside her body, the rapid cellular repair of her kind was underway. But this was an imperfect process, and complicated by the vastness and complexity of her wounds. This was especially true of the winglike flange of her right hip, which had been pulverized. The viral part of her could accomplish many things, but it could not reassemble a jigsaw puzzle. It might have been said that the only thing keeping Alicia Donadio alive was habit—her predisposition to see things through, just as she had always done. But she no longer had the heart for any of it. As the bone-banging hours passed, that she had failed to die seemed more and more like a punishment, and proof enough of Peter’s words. You traitor. You knew. You killed them. You killed them all.

  Sara was sitting on the bench above her. Alicia undestood that the woman hated her; she could see it in her eyes, in the way she looked at her—or, rather, didn’t—as she went about attending to Alicia’s injuries: checking the bandages, measuring her temperature and pulse, dribbling the horrible-tasting elixir into her mouth that kept her in a pain-numbed twilight. Alicia wished she could say something to the woman, whose hatred she deserved. I’m sorry about Kate. Or It’s all right, I hate myself enough as it. But this would only make things worse. Better Alicia should accept what was offered and say nothing.

  Besides, none of this mattered now; Alicia was asleep, and dreaming. In this dream, she was in a boat, and all around was water. The seas were calm, covered in mist, without a visible horizon. She was rowing. The creak of the oars in their locks, the swish of water moving under their blades: these were the only sounds. The water was dense, with a slightly viscous texture. Where was she going? Why had the water ceased to terrify her? Because it didn’t; Alicia felt perfectly at home. Her back and arms were strong, her strokes compact, nothing wasted. Rowing a boat was something she did not recall ever doing, yet it felt completely natural, as if the knowledge had been inscribed into her muscles for later use.

  On she rowed, her blades elegantly slicing through the inky murk. She became aware that something was moving in the water—a shadowy bulk gliding just beneath the surface. It appeared to be following her, maintaining a watchful distance. Her mind did not register its presence as menacing; rather, it merely seemed to be a natural feature of the environment, one she might have anticipated if she’d thought about it in advance.

  “Your boat is very small,” said Amy.

  She was sitting in the stern. Water was running from her face and hair.

  “You know we can’t go,” Amy stated.

  The remark was puzzling. Alicia continued to row. “Go where?”

  “The virus is in us.” Amy’s voice was dispassionate, without any perceptible tone. “We can’t ever leave.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  The shape had begun to circle them. Great bulges of water began to rock the boat from side to side.

  “Oh, I think you do. We’re sisters, aren’t we? Sisters in blood.”

  The motion increased in intensity. Alicia drew the oars into the boat and clutched the gunwales for balance. Her heart turned to lead; bile bubbled in her throat. Why had she failed to foresee the danger? So much water all around them, and her little boat, so small as to be nothing. The hull began to rise; suddenly they were no longer in contact with the water. A great blue bulk emerged under them, water streaming from its encrusted flanks.

  “You know who that is,” Amy said impassively.

  It was a whale. They were balanced like a pea atop its immense, horrible head. Higher and higher it lifted them into the air. One flick of its monstrous tail and it would send them soaring; it would crash down upon them and smash their boat to pieces. A hopeless terror, that of fate, took her in its grasp. From the stern, Amy issued a bored sigh.

  “I’m so … tired of him,” she said.

  Alicia tried to scream, but the sound stopped in her throat. They were rising, the sea was falling away, the whale was looming up …

  She awoke with a slam. She blinked her eyes and tried to focus. It was night. She was in the back of the truck, and the truck was bouncing hard. Sara’s face floated into view.

  “Lish? What is it?”

  Her lips moved slowly around the words: “They’re … coming.”

  From the rear of the convoy, the sound of guns.

  Shit. Shit shit shit.

  Michael took the stairs from the pilothouse three at a time; he raced across the deck, his feet barely touching steel, and down the hatch. He was yelling into his radio, “Rand, get down here right now!”

  He hit the engineering catwalk at a sprint, grabbed the poles of the ladder, and slid the rest of the way. The engines were quiet, everything stopped. Rand appeared above him.

  “What happened?”

  “Something tripped the main!”

  Lore, on the radio: “Michael, we’re hearing shots up here.”

  “Say again?”

  “Gunshots, Michael. I’m looking down the isthmus now. We’ve got lights coming this way from the mainland.”

  “Headlights or virals?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  He needed current to trace the problem. At the electrical panel, he switched diagnostics over to the auxiliary generator. The meters jumped to life.

  “Rand!” Michael bellowed. “What are you seeing?”

  Rand was positioned at the engine-control array on the far side of the room, checking dials. “Looks like its something in the water jacket pumps.”

  “That wouldn’t trip the main! Look farther up the line!”

  A brief silence; then Rand said, “Got it.” He tapped a dial. “Pressure’s flatlined on the starboard-side charger. Must have shut down the system.”

  Lore again: “Michael, what’s going on down there?”

  He was strapping on his tool belt. “Here,” he said, tossing Rand the radio, “you talk to her.”

  Rand looked lost. “What should I say?”

  “Tell her to get ready to engage the props straight from the pilothouse.”

  “Shouldn’t she wait for the system to repressurize? We could blow a header.”

  “Just get on the electrical panel. When I tell you, switch the system back over to the main bus.”

  “Michael, talk to me,” Lore said. “Things are looking very fucking serious up here.”

  “Go,” Michael told Rand.

  He raced aft, plugged in his lantern, dropped to his back,
and wedged himself under the charger.

  This goddamn leak, he thought. It’s going to be the death of me.

  The convoy hit the isthmus doing sixty miles an hour. Buses were bounding; buses were going airborne. The tanker, last in the line, had failed to keep up. The virals were close behind and massing. The barrier of razor wire appeared in the headlights.

  Peter yelled into the radio, “Everyone keep going! Don’t stop!”

  They careened straight through the barrier. Chase stamped the brakes and pulled to the side as the convoy roared past with inches to spare, pushing a wall of wind that buffeted the vehicle like a howling gale. Peter, Chase and Amy leapt from the cab.

  Where was the tanker?

  It lumbered into view at the base of the causeway—lamps blazing, engine roaring, traveling toward them like a well-lit rocket in slow motion. Past the turn it began to accelerate. Two virals were crouched on the roof of the cab. Chase raised his rifle and squinted through the scope.

  “Ford, don’t,” Peter warned. “You hit that tank, it could blow.”

  “Quiet. I can do this.”

  A bullet split the air. One of the virals tumbled away. Ford was taking aim at the second when it dropped to the hood: no shot.

  “Shit!”

  From the cab, a pair of shotgun blasts came in rapid succession; the windshield shattered outward into the moonlight. There was a hissing groan of brakes. The viral flopped backward into the conical glare of the truck’s headlights and disappeared beneath the front wheels with a wet burst.

  Suddenly the cab was at a right angle to the causeway; the tanker was jackknifing. The whole thing began to swing crosswise. As its back wheels touched the water, the rear of the truck abruptly decelerated, swinging the cab in the opposite direction like a weight on a string. The truck was less than a hundred yards away now. Peter could see Greer fighting the wheel for control, but his efforts were now pointless; the vehicle’s angular momentum had assumed command.

  It flopped onto its side. The cab separated from its cargo, which rammed it from behind in a second crunch of glass and metal. A long, screeching skid, and the whole thing came to rest, lying driver side up at a forty-five-degree angle to the roadway.