The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

  He peeked around the corner, using the angled mirror to survey the room. The virals, on their hands and knees, were busily pressing their mouths to the floor, their tongues swirling like mopheads. Michael scooted down the length of the counter so he was as close as possible to the door, which was positioned ten feet behind him and to his right. If he could move the virals to the opposite corner of the room, the counter would obscure him completely.

  Michael unwound the scarf from his leg. The fabric was bloated with blood. He formed it into a ball, tied off the ends to hold the shape, and rose on his knees, keeping the top of his head just below the lip of the counter. Pulling back his arm, he counted to three. Then he lobbed the scarf across the room.

  It impacted the far wall with a splat. Michael dropped to his stomach and began to crawl. From behind him, he heard scurrying, then a series of clicks and snarls. It was better than he’d hoped; the virals were fighting over the rag. He slipped beneath the curtain and kept going. Now he couldn’t see a goddamn thing. He crawled another few feet, until he was away from the door, and attempted to rise. The instant the foot of his injured leg touched the ground was one he was pretty sure he would always remember. The pain was simply spectacular. He reached into his shirt pocket and removed a box of matches. Fumbling in the dark, he managed to remove one without dumping out the rest, and scraped it on the striker.

  He was in a narrow hallway of high brick walls that led deeper into the building. Metal racks of empty hangers lined the walls. The air was clearer here, less dust-choked. He pulled the kerchief down from his face. An opening to his left dead-ended in a small room of curtained booths. He looked down; drops of blood had followed him like a trail of crumbs. More blood sloshed in his boot. The match burned down; he flicked it away, lit another, and went on.

  Eight matches later, Michael concluded that there was no way out. Branching hallways always led him back to the central corridor. Who designed a building like this? How long before the virals’ interest in the rag exhausted itself and they followed the blood?

  He came to a final room. It appeared to be a kitchen, with a stove and sink and cabinets lining two of the four walls; in the center was a small square table covered with open cans and plastic bottles. Two brown-boned skeletons lay on a cratered mattress, curled together. In all of New York, these were the first human remains Michael had encountered. He crouched beside them. One of them was much smaller than the other, who appeared to be a grown woman, with a desiccated tangle of long hair. A mother and her child? Probably they had holed up together during the crisis. For a century they had lain here, their last loving moment captured for all time. It made him feel like an interloper, as if he had violated the sanctity of a tomb.

  A window.

  It was covered by a cage, hinged shutters of crisscrossing wire, held in place by metal bars bolted to the wall. The two halves were joined with a padlock. The match burned down, scorching his fingertips; he flung it away. As his eyes adjusted he realized a faint glow was coming through the window, just enough to see by. He looked around the room for something to use as a lever. Think, Michael. On the table was a butter knife. The floor lurched again with a single, horizontal bang. Plaster dust rained down. He wedged the knife into the curved arm of the lock. His hands felt cold and slightly numb, at the edge of his ability to command them; the loss of blood was catching up to him. He tightened his arms and shoulders and twisted the blade, hard.

  It snapped in two.

  That was it; enough already. Michael was done. He sank to the floor and braced his back against the wall so that he could see them coming.

  Peter was standing in a field of knee-high grass. The color of everything was peculiar, possessing an unnatural, off-kilter vividness that accentuated the smallest movements in the landscape. A breeze was blowing. The land was perfectly flat, though in the far distance mountains jostled the horizon. It was neither day nor night but something in between, the light soft and shadowless. What was this curious place? How had he come to be here? He searched his memory; only then did he realize that he did not, in fact, know who he was. He felt vaguely alarmed. He was alive, he existed, yet he seemed to have no history he could recall.

  He heard the sound of running water and walked toward it. The action was automatic, as if an invisible intelligence were piloting his body. After some time had passed, he came upon a river. The water moved lazily, murmuring around scattered rocks. Leaves spiraled in its current like upturned hands. He followed the river downstream to a bend where it gathered in a pool. The surface of the water was still, almost solid-looking. He felt a peculiar agitation. It seemed that within the pool’s depths lay an answer, though the question eluded him. It was on the tip of his tongue, yet when he tried to focus on it, it darted up and away from his thoughts like a bird. He knelt at the edge of the pool and looked down. An image appeared: a man’s face. It was disturbing to look at. The face was his, yet it might as well have been a stranger’s. He reached out and with his index finger broke the surface. Concentric rings bloomed outward from the point of contact; then the image reassembled. With this came the sense, distant at first, but growing stronger, of recognition. He knew who he was, if only he could manage to recall. You’re … It was as if he were attempting to lift a boulder with his mind. You’re … you’re …

  Peter.

  He lurched backward. A dam was bursting in his mind. Images, faces, days, names—they poured forth in a torrent, almost painful. The scene around him—the field and the river and the flat light of the sky—began to disperse. It was washing away. Behind it lay a wholly different reality, of objects and people and events and ordered time. I am Peter Jaxon, he thought, and then he said it:

  “I am Peter Jaxon.”

  Peter stumbled backward; the sword fell from his hand.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Fanning barked. “I said, kill her.”

  Peter’s head swiveled; his eyes narrowed on Fanning’s face. It was happening, thought Amy. He was remembering. The muscles of his legs compressed.

  He sprang.

  He rammed Fanning headlong. Surprise was on his side: Fanning went sailing. He crashed back down and rolled end over end, coming to rest against a concrete pylon. He rose onto all fours but his movements were sluggish. He gave his head a horsey shake and spat on the ground.

  “Well, this is unexpected.”

  Then Amy was being lifted; Peter had gathered her into his arms. Together they raced down 43rd Street on soaring strides. Where was he taking her? Then she understood: the partially constructed office tower. She tipped her face skyward, but the dust was too thick to see if the building’s upper floors rose above the cloud deck. Peter halted at the base of the elevator shaft. He swung her onto his back, scrambled ten feet up the shaft’s outer structure, guided Amy back around his waist, lowered her through the bars to the elevator’s roof, and followed her down. His purpose in all this was unknown to her. He hoisted her onto his back again, using his elbows to compress her legs around his waist to tell her to hold onto him as tightly as possible. All of this had transpired in just a matter of seconds. The elevator’s cables, three of them, were set into a steel plate affixed to a crossbar on the elevator’s roof. Peter gathered the cables into his fists and set his feet wide. Amy, her arms hooked around his shoulders and her legs squeezing his waist like a vice, felt a gathering pressure in his body. Peter began to groan through his teeth. Only then did she grasp his intentions. She closed her eyes.

  The plate tore free; Amy and Peter launched skyward, Peter gripping the cables, Amy riding his back like the shell of a turtle. Five stories, ten, fifteen. The elevator’s counterweight plunged past. What would happen when they reached the top? Would they shoot through the roof into space?

  Suddenly the whole cage shuddered; the counterweight had reached the bottom. The tension on the cable was instantly gone. Hurled upward, Amy found herself looking down at the base of the shaft. She was alone in the air, unattached to anything. Her body slo
wed as she approached the apogee of her ascent and for a second seemed to hover. I am going to fall, she thought. How far away the ground was. She would hit it going a hundred miles an hour, maybe more. I am falling.

  A jolt: Peter, still gripping the cable, had seized her by the wrist. He pumped his legs, shifting his center of gravity to swing Amy in progressively wider arcs. Amy saw his target, an opening in the wall of the shaft not far below them.

  He flung her away.

  She landed on the floor and rolled to a halt. They were still inside the dust cloud. The adrenaline of their ascent had sharpened her thoughts. Everything was coming into a fine, almost granular focus. She scrambled to the edge and looked down into a dizzying maw of space.

  Fanning was climbing up the side of the building.

  The air concussed with a titanic roar. The building on the opposite side of Forty-third Street began to melt straight down into itself like a man felled at the knees. The floor under Amy began to shake. The vibration deepened; sounds of buckling metal rippled through the structure as the floor tipped abruptly toward the street. Loose materials—rusted tools, sawhorses, moisture-swollen pieces of drywall, a bucket of nails—slid past her and sailed into the abyss. She was on her stomach, pressing herself to the floor. The angle was increasing. She was slipping, her hands and feet could gain no traction, gravity was taking hold …

  “Peter, help!”

  The sweet pressure of his hand on her arm halted her slide; he was lying on his stomach, the crowns of their heads just touching. The floor gave another downward lurch, yet he held on, his toes digging into the concrete. With gathering force, he drew her back from the edge.

  “Ah,” said Fanning. His face had appeared above the lip of the floor. “There you are.”

  Michael heard a faint metallic ringing from the hallway—the sound of hangers jostling on racks. A short silence ensued; the trail of his blood, crisscrossing the various hallways and doubling back, had momentarily perplexed them. The delay was excruciating. If only he would just pass out. If anything, he felt more alert than ever.

  Maybe he should make a noise. Call out to them, to get the whole thing over with. Hey, I’m in here, idiots! Come and fucking get it!

  Such a stupid, arbitrary place to die. He’d never thought he’d die in bed; it wasn’t that sort of world, and he wasn’t that sort of person. But some damn kitchen?

  A kitchen.

  Standing up was out of the question. But the top of the stove lay within his reach. Vertigo sloshed through his brain as he rocked onto his knees; straining forward, he grabbed hold of the skillet. He spat on the underside and wiped the metal with the hem of his shirt. His reflection was vague and undetailed, more a general outline of a human face than any particular person, but it was what he had.

  The sounds were coming closer.

  They raced up the stairs. Two flights brought them to the roof. The dust was as thick as ever, though in the western sky a paler region, weak but discernible, showed the sun’s location.

  They had to get higher. They had to get above the cloud.

  Amy looked up. The boom of the crane was rocking like the neck of a pecking bird. A long, hooked cable swayed from its tip. A stairway inside the crane’s mast ascended to the top.

  They began to climb. Where was Fanning? Watching them, no doubt—enjoying himself, choosing his moment.

  They clanged the rest of the way to the top. The swaying was getting worse. The whole thing felt unstable, as if at any moment the crane might peel away from the side of the building. They were still inside the cloud. The skyline of midtown Manhattan was a smoldering wreckage, the destruction continuing to extend outward from its epicenter. A rumble, a cloud, and another building toppled. Broad gaps existed where whole blocks had once stood.

  “Hello up there!”

  Fanning was halfway up the mast. Gripping a bar with one hand, he leaned out and waved to them with merry confidence. “Not to worry, I’ll be there soon!”

  A narrow catwalk led to the end of the boom. Amy crawled along it, Peter following. The boom was slamming up and down. She kept her eyes aimed forward; she didn’t dare look down into the void. Even a glimpse would paralyze her.

  They reached the end; there was no place else to go.

  “Goddamn I like a view.”

  Fanning had reached the top of the mast and was now standing fifty feet behind them. Back arched, chest puffed out, he let his gaze travel over the ruined city.

  “You’ve really made a mess of things, haven’t you? Speaking as a New Yorker, I have to say, this brings back some very unpleasant memories.”

  A sudden warmth touched Amy’s cheek. She looked to her left, across Fifth Avenue. The glass facade of the building on the far side shone with a faint orange color. Which made no sense; the building faced east, away from the sun. The light, she realized, was a reflection.

  Fanning huffed a sigh. “Well. Looks to me like we’ve reached the end of the line. I’d ask you to stand aside, Peter, but you don’t seem to be a very good listener.”

  The violence of the crane’s movement intensified. Far below, the hooked chain was swaying like a pendulum. The glow of the glass was growing brighter. Where was the light coming from?

  “What do you say? Perhaps the two of you could hold hands and throw yourselves off. I’ll be glad to wait.”

  There was a flash. A ray of intense sunlight, angling off the steel crown of the Chrysler Building, had broken through the murk.,

  It shot Fanning directly in the face.

  Suddenly the crane tipped away from the side of the building. The bolts attaching the mast to the structure’s outer girders were breaking away. With a groan, the boom began to arc over Fifth Avenue, slowly at first, then with gathering velocity. The mast was tipping from its base. They were moving both down and away, the boom falling like a hammer toward the glass tower across the street. It would spear the building at a forty-five-degree angle, going like a shot.

  Oh please, thought Amy. She was hugging the edges of the catwalk. Make it stop.

  Glass exploded around them.

  The virals did not so much enter as pop into the room. The first one, the alpha, bounded straight over the table, landing in front of him. Michael thrust the pan out toward its face.

  It froze.

  The other two seemed confused, unable to decide what to do. It was as Michael had hoped; he had disrupted their chain of command. He moved the pan a little to the side; the viral’s gaze tracked it unerringly. This discovery would have intrigued him if he weren’t so terrified. Hardly daring to breathe, Michael slowly drew the pan toward himself. The viral obediently followed; it seemed utterly entranced. Inch by inch, the gap between them closed. Michael shifted the pan to the left, making the viral turn its face.

  A broken butter knife, thought Michael. I better get this right.

  He struck.

  The end of the crane’s boom speared the glass tower at the northwest corner of Forty-third and Fifth at the thirty-second floor. Such was the force of impact that it continued its downward course through two more floors, while also embedding itself deeper within the structure. Here it came to rest in precarious balance, mast and boom forming the upper legs of an isosceles triangle suspended three hundred feet above the street.

  Amy returned to consciousness with only partial recollection of these events: a sensation of wild decent, culminating in a chaos so total that her mind could not sort its components. She was lying on the floor, her body twisted and her knees drawn up, her left arm extended past her head. Ahead lay a region of light and wind and swirling dust, which, after a moment, showed itself to be a gaping hole in the side of the building. To her left, the end of the boom sloped downward into the floor, swaying from side to side with a soporific creaking sound. The air was otherwise weirdly still. Something rough and bulky lay beneath her: the chain. It was still attached to the tip of the boom. She felt profound puzzlement at having survived, at the mere fact of being alive. That was her
only emotion. As she rolled onto her stomach, her center of gravity, distorted by her long plunge through space, swayed nauseatingly inside her. Nevertheless, she managed to push herself onto her hands and knees and crawled toward the end of the boom.

  Peter was lying facedown on the catwalk. He did not, at first, appear to be living. There was blood everywhere, and his neck was bent away from her at an unnatural angle. One arm dangled over the edge. But as Amy inched forward, calling his name, she detected a faint respiratory stirring, followed by a twitch of his exposed hand. I’m coming, she cried, I’m coming to get you. Just hang on.

  She didn’t have much time; the crane’s tenuous state of balance would not last long. At any moment the whole thing would wrench free and topple to the street below. Kneeling on the catwalk, Amy slid her hands beneath Peter’s shoulders. She was panting for air; perspiration dripped into her mouth and eyes. In a series of jerks, she drew him to the end of the boom and slid him onto the floor.

  She rolled him onto his back. His body seemed completely inert, yet his eyes were open. Amy cupped his chin to make him look at her. His tongue swished behind his teeth with a gurgling sound; he was attempting to speak.

  “You’re hurt,” she said. “Don’t try to talk.”

  The muscles of his face compressed. His eyes were open very wide. She realized he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking behind her.

  A single word, the last one of his life, burst from Peter’s lips: “Fanning.”

  The fractured end of the butter knife sank into the creature’s eye with a spurt of clear fluid. Michael tried to hold on, but the metal slipped from his fingers as the creature emitted a high-pitched squeal and staggered backward, the blade still embedded. Now Michael had nothing but the pan to work with. As one of the others shot forward, he swung it as hard as he could, connecting with the side of the creature’s skull. He fell onto his side, still pressed to the wall. He raised the pan before his face.