The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

  The viral batted it away.

  Michael rolled onto his stomach and buried his head in his arms.

  Roaring with rage, Fanning blasted into her. A second of confusion and she was on her back, Fanning straddling her waist, claws coiled around her neck. The skin of his face was blackened and charred, the flesh separated in long, puckered slits that exposed the musculature beneath; his lips were gone, transforming his mouth into a skeleton’s grin of naked teeth. Bits of damp, stringy material dangled from his eye sockets; the orbs within had burst. She tried to breathe, but no air passed the knot of pressure on her throat. Jets of spittle flew from Fanning’s mouth into her eyes. Her hands batted at his arms and face, but her efforts were weak and vague. The floor began to shake; the crane was breaking loose. The walls of her vision were compacting around her like a narrowing tunnel. She abandoned her flailing and swept her hands along the floor. He’s blind, she told herself. He can’t see what you’re doing. The shaking deepened; with a shriek of torquing metal, the boom jerked upward.

  There it was, in her hand. The chain.

  As she wound it around Fanning’s neck, his face and body startled; Amy felt a momentary easing of the pressure on her windpipe. The boom had begun to back out the side of the building. She quickly formed a second loop and tossed it over his head.

  Fanning released her and sat upright. He raised a searching hand to his throat. The slack was running out.

  “Look for her,” said Amy.

  He made no cry. He exited the world in a blink. He was there one second and gone the next, plucked into the whirling dust, his body thus to join the ashes of the vanished city.

  And then it was over.

  For a long time Michael waited. The silence seemed like a trick. But as the seconds passed and nothing happened, he realized something had changed. There was, all around him, a deep stillness, as if he were alone in the room.

  He uncovered his eyes and looked.

  The virals were dead. The one that had knocked the pan away lay at his feet, curled in a fetal position. The other two were on the far side of the room in a similar posture—even the one with the blade in its eye, from which still issued a trail of blood-tinged fluid. There was something tender about their postures. It was as if, overcome by a sudden exhaustion, they had lain on the floor and gone to sleep.

  He used the stove to pull himself upright and limped down the hall, following the trail of his own blood. He took a scarf from one of the racks, rebandaged his leg, and ventured outside. A low evening sun, punching through the dust, flared the clouds with color. He made his way east to Lafayette Street and turned north. It wasn’t until he’d traveled another block that he knew for certain what had happened.

  The virals lay everywhere. On the sidewalks. On the street. On the roofs of old cars. All in the same fetal posture, curled like children in their beds, worn out by a too-long day. A sight less of death than of a vast, collective repose. Their bodies, like the city of which they had so long been a part, were crumbling to dust. It was a scene of wonder. A great, sad, and joyous wonder, too heavy for one mind to bear. He stumbled forward. Uptown, the rumbling of destruction persisted. For months, years, centuries even, the immolation would continue, the great metropolis finally folding itself into the sea. But now, as Michael moved among the bodies, an infinite quiet prevailed, the world pausing in acknowledgment, history held in time’s cupped hand.

  And Michael Fisher did the only thing he could. He fell to his knees and wept.

  Peter had begun to die.

  Amy felt his spirit fade; Fanning was leaving him. His eyes were open, yet the light inside was dimming. Soon it would be gone.

  Don’t leave me. She lifted his hand and pressed it to her cheek; his flesh was growing cold. The muscles of his face relaxed toward death. Please, she said, and shuddered with a sob, don’t leave me alone.

  The time had come to let him go, to say goodbye, yet the prospect was unendurable; it could not be accepted. There was a way, perhaps. The gravest act—a betrayal, even. She momentarily had the sensation of being outside her body, watching herself, as she took the shard of glass from off the floor and slashed the edge across her palm. Blood rose from the wound and swiftly gathered in a rich, crimson puddle. She took Peter’s hand and did the same. A last flicker of doubt, then she placed his palm against her own and meshed their fingers together. She felt a tiny twitch; with accumulating pressure, Peter folded his fingers over the back of her hand.

  She closed her eyes.

  XII

  The Wild Beyond

  Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;

  I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

  —SARAH WILLIAMS, “THE OLD ASTRONOMER TO HIS PUPIL”

  83

  At the top of Central Park, away from the destruction, Amy and Michael pitched their camp. It had taken them nearly a week to find each other; the center of the island was blocked by impenetrable mountains of debris. It was on the morning of the sixth day that Amy had heard him calling. Michael emerged from the rubble, a ghostly figure, covered with ash. By this time, Amy knew Alicia was gone; her presence, her spirit, these were nowhere in the world. Still, when Michael told her what had happened, the reality undid her. She sat on the ground and wept.

  —And Peter? Michael asked tentatively.

  Not looking up, Amy shook her head. No.

  They remained there for three weeks to rest and gather supplies. Michael slowly regained his strength. Together they constructed a simple smokehouse and set snares to catch small game. Elsewhere in the park they found a variety of edible plants, even some apple trees, fat with glossy fruit. Michael worried that the water in the reservoir would be tainted by seawater, but it wasn’t; they retrieved the water filter from the Nautilus to clean it of debris. From time to time they would hear the rumble of another building’s collapse, followed by a silence that seemed somehow deeper in the aftermath. At first this unnerved them, but eventually the noise became commonplace, nothing even to acknowledge.

  The days were long, the sun hot. One early morning they awoke to a blast of thunder. Storm after storm crashed through the city. When at last the sun returned, the air was different. A sparkling freshness lay upon the park, dust washed from the leaves of the trees.

  It was on their final night that Michael produced the bottle of whiskey. He had found it in an apartment building when he’d gone to scavenge tools and clothes. The cap was sealed, the glass caked with dust so thick it was like a layer of soil. Sitting by the fire, Michael was the first to try it. “Absent friends,” he said, raising the bottle, and took a long swallow. As his throat bobbed, he began to cough while also, somehow, wearing an expression of triumph.

  “Oh, you’re going to like this,” he wheezed, and handed it to her.

  Amy took a small sip, to get the feel, then, as Michael had done, tipped her head back and let the whiskey fill her mouth. A rich, smoky taste bloomed on her tongue, filling her sinuses with tingling warmth.

  Michael looked at her inquisitively, eyebrows raised. “You might want to go easy,” he warned. “That’s a hundred-and-twenty-year-old Scotch you’re drinking.”

  She took a second pull, savoring the flavor more deeply.

  “It tastes … like the past,” she said.

  In the morning they broke camp and headed south, through the park and down Eighth Avenue. At the water’s edge they loaded the last of Michael’s supplies into the Nautilus. He would head first for Florida, where he would restock, then make the long jump to the coast of Brazil, hugging the land until he reached the Strait of Magellan. Once through, a final stop to rest and resupply and he would set sail for the South Pacific.

  “Are you sure you can find them?” Amy asked.

  He shrugged carelessly, though they both understood the danger of what he was attempting. “After all this, how hard can it be?” He stopped, looked at her, then said with a note of caution, “I know you don’t think yo
u can come with me—”

  “I can’t, Michael.”

  He hunted for words. “It’s just … how will you get along? All alone.”

  Amy did not have an answer, at least not one she believed would make sense to him. “I’ll have to manage.” She looked at his sad face. “I’ll be all right, Michael.”

  They had agreed that a clean break would be best. Yet as the moment of separation arrived, this seemed not just foolish but impossible. They embraced, holding each other for a long time.

  “She loved you, you know,” Amy said.

  He was crying a little; they both were. He shook his head. “I don’t know that she did.”

  “Perhaps not the way you wanted. But it was the way she knew how.” Amy drew back a little and placed a hand to his cheek. “Hold on to that, Michael.”

  They parted. Michael stepped down into the cockpit; Amy cast off the lines. A snap of the sail and the boat streamed away. Michael waved once over the transom; Amy waved in reply. God bless and keep you, Michael Fisher. She watched the image recede into the vastness.

  She put on her pack and hiked north. By the time she reached the bridge, it was early afternoon. A strong summer sun gleamed upon the surface of the water, far below. She made her way across and on the opposite side stopped to drink and rest, then donned her pack once more and continued on her journey.

  Utah was four months away.

  From the observation deck of the Empire State Building—one of the last intact structures between Grand Central and the sea—Alicia watched the Nautilus sail down the Hudson.

  It had taken her most of two days to make the climb. Two hundred and four flights of stairs, most in total darkness, an agonizing ascent on her makeshift crutch and, when the pain became too great, her hands and knees. For hours she had lain on various landings, perspiring and breathing hard, wondering if she could go on. Her body was broken; her body was done. In those places where there was no pain, she felt only a creeping numbness. One by one, the lights of life were winking out inside her.

  But, her mind, her thoughts: these were her own. No Fanning, no Amy. How she’d escaped the subway tunnel she possessed no memory of; somehow she had been ejected onto dry land. The rest was fragments, flashes. She remembered Michael’s face, backlit by sunshine, and his hand reaching down; the water slamming into her, its power immeasurable, large as a planet’s; all volition gone, her body plunging and tumbling; the first involuntary gulp, making her choke, her throat opening instinctively to take a second breath, pulling the water deeper into her lungs; pain, and then a merciful lessening of pain; a feeling of dispersal, her body and her thoughts losing their distinctiveness, like a radio signal fading from range; and then nothing at all.

  She’d awakened to find herself in the most perplexing circumstance. She was sitting on a bench; around her, a small park of overgrown trees and a playground deep in tall, feathered grass. Slowly her awareness expanded. Vast crags of debris surrounded the perimeter although the park itself was miraculously untouched. The sun was out; birds twittered in the trees, a peaceful sound. Her clothing was soaked and her mouth tasted of salt. She sensed a gap in time between remembered events and her present situation, the calm of which seemed wholly anachronistic, like nothing she had ever known. She wondered, somewhat dully, if she was dead—if she was, in fact, a ghost. But when she attempted to stand, and the pain volleyed through her body, she knew this wasn’t so; surely death would bring an absence of bodily sensation.

  That was when she realized it. The virus was gone.

  Not transmuted into some new state, as it had been in Fanning and Amy, restoring their human appearance while leaving other traits intact. The virus was nowhere inside her at all. Somehow the water had killed it, and then returned her to life.

  How was this possible? Had Fanning lied to her? But when she searched her memory she realized he had never told her, in so many words, that the water would kill her, she who was neither wholly viral nor wholly human but poised between the two. Perhaps he had sensed the truth; perhaps he simply hadn’t known. What irony! She had hurled herself off the fantail of the Bergensford intending to die, yet it was the water that had been her salvation in the end.

  But to be alive. To smell and hear and taste the world in proper proportion. To be alone in one’s mind at last. She inhaled the sensation like the purest air. How amazing, how wondrous and unexpected. To be purely and simply a person again.

  Fanning was dead. The wreckage of the city told her so first, then the bodies, curled and crumbling to ash. She took shelter in a ruined bodega. Perhaps the others were searching for her; perhaps they weren’t, believing her dead. On the morning of the second day she heard someone calling. It was Michael. “Hello!” His voice ricocheted through the becalmed streets. “Hello! Is anybody there?” Michael! she answered. Find me! I’m here! But then she realized that she had not, in fact, spoken these words aloud.

  It was very puzzling. Why would she not call out to him? What was this impulse to be silent? Why could she not tell him where she was? His calls faded, then were gone.

  She waited for the meaning of this to become clear, so that a plan might emerge. The days moved by. When it rained, she set pots outside the store to catch the drops, and in that manner she slaked her thirst, though she had neither food nor the means to locate it, a fact that seemed oddly unimportant; she wasn’t hungry at all. She slept a great deal: whole nights, many days as well. Long, deep states of unconsciousness in which she dreamed with fascinating emotional and sensory vividness. Sometimes she was a little girl, sitting outside the wall of the Colony. At others, a young woman, standing the Watch with cross and blades. She dreamed of Peter. She dreamed of Amy. She dreamed of Michael. She dreamed of Sara and Hollis and Greer and, quite often, of her magnificent Soldier. Whole days, whole episodes of her life replayed before her eyes.

  But the greatest of these dreams was the dream of Rose.

  It began in a forest—misty, dark, like something from a childhood tale. She was hunting. On cautious, nearly floating steps she progressed beneath the tree’s dense canopy, bow at the ready. From all around came the small noises and movements of game in the brush, yet her targets remained elusive. No sooner would she identify the location of a particular sound—a cracking twig, the rustle of dry leaves—than it would swing behind her or shift to the side, as if the woodland’s inhabitants were toying with her.

  She emerged into an area of rolling fields of open grassland. The sun had set, but darkness was yet to fall. As she walked, the grass grew taller. It rose to her waist, then to her chest. The light—soft, faintly glowing—remained uniform and appeared to have no source. From somewhere ahead she heard a new sound. It was laughter. A bright, bubbly, little-girl laughter. Rose! she cried, for she knew instinctively that the voice was her daughter’s. Rose, where are you! She tore forward. The grass whipped her face and eyes. Desperation gripped her heart. Rose, I can’t see you! Help me find you!

  —Here I am, Mama!

  —Where?

  Alicia caught a flicker of movement, ahead and to the right. A flash of red hair.

  —Over here! the girl teased. She was laughing, playing a game. Can’t you see me? I’m right here!

  Alicia plunged toward her. But like the animals in the forest, her daughter seemed to be everywhere and nowhere, her calls coming from all directions.

  —Here I am! Rose sang. Try to find me!

  —Wait for me!

  —Come find me, Mama!

  Suddenly the grass was gone. She found herself standing on a dusty road sloping upward toward the crest of a small hill.

  —Rose!

  No answer.

  —Rose!

  The road beckoned her forward. As she walked, she began to have a sense of her environment, or at least the kind of place it was. It was beyond the world she knew while also a part of it, a hidden reality that could be glimpsed as if from the corner of the eye but never wholly entered into in this life. With each step, her an
xiety softened. It was as if an invisible power, purely benevolent, was guiding her. As she mounted the hill, she heard, once again, the bright, distant music of her daughter’s laughter.

  —Come to me, Mama, she sang. Come to me.

  She reached the top of the rise.

  And there Alicia awakened. What waited in the valley beyond the hilltop was not yet hers to see, though she believed she knew what it was, as she also knew the meaning of the other dreams, of Peter and Amy and Michael and all those whom she had loved and been loved by in return.

  She was saying goodbye.

  A night came when Alicia dreamed no more. She awoke with a feeling of fullness. All she had meant to do had been accomplished; the work of her life was complete.

  On the crutch she had fashioned from scrap wood she made her way through the debris, three blocks north and one block west. Even this short distance left her gasping with pain. It was midmorning when she began her ascent; by nightfall she had reached the fifty-seventh floor. Her water was nearly gone. She slept on the floor of a windowed office, so that the sun would wake her, and at dawn she resumed her climb.

  Was it coincidence that this was the very same morning that Michael set sail? Alicia preferred to think it wasn’t. That the sight of the Nautilus, pulling away on the wind, was a sign, and meant for her. Could Michael feel her? Did he, in some manner, sense that she was observing him from above? Impossible, and yet it pleased Alicia to think so—that he might suddenly look up, startled, as if touched by a sudden breeze. The Nautilus was departing the inner harbor, headed for open sea. Sunlight glimmered dazzlingly upon the water. Clutching the balustrade, Alicia watched as the tiny shape became smaller and smaller, fading into nonexistence. Of all people, Michael, she thought. And yet he had been the one. He had been the one to save her.