“You care about this man, do you not?”
Peter found Amy with his eyes but seemed unable to focus. His mouth was moving soundlessly, with what might have been a sigh or groan.
“Answer the question.”
“Yes,” she said.
“So much that you would do anything to save him, in fact.”
Her vision swam. To be undone so easily; that was the cruelest thing.
“Say it, Amy. Let me hear the words.”
Her answer came out with a choking sound: “Yes, I’d do anything to save him.” Her head rolled forward in defeat; she had nothing left. “Please, just let him go.”
One flick of the wrist and his throat would open like paper. Peter’s eyes were closed, preparing for death. That or he had slipped back into a merciful unconsciousness.
“Let me show you something,” Fanning said. “It’s a little talent I’ve discovered. Jonas would get a real kick out of this.”
He did something strange: he began to undress. First the suit coat, which he folded in half and lay neatly on the floor with the sword, then his shirt, unbuttoning it to reveal a fan of downy white chest hair and a smooth, leanly muscled trunk.
“I have to say, it’s good to finally get out of these clothes.” He had knelt to untie his shoes. “To put aside these
trappings.
”
Shoes, socks, pants. The air around him had begun to change. It fluttered like waves of heat above a desert road. He rocked his head toward the ceiling; a sheen of oily sweat appeared on his skin. He licked his lips with a slow tongue and began to roll his shoulders and neck, his eyes half-lidded, lost in sensation.
“God, that’s good,” he said.
With a bony pop, Fanning arced his back and moaned with pleasure. His hair was ejecting in clumps; fat, throbbing veins pulsed beneath the skin of his face and chest, tatting a bluish web. He rocked his jaw, showing his fangs. His fingers, from which long, yellowish nails now protruded, flexed restlessly.
“Isn’t it … wonderful?”
Michael hit the tunnel, Alicia shouting his name behind him. Rats were suddenly everywhere, an undulating wave of them, flowing toward the bulkhead.
The screw had torn loose; the pack lay in the water. The fuses were soaked and useless.
“Fuck!”
His eyes fell on a small electrical panel, at eye level, just to the right of the bulkhead. The ground was boiling with rats. They were swarming around his ankles, brushing against his legs with their soft, nauseating weight. With the tip of a screwdriver, he popped the door and waved the lantern over the interior.
“Get back!”
Alicia was standing a few yards behind him. Thirty feet away, a viral was crouched on the floor of the tunnel; a second clung to the ceiling, its inverted head rocking side to side. The long, bald tail of a rat was whipping from its mouth.
“Go on, beat it!” The virals merely looked at her. “Get out of here!”
The inside of the panel was a tangled mess of wires connected to a breaker board. Give me an hour, Michael thought, and I can do somethign with this, no problem.
“These guys look hungry, Circuit. Tell me you’ve figured this out.”
God, how he hated that name. He was pulling wires free, attempting to separate them into some kind of coherence, to trace them back to their source.
“More coming!”
He glanced over his shoulder. The walls of the tunnel had begun to glow green. There was a skittering sound, like dry leaves rolling on pavement. “I thought these guys were your friends!”
Alicia fired at the viral on the ceiling. Her aim was unsteady; sparks flew up. The viral skittered backward, dropped, and came up on all fours. “I don’t think it’s me they’re interested in!”
He sliced off a length of cable, stripped the ends, and screwed them to the plunger. Holding the wire, he gave a final look into the panel. He would have to take a wild guess. This one? No, that.
A barrage of fire behind him. “I’m not kidding, Michael, we’ve got about ten seconds!”
With four quick turns, he spliced the ends of the wires together. Alicia was backing toward him, firing in short bursts. The sound reverberated off the walls of the tunnel, hammering his eardrums. Good God, he was tired of this sort of thing. Tired of guesswork and laboring in the dark, tired of leaking valves and bad circuits and busted relays—tired of things not working, things that refused to bend to his will.
“Need some help here!” Alicia yelled.
Her rifle drained, Alicia tossed it aside and drew a pair of blades from her belt, one for each fist. Michael grabbed her around the waist and pulled her into him.
The tunnel was a squirming mass.
They fell backward as the first viral careened forward. Michael drew his sidearm and fired two shots, the first sparking off its shoulder, the second catching it in the left eye. A splash of blood and with a shriek it skidded to the floor. They were scooting backward toward the bulkhead, Michael firing his pistol, shoving his heels against the concrete, one arm encircling Alicia’s waist to drag her with him through the fetid water. He had fifteen rounds in the gun, another two magazines stashed in a pocket, useless and out of reach.
The slide locked back.
“Oh, shit, Michael.”
So: the end of the line. How slow its approach, how sudden its arrival. We never truly believe it’s coming, he thought, and then before we know it, it’s here. All the things we’ve done in our lives, and the undone things as well, extinguished in an instant. He dropped the gun and pulled Alicia tight against him. His hand was on the plunger.
“Close your eyes,” he said.
The change was complete.
Fanning’s face was still tipped upward, lips parted, eyes shut. A sigh of satisfaction heaved from deep in his chest. The being before her was not one Amy had ever seen or imagined—still recognizable as himself but neither wholly man nor wholly viral. An amalgam, half one and half the other, as if a new version of the species had been born into the world. There was something of the rodent about him, the nose snoutlike and full-nostrilled, the ears triangulated at the top and swept back from the curve of his skull. His hair was gone, replaced by pinkish natal fuzz. His teeth were the same, though the mouth itself had enlarged into a kind of windblown grin, giving a full view of his fangs, which dripped from the corners. His limbs possessed a thin-boned delicacy; the index fingers of both hands had elongated to curve-tipped points.
Amy thought of a giant wingless bat.
He stepped toward her. His eyes locked on hers; she dared not look away, no matter how much she wanted to. Fear had paralyzed her limbs. They felt far away and useless, loose as liquid. As Fanning neared, his right hand rose. The digits were webbed with a translucent membrane. The daggered index finger, jointed in the middle, unfurled toward her face. Her eyes clamped shut instinctively. A prick of pressure on her cheek, not quite hard enough to break the skin: every molecule in her body shuddered. With lascivious slowness the nail traced downward, following the curve of her face. As if he were tasting her flesh through his finger.
“How good it is to let the truth come out.”
His voice, too, had altered, possessing a high, hidden note with a squeaking sound. The air around him smelled of animals. The small, burrowing things of the world.
“Open your eyes, Amy.”
Fanning was standing beside Peter. The virals had hauled him upright.
“This man, he is your curse, as Liz was mine. It’s love that enslaves us, Amy. It is the play within the play, the stage on which the tragic drama of our human lives unfolds. That is the lesson I have to teach you.”
And with these words, Fanning opened his jaws wide, tipped Peter’s face upward on the end of one long, webbed digit—tenderly, like a mother with her child—and clamped his jaws around Peter’s neck.
The squeak of current from the plunger was not enough to open the bulkhead all the way; but it was enough to get things started. As the door’s counterweights jolted downward, creating a gap between the door and the floor of the tunnel, Michael and Alicia were blasted by a jet of water. In less than a second, the tunnel became a roaring river. Michael attempted to rise, but the force was too great, he could find no traction, and then they were tumbling, hurtled downstream in the roiling water.
They plunged into the station, going like a shot. There was no real light, only a vague glow from the stairway, glimpsed fleetingly as they passed. Water filled his nose and mouth, foul-tasting—he imagined this to be the taste of rats—and threatening to choke him. They were riding just beneath the platform. Gripping Alicia by the wrist, Michael reached out with his free hand and made a desperate lunge for the edge. His fingers touched but tore away.
They passed through the station. The water was rising fast; soon it would be over their heads. The next station would come at Fourteenth Street—much too far. Ahead, a faint glow appeared. As they neared, the light congealed into a discrete shaft—an opening in the roof of the tunnel.
“There’s a ladder!” Alicia cried. Her head went under again.
“What?”
Her face reemerged; she was fighting for breath. She pointed. “A ladder on the wall!”
They were sailing straight for it. Alicia grabbed hold first. Michael spun around her body, then, using his left hand, reached out, seized a rung, and hooked an elbow through it. At the top of the ladder was a metal grate, daylight beyond it.
“Can you make it?” Michael said.
They were being pummeled by the current. Lish shook her head.
“Try, damn it!”
Her strength was gone; she had nothing left. “I can’t.”
He would have to pull her up. Michael reached above her head and drew himself free of the water. The grate presented a different problem; unless he could find a way to open it, they were going to drown anyway. At the top of the ladder, he raised one hand and pushed. Nothing, not the slightest tremor. He reared back and shoved the heel of his palm into the slatted metal. He punched the grate again, and again. On the fourth blow, it burst open.
He shoved it aside, climbed out, and pressed his body to the pavement. The rising water had lifted Alicia halfway up the ladder. The light seemed to make a kind of halo around her face.
He reached down. “Take my hand—”
But that was all he said, his words cut short as a wall of water slammed into her—into both of them—bursting like a geyser through the open grate and blowing Michael halfway across the street.
The collapse of the bulkhead just south of the Astor Place station—one of eight retention dams protecting the subway lines of Manhattan from the greedy Atlantic—was the first in a series of events that no person, Michael included, could have anticipated. Freed from incarceration, the water shot through the tunnel with the hammering power of a hundred locomotives. It ripped and tore. It blasted to bits. It detonated and crushed and destroyed, plowing through the structural underpinnings of lower Manhattan like a scythe through wheat. Eight blocks north of Astor Place, at Fourteenth Street, the water jumped the tracks. While the main body churned straight north beneath Lexington Avenue, toward Grand Central, the rest veered west on the Broadway line, roaring toward the bulkhead at Times Square, which would subsequently fail as well, flooding everything beneath the pavement south of Forty-second Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue and opening the whole West Side to the sea.
And it was only just getting started.
In its thundering wake, the water left a trail of destruction. Manhole covers blew sky-high. Sewers exploded. Streets buckled and collapsed. Beneath the ground, a chain reaction had commenced. Like the ocean of which it was a part, the raging water sought only the expansion of its domain; the prize was the island itself, which, after a century of sodden neglect, was rotten to the core.
On the corner of Tenth Street and Fourth Avenue, Michael returned to consciousness with the unsettled sense that the world’s relationship to gravity had altered. It was as if every object were moving away from every other in a state of general repulsion. He blinked his eyes and waited for this feeling to stop, but it did not. A great font of water was jetting from the grate, high into the air, dissolving at the top into a sparkling mist that cast a rainbow above the flooded street. In his mentally fogged state, Michael stared at it in astonishment, not yet connecting the sight to anything else, while also noting, rather blandly, that other things were occurring: loud things, concussive things, things that warranted further consideration if only he could marshal his thoughts. The street seemed to be sinking—either that or everything else was getting taller—and bits of material were sailing off the faces of the buildings.
Wait a second.
The structure he was looking at—a nondescript, mid-rise office building of dark tinted glass—was doing something peculiar. It appeared to be … breathing. A deep respiratory flexing, like a baby’s first breaths of life. It was as if this anonymous structure, one of thousands like it on the island, had awakened after decades of abandoned slumber. Spidering cracks materialized in its reflective face. Michael sat upright, balancing on his palms. The pavement had begun to undulate disturbingly beneath him.
The glass exploded.
Michael rolled and flattened himself to the ground, covering his head as a million shards rained down. Whole plates detonated on the pavement. He was yelling at the top of his lungs. Nonsensical words, vile curses, an aural vomitus of terror. He was about to be diced to ribbons. There wouldn’t be enough of him left to bury, not that there would anybody around to do that. The seconds passed, glass cascading all around him, Michael waiting, for the second time that day, to die.
He didn’t.
He lifted his face from the pavement. The sun was gone, the air grown dim. Tiny, twinkling shards covered his body, clinging to his arms and hands and hair and the fabric of his clothing. A gritty wind swirled the air. The sky, it seemed, had begun to issue snow. No, not snow. Paper. A single page dropped lazily into his hands. “Memo,” it read at the top. And, beneath that, “From: HR Department. To: All employees. Re: Benefits enrollment period.” Michael was momentarily transfixed by the strangeness of these words. They felt like a code. Within their mysterious phrasing lay an entire reality, a world lost in time.