Suddenly the paper was gone; a gust of air had stripped it from his hand. The street was darkening. A roaring sound came from his left. Second by second it increased, as did the wind. He turned his head to look uptown, toward the source of the noise.
A great gray monster was roaring toward him.
He scrambled to his feet. His head was swimming; his legs felt like wet sand.
He ran, nonetheless, like hell.
The first building to fall was not the one Michael saw. By this time, the collapse of midtown Manhattan was several minutes old. From the south edge of Central Park to Washington Square, edifices large and small were in the process of acute structural liquefaction, melting and toppling into the gobbling sinkhole that the island’s central core was on its way to becoming. Some fell independently, crumpling vertically into their foundations like prisoners felled by a firing squad. Others were encouraged by their neighbors, as building after building teetered and toppled into others. A few, such as the great glass tower on the east side of the trapezoidal city block at Fifty-fifth and Broadway, appeared to succumb entirely through the power of suggestion:
My fellows are giving up the ghost—why don’t I do that also?
The process might have been likened to a swiftly moving metastasis; it leapt across the boulevards as if from organ to organ, it churned through the avenues of blood, it wrapped its lethal fingers around the bones of steel. Dust clouds roared in a great carcinogenic regurgitation, blackening the skies.
An ersatz night fell over Manhattan.
Beneath Grand Central Station, the water arrived from two directions: first via the Lexington Avenue subway line from Astor Place, then, a few seconds later, though the Forty-second Street shuttle line from Times Square. The currents converged; like a tsunami compressing as it approached the shore, the water’s power magnified a thousand-fold as it tore up the stairs.
“You ungrateful bitch!” Fanning cried. “What have you done?”
He said no more; the water arrived, a pounding wall, blasting them off their feet. In a blink, the main hall was subsumed. Amy went under. She was rolling, tossing, her sense of direction obliterated. The water was six feet deep and rising. Glass was shattering, things were falling, everything was in a tumult. She broke the surface in time to see the hall’s high windows burst inward; the current grabbed her, sending her under again. She flailed helplessly, searching for something to grasp. The body of a viral careened into her. It was the female with the hair. Through the roaring murk, Amy glimpsed her eyes, full of terrified incomprehension. She sank and was gone.
Amy was being swept toward the balcony stairs. She impacted hard—more bells, more pain—but she managed to grab hold of the rail with her right hand. Her lungs cried out for air; bubbles rose from her mouth. The urge to breathe could not be forestalled much longer. The only thing to do was let the current take her, in the hope that she would be carried to safety.
She let go of the rail.
She smashed into the stairs again, but at least she was moving in the right direction. If she’d been carried into the tunnels, she would have drowned. A second shock wave hit her, squirting her upward.
She landed on the balcony, clear of the water at last. On her hands and knees, she coughed and retched, foul-tasting water spewing from her mouth.
Peter.
Hurled up the stairs by the same current, he was lying just a few feet behind her. Where was Fanning? Had he been pulled under like the other virals, carried to the bottom by his weight? As she thought this, the floor lurched. The air cracked. She looked up to see a large chunk of the ceiling detach and tumble to the water.
The building was coming down.
Peter’s chest was moving rapidly. The change had yet to begin. She shook him by the shoulders, called his name; his eyes fluttered open, then squinted at her face. She saw no recognition in them, only vague puzzlement, as if he could not quite place her.
“I’m going to get you out of here.”
She drew him up by his arms and folded his body over her right shoulder. Her balance wavered, but she managed to hold on. The floor was sliding and undulating like the deck of a boat. Hunks of ceiling continued to break away as the building’s structural underpinnings failed.
She looked around. To her right, a door.
Run,
she thought.
Run and keep on running.
Then they were outside, though it hardly seemed so. The sky was dark as night, the sun eclipsed by dust, the great city unrecognizable. A vast immolation, everything rushing to ruin. The noise hammered her ears, roaring from all directions. She was on the elevated roadway on the west side of the station. It was tipped at a precarious angle; cracks were spreading, whole sections collapsing. Amy picked a direction; under Peter’s weight, the best she could manage was jog. Instinct was her only guide. To run. To survive. To carry Peter away.
The road sloped down to street level. She could go no farther; her legs were giving way. At the base of the ramp, she eased Peter to the ground. He was trembling—shaking with small, sharp spasms, like the chills of a fever, but growing stronger, more defined. Amy knew what he would want. He would want to die while still a man. The mortal instruments lay everywhere among the wreckage: segments of rebar sharp as knives, hunks of twisted metal, shards of glass. Suddenly she knew: this was what Fanning had intended, all along. That she should be the one.
It’s love that enslaves us, Amy.
She was beaten; it was all for nothing in the end. She would be alone again.
As she knelt beside him, a great sob shook her, the pain of her too-long life, forestalled for a century, unleashed. The glimpse of life she’d been given: how fleeting it was. Better, perhaps, never to have had it. Peter had begun to moan. The virus churned inside him; it bore him away.
She made her choice: a three-foot length of steel with a triangulated tip. What function had it served? Part of a signpost? The frame of a window that had once gazed out upon the busy world? The underpinnings of a mighty tower soaring to the sky? She knelt again by Peter’s body. The man inside was leaving. She bent and touched his cheek. His skin was damp and feverish. The blinking had commenced. Blink. Blink, blink.
A voice from behind: “Goddamn you!”
She went hurling through the air.
Michael sprinted down Fourth Avenue, the debris cloud roaring behind him. There would be no outrunning it. He turned right onto Eighth Street. At the ends of the block, both in front and behind, the cloud roared past with a tornadic whoosh, then, as if suddenly recalling his presence—
Oh, Michael, sorry I forgot you
—turned the corners, barreling toward him from two directions.
He dove through the nearest door and slammed it behind him. Some kind of clothing shop, coats and dresses and shirts hanging disembodied on the racks. A wide window with mannequins propped upon an elevated platform faced the street.
The cloud arrived.
The window burst inward; Michael’s hands shot up to protect his eyes. Dust engulfed the room, blasting him backward. Pricks of pain announced themselves all over his body—his arms and hands, the base of his throat, the parts of his face that had been exposed—as if he’d been attacked by a swarm of bees. He tried to rise; only then did he discover the long shard of glass embedded in his right thigh. It seemed strange that it didn’t hurt more—it should have hurt like hell—but then the pain arrived, annihilating his thoughts. He was coughing, choking, drowning in the dust. He scrambled back from the window and crashed into a clothing rack. He yanked a shirt from its hanger. It was made of some kind of gauzy material. He wadded it in his fist and pressed it to his mouth and nose. Breath by hungry breath, oxygen flowed back into his lungs.
He tied the shirt around the lower half of his face. With stinging eyes, he looked out upon the dark street. He was inside the cloud. Everything was silent except for a faint pattering: the sound of airborne particles falling upon the pavement and the roofs of abandoned cars. His hands and arms were slick with blood; his leg, where the long piece of glass was buried, screamed with the slightest motion. He drew his blade and cut, then tore, the leg of his trousers away. The glass, a long, narrow splinter, irregularly edged and slightly curved, had entered at an angle; the wound was roughly halfway between his groin and his knee on the inside flank of his leg. Good Christ, he thought. Another few inches higher and that thing would have sliced my nuts off.
He reached over his head to yank another shirt from the rack and used it to wrap the exposed end of the shard. He supposed it was possible that removing the glass would open the wound wider, but the pain was unendurable. Unless he removed it, he wouldn’t be going anywhere. To do it quickly: that was the best way.
He took the wrapped shard in his fist. He counted to three. He pulled.
All up and down the block, man-sized figures, moving in the dust, halted in their tracks and swiveled their faces toward the sound of Michael’s scream.
“This was a temple!”
Fanning’s hand caught her across the cheek. The blow sent her careening backward.
“You do this to
me
? To
my
city?”
She raised her hands to protect her face. Instead Fanning yanked her by the collar, hauled her up until her feet left the pavement, and tossed her away.
“I am going to take my time with you. You’re going to
want
me to kill you. You are going to
beg.
”
He came at her again, and again. Tosses, slaps, kicks. She discovered herself lying facedown. She felt detached from everything. Her thoughts possessed a lazy, unmoored quality. They seemed on the verge of some permanent and final severing, as if with the next blow they would sail up and away from her body, swallowed into the sky like a balloon cut from its string.
Yet, to yield, to accept death: the mind forbade it. The mind demanded, against all sense, to go on. Fanning was somewhere behind her. Amy’s awareness of him was less as a physical presence than an abstract force, like gravity, a well of darkness into which she was being relentlessly sucked. She began to crawl. Why wouldn’t Fanning just kill her? But he’d said so himself: he wanted her to feel it. To feel life leaking out of her, drip by drip.
“Look at me!”
A crack to her midriff lifted her off the ground; Fanning had kicked her. The wind sailed from her chest.
“I said, look at me!”
He kicked her again, burying his foot below her sternum and flipping her onto her back.
He was holding the sword over his head.
“We were supposed to meet at the kiosk!”
We?
“You said you would be there! You said we would be together!”
What was he seeing? Who was she to him? The transformation: it had done something to his mind.
“I never should have loved you!”
She rolled away as the sword came down. It struck the pavement with a single-noted clang. Fanning howled like wounded animal.
“I wanted to die with you!”
She was on her back again. Fanning had raised the sword above his head, ready to swing. She raised her arms in forbearance. One chance was all she had.
“Tim, don’t.”
Fanning froze.
“I wanted to be there. To be with you. That was all I ever wanted.”
His arms tensed. At any second, the blade would fall. “I waited all night! How could you do that to me? Why didn’t you come, why?”
“Because … I died, Tim.”
For a moment nothing happened.
Please,
she thought.
“You … died.”
“Yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
His voice was numb. “On the train.”
Amy spoke cautiously, keeping her voice even. “Yes. I was coming to see you. They carried me off. I couldn’t stop them.”
Fanning’s eyes floated away from her face. He glanced around uncertainly.
“But I’m here now, Tim. That’s what matters. I’m sorry it took me so long.”
How long could she sustain the lie? The sword was everything. If she could convince Fanning to give it to her …
“We can still do it,” she said. “There’s a way we can always be together, just like we planned.”
He looked back at her.
“Come with me, Tim. There’s a place we can go. I’ve seen it.”
Fanning said nothing. She sensed her words gaining traction in his mind.
“Where?” he asked.
“It’s the place where we can start over. We can do it right this time. All you have to do is give me the sword.” She extended her hand. “Come with me, Tim.”
Fanning’s eyes were locked on hers. Everything was inside them, the whole history of the man he’d been. The pain. The loneliness. The interminable hours of his life. Then:
“You.”
She was losing him. “Give me the sword, Tim. That’s all you have to do.”
“You’re not her.”
She felt it all collapsing. “Tim, it’s me. It’s Liz.”
“You’re … Amy.”
Fifty yards away, lying faceup on the ground, the man known as Peter Jaxon had begun to disappear.
His mind straddled two worlds. In the first, one of darkness and commotion, Fanning was hurling Amy through the air. Peter sensed this rather dimly; he could not recall why it should be so. Nor could he intervene, his powers to act, even to move at all, having abandoned him.
In the other was a window.
A shade, drawn over it, glowed with summer light. The image felt familiar, like déjà vu.
The window,
Peter thought.
It means I must be dying.
As he fought to focus his eyes, to bring himself back to reality, the light began to change. It was becoming something else: not a window in his mind but something physical. Through the dust-filled darkness was an opening, like a corridor ascending to a higher world, and through this tunnel a shining shape appeared. It teased at his memory; he knew what it was, if only he could summon the image forth. The picture sharpened. It resembled a crown, multilayered, each layer arched as it narrowed to a spiked peak. Sunlight flared upon its mirrored face, shooting a bright beam down the corridor, which was a hole in the clouds, into his eyes.