Condemned: A Thriller

by McBride, Michael

  The media could and would spin it into an escalation of hate crimes culminating in racial warfare, but I saw right through it. This wasn’t about black and white. It was about human nature, at the very heart of which was the desire to see everything and everyone burn.

  I left the coffee shop and the barista to whatever slice of Americana they inhabited and stepped out into air that already smelled of smoke. And as I walked toward my ultimate destination, I realized that the past I’d fought to protect was the exact same thing as the future I’d tried to prevent.

  In the end, both were little more than ashes in my mouth.

  THIRTY -FOUR

  I pried back the corner of the weathered plywood, cast one last glance over my shoulder, and crawled into the darkness. The influx of air caused the cobwebs to sway and ushered in the smell of smoke. It reeked of old wood and burnt rubber, leaves and molten asphalt, grass and oil. It was only fitting that this city would smell the same way in death as it did in life.

  The marble floor of the vast lobby had been stripped to the bare concrete years ago. Fallen chunks of the decayed ceiling crunched underfoot. Puddles of stagnant water reflected my flashlight beam. All that was left of the great dome overhead was a frame of rusted rebar. Gothic arches lorded over the remains of the balconies, heaped against the wall far below.

  Once upon a time, this had been the most majestic of theaters, where ordinary men and women donned their nicest attire and for thirty-five cents rose above their stations in life and lost themselves in the Hollywood illusion. It now stank of urine and the mildewing nests where the homeless people ambitious enough to scale the chain link fence on Clifford bedded down. Not tonight, though. Not while society was unraveling outside.

  The concrete stairs were cracked and crumbled beneath my weight as I ascended. I shined my light ahead of me, cutting through the smoky haze.

  The United Artists Theatre opened in 1928 to a packed house for a screening of Sadie Thompson. A marvel of Spanish Gothic architecture, it was the crown jewel of Grand Circus Park with its eighty-foot-tall blade sign and multicolored lights. Since it was designed exclusively to show motion pictures—an industry in its infancy—the investors hedged their bets by building it with an adjoining eighteen-story office tower, which once featured upscale tailors and beauty parlors. That was my destination. I could think of no better vantage point from which to watch the world burn.

  The dream succumbed to reality within forty years and what was once a shrine to the motion picture became first a pornographic theater, then a grindhouse, before ownership gutted it of everything of value and auctioned off the haul for pennies on the dollar. And here she’d lain ever since, decomposing in the elements and mirroring the decline of the city around her, just another of the formerly majestic buildings we pretended not to see. Occasionally, she reminded us that she was still here by dropping bricks from her hide and shattering the windows of cars parked on the street below.

  I used to believe I could save her, and all of the others like her. I don’t know if that was more narcissistic or naïve. There’s no way to turn back the hands of time, and you can only save the world if it wants to be saved.

  I passed from the theater into the office building, where the windows remained largely intact as a result of the city’s efforts to entice outside investors and the capital necessary to bring the city back from the brink of bankruptcy. It was just another deception, like everything else. As I’d learned over the past seventy-two hours, nothing is sacred and everybody lies. To each other, and, more importantly, to themselves. Worse, it is the nature of our species to throw torches onto our own roofs, if only to watch them burn.

  Dostoyevsky wrote, “The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him.” Our perception defines our reality. If we believe the lie fervently enough, then is it not the truth? Belief is the currency of the masses. It is the foundation of every religion and the cause of every war. It is the one thing both unique to each of us and common to all, and the one thing that can tear us apart faster than any other, especially when we learn that we’ve been wrong all along. Still, we perpetuate our lies because we have no choice. We are like sharks in that sense; whereas they must always remain moving to stay alive, we must continue to lie to ourselves to keep the world as we know it from ceasing to exist.

  The hall leading to the elevators was in marginally better shape than the theater. The plaster on the walls was mottled with water damage and streaked with rust. The prevailing odor was one of mildew and rot, but it was an improvement over the thickening smoke, which billowed against the windows, suffused with the red and blue lights from the cruisers streaking past outside. I could already see the glow of flames from Grand Circus Park, silhouetting the elevated track of the people mover across Bagley.

  The elevator doors stood open on nothing. Not even cables. Simply an emptiness wavering with motes of dust that sparkled in my light. The clap of gunfire from somewhere outside reverberated through the shaft.

  I found the stairwell at the end of the corridor and ascended to the echo of my footsteps, which seemed to originate from all around me at once. The smoke seeped in tendrils through the walls and the ventilation ducts. I coughed as I shined my beam upward into darkness that extended well beyond its reach, then returned it to the ground and the footprints in the dust I knew would be there. I drew my pistol from the pocket of my jacket and took the stairs two at a time for as long as I was physically able, until my harsh breathing became even louder than my heavy footfalls. The smoke grew denser with each flight. The doors on the landings were dented and rusted or absent altogether. Someone had painted a skull on the uppermost, and recently, too, judging by the way it still glistened.

  The knob was cool to the touch and turned easily in my hand. I opened it with a squeal of hinges and ducked into the corridor. The smell that accosted me was beyond anything I’d encountered, even during the past few days, and I retched despite my best efforts to the contrary. I killed the flashlight, dropped it to the floor, and used my free hand to hold my shirt over my mouth and nose.

  The doors had been removed from the rooms to either side. The aura of destruction hanging over the city filtered through the windows and illuminated the central hallway with pale columns of flickering light. Smoke clung to the ceiling and yet no amount could mask the smell of death.

  I felt the faintest current of cool air on my face, coming from somewhere ahead of me. The sounds from the street below grew louder with each step. I passed office suites filled with the debris of abandonment—rolls of waterlogged carpet, desks and chairs shoved into corners or toppled on their sides, stacks of moldering files and rusting cabinets—until there was a single doorway remaining to either side, only one of which overlooked downtown and the confluence of streets from which I heard angry shouts, sirens, and the thupping of the news choppers circling over a city taking its last gasps of life through a pall of smoke and teargas.

  My pulse throbbed in my temples. Blood rushed in my ears.

  I adjusted my sweaty grip on the pistol. Tried to steady my hands. Couldn’t swallow. Could hardly breathe.

  I risked a peek. Quickly pulled my head back.

  The room. A disaster. Debris piled against the walls to either side. Shattered glass sparkled on the floor amid heaps of plaster and broken bricks. A sledgehammer leaned beside the gap where the back wall and windows had once been. A silhouette was framed against the open air. Standing with its back to me, surveying the nightmare playing out before it, a nightmare of its own creation.

  I closed my eyes. Tried to summon the courage.

  My heart. Pounding so hard it was all I could hear.

  My breathing. Too fast. Too loud.

  I went around the wall, high and fast. Raised the pistol in a two-handed grip. Aimed at the center of the figure’s back.

  Tightened my finger on the trigger.

  And realized I was damned.
/>   THIRTY -FIVE

  Dray was silhouetted by an almost ethereal orange glow from the countless fires burning as far as the eye could see. The flames drew no distinction between the inhabited and the abandoned; everything they touched was condemned. Much like the man who watched over them, a man I’d known since I was a child, a man who even now I couldn’t think of as anything other than my best friend.

  I tried to pull the trigger, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  My hesitation damned me.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Dray said.

  I prayed he wouldn’t turn around. If he did, I would never be able to do what I’d come here to do. It was one thing ending this with his back turned, another entirely while looking into his eyes.

  I took another step closer.

  He looked up at the sky and drew a deep breath. I part of me hoped he was talking to himself, that he didn’t know I was behind him, but deep down I understood that could never have been my fate.

  “You and me, Webb. We were going to change the world. The two of us. You remember that?”

  “Yeah, Dray,” I whispered. “I remember.”

  “Whatever happened to that? How did it all go so wrong?”

  “The world didn’t want to change. We were stupid to think we could ever impose our will upon it.”

  He nodded.

  “That about sums it up.”

  He started to turn around.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  He remained tensed for several seconds. When his posture finally softened, his shoulders slumped in resignation. I can only imagine how much restraint it must have taken not to turn around and look at me. It was a favor for which I was infinitely grateful.

  “You remember when we came up here as kids?” he said. “You can still see where you put that chair halfway through the wall.”

  “That was you, Dray.”

  “You and your selective memory.” He shook his head. “Can you imagine the beating we’d have gotten if either of our old men found out?”

  I didn’t know what to say. This was nothing at all like I’d envisioned this going down.

  “This is where it all changed,” Dray said. “Right here. In this exact spot. This was where I first saw the city for what it really was. What it was becoming. I just wasn’t able to stop it.”

  “I loved Janae, too, you know.”

  He let his head hang. His voice was flat and emotionless when he spoke.

  “I failed her, man. I promised to love and cherish her. To protect her. I wasn’t there when she needed me most. You know what that’s like.”

  It was a statement, not a question. We both knew I understood exactly how that felt. The easiest way to bear any burden was by sharing it.

  “She was alone at the end. While I was off—” His voice cracked. “While I was off…with Marcela…with my partner…she was all alone…terrified. I should have been there. I should have stopped her. Or at least we could have gone out together.”

  I took another step closer and raised the pistol toward the back of his head. I tried to convince myself I’d be doing him a favor, but to do so I’d have to borrow his logic, and nothing good would ever come from spilling blood.

  “That’s why I brought her here. So I could make things right. So we could be together in the end.”

  I felt like I’d been punched in the gut.

  The smell.

  Jesus.

  I was so focused upon him when I entered the room that I didn’t even notice the shape slumped against the wall to my right. Her legs dangled out over the nothingness. Her hair was desiccated and tangled, her neck little more than a collection of vertebrae I could see through the adipocere. Her bony shoulders tented her crisp black dress. What little I could see of her profile was skeletal, gaunt. Her mouth was wide open, her cheeks stretched beyond their limits to reveal yellowed teeth. I looked away too late. I knew I’d never be able to think of her again without envisioning her like this.

  “I needed to see this first, though,” Dray said. “I needed to watch it burn.”

  “You’ll probably see a lot more flames where you’re going.”

  He expelled a breath through his nose that sounded almost like a chuckle.

  “You still sore about me shooting you?”

  “I can’t say I enjoyed the experience. Did you know I was wearing Kevlar?”

  “What do you want to hear?”

  I took another step closer.

  “It was you and me against the world, Dray. I guess I always thought of us as the good guys.”

  “’To get back up to the shining world from there, my guide and I went into that hidden tunnel; Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.’”

  “Those are the final lines of Dante’s Inferno. They describe Dante and Virgil climbing out of hell and being able to see heaven once more. They’re about redemption.”

  “I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately.”

  “I noticed.”

  Another step and I was within mere feet of both him and the abrupt edge where the wall had once been. The wind carried the smoke past me. There were police lights and fires everywhere.

  “See that out there? Those are the seeds of my redemption. They’ll be sewn in the ashes of the past so a better future can be born.”

  I stared down at the only landscape I had ever known. The skyscrapers were all dark. So were the lights on the streets and in Grand Circus Park, where the skeletal deciduous trees continued to burn. The power had been out for hours. The only light came from cars looking for trouble, either to fuel it or to fight it. I wasn’t sure which side to root for anymore, as the outcome would likely be the same.

  “At what cost, Dray? How many people need to die?”

  Entire neighborhoods burned. Parks where I had played as a child, stores where I had shopped. Here I stood an arm’s length from a monster who killed fourteen people, while down below us a society of ordinarily sane and productive citizens burned their own city in an effort to show the entire world their outrage, but instead only proved that we, as a species, were still savages at heart.

  “It was never about the killing.”

  “Then what was it about? I want to understand.”

  “It was about proving that every life matters, that the loss of even a single individual creates a hole that’s impossible to fill.”

  “Does it look to you like that’s the message they received?”

  The flames rising from the upper stories of the Metropolitan Building looked like a crown perched on top of a giant skull.

  “They might not get it now, but they will. Once the fires burn themselves out and the smoke clears. They’ll understand the meaning of loss.”

  I steadied my hand as best I could and raised the pistol until the barrel was mere inches from the back of my best friend’s head. From this range, I could no more miss than he could survive.

  “I would have done everything in my power to help you. There’s nothing on this planet I wouldn’t do for you.”

  He slowly turned around and faced me. Our eyes locked over the pistol pointed straight at the bridge of his nose.

  “Would you have offered me absolution?”

  Tears streamed from his eyes.

  “It’s not mine to give.”

  He raised his hands to his sides and slowly, deliberately, knelt before me. I followed the movement with the Colt until it aligned with his forehead. I couldn’t do it, though. Not like this.

  “How about redemption, then? Think there’s still a chance of that?”

  “I hope so.”

  “I guess we’ll find out.”

  He lunged to the side and grabbed his dead wife by the hand. Before I recognized what he was going to do, he pulled her to his chest and threw himself backward.

  I watched my best friend and his wife plummet through the smoke while the city I loved burned from one horizon to the other.

  And I realized with complete clarity that
this was exactly what my vision of hell would look like.

  EPILOGUE

  As the sun rises and the smoke clears, the extent of the devastation is revealed. Police lights are the only sign of color. Everything else has burned to a uniform shade of charcoal-gray. The past has been consigned to black and white memories, for better or worse.

  It’s in our nature to seek out the familiar—the similar—and to distrust the foreign—the different. The inherent problem isn’t with that nature, but rather with our obsessive need to continually qualify that sameness, when it is our differences that make us unique. We are all of one species, one race…a race we are destined to lose.

  T.S. Eliot wrote, Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

  I’ve never been more alone than I am right now.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michael McBride is the bestselling author of Ancient Enemy, Bloodletting, Burial Ground, Fearful Symmetry, Innocents Lost, Sunblind, The Coyote, and Vector Borne. His novella Snowblind won the 2012 DarkFuse Readers Choice Award and received honorable mention in The Best Horror of the Year. He lives in Avalanche Territory with his wife and kids.