“What’s that?”
“Seriously? You haven’t noticed?”
“Noticed what?”
“The nexus—it’s down.”
He might as well have told me the number four has been replaced by purple. “What does that mean, down?”
“As in, this entire city is at a complete standstill. Maybe the whole continent, for all we know.”
Looking around, I realize that he’s right; the streets are filled with stalled trams and helpless, wandering pedestrians. The sky is completely void of shuttles and air traffic. The sounds of industry have vanished. I try to access my implant and I’m able to without resistance, but it’s operating on cached data, and most of my add-ons are idling.
“Holy circuit scrap, man.”
“I know, right? What do you think caused it?” he asks. For once, I look at Tim like he’s the clueless one.
“C’mon, Tim. What do you think?” His smile falters, but it doesn’t entirely disappear.
“You don’t mean the plants, do you?”
I rotate in place slowly, scanning the panorama for new information. “There,” I say with foreboding. I point to a nearby railway bridge. “See it?” He doesn’t respond, but I know he sees the blood plant, just as I do. It’s radiating like a mass of giant sea stars from the underside of the overpass. My eyes hover there for several seconds and then continue on.
“And there,” I add, pointing down a side street to where a manhole cover has been dislodged and is perched atop a bloody mass of leaves in the middle of the road.
“And there.”
And everywhere.
It takes us two hours to walk home. Tim lives closer than me, so I drop him off along the way. Since the nexus has gone down, I’ve been knotted with worry over the state of my world. Why didn’t I take the time to ferret out Mitzy’s address? I have absolutely no way of reaching her. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’d give anything for the nexus to be alive and kicking right now. Several times as I walk along, my implant reconnects with the nexus, but only for a second. It’s like the nexus has a million shorts in its circuitry. I can imagine laborers and nexus administrators frantically darting about the city, digging up and repairing buried lines compromised by the roots of blood plants, only for new problems to take their places elsewhere.
The next couple of days are quiet, but no less disconcerting. Since I can’t call Mitzy, I take to sitting on my patio where I can watch for her. I know this is ridiculous, but I don’t care. Mrs. Grace sits with me often, sniffling once in a while into a wad of tissue. If she’s intuited my role in this mess, she’s been gracious enough to overlook it. I’m glad she’s here with me.
Life is funny sometimes.
I’m barely thirty-one, a multimillionaire living in a middle-income condo, wearing the same clothes I wore before I hit it rich. The irony is that, while I’ve finally decided that the money is mine and can safely be enjoyed, we’re on the brink of a plague so devastating that my newfound wealth is rendered moot. I literally can’t spend a single credit with the nexus down, and there’s no reason to believe things will turn back around any time soon.
I can almost hear Arthur’s ghostly voice, as if he’s whispering in my ear: There goes the pedestal, Wilson. Can you feel it crumbling? I’d cry if I wasn’t already laughing so hard.
It’s been three days since the nexus went down. The sky has taken on a pale pink sheen. Everywhere I look, blood plants are entangled in the city’s bones. I awoke this morning to a resounding blast nearby. When I went outside and down to ground level, I found the sidewalk littered with seeds from a burst seedpod. Before I could return to my condo, a series of similar explosions concussed from my roof. Seeds showered me like sticky drizzle.
Frightened for my life, I stripped nude on my doorstep and left my clothes in a pile. I made a mad rush for my bathroom and pilfered my cabinets until I found a pair of electric clippers. I shaved my head and swept the clippings into the toilet. It occurred to me that I was flooding our sewers with blood plant seeds, but I figured better the sewers than my apartment.
I took a long shower, followed by a thorough swabbing of my ears. It was a stressful event from which I still haven’t quite recovered, even two hours later.
I’m sitting on my couch now, trying not to cry for what is happening to my city. When I wipe my eyes and stand to get a hold of myself, I see that two blood plants have taken root on my living room floor—one immediately inside the doorway, the other a few feet farther toward the bathroom. I carefully untwine them from the carpet fibers and flush them, like my hair.
I peek out my door, and just as I expect to see, my clothes are speckled with tiny plants. I scan around me and find that everywhere I look, blood plants are sending up leaves. I use my foot to shove the pile of clothes under the railing and onto the ground below. I hear Mrs. Grace shuffling about next door, and I knock lightly on her door.
She opens it so quickly, I wonder if she’s been standing there all along.
“Are you okay?” I ask, giving her arm a squeeze.
“Oh, Wilson. It’s so terrible.” I nod my understanding, but then, as I glance over her shoulder and into the freakish greenhouse of her living room, I realize she’s not making a generalization.
“Jeez, Mrs. Grace! Come out of there!”
She sobs, but allows me to escort her to my own condo, whose walls, unlike her own, are not bristling with the advancing tendrils of death.
On day five, my heart soars. I’m on my patio with Mrs. Grace, just watching the horror unfold—don’t think me morbid; there’s really nothing else we can do—when a figure appears around the corner.
“Mitzy?” I cry out. She looks up and it’s her—it’s really her! I traipse the stairs like a dancer, so filled with joy that the creeping vineyard consuming my building might have been the set for some bizarre ballet. I receive her in an embrace so fierce she cries out. I kiss and hug her, and she laughs at my zeal.
In this moment, I don’t care about death and the fall of civilization. The world doesn’t exist but for this lone woman, who I have somehow fallen so deeply in love with that I can die a happy man, right here and now.
That night, just as the horizon sucks the last bit of light from the sky, we lose power to the building.
We can’t stay here any longer. I’ve called this place home for my entire adult life, excluding my brief but memorable Martian sabbatical. Funny, though: so few moments of real significance have taken place here that I’m having a hard time scraping together more than a handful of memories worth cherishing. You could argue that my time here with Adrian was significant, and you wouldn’t be wrong; but considering how that turned out, I don’t care to dwell on the subject. Besides that, this has been my eating and sleeping quarters, my gym, and little else. As a result, I’m lit up by an impression of coziness rather than the emotional series of snapshots one expects when leaving his long-time home. I suppose this is a little sad all on its own, yet it’s also a good thing—because leaving would be a somewhat traumatic event, otherwise. And it’s important that we hit the road with clear heads.
I’m not suggesting that a safe haven is awaiting us out there, or that we’ll be running to anyplace in particular, only that another night here will surely claim one or more of our lives. The blood plants have infiltrated the electrical chases and plumbing of the building and when dawn finally sent light forth through my window this morning, it revealed a network of vines stretching across the ceiling in my bedroom.
This time tomorrow, my condo will resemble a crimson rain forest, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
Outside, the skyline looks less like a cityscape than a lost ruin. There are occasional pedestrians out and about, but none seem interested in speaking with us—they’re skittish and take care to keep their distance from us. It occurs to me that we should take their cue and do likewise.
With no real plan in mind, I suggest we make the trek to Tim’s apartment building.
It’s a good five miles from here, but it’s a high-rise—unlike my building—so it makes sense to me that perhaps the plants haven’t completely ravaged it yet.
It’s a long, laborious hike through neighborhoods that appear to be completely abandoned. A few areas seem virtually untouched by the blood plants; others can’t be seen at all for the sheer lushness of the foliage. Once, while crossing an intersection, I step over a huge, swollen vine that has spanned buildings on either side of the street; my foot lands squarely on the torso of a corpse. Her face is buried under leaves and the rest of her is sapped to a dried husk; I’m able to make a gender assessment only by her clothes. I won’t describe the sensation of my foot sinking into her flesh because it’s important that I push that behind me, lest I lose my mind.
Mrs. Grace, who started off with admirable stamina, has used up her last reserves by the time we reach Tim’s building. I’m not sure what to do now; Mrs. Grace won’t survive ten flights of stairs, yet remaining at ground level is hardly an option. Even if the blood plants weren’t already encroaching into the lobby, I’ve had the distinct feeling of being watched—if not followed—for a while now. This city has to be crawling with looters and opportunistic vagrants, even if I can’t see them.
And we’re completely defenseless.
For now, we resolve to rest in the stairwell, which seems clear of vegetation so far. I’m eager to check on Tim. Still, I’m not about to leave my ladies behind to fend for themselves. So I sit on a stair next to Mitzy, whose cheeks are aglow from the hike.
A couple of hours later, things aren’t looking any better for Mrs. Grace. She’s weakened to the point of no return, at least until we get some food in her. I realize the only option at this point is to carry her. I accept this task with some doubt—I’m tired and hungry myself, mind you—but once I pick her up, I know I’ll be okay.
She’s startlingly light, like a frail wicker chair covered in soft down. We stop at the second floor and I set her down gently. Mitzy opens the main hallway door and I peek through, peering thoroughly into the darkened corridors. We repeat this process until we reach the seventh floor, glimpsing a few strangers who dart away at the sight of us.
Tim’s door is unlatched—not really open, but not firmly shut—so as I rap my knuckles onto the hollow steel, the panel hinges open in a gliding welcome.
“Tim?” I whisper. I’m greeted by silence. I push slowly inside and take a look around. It’s too dark to interpret much detail, and it doesn’t take long for my imagination to run away from me—the shadows look like human figures in various positions of waiting, ready to pounce on me. I feel the hairs on my neck standing at attention. Before I can chicken out, I dash to the window to open the shades. They aren’t shades, though. Tim—or someone—has peeled the Viseon layer from one of his walls and used it to black out the window. I free it from invisible restraints, realizing with detached curiosity that I never figured Viseon fiber to be opaque.
As the sun splashes across the furniture and the walls, the corpses seem to smile at me.
Tim barely looks dead at all, actually; he could just be napping after an afternoon snack, his head resting against a corduroy pillow with a hand forked underneath. But there’s no question; just like the others in his living room—three teenage boys and an older woman with long, frizzy hair—his clothes are crusted with dried blood.
“Oh, no,” I whisper. There’s no sign of blood plants in here, but they aren’t the only predators on this planet. I take a step toward him, tears springing from my eyes, and a bullet casing bounces away at the touch of my foot.
A gentle hand settles against my lower back. “I’m sorry, Wilson.” Mitzy’s voice is so deflated, so broken that I can barely hear it above the hum of death in my ears.
We settle into an empty apartment on the second floor—close enough to the ground floor to make a clean getaway if necessary, high enough to employ a bird’s-eye view of the street below. There are plenty of food tablets in the pantry, though we have no way to prepare them. There are old-world staples in there, too—pasta, rice, beans—which seems to indicate the owner of this apartment had the foresight to prepare for hard times. It isn’t difficult to conjure scenarios in which he or she was forced to flee without first gathering these survival foods, and while I’m exceedingly relieved to have found them, I’m just as worried at what attention their aroma might draw.
Mrs. Grace has benefited greatly from a few hours of rest and is now bustling around the candlelit kitchen with very nearly a zing in her step.
I don’t know what time it is, but it must be very late—or very early. Mrs. Grace is sleeping soundly, the way some children learn to do when surrounded by the constant tumult of bickering parents. I know she’s asleep because she snores—gingerly, like cotton against cotton.
Mitzy is awake next to me, on the couch in the living room; we have jittered to consciousness in tandem at the sound. First it was in the halls—a rabid slough of expletives shouted with sneering, and then in gleeful abandon—and then above us, coupled with the explosive sounds of murder.
I’ve known there were others in this building—we’ve seen a few in passing—but until now, it hasn’t occurred to me that we are in any real, immediate danger. Mitzy’s looking at me, spotlit by the moon through a large window between drapes hanging at half-mast. Her eyes dance across mine, and I sense they’re begging for a sign that I have this under control. I give her a reassuring smile, though I know in my heart that we won’t last long if this apartment is infiltrated.
If we make it through tonight? I’m going on a raiding party of my own; this isn’t a time or place one can afford to remain unarmed—and I have some very important people to protect now.
I lock and deadbolt the apartment door, jolting at every mechanical scrape and click, knowing that if we’re heard, this door won’t shield us for long. Mitzy and I lie in each other’s arms until dawn; a few times, I feel her breathing relax and deepen as she succumbs to exhaustion, and a few times I suspect I’ve nodded off myself. But overall? I feel as though I haven’t slept in a week, and when we finally rise, I see my exhaustion reflected in Mitzy’s puffy eyes and slumping posture.
Mrs. Grace has stayed behind as Mitzy and I venture out to scavenge what remains of the city. Outside, the air is crisp and clear, one of those sharp autumn mornings that could easily take me back to better times if I was brave enough to close my eyes for a moment. We take a fairly circuitous route through the neighborhood, in part to avoid heavier concentrations of plants, and also because I’m simply too unfamiliar with the area to navigate more efficiently.
Rounding a once-proud brownstone, I feel my pulse quicken; up ahead, jutting out over the sidewalk like an armed guillotine, is the unlit sign of a pawn shop. My heart rejoices, screaming for me to abandon caution and make a run for it, but my gut has me hugging the stone-clad building as if I could disappear into the grout lines. I’m rewarded for my caution: as we watch, a trio of unsavory gentlemen suddenly erupts from the storefront and spills onto the sidewalk like gunslinging insects fleeing a plundered nest. We’re far enough away that they don’t see us, though if any one of them takes a moment to look in our direction with even an ounce of scrutiny, we’re completely exposed. They’re each weighted down with rifles and bags of ammunition, but they look strong and determined. They cross the street and disappear between two buildings.
“Let’s go,” I whisper, and we retreat back around the corner.
In another lifetime, alleyways were surrounded in taboo, the proverbial playground for misfits and hardened vagrants. Times have changed. Right now, anyway, this one seems like the safest place to be. I haven’t given up on the pawn shop, even if I’ve forfeited the front entrance. It’s dark enough between the buildings that I nearly miss the back door—actually, I do, but Mitzy doesn’t. When she elbows me in the ribs and points to the heavily riveted barrier, I see that we have our work cut out for us. I guess I should’ve expected this—this is Chicago, for cryi
ng out loud, and just because crime was at an all-time low not long ago, every right-minded person still locked his or her doors at night—but as I take in the formidable door with its steel panels and industrial-grade deadbolt lock, I feel a wave of helplessness wash over me.
A couple of hours with a grinder and a cold chisel might get me in there—but nothing less. It isn’t until I look up that I realize we’re not completely out of options. A fire escape ladder is suspended just a few feet above our heads, leading up a series of iron switchbacks toward the roof.
It takes a few running tries to get a grip on the ladder, which is cold and slick with morning dew. When my fingertips finally snag a rung, I seize it and allow my body to counterweigh the springs holding it out of reach. The structure groans a loud squeak of protest that echoes through the corridor like a scream. Glancing down at Mitzy, the panic in her eyes gives my heart a pinch of admonishment.
We scurry up the fire escape like our lives depend on it, because we very much believe that they do. At the first switchback, I manage to get a painted window open. I’m peeking in when Mitzy grabs a handful of my shirt and gives it a swift yank.
“Wilson!” she hisses.
I back out and look at her, and even if I didn’t suddenly hear the menacing approach of voices, the look on her face would have explained all. The space behind the window might be a bottomless crypt, but what can we do? I contort my body through the opening and breathe a sigh of relief when my feet clumsily find a floor. Mitzy, who is much smaller and far more limber than me, slips inside with ease. I ease the window shut and squeeze off to one side. From here, I can safely survey the ground through a gouge in the painted glass. In the anonymity of darkness, I feel overwhelmed with sadness for what has come of not only my life, but the lives of us all, that we should all be reduced to surviving at the expense of others. The voices are just audible from in here, like a radio in a tin can. Moments later, bodies join the noise as a horde of miscreants swamps the alleyway.
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