Lost, she thought, as a curtain of darkness fell. Everything is lost.
—
The majority of virals emerged inside the city at four points: the central square, the southeast corner of the impoundment, a large sinkhole in H-town, and the staging area inside the main gate. Others had piloted their way through the pocketed earth to emerge in smaller pods throughout the city. The floors of houses; abandoned lots, weedy and untended, where children had once played; the streets of densely packed neighborhoods. They dug and crawled. They traced the sewage and water lines. They were clever; they sought the weakest points. For months they had moved through the geological and man-made fissures beneath the city like an infestation of ants.
Go now, their master ordered. Fulfill your purpose. Do that which I’ve commanded.
On the catwalk, Peter did not have long to consider Alicia’s words of warning. Amid the roar of guns—many of the soldiers, gripped by the frenzy of a mob, were firing upon the dopeys as well—the structure lurched under him. It was as if the metal grate beneath his feet were a carpet that had been lifted and shaken at one end. The sensation shot to his stomach, a swirl of nausea, like seasickness. He looked side to side, searching for the source of this motion, simultaneously becoming aware that he was hearing screams. A second lurch and the structure jolted downward. His balance failed; knocked backward, he fell to the floor of the catwalk. Guns were blasting, voices yelling. Bullets whizzed over his face. The gate, someone cried, they’re opening the gate! Shoot them! Shoot those fuckers! A groan of bending metal, and the catwalk began to tip away from the wall.
He was rolling toward the edge.
He had no way to stop himself; his hands found nothing to grab. Bodies tumbled past, launching into the dark. As he rolled over the lip, one hand seized slick metal: a support strut. His body swung around it like a pendulum. He would not be able to hold on; he had merely paused. Beneath him, the city spun, lit with screams and gunfire.
“Take my hand!”
It was Jock. He had lodged himself under the rail, one arm dangling over the edge. The catwalk had paused at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground.
“Grab on!”
A series of pops: the last bolts were yanking free of the wall. Jock’s fingertips, inches from Peter’s, could have been a mile away. Time was moving in two streams. There was one, of noise and haste and violent action, and a second, coincidental with the first, in which Peter and everything around him seemed caught in a lazy current. His grip was failing. His other hand flailed uselessly, trying to grasp Jock’s.
“Pull yourself up!”
Peter tore away.
“I’ve got you!”
Jock was gripping him by the wrist. A second face appeared under the rail: Apgar. As the man reached down, Jock heaved Peter upward; Apgar caught him by the belt. Together they hauled him the rest of the way.
The catwalk began to fall.
—
The slaughter had commenced.
Freed from hiding, the virals poured over the city. They swarmed the ramparts, flinging men into space. They launched from the ground and rooftops like a glowing fireworks display. They burst through the floors of hardboxes to butcher the occupants and exploded through the floors of buildings to haul the hiding inhabitants from closets and out from under their beds. They stormed the gate, which, although formidable, was not designed to repel an attack from within; all that was required to open the city to invasion was to tear the crossbars from their braces, free the brake, and push.
The pod that emerged near the impoundment was likewise charged with a specific mission. Throughout the day, their delicate sensorium had detected the footfalls of a great number of people, all headed in the same direction. They had heard the roar of vehicles and the barks of bullhorns. They had heard the word “dam.” They had heard the word “shelter.” They had heard the word “tubes.” Those that sought a direct entry to the dam were confounded. As Chase had predicted, there was no way in. Others, like an elite assault force, homed in on a compact building nearby. This was guarded by a small contingent of soldiers, who died swiftly and badly. Jaws snapping, fingers trilling, eyes restlessly roaming, the virals took measure of the interior. The room was full of pipes. Pipes meant water; water meant the dam. A flight of stairs descended.
They arrived in a hallway with walls of sweating stone. A ladder took them deeper underground, a second deeper still. A dense humanity lay near. They were coming closer. They were homing in.
They reached a metal door with a heavy ring. The first viral, the alpha, opened the door and slid inside, the others following.
The room was ripe with the odor of men. A row of lockers, a bench, a table bearing the remains of a hastily abandoned meal. Connected to a complex assembly of pipes and gears was a panel with six steel wheels the size of manhole covers.
Yes, said Zero. Those.
The alpha gripped the first wheel. INLET NO. 1 it was marked.
Turn it.
Six wheels. Six tubes.
Eight hundred dying cries.
—
Pistol extended, Sara approached the storage room and gently dislodged the door with her foot.
“Maybe it was just mice,” Jenny whispered.
The scratching sounded again. It was coming from behind a stack of crates. Sara placed the lantern on the floor and pushed the pistol out with both hands. The crates were piled four high. One on the bottom began to move, jostling those above it.
“Sara—”
The crates went tumbling. Sara fell back as the viral burst through the floor, twisting in midair to attach itself to the ceiling like a roach. She fired the pistol blindly. The viral seemed not to care at all about the gun or else knew that Sara was too startled to aim. The pistol’s slide locked back; the magazine was spent. Sara turned, shoved Jenny from the room, and began to run.
—
At the base of the wall, Alicia, immobilized, broken, lay alone. Her breathing was labored and damp, punctuated by small, exquisitely painful hitches. Blood was in her mouth. Her vision seemed skewed; images refused to resolve. She had no sense of time at all. She might have been shot thirty seconds ago. It might have been an hour.
A dark shape materialized above her: Soldier, bowing his head to hers. Oh, see what you’ve done to yourself, he said. I leave you for a minute and look what happens. His warm breath kissed her face; he dipped closer, nuzzling her, exhaling softly through his nostrils.
My good boy. She raised one bloody hand to his cheek. My great, my magnificent Soldier, I am sorry.
“Sister, what have they done to you?”
Amy was kneeling beside her. The woman’s shoulders shook with a sob; she buried her face in her hands. “Oh no,” she moaned. “Oh no.”
The spotlights had gone out. Alicia heard gunshots and cries, but these were distant, dimming. A merciful darkness enveloped her. Amy was holding her hand. It seemed that all that had gone before was a journey, that the road had brought her here and ended. The night slid into silence. She felt suddenly cold. She drifted away.
Wait.
Her eyes flew open. A breeze was pushing over her—dense, gritty—and with it a rumble, like thunder, though the sound did not stop. It rolled and rolled, its volume accumulating, the air swirling with windblown matter. The ground beneath them began to shake; with a whinny, Soldier reared up, his hooves slashing the air.
Her army is nothing. I can whisk it away.
Alicia raised her head just in time to see them coming.
—
Peter, Apgar, and Jock were racing down the falling catwalk. Its failure proceeded in sections, like dominoes falling in a line. Peter’s orders to fall back to the orphanage, the city’s last line of defense, went unheeded; a state of panic reigned. The problem was not merely the serial collapse of the catwalk, from which soldiers were falling a hundred feet to their deaths. The virals had also stormed its length. Some men were hurled, others devoured, twitching and screaming as the viral
s’ jaws sank home. Yet a third group were bitten and subsequently left to their own devices. As had been witnessed in the townships, Fanning’s virus did its work with unprecedented swiftness; in short order, a growing percentage of Kerrville’s defenders were turning on their former comrades.
A hundred yards downstream from the vanished command post, Peter, Apgar, and Jock found themselves boxed in. Behind them, the catwalk’s failure continued, span by span; ahead, the virals were coming toward them. No flight of stairs lay within reach.
“Oh, hell,” said Apgar. “I always hated doing this.”
They unfurled the ropes over the side. Jock was no fan of heights, either; the incident on the mission roof had scarred him for life. Yet it was also true that in the last twenty-four hours a change had occurred. He had always believed himself to be a flimsy man, a chip in the current of life. But since the birth of his son, and the burst of love this had produced, he had discovered within himself a solidity of character he had never thought possible, an expanding sense of life’s importance and his place within its web. He wanted to be a man of whom it could be said that he had put others before himself and died in their defense. Thus the newly inducted and personally transformed Private Jock Alvado shoved his terror aside, stepped over the rail, and turned his back on the maw of space below him; Peter and Apgar did the same.
They jumped.
A hundred feet with only the friction of their hands and feet to slow them: they landed hard on the packed dirt. Peter and Apgar came up quickly, but Jock did not. He had sprained, perhaps broken, his ankle. Peter pulled him upright and threw the man’s arm over his shoulder.
“Christ, you’re heavy.”
They ran.
—
The basement was a death trap.
As Sara ran for the door, a scream volleyed behind her, sharp, like metal being cut, then the room erupted in cries. She was carrying a little girl; she had scooped her up without thinking. She would have carried more if she could; she would have carried them all.
Jenny reached the door first. People were surging behind her. Suddenly the woman couldn’t move; the weight of panicked bodies had immobilized her, pressing her against the metal. She was yelling for people to back away but could scarcely be heard. The shrieks of the children were like the highest notes of a scale, impossibly shrill.
The door burst open; a hundred people attempted to cram through at once. Blind instinct had taken hold—to flee, to survive whatever the cost. People were falling, children being trampled underfoot. Virals ricocheted around the room, flinging themselves from wall to wall, victim to victim. Their enjoyment was obscene. One was carrying a child in its mouth and shaking it like a dog with a rag doll. As Sara wedged through the door, a faceless woman wrenched the little girl from her arms and shoved ahead, knocking her to the floor at the base of the stairs. People were thundering past. A familiar face emerged from the chaos: Grace, holding her baby. She was huddled against the wall of the stairwell. Upstairs, guns were popping. Sara gripped the woman by the sleeve to make her look at her. Stay with me, hold my hand.
Jenny and Hannah were waving to her from the top of the stairs. Sara half-pulled, half-dragged Grace to the lobby. Beyond the doors, a fierce battle raged. Children were screaming, mothers were huddled with their children, no one knew where to go. A few were running blindly out the door, into the heart of it. The virals were behind them and coming up the stairs.
A huge crash: the front of the building detonated inward. Bricks, shards of glass, splintered plywood went flying. Suddenly an Army five-ton was standing in the lobby. Hollis was at the wheel.
“Everybody, get in!”
—
Amy covered Alicia’s body with her own. Her army was dying; she felt them leaving her, souls draining into the ether. You did not fail me, she thought. It was I who erred. Go peacefully—at last you are free.
Fanning’s virals broke through. Amy buried her face against Alicia’s neck, holding her close. It would happen quickly, faster than light. She thought of Peter, then of nothing at all.
It felt as if they were inside a flock of birds; as if the air around them had turned into a million flapping wings.
—
From the roof of the orphanage, Caleb watched the city die.
He had heard the catwalk collapse, a terrific crash. The scene before him possessed an odd quality of disconnection. It was as if he were observing events that did not wholly pertain to him, unfolding at a great remove. Though when the shooting started, he knew, he would feel differently. Twenty-five men: how long could they last?
The gunshots faded, the flash of fired rounds, the pitiable, anguished screams. The city was sliding into silence, a place of ghosts. A moment of stunning quiet; then a new sound accumulated. Caleb pressed his eyes to the binoculars. An Army five-ton, draped in canvas, was roaring toward them from the square, flanked by a pair of Humvees. The men on the turrets were firing wildly, others shooting through the windows of the cab. Simultaneously Caleb became aware of a second, more compact movement to his right. He swung his lenses around. Impenetrable darkness; then two figures appeared. A third man was being carried.
Apgar.
His father.
They would intersect with the truck near the front of the building. Caleb’s feet barely touched the ladder as he descended. One of the Humvees veered away from the other vehicles; virals were clinging to it. It crashed onto its side and began to roll, like an animal trying to shake off a swarm of hornets. The five-ton was moving too quickly; it was going to crash into the building. At the last second, the driver cut the wheel to the left and screeched to a stop.
Hollis leapt from the cab, Sara from the bed. Everyone was grabbing children and hauling them through the door. Caleb vaulted over the sandbags and raced toward his father and the general.
“Take him,” his father said.
Caleb threaded an arm around the injured man’s back. The situation took shape in Caleb’s mind: the orphanage would be their final stand. In the dining room, Sister Peg waited by the open hatch. The woman was holding a rifle. The sight was so odd that Caleb’s mind simply rejected it. “Hurry!” Sister Peg yelled. His father and Apgar were ordering men to take positions at the windows. Hands reached up through the opening in the floor to help the children, who funneled into the hatch with a slowness painfully out of sync with everything else that was occurring. People were pushing and shoving, women screaming, babies crying. Caleb smelled gasoline. An empty fuel can lay on its side on the floor, a second by the pantry door. Their presence made no sense—it was in the same category of unaccountable details as Sister Peg’s rifle. Men were hurling dining chairs through the windows. Others were upending tables to act as barricades. All the things of the world were colliding. Caleb took a position at the closest window, pointed his rifle into the darkness, and began to fire.
—
For Peter Jaxon, last president of the Texas Republic, the final seconds of the night were nothing he had anticipated. Once the catwalk had begun its collapse, and the nature of the situation had become clear to him, he wholly intended to die. This was the only honorable outcome he could foresee. Amy was gone, his friends were gone, the city was gone, and he had only himself to blame. Surviving Kerrville’s destruction would be an unthinkable disgrace.
The last of the civilians had descended through the hatch, but would the door hold? Judging from the events of the last ten minutes, Peter could only conclude that, like everything else, it was bound to fail. Fanning, however he’d done it, knew everything.
Still, one had to try. Symbolism counted for something, as Apgar had said. The virals were amassing outside; they would storm the building as a horde. Still firing from the window, Peter ordered the men to fall back to the shelter; they had nothing left to defend except themselves. Many were out of ammo, anyway. A final shot from Peter’s rifle and the charger locked back. He cast the gun aside and drew his pistol.
“Mr. President, time to go.”
/>
Apgar was standing behind him.
“I thought you were calling me Peter now.”
“I mean it. You need to get down that hole right now.”
Peter squeezed off a round. Maybe he connected, maybe not. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Peter would never be sure what Apgar had hit him with. The butt of his pistol? The leg of a broken chair? A thud at the back of his skull and his legs melted, followed by the rest of him.
“Caleb,” he heard Apgar say, “help me get your father out of here.”
His body lacked all volition; his thoughts were like slick ice, impossible to hold. He was being dragged, then lifted, then lowered once again. He felt, oddly, like a child, and this feeling morphed into a memory—an impossible memory, in which he was a little boy again, not merely a boy but an infant, being passed from hand to hand. He saw faces above him. They floated enormously, their features bloated and vague. He was being laid upon a wooden platform. A single face came into focus: his son’s. But Caleb wasn’t a boy anymore, he was a man, and the situation had reversed. Caleb was the father and he the son, or so it seemed. It was a pleasant inversion, inevitable in its way, and Peter felt happy that he had lived long enough to see this.
“It’s all right, Dad,” Caleb said, “you’re safe now.”
And then the light went out.
—
Apgar slammed the hatch and listened as the bolts sealed from inside.
“You could have gone,” said Sister Peg.
“So could you.” He rose and looked at her. Everything felt suddenly calm. “The gas was a good idea.”
“I thought so, too.”
“Ready?”
Sounds above: the virals were tearing through the roof. Apgar lifted a rifle from the floor, checked the magazine, and shoved it back into the well. Sister Peg withdrew the box of matches from the pocket of her tunic. She struck one, tossed it. A river of blue flame snaked along the floor, then separated, running in several directions.
The City of Mirrors: A Novel (Book Three of The Passage Trilogy) Page 53