Black River Falls

by Jeff Hirsch

  I crept up another set of stairs, carefully testing each one for creaks before committing my weight to it. The top floor was tiny, nothing but a short hallway of deeply worn wooden slats with two doors in the middle and one at the far end. They were all open. Moonlight filled the room at the end of the hall. I could see two figures lying beneath a white sheet.

  My pulse beat in my throat. I closed my eyes and pictured Cardinal. I felt armor slapping down over my skin and wings growing from my back.

  A floorboard groaned as I came into the bedroom. The man didn’t stir, but Mom’s eyes popped open and she shot upright against the headboard. I got to her before she could make a sound, clamping one gloved hand over her mouth and motioning for her to stay still with the other. She started to struggle when she saw the knife.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” I whispered, letting her see me put it back in its sheath. “I need you to get up and come with me. Do you understand?”

  There was a pause, and then she nodded slowly. I lifted my hand away from her mouth.

  “Good. Let’s move. Downstairs.”

  I motioned toward the door. She pushed aside the sheets and stood up, moving with that same dreamy obedience I’d seen the night before. Of course, I knew what it was now. She was terrified. I hated scaring her, but if it kept her quiet and doing what I said, I’d have to live with it. Once I got her up to Lucy’s Promise, I’d explain everything, just like I’d done with Hannah.

  I kept an eye on the man in the bed as she headed for the door. He was on his side, the sheets rising to mounds at his shoulders and his belly. My hand went to the hilt of the knife, and I felt some part of myself drain down into the blade. The steel edge hummed.

  Mom’s voice broke through her shock. It was small and trembling. “Don’t hurt him. Please. I’ll do whatever you want, just don’t hurt him.”

  I felt a sliver of rage. She’d been taken in by him so completely that she wanted to defend him. I told myself she didn’t know any better, couldn’t have known any better. I nodded toward the door.

  “Go. Now.”

  Mom took a last look at the man in the bed, then started down the hall toward the stairs. When we got to the first floor, she stopped in the living room, as if she were waiting for instructions. The front door was to my left, just beyond a small kitchen. We’d be home free in no time.

  “Come on,” I said, hurrying past her to the door. “We’ll go out this way, and then—”

  Something plowed into my back and sent me sprawling out in the entryway. When I turned over, I saw Mom standing by the kitchen table with a metal chair in her hands.

  “Fred!” she screamed. “There’s someone here! There’s someone in the house!”

  “No! Wait! You don’t understand. That man, he isn’t—”

  The room exploded with light. The man came running down the stairs with a baseball bat. I didn’t hesitate. I pulled my knife and charged him, swinging as soon as he was within reach. The blade bit into the back of his hand, and I dragged it across his knuckles. He dropped the bat and fell into a heap at the foot of the stairs, bent in half over his injury, pressing it into his stomach. When he sat up again, his white T-shirt was soaked with blood. The red of it was electric in the bright lights. Throbbing.

  “You have to listen to me,” I said as Mom ran to him. “You’re not who you think you are. This man isn’t . . . he isn’t . . .”

  Darkness came flooding in from the corners of the room and closed in around the point where the man’s hand was pressed to his belly. A stream of blood filled his lap and spilled out onto the floor. My stomach turned. The stench was so strong that I could smell it through my mask, like copper and lightning. Metallic chimes rang in my head. I stumbled backward toward the front door. My vision blurred. I was going to be sick.

  I fumbled with the doorknob, my fingers slipping uselessly against the metal. Finally, I managed to turn it and fresh air flooded the room. I fell out onto the porch and down the stairs. The last thing I heard was Mom crying as I ran into the night.

  I tried to make it back to Lucy’s Promise but got only as far as Monument Park before I fell to my knees in the grass. I clawed off my mask and gulped at the air but couldn’t seem to clear the stink of blood. It had seeped into my clothes and my skin and my hair. It filled my mouth. When I closed my eyes and saw that blaze of crimson splashed across the man’s middle, I vomited into the grass until my throat burned. I wanted to pass out, but I forced myself up onto my feet and strapped on my mask. I had to get back to Lucy’s Promise. Back to my camp.

  “Quite a little tour you’re taking.”

  A flashlight beam pierced the dark. A man’s voice came from behind it.

  “Six nights running now,” he said. “Everybody’s talking about some kid treating our town like his own private museum.”

  The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I started backing away, but then another beam hit me and then another one after that, until I was frozen in a cage of light. Dark shapes loomed on the other side of the flashlights. And there were more behind them. I counted six men. Then seven. Then ten.

  “Imagine my surprise when the descriptions of this kid started to sound a wee bit familiar.”

  I turned back to the voice. Light from behind me glanced off his shoulders, illuminating the pale, bald head and gleaming off the gold frames of his glasses. When he lowered his flashlight, I saw bruises on his face and around his neck. I looked over his shoulder toward Lucy’s Promise, but it was lost in the darkness, too far to reach even if I ran.

  I pulled my knife from its sheath. “I just want to leave.”

  A wave of laughter circled me.

  “Well, son, I’d like to take a trip to Rio de Janeiro, but I think we’re both gonna be disappointed.”

  “Please,” I said. “All I want to do is—”

  There was a rush of movement behind me, and then I was face-down in the dirt at Tommasulo’s feet. More laughter. I got up and lunged at my attacker, but a boot hooked under my foot and I went down again. Another boot found my ribs and dug in. After that, they were all on me at once. Callused knuckles and boot heels. Blows landed on my arms, my back, my chest. Eventually the pain crested and started to fade, seeming more and more distant, like someone knocking on a faraway door. I wasn’t afraid anymore. I wasn’t in pain. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t thinking about Mom or Dad or Hannah or Greer. Or you.

  The last thing I remember is Tommasulo leaning over me and reaching for my mask. Before he could get a hold of it, a harsh light splashed across his face, followed by the wail of sirens. Someone grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled. After that, everything went black.

  17

  I WOKE UP in the Gardens of Null.

  Cardinal was on his knees, with his back to me, watching a pack of dogs sniff through a mountain of garbage that had been left to rot. His armor was charred and dented, ripped in places and held together by wire and bandages that had gone a rusty brown from dried blood. On his back there were two ragged stumps where his wings had been.

  The land around us was a sea of rubble—ruined streets, collapsed skyscrapers, piles of scorched concrete with rebar sticking out of them like cracked rib cages. The sky was a seething red, brushed with black smoke coming from the incinerators that ran night and day out near Abaddon.

  When he spoke, the dying electronics in his mask made his voice sputter and wheeze.

  “I tried to save them, but I failed. Black Eagle. Blue Jay. Kestrel Kain. Rex Raven. Goldfinch. Lord Starling. Sally. My Sally.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. A fever ran through the broken steel.

  I said, “There’s only one thing to do.”

  Cardinal turned toward me. One of his electronic eyes had been put out, so I could see all the way down to the real one. It was bloodshot and glassy. The chrome blade of a butcher knife shimmered in my hand. I held it out to him.

  “Forget.”

  I sat up with a gasp. I was on a couch in a small
dark room. My mask was still on and so were my gloves. Even my knife was where it was supposed to be. Every inch of my body ached.

  There was a window just above my head. I strained to look out, but it was too dark to see what lay beyond it. I could hear footsteps, though, and an odd whispering sound. Someone was out there.

  I slowly got to my feet. The pain made my head swim, but I managed to hobble out of the room and into a narrow hallway. At the end, there was a soft, amber-colored light. I made my way to it, one hand against the wall to hold myself up. When I came to the end of the hall, I turned a corner and found a large open space. Candles sat on every available surface, their warm glow illuminating a maze of floor-to-ceiling shelves. I was in the library.

  I wound through the stacks, surprised to find entire rows of shelves sitting empty. It looked like nearly half of the library’s books were gone. Most of what remained lay in messy heaps in the aisles. I stepped over a mountain of Stephen King paperbacks and a crumbling pyramid of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. Some had pages torn out of them; some had been ripped in two.

  I found Freeman not far from the circulation desk, taking books from the floor and methodically re-shelving them. His coat was draped over a chair, leaving him in his dingy black pants and a sweat-stained shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He glanced up when I came in, but he didn’t say anything, just nodded toward one of the empty shelves. Sitting on it was a bottle of water and a bottle of aspirin. I shook four into my palm and chased them with a gulp of water.

  “Thanks.”

  Freeman slid another book onto the shelf. I figured I should start heading back to Lucy’s Promise, but I was too tired, too sore. The bruises along my chest and sides screamed as I lowered myself onto the floor beside the collected works of Charles Dickens. The spine of Great Expectations was broken. The cover of A Tale of Two Cities had been torn off and tossed aside.

  “What happened?”

  Freeman knelt by another pile of books and started turning each one over in his hands, lovingly checking it for damage.

  “The latest skirmish in an old war,” he said.

  “What war?”

  “The library versus the powers that be.”

  The powers that be? There’s no way the Guard would have done something like this, which left only one possibility. “Martinson Vine did this? Why?”

  He selected a handful of volumes and took them to an empty shelf.

  “Since the beginning of time, rulers have held on to power by making the masses believe the order they impose is permanent and inevitable. That resisting it would be like resisting gravity.” He nestled a book into place. “What could be a greater threat to that than the contemplation of alternate realities?”

  Freeman stepped back and brushed his fingertips along the spines of the books he’d just arranged. He seemed so different from the last time I saw him. He stood straighter. His eyes were sharper. He was calm. Was it because he was here in the library? Or was it something else?

  There was the sound of a distant siren and then a flash of red lights as a Guard vehicle passed by and continued on down the street. I was thrown back to earlier that night—my back in the mud, Tommasulo leaning over me, and then someone’s hands on my shoulders, dragging me away.

  “You were the one who called the Guard,” I said. “The one who pulled me out when those men were—”

  Freeman nodded.

  “Why?”

  He returned to his pile of books and held one up so I could see the cover. To Kill a Mockingbird.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Freeman set the book down again and went back to his work, moving between the shelves and the stacks on the floor. “I came here the night of the sixteenth,” he said. “By then I understood what was about to happen to me, so I wrote down everything I knew about myself. Things I’d done. Things I’d seen and thought and believed. I decided that once the virus had finished its work, all I’d have to do was read what I’d written and I’d be able to recreate the man I was.”

  Freeman finished the shelf he was working on, but instead of returning for more books, he took one of the candles and sat on the carpet across from me, careful to keep a gulf of distance between us. Yellow light flickered over the creases of his face.

  “But the next day, when I read what I’d written, it became clear to me that I had no desire to be the man I once was.”

  Freeman looked out across the mountain range of books scattered across the room.

  “That’s when I realized what this place actually is,” he said. “It’s not a repository of paper and ink. It’s the memory of the world, the memory of a thousand worlds, from the Big Bang to the darkness that lies in wait at the end of time. For weeks, I didn’t sleep. I barely ate. I did nothing but read, constructing Freeman Wayne sentence by sentence from this place’s memory instead of my own. One book became my heart. One my mind. One my soul.”

  He took the copy of To Kill a Mockingbird in both hands, as if he was afraid it might crumble to dust and blow away. He opened it, and for a while the library hush was filled with the dry sweep of pages turning. When he looked up at me again over that book’s spine, there was a clarity in his eyes I’d never seen before.

  “Tell me,” he said. “What raw materials did you use to build Cardinal Cassidy?”

  “I’m not—”

  “I know you’re not infected.”

  Freeman waited, his sea blue eyes never wavering.

  “I thought you said that you could just look at someone and see their past and their future.”

  He studied me a second longer, and then a slow grin softened the lines of his face. He closed the book and set it in his lap.

  “What were you doing at Mr. Addad’s house?”

  “Who’s Mr.—” Then it hit me. The man in the house. The man who had taken Mom. “How did you know I was there? Were you following me?”

  Freeman said nothing. I shrugged and picked at a stray bit of carpet. “I thought I knew the woman there.”

  “Sara?”

  The word hit me with a jolt. So that was her name now. Sara. I nodded.

  “She’s been good for him.”

  I made myself look up. “What do you mean?”

  “Sara found Fred wandering in the woods two weeks after the outbreak. He was alone. Nearly starving. She got him to the Guard. It turned out his mother had died a week before the outbreak and he was in town for her funeral. That’s her house they’re staying in. He and Sara have been together ever since.”

  “So he didn’t . . .”

  “What?”

  I swallowed back an ache in my throat. “He didn’t . . . take her?”

  An even greater intensity flooded Freeman’s eyes. “So that’s why you came,” he said. “You wanted to rescue her.”

  Freeman assured me that Fred wasn’t that kind of man. That he was gentle and seemed to love Mom. Every bit of the exhaustion and pain I’d felt over the last few days came surging back at once. Maybe I should have been happy to know that Mom wasn’t with some monster, but all I could think about was how she had gone to the Guard to get some stranger his name back, and had left her own behind.

  When Freeman was done, I forced myself up and started toward the front door.

  “Did you know her?”

  I turned back. Freeman was still sitting on the floor, surrounded by his books.

  “Sara,” he said. “Did you know her?”

  From where I was standing I could see down a line of shelves to the front desk and the windows behind it. While we’d been talking, the sun had begun to rise, filling the library with a blueish early-morning light. Near the desk was a small round table surrounded by four plastic chairs. I saw the four of us sitting there that first week in Black River when we came with Mom and Dad to get our library cards.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t know her. Thanks for the help, Freeman.”

  My legs shook as I made my way through the stacks. But I didn’t g
o straight to the front door. I veered off into the dimmer sections of the library, wandering aimlessly until I decided to stop lying to myself. I knew where I was going.

  I found all four volumes of Cardinal and the Brotherhood of Wings on a shelf toward the back. Their scarlet spines seemed to glow in the low light, standing out against all the others. I ran my finger down the length of them. A bell tolled in my chest as I read each title:

  VOLUME 1. THE RADIANT CITY AND THE EMERALD HORDE

  VOLUME 2. SALLY SPARROW DANCES AMONG THE STARS

  VOLUME 3. BEHOLD, ABADDON

  VOLUME 4. EXILE IN THE GARDENS OF NULL

  I picked up the first volume and became lost in it immediately. The pain of my injuries faded as I breezed through the Brotherhood’s battles with Madame Night, Slim John, and Professor Hurricane. I was right there when Blue Jay learned what being a leader meant on the day the Brotherhood was trapped in the Gray Waste. When Black Eagle and Rex Raven survived the three trials of the King of the Molemen. When Sally Sparrow danced among the stars.

  Before I knew it, I was at the end of the second volume and staring at that page, you know the one, the panel everybody said won Dad his Hugo. The one that made him famous.

  The Rose Prison.

  I’d seen it a thousand times, but it still stopped me cold. It was so simple. Cardinal and Sally Sparrow imprisoned at the heart of an immense rose of coral-colored steel. I’d looked at the panel a thousand times and still couldn’t understand how Dad had managed to make something that was so beautiful and so horrifying at the same time.

  The sun was fully up by then and the room was bright and warm. The green curve of Lucy’s Promise showed in one of the south-facing windows, but I knew I couldn’t go back there, not yet. There was somewhere I needed to go first.