The City of Mirrors

A harsh white light raked their faces; a pickup was racing down the roadway toward them. Peter hooded his eyes against the glare. The driver skidded to a stop.

“Get in,” Caleb said.

—

Alicia saw only the sky. The sky and the back of a man’s head. She sensed the presence of a crowd. Her stretcher jostled beneath her, there were voices, people crying, everything rushing around her.

Don’t take me. Her body was broken; she lay loose as a doll. I’m one of them. I don’t belong.

Clanging footsteps: they were crossing the gangway. “Put her over there,” someone said. The stretcher-bearers lowered her to the deck and hurried away. A woman was sitting beside her, her body curled around a blanketed bundle. She was murmuring into the bundle, some kind of repeated phrase that Alicia could not make out, though it possessed the rote rhythm of prayer.

“You,” Alicia said.

One syllable; it felt like lifting a piano. The woman failed to notice her.

“You,” she repeated.

The woman looked up. The bundle was a baby. The woman’s grip on it was almost ruthless, as if she feared someone might snatch it away at any moment.

“I need you…to help me.”

The woman’s face crumpled. “Why aren’t we moving?” She bent her face to the baby again, burying it in the cloth. “Oh, God, why are we still here?”

“Please…listen.”

“Why are you talking to me? I don’t even know you. I don’t know who you are.”

“I’m…Alicia.”

“Have you seen my husband? He was here a second ago. Has anybody seen my husband?”

Alicia was losing her. In another moment, she’d be gone. “Tell me…her name.”

“What?”

“Your baby. Her…name.”

It was as if nobody had ever asked her such a question.

“Say it,” Alicia said. “Say…her name.”

She shook with a sob. “He’s a boy,” she moaned. “His name is Carlos.”

A moment passed, the woman weeping, Alicia waiting. There was chaos all around, and yet it felt as if they were alone, she and this woman she did not know, who could have been anyone. Rose, my Rose, Alicia thought, how I have failed you. I could not give you life.

“Will you…help me?”

The woman wiped her nose with the back of a wrist. “What can I do?” Her voice was utterly hopeless. “I can’t do anything.”

Alicia licked her lips; her tongue was heavy and dry. There would be pain, a lot of it; she would need every ounce of strength.

“I need you…to untie…my straps.”

—

Soaring leap after soaring leap, Carter made his way down the channel toward the isthmus. The mushroom shapes of chemical tanks. The rooftops of buildings. The great, forgotten debris fields of industrial America. He moved swiftly, his power inexhaustible, like a huge heaving engine.

A great backlit shape rose before him: the channel bridge. He unleashed his body skyward; up he flew, seizing a handhold just below the bridge’s shattered surface. A moment of calibration and he hurled himself upward again, grabbed a guy wire with one hand, and somersaulted to the deck.

Below, the unfolding battle was laid out before him like a model. The ship and the mob of people funneling aboard; the truck roaring down the causeway; the barricade of flames and the viral horde amassed behind it. Carter cocked his head to calculate his arc; he needed more height.

Using one of the support wires, he climbed to the top of the tower. The water shone below him still as glass, like a great smooth mirror to the moon. He felt some uncertainty, even a bit of fear; he pushed it aside. The tiniest fleck of doubt and he would fail, he would plummet into the abyss. To traverse such a distance—to master its breadth—one needed to enter an abstract realm. To become not the jumper but the jump, not an object in space but space itself.

He compressed to a crouch. Energy expanded outward from his core and gushed into his limbs.

Amy, I am coming.

—

From the pilothouse, Lore was watching the viral horde through binoculars. Blockaded by the flaming wreckage, it appeared as a column of thrumming light that stretched far back onto the mainland and beyond, widening to encompass virtually all of the far shore.

She raised the radio to her mouth. “I don’t want to rush you, Michael, but whatever’s wrong, you have got to fix it right the fuck now.”

“I’m trying here!”

Something was happening to the horde, a kind of…rippling. A rippling but also a compacting, like the gathering action of a spring. Beginning at the rear, the motion slithered forward, gathering speed as it proceeded down the causeway toward the flames. The truck was lying lengthwise across the roadway. What was she seeing?