The City of Mirrors (The Passage 3)

Our species’ aversion to water is well known; water is death to us. We sink like stones, our bodies lacking the buoyancy of adipose tissue. Of my plunge into the quarry I possess only a fractured recollection. The truck’s slow progress to the lip of the abyss; the snatch of gravity and the inevitable plunge; water all around me, a cocoon of cold death, engulfing my eyes and nose and lungs. From small mistakes come great catastrophes; invincible in most other aspects, I had found the quickest way to die. As the truck touched down with a soft thump upon the quarry’s watery floor, I extricated myself from the cab and began to crawl along the bottom. Even in my panicked state, the irony was not lost on me. Subject Zero, World Destroyer, scuttling like a crab! My only hope was to feel my way to the edge of the pit and scale my way to freedom. Time was my enemy; I had but one bottled breath with which to save myself. A wall of rock met my desperate grasp; I began to climb. Hand over hand I made my ascent. My vision swirled with darkness, the end was closing in…

How I came in due course to find myself on hands and knees—pink-fleshed, inarguably human-looking hands and knees—whilst gagging out great volumes of boggy vomitus is a question I shall leave to the theologians. For die I surely did; the body remembers these things. Having freed myself from the quarry’s waters, I had yet succumbed and for some period of time lain as a drowned corpse upon the rocks, only to be shot back into existence.

Death’s doorway, it seemed, was not marked EXIT ONLY after all.

The last of the quarry’s waters expelled, I managed, in a state of dazed astonishment, to rise. Where was I? When was I? What was I? Such was my disorientation that it seemed that I might have dreamed it all—then, conversely, that I was dreaming this. I held up a hand before the moon. It was, in every visible aspect, the hand of a human being—the hand of Timothy Fanning, holder of the Eloise Armstrong Chair, et cetera. I looked down upon the rest of me; with tremulous digits I probed my face, my chest and stomach, my pale legs; naked by moonlight, I investigated each feature of my physical person like a blind man reading braille.

I’ll be goddamned, I thought.

I had come to rest on a rocky shelf jutting from the quarry wall; a narrow switchback led me to the top, where I emerged into an area of rusted machinery half-buried by weeds. The hour was unknown to me. Save for the moon, no lights burned anywhere. The landscape was one of such uninhabited desolation the world might have ended already.

The quarry’s waters would conceal my second victim, but there was the woman to consider; the last thing I wanted was a police manhunt to complicate matters. I circled the quarry to the parking area. The sight of her aroused no remorse, just the sort of perfunctory, quickly dispatched pity one might feel reading a newspaper account of some distant catastrophe over one’s second slice of morning toast. Two distant splashes—body, head—and into the watery deep she went.

None of which did anything to solve the problem of being a naked, full-grown man at large in an unknown countryside. I needed clothes, shelter, a story. Also, a certain mental agitation, like an inaudible siren in my brain, told me that, should daybreak find me in the open, nothing happy would ensue.

The main highway was too risky. I headed for the woods, hoping that I might eventually come to some lesser-traveled thoroughfare. At length I emerged into a landscape of freshly planted fields bisected by a dirt road. In the distance I saw a light and headed toward it. A small, rather dilapidated one-story house of nondescript design, little more than a box in which to store a human life: the light I’d seen was a lamp in one of the two front windows. There was no car in the driveway, suggesting that the house was unoccupied, the light left burning in anticipation of its owner’s return.

The door obediently opened onto a living room of particleboard furniture, country-themed bric-a-brac, and a television the size of a Jumbotron. A quick survey of the interior—four rooms and a kitchen—confirmed my impression that no one was home. My inspection further revealed that the occupant was a woman, had attended nursing school at Wichita State, was in her late forties, possessed a soft, moonlike face and gray hair she didn’t do much with, wore a size twenty, was frequently photographed in a state of rosy-cheeked inebriation in ethnic-themed restaurants (wearing a plastic lei, flirting shamelessly with the mariachis, holding up a flaming fondue spike), and that she lived alone. From her wardrobe I selected the most neutral things I could find—a pair of sweatpants, voluminous on my midsized masculine frame, a hooded sweatshirt, likewise huge, and a pair of flip-flops—and entered the bathroom.

The sight that greeted me in the mirror was not wholly unexpected. By this time it had become apparent to me that the physical act of drowning had not wholly restored me to my human state but wrought upon my person something more like costumery. The virus remained; my death had merely excited it into some new interaction with its host. Many attributes had been preserved. Vision, hearing, smell: all had retained their supercharged acuteness. Though I had yet to put them to a proper test, my limbs—indeed, my entire physical carriage, bones to blood—hummed with bestial strength.