The City of Mirrors (The Passage 3)

“Why? So he can get us all killed?”

“Michael, I want you to listen to me very carefully.” Peter wasn’t angry; he had expected the man to object. What mattered now was making sure everyone stayed on board. “I know your feelings. You’ve made them very clear. But the situation has evolved.”

“The time line has moved up, that’s all. We’re pissing away our chance sitting around like this. We should be loading buses right now.”

“Maybe it would have worked before. But we start moving people out of here now, there’ll be a riot. This place will come apart. And there’s no way we can move seven hundred people to the isthmus in daylight. Those buses would be caught in the open. They wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“We don’t stand a chance anyway. The Bergensfjord is all we have. Lucius, don’t just sit there.”

Greer’s face was calm. “This isn’t our decision. Peter is in charge.”

“I don’t believe what I’m hearing.” Michael looked around the room, then back at Peter. “You’re just too goddamn obstinate to admit you’re beaten.”

“Fisher, that’s enough,” Apgar warned.

Michael turned toward his sister. “Sara, you can’t be buying this. Think about the girls.”

“I am thinking about them. I’m thinking about everybody. I’m with Peter. He’s never steered us wrong.”

“Michael, I need to know you’re with us,” Peter said. “It’s that simple. Yes or no.”

“Okay, no.”

“Then you’re dismissed. The door is that way.”

Peter wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen next. For several seconds, Michael looked him dead in the eye. Then, with an angry sigh, he rose from the table.

“Fine. You make it through the night, you let me know. Lucius, are you coming?”

Greer glanced at Peter, eyebrows raised.

“It’s all right,” said Peter. “Somebody needs to look after him.”

The two men departed. Peter cleared his throat and continued: “The important thing is that we get through tonight. I expect every able-bodied person to man those walls, but we’ll need shelters for the rest. Ford?”

Chase rose, crossed to Peter’s desk, and returned with a rolled tube of paper, which he unfurled on the table and weighed down at the corners.

“This is one of the builders’ original schematics. Hardboxes were constructed here”—he pointed—“here, and here. All three date to the early days of the city, and none has been used in decades, not since the Easter Incursion. I don’t imagine they’re in very good shape, but with some reinforcement, we can use them in a pinch.”

“How many people can we fit?” Peter asked.

“Not many, at most a few hundred. Now, over here,” he continued, “you’ve got the hospital, which can fit, oh, maybe another hundred. Another, smaller box is underneath this building, the old bank vault. Full of files and other junk, but basically in good shape.”

“What about basements?”

“There aren’t a lot. A few beneath commercial buildings, some of the old apartment complexes, and we can safely assume there are a few in private hands. But the way the city was built, almost everything is on slab or pier. The soil by the river is mostly clay, so no basements at all. That extends from H-town all the way to the southern wall.”

Not good, Peter thought. So far, they had accounted for fewer than a thousand people.

“Now, here’s the granddaddy.” Chase directed everyone’s attention to the orphanage, which was marked “HB1.” “When they moved the government from Austin, one of the reasons they chose Kerrville is because of this. While the walls were being constructed, they needed a safe place to overnight the workers and the rest of the government. This end of the city sits on top of a large formation of limestone, and it’s full of pockets. The largest one is underneath the orphanage, and it’s deep, at least thirty feet below the surface. According to the old records, it was originally used by the sisters as part of the Underground Railroad, a place to hide runaway slaves before the Civil War.”

“How do we get down there?” Apgar asked.

“I went and looked this morning. The hatch is under the floorboards in the dining area. There’s a flight of wooden stairs, pretty rickety but usable, that leads down to the cave. Dank as a tomb, but it’s big. If we pack folks in, it can hold another five hundred at least.” Chase looked up. “Now, before anybody asks, I went through the census data last night. It’s just an estimate, but here’s how things break down. Inside the walls, we have about eleven hundred children under the age of thirteen. Not counting military, the remainder divvies up about pretty evenly in terms of gender, but the population skews old. We’ve got a lot of people over sixty. Some of them will want to fight, but I don’t see that they’ll be much help, frankly.”