The City of Mirrors (The Passage 3)

She looked around. To her right, a door.

Run, she thought. Run and keep on running.

Then they were outside, though it hardly seemed so. The sky was dark as night, the sun eclipsed by dust, the great city unrecognizable. A vast immolation, everything rushing to ruin. The noise hammered her ears, roaring from all directions. She was on the elevated roadway on the west side of the station. It was tipped at a precarious angle; cracks were spreading, whole sections collapsing. Amy picked a direction; under Peter’s weight, the best she could manage was a jog. Instinct was her only guide. To run. To survive. To carry Peter away.

The road sloped down to street level. She could go no farther; her legs were giving way. At the base of the ramp, she eased Peter to the ground. He was trembling—shaking with small, sharp spasms, like the chills of a fever, but growing stronger, more defined. Amy knew what he would want. He would want to die while still a man. The mortal instruments lay everywhere among the wreckage: segments of rebar sharp as knives, hunks of twisted metal, shards of glass. Suddenly she knew: this was what Fanning had intended, all along. That she should be the one. It’s love that enslaves us, Amy. She was beaten; it was all for nothing in the end. She would be alone again.

As she knelt beside him, a great sob shook her, the pain of her too-long life, forestalled for a century, unleashed. The glimpse of life she’d been given: how fleeting it was. Better, perhaps, never to have had it. Peter had begun to moan. The virus churned inside him; it bore him away.

She made her choice: a three-foot length of steel with a triangulated tip. What function had it served? Part of a signpost? The frame of a window that had once gazed out upon the busy world? The underpinnings of a mighty tower soaring to the sky? She knelt again by Peter’s body. The man inside was leaving. She bent and touched his cheek. His skin was damp and feverish. The blinking had commenced. Blink. Blink, blink.

A voice from behind: “Goddamn you!”

She went hurling through the air.

—

Michael sprinted down Fourth Avenue, the debris cloud roaring behind him. There would be no outrunning it. He turned right onto Eighth Street. At the ends of the block, both in front and behind, the cloud roared past with a tornadic whoosh, then, as if suddenly recalling his presence—Oh, Michael, sorry I forgot you—turned the corners, barreling toward him from two directions.

He dove through the nearest door and slammed it behind him. Some kind of clothing shop, coats and dresses and shirts hanging disembodied on the racks. A wide window with mannequins propped upon an elevated platform faced the street.

The cloud arrived.

The window burst inward; Michael’s hands shot up to protect his eyes. Dust engulfed the room, blasting him backward. Pricks of pain announced themselves all over his body—his arms and hands, the base of his throat, the parts of his face that had been exposed—as if he’d been attacked by a swarm of bees. He tried to rise; only then did he discover the long shard of glass embedded in his right thigh. It seemed strange that it didn’t hurt more—it should have hurt like hell—but then the pain arrived, annihilating his thoughts. He was coughing, choking, drowning in the dust. He scrambled back from the window and crashed into a clothing rack. He yanked a shirt from its hanger. It was made of some kind of gauzy material. He wadded it in his fist and pressed it to his mouth and nose. Breath by hungry breath, oxygen flowed back into his lungs.

He tied the shirt around the lower half of his face. With stinging eyes, he looked out upon the dark street. He was inside the cloud. Everything was silent except for a faint pattering: the sound of airborne particles falling upon the pavement and the roofs of abandoned cars. His hands and arms were slick with blood; his leg, where the long piece of glass was buried, screamed with the slightest motion. He drew his blade and cut, then tore, the leg of his trousers away. The glass, a long, narrow splinter, irregularly edged and slightly curved, had entered at an angle; the wound was roughly halfway between his groin and his knee on the inside flank of his leg. Good Christ, he thought. Another few inches higher and that thing would have sliced my nuts off.

He reached over his head to yank another shirt from the rack and used it to wrap the exposed end of the shard. He supposed it was possible that removing the glass would open the wound wider, but the pain was unendurable. Unless he removed it, he wouldn’t be going anywhere. To do it quickly: that was the best way.

He took the wrapped shard in his fist. He counted to three. He pulled.

All up and down the block, man-sized figures, moving in the dust, halted in their tracks and swiveled their faces toward the sound of Michael’s scream.