Bad Glass (50 page)
Authors: Richard E. Gropp
As we climbed, the light from my flashlight revealed more words spray painted on the wall.
First:
IN ITS PLACE
. And then, on the next landing,
OUT
, followed by an arrow curving up toward the top of the stairs. As soon as he saw the word and the arrow, Floyd let out another shrill laugh.
“There is no out,” he whispered, the laugh still in his voice. “It’s just this, right? This place. And us. And the stuff that followed us in.”
“That’s enough, Floyd,” I growled. “You’re not helping any.”
He laughed again, and I grabbed his forearm. He jumped at my touch and pulled away. There was fear in his eyes. And confusion.
On the next landing, we found a door. It was the first door since the basement, at least six landings down. The door was steel gray and smeared with grime—smoke grime, the exhaust of machines, layered thick and sticky against the metal. I opened it and found a hallway on the other side.
The hallway was a foreign place. Not the research facility; I was sure of that. It was no place I’d ever been. To the left, doorways stretched down both sides of the corridor, each about fifteen feet apart. About half of the doors were open, spilling muted red light onto the waxed floor. There was the smell of antiseptic in the air and, underneath it, a pungent touch of sweat and decay. It was a thick smell. I could almost feel it gathering on my skin, like pollen or lacquer.
Taylor stepped past me and let out a surprised breath. “It’s the hospital,” she said. “ICU.” It took me a moment to parse the initials, at first hearing them as out-of-place words: “I see you.”
I turned to the right, and sure enough, there was a nurses’ station just down the corridor, and a line of rolling gurneys pressed up against the wall. There was a whiteboard posted behind the desk, listing room numbers, patient names, and ailments. 503, M
ARTIN
H
ELDER, CIRRHOSIS—LIVER FAILURE
. 504, E
UNICE
W
EST, ANEURYSM—SHUNT
. 505, P
ETER
W
ILMORE, TRAUMA—FRACTURED PELVIS, RUPTURED SPLEEN, BROKEN LEG/ARM
. 506, R
ICHARD
S
CALLEY
…
It went on and on, scrawled in messy mismatched ink. Patients who were no longer in their rooms—the hospital now empty, evacuated and populated by nothing but silence.
I stepped toward the nurses’ station and then stopped.
“Fifth floor,” Taylor said at my back. There was absolutely no emotion in her voice, just muted, disconcerting calm. “We could find a window and jump out. Like that soldier. Remember the soldier?”
I nodded. I remembered the soldier.
Flying through the hospital window, falling through the air, hitting the concrete parking lot and
bouncing. Then rising up on injured legs and lurching forward mindlessly
.
“There’s got to be an exit,” I said, standing motionless in the middle of the corridor. My body felt heavy, exhausted, and I didn’t want to move. “Another stairwell, maybe, with an exit on the first floor. Or we could make a rope, lower ourselves to the street.”
I saw her nod out of the corner of my eye. Then she turned and peered down the corridor, first to the left, then to the right.
“Where’s Floyd?” she asked. “Where’d he go?”
My stomach dropped. I turned and found the corridor empty. It was just Taylor and me, the stairwell door shut at our backs. Floyd was gone. He’d disappeared.
Frantic, I pointed her down the corridor to our right, then headed left on my own, peering into each of the rooms in turn.
It didn’t take long to find Floyd. He was in the third room down.
It was a standard double-occupancy hospital room. The bed closest to the door was hidden behind a curtain, and I found Floyd seated on the second. He was perched motionless on its far edge, facing the window. The sky outside was bright red. While we’d been underground, night had become day, and the sky had lit up once again—with spores or blood, I didn’t know.
“Floyd?” I prompted.
He didn’t respond.
I crossed to the foot of the bed and looked at his face. He blinked and continued to stare at the window. He seemed to know I was there, but he didn’t engage, didn’t acknowledge my presence. I didn’t press it. I didn’t try to force his attention, didn’t grab his shoulders and start shaking, didn’t slap his face and shout bracing words.
I stepped up to the window and peered out at the city.
It was an unfamiliar landscape—still Spokane but worse, battered and beaten. I-90 was visible a couple of blocks away, to the
north, but it had suffered. Chunks of concrete had collapsed from its edge, diminishing its surface, and the entire Monroe overpass had fallen to the street below, leaving a wide gap in the interstate’s length, filled with boulders and jagged lengths of rebar. And the destruction didn’t look recent. All the buildings in sight had taken damage. Collapsed walls lay across sidewalks and streets, road surfaces had buckled and crumbled, streams of muddy water wended their way through eroded asphalt.
Time had passed somehow. The city had aged. And it had aged badly.
The sky was deep red, roiling in violent waves.
That’s not spores
, I thought,
not light reflecting off of the atmosphere. That’s not even sky. It’s something else. Something above us, waiting to fall
.
There was smoke in the distance, up north—several columns, billowing thick and black.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” Floyd asked, his voice slow and emotionless. I turned and looked at him. His face was impassive, but his eyes swam, refusing to spill but filled with tears. “He’s here. This is hell and he’s here, waiting for me. Just out of sight. Always here, around the next corner. And there’s no escaping it … no way out.”
Floyd slowly lowered himself onto his side, briefly curling his legs into a loose fetal position at the edge of the mattress. Then he rolled onto his back and settled his head on the pillow, fixing his eyes on the blank ceiling.
I looked up and saw Taylor standing in the doorway. There was relief on her face as she regarded Floyd. Then she saw the window.
She made her way to my side and peered out at the devastated landscape. She didn’t look for long; she turned away from the window and lowered herself onto the edge of the bed, taking a seat next to Floyd’s knees. She was sitting in the exact same position in which I’d first found Floyd. Her shoulders were slumped, her face expressionless.
“I can’t do this, Dean,” she said. “I can’t be here anymore.”
“We’ll find our way out, get back to the house.”
“I mean Spokane,” she replied, her voice flat, lifeless. “I can’t do this.” She nodded toward the window. “I can’t do
that
anymore.”
I nodded. And I didn’t ask any questions. I didn’t ask about her father, her mother, her obligations; I didn’t ask about the things that had been keeping her here. I didn’t want to change her mind.
“We’ll go,” I said. “We’ll go to California … or Seattle, or Olympia, if you like. We can find Terry, maybe help him with his book.”
She nodded.
“You, too, Floyd,” I added. “We’ll get out of here. It’ll get better. We’ll go far, far away.”
He turned his head and stared at me. There was a distance there, in his eyes. It seemed like he was already far, far away. And looking back at me through a veil.
Photograph. Undated. Spokane from above:
The city is in ruins beneath a bloodred sky.
The roof curves in an arc at the bottom of the frame, the wide angle distorting the foreground. Down below, there are no neat, rectangular blocks, no hint of city planning, no remnant of order. Buildings have collapsed across streets, and streets have collapsed into rubble.
The city has lost its shape.
The view is from at least ten stories up, peering northeast across the remains of I-90. There are vehicles in the ruins, where an army checkpoint has been—far to the left, at the edge of the city. A
park to the north is smoldering in the distance, sending up plumes of dark smoke—ethereal fingers, trying to puncture the liquid red sky. There isn’t even a hint of vegetation there, just charred black coal.
Two blocks north of the interstate, a wide valley of destruction has been gouged into the gray landscape, revealing a long trough of darkened earth. At the end of this valley, on the right-hand side of the frame, is a downed jetliner, dented, its wings torn free and left littered in its wake. The crash is old. It doesn’t smolder, and there are no signs of life—no emergency vehicles, nothing but rubble. Its nosepiece is angled up toward the heavens.
There are no signs of life anywhere in the photograph. Nothing but a shapeless city and a bloodred sky.
Floyd led the way up to the roof. I wanted to find a different stairwell on the fifth floor, a different route to the street, but he was insistent. He had an energy that surprised me; it seemed out of keeping with his earlier mood.
“I want to see the city,” he said, “from up high.” Then he smiled. It was an odd smile. Delirious. It didn’t touch his eyes. “You can take pictures.”
Taylor looked reluctant.
“There’ll probably be another stairwell up there,” I offered, “on the other side of the building. Or maybe a fire escape. You saw the graffiti. Up is out.”
Taylor still looked reluctant, but she nodded. And I got the sense that this was a big deal for her. She was putting herself in my hands. She was counting on me to get her out.
Back in the stairwell, we passed the doorways to the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh floors. It kept getting
brighter as we climbed higher and higher. Up at the top, the door to the roof was chocked open with a cinder block brick. A simple iconic eye had been spray-painted on the door’s surface.
The view from the roof was amazing.
“When did that happen?” Taylor asked as we approached the northern edge of the building. There was a jetliner down in the middle of the city. A big one. The blocks immediately north of I-90 had been reduced to rubble.
“It didn’t,” I said. “It never happened.”
Riverfront Park was smoldering on the horizon. It looked like it had been burning for quite some time. Taylor followed my eyes. “We were just there,” she said, her voice hushed in reverent wonder.
I shook my head. “Not there. Someplace else.”
Some
time
else
, I thought.
I raised the camera to my eye, cranked the lens as wide as it would go, and took a handful of pictures, rotating between shots to catch the full panoramic view. When I was done, I lowered the camera and we just stood there, staring out across the horrible landscape.
“Hey, guys. Check it out.”
We turned and saw Floyd standing twenty feet back, next to the stairwell door. He rocked back on his heels and flashed us a brilliant smile. Then he stuck out his tongue, raised forked fingers to the sky, and started running toward the eastern edge of the building.
I didn’t move. Taylor didn’t move. We just watched.
Floyd took off a couple of feet from the roof’s edge. He reached down, grabbed an invisible skateboard, and ollied into the void, lifting his feet to the side as he dropped out of sight.
He didn’t make a sound. He just disappeared beneath the ledge. And was gone.
After a stunned moment, I managed to break my paralysis and follow him to the edge. He’d already finished falling by the time I
got there. I could barely make out his remains down in the rubbled street.
A rag doll, twisted and broken.
Not Floyd—not anymore. Just ravaged meat. Nothing but an insensate piece of the landscape.
Photograph. Undated. Taylor in the boardroom:
A young woman. Her face is center frame, bright and luminous, tinted pale red. Her eyes are dark and focused elsewhere, on some point far behind the camera. Her skin is on the dark side of Caucasian, vaguely Indian.
She is frozen in place about ten feet away, next to an empty chair in the middle of a deserted boardroom. The chair is magnificent—a cushioned black leather throne, empty. There are three other chairs in view, all empty, including one that’s been spilled onto its back. She is striding forward, caught with her arm swinging out, toward the camera.
There is a table on the right-hand side of the frame. It is smooth, black, and polished to a gleam. It stretches to the far end of the room, where a window dominates the background. The window is filled with red—the shape of clouds caught in
various shades of crimson, pink, and dark, dark oxblood.
The woman is dirty, but beautiful.
The room is abandoned, but beautiful.
Then it was just the two of us.
Taylor didn’t look over the edge. She remained where she stood, her eyes wide, staring off into space. When I looked back at her, her lips parted slightly and she shook her head. A violent denial:
No, that didn’t happen. No, Floyd’s fine, just fine
.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
I wanted to move before the horror of what we’d just seen could really sink in, before it became real. For both of us. If I paused, if I gave us time to think, I was afraid we’d never be able to move again, afraid it would send us gibbering into complete surrender. And they’d find us—who, I don’t know—sitting here cross-legged in the middle of the roof. Skeletons, Taylor and me, eons dead and gone, frozen in place by the horror, the loss, the confusion.