77 Shadow Street (58 page)

A similar thing had happened in the inadequate boat in which he and his father eventually put to sea with fifty other refugees. After being set upon by Thai pirates, after thirty of their own people were slaughtered and the pirates took enough losses to retreat, with the decks awash in blood, time seemed to be distorted on the South China Sea, each period of daylight lasting but a few hours, the nights impossibly long and all the stars out of their usual positions in the heavens. Tom knew that anyone not there would insist it had been delirium, but those who endured were certain that it was something more mysterious.

And now, in this changed Pendleton, he and Bailey Hawks moved along corridors that they could swear expanded ahead of them and prowled room after ruined room in apartments and public spaces that he did not remember previously having so many chambers. They were never lost but several times disoriented, gripped by the feeling that this building was far different from the Pendleton of their time not just because of its miserable condition but also for other reasons that eluded them.

They found ever stranger formations of fungi and other growths, heard movement in the walls, and felt the oppressive presence of the hidden ruler of this Pendleton. It must have had some telepathic power, for Tom could feel it curling through his mind like tendrils of cold mist, and Bailey described it as a someone-walking-on-my-grave feeling. What it conveyed to them by this intrusion was its contempt, its unalloyed hatred.

The longer they searched, the more certain Tom became that they would die here, and soon. Yet the attack did not come.

Although he thought they had not finished searching elsewhere, and although he could not recall how they had returned to the north wing on the second floor, which they had searched before, Tom kept moving as they stepped out of 2-D, the Tullis apartment, and turned right. At the end of the hallway, a young man whom Tom had never seen before appeared out of the open door to 2-F and motioned for them to join him.

“Witness,” Bailey Hawks said.

Winny

Under the circumstances, taking time out to think might be a good idea, but only if you were smart enough to scheme up a great strategy. Tucked in among the skeletons, swaddled in the odorous deathbed clothes, Winny brooded hard about what would be the best course of action for him and Iris, but the only thing he could think to do was stay right where they were, pretending to be dead until either they were found by their mothers or they actually
were
dead.

For a while he had felt amazingly good about himself, scared shitless but forging forward, but now he was crashing back from a hero-in-the-making to the usual skinny Winny. Strategizing meant having a serious internal conversation, and to his great dismay he discovered that, under pressure, he did not even know what to say to
himself
. He could almost hear his father telling him that he’d have been better prepared for this emergency if he hadn’t read so damn many books, if he had learned Tae Kwon Do and how to play a manly musical instrument, if he had spent a summer or two wrestling alligators and had worked at growing some hair on his chest. Winny didn’t yet have a single hair on his chest, and now he probably never would.

Poor Iris. She had worked up all her courage and had done the
thing hardest for her to do, only to commit herself to the dork of the year, the decade, the century. She probably thought he was Clark Kent, when in fact if he was any comic-book hero, he was SpongeBob SquarePants. Since he was a bust with strategy, he tried to think of the words with which to break the bad news to her.

Of course those words wouldn’t come to him either, and as he struggled to find them, bits of luminous fungi drifted down in front of him, past his one uncovered eye, like flakes of yellow snow, which seemed fitting. When the second flurry of fungi glowed past him, he belatedly realized what they signified.

He told himself,
Don’t look up
, as if what was about to happen could occur only if he were dreaming this entire trip to the future. If he dreamed that the flakes of glowing fungi never drifted past him, then he and Iris would be safe. If he dreamed all of them back to the good old Pendleton of their time, then they would suddenly be there, and the worst thing he would have to worry about was his dad showing up with a gift of a punching bag and boxing gloves.

In dreams, when you told yourself,
Don’t look up
, you always looked up anyway, sooner or later, and it was the same in real life. Winny tilted his head back, the stinking cloth falling away from his face, gazed up past the grinning skull of the skeleton that slumped against him, into the fierce eyes of the bullet-headed beast, which hung upside down on the wall, its face no more than two feet from his, its gray lips skinned back from its rows of sharp gray teeth.

Bailey Hawks

When he followed Witness into Apartment 2-F, it was almost as if Bailey had stepped back through time to the Pendleton of 2011. The apartment was furnished as it had been then, everything as he remembered
it, from the furniture to the walls of books on arcane scientific subjects, to the lighted aquarium. The only differences were the dirty windowpanes and the absence of fish in the big glass tank. All the electric lights worked, and no luminous fungi intruded here.

“What is this place?” Bailey asked, but thought he knew.

Witness said, “A shrine. And you might call me the caretaker.”

Tom Tran stood marveling, as if this was not just the home of Kirby Ignis but as if seeing it in this future Pendleton was either magic or a miracle.

“Witness to what?” Bailey asked.

“To the history of the world now lost,” Witness said, “and most especially to the origins of the One.”

“You’re apart from it,” Bailey remembered. “It allows that.”

“I was born in 1996. And in my twenties I became one of the first to benefit from full-spectrum BioMEMS, not just respirocytes and other physical enhancements, but also brain augmentation. That’s why I have the capacity to hold the entire history of the world in my memory. I do not age. I do not sicken. I can be killed only with the most extreme act of violence because … I repair.”

“Immortality.”

“Virtually.”

“The essential dream of humanity, the long-desired blessing.”

“Yes.”

Staring at Witness, Bailey could see the melancholy in his eyes and could almost
feel
it radiating from him. “Immortal … and alone.”

“Yes.”

Tom Tran said, “The last man on Earth.”

“Technically, I’m posthuman. Hybrid. A man augmented with billions of nanomachines.”

From elsewhere in the apartment, someone called out, “Do I hear Bailey Hawks?”

Winny

Fixed to the wall above Winny, the creature hissed, and from between the halves of its sharp smile came a glistening gray tubular tongue. Winny didn’t know the purpose of that tube, but he knew the purpose of those wicked teeth, and he had no doubt that the bite would be less terrible than what the tongue would do to him, maybe act like a vacuum and suck the flesh right off his bones, leaving him as picked clean as the skeleton beside him.

Paralyzed with terror, he felt even smaller than usual. He knew that he needed to do the hardest thing, never the easiest. But his philosophy failed him now because it seemed that the hardest thing he could do was die, and he was going to die whether he fought back or tried to flee. He couldn’t battle anything this big, this strong, and he couldn’t outrun it, either. He had only two options: a quick or a quicker death.

Iris must have raised her head, too, must have seen the thing above them on the wall. Her hand relented, she stopped trying to crush his knuckles, and she plucked urgently at his sweaty fingers, his wrist, his arm, as though she thought he must have fallen asleep and needed to be awakened to defend them.

She said something then that made no sense: “ ‘We’re going to the meadow now to dry ourselves off in the sun.’ ”

Listening to her trembling voice, Winny was reminded that Iris was not the plucky heroine of the adventure story he had been casting in his head. She was a girl apart and always would be, dealt a far worse hand in life than he had been. Being skinny and shy and never knowing what to say to people and having a father who was almost as fictitious as Santa Claus—all of that was nothing, nothing compared to autism. If she could dare to take his hand, could dare to keep silent in
this hiding place of bones and rotting gravecloth, in spite of all the fears and irritations with which she was plagued, then
he
, for God’s sake, could do something more than die quick or quicker.

Clinging to the wall with both its feet and one hand, the beast reached slowly toward Winny with its left arm. It pressed the tip of one long finger against the center of his forehead, above the bridge of his nose, kind of the way that a priest marked people on Ash Wednesday. Its finger was death-cold.

Iris was weak, and Winny wasn’t strong, but he was stronger than she was, and that meant he owed her a defense. His father was strong, really strong, and he got in bar fights and shoved people’s heads in toilets, but you didn’t always have to misuse strength. You could use strength, whatever little of it you might have, for the right thing, even if you knew there was no chance you would win the fight, even if you were doomed from the start, you could stand up and swing your skinny arms, because trying against the worst odds was what life was all about. And there he had found the harder thing he needed to do, the hardest thing of all hard things: do what was right even if there was no hope of success or expectation of reward.

Clutching Iris’s hand again, Winny pulled her away from the wall, scrambled with her from the bracketing skeletons, ran a few steps, kicking aside brass shell casings, and turned to confront the beast. It remained upon the wall, its head craned to one side, watching them with eyes as steady and icy and gray as tombstone granite.

Winny let go of the girl’s hand and pushed her behind him. He snatched up the old rifle with the fixed bayonet and held it in both hands, point thrust forward. He was like a rabbit threatening a wolf, and he felt fear—oh, yeah—but he did not feel either useless or stupid.