Chapter 9
Liam did not answer it.
That was the hardest thing he had ever done, and he had climbed a broken bridge over a two hundred foot drop, and he had lain in the snow and let Uebert Murray stand over him and call him a passenger.
He stood at the tiller of a stolen sailboat with the black water of the Sound opening ahead of him and he looked down through the companionway hatch at his best friend's face and he did not give it a word.
"You're not curious," Chloe said.
Her eyes had not blinked.
"You're the most curious man I've ever met," she said.
"You file everything. You've been filing since you were nineteen. You filed Uebert and you filed Duncan and you filed Merja and you filed me, and now there's a man on a rock with a rifle you think you recognize and you're going to stand up there and pretend you don't want to know?"
Isaiah came up the companionway ladder fast and Liam grabbed his collar and hauled him back.
"Don't," Liam said.
"She's awake—"
"That isn't her."
"Liam, her eyes are open, she's—"
"It isn't her, Isaiah."
Isaiah stopped.
He stood there on the ladder with his head and shoulders out of the hatch and the wind coming off the water, and Liam watched him understand, and watched it hurt him.
"Then who am I talking to," Isaiah said.
There was a long silence from the cabin.
And then Chloe's voice, from the dark, said, very softly:
"You're not talking to anybody, Isaiah. That's rather the point."
Liam turned the boat north.
They ran north all night on a black sea under a black sky.
The wind came out of the southwest, steady, a following wind, and Cully sat cross-legged in the bow with a hand line over the side reading the water like a man reading a page, and every so often he called back an adjustment and Liam made it.
He had never sailed a boat in his life.
He learned that night, badly, by having a fifteen year old boy tell him what to do and by doing it, and by the middle of the night he had stopped being terrified and had started merely being cold.
The other four hulls stayed close.
Nell's rowboats and the skiff and the leaking crabber, roped to the sailboat's stern in a long line, and every hour Isaiah went down the rope hand over hand in the dark to look at his pitch, and every hour he came back and said, "She's swimming."
Chloe talked all night.
She talked from the cabin, and nobody went down there.
She talked about the ice. She talked about her father, and about a canoe, and about a summer when she was eleven and the perch were so thick you could put your hand in the water and touch them.
She talked about her little brother, and about the way he had laughed, and about the spring he had died and how the ground had still been half frozen.
Then she started talking to Isaiah.
"You should have looked at the bow," she said.
Isaiah, at the mast, went rigid.
"Isaiah. Sweetheart. All you had to do was look. You got the motor running and you were so proud of yourself, and you took the wheel, and you drove us away, and I was in the water fifty feet behind you screaming your name."
"Isaiah," Liam said sharply. "Come here. Come here right now."
"I could see the boat," Chloe said. "I could see you at the wheel. The whole time."
Isaiah made a sound like a man being unmade.
"COME HERE," Liam roared.
And Isaiah came, stumbling aft along the pitching deck, and Liam grabbed him and put him down on the bench beside the tiller and got an arm around him and held him there.
"It's not her," Liam said, into his ear, low and fierce. "It's not her, it's not her, it's not her."
"She saw me—"
"She was unconscious in a swamp when we told that story to Nell."
Liam shook him. "Isaiah. Listen to my voice. We told that story in the blockhouse. You and me. Out loud. Both of us. We stood in that concrete room and we told twenty-two strangers exactly what happened at the marina and exactly what you did and exactly what you didn't do."
Isaiah stared at him.
"It was listening," Liam said. "It was standing outside the door and it was listening, and everything it has said to you tonight is a thing you said about yourself."
Isaiah's face crumpled.
"It's using my own guilt," he whispered.
"It's got nothing else. It's got no hands, it's got no feet, it's got nothing in the world but the things we've told it." Liam's voice was shaking now. "It is the emptiest thing that has ever existed and the only thing it can hurt you with is the stuff you handed over yourself."
Isaiah put his face in his hands.
"Then I gave it a weapon," he said.
"Yes."
"I gave it the only one it needed."
"Yes," Liam said. "And now you know that. And now it doesn't work anymore."
The talking stopped at dawn.
It stopped the way it had stopped in the blockhouse, mid-word, like a lamp going out, and the silence afterward was so complete that Liam went down the ladder for the first time in nine hours to make sure she was still breathing.
She was.
She was sleeping. Her eyes were shut. The fever had come all the way down and her skin was cool and her breath came slow and even, and when Liam put his hand on her forehead she turned her face into it, just slightly, in her sleep.
He sat down on the cabin sole and put his back against the bulkhead and did not move for a long time.
"Liam," Nell called from above. "Come up. You need to see this."
He came up.
The sun was coming, or as much of it as this country ever got, a gray brightening in the east behind the mountains, and the fog was lifting off the water in long torn sheets.
And the Sound was open in front of them.
It was enormous. That was the first thing. It was not a bay and it was not a channel, it was a great inland sea, miles across, with black timbered islands standing up out of it and long forested arms running away east and west into the mist.
And on the water, everywhere, were the dead.
Ships.
Liam had not been ready for it and there was no way he could have been.
Container ships, four hundred feet of rusted steel, lying over on their sides in the shallows with barnacles up their hulls.
Ferries, huge and white and streaked with rust, grounded on sandbars, their windows gone.
Tugs and fishing boats and pleasure craft and one great gray naval hull, half sunk, with her deck awash and gulls standing on her gun mounts.
Hundreds of them.
The pulse had killed every engine on that water on the same afternoon, and every one of those ships had gone dark and dead in the middle of a voyage, and drifted, and grounded, and stayed.
"God," Isaiah said.
"That's nothing." Nell was standing at the shrouds with her scarred face turned north. "Wait till you see the city."
They saw the city three hours later.
It came up over the horizon slowly, the way a mountain range does, and Liam saw it first through the Leupold and did not say anything for a long time.
The towers were still standing.
That was what he had not expected. Some part of him had assumed the cities would be gone, that two years of fire and rot would have flattened them the way the world had flattened everything else, and it was not true at all.
Seattle stood.
Glass and steel, forty and fifty and sixty stories of it, black now, all the windows blown out by weather and time so that the towers stood like enormous empty ribcages, and the whole skyline was rising up out of a gray haze of woodsmoke.
Woodsmoke.
Liam counted the fires.
"There's people," he said. "Nell, there's a lot of people. I'm counting forty separate columns of smoke and that's just what I can see from here."
"Thousands," Nell said. "That's what Cully heard. Two, three thousand across the whole Sound."
She took the rifle from him and looked through the glass and handed it back.
"Everyone thinks the cities emptied out. They didn't. They died, ninety-five percent of them died, and the last five percent are still standing in the rubble and they are the hardest five percent that ever drew breath."
Liam looked at the towers.
Somewhere down at the bottom of them, at the waterline, under a market, there was a door with a light on it.
"How close can we get?" he said.
"Not close," said Cully.
The boy had come aft. He was looking at the city the way a man looks at a dog that has bitten him before.
"There's a line," Cully said. "Everyone knows it. You come up the Sound and there's a point, down by the old grain terminal, and past that point you're in it. The crews have got men on the water and men on the shore and they watch every hull that comes north,
and if you cross that line you get boarded."
"By who?"
"Depends who's winning that week." Cully spat over the side.
"Ballard's got the north waterfront. The Pike men hold the market and the hillside. The Yards are south of the stadiums and the Shore is south of them. Four crews and about a mile and a half of shoreline between the whole lot of them, and they've been killing each other over it for two years."
"And the door's in the middle."
"The door's in the Pike men's ground," Cully said. "Right in the middle of it. That's why they're the smallest crew and the meanest one, because they hold the thing everybody wants and they've been holding it for two years and every man of them knows exactly what happens if they let go."
Liam brought the glass up again.
He found the waterfront. He found the long ruined line of the piers, half collapsed into the water, and the great gray bulk of the viaduct behind them, and the hillside rising up sharp behind that.
And he found the market.
It was unmistakable, even now. A long low sprawling building on the edge of the bluff, the roof half gone, and hanging off the front of it, still, impossibly, a great steel sign, rusted red, its letters bent but legible.
PUBLIC MARKET.
And below the sign, on the bluff face, down at the bottom where the hillside met the ruined street, Liam saw a wall of stacked debris and a gap in it and something small and black set into the concrete of the hill.
And beside it, a point of light.