Chapter 29 #2
Careful progress brought me to a pile of rubble forty feet high blocking the street.
The tower on one side of the avenue had collapsed and fallen across the roadway and into the buildings opposite.
It lay buckled in mounds of shattered marble and concrete.
Arcing metal beams, twisted and sheared off at the ends, protruded from the rubble.
I thought about trying to climb over but I didn’t think I could, not without proper gear and actual climbing experience, which I did not have.
So, I backtracked until I found a side street.
I followed it until I hit another avenue.
I walked. I listened. I kept my eyes moving.
Deep shadows loomed on all sides and, overhead, the clouds surged like the underside of ocean waves.
Ash blew in gusts, the wind whistling and moaning through the broken buildings all around me.
Aside from the wind, there was no movement. No sign of other living people.
It was dead. New City of Angels was dead. Wrecked and abandoned.
I stopped to rest under a partially collapsed pedestrian overpass and sat on a flat section of concrete.
Ash fell. I thought again about Anjari, about her confidence in her time.
She’d been convinced hers was the epoch of human civilization.
A culture that would last forever. Now I was here, seven hundred years later, and there was only debris to greet me.
And the ash. Which was, what, exactly? Burnt sections of the city.
The remnants of the forests and parklands I’d seen in my last jump.
Or maybe, a small, dark part of me whispered, it was the cremated remains of the people who’d once inhabited the city.
What was left of their bodies, endlessly churned by the wind only to fall back to Earth like snow.
I rubbed my eyes through the suit fabric. There was no one here. There was no reason for me to keep going any deeper into the city.
“Dad.”
I jumped. “Yes?”
“You’ve stopped moving.”
“You’re right.”
“Are you planning on staying here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Perhaps you—”
“What are you?”
There was a pause. “I understand this is difficult for you.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the start of one.”
“No riddles or doublespeak, okay? What are you? Because my son, Lyle, died centuries ago. He died, and I don’t know if he ever really lived.
He spent his whole life trying to save me, over and over.
I told him to live his life and not let this …
this … whatever this is, drag him down, too.
” I set my head against the shattered concrete.
“I did live.” His voice was calm. “I lived a century. I lived a life wildly varied and exciting. I wanted for nothing, except to save you. Did you listen to the message I left for you in the bunker?”
“I heard it.”
“Then you know all this.”
“I know that’s what my son said.”
“I am your son.”
“You’re a voice in my ear that sounds like my Lyle.”
He was silent a moment. “Do you remember the little office you had in our house? Before Mom packed me up and left for Oregon. The one in Madison, before you started jumping through time. Do you remember the hours we spent there, together, you and me, drinking hot chocolate and reading?”
I let out a breath through my teeth.
“I remember,” Lyle said, his voice soft. “Those are some of my favorite memories. I kept them with me after I’d forgotten far more than I remembered. I kept those. And those memories are here, now. They’re making me what I am. I am, still, Lyle. Your son. Just in another form.”
Tears welled and spilled down my cheeks under the tight mask. I brought my hands up and cupped my face, the skin of my palms kept separate from the skin of my cheeks by layers of survival suit. “Christ, Lyle. Why didn’t you let me go?”
“I couldn’t. Could you, in my place?”
“No. No, I couldn’t.”
“Then you can’t expect me to give up on you.”
I sat there, eyes blurred with tears. I thought of arguing. Pushing back. But what would I push against? I was glad he was there. In any form, I was glad to have him back. Lyle, my son, now a disembodied voice in my head.
I was glad he was there.
I struggled upright. There was nothing in the city.
No survivors. No answers. No food and water.
Not even much in the way of shelter. I decided to head back the way I’d come and find the thickest slab of concrete to sit under for the rest of the day and night, regardless of how unappealing that sounded.
As I turned, the clouds parted, and I saw the object in the sky again.
I stepped back into the shadows, my heart jumping into my throat.
It was immense. It hung within the clouds, all black and hard angles and complex conjunctions of long geometric shapes.
And it was holding station over the city.
I craned my neck to see between the broken and exposed structures of the skyscrapers. I squinted, trying to make out more details, when a piece of the object detached from the central mass and fell toward the city.
“What the hell?” I whispered. The piece looked like it would hit the ground several blocks from where I stood, but it slowed. The diamond shape spun in midair and accelerated into a black blur, flitting between buildings.
“Dad.”
The diamond shape hurtled straight toward me.
“Oh, shit,” I said. I turned, my heart racing.
There was nowhere to go—nothing but black shadows under the remains of the overpass and the swirl of ash in the open street around me.
“Shit.” I ducked into a corner formed by large sections of broken concrete, trying to slide as deeply into the shadows as I could.
As soon as I stopped moving, I heard the boom of the flying piece as it passed overhead. I froze, waiting, heart pounding.
The touchpad on my forearm blinked a silent, angry red. I hesitated a fraction of a second and moved my head and arm enough to read the pad.
Warning: energy buildup. Significant discharge imminent.
“Dad, move,” Lyle shouted.
I threw myself from the dark little corner and back onto the avenue.
My legs pumped, boots scattering little explosions of ash with each pounding step.
I managed a few yards when a white flash lit the falling ash and blew away the shadows of the skyscrapers.
There was a fractional pause. Then the shock wave slapped my back.
I flew forward, spinning, and as the world tilted around me, I had a crazy, slanted glimpse of a flowering explosion of dirt and debris as the overpass disintegrated, blown apart by a white line of energy that had lanced down from the diamond-shaped object racing by overhead.
I hit the street and tumbled through ash, bouncing along the roadway until I slammed into a collapsed wall and jarred to a stop.
I pulled in shocked breaths as I lay on my back, bits of concrete and dirt raining down around me.
“Dad, are you okay?” Lyle’s voice was distant, muted. The world had gone behind a veil.
The touchpad on my arm started blinking red again.
I forced myself up, first to my knees, then to my feet.
Then I was running, stumbling along the edge of the collapsed wall and into a narrow crevice formed by two slumping buildings.
I ran, shoulders brushing concrete, my heart pounding and the blood rushing in my ears, my breaths coming short and hard with each step.
“I can’t see it on the optics,” Lyle said. “Do you see it?”
I didn’t answer. It didn’t matter if I saw it. I didn’t have a gun. I didn’t have a sharp stick. All I could do was run and hope Anjari’s suit could protect me.
My shoulder clipped a jutting piece of concrete in the darkness, and I fell sideways as the dark crevice lit blinding white.
I landed hard on my hands and knees as the buildings above shook with the force of an explosion.
There was a rumbling, tearing cacophony as the skyscrapers over my head sheared themselves apart and started coming down.
A huge section of building slammed into the street behind me, covering the opening of the cleft and plunging it into darkness.
I had time for a single breath. Then the concrete under my hands heaved and split with a startling boom as another explosion went off over my head, the sound penetrating the hundreds of tons of concrete and steel all around me. I fell, tumbling into darkness. I didn’t even have time to scream.
My right thigh and upper back hit something hard.
I reached out for whatever I’d struck, trying to slow my tumble, but the chunk of concrete, or whatever it was, came loose in my hand.
I hit a second object, this one giving off a metallic ring, then there was nothing as I rolled off an edge and into space.
I fell twenty feet before plunging into water.
I rebounded against an unyielding bottom and came up gasping in reflex—the suit was in place over my face, supplying oxygen, and it hadn’t let any water touch my skin.
I floundered there for a minute in the darkness.
Water slopped back and forth against nearby walls.
I remembered the touchpad. I brought it up, fumbled, and found the icons for the vision augmentation options, and the one marked Darkness—Adaptive.
Light flared around me. Or rather, the touchpad emitted an omnidirectional glow, the optics of the suit over my eyes enhanced the light, and I could see.
I stood chest-deep in dirty water running through an ancient aqueduct or sewer.
Stone walls curved along each side, meeting each other over my head.
There was a gaping hole in the ceiling above me, through which I’d fallen.
To my left and right were narrow ledges or walkways.
I levered myself out of the water and lay there for a few seconds, breathing hard, feeling every bump and knock I’d taken in my fall. “Lyle?”