Bad Glass

The basement in which we’d found Danny and his soldiers had been dark and damp, dingy concrete. This one was different. This one was brightly lit and clean, an underground hallway painted beige, with rows of flickering fluorescents in the ceiling. The floor was linoleum. There were mounds of dirt piled around the mouth of the tunnel, and a single line of footprints led the way down the corridor. Otherwise the floor was spotless, glossy clean, reflecting the overhead lights.

We paused just outside the tunnel. I held my breath and listened. Except for the buzz of the fluorescents, the building was quiet. There was the smell of cleaning supplies in the air. Disinfectants, wax. I wondered who was keeping the floors so sparkling clean.

Taylor cleared her throat and pointed to the wall, just outside the tunnel’s opening. There was a single word painted there, in faded red paint—UP—and an arrow pointing toward the ceiling. It was a small sampling, just two letters, but I was sure it was the Poet’s work. I could imagine her here, her face hidden behind that black leather mask, spray-painting those letters. Cobb Gilles would have been standing at her shoulder, watching, waiting, protecting. When? When had they been here?

“They’ve got power,” Charlie said, stating the obvious. “Just like the research facility.” There was excitement in his voice. “The government must be keeping it running.”

“Well, somebody’s keeping it running,” Floyd said. His voice was slurred slightly. When I turned to face him, he was tossing an empty pill bottle back through the mouth of the tunnel, back into the darkness. He still had that nervous smile on his lips. “Maybe just a generator. Somebody with their own purpose, their own vision. There’s plenty of shit in this city. It’s not just the government.”

“Whatever,” I said. “Let’s just get the fuck out of here.”

I started down the hallway, trying to avoid the footprints that were already there, smeared like black ink across the floor. They were abstract Rorschachs—I saw a butterfly there, a nuclear mushroom cloud, a crying face. Taylor, Charlie, and Floyd followed.

After a moment, I heard Taylor’s voice behind me, tentative and quiet. “Is this the research building?” she asked. “It … it seems familiar.” Her voice sounded tortured and confused, as if she were drunk and straining to make sense of something just outside her realm of comprehension.

I pulled to a stop. The hallway swam around me for a moment.

“No,” Charlie said. Then, confused: “Or … fuck.”

I turned. Charlie was standing in the middle of the hallway, spinning, confused, on his heel. He no longer had his shovel; he must have discarded it in the tunnel. “I mean, it was different, right?” he asked. “A different color? A different sound?” He raised his hand to his forehead and crinkled his brow, thinking, but struggling at it.

I looked at the doors to my right: B24, B22. And on my left: B23, B21.

“I don’t know, Charlie,” I said. “This place does look familiar, but I … I just don’t know.”

I tried to remember that other place: the building, Devon, Charlie’s parents’ lab, the laser apparatus. It seemed so indistinct, like someone else’s photograph, viewed a long time ago, or maybe a video I’d seen on the Web, seen and then forgotten. And here, all we had was … what? I looked up—nothing but buzzing fluorescents above our heads—then back down the way we had come, toward the tunnel’s empty mouth. And still there was that single set of footprints on the floor behind us, just one, despite the passage of our muddy feet. Nothing had changed. The world remained static.

Moving through this world without leaving footprints—that’s what we are, I thought. Nothing we do makes even the slightest impression. There’s nothing important we can ever really change.

I couldn’t think, and it wasn’t just the drugs or my injured head. It was the world. It was this place.

Charlie dropped his hand from his forehead, and his face widened with sudden surprise—a dawning moment of clarity—then he sprinted past me, down the corridor. After a moment, I got my feet unstuck from the floor and hurried to follow.

At that point, I don’t know. In that place …

There was a sound now at the far end of the corridor. Maybe it had been there all along and I just hadn’t noticed. But that seemed unlikely.

Footsteps, echoing. A whir and a hum.