Bad Glass

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.