Bad Glass

I wanted to move before the horror of what we’d just seen could really sink in, before it became real. For both of us. If I paused, if I gave us time to think, I was afraid we’d never be able to move again, afraid it would send us gibbering into complete surrender. And they’d find us—who, I don’t know—sitting here cross-legged in the middle of the roof. Skeletons, Taylor and me, eons dead and gone, frozen in place by the horror, the loss, the confusion.

Mourning the death of the universe. A universe broken, like Floyd, eleven floors down.

“We should have stopped him,” Taylor said. “We should have seen it coming … just like with Charlie.”

I reached for her, and she reached for me. She grasped my hand tightly, and I led her across the roof in a quick trot.

We found a second staircase on the far side of the building. The door was propped open with another cinder block brick, and there was another eye painted on its metal surface. But this eye was different from the first: this eye was closed, eyelashes hanging down from the shut lid like a line of commas.

I pulled Taylor through the door and started scrambling down the stairs. We got a single floor down before we found our way blocked. The concrete steps beneath the top-floor landing had fallen away, clogging the shaft ten feet down. I was in such a rush, I would have fallen into the gap if Taylor hadn’t grabbed my shoulder and pulled me to a stop. The space was illuminated by light from the open doorway above our heads, but there was absolutely no indication of what had caused the collapse. Time, maybe. Or poor construction.

“What now?” Taylor asked in a trembling whisper.

I shook my head and pushed my way through the door at our side.

I had to find another way down.

Back to the other stairwell, maybe. A bedsheet rope through a window on the fifth floor. Anything to get us out of here, anything to get us back down to the street and back home.

I was expecting more hospital rooms up here on the top floor—gurneys and crash carts, wheelchairs and nurses’ stations—but the hallway on the other side of the door was something different. Skylights illuminated its length. It was long and carpeted—speckled gray—and it no longer smelled anything like a hospital. It was in good repair. The walls were paneled wood, decorated with respectfully spaced pieces of framed art. Abstract paintings in red and gray and black, violent slashes and speckles of pigment.

There were doors on the right-hand side of the corridor. All of them were closed except for one, far down its length. Light spilled from this distant portal, tinting the carpet a pinkish gray. I tried the nearest door and found it locked.

There was nothing for us here. Nothing but the door in the distance. And the promise of a stairwell, maybe, back on the other side of the building.

Taylor caught my hand, and I met her eyes. She nodded, urging me on. We started down the corridor, breaking into a quick jog.

The walls sped past: wood paneling, shut doors, abstract art. I could feel my eyes going wide with adrenaline-fueled frustration. I just wanted this over—the corridor, the hospital, the city. Everything. There was nothing here but confusion and pain. And friends—run through with limbs, consumed by wolves, eaten by ghosts, pushed over the edge by memory and guilt. I wanted none of it. I was done.

No documenting. No shutter flash in the dark. No eye. No unblinking “truth.”

I would have kept running, but Taylor pulled me to a stop. I was panting loudly. She was crying, tears streaming down her cheeks as she doubled over, trying to catch her breath in the middle of the carpeted hallway.

The open door was at our side.

We were here. We’d reached the boardroom.

It was a long room, and it ended in a wall of picture windows. There was a table stretching nearly its entire length—sturdy hard wood, black as night. In the ways of corporate excess, I’m sure the table had cost more than my entire education.

The light was pink, but the view beyond the window was red.

There were large chairs along both sides of the table, but they were all empty. Twenty chairs. I counted them. One of the chairs had been overturned, as if someone had stood up too fast, knocking it to the floor. There were pieces of paper scattered across the table, stacks in front of each skewed chair. I stepped up to the table and passed my hand over the nearest pile. There was nothing printed there. Just blank sheets of paper: white, expressionless.

Is this Cob Gilles’s boardroom? I wondered. Is this what he found when he and the Poet climbed up from the underworld? He’d described a bright golden light and people seated at every chair … waiting. Waiting for something to happen.

Gone now. The room was empty, abandoned.

I glanced back at Taylor. She was standing in the doorway. She looked confused.