Bad Glass

I couldn’t tell if this was just the normal transition between fall and winter here, or something different. Something permanent.

In my search, I found an old man sitting cross-legged at the top of a hill near the base of the clock tower. If I hadn’t been looking for Taylor, my eyes would have skipped right over him, just a lonely old man growing like a lump out of the crest of a hill. A goddamned Methuselah, I thought as I drew near. He was stick-thin and had a scraggly white beard. His eyes looked haunted, sunk deep into the bony angles of his face.

He didn’t respond when I tried to talk to him, when I asked after Taylor. He didn’t even look up. I’m not even sure he knew I was there. He just kept staring off into the distance—down the hill, across the river, out toward the heart of the city. I didn’t try very hard to get his attention. I just left him sitting there.

As I made my way through the park, I didn’t see any dogs. In fact, except for the old man, I didn’t see anything alive. No animals. No people.

I stayed away from Amanda and Mac’s tunnel.

After about an hour, I gave up the search and started home, hoping Taylor had beaten me there.

Charlie was in the kitchen, and Sabine was upstairs, locked in her room. The rest of the house was empty. There was no Floyd, no Devon, no Amanda, no Mac.

And no Taylor.

I stood in Taylor’s doorway for a while, staring at her empty bed. Her smell was thick in the air. It wasn’t a particularly clean scent—we were living rough here, after all—but there was a hint of sweet amber and rose beneath the smell of sweat and dirt. It smelled like flowers, I thought, sprouting from rich soil; this was a horribly romantic notion, and it left me feeling a bit disgusted at myself.

I was losing my focus, my drive—I should be hunting down photographs, looking for images that will rock the world!—but it seemed like there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t put Taylor out of my mind. No matter how many times she ran away, no matter how distant she remained.

I gave the room one last look, then shut the door.

Before heading back downstairs, I gulped down a Vicodin. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, I chased it with my last oxycodone.

I found Charlie sitting at the kitchen table. “It’s getting lonely here,” he said when I entered. He sounded wistful. “Sabine’s hiding upstairs. Floyd and Taylor are off doing their own things. Amanda and Mac … well, they’re just gone.” He shook his head at the word gone. “And Devon—I haven’t seen Devon in days and days.”

“Yeah, Devon,” I repeated, remembering the conversation Taylor and I had had with Terry, right before we found Weasel’s disembodied fingers.

Devon. His tunnels. His radio. The subject was a welcome distraction. It was something I could grasp hold of, something relatively solid.

“Remember that networking hub I showed you? You said you could access it, get information. Can you still do that? Can you figure out what it is?”

“Now?”

“Yeah, now.”

“I can try. If it’s standard hardware, standard networking, I should be able to just plug right in.” Then he shrugged. “What that’ll tell us, however, I have no idea. Maybe nothing.”

“Then get your stuff,” I said. “It’s time to go.”

The house across the street was filled with a still and unnatural silence. There were muddy footprints leading back and forth from the front door to the basement stairs. Did Floyd and I leave those behind the last time we were here? No, I realized. Our tracks would have only been going one way, from the muddy tunnel out to the street. Someone else must have been here.

Charlie crossed the threshold behind me and then pulled to a stop. He looked around the empty house, perplexed. “There’s a networking hub in here? Right across the street? But why? And who?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, Charlie. Those are the million-dollar questions.”

I led Charlie to the room upstairs. The radio was still there, but the binoculars were gone. So somebody had been here. Devon, maybe? Come back to collect his property? They were nice binoculars; I probably would have come back for them myself if they were mine.

“Do you need the hub, or can you work with this?” I asked.

Charlie shrugged and headed straight for the radio. He sat down at its side and bent low over the matte-black console. “This should work,” he said, unhooking the cable with a soft click. There was a small box at the end of the line and a couple of different wires sprouting from its end. “I don’t even need to dig out a connector. This thing goes straight from coax to cat-5.”

He set his shoulder bag down at his side and started setting up his computer. “Did you listen to it?” he asked as he went to work. “It’s some type of networked radio, right?”

“There’s nothing but static.”