The Dark River

Can’t stay here, she thought. Too exposed. She scrambled up the bank of the river into a patch of dead trees. Fallen leaves crunched softly beneath her shoes. Some of the trees had already fallen, but others were leaning against one another like silent survivors.

About a hundred yards from the river, she crouched down and tried to adjust to her new surroundings. This dark forest was not a fantasy or a dream. She could reach out and touch the dry stalk of grass in front of her. She could smell something burning and hear a distant roaring sound. Her body sensed danger, but-no, it was more than that. This was a world dominated by anger and a desire to destroy.

Maya stood up and moved cautiously through the trees. She found a gravel pathway and followed it to a white marble bench and a park fountain filled with fallen leaves. These two objects seemed so out of place in the dead forest that she wondered if they were put there to mock the person who found them. The fountain suggested a genteel European park with old men reading newspapers and nannies pushing perambulators.

The pathway ended at a redbrick building with all the windows smashed and the doors ripped off their hinges. Maya shifted her sword so that she was ready for combat. She walked inside, passed through the empty rooms, and peered out the window. Four men were out on the road that ran past the abandoned park. They wore boots or mismatched shoes and a motley collection of clothes. All of them were armed with homemade weapons-knives, clubs, and spears.

When the men reached the far end of the park, a second group appeared. Maya expected a fight, but the two groups greeted each other and headed off in the same direction-away from the river. Maya decided to follow them. She stayed off the streets and passed through the ruins of the city, stopping occasionally to glance through a shattered window. Darkness concealed her movements, and she stayed away from the gas flares burning from broken pipes. Most of these flares were small and sputtering, but a few larger ones were twisting columns of fire. The flares left black soot on the walls and the smell of burned rubber filled the air.

She got lost in a half-destroyed office building. When she found her way to an alley, she saw a crowd of men forming near a gas flare down the street. Hoping no one would see her, she dashed across the street to an apartment complex with oily water flowing like a stream through the concrete hallways. Maya climbed up the staircase to the third floor and peered through a hole in the wall.

About two hundred armed men had gathered in the central courtyard of a U-shaped building. Names were carved into the building’s façade. PLATO. ARISTOTLE. GALILEO. DANTE. SHAKESPEARE. She wondered if the building had once been a school, but it was difficult to believe that children had ever lived in this place.

A white man with braided hair and a black man wearing a torn lab coat stood on chairs beneath a wooden frame that served as a crude gallows. Their hands were tied behind their backs, and ropes were around their necks. The crowd milled around these two prisoners, laughing at them and jabbing them with knives. Suddenly, someone shouted a command and a separate contingent marched out of the school. A man wearing a blue suit led this group. Directly behind him, a bodyguard pushed a young man tied to the frame of an old-fashioned wheelchair. Gabriel. She had found her Traveler.

The man in the blue suit climbed onto the roof of an abandoned car. He stood with his left hand in his pocket while his right hand jabbed and gestured at each word that came out of his mouth.