Bad Glass (49 page)

But not yet. Not here.

Time passed, and I lost all sense of direction. Turning randomly. Tunnel after tunnel after tunnel. Hub after hub after hub. They all looked the same to me, and it felt like we weren’t making any progress at all.

Then Floyd paused and gestured me to a stop.

“Do you hear that?” he asked, turning the flashlight back the way we’d come. Charlie and Taylor had taken the lead three hubs back, and there was only darkness behind us now.

I shook my head. I didn’t hear a thing.

“It was laughter,” Floyd whispered, a nervous smile on his face. He closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. The smile quivered, but it didn’t quite disappear. “It’s my brother. It’s Byron. He’s down here, Dean. He’s always been down here.”

Charlie and Taylor paused up ahead as soon as they noticed that we’d stopped following. They were out of earshot, about twenty feet away, a semicircle of light in the darkness, their half-moon faces turned our way.

Floyd took a step forward and then stopped. I was worried that he was going to take off into the tunnel, looking for his brother. And if that happened, I knew, he’d disappear. Forever. I knew it, just as I knew that Sabine was gone. And Weasel. And Danny. And Amanda. And Mac—most definitely Mac. I grabbed Floyd’s forearm and held him back. He looked down at my grip. There was no annoyance there, on his face, but no relief either.
Hell, there was no comprehension whatsoever. He might as well have been staring at the bottom of an empty bucket.

“He was looking for me that night,” he whispered, “when he died, when I …” He raised his eyes and once again squinted into the dark. “I don’t think he ever stopped looking. No matter where I run, no matter what I take, he’s always there, tortured and alone, looking for his big brother.”

He turned back toward me. “That makes sense, right?” he pleaded. His brow crinkled down into a narrow chevron, and his eyes collapsed into slits.

“I don’t know, Floyd,” I said, pulling him back a step. I urged him down the tunnel, back toward Charlie and Taylor. “I don’t know what’s possible in this place. But I know what’s healthy, and this,” I said, gesturing around the tunnel, “isn’t healthy. We have to get out of here. We have to find our way back up to the surface.”

He gave me a brief nod, then turned and once again started forward.

I stood there for a moment as he walked away, peering into the darkness behind us. There was nothing there. Nothing but dirt and rock.

The tunnel ended at another basement.

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
.

Taylor caught up to me and grabbed my arm. I looked back at her worried face, but I didn’t stop running. “Don’t let him go,” she said as we continued to chase Charlie down the hallway. Her voice was pleading but confused. She was just as lost as I was, bogged down in this sea of incoherence, this maze of overwhelming impressions.
Bright lights overhead. Hard and shiny floor
. And the feeling that something was wrong, the feeling that we were completely, irrevocably lost.

I shook my head. I don’t know why. I don’t know if I was trying to shake the cobwebs from my mind or if it was a response to Taylor’s request. And if so, what was I trying to say?
No, I won’t let him go? No, I don’t understand?
Or
no, he’s gone and I can’t do a goddamned thing about it?

Charlie reached B13 and, without slowing down, twisted the doorknob and bolted inside. Taylor and I reached the door a couple of seconds later. We nearly ran into Devon’s outstretched hand.

Devon. He was standing there, just inside the threshold, blocking our way. There was a smile on his face; it was a self-righteous, victorious smile, and it filled me with dread. He knew too much. Here, in this city, no one knew enough to wear that kind of smile. His palm was up, keeping us out of the room, and he shook his head:
No
.

I was about to press my way through, but Taylor let out a loud gasp, and her hand tightened on my forearm. I glanced down and saw her peering deeper into the room. I followed her eyes.

Charlie was standing fifteen feet away, next to the laser apparatus. There were two other people in the room with him. I recognized his mother from the emailed picture. In that picture, she’d been scared and confused, peering back over her shoulder; there was absolutely none of that now. The man must have been his father. Charlie’s back was to us, but his parents were smiling. His father had a good grip on his son’s biceps, holding him at arm’s length and beaming with pride.

As we watched, Charlie’s mother moved in and encompassed
him in a tight hug. A second later, his father’s arms collapsed and they all pulled near. They stood like that for a time, clenched in a three-way embrace. Then Charlie’s shoulders began to shake gently.

There was no sound in the room. Even the hum of the laser—still spitting out its bursts of bright green light—had gone silent.

I once again moved to push Devon aside, but Taylor held me back. I glanced back down at her face. There was a smile on her lips, warm and heartfelt. “Give him this,” she whispered. “For a moment, at least.”

So I grunted and rocked back on my heels. After a moment, watching this heartfelt reunion, I lifted the camera from my chest and started taking pictures. I felt like a voyeur—more so than usual—but I didn’t stop.

Photograph. Undated. Charlie and his parents:

Finally, after standing in his parents’ embrace for nearly a minute, Charlie looked back at the door. There were tears on his face as he gave us a smile. But the smile didn’t last long. It quivered and broke, and his eyes slowly drew wide.

Then Devon blocked our view. This infiltrator—
government agent, demon, whatever
—once again flashed that victorious grin. Then he stepped back into the room and slammed the door shut in our faces.

Taylor jumped, startled at the sudden violent gesture. Her eyes sprang wide, and her hands bolted to the doorknob. She worked at it violently, but to no avail. It didn’t even rattle. She let out a horrified squawk, completely incoherent. I stepped up to her side and started pounding at the door. It was like hitting the side of a building; it didn’t even shake in its frame.

“Charlie!” Taylor called. No answer. “Charlie!”

After nearly half a minute, she let out a devastated sob and gave the knob one last upward heave. It didn’t move. Her hands slipped from the knob and flailed in the air for a moment, then she pressed them flat against the door’s surface. Dejected, burned through all of her determination and anger, she lowered her forehead against the immovable panel and let out a pathetic sob.

“I let him go,” she said, her voice choked. She pressed her face
up against the door, hiding it from sight. “I … we could have stopped him, but I let him go.”

There was silence for a moment—I didn’t know what to say, I never knew what to say, not when it came to Taylor, not anymore—then a loud peal of laughter rang out at our backs. I turned. It was Floyd, standing in the middle of the corridor, braying like a moron.

“Fuck, I … I’m sorry,” he said, trying to rein it in. He seemed confused and genuinely abashed at the inappropriate laughter. He managed to hold it in for a moment, then it burst forth once again. So shrill. So totally out of place.

The laughter echoed in the empty hallway, filling the space like blood pooling into a deep wound.

Up
.

We found the stairwell and started to make our way up, toward the street.

There was no longer any light here. No overhead fluorescents, just the thin beams of our flashlights. Charlie’s parents’ lab had been one floor down in the research facility, but there was no door on the first landing here and no door on the second. I leaned out into the center of the stairwell and peered up toward the top of the shaft. There was a dim light up there, at least ten floors above our heads. The research facility hadn’t been that tall.