The City, Not Long After Read online

  She opened her eyes to morning sunlight streaming through the window. She clung to the hand of a dead woman who looked a little bit like her mother. The blanket was tucked around her body. On the pillow by the dead woman’s head was a golden feather that seemed to glow with an internal light. When the young woman reached for the feather, it changed, becoming a bright spot of sunlight reflected from a shard of the broken mirror.

  The young woman studied the dead woman’s face. The dead woman did look a little bit like her mother, but she knew that her mother had gone to San Francisco with the angel. Those were not her mother’s eyes; that was not her mother’s mouth. This dead woman was a stranger—much smaller than her mother, much thinner.

  For a long time, the young woman sat with the body, waiting for something to happen. She shivered in the chill, but she did not build up the fire. It seemed right that the room should be cold.

  Finally, late in the morning, she roused herself, realizing that she had to act. She dressed the dead woman in one of her mother’s favorite dresses, knowing that her mother would have wanted it that way. She wrapped the body in a wool blanket to keep the cold dirt from her skin. She tied back the wild dark hair with a blue satin ribbon. The woman buried the body by the vegetable garden and built a stone cairn on top of the grave.

  The next day she woke at dawn, touched by restlessness. That morning she wandered around the house, considering what to take with her. She packed her most valued possessions in her leather knapsack and her saddlebags, including her glass globe city, her knives, extra bolts for the crossbow. She collected mustard flowers from the orchard and put them on the grave. She spent one last night in the farmhouse and woke at dawn.

  Fog filled the valley, a dense gray cloud that hid the vegetable garden and swirled in the branches of the almond trees. She pulled her leather jacket close around her, threw the saddlebags over Young One’s back, took her knapsack, and mounted.

  A short distance from the house, she looked back. The fog had swallowed her past: the house was gone, the trees were gone, the vegetable garden and the grave were all gone. She zipped up her leather jacket and turned away, following the road toward I-80, the old freeway that ran between the hills. She had never been there, but Leon had said that he came that way.

  By noon the fog had burned away. Soon after, she left familiar territory and looked around with new excitement, studying each farmhouse with sharp interest. Young One seemed to catch her excitement, snorting and pulling on the reins, eager to gallop. She let the horse have her head for a time, then reined her in. She passed herds of cattle that lifted their heads to watch her warily. Twice she flushed coveys of quail, each time bringing down one plump bird with her crossbow.

  That night she slept in an unfamiliar house. She found the remains of one inhabitant still tucked into bed in an upstairs bedroom, but she had made many such finds during her childhood explorations, and was not particularly troubled by the discovery. She closed the bedroom door, built a fire in the living room fireplace, and lay down on the couch. Though the upholstery smelled dusty and the fabric tore beneath her weight, the room was dry and the furniture was free of mildew.

  The fire radiated a cheerful warmth, but she felt ill at ease, lonely in a way that she had never been in the old farmhouse. When she heard the distant baying of wild dogs, she brought Young One into the living room, leading her through the front door. She felt more comfortable with the horse near; her bulk and warmth were reassuring. For a long time she stared into the fire, and then she slept and dreamed of wandering through the streets of San Francisco, searching for something that she could not identify.

  For three days she followed the freeway. Each night she camped in a different house. Sometimes she shot rabbits. On a day when the hunting had not been good, she found a restaurant where there were still canned goods on the kitchen shelves. The paper labels had been chewed away by mice. She opened five cans before she found one that had not been invaded by rust and mold. The fifth can held chili, which she heated over a small fire.

  On the fourth day, she crested a hill and reined in her horse. Below her lay the ruins of Berkeley and the glittering expanse of San Francisco Bay. She could see the ribbon of freeway curving along the shore, leading past dark angular buildings. Far away, hazy in the distance, the tall buildings of San Francisco glistened white in the sun. The triangular building that Leon had called the TransAmerica Pyramid stood above the rest, like a finger raised in warning. Between the city and the dark ruins of Berkeley stretched a white line: the Bay Bridge.

  The woman looked toward San Francisco and doubted, for the first time, the wisdom of her journey. Looking at the city in her glass globe, she had not dreamed that it would be so large and so strange. She thought for a moment of returning to the valley, where she knew the best places for hunting, the groves where quail nested, the meadows where deer came to graze. She shook her head and spurred her horse onward, following the ribbon of freeway.

  Halfway down the hill, on an old highway sign, someone had scrawled a new message in red spray paint. “No Trespassing!!!” it said, and “Black Dragons Rule.” She wondered, as she rode by, what trespassing was.

  Just inside the city limits, she passed the site of an ancient automobile accident. A black BMW had struck the center divider, leaving a long streak on the cement. From the look of the crumpled fender and hood, the vehicle had struck at an angle, spun around, and ended by smashing broadside into the railing. The driver’s side of the car was caved in.

  Farther on, other wrecks littered the freeway. A red convertible lay on its back with its wheels pointing to the twilight sky. A pickup truck had driven off the edge of the road, taking a portion of the railing with it. The truck rested on one side at the bottom of the hill, its body blackened by fire.

  She was fascinated by the streets and buildings that she could see below the freeway. She had never seen so many buildings packed together so tightly. Some areas had been burned; here and there, charred supports thrust upward through the weeds, and broken glass glittered in the fading light.

  She did not like the feel of this place; it smelled of ashes and danger. The sky was the color of bruised flesh: deep purple shot through with crimson from the sunset. It pressed low over the city, a ceiling no higher than the rooftops. As she urged Young One between the wrecks, the air around her seemed to vibrate with a low, heavy rumbling like distant thunder. The sound grew louder, coming from the streets below the freeway. She urged the horse into a trot.

  She was crossing an overpass when three motorcycles appeared on the road below. The rider on the first motorcycle spotted her and lifted a bare arm to point her out to the others. She had only a momentary glimpse of them: black motorcycles, bare-chested riders in black leather pants, long hair that streamed behind them in the wind of their passing.

  The lead rider wheeled around, heading for a nearby on-ramp. The sound of a siren split the air. She did not have to urge Young One to run. The horse fled the screaming siren, her ears laid back, her neck outstretched. The woman crouched low over Young One’s neck, listening to the engines fade as the motorcycles passed under the freeway and then rise in volume as they approached. Glancing back, she could see only bright headlights.

  The bridge was ahead; she could see it silhouetted against the sky. The approach was crowded with automobiles, dark shadows that blocked the way. Young One dodged among the wrecks, running full tilt without any guidance. The siren continued to wail. The woman risked a glance back at the headlights. In that moment the horse broke stride, gathering herself for a jump. The woman was off-balance, unprepared; when Young One jumped, the woman lost her grip on the horse’s mane and fell to the asphalt below. A sharp pain sliced through her shoulder, but she had no time for that. Instinctively she sought cover, rolling toward the car that the horse had hurdled and squeezing herself into the darkness beneath the chassis, pulling her knapsack with her. She lay motionless, listening as the siren passed her and the roaring of the engines f
aded. Then pain came and filled her head with hot red light.

  She waited, lying still and watching the flashes of pain—light that invaded the darkness behind her eyelids. She did not know how long it was before the engines returned, passing her a second time. When they faded in the distance, she squirmed out from under the car, paying for each movement with a burst of pain. One arm was scraped and bleeding. She bandaged that as well as she could with her neckerchief. The shooting pain that accompanied any movement of her shoulder was internal. She could see no way to bandage that. So she lifted her knapsack onto her uninjured shoulder, and began the long journey toward the city’s distant spires.

  CHAPTER 7

  TIGER WAS AN ARTIST OF THE SKIN. With delicate needles and a tattoo rig that purred like a cat on speed, he etched beautiful pictures on anyone willing to have them.

  Years ago, just after the Plague, he had tattooed his own face. While tripping on acid, he had looked in a mirror. Sunlight shining through Venetian blinds made patterns on his skin, broad strips that crossed his face at a diagonal. With his tattoo rig, he made the shadows permanent.

  He preferred tattooing other people, resorting to his own skin only when he could find no other volunteers. During the year that Lily, the red-headed sculptress, had been his lover, Tiger had painted her back with a riot of wildflowers: buttercups and bluebells and daisies, Indian paintbrush and lupine and wild blue irises. Flowering vines curled around her shoulder blades and forget-me-nots nestled in the small of her back.

  From a distance, the individual flowers merged into areas of color and formed a new picture. Two irises formed eyes beneath a blazing mane of Indian paintbrush; two rosebuds were nipples in breasts formed by the curve of the vines. Hidden in the garden was a portrait of Lily, constructed from flowers. In the portrait Lily was naked, standing with one hip cocked, smiling a lopsided and uncertain smile.

  Lily had left Tiger when he finished the tattoo. To her friends, she had complained that she could never be sure whether he loved her—or perhaps he just loved the empty stretches of pale skin that served so well as his canvas.

  Tiger had not been able to convince her to stay. When Lily had asked him if he loved her or her skin, he had been puzzled. Yes, he loved her skin—and that was a part of loving her. When he looked at her, he saw the tattoos that lingered beneath the surface, waiting to be revealed by his art. Tiger suspected that she had left him because his tattoos revealed that he knew her too well. He saw beneath the surface, and Lily feared that.

  In any case, his answers did not satisfy her. In the end, her doubts drove her out.

  After Lily had left, Tiger turned to his own body, decorating it wherever he could. Ragged geometries ran down his left arm; Maori-style tribal patterns decorated one leg. On his belly was a series of lizards that fit into one another like an Escher print. The intertwined reptiles undulated when he breathed.

  Since Tiger was right-handed, his right arm had remained clean. He could not tattoo it himself, and he trusted no one else. But one morning he noticed dark lines appearing on the pale soft skin on the underside of his wrist. They were indistinct at first, like bruises beneath the skin. He tried to wash them off, but they remained despite his scrubbing. The skin itched a little, like a new tattoo.

  The next day the lines were darker, and he could see a word forming, though he rarely used words in his own work. WAR, it said. As the days passed, the tattoo continued to change. Dark vines climbed the bold block letters, and brilliant red roses grew in the gaps between them. But even so, the message was clear.

  Ghosts crossed the bridge ahead of the young woman, pale wraiths that tattered in the night wind and merged with the cold mists that rose from San Francisco Bay. The moon was a vague light in the east, blurred by the fog. Gulls roosting among the metal girders of the bridge stirred uneasily and croaked unintelligible warnings as the woman passed.

  In the darkness, she stumbled over a broken place in the pavement, but recovered her balance before she fell. Her head ached and her injured shoulder throbbed with each step. She shook her head to clear it, then started forward again.

  Her face was hot and the fog droplets that settled on her skin did little to cool her. Beneath her feet, ghosts whispered in tiny liquid voices. She saw dancing lights in the fog, touches of color, swirling faces that vanished when she turned to look at them. Sometimes white shapes reached for her with vast flowing arms. When she stepped forward, the grasping arms always became insubstantial, only drifting fog. But she knew that the ghosts were more than fog. Her mother had left the city because of ghosts.

  She listened to her footsteps, muffled by the dense fog. Then a high, sweet, hollow note rang out in the darkness—a piercing sound that hung in the air like the alarm cry of a frightened bird. In an instant she was crouching by a guard rail at one side of the bridge, holding her knife ready. The note faded.

  She waited, listening in the darkness. Moving slowly, she slipped her knife into her belt and took her crossbow from her pack. Favoring her injured shoulder, she cocked the bow with difficulty and slipped a bolt into place. With the crossbow in her right hand and the knife in her left, she straightened from her crouch and took a cautious step forward.

  The fog eddied in a light wind, and a low note sounded, followed by a metallic rattling, as if rats with steel-tipped claws were scampering across a tin roof. Another pause, then a stealthy scraping, like a knife being pulled from a metal sheath.

  With crossbow and knife, the woman stalked the spectral sounds. They came from farther down the road. After each sound she hesitated, continuing only when silence returned.

  Somewhere beyond the fog, the sun was rising. She could see the dark rectangle of a highway sign mounted above the roadway. Strange shapes dangled from the sign, swaying in the breeze. She approached carefully.

  The cylindrical tank from a household water heater hung from a heavy metal cable. Its white paint was chipped, and patches of rust mottled the once-smooth surface. The tank was surrounded by a bewildering assortment of other metal objects. A tarnished brass cymbal bumped against a sword etched with foreign characters, producing a high ringing sound. A long metal spring, draped in loops like bunting on a review stand, rattled against the tank, and she heard again the scampering of metal claws. She stepped closer. Tentatively, she tugged on a chain of tuning forks that were hanging from their handles. They clattered together and a faint humming tickled her ear.

  The woman stepped back. She wondered why anyone would hang such things to sway in the breeze. A tuning fork bumped against the cymbal and the quavering note made her shiver. She edged around the strange wind chimes and continued trudging toward the invisible spires of San Francisco.

  Dawn in the city: gray light on gray stone. Even the red brick buildings looked gray, their color stolen by the light. The breeze from San Francisco Bay toyed with a few pigeon feathers, making them whirl and dance in the gutter.

  Weeds and grass had taken root in the cracks between the sidewalk stones. The woman passed an abandoned Mercedes. Its leather upholstery supported an assortment of mosses and tender young weeds, watered by the fog that blew through the broken windshield. A black cat peered at her from a doorway, its whiskers twitching as it tested the morning air.

  The woman’s footsteps echoed in the silence of the city. She had never seen buildings so tall: tremendous slabs of rock and glass, streaked with bird droppings and crusted with pale green lichen. The broken windows watched her. Fog hid the upper stories. For all she knew the buildings went on forever, reaching up to challenge the moon and the stars.

  She was weak and tired; her body ached, and she wanted to rest. But she could not bring herself to venture into any of the buildings, and she could not rest beneath their windows. She trudged down Market Street, half in a dream, knowing that she must keep walking.

  As she walked she heard organ music, great hollow notes that echoed through the streets. A machine that looked a bit like a mechanical spider rattled around the corn
er and passed her, following the streetcar tracks that ran down the center of the street. The round white globes of the streetlights had been painted with the delicate features of women; the faces smiled benignly over the young woman’s head.

  She passed the TransAmerica Pyramid and stopped to stare toward the top, which was lost in the fog. As far up as she could see, the building’s concrete walls had been painted with strange designs. A group of figures with human bodies and animal heads stared back at her. A brightly colored serpent climbed up the wall toward the foggy sky. In her dizziness, it seemed to twist and squirm. She blinked and turned away.

  At one intersection, she hesitated. In the gray light she could see a crowd of people, clad in black, standing motionless in the open space where four streets met. The young woman stood by a corner of a building, waiting for some movement that would tell her about these people and who they were. When the breeze blew in her direction, she could hear the murmuring of voices, but she could not make out any words. At last, when the fog had chilled her and she could wait no longer, she approached the people slowly, holding her crossbow ready.

  The people were made of black metal; the fog had settled on them in tiny droplets. When the wind blew, their hinged jaws waggled up and down and the muttering of wind-generated voices came from their hollow throats. Their vacant eyes made the woman nervous. She skirted the crowd and continued down the street.

  She heard the heavy beating of wings as something flew overhead, swooping low over the street. She looked up to see an angel silhouetted against the fog. The light from the sky surrounded it so that its wings and body seemed to be edged in gold. The angel flew ahead, and the woman followed, hurrying to catch up. If only she could catch it, she felt certain that the angel would lead her to her mother.

  The way grew twisted, leading through narrow alleys where tall buildings shut off the light. Her head ached and the world around her grew darker, as if it were dusk rather than dawn. The buildings pressed close around her. Once she looked back, and the street seemed to shimmer and change as she watched, the buildings shifting to block off the way she had come.