Immobility

He came to a river, its water still red, this one with a different sort of plant life running along the bottom of it, long and filamental and recoiling at the touch, almost more animal than plant. One or two water bugs, too, though more like underwater roaches than like the water striders he remembered watching when he was a child. He watched the tendril of a plant suddenly snap itself around one, suck it under. Yes, he thought, life was coming back, but it was coming back as something else, utterly unlike what it had been before. Another few decades, and perhaps it would no longer be a world humans could survive in. Chary of the plants in the water, he walked along the river until he found a place narrow enough to leap across.

From there, he told himself, he would aim roughly for the place on the mountain where the letter had been; that would lead him directly across the university.

It would have been simple. He would have done it, too, except after just a few blocks he caught a glimpse to the south of a large building, the sun glinting off it. It was, he could see even from here, an old town capitol, made of stone, pillars running along the front at regular intervals. Topping it was a metal dome. It reminded him of his dreams.

He stopped and stared for a long time. What does it matter? he told himself. I dreamed about a dome, so what? That doesn’t mean it was this dome. I have a purpose, there is no point deviating from it.

But when he started again, he was moving not toward the university but south, toward the dome.

* * *

WELL BEFORE HE ARRIVED, he looped the cooler over one shoulder by the handle, had the rifle out, the safety off. The building, he saw now that he was closer, had partly collapsed, one of the wings little more than a facade. But the middle section and the dome were still intact.

He circled the building once, looking for signs of life. No signs of recent garbage, no plywood or metal sheets blocking the windows, nothing. Most of the windows were broken all or partly out and there were cracks in the walls, some of them big enough to push through. But he decided instead to climb the front steps, go directly in.

The entrance hall was large and long, with a vaulted ceiling made of glass and steel, most of the glass gone now. It opened up into a grand rectangular room with the dome topping it, pendentives stretching down the walls to ground themselves in each corner. There were, just below the dome itself, on the vaulting of each of the pendentives, remnants of old murals, the images themselves little more than ghosts now. Here he could distinguish a human shape, there a bit of what must have been tree or mountain, but if there was a narrative to be read, he couldn’t follow it. The arches themselves were studded with stone, rows and rows of stone flowers carved into them. The dome itself was plastered on the inside and he could see remains of a mural there as well, bits of cloud and sky. Windows around the base of the dome gave light.

A circle had been marked on the floor, a thin line of dark stone against the lighter stone, and another circle around it, and one more, this one in a lighter greenish stone cut through with darker lines, the whole of it vaguely giving Horkai the impression of a target. He circled around the circle but did not enter it.

He felt the columns of the pendentives, but they weren’t sticky, no gluey gray substance. He looked up at the dome, scrutinized it carefully. Yes, there was something there—dark lines, streaks along the dome, cutting through the remains of the mural. But whether they were natural wear and tear or something else, he couldn’t tell. He stayed staring up at the dome, waiting for something to move, but nothing did.

In the end, he passed under one of the arches and moved into the other part of the building. He climbed a mostly intact stairway and circled a stone balcony, having to leap across it in some places, not altogether sure how stable it was. A door marked SENATE CHAMBERS was half off its hinges, its handle stained with blood. He pushed through.

The floor just inside the door was smeared with blood. Beyond that were collapsed desks and scattered chairs, as well as heaps of black phones. In the front, a dais, a larger desk on it. On it was a body.

He moved carefully forward, rifle ready. The body was relatively recent, not the dessicated corpses he’d seen while traveling with the mules. It was naked. A stake had been hammered into its chest. It was extremely pale and hairless, just like him. He could not tell if it was a man or a woman; the facial features were ambiguous and the hips could have belonged either to a boyish girl or an effeminate man. It had what looked like the beginnings of breasts, but the body itself was chubby and the nipples looked more like those of a man than a woman. Between the legs there was no sex, neither male nor female, but instead what looked like series of a half dozen strings of pearls in a strange gelatinous casing that seemed to have been extruded from the flesh itself. He bent to get a closer look, but couldn’t figure their purpose. He was just reaching out to touch them when the creature opened one eye.

He stumbled back, bringing the rifle up, and shot it in the temple. The head jerked to one side and blood began to drip as slow as tar from the hole, and then, even as he watched, the bleeding stopped and the hole turned opaque.

Not dead after all, he thought. He stayed at a distance, wondering what he should do. Part of him—must be the human part, he thought—wanted to kill it, wanted to finish the task someone else had started. Another part, though, felt that, whatever it was, it should be given the same chance he himself had been given.

He came close again, this time reached out and tried to tug the stake from the chest. He got it up only a little bit before realizing that the flesh around it had already begun to insinuate it, to make it part of itself. He let it go.

Always remove the head, the human part of him thought.

Before it could think anything else, he fled.

* * *

HE CUT BACK roughly the way he had come, passing through old yards now reduced to dirt and crossing through ruined fences. He couldn’t stop thinking about the creature, wondering what was wrong with it, why it seemed to have sprouted strange appendages in place of its sex. After a while, he had to stop and reorient himself, realized he’d gone too far.

Back to the original purpose, he told himself. Focus, Horkai. He came to a surgery center, followed almost immediately by a sprawling medical center, which gave some evidence of being inhabited—nothing he could really put his finger on, just a feeling that things had been arranged, straightened up a little. He thought about exploring it, but in the end gave it a wide berth, thinking of what he’d seen in the town capitol.

He saw a Mormon church, and then, almost immediately, little more than a block away, another one. He saw what must have been a soccer or baseball field—too hard to say now. Another field, all dirt and dust, this one with the cracked remnants of a track encircling it and a set of rotted wooden bleachers. A high school and, fairly close on it, additional fields: the start of the university.

From there it was no time at all before he was standing near the ruined library pounding on the iron door, shouting Rasmus’s name.

28

IT WAS SOME TIME BEFORE the door swung open. When it did, it opened to a man in a baggy hazard suit, though of a thinner, less resistant sort than either the mules or the twins had had. When he saw who it was, the man immediately tried to close the door, but Horkai already had his foot in.

“What is it?” asked the man nervously. Horkai could see through the faceplate that the man was thin, old. “What do you want?”

“I need to see Rasmus,” said Horkai.

“No,” said the man. “I’m sorry. You can’t come in.”

“I’m here to report,” said Horkai. “I’ve come to report.”

“No, I’m sorry, I already told you—”

And that was as far as he got before Horkai butted him in the chest. The man went tumbling backwards, clattering down the steps, and Horkai was in, shutting the door behind him. He went down the steps quickly,