she suddenly knew how, and why. Somewhere in the ruins of this city were his wife and child. And somewhere else… Jenny’s other, her echo, her alter ego.
They moved off, bypassing the accident and the injured people, and Trix kept glancing back at the blond women. Before a drift of smoke hazed them from view, she saw that still neither of them moved. They simply stared.
There were three bodies laid on the pavement outside a collapsed seafood restaurant on Dorchester Avenue. They were lined up as if sleeping side by side, but as they closed on the corpses, Jim saw blood. Before today the only dead body he had ever seen was his mother in the funeral home.
As he approached the bodies, Trix grabbed his shoulder. “Jim?”
“There’s something about…,” he started, trailing off as they drew closer. One body was covered in a thin net curtain, blurring its features and molding to its skin with blood. For a moment he’d feared it was one of them. “Maybe the ghost guys are already ahead of us,” he said.
“There’s nothing we can do about that,” Trix said. “Here.” She moved past the bodies and through the restaurant’s collapsed facade. Rooting around in the rubble, she pulled out two bottles of water and handed one to Jim.
“That’s looting,” he said.
“Yeah.” She blinked at him a couple of times, then pulled a five-dollar note from her back pocket. She used a small chunk of broken brick to weight it down on the sidewalk before the slumped restaurant. For some reason, that brought tears to Jim’s eyes.
“We’ve got to run,” he said. “We can’t let anything distract us. Anything like that.” He gestured over his shoulder back the way they’d come. Those women are the same person, he thought, and he could only think of what would become of Jenny if she met herself. The results could be devastating. What would that do to a person?
Tonight in this city, it must be happening all over.
“How far to Sally Bennet’s?” she asked.
“Not far. Across the bridge over the train tracks, under the highway overpass, then a couple of blocks. Not sure how far up Harrison she lives…”
“Let’s go, then.” And they went.
The sights Jim saw that day he knew would stay with him for the rest of his life. There were the stunned people wandering the streets, so many of them that he wondered whether there had been some sort of gas leak that had numbed them all to what had happened. Some of them were crying silently, and others seemed to be attempting to go about their nighttime business, skirting fallen walls or bodies in the street as if they were minor inconveniences. The sight of ruined buildings went from overwhelming to almost unnoticed, and even the structures that were so obviously out of place soon failed to move him. Maybe it was because he was out of place here himself. But the suffering people-the wounded, the bereaved, the confused, and the many bodies he saw in the shadows of ruins or laid out in the street-never failed to touch him. Humanity tonight was suffering more than an earthquake, and he had no idea how they would deal with what was to come. The two blond women could not stare at each other forever.
The sounds of the damaged city pressed in as they ran. Shouting and screaming, the roar of fires, the grumble of falling buildings, the smashing of glass shattering from window openings still under tension, car engines, the throbbing of helicopters passing overhead, sirens, alarms, and somewhere the slow tolling of church bells, mourning the past and solemnly welcoming the future with every chime. And the smells told the same story, the warm aroma of cooked food mixed with the stench of ruptured sewers, the acid tang of fires overlying the sharp sting of dust.
Everything soon became a blur, and he concentrated only on moving. Trix was always by his side, and they swapped frequent glances and strained smiles. He found comfort in his friend, and knew that she felt the same way. She was stronger than he was. He feared losing her.
It was Trix who saw the first wraith, when they were already on Harrison Avenue and headed north. First she was beside Jim, then she’d disappeared, and when he skidded to a halt and looked back, she was staring across the street. A row of five shops had slumped down in the middle, roofs exploded outward by the intrusion of a modern brick church. “It was there,” she said when he joined her. “In the arch of the church doorway. Then it was gone.”
“You just saw a shadow,” Jim said.
“No!” Trix said, frowning at him. “I know what I saw, Jim. They’re following us.”
“We have no idea how fast they can move,” he said, vocalizing what he had only just been thinking. They might have reached Sally already, stepping away from and back into this ruined Boston as he’d seen them do outside O’Brien’s. She might already be dead, and the first they’d know about it was when a great, more cataclysmic quake struck.
“That’s why we have to move as quickly as we can.”
They went on, pausing between two parking lots on Herald Street and finding a brief moment of normality until Jim looked to the north. The ruined cathedral was so tall it was visible from this distance, the air between it and them apparently clear of smoke. Fires burned elsewhere across the city, but the cars in the parking lots appeared miraculously untouched. A flock of pigeons hopped from roof to roof, woken from their slumber by helicopters, and sirens, and the sounds of the wounded city.
Jim saw a wraith rushing across the street a hundred feet from them. He saw it again past the next block, keeping pace with them a block away. Waiting for me to deliver the note, he thought. And however simple it might seem, disposing of the note seemed far too easy. There’s more to it than that.
At the corner of Oak Street a building had collapsed. There were scores of people there digging with their bare hands, and Jim felt a tug of guilt as he and Trix sought a way around the destruction.
“Another one,” she said. “Keeping pace with us.”
“I saw it,” Jim confirmed. They paused, waiting for a convoy of police cars and ambulances to pass by. One of the cops, eyes haunted, a smear of dirt across his face, looked out at Jim. “Hid away in a doorway when we turned around. So why not just flit away like they did back at O’Brien’s?”
“They don’t mind us seeing them.”
“Yeah.” And if they could just step into and out of this world, why not just reappear at Sally Bennet’s?
It was a few minutes later when Jim realized where they were. Just a few streets north of here-in his Boston, at least-was Jenny’s parents’ restaurant. They’d been running the seafood-and-steak place for thirteen years, building a steady reputation for quality food and a comfortable, casual atmosphere. Jim and Jenny had eaten there frequently, and not only because the food was usually free. It was good. “Trix, we’re close to the restaurant.”
“You’re thinking we should both go there?”
“No, we can’t let Sally down. But I have an idea. You won’t like it.”
Trix closed her eyes, and he realized how grubby she was. Her pink hair had lost much of its color to the dust. Her clothing was faded, her skin pale, and it was as if the earthquake was doing its best to erase her from the world. That was a concept he did not like. She sighed. “We’re going to split up,” she said.
“It won’t be for long.”
“We should go straight to Sally,” Trix said, but he could already hear the defeat in her voice.
“It’s a distraction. A good idea. Their restaurant is half a mile from here, if that. Sally Bennet’s address is a handful of blocks away. We go into a building somewhere, hide you away, I leave and race toward the restaurant, the wraith-things follow… and you go and warn the Oracle.”
“Is your secret name Jason Bourne?”
He smiled again, and this time he meant it. Even in adversity Trix could quip. He wondered where she found the energy, and then thought perhaps such an attitude gave it to her. “I’ll meet you there in an hour,” he said.
“Unless you find them?” And in Trix’s eyes he saw fear. She was afraid that she would lose him, run off into this altered, shattered Boston and never see him again.
“Trix, I promise. If I find them, I’ll pile them into a car and drive there for you. This is all…” He looked around at the damaged city, smelled fire and death on the air, and somewhere in the distance a man was shouting an unidentifiable word again and again. Perhaps it was a name, or maybe an exhalation of pure rage. “It’s beyond us,” he said. “It’s catastrophic. But Jenny and Holly are still my whole world.”
“I know,” she said, but he could still see her disappointment.
