uncertain. “Maybe he missed the junction in the dark and just kept on running.”
I nodded and said “yeah, yeah, yeah,” but I already knew that wasn’t the case. I knew we wouldn’t find him.
I’m not sure where this certainty came from. Maybe it was the flash I saw in the other tunnel, that momentary vision—seeing him standing there at the dead end, his hands up, trying to push his way through the cave-in—but I
No. Mac had found a way
Sabine and I walked the tunnels several times, but we found absolutely no sign of Mac. He was gone. Charlie and Floyd had been standing at the entrance the entire time, and they assured us that he hadn’t made it out.
He was just gone. As far as I could tell, he’d followed Amanda down into the dark.
In fact, I don’t think I could have handled the situation any worse. Amanda had come to me in the middle of the night—I remembered that now, putting her face to that faceless voice—shaking me, looking for my help, and I’d ignored her. I’d just rolled over and buried my head in the pillow. And now Mac had slipped right through my fingertips.
I could have stopped them, I was sure. I could have saved them.
But I didn’t.
It was a horrible feeling, this impotence. It seemed like everything I touched turned to shit.
I wanted to bury my hands deep in my pockets and never take them out. I wanted to run away. I wanted to do something to protect the world from my horrible, infectious failure.
We abandoned the search without saying a word. I was so frustrated, I just turned around and walked away.
Sabine, Charlie, and Floyd followed.
Photograph. October 21, 07:25 P.M. Spray-paint spiders:
Two flashlight beams illuminate a weathered brick wall. The shutter speed is set a bit too slow, and there is blurring around the staggered bricks; sharp lines of mortar have been rendered dull. The bottom half of a window is visible at the top part of the frame, and there’s a glimpse of sidewalk down at the bottom. Otherwise, the picture is all faded red brick punctuated by lines of glossy black paint. And there is a hole in the center of the frame—a ragged crater, punched through the wall in some gesture of extreme violence.
And crawling out of the hole: a swarm of spray-paint spiders.
It is a vast army of simple shapes, sketched out in black lines—multijointed legs sprouting out from squat bodies. They are densest near the hole—where individual limbs reach out from the shattered crevice—and become sparser as they near the edges of the frame.
Only one spray-paint spider has made it all the way up to the window frame. Its bottom half is sprayed across brick and wood, and its top half is gone, vanished through a crack in the dirty glass.
The sun was blindingly bright after the dark tunnel. It struck diamond flares off the melting snow, dazzling my eyes. There was a smell of electricity in the air, and I could once again taste copper on my tongue; it was the same sensation that had greeted me on my way into the city.
It felt like a different world out here, in the sun, and none of it seemed real. All around me this bright, still city: nothing but plastic and cellophane, a dime-store mask hiding the true face of the world. And it was a dark face, underneath it all, distorted with disease and rot, with eyes closed and mouth wide open, leaking pure midnight ichor.
We walked back to the house in silence. Floyd spent the first couple of minutes shaking an empty pill bottle; then, as we crossed the bridge to North Spokane, he pulled his arm back and launched it out into the river. He moved with a slow, exaggerated grace. His eyes were unfocused, hidden beneath drooping lids.
“What do we do, Dean?” Charlie asked as we rounded the corner to our block. “Amanda and Mac just disappeared … into thin air. So what do we do now?” His voice was a quavering whisper. He seemed far less confident—less substantial—without his computer in front of him.
“I don’t know,” I said. “If you’ve got any bright ideas, feel free to chime in.” I couldn’t keep the annoyance out of my voice. This was just about the last thing I wanted to hear: people turning to me for answers.
“Where’s Taylor?” Sabine asked. “She’ll know. She always knows.” And somehow, this seemed a million times worse than Charlie’s question.
I shot Sabine a dirty look and headed straight for our front door.
There was water dripping from the eaves when I mounted the porch. The day was getting warmer, and the snow was transforming into slush. Before long, the streets would once again be bare.
I continued up to the privacy of my room, shutting the door behind me.
I sat down on the futon mattress and dropped my head into my hands. I felt awful. I’d woken up in a rush of adrenaline—Mac pulling me out of Taylor’s bed—and I’d spent the whole morning so far jumping from one long adrenaline spike to another. Now that that ride was over, however, and the chemical rush was gone, a massive wave of sickness came flooding in, and suddenly I felt nauseated, hungover. My head was throbbing. My injured hand was on fire.
I gritted my teeth and lashed out, kicking the back of the folding chair. It skidded into the sewing table on the other side of the room and collapsed in a loud clatter, falling flat like a deflated lung.
I seethed for a full minute, gritting my teeth and clenching my hands. Then I got up and righted the chair.
After I calmed down, I settled into the futon and got a couple of hours of sleep. It was a restless sleep, tainted by pain and nausea. I don’t remember my dreams, but I’m sure they were bad. Dark tunnels and singing voices. Expressive eyes peering out from plaster and wood. And Taylor, always Taylor, retreating from my touch.
The light was still bright when I woke up, shining a midafternoon orange against my closed blinds. My head still ached, and my wounded hand felt hot and wet.
I slowly unwrapped my bandages, wincing at the change in pressure against my flesh. The smell hit me even before I was done: a gamy vinegar tang that turned my stomach. I opened the blinds and raised my hand into the light. The whole hand was swollen. There were red tendrils snaking up my forearm, fleeing the gray withered holes—crucifixion holes—one in my palm and two in the back of my hand.
My hand was infected. Badly infected—
I needed antibiotics.
There were only two places I could think to go for help: the military, which would almost certainly get me
