Bad Glass

pants. With a trembling hand, she produced one of Weasel’s notebooks. The ratty black-and-white notebook had been folded down the middle. The cover was creased and stained, painted brown with dirt and dried liquid. The upper right-hand corner had been torn back like a scraped tag of skin, still attached to the book by a precarious tongue of cardboard.

Taylor flipped back the cover and started to read.

She kept her head down. Her face was buried in the book for nearly ten minutes. Then her shoulders started to shake, and the notebook fell out of her suddenly limp hands.

There were tears trickling down her cheeks, but I only got to see them for a couple of seconds before she once again buried her face in her palms.

I opened my mouth to say something, then closed it once again, remembering her request: Don’t say a fucking word. I can’t hear it. Looking at her, I knew that that instruction still stood.

So I left her alone. I picked up Weasel’s notebook, flipped to the first page, and started to read his story.

The last page was gone. It had been torn from the book, the final entry cut short, severed midsentence. All that remained was a ragged strip of lined paper that still clung to the binding.

But I knew how the story ended. With fingers sticking out of smooth concrete.

As soon as I reached the end, Taylor pulled the book from my hands and got to her feet. “I did this,” she mumbled, her frantic eyes darting back and forth. “I did this to him.” And before I could stop her, she ran away, heading toward Riverfront Park.

Object. A skateboard:

It is an oblong piece of wood, about three feet long and caked in mud. One sloped end has been shattered. The layers of pressed maple have come apart, splintering into jagged, weather-darkened fragments. There’s a crack in the middle of its length; it looks like a jagged rictus, reaching from one edge of the skateboard halfway to the other.

The mud is thick, but there’s an image visible on the board’s bottom side, peeking out through the dried and flaking dirt. Just parts and portions: a beatific face, wings in flight. White lines on a blue and black background, with starbursts of yellow—the Milky Way—glowing in the distance.

The skateboard is turned up on its back. Its wheels are still spinning.

I didn’t find Taylor in the park.

The park had changed in the last couple of days. Maybe it was just the snow and the ensuing melt, but it seemed much more desolate now, quiet and still. Like an animal holding its breath, or, maybe, like an animal that’s no longer got any breath left to hold. The trees had lost their last leaves. Lush branches had transformed into skeletal limbs, with sharp fingers reaching up to scratch a painfully blue sky, and the ground beneath was carpeted in a thick layer of decaying brown mulch. And where there weren’t any trees, there was dead grass, vast stretches of wild straw pressed flat against the ground. There was no longer even a hint of green, just sickly, jaundiced yellow.

I couldn’t tell if this was just the normal transition between fall and winter here, or something different. Something permanent.

In my search, I found an old man sitting cross-legged at the top of a hill near the base of the clock tower. If I hadn’t been looking for Taylor, my eyes would have skipped right over him, just a lonely old man growing like a lump out of the crest of a hill. A goddamned Methuselah, I thought as I drew near. He was stick-thin and had a scraggly white beard. His eyes looked haunted, sunk deep into the bony angles of his face.

He didn’t respond when I tried to talk to him, when I asked after Taylor. He didn’t even look up. I’m not even sure he knew I was there. He just kept staring off into the distance—down the hill, across the river, out toward the heart of the city. I didn’t try very hard to get his attention. I just left him sitting there.

As I made my way through the park, I didn’t see any dogs. In fact, except for the old man, I didn’t see anything alive. No animals. No people.

I stayed away from Amanda and Mac’s tunnel.

After about an hour, I gave up the search and started home, hoping Taylor had beaten me there.

Charlie was in the kitchen, and Sabine was upstairs, locked in her room. The rest of the house was empty. There was no Floyd, no Devon, no Amanda, no Mac.

And no Taylor.

I stood in Taylor’s doorway for a while, staring at her empty bed. Her smell was thick in the air. It wasn’t a particularly clean scent—we were living rough here, after all—but there was a hint of sweet amber and rose beneath the smell of sweat and dirt. It smelled like flowers, I thought, sprouting from rich soil; this was a horribly romantic notion, and it left me feeling a bit disgusted at myself.

I was losing my focus, my drive—I should be hunting down photographs, looking for images that will rock the world!—but it seemed like there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t put Taylor out of my mind. No matter how many times she ran away, no matter how distant she remained.

I gave the room one last look, then shut the door.

Before heading back downstairs, I gulped down a Vicodin. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, I chased it with my last oxycodone.

I found Charlie sitting at the kitchen table. “It’s getting lonely here,” he said when I entered. He sounded wistful. “Sabine’s hiding upstairs. Floyd and Taylor are off doing their own things. Amanda and Mac … well, they’re just gone.” He shook his head at the word gone. “And Devon—I haven’t seen Devon in days and days.”

“Yeah, Devon,” I repeated, remembering the conversation Taylor and I had had with Terry, right before we found Weasel’s disembodied fingers.

Devon. His tunnels. His radio. The subject was a welcome distraction. It was something I could grasp hold of, something relatively solid.

“Remember that networking hub I showed you? You said you could access it, get information. Can you still do that? Can you figure out what it is?”

“Now?”

“Yeah, now.”

“I can try. If it’s standard hardware, standard networking, I should be able to just plug right in.” Then he shrugged. “What that’ll tell us, however, I have no idea. Maybe nothing.”

“Then get your stuff,” I said. “It’s time to go.”

The house across the street was filled with a still and unnatural silence. There were muddy footprints leading back and forth from the front door to the basement stairs. Did Floyd and I leave those behind the last time we were here? No, I realized. Our tracks would have only been going one way, from the muddy tunnel out to the street. Someone else must have been here.

Charlie crossed the threshold behind me and then pulled to a stop. He looked around the empty house, perplexed. “There’s a networking hub in here? Right across the street? But why? And who?”