She nodded.
“You, too, Floyd,” I added. “We’ll get out of here. It’ll get better. We’ll go far, far away.”
He turned his head and stared at me. There was a distance there, in his eyes. It seemed like he was already far, far away. And looking back at me through a veil.
Photograph. Undated. Spokane from above:
The city is in ruins beneath a bloodred sky.
The roof curves in an arc at the bottom of the frame, the wide angle distorting the foreground. Down below, there are no neat, rectangular blocks, no hint of city planning, no remnant of order. Buildings have collapsed across streets, and streets have collapsed into rubble.
The city has lost its shape.
The view is from at least ten stories up, peering northeast across the remains of I-90. There are vehicles in the ruins, where an army checkpoint has been—far to the left, at the edge of the city. A park to the north is smoldering in the distance, sending up plumes of dark smoke—ethereal fingers, trying to puncture the liquid red sky. There isn’t even a hint of vegetation there, just charred black coal.
Two blocks north of the interstate, a wide valley of destruction has been gouged into the gray landscape, revealing a long trough of darkened earth. At the end of this valley, on the right-hand side of the frame, is a downed jetliner, dented, its wings torn free and left littered in its wake. The crash is old. It doesn’t smolder, and there are no signs of life—no emergency vehicles, nothing but rubble. Its nosepiece is angled up toward the heavens.
There are no signs of life anywhere in the photograph. Nothing but a shapeless city and a bloodred sky.
Floyd led the way up to the roof. I wanted to find a different stairwell on the fifth floor, a different route to the street, but he was insistent. He had an energy that surprised me; it seemed out of keeping with his earlier mood.
“I want to see the city,” he said, “from up high.” Then he smiled. It was an odd smile. Delirious. It didn’t touch his eyes. “You can take pictures.”
Taylor looked reluctant.
“There’ll probably be another stairwell up there,” I offered, “on the other side of the building. Or maybe a fire escape. You saw the graffiti. Up is out.”
Taylor still looked reluctant, but she nodded. And I got the sense that this was a big deal for her. She was putting herself in my hands. She was counting on me to get her out.
Back in the stairwell, we passed the doorways to the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh floors. It kept getting brighter as we climbed higher and higher. Up at the top, the door to the roof was chocked open with a cinder block brick. A simple iconic eye had been spray-painted on the door’s surface.
The view from the roof was amazing.
“When did that happen?” Taylor asked as we approached the northern edge of the building. There was a jetliner down in the middle of the city. A big one. The blocks immediately north of I-90 had been reduced to rubble.
“It didn’t,” I said. “It never happened.”
Riverfront Park was smoldering on the horizon. It looked like it had been burning for quite some time. Taylor followed my eyes. “We were just there,” she said, her voice hushed in reverent wonder.
I shook my head. “Not there. Someplace else.”
I raised the camera to my eye, cranked the lens as wide as it would go, and took a handful of pictures, rotating between shots to catch the full panoramic view. When I was done, I lowered the camera and we just stood there, staring out across the horrible landscape.
“Hey, guys. Check it out.”
We turned and saw Floyd standing twenty feet back, next to the stairwell door. He rocked back on his heels and flashed us a brilliant smile. Then he stuck out his tongue, raised forked fingers to the sky, and started running toward the eastern edge of the building.
I didn’t move. Taylor didn’t move. We just watched.
Floyd took off a couple of feet from the roof’s edge. He reached down, grabbed an invisible skateboard, and ollied into the void, lifting his feet to the side as he dropped out of sight.
He didn’t make a sound. He just disappeared beneath the ledge. And was gone.
After a stunned moment, I managed to break my paralysis and follow him to the edge. He’d already finished falling by the time I got there. I could barely make out his remains down in the rubbled street.
A rag doll, twisted and broken.
Not Floyd—not anymore. Just ravaged meat. Nothing but an insensate piece of the landscape.
Photograph. Undated. Taylor in the boardroom:
A young woman. Her face is center frame, bright and luminous, tinted pale red. Her eyes are dark and focused elsewhere, on some point far behind the camera. Her skin is on the dark side of Caucasian, vaguely Indian.
She is frozen in place about ten feet away, next to an empty chair in the middle of a deserted boardroom. The chair is magnificent—a cushioned black leather throne, empty. There are three other chairs in view, all empty, including one that’s been spilled onto its back. She is striding forward, caught with her arm swinging out, toward the camera.
There is a table on the right-hand side of the frame. It is smooth, black, and polished to a gleam. It stretches to the far end of the room, where a window dominates the background. The window is filled with red—the shape of clouds caught in various shades of crimson, pink, and dark, dark oxblood.
The woman is dirty, but beautiful.
The room is abandoned, but beautiful.
Then it was just the two of us.
Taylor didn’t look over the edge. She remained where she stood, her eyes wide, staring off into space. When I looked back at her, her lips parted slightly and she shook her head. A violent denial:
“Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
I wanted to move before the horror of what we’d just seen could really sink in, before it became real. For both of us. If I paused, if I gave us time to think, I was afraid we’d never be able to move again, afraid it would send us gibbering into complete surrender. And they’d find us—who, I don’t know—sitting here cross-legged in the middle of the roof. Skeletons, Taylor and me, eons dead and gone, frozen in place by the horror, the loss, the confusion.
Mourning the death of the universe. A universe broken, like Floyd, eleven floors down.
“We should have stopped him,” Taylor said. “We should have seen it coming … just like with Charlie.”
I reached for her, and she reached for me. She grasped my hand tightly, and I led her across the roof in a
