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Forty-eight
UTTERLY EXHAUSTED, WE crawl out of the elevator. To keep the elevator from descending and picking up more duskers from the lower floors, we pull the headless dusker across the precipice. The body will prevent the doors from fully closing. For a while, anyway. Like persistent toothless jaws, the doors will open and close on it, open and close, gnawing the gelatinous body. Eventually, they’ll ground the dusker to into a soppy mush, enabling them to fully close.
I look at Sissy. Her clothes are splattered with a white-yellow creamy substance. Dusker fluid. She is staring out the window, at the disappearing sunlight, her hair bejeweled with glistening shards of glass. She looks ten years older than the day we first met at the pond. All the innocence beneath her skin has cauterized into hardness.
“Epap?” she asks.
I shake my head.
Her eyes well up, but no tears fall.
I take off my splattered shirt. Using the less filthy underside, I wipe clean the sticky fluid from her lips, cheekbones, nose. I dab her tears, gently wipe her eyelashes to remove the gooey droplets before they can dry and glue her eyes shut. The last few dying rays of dusk light fade from the sky. In the streets below, a sea of black creeps up the façades of nearby buildings, floor by floor.
We should be moving, thinking of a way to escape. But for now, all I can do is pick out the glass beads from her hair, one piece at a time.
“We were idiots,” she says, her voice whittled to a whisper. “Walked right into a trap. ” She looks at me. “Did you get scratched anywhere? Cut, bitten?”
I don’t answer, only stare outside.
“No?” she asks.
“Does it matter anymore?” I say.
“What are you saying?” She gazes at me quizzically.
“Nothing,” I whisper. I wipe the gooey mess off her arms, dislodging something tucked into her pocket. It clatters to the ground.
“I found it on the fifty-ninth floor,” she says when I pick it up. It’s a pair of shades.
Just then, a chorus of screams and howls breaks out from all corners of the Domain Building. Even the floor starts trembling, like a quickening. Ashley June was right. There must be thousands in this building alone. And millions more in the adjacent buildings stirring awake.
“Let’s move away,” says Sissy. Her hand slips into mine, and our fingers interlace as we walk to the other end of the floor.
Sissy leads us to the conference room, the farthest point from the elevator. The dark interior of the Panic Room is empty now. Ashley June gone. The bottom of the Panic Room has given way to a dark chute that tunnels down to floors below.
“Gene,” Sissy says. “We break this glass, slide down the chute. Maybe that’ll buy us some time. ”
But I shake my head. “Then we’ll have, what, fifty more floors to get through before we reach the lobby? With each floor crowded with who knows how many duskers? We’re outnumbered. We’re out of weapons. We won’t get past one floor,
much less fifty. ”
Across the street, a window of a facing skyscraper smashes outward. A dusker scuttles down the face of that building, over the ledges of each floor. It is joined by many more duskers, pouring through the same smashed window, three, four, a dozen duskers. They’ve heard the screams and wails coming from this building, have recognized the pitched heper excitement in the cries. They know we’re here. They all know. Another window, a few panes down, smashes outward. And another, another, until glass is falling like rain from a few dozen different spots on that side of the building. And just like that, in another nearby skyscraper, another windowpane explodes outward. Duskers slide out, like teardrops gliding down.
“There’s got to be a way out,” Sissy says. “Some way to get to ground level. ”
“And then what?” I lay my hand on the side of her face. “We have a few minutes. Maybe five, tops. Let’s just . . . let’s just stop running. Go out on our terms. Pretend it’s just you and me and none of them. For just these last few moments. Can we do that, Sissy?”
“We fight this, Gene. We keep going. ”
“Sissy—”
“No, there’s always some way out. Some way to fight for another minute, another second—”
“—Sissy—”
“—we’ll find a horse on the street, we can at least try—”
“—Sissy—”
“—that’s what we’ve always done, Gene! Survive. Then we get back to the Palace, we get David—”
“Sissy. ” My voice soft, tender. And one last time, I whisper her name. “Sissy. ”
I don’t need to say any more. I feel something inside her bend, then break. For the first time in her life, for the only and last time, she knows surrender. She gasps, eyes widening. This is a new emotion, an unwanted one. It is a gale of ice wind to her hot, fervent, beating heart.
Outside, duskers are now pouring down the sides of every skyscraper and sprinting along the streets toward the Domain Building. The race is on; the Hunt has begun. The spoils go to the few, the swift, the risk takers, those willing to endure the piercing-sharp effects of the last rays of dusk. The sight of so many jumping the gun convinces even the more cautious to leap out as well. The dominos are falling now. Every dusker in a ten-block radius is pushing out of skyscrapers, sweat out of pores, pus out of pimples.
