Christopher Golden - The Shadow Men

Glass shattered all around them. Alarms pealed. Masonry cracked. A fire hydrant less than ten feet from Trix exploded, water spouting upward, showering around them. A piece of the hydrant flew past her head and shattered the rear windshield of a parked car. Jim grabbed her wrist and tugged her back toward O’Brien’s.

“No!” she shouted, but her voice was drowned out by the roar and rumble of the earth.

He tried to tell her something, but all she could make out was “… outside wall!” Still, she understood. In an earthquake, the safest place inside a building was next to an object that might be crushed-a table or bed-and not beneath it. But outside, in a built-up area, curling against a building’s outer wall might prevent them from being injured. Even if the wall fell, it would likely not collapse right down to ground level. And between the fallen wall and what was left of its base, a triangle of life.

Jim tried to pull her toward the building. People screamed. Trix spotted a little yellow dog chasing its tail on the sidewalk up the street. The world continued to buck and crack, so long now that she feared it would never end. A hundred yards along the street, a traffic light toppled onto a swerving minivan, which careened through the front window of a pharmacy.

Beyond where the light had fallen, the three faceless men who had killed O’Brien stood watching her and Jim, motionless, as though the quake could not move them. The moment she noticed them it was as though her perception changed, and she saw others-one standing in front of a hat shop, another crouched on the second-story ledge of an apartment house. The world shook, but the faceless men remained impassive, only watching as Boston tore itself apart… again.

Shit, is that what this is? she wondered. Is it splintering again?

When part of the street gave way, the sewer cracking open like some ravenous maw, Trix decided Jim had a point. She gave in so abruptly that it was she who pulled him back against O’Brien’s. Even the illusion of safety was better than this chaos. A fissure split the sidewalk only feet from where they’d been standing a moment before. Jim held her tight, and Trix pulled him down until they sat, leaning against each other.

The ground heaved up beneath them. Trix struck her head on the masonry; Jim squeezed her hand. The whole world roared, and behind them the ceiling inside O’Brien’s gave way, the second-story apartment crashing down into the ruin of the bar, burying the city’s Oracle in the rubble of his life.

The shaking eased, the ground steadied, but Trix still listed to one side, staggered by the sudden ending of the quake. The street sang to cries of anguish and the pointless blaring of alarms. Fires bloomed in the distance. She heard several dull thumps and wondered whether they were gas-main explosions.

“Is it over?” Trix asked, standing. Jim held her hand, and they both took a shaky step away from the building.

“Careful,” Jim said. “There could be-”

Later, Trix would be sure the next word had been meant to be “aftershocks,” but Jim never had a chance to say it.

It felt like a collision. The sidewalk did not buck this time but instead shifted to the east with such force that they fell, rolling into the street. Trix scraped her right cheek and both arms on the pavement. The explosion tore the sky apart, deafening thunder followed by a roaring cascade that sounded to Trix’s bleeding ears like the whole city coming down around her.

She called Jim’s name and looked up to see him on his hands and knees, trying to rise. Screams that sounded distant were actually coming from Dwyer’s New Dublin. People had been thrown against the jagged fins of plate glass jutting from the frame of the pub’s front window, and a young blond woman hung impaled, staring dumbly at the bloody glass shard sticking out of her chest, her expression not of pain but of sorrow, wondering how and why.

Jim shouted something loud, incoherent-a cry of shock and terror.

Trix sat up and tried to look around. She was shaking, bleeding. A cloud of dust spread across the sky. “What was that, at the end?” she said, barely aware that she was shouting. “Was that a fucking nuke?”

They were both coughing on the dust that roiled in the street. The ground had stopped moving, but Trix didn’t trust it anymore. As she managed to get onto her knees, she kept touching the pavement, expecting to be thrown down again. It took her a few seconds before she realized that Jim hadn’t said anything more. She looked up and saw him standing, staring over the tops of buildings, looking even more frightened and anguished than he had when she had first come to him to ask him about Jenny and Holly’s disappearance.

Trix tried to see what he was looking at. She narrowed her eyes. They stung and watered with the dust, and she wondered what chemicals she was breathing in from the devastation around her.

On the next block, a silver roof ridge gleamed in the midst of the swirling dust. Trix frowned, staring at it, wondering how she had missed it before. It must be an office building, but the architect had designed it to appear as though the top had been sheared off at an angle. It was made of glass and steel, and now the majority of the windows were broken. She could see emergency lights flickering inside. It was perhaps twenty stories-a tower in this old Boston neighborhood.

And there were others. A modern church stood two blocks down. She blinked as she stared and realized that the street had split around it-and not only the street but the row of shops that had been there before. It looked as though the church had fallen from the sky, like Dorothy’s house on Oz.

Sirens wailed in the distance, some growing nearer. Emergency rescue efforts were under way. The fires raged across the city skyline, and as Trix studied it, she remembered her dreams and Jim’s paintings, and the sketch he had done only an hour ago, and she understood.

The skyline had changed.

A massive cloud fed by the black smoke from several huge fires began to bloom above the city. It let in faint moonlight, and at last she realized what Jim had seen the second he had struggled to stand. He’d been peering in that direction ever since, as though waiting for confirmation that he had not imagined it.

“That’s impossible,” Trix said, a terrible numbness spreading through her.

In the distance, the huge, ornate cathedral they had seen upon their arrival in this parallel city had been disastrously altered. At first Trix thought the three towers that thrust up through the roof of the cathedral were separate buildings, but then she realized that their upper stories were joined together, a massive tripod high-rise office complex with a revolving restaurant above, capped by a needle spire blinking warning lights to warn air traffic over the city.

Jim shuffled up beside her, cradling his bloody left arm against his chest. “You recognize that building?” he asked.

Trix nodded. It had taken her a moment to remember, but she did know it. She had dreamed it a handful of times, years ago. And she understood now that it had been after her drowning in one reality, and not the others. “It doesn’t belong here,” she said.

“No,” Jim agreed. “It doesn’t.”

Now the people in the street were screaming and pointing. They had seen it, too. But Trix studied them, and she realized that not all of them had been there before. There were too many. And even here, the buildings were different-weird variations. The pharmacy the van had crashed into had a different sign, now identifying it as an antiquarian bookstore. But the product that had spilled onto the sidewalk belonged to the pharmacy. The facade of Dwyer’s New Dublin had been altered completely. Instead of an Irish pub, it had become the Yankee Fish Company.