Necropolis (38 page)

“Follow my lead,” I whispered. “Don’t fire until I do.”

Max nodded grimly. Even with his plasma rifle, it would be Custer’s last stand.

The Lifetaker spoke. “Which of you is Alexander?”

Hesitation. One of them stepped forward. He wore filth-encrusted jeans, a mesh vest and a canvas utility belt. The locks of his hair were porcupine quills. Nose and lips were laced with scars. “I am Alexander,” the boy-man said.
 

“You know who I am,” said the Lifetaker. “Why do you approach us this way?”

The gold eyes all riveted on Alexander. He drew himself up. “I claim these”—he pointed to us—“as spoils.”

This evoked a barrage of chanting and
root-root-rooting
from the assembly, accompanied by waving fists and weapons. Maggie flinched as a soda can hit her shoulder. They wanted to tear us to pieces. The only thing that held them back was their obedience to Alexander.
 

I touched Max’s arm. It was like granite. “Wait,” I said.

“I won’t go out like this,” he said, his finger tightening on the trigger.

“Wait,” I repeated.
 

The Lifetaker’s face had become more human. There was something awful about a smile from a mouth with no lips. “Bold words. Your pack is strong, to have such a
sachem
.” Alexander puffed up a little. “How sad that such boldness should be displayed now. When I could kill you all in the blink of an eye.”

I watched the group’s bravado waver in shock, then shatter. Lowered eyes, shuffling feet. They knew, alright. Without a doubt, they knew.
 

I knew that kind of terror as well. Once a child feels it, it’s a tattoo he can never remove. The terror of trapped prey.
 

“These people are under my master’s protection. You’ve been told this.”

I felt Max’s eyes flick toward me. Master?

“In return,” it continued, “I have ceased to hunt you.”
 

Jesus. They’d lived down here in the twilight like animals, listening to screams in the night as their friends were dragged away by this synthetic demon.
 

 
“You wish to return to the old ways? You would rather take these worthless trophies and suffer again?”

More shuffling, murmurs, a cry of outright despair. Alexander’s defiant eyes had fallen. “No,” he said. “We’ll honor the pact.”
 

The Lifetaker looked almost disappointed. “We need transportation and safe passage to the Heath.”

Alexander summoned a lieutenant with a strange whistle. They conferred while the Lifetaker drifted to us. “It will take them an hour,” he said. “They will bring you food and drink. You may rest.”

We exchanged a look. Rest. Right…
 

***

How can I describe the journey which followed? A journey that seemed designed to take me farther and farther from all references of the world I knew?
 

It’s pitiable when a man learns exactly how much he relies on his environment to define himself. The million daily sonar pings that not only illuminate his place in the world, but his character. Coffee at Starbucks. Ping! Put off that big cleaning job. Ping! Take a pen from work, nobody’ll notice. Ping! Let the old lady have the cab. Ping! Vote Republican. Ping! Vote Democrat. Ping! Earn that key to the executive washroom. Ping! Leave your wife. Ping! Take that drink. Ping!

Then, one day, the sonar goes out and returns indecipherable. Suddenly, there’s nothing out there that you recognize. At first, you rally yourself. You remind yourself of all the things you are (or ought to be). Faithful husband, dutiful employee, helpful neighbor, whatever. But as those pulses keep going out and returning with unfamiliar shapes and unwelcome images, as the void deepens around you, your boundaries falter. Your once so well-defined framework softens, become permeable. For better or worse, you start having a lot of “did I just do that?” moments. Even your memory becomes suspect, because when you look back to your life, you begin to see that these new parts of yourself aren’t really new at all. You just hadn’t noticed them before. And the slippery sense of disorientation widens as you come to understand that you weren’t really all that good a husband, or a very hardworking employee; you never even knew your neighbors. You come to understand that you saw yourself as you wanted to be, not as you were. All those sonar pings went out and came back filtered,
interpreted
, didn’t they? Selectively designed to reinforce the fragile identity of a fictional man.
 

And when those things are removed, when only the emptiness calls back from your shouts, when you tremble and stumble and wonder whether your hand still exists if you can’t see it in front of your face, when you can’t color inside the lines anymore because your edges have melted to smudges, when your past is a bruise and your future a burning coal, you are not only faced with a crisis but with a fresh chance.
 

A fresh choice.

Did I ever expect to be in the back of a cart, resting on a bed of straw, next to an artificial woman I might be in love with? Did I think I’d ever be pulled by a sway-back horse through a tunnel
under
the Hudson River? Could I have predicted my reaction when we came above ground and turned, gasping, at the sight of the arching magnetic spine of the Blister over Manhattan in the distance? Or continued on through towns that were once called North Bergen and Secaucus but now were a desolate landscape of crumbling buildings and empty streets? Where nothing, not even weeds, grew?

I had been reborn twice. Each time, I’d clung violently to many false pieces of myself, even as they were torn away.

The first time I’d come back, I’d tried to play Philip Marlowe in their little retro fantasy world, because I needed a place to fit in, a new identity. The second time, I’d turned into some kind of half-assed Che Guevara. Neither role suited me.

The source of my rage had seemed obvious. A family had been taken from me, a wife, a life. But the suspicion grew, as we ferried across the Hackensack on a pontoon barge made of planks and plastic barrels, that perhaps it rose not so much from my lost life as from my lost illusions. Perhaps denial had been my most jealously-guarded possession.
 

But it, like everything else, had been stripped away.

I had not been a good husband. I was an alcoholic. I had not become a detective to serve justice. I had put those people behind bars to hurt them, as revenge for a crushed childhood.
 

My wife had come second to this vendetta, something it had not taken her long to figure out. I had given her a home, but I had not given her myself. The innermost parts of myself I had withheld. How could I not? They had been wrapped in chains of terror.

We passed beneath a highway interchange, broad loops of road that curled back on themselves into knots of cement. The upper levels had collapsed. It looked like a Roman ruin, a thousand year-old Ozymandian toe-tag for some dead civilization.
 

Beyond, where the Meadowlands Sports Complex had once stood, the ground became barren. Mile after mile of nothing, stretching to the horizon. Everything had been razed and cleared. Nothing, not so much as a broken bottle or a rusted fender. Nothing but fissured earth and bloated sky.
 

The Blasted Heath. Deliberate desolation.

The horse did not like this lifelessness. It stomped at the ground, its nostrils flaring.

“The animal will not cross into this place,” said the Lifetaker. “We must walk.”

“Walk to where?” said Max.
 

He got no reply. We climbed off the buckboard, flexed our stiff legs. Without a word, Alexander’s man turned the buckboard around and head back for the city.

As we marched across the parched clay, I made a promise to myself. Whatever lay ahead, I would try to encounter it with more honesty than I had in the past. If I could accept the world for what it was and not what I wanted it to be, perhaps there was still a chance for me.
 

Whatever lay ahead, perhaps there was still a chance.

***

It started as a black blip on the horizon. A trick of the light, a mirage. As we got closer, it resolved itself into an impossible thing, just as I knew it would be.

“Welcome,” said the Lifetaker, “to Arg-é Bam.”

PART THREE:

UNICORN
 
HUNT

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

—Raymond Chandler,
The Big Sleep

48

DONNER

A
 
fortress in New Jersey.

Well, I came back from the big one, so what did I know?

I turned and caught Max actually rubbing his eyes, sure he was viewing a mirage. I knew how he felt. It was a scene out of the
Arabian Nights
: the vast, cracked plain sweeping away from us, rising in the distance into a hillock on which rested the castle.

No, not a castle. A castle-city, with the keep forming the highest point, overlooking everything. Ancient. And so out of place that every time you looked away and then swung your eyes back to it, you expected it to be gone. But there it was, as real as—

As real as it gets, baby.

“You gonna explain this to us?” I asked the Lifetaker. Its reply was to continue forward across the dead ground. Max and Maggie pulled close. “What did he call it?” I asked.

“Arg-é Bam. Which is impossible,” she said.

“Why?”

“Arg-é Bam was an ancient Persian citadel,” said Maggie.
 

“Persian?” said Max. “As in Middle East?”

“Pre-Islamic Iran,” said Maggie. “Supposed to have been built before 500 BC.”

“What’s it doing
here
?” asked Max.

“This has to be a re-creation. The real Arg-é Bam was destroyed by an earthquake in 2003. Before its destruction it was the largest adobe structure in the world.”

“Adobe?” said Max. “You mean clay?” He blinked at it again. “It’s
miles
in diameter! You can’t build a whole city out of clay… can you?”

Maggie narrowed her eyes in a way that told me a lecture was coming. “Anglo-centric Americans! Iranian architecture and urban planning go back ten thousand years. They were among the first to use mathematics, geometry and astronomy. In the Middle Ages, while your European forefathers were scratching in the mud with sticks, Persian empires had libraries and universities. Persian doctors performed brain surgery. They rediscovered the great works of the Greeks and Romans long before you had your Renaissance.”
 

“Okay,” I said. “We’re arrogant bastards. That doesn’t explain why a destroyed Iranian castle—”

“Citadel,” said Maggie.

“—
citadel
is sitting where the Meadowlands used to be.”

The Lifetaker shimmered in scorn. “Your questions will be answered in—”

“In time. Yeah, I got that the first time. Okay, I’ll shut up and enjoy the scenery.”

***

It took two more hours of walking to reach the base of the complex. Irrigation ditches ran past groves of evergreen palm and citrus trees.
 

“I thought nothing could grow out here,” I said to Maggie.

“Nothing’s supposed to. The ground was salted with an enzyme that suppresses organic growth. It’s to keep anyone from living here if they somehow escape Necropolis. When the Blister’s finished and reborn containment is 100%, they’ll neutralize the enzyme and resettle the area.”

“So what are date trees doing here?”

“You got me.”
 

“Curiouser and curiouser,” muttered Max, sounding disgusted. I knew how he felt. These bizarre sights filled me not with wonder but leaden resentment. Someone was playing a vast, arrogant game. I doubted the purpose was to make us squeal in childish delight.
 

We crossed over an empty moat. The entrance to Arg-é Bam was a narrow gatehouse at the top of an incline. We were panting by the time we reached its summit. As we stopped to catch our breath, we looked back. I still couldn’t quite accept the miles of emptiness stretching away to the corpses of Jersey towns and industrial plants. Further still was the Blister. From here, it looked like a table of snow globes someone had taken a flamethrower to.

“Not much farther,” said the Lifetaker.

“Thank God,” whispered Max. “I’m out of gas.”

I craned back to look at the walls in front of me. They had to be thirty feet high and were crenellated at the tops. The structure was rectangular, but unlike a European castle, its corners were rounded. Even the battlements were rounded, with notches rising like little half-moons from the tops. Watch towers rose from each corner. Near their tops were holes for sentry watch or weapons fire.

We passed through an octagonal gatehouse into the main complex. As I passed, I noticed that the walls were five feet thick. Adobe nor not, it would take artillery to pierce that depth.

We stood in a vast bazaar. Twisting lanes ran off from the central space, with shops on each side. The buildings were brick and clay mortar. “This place is huge,” I said.