The Damned (31 page)

After a time, the hallway slopes up and feeds into the atrium. An immense open space that, through a shattered window on the far opposite side, offers a glimpse of the frozen river, gray and snowless. From the level I'm on, the atrium plunges down to a concrete floor a hundred feet below. I take a look over the side. Before rearing back from vertigo I glimpse what's left of the display laid out on the basement exhibition floor: a scale model of Detroit made out of unpainted metal,
CITY OF STEEL
spelled out in a circle around it. The baseball stadium wide as a toilet bowl. The downtown buildings tall as a man.

Once the waves have subsided from my vision, I scan the space for a way up. Other than the stairs (wherever they might be), only one: the white column on the opposite side, an artery of elevator shafts rising up seventy-three stories.

Little chance the elevators would still be running. But it's worth a check.

I take a second to judge which is the best way—right or left—to get to where they are. The atrium is structured as a series of tiered balconies circling the building's core, multiple viewpoints from which employees and visitors were meant to admire the showroom of product, cars and trucks sitting on floating islands. I'm surprised to see that some of them are still here. A Chevy Volt furry with dust beneath a
SOMEBODY HAS TO BE FIRST
banner. Somewhat closer, a minivan directly across the abyss on the right even has passengers inside. A family. Dad behind the wheel, Mom next to him staring at the horizon, brother and sister visible through the open side door playing lifeless video games in the bench seat behind. Realistic wax statues fixed in expressions of middle-class boredom, the faraway stares and private thoughts of an interminable road trip.

They turn at the roar before I do.

The dad now slapping at the wheel, pumping the gas. The mom urging him on by saying the same thing, though not out loud—a
Harry!
or
Hurry!
—that I can lip-read. Trying to get the thing to
move
.

When it sees me, the beast roars again.

Red Eyes pauses at the bottom of the slope I'd just made my way up, a hundred feet away. Panting from the chase. The tail thrashing against the hallway's ceiling.

This time, it doesn't wait. Neither do I.

I head right. If I make it to the minivan I can close the doors, barricade myself inside the Dodge Caravan along with the terrified Mid-westerners who probably died trapped in one and now call it their afterlife home.

Not that it will stop the tiger from ripping the roof off and flaying all five of us.

Not that I'll make it halfway there in the first place.

The monster bursts onto the concourse. I can hear its claws slide on the sheer, polished floor as it makes the turn. Bounds after me.

There are no exits or doors between me and the minivan. The only way out is over the side of the chest-high parapet to the floor below.

I try to scream but the cold steals it away the moment it passes my lips. Only the tiger is permitted a voice here, this close to the river, this close to the end of everything.

It's why, when I feel it, I say nothing.

A bubble of warmth I run through, brief and inexplicable as a pocket of heat that strokes your skin when swimming in a lake. It stops me. Not its strangeness, but the sensation it leaves me with. A wallop of thoughts and emotions, swirling and unreadable. The mark of the human.

A presence here that wasn't here a moment ago. Not meant to be here. One that, like me, has made the journey in the name of another.

T
he boy stands between me and the tiger.

Eddie's back to the beast, eyes on mine, at once finding strength in me and lending me strength of his own.

It's not the sight of him that returns his name to me. It's the memory of what he means, the commitment to something other than the self, the ungovernable mess love leaves behind.

I see the boy and I remember being alive.

Eddie knows the tiger will reach him in the next second or two, that it sees him and is deviating its course a single stride in order to strike him down, but he doesn't move. He has come here for this. He will let the beast take the moment required to cut him in half so that I might have a moment more.

Eddie!

I don't make a sound no matter how wide I open my mouth, no matter how hard I push the name out of me.

He climbs up onto the edge of the balustrade. It forces the tiger
to skid hard to the left to reach him. The great back legs pushing the head up to sink its teeth into the boy when he jumps.

It could be a slip, a miscalculation, an accident that has an unimaginable result.

Except it isn't.

Eddie pushes himself off into the atrium's empty space just as the beast lunges at him. Its front-loaded weight carries the creature forward, the jaws still snatching as it, too, tumbles over the side.

For a sliver of time they are both suspended. The tiger awkward and flailing against the inevitability of its fall. Eddie still. Arms and legs extended as if ready to be met by water.

Then they're gone.

I rush to look over the side but it takes a while to get there. The nightmare slow motion that stretches out the most terrible revelations.

It takes a further moment to figure out the puzzle on the floor below.

Red Eyes is there. The tiger's body twisted in a way that makes it look like two or three tigers atop one another, one head visible, looking up. Dead. It's not the fall that's killed it, it's Detroit. The model
CITY OF STEEL
's towers speared through its rib cage, its neck. The enormous skull spilling its contents out after being smashed open on the miniature office buildings of Woodward Avenue.

Eddie is nowhere to be seen.

There's no way he could have walked away from the fall, so the only place he could be is under the tiger. Crushed. But maybe not. Maybe shielded by the struts of the Penobscot and Guardian Buildings.

I find the stairs beyond the minivan and fly down them, leaping four steps at a time and shouldering into the wall at every landing. At the basement level I fall, tripping on a pipe exposed through a hole in the foundation. It feels like something cracks in my leg, not that I hear it. Not that I hear anything but my speaking, beating heart.

Eddie . . . Eddie . . . Eddie . . .

More of the tiger's insides now spilled over the model city so
that the streets are awash in its blood. The beast so heavy it has uprooted many of the structures it fell upon, but not entirely flattened them, so that there is a space of three of four feet between it and the ground. This is where Eddie would be if he survived. Or if he didn't.

Either way, he's not here.

DING!

Across the atrium's floor, one of the glass elevators—missing all of its glass now—opens its doors. Nobody inside. Waiting for me.

Two thoughts, both arriving at the same time, both seemingly inarguable.

One, Ash sent the elevator for me. And if I step inside it will take me to her.

Two, I can't leave without finding Eddie first.

And then a follow-up consideration, less certain than the first two, but persuasive all the same.

I'll never find Eddie, not on this side. Because if he's dead, this isn't his place.

If he died in the hospital in Boston, he would have gone to a different place, the best day of his life, whatever that would be. Pushed on the swings by his mother in the playground in Marcellus. Playing soccer with his dad after he came home from a shift still wearing his uniform, the smooth leather holster, the shining badge. Something from the time before he met me and Ash was introduced to his life.

Which means he
willed
his way here.

Which means he did it for me.

I walk to the elevator and step inside.

I
press the button for the forty-second floor but I don't have to, the doors closing on their own, the elevator rising before being told where to go. As I drift up, I watch the monster's body shrink on the floor below, its red eyes now lifeless and dark as buttons. Gone to a deeper hell where it will hunt again. Where it will exist for eternity as something worse.

The elevator passes through the atrium's roof and I'm knocked back by a blast of arctic air. Below, the river is gun-gray, its surface mottled by what looks like spattered paint—browns and blacks and whites—that I know to be the faces of the dead. The damned of the damned, staring up through the ice.

That's forever, Tiger.

It's like he knew. Like my father tried to tell me what every father tries to tell his children without frightening them, coming at the subject sideways. An effort to say that while there is an end, it only means we should live as hard as we can while we're here.
Not like me,
he was trying to say.
I want you to live better and more awake than me.

I thought I didn't know what he meant when he said those things, yet I remembered them, cling to them still.

There's a border in the middle. An invisible line.

My mother left me a watch. My father a puzzle of words.

DING!

The doors open.

From the hallway, the stale smell of printer ink and recycled air. The perspiration that comes not from physical exertion but stress, the sourness of human worry left in the carpet, cleaved to the ceiling tiles.

As soon as I step out of the elevator the doors close behind me. I don't even try to throw my hand in to stop them. There is only here, the room I'm already starting toward. There's only the unmeasurable now.

It still looks like a corporate workplace—the interior modular desks, the exterior offices where the management worked their phones and screens—but one left in a hurry, an evacuation from which none returned. There's papers on the surfaces, computer keyboards, name tags fixed to the walls next to doors, calendars pinned to the sides of cubicles. All blank. Arranged as if by the hands of those who once came here every day, but all trace of their presence erased. Like they were ghosts even for the time they were alive.

My dad's office is second from the end. I remember that because his boss had the larger unit, a man whose first name I never knew as he was referred to exclusively as “Henley, the sonofabitch,” though the two men golfed and drank and worked together for over twenty years.

Both my dad's and Henley's doors are closed. The only ones I've seen that are.

I open Henley's first.

His things are still here—the kidney-shaped desk, the view of the Ambassador Bridge, now collapsed—but no photos or personal items. The Detroit Tigers bat, signed by the entire 1987 American League East championship team, no longer stuck in the wood brackets screwed into the wall.

“Come on, Danny! You're keeping poor Dad waiting.”

I can hear her.

Not just in my head anymore. I can hear her calling through the wall, six feet from where I stand.

“He's been so patient. Haven't you, Daddy?”

The voice takes me out into the hallway again. It's not my decision but hers, taking over things as easily as she'd ever done. Telling me to put my hand on the door handle, a ball of ice she urges me to turn. The door a slab of steel she suggests I might shoulder open.

Cold.

A single step onto the office's carpet and the air crystallizes, making it almost impossible to move through. It cramps every muscle, stutters the simplest thoughts. An equal slowing of body and mind.

It takes a moment to see my father.

He sits behind his desk. The chair turned around so that he looks out the window, the leather back obscuring all of him except the thinning hair of his head, the liver-spotted knuckles on the armrests.

One foot on the far side of the river and the other on your throat.

“Dad?”

He doesn't respond other than the slightest shifting in his seat, an involuntary twitch. Something about it suggests it is the outward expression of an internal struggle to be heard, to signal that a part of him still feels and hears, too.

“Go on, Danny. I'm sure Dad wants to sink his eyes into you.”

Ash leans against a bookshelf of binders. Our father's lifework, the memos that weighed the chances of a certain engine or headrest or seat belt causing paralysis or dismemberment or death for those riding the open roads. She's no longer burned, but Ash the ugly-beautiful, radiant and blue-eyed and flushed, a masterful simulation of gratitude in her dimpled show of straight white teeth.

“Really.
Go on.
”

So I do. Side-step around the desk with my back to her—feel the septic breath she leans forward to blow against the back of my neck—and stand at my father's side.

“Say hello, Danny.”

“Hi, Dad.”

He twitches again.

His face a rictus of desperation, eyes swollen half spheres. The black nostril hairs flickering. He knows I'm here and it has brought on a new layer of whatever horror he's already been inflicted with. Whatever my sister has already done to him.

“See? Look how happy you've made him!” Ash squeals, coming around to press against me. “I haven't seen him this excited in, well,
forever.
He's positively
beaming
!”

A single finger touches my chin and turns my head to face her. The skin on the inside of her lips blue as something hanging in a meat locker.

“Have you missed me?” she says.

She opens her arms. Steps closer. Wraps them around me.

An embrace suffocating and dark as soil spilled onto a body thought to be dead but isn't. A hold my father will never escape. And now neither will I.

“You drowned her.”

It's something less than a whisper, but the sound I make is so close to her ear she hears it. Her whole body hardening to stone.