The sky stayed red for about twenty minutes.
I had a hard time taking pictures of that sky. Without anything in the foreground, it looked like nothing but a red, fluid pattern, an abstract collage of crimson and pink and electric blood. Finally, I went wide-angle and focused on the eastern skyline, down the length of the street. It was a view of the city from the floor of a concrete valley, with the walls on either side reaching up (and bending out) before opening onto the wide red sky. I set the camera to burst mode and shot five frames a second until I caught a couple of frames with the lightning—or the artillery fire or whatever it was—above the left-hand line of buildings.
After I captured that shot, I sat down on the asphalt and pretended to stare up at the sky, taking my place alongside Taylor, Mama Cass, and Hershel. But really, I had the camera down in my lap, angled up at Mama Cass as she watched the heavens. There was a childlike wonder spread across her face, and I tried to capture that expression, that joyful, rapturous euphoria, with the bright sky shining behind her. I was shooting blind, though, so I couldn’t be sure if the autofocus was locked on her or on the buildings in the background. I didn’t bother to check on the LCD screen, and after a minute, I just shut down the camera and tucked it back into my backpack.
The street was still eerily quiet. I knew that there were people on the sidewalk behind us—I’d seen them as Taylor and I had approached—but they didn’t make a single sound.
I reached out and took Taylor’s hand, gently, trying not to startle her. She looked down from the sky, first glancing at our joined hands and then looking up at my face. She was perplexed and overwhelmed; I could see that in her glazed eyes. I gave her a reassuring smile, and she turned back toward the heavens.
She didn’t drop my hand, at least. For that I was grateful.
The sky turned back to gray. The change from red to gray was slower than the change from gray to red. There was no earth-rending roar, no quick unnatural movement up in the atmosphere. The red just darkened gradually, and a new cloud front blew in from up north. It took a couple of minutes for the last of the red to disappear. Then it was just your typical overcast early-winter sky.
The reaction to this event, this return to normality, was surprisingly subdued. Mama Cass stood up and stretched lazily. She handed her empty beer bottle to Hershel, then folded up the lawn chair and tucked it under her arm. Back on the sidewalk, people looked down from the sky. They exchanged muted words and then walked away. I even saw one man yawn as if just getting up from a midafternoon nap.
It was over. Life—this parody of life here inside the city—could resume.
“Come back to the restaurant with me,” Mama Cass said, using her free hand to gesture toward the open storefront. She was smiling, relaxed. “I’m thinking you two can help me out with something. A delivery.”
“What?” Taylor asked. She sounded genuinely offended. How could Mama Cass confuse their relationship so thoroughly? Why would she for one second think that Taylor would do anything to help her out?
“Don’t play it that way, girl,” Mama Cass said. “We’re in this together, right?” She smiled. It was a staged, artificial smile, and it put the lie to her words. “Besides,” she continued, “if it bugs you so much, you can think of it as giving Terry a hand.”
“Terry?”
“Yeah… Terry. Your mentor. I’m running some errands for him. I’m doing him a favor.” She spit out this last word—favor—giving it barbs. Suddenly, her drugged euphoria was gone, and she was wielding nothing but venom. “I’m acting like an adult here, Taylor, and if you can’t do the same, if you can’t ditch that holier-than-thou bullshit, maybe you should just keep on running. Maybe you should get out of the way and leave the adult interactions to people who aren’t complete fucking pussies.”
Taylor’s eyes widened with surprise, and her mouth fell open in a wordless gape. She didn’t have a reply.
After a moment of silence, Mama Cass turned back toward me and smiled, once again picking up that relaxed, mellow attitude. “C’mon, Dean,” she said. “I’ll show you what I was thinking.” Then she headed toward her restaurant.
It was as if the red sky hadn’t even happened.
There was laughter in Mama Cass’s dining room. People had drifted back to their tables; they’d picked up their abandoned forks and resumed their interrupted meals. The laughter, the mindless chatter—it made me think that perhaps they’d picked up the same conversations, too. Hershel went on ahead, disappearing into the kitchen, while Mama Cass paused at a couple of tables to chat with her customers. Taylor and I stayed a couple of paces back. Taylor was stewing. Her arms were crossed, and her head was turned, refusing to even look in Mama Cass’s direction.
After a couple of minutes, Mama Cass waved us toward the back of the dining room. She escorted us through the kitchen and into her office.
“How’s the hand?” she asked. She leaned back against the edge of her desk and gestured for me to raise my palm up into the air. I showed it to her, and she nodded. “It’s healing up all right? It isn’t hurting?”
“It’s getting better,” I said, “but it still hurts a bit.” This wasn’t exactly true. In fact, it didn’t hurt at all, but I was running low on Vicodin. Mama Cass nodded her head in understanding.
Taylor shot me a perplexed look. I hadn’t told her about my hand or Mama Cass’s help, so this was all news to her. I caught her eye, and after a second, her confusion turned to anger. I couldn’t help feeling a bit guilty. Like I was conspiring with an enemy, like I was sneaking around behind her back and plotting against her.
“What do you want us to deliver?” Taylor asked brusquely, turning away from me.
“A package. Something Terry wanted me to find.”
“What is it?” Taylor asked again, crossing her arms.
“I’m not going to tell you that,” Mama Cass said. “It’s Terry’s business, not yours.” She turned toward me. “Can I trust you, Dean?” she asked. “Can I trust you to be careful and discreet? Can I trust you to keep this out of her hands?”
I nodded, then glanced at Taylor. Her arms were still crossed, and she was staring angrily at the wall. “It’s for Terry,” I explained, trying to win her over. She just shrugged.
Perhaps Taylor would have preferred that I just let it go right there. But I was curious. I wanted to know what Mama Cass and Terry were working on, and I was pretty sure that that was what Taylor wanted, too. Despite her feelings for this mercenary businesswoman, despite her obvious loathing.
Mama Cass circled to the far side of her desk and bent low over its open drawers. There was the sound of rummaging—the crinkle of paper and change, the rattle of loose items—and when she came back up, she had a brown-wrapped parcel in her hand. It was a book; I recognized that as soon as she handed it over. A hardback book. I could feel the solid edges beneath the layer of butcher paper, the sheaf of recessed leaves.
“Be careful with it,” she said. “It wasn’t easy to find. My contacts had to scour all of Seattle.”
I tucked the book into my backpack, and we turned to leave. Taylor stepped out of the room ahead of me.
“Dean!” Mama Cass hissed as soon as Taylor disappeared through the door. She rounded her desk and, with a huge dose of melodrama, slipped a pill bottle into my hand. I glanced at the label: Vicodin. “For the pain,” she said with an ingratiating wink. The wink made me feel dirty, slimy. I slipped the bottle into my pocket and quickly followed Taylor out into the restaurant.
“I hate her,” Taylor said as soon as we were alone out on the street. “I really fucking hate her. She’s a game player. It gets her off. My father worked with people like that at the university. They’re the ones who got all of the promotions, on the backs of their lies and their power plays.”
She got quiet right then, and I knew that she was thinking about her father, remembering what had passed between them, what she thought she’d done. Her voice, raised in anger, as he fell through the floor. His rolling eyes and searching hands. And then her mother, doting on that floor-bound body, her hidden heart filled with blame, or love, or both, or neither.
We walked a block in silence. When we reached Monroe Street and turned to head up north, Taylor pulled to a stop. I turned to face her and found her forehead wrinkled in confusion.
“What’s wrong with you, Dean?” she asked.
I shook my head, not understanding the question.
“Why are you trying so hard? With me? What attracts you?”
I stared at her for a moment, still perplexed. “You do, Taylor. You attract me.”
She looked at me skeptically. “No, Dean, that’s not it. That’s not good enough. Not anymore.” A bitter, contemptuous smile surfaced on her lips. “There’s something wrong with you, Dean, something genuinely wrong. I’m sure of it now. You’re not quite right in the head. You’re not quite… sane. Not if you want to be with me.” With this, she turned and resumed walking.
I let her get ahead of me. Then I dug out my new bottle of Vicodin and bolted down a couple of pills.
There was no one guarding the Homestead’s entrance. No Mickey with a baseball bat. No figure hiding in the shadows. Taylor was confused.
“They should be here. They were here yesterday.” There was a note of panic rising in her voice.
We stepped into the sketchy business center, and she cocked her head, listening for sounds of life inside the building. I could hear wind rattling paper out on the street, but the building itself was still and silent. After a moment, Taylor barreled forward, making her way down the dim bottom-floor corridor—past the insurance office, the office supply place, the acupuncture clinic—then up the stairs to the second floor. I followed, not wanting to fall behind.
Up on the second floor, Taylor pushed aside the plywood window cover and crawled out onto the plank bridge on the other side. I was about to follow when movement down the length of the corridor caught my eye. A door near the front of the building stood wide open. It was about twenty feet away, and in the gloom I couldn’t see what the room was. Broom closet, bathroom, storage? Its purpose was lost in murky black.
But there was movement there, inside the dark. A churning motion on the floor that set my skin to crawl. Black masses in the dark gray. And it was silent, whatever it was. Absolutely silent.
The plywood cover swung back and forth from Taylor’s passage, and I reached out to hold it steady, still watching the threshold down the length of the corridor. As I watched, part of the black shadow broke away, flowing smoothly out into the corridor. It was a large black spider, moving on multijointed legs. It was as big as a small dog, much bigger than the spiders that had swarmed through the crack in the wall back at the abandoned apartment building. How long ago was that? I wondered, not quite sure. A week ago? Is that right?
The room behind the spider continued to crawl with dark motion. It could have been just my eyes and my overactive imagination populating that darkness, but I thought I could see that space full of spiders. Moving, swarming, crawling over one another in waves of liquid motion.
My back shivered in an involuntary spasm, and the spider started to crawl my way. Before it got more than a couple of feet, I slammed the window cover aside and frantically crawled out onto the thin bridge that linked this building to the next. If I waited, if I stood there for one second longer, I was afraid I’d find myself hypnotized by the spider’s smooth, almost mechanical motions—standing there frozen as it drew near, as wave after wave of its brothers and sisters broke away from the darkness, surging out into the corridor to engulf me, to swallow me whole. And the touch of those bristled legs, caressing—light, tremulous touches, gaining muscle and strength—quickly paralyzing me inside a dense spiderweb mesh.
And maybe the touch of a finger in there, too, hidden. And lips and tongue.
As I crossed the bridge, I didn’t even think about the distance to the ground or the way the wood wobbled and bounced beneath my feet. I just kept going, not pausing until I jumped down into the hallway on the other side.
There were no spiders here in the back rooms of Terry’s ballet studio. At least none that I could see. Just Taylor, moving quickly ahead.
I caught up with her at the end of the hallway. She didn’t notice my rattled state. She was too busy looking for Terry.
She called out his name as she stepped onto the wide studio floor, but there was no one there. Terry’s ratty sofa stood vacant near the window, surrounded by a scattered corona of books. She crossed the hardwood floor and circled the sofa—once, and then again—as if it were all a matter of angle, as if she’d be able to find Terry if she could just look at it from the right direction.
I paused in the center of the room and peered into every corner, checking for shadows, checking for spiders. But there were none. No shadows, no spiders.
“He’s gone,” Taylor said, her voice trembling. “I was here yesterday, and now he’s gone. They’re all gone.”
“We just got here, Taylor,” I said. “He could be anywhere. I’m sure he’s fine.” But really, with the spiders, I knew I was lying. I had no idea what had happened here, no idea what had happened to Terry, but I didn’t think we’d find him again. Not really. The spiders were an omen, a harbinger of loss.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s keep looking.”
Taylor nodded and hurried on ahead, retracing the path we’d taken through the building on our previous visit. I kept my eyes on the shadows as we climbed the stairs and crossed to the second bridge. The shadows in the staircase were deep, but they were motionless.
The third building was as quiet as the first and second. Taylor stopped to listen at each new hallway, but there was never even a whisper of sound. I waited as she cocked her head and slowly craned her neck, angling her ears for any hint of humanity in the air, any quarreling voices or laughter, or the tinned sound of a distant boom box. I wanted to keep moving. In those brief intervals of silence, I could feel waves of spiders cresting against the closed doors around us, on all sides, penning us in. But there were only empty rooms. Empty rooms and silence.
I was grateful when we finally reached the roof. I wanted more than anything to see the sky once again. No matter what color it might be.
We found Terry standing at the edge of the roof, near his tent and his makeshift camp. He was staring up at the gray clouds.
“Terry!” Taylor cried as soon as she saw him standing there. She broke into a run. Terry turned at the sound of her voice. His face was blank, unreadable, but he didn’t seem at all surprised to see us there. He opened his arms, and Taylor fell into them.
“I thought you were gone,” Taylor said, her voice choked with emotion, with relief.
“Not yet.”
Terry looked older in the overcast light. The creases on his face looked deeper, and it seemed like there was more gray in his hair. “Did you see it?” he asked, his eyes turning back toward the sky. “The sky was red. Or was that just me?” There was a perplexed awe in his voice. He sounded completely and totally lost.
“We saw it,” Taylor said. “Everyone saw it. It was real.” She stepped back out of Terry’s arms. There was concern on her face as she studied him intently. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he said with a gentle smile. “I’m just tired. Just sick and tired.”
“What happened to everyone? What happened to Mickey and the guards and everyone else? This place is deserted. We just walked right in.”
“They’re gone. All gone. They packed up their things and left. Last night was rough. People… people started to see things, in the hallways, in the shadows. They started to hear things, too, voices in the dark. They think this place is haunted.” He shook his head. He didn’t seem angry or sad about his abandonment. Just very, very tired. “I think Mickey took some of them and headed out on his own. But the rest… the rest just wandered away.”
He turned and faced the city, his eyes turning from the sky to study the streets down below.
Taylor gave me a look, and I shrugged the backpack off my shoulder. “Here,” I said as I unearthed Mama Cass’s parcel and handed it to Terry. “Mama Cass wanted you to have this.”
Terry accepted the package without looking at me. He unwrapped the brown paper and let it fall to the roof of the building. Then he glanced at the book’s cover and let out a short laugh. He held it up so we could read the title: Sustainable Small-Plot Farming. I felt a bit cheated. This was Mama Cass’s big secret?
“I’m a fool,” Terry said. He hauled off and threw the book as hard as he could. It sailed out over the street, making it halfway to the intersection of Monroe and Second Avenue before finally hitting the asphalt and breaking in two, pages ripping and flying as the textbook bounced and skidded down the distant street. “What was I thinking? Sustainable farming? There’s nothing sustainable here…
“I’m leaving,” he said. “I’m getting out. It’s too painful now, watching it all fall apart, trying to hold it all together while everyone else’s content to just let it fade away.” He paused for a moment and looked down at the street below. “We’re standing at the edge of a cliff here, in the city, and the ground’s crumbling away beneath our feet. I think it’s time I found something new. Something solid.”
Taylor took the announcement in stride. Maybe this was a good thing: Terry safe, Terry out of danger. “Where will you go?” she asked.
“I have friends in Olympia. I’ll stay with them for a while, until I get things sorted out. Maybe I’ll write a book. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be human, about what we owe one another.”
“I’d read it,” Taylor said. And then: “You’ll be okay, Terry. I know it.”
Terry was quiet for a little while, staring out over the city.
“And you, Taylor?” he finally asked, turning back toward her. “You’re strong, but I don’t think strong matters much anymore. Are you going to be okay? Can I convince you to come with me to Olympia?” After a moment, he gestured toward me. “And Dean, too, of course. If that’s what it takes, if that’s what you want.”
“You know I can’t do that. I can’t leave them.” “Them”—her parents.
“Yeah,” Terry said. “I know. You are your own woman. And when your mind is set, your mind is set.”
Taylor laughed. “Yeah, that tautology… you’re starting to sound like Mickey there. Maybe it is time for you to go.”
“Yeah,” Terry said, with a shrug. “Fuck, yeah.”
Then he gestured toward the charcoal grill standing next to his tent and the curl of smoke stretching up into the dark sky. “While you’re here, you might as well stay for dinner, though. Right?” He offered a weary smile. “It seems I’ve got more food in the city than I’ve got time, and I don’t want it going to waste.”
Taylor took me up into the tower while Terry cooked dinner.
When we reached the eighth floor, she gestured to an empty doorway across from the stairwell. “This was my room,” she said. “After my parents… well, after my mom kicked me out, Weasel took me to Terry and Terry put me up here.”
It was a boring room: maroon hotel carpeting, heavy drapes pulled away from a dirty window, nightstand, chest of drawers with an empty TV nook. The bed was a single stripped mattress hanging half off its frame. I inhaled deeply. Underneath a musty layer of abandonment, the room smelled faintly like Taylor.
“I wasn’t in a very good state,” she said. She moved about the room absently. After making a complete circuit, she approached the bed and nudged the mattress back into place atop its box spring. “Weasel found me in the park, camped out on the steps. I couldn’t leave the city—I just couldn’t—and I didn’t know where else to go.”
“It’s good to have friends,” I said. I crossed the room and looked out the window. The window faced the neighboring building, and four floors down, I could see Terry standing at the grill in his rooftop camp.
“Yeah, it was.”
I turned and looked back at her. She was sitting on the edge of her bed now, staring blankly at the wall. “He used to hold meetings,” she said. Her face lit up at the memory, a smile surfacing on her lips. “A couple of times, in the first weeks, he held them down in the hotel ballroom, just off the lobby.” She pointed down at the carpeting, toward a room eight floors beneath our feet. “It’s a big room, down there, and there were a lot of people back then—this was back when everybody still thought they needed a community in order to survive, in order to buck the government—and Terry refused to yell. He’d stand on stage in this huge room, in front of a sea of people, and he’d talk in his normal conversational voice. And I swear, everyone held their breath, trying desperately to hear what he had to say. He set up committees and scavenging groups, put people in charge of research—figuring out electricity, how to grow food, how to communicate and get supplies in from the outside world. He was magnificent back then. He was a complete government packed into a single body.” She sighed, and her smile dimmed. “It’s hard to believe that that was just a month ago.”
I looked down at Terry. He was just a lonely old man down there, standing in front of his grill, flipping burgers.
“Maybe that’s our attention span now,” she said. “Maybe that’s civilization, sped up to its natural end. Entropy. Apathy. And he’s gone now. He’s leaving.”
I didn’t know what to say. I stood at the window and watched her face move from emotion to emotion, from wry amusement to melancholy sadness. And then, whispering, she continued: “What happens, Dean, when the people you’re close to don’t want to be close to you anymore? What happens to me in this world?”
“You go on,” I said. I moved closer, tentative at first but gaining confidence as I sat down at her side. She didn’t cringe or move away. I got the feeling that she needed me right then, needed me at her side. “Besides, you’ve got me. And the people you’re losing… you aren’t really losing them. Your mom still loves you, and Terry—it’s obvious he still cares. It’s just, things come between us—that’s how it happens. People move along their own trajectories. Terry’s got places he needs to be, and your mother… she just wants to protect you.” I didn’t mention her father. He was gone now—I was sure of that—and there was absolutely no way I could put a gloss on that horror.
She shook her head. The violent motion dislodged tears from her cheeks, and I watched one hit the mattress next to her leg. Then she looked at me, and a gentle smile surfaced on her lips. “Like I said, Dean, there’s something wrong with you. Something deeply and truly wrong.” But the way she said it, it was gentle and warm.
She reached out and rested her hand on my leg. It was only a brief moment of contact, but it filled me with confidence. It felt like I was doing my job here. I was lifting some of her burden, and that made me happy.
I nodded toward the window, indicating Terry down below. “The food should be ready by now.”
Taylor nodded and wiped the tears from her cheeks. Then she started a last circuit around the room, idly trailing her fingers along the hotel walls. Her expression was distant as she moved slowly through memory.
When she reached the chest of drawers under the empty TV nook, she idly pulled open the top drawer and her breath hitched in surprise. She stood still for a moment, transfixed by whatever she’d found inside.
“What is it?” I asked. And, after a moment of silence: “Taylor?”
She shook her head. I stood up and moved to her side, but her hand quickly darted into the drawer, pulling back whatever it was before I could get a good look. It looked like a piece of paper, but she quickly turned away, blocking it from view. Her hand disappeared into her pocket, and when she turned back, the piece of paper was gone. Her face was set, secretive and angry.
“What is it?” I repeated.
“It’s mine,” she said gruffly. “It’s mine.”
Then she shouldered me aside and headed toward the door.
Dinner was good. Terry served us hamburgers—fresh meat on home-baked bread, crisp lettuce, and fragrant cheese—and a selection of grilled vegetables, including squash, zucchini, carrots, and tiny potatoes. I don’t know if he grew the vegetables himself or if he’d found them somewhere in the city. Despite his plans, despite his book, I hadn’t seen any crops growing up here in the Homestead. Maybe he got them from Mama Cass.
Before we ate, he produced bottles of microbrew beer from an ice-filled cooler and toasted the city mockingly. “To this pile of crap at the end of the world,” he said, “and to my well-deserved escape.” But his tone wasn’t joyous.
Taylor seemed distant throughout dinner. When she wasn’t working at her food, she kept her jaw clenched, and she looked angry. It was frustrating. Up in the tower, I’d managed to help her drop one of her burdens, I think. But in that drawer she’d picked up another.
And this one seemed heavier, something she didn’t want to share.
She hugged Terry for a long time before we parted. There were no tears, but I heard her voice crack as she said good-bye. Terry gave her a nod and a smile, and then we left.
When we reached the stairwell, I cast a glance back over my shoulder. Terry was standing in the middle of the roof, once again staring up at the overcast sky.
That was the last I saw of him.
Taylor didn’t look back.
We found a new poem on the way home. Taylor wasn’t speaking to me then. Once again, a distance had formed between us, a gulf as wide as the city. And she was standing alone on the other shore.
It was frustrating.
One step forward, twelve steps back.
The poem was on Riverside Avenue, painted on the side wall of an apartment building. There was a basketball hoop bolted next to the ten-foot-tall block of text, and a half-court boundary filled the space between the buildings. The poem was drawn in bright red paint—shiny acrylic—and it couldn’t have been more than an hour old. The paint was still wet and dripping, and the smell of aerosol still hung in the air.
I glanced around, thinking I might catch the Poet somewhere nearby. But the block was deserted.
Taylor didn’t even stop to read the poem. When I looked back down, she was already half a block away.