The Shadow Men

“We have to warn the Oracle,” he said. He stepped out into the street and looked around for more of the wraiths, scanning street level, then up at the broken windows and the buildings that should not be there. “I can’t see them!” he said to Trix. “Maybe they’ve gone already.”



Trix looked for herself. There was no sign of the wraith-things, but the air was filled with smoke and dust, making a blur of anything more than a hundred steps away.



“Come on,” she said. “We might not have much time.” So they ran. With a destination in mind, and an aim, she tried in vain to distract herself from some of the sights surrounding them. Because the terrible was merged with the impossible, and that did nothing to detract from the awful reality.



Some of the buildings’ façades had tipped outward into the road, exposing the floors and rooms within. Many had collapsed altogether, and the broken roofs of three-story buildings now sat a story above the roadway. Most windows were shattered, and the street was carpeted with glinting glass, smashed tiles, dust, and other debris such as drifting papers, broken bricks, and personal possessions that looked so out of place. I shouldn’t be seeing shoes, Trix thought. I shouldn’t be seeing someone’s bloody nightgown, or a kid’s toy gun, or a music system’s speaker.



Beyond the earthquake destruction was the more unlikely damage. Trix could see the difference between the two, and she was sure that Jim did as well, but to other people on the street it must present a bewildering mystery among the chaos. A car showroom had seemingly appeared, straddling one corner of an old market hall and the narrow parking lot beside it, its walls buckled, forecourt cracked, as if dropped from a height. The cars were familiar models, all of them thrown around as though stirred by some angry god. Inside the showroom, where the finest models were kept, two cars were ablaze. The flames spewed across the ceiling and fingered their way up the showroom’s front façade, plastic sign bubbling. The only words still visible on the sign were BOSTON’S BEST. Around one edge of the incongruous showroom the older, more attractive market had collapsed, and an avalanche of goods was slewed across the street.



Elsewhere on the street, other buildings had collided in the impact of two worlds coming together. A couple were aflame, some had collapsed, but here and there were structures that remained surprisingly undamaged.



To the south, beyond the ragged outline of collapsed rooftops, Trix could make out the ghostly presence of taller buildings that had not been there before. There was the tripod-like building that had burst from the giant cathedral, but closer to them were other structures. She had the sense that these, too, were new, and that before the cataclysm she would have been able to see open sky where they now stood, and that the buildings’ presence here was as invasive as her own. They shimmered through the smoke and reflected firelight from their broken glass and steel façades, giving them the impression of having their own apocalyptic glow. Like giant faces, she thought, and the image sent a cold chill through her.



She’d once spent days walking a certain street in Boston and feeling disconcerted for no reason that she could identify. She’d been convinced that something had changed, but the more she walked that street, the more certain she’d become that something within her had altered, not something without. When she’d finally searched the Internet for images and found photos of the same view, she’d realized that an old clock tower in the distance had been taken down. It was the fresh spread of sky that had disturbed her, a space where there should have been no space, and realization had banished the feeling immediately.



Now it was not something missing that made her so unsettled, but something added. They walked through blocks of houses and residential buildings, many of which had been ruined by the clash between the upscale neighborhood of Irish Boston and the forgotten Southie of Brahmin Boston. Others in the street stared in horror and awe at these invading structures. The sense of panic was palpable, its incidental music the screams and cries of those injured or bereaved.



For long blocks they walked, attempting to reach Harrison Avenue, with no chance of any taxi picking them up now. When they reached the intersection at West Fourth Street and Dorchester Avenue, they saw the aftermath of a horrible accident. At least seven cars were involved, and people swarmed over the carnage pulling survivors from the wrecks. Several people sat along the curbside nursing injuries, and in the distance sirens screamed.



“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Jim said, and for a moment Trix panicked. He saw Jenny in one of the cars, she’s one of those bodies hanging from that station wagon’s windows, and if she’s there, then where is Holly?



But he had not seen his dead wife. When he grabbed her hand and nodded across the road, what they witnessed was altogether more surreal.



Two women stood staring at each other. One must have just emerged from one of the less damaged cars, her right foot still in the footwell, right hand curled around the door frame. She had long blond hair tied in a ponytail and wore a tight-fitting dress and knee-length boots. The other woman stood a dozen paces away, close to the overturned truck that the first woman had crumped into. She, too, had long blond hair, though she wore jeans and a light jacket. Her boots were of slightly darker leather. Her hair was slightly longer.



The women must have been identical twins. Looking from one to the other caused a strange tingling sensation at the nape of Trix’s neck. They were equally attractive, but something seemed to draw the beauty from their faces. Something like terror. “They don’t know each other,” Trix whispered, and Jim’s hold on her arm strengthened.



The women stared, utterly motionless while the rescue went on around them. No one else seemed to have noticed this frozen tableau. The woman by the car went to speak; the other woman lifted her arm to point.



“Come on,” Jim said.



“Wait, we need to see—”



“Come on.” And his voice was so heavy that she could not help but look at him. His eyes were haunted, and she suddenly knew how, and why. Somewhere in the ruins of this city were his wife and child. And somewhere else … Jenny’s other, her echo, her alter ego.



They moved off, bypassing the accident and the injured people, and Trix kept glancing back at the blond women. Before a drift of smoke hazed them from view, she saw that still neither of them moved. They simply stared.



There were three bodies laid on the pavement outside a collapsed seafood restaurant on Dorchester Avenue. They were lined up as if sleeping side by side, but as they closed on the corpses, Jim saw blood. Before today the only dead body he had ever seen was his mother in the funeral home.



As he approached the bodies, Trix grabbed his shoulder. “Jim?”



“There’s something about …,” he started, trailing off as they drew closer. One body was covered in a thin net curtain, blurring its features and molding to its skin with blood. For a moment he’d feared it was one of them. “Maybe the ghost guys are already ahead of us,” he said.



“There’s nothing we can do about that,” Trix said. “Here.” She moved past the bodies and through the restaurant’s collapsed façade. Rooting around in the rubble, she pulled out two bottles of water and handed one to Jim.



“That’s looting,” he said.



“Yeah.” She blinked at him a couple of times, then pulled a five-dollar note from her back pocket. She used a small chunk of broken brick to weight it down on the sidewalk before the slumped restaurant. For some reason, that brought tears to Jim’s eyes.



“We’ve got to run,” he said. “We can’t let anything distract us. Anything like that.” He gestured over his shoulder back the way they’d come. Those women are the same person, he thought, and he could only think of what would become of Jenny if she met herself. The results could be devastating. What would that do to a person?



Tonight in this city, it must be happening all over.



“How far to Sally Bennet’s?” she asked.



“Not far. Across the bridge over the train tracks, under the highway overpass, then a couple of blocks. Not sure how far up Harrison she lives …”



“Let’s go, then.” And they went.



The sights Jim saw that day he knew would stay with him for the rest of his life. There were the stunned people wandering the streets, so many of them that he wondered whether there had been some sort of gas leak that had numbed them all to what had happened. Some of them were crying silently, and others seemed to be attempting to go about their nighttime business, skirting fallen walls or bodies in the street as if they were minor inconveniences. The sight of ruined buildings went from overwhelming to almost unnoticed, and even the structures that were so obviously out of place soon failed to move him. Maybe it was because he was out of place here himself. But the suffering people—the wounded, the bereaved, the confused, and the many bodies he saw in the shadows of ruins or laid out in the street—never failed to touch him. Humanity tonight was suffering more than an earthquake, and he had no idea how they would deal with what was to come. The two blond women could not stare at each other forever.



The sounds of the damaged city pressed in as they ran. Shouting and screaming, the roar of fires, the grumble of falling buildings, the smashing of glass shattering from window openings still under tension, car engines, the throbbing of helicopters passing overhead, sirens, alarms, and somewhere the slow tolling of church bells, mourning the past and solemnly welcoming the future with every chime. And the smells told the same story, the warm aroma of cooked food mixed with the stench of ruptured sewers, the acid tang of fires overlying the sharp sting of dust.



Everything soon became a blur, and he concentrated only on moving. Trix was always by his side, and they swapped frequent glances and strained smiles. He found comfort in his friend, and knew that she felt the same way. She was stronger than he was. He feared losing her.



It was Trix who saw the first wraith, when they were already on Harrison Avenue and headed north. First she was beside Jim, then she’d disappeared, and when he skidded to a halt and looked back, she was staring across the street. A row of five shops had slumped down in the middle, roofs exploded outward by the intrusion of a modern brick church. “It was there,” she said when he joined her. “In the arch of the church doorway. Then it was gone.”



“You just saw a shadow,” Jim said.



“No!” Trix said, frowning at him. “I know what I saw, Jim. They’re following us.”



“We have no idea how fast they can move,” he said, vocalizing what he had only just been thinking. They might have reached Sally already, stepping away from and back into this ruined Boston as he’d seen them do outside O’Brien’s. She might already be dead, and the first they’d know about it was when a great, more cataclysmic quake struck.



“That’s why we have to move as quickly as we can.”



They went on, pausing between two parking lots on Herald Street and finding a brief moment of normality until Jim looked to the north. The ruined cathedral was so tall it was visible from this distance, the air between it and them apparently clear of smoke. Fires burned elsewhere across the city, but the cars in the parking lots appeared miraculously untouched. A flock of pigeons hopped from roof to roof, woken from their slumber by helicopters, and sirens, and the sounds of the wounded city.



Jim saw a wraith rushing across the street a hundred feet from them. He saw it again past the next block, keeping pace with them a block away. Waiting for me to deliver the note, he thought. And however simple it might seem, disposing of the note seemed far too easy. There’s more to it than that.



At the corner of Oak Street a building had collapsed. There were scores of people there digging with their bare hands, and Jim felt a tug of guilt as he and Trix sought a way around the destruction.



“Another one,” she said. “Keeping pace with us.”



“I saw it,” Jim confirmed. They paused, waiting for a convoy of police cars and ambulances to pass by. One of the cops, eyes haunted, a smear of dirt across his face, looked out at Jim. “Hid away in a doorway when we turned around. So why not just flit away like they did back at O’Brien’s?”



“They don’t mind us seeing them.”



“Yeah.” And if they could just step into and out of this world, why not just reappear at Sally Bennet’s?



It was a few minutes later when Jim realized where they were. Just a few streets north of here—in his Boston, at least—was Jenny’s parents’ restaurant. They’d been running the seafood-and-steak place for thirteen years, building a steady reputation for quality food and a comfortable, casual atmosphere. Jim and Jenny had eaten there frequently, and not only because the food was usually free. It was good. “Trix, we’re close to the restaurant.”



“You’re thinking we should both go there?”



“No, we can’t let Sally down. But I have an idea. You won’t like it.”



Trix closed her eyes, and he realized how grubby she was. Her pink hair had lost much of its color to the dust. Her clothing was faded, her skin pale, and it was as if the earthquake was doing its best to erase her from the world. That was a concept he did not like. She sighed. “We’re going to split up,” she said.



“It won’t be for long.”



“We should go straight to Sally,” Trix said, but he could already hear the defeat in her voice.



“It’s a distraction. A good idea. Their restaurant is half a mile from here, if that. Sally Bennet’s address is a handful of blocks away. We go into a building somewhere, hide you away, I leave and race toward the restaurant, the wraith-things follow … and you go and warn the Oracle.”



“Is your secret name Jason Bourne?”