I hit the wall of an apartment and crash through the sheet metal into a child’s bedroom. A girl jumps up in her bed and I see her face contort into a squeal of terror, but it’s silent. I hear only the high ringing of a tuning fork. I free myself from the debris; I stumble back onto the street and into a silent nightmare.
Chunks of concrete rain from the sky, silently cratering the asphalt and punching holes through walls and roofs. Silent rockets streak out from a cloud of smoke and pinwheel madly through the stadium, blooming into silent fireballs that incinerate buildings and tear chunks out of the stadium wall. Support cables pop out of the concrete and rickety apartment towers sway. Silently, two of them fall, crashing into each other and splitting open in the middle, dumping streams of people out of their beds and onto the street. Those who survive the fall have just enough time to raise their hands in a futile defensive gesture before being buried under their own homes.
The darkness pulses red with countless fires. Crates of grenades go off in bursts of white flashes. I run past dead bodies that are beginning to twitch, but I leave it to someone else to decide their second fates. I can’t stop. I am running toward a smoking hole where I abandoned someone who believes in me, and as my hearing returns, I notice that I am screaming.
THE RAW EDGES of shattered concrete are still hot enough to burn my hands as I dig my way through the debris, but I feel the sensation more distantly than ever. I hear salvos of gunfire from somewhere in the wreckage, but this is not a battle, it’s just ammunition going off, bullets firing themselves without waiting for the trigger, as if they know what they were made to do and are eager to get on with it.
I heave aside a slab of concrete and slip through the gap into what’s left of the Armory. It’s dark, but cut electrical wires light the cavern in blue flashes, along with the dim red glow of burning supply crates.
“Rosso!” I shout into the flickering darkness. “General Rosso!”
The path is littered with jagged concrete and spears of sheared rebar, but I start to run. I don’t get more than a few paces before I trip on something soft. An electric pop from an overhead wire illuminates a body with most of its flesh blasted away, revealing a scorched, cracked skeleton, identifiable only by the shredded tie around its neck.
Black Tie says nothing.
I push further in, past the garage and into Grigio’s beloved war room. In the sickly orange glow of a few burning tires, I find the other two pitchmen. Blue Tie grins up at me from the floor, his impossibly blue eyes attempting to establish trust with the ceiling while his mangled body slumps in a corner ten feet away. A steel beam runs through Yellow Tie’s skull from temple to temple, pinning her head to the floor, and I search her final expression for any hint of comprehension, any realization of error or betrayal, but it remains locked in that blandly cheerful mask.
What are these people?
A ragged gasp from somewhere in the shadows. I force myself to move.
He’s lying slumped against a pile of rubble. His chest isn’t shaped right and his gray jumpsuit has turned dark purple. Perhaps he has spilled wine on himself. Overindulged at a tasting party, embraced life a little too hard. He’ll have a headache in the morning but good stories to go with it. Julie and I will sit by his fireplace and listen, glancing at each other and smiling while Ella shakes her head in the kitchen. He is old but still vital, with plenty of days left to read his books and drink his wine and teach me how to be a person.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers as I kneel beside him.
“For what?”
Why is there a tremor in my voice? He’s just drunk.
“I wanted so badly . . . to see your life. You and Julie.” He coughs, and a fine spray of wine speckles my shirt. “I wanted to be there.”
Why do my eyes sting? Why is my vision getting blurry?
“But I’m excited, too.” He stares up at the patches of night sky visible through holes in the ceiling. “I’ve wondered for so long what comes next.”
Drunk people say the strangest things. I squint my eyes shut and warm liquid seeps out of them.
“Oh,” he says, and his tone suddenly shifts. I open my eyes and find his wide with awe, his mouth slightly agape. “I can see it.”
“Stop.” I grip his shoulders. “Wait.”
His eyes focus on me with a feverish intensity. “We’re so close, R. Show them.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying!”
His eyes drift to the ceiling again. His body begins to slacken. “It’s beautiful,” he says in a faint release of breath. “It’s everything.”
I watch his face for a while. I burn the image into my memory. I have never seen an expression like this. It says things that no one could ever articulate, no matter how vast their vocabulary or how limber their tongue. And in a moment, it will be gone.