The man in the rabbit costume has been knocked twenty yards by the blast, his skin scorched and his fur smoldering, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He sits up, and then stands unsteadily, before marching away.
All throughout Portland, the wind blows and the trees seethe, their leaves torched with color. Pumpkins shudder with candlelight. And screens glow with streaming red code. People look at their phones and then tear off their masks to reveal something scarier beneath. People checking scores, stocks, the weather, email, text messages, social media. Who to hook up with, who to meet up with, where to go for drinks, how to get there. Everyone minutes away from watching something, checking something, their devices like a part of their mind that needs constant access, a prosthetic cerebrum. “Hold on a sec,” they say, “let me take a photo of this.” “Hold on a sec,” they say, “I want to show you this funny video.” “Hold on a sec,” they say, “I gotta send this text.” And when they look up again, their eyes burn as if pocketed with embers.
A club surges with bodies until someone opens Tinder and swipes right and five minutes later people are shoving their way out the exits, screaming and painted with blood. Trick-or-treaters roam the streets hungry for more than suckers and candy bars. A window shatters, a body flung from it. A car smashes through a fence and into a backyard party lit with strings of jack-o’-lantern lights. The digital veins of the city course with the contagion.
Around midnight a private jet drops from the sky and circles the city as if to survey it before landing at the Portland airport. It does not hail control. No ground crew comes to meet it. A fire burns in the terminal, and the flames shimmer across the fuselage. The tarmac is empty when its wheels screech and it rolls slowly to a stop. The door opens and a man appears in it. A man named Cloven, who takes a deep breath of the smoke-scented air as if it were purifying.
The fall climax is a time of reaping harvest, of accounting. The sun and the night end their tug of war as the long death of winter emerges the victor. Tonight, darkness wins.
Chapter 23
HANNAH IS USED TO the dark, so she manages this labyrinth of tunnels better than most. Blindness feels familiar, even comforting, since she knows it is all-encompassing, shielding her from sight. One hand traces the wall; the other carries the obsidian blade. It is as long as her forearm, scalloped from the antler that punched the stone, shaped and sharpened it. The handle is wrapped in an ancient leather binding. She takes tall steps so as not to trip on anything. She is not afraid of what is ahead of her, only behind.
Maybe an hour, maybe a half hour ago, soon after she ran from the chamber, an explosion sounded. The ground shook. Her ears popped. Several bricks untoothed from the ceiling and walls. This was followed by a wall of wind that knocked her forward a step and carried grit in it.
She doesn’t know which way to go or how far. She doesn’t know how long she has been walking or how far. Down here time seems to pass more slowly and distances to stretch twice as long. Down here every noise is exaggerated. The scuttling of something underfoot, the fluttering of something overhead, all pronounced by the same acoustics that make her every breath and skidded heel sound thunderous. She takes care to slink along as quickly and quietly as she can and not cry out when cobwebs net her face or when a centipede scuttles across her probing hand or when bats swoop and make kissing sounds overhead.
For a few years, she played in a beep baseball league. It was a version of the game adapted for sight-impaired players. Some could see only a few feet, some couldn’t see at all, so they wore eye masks to make things fair. The ball was oversize and housed a speaker that beeped. The batter swung for the sound. There were only two bases, foam pillars that emitted a screeching alarm the runner hustled toward with arms wide open. If the runner touched the base before the fielders touched the ball, they were safe. She was always fast. She was always unafraid of hurrying perilously through the dark. She was almost always safe. That’s what the umpire would cry—“Safe!”—and she hopes for the same now. To be safe.
She crosses a short steel bridge over a canal. Pipes—as big around as a man—drop from the ceiling and jut from the walls. Whenever she walks past them, she hurries, as if something might reach out and drag her in. She stops every now and then, saying, “What was that?” and “Did you hear that?” her voice echoing away. No one answers. She is alone.
Until she isn’t. The sound is unmistakable. A sound with gravity to it, a weighted presence: the scrape and thud of footsteps. And panting. A clicking. A hound. She stands at the junction of two tunnels and for one bewildering moment cannot distinguish the sound’s direction. It seems to come from one way, then the other, behind her, before her, then all ways at once, as if she is surrounded. She spins in circles, losing track now of which way she came. The panting is louder, coming in gusts.
She’s not fast enough to run. So she tightens her grip around the obsidian dagger, holding it two-handed, as if it were a bat and the hound the beep ball hurtling toward her. She tries not to cry, tries not to scream, tries not to think. Her senses narrow. Just like beep baseball, she imagines her ears growing larger, like big pouches to catch noise, every nerve in her body rooted there. She cocks her head, and the hound’s approach and the tunnel system take shape in her mind. She hears air currents huffing and whistling. She hears water dripping. She hears a sniff and claws click-clicking against stone. She faces the tunnel from which the noise comes. Now she’s certain. The hound is no more than twenty feet away, rounding a corner.
There. The deep-chested growl that signals its approach. She can feel it as well as hear it, as if her bones are being scraped over. It is a sound and she is a smell. They are both blind. She is used to being blind. She knows how to survive being blind. The hound does not creep hesitantly forward, but springs toward her, excited by her nearness. She tries to gauge its size—almost as tall as her on all fours—and crouches down with the dagger angled upward in defense.
The full weight of the hound slams into the point. There is an almost human scream in response. She falls back with the animal on top of her. She does not know where it is wounded—its breast or neck—but the dagger has buried itself deeply. She holds tight to it. Blood warms her hands. Jaws snap, nicking the air near her face. Claws scrape at her sides. But still she holds fast, arching her back and forcing all her strength upward. With a damp pop and a surge of blood, something gives. And the hound goes still a moment later.