Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [143]
The noise I’d heard seemed to be getting louder, ricocheting round the walls until the whole city appeared to shake. Before I made it to the door the men there had already turned and run.
I burst out of New Richmond, still pulled by Angela’s hand. I panted through the basement and up the stairs, barely yards behind the fleeing men, and then out into the Portal to find that everyone else was running, too.
I ground to a halt in the midst of chaos. Hundreds of people sprinted past me out of the buildings arranged round the walls of the city. For a moment I couldn’t understand, thought only that I’d started some new trend, and then a distant rumbling told me what in some sense I already knew.
I felt a tugging, and I let her pull me backward, away from the bulk of New Richmond and out of harm’s way. In my mind I could still hear footsteps pursuing me, though I knew they were still down in the exhaust ducts, that Yhandim and the soldiers who were with him were now probably being shaken off their feet by forces that were awake again.
When we were two hundred yards away we stopped, and I turned to see where she’d gone. A small shape leaped up at me as she always had, and I caught her and clasped my arms around her, and it was as if she were really there. I pushed my face into hers, smelling her mother and hearing my daughter’s laugh.
Then my arms held nothing but air.
People kept speeding past me, still tumbling out of buildings which would be falling within seconds. I gazed up beatifically at the bulk of New Richmond, at its two hundred floors and its countless rooms filled with life. As the ancient pulse engines finally fired into action I knew that I had nothing to fear from anyone who still chased me deep in the tunnels. The things that had pursued me were gone.
I shouted Ratchet’s name as I realized what he’d done, that the old repair droid in the basement had somehow found the chip and Ratchet’s mind had saved me once again; and I staggered backward, laughing my head off, as the MegaMall stirred like a mountain waking up after too long a sleep.
There was a moment of hesitation, as if old machineries were striving to remember the jobs they’d once performed, and then the entire city lifted up into the air. New Richmond rose up into the sky, higher and higher, until it was finally free of the earth. Looking for old paths, new roads, and a life it could have once again.
The sky has a frost around the edges today, but is a blue that tells that though winter may not be over, spring is on the way. I don’t mind either way, to be honest. Rain or sun, it’s just good to see weather again.
I had waited until the city had gone out of sight, standing amidst the spouting water mains and spitting power cables, then hitched my way down to northern Florida, to the beach where my mother and I used to visit. For a couple of days I just walked up and down the coast and slept in the dunes beneath the sky. Then I took a deep breath and found the condominium where my grandparents used to live. It looked older now, and battered, and nobody lives there anymore; but I found a room that was more than habitable, and that’s where I’m staying for now.
When I was ready I got a job in a bar in St. Augustine, and one quiet night I was standing there serving beer and wine when I saw a news report on the flatscreen hanging down at the other end of the bar. An unspecified medical facility in Vermont had been attacked by a lone terrorist. Nobody knew who he or she was, and all they’d done was kidnap one of the “patients” and disappear.
At first I just smiled, and then I laughed so loud and so long that people moved away and left me standing there alone.
I wished Suej and David luck, and hoped that someday I’d see them both again.
Nearly arrived yesterday afternoon. I was sitting by the old, empty pool round the back of the condo, remembering when there was water in it, when she marched