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 facade. 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.