“This is good, I think,” she says. “I think we’re close enough. The last thing we need is a blown-out tire trying to park a little closer—”
I wander into the street, look around—the day’s overcast, the sky marbled steel gray, the light murky and depressive. My body’s refusing to wake because of the early hour and the weather—moist, heavy air that’s already gummed up my sinuses.
“You said we’re close enough?” I ask her, considering the vast expanse of emptiness and flatland and scrub surrounding us, thinking we must be nowhere near the city, not yet, that we must have miles still to drive, until it dawns in my gut that ahead, in that emptiness cradled between slopes, should have been the city skyline—yes, the city skyline should have been there, right over there, skyscrapers leering over the tops of trees. There’s nothing now—just space.
“Oh no, oh God, no, no, no,” I say, the corners of my vision darkening, everything tunneling into black—I don’t exactly faint but sit down gingerly, like too much blood’s rushed to my head. “I can’t do this,” I tell Albion. “I don’t think I can do this—”
Albion opens the hatch of the Outback, unpacks the car. She separates our gear before making her way over to me. She kneels, waits until I raise my face and look at her.
“Are you okay?” she asks. “Physically, I mean. Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m okay,” I tell her.
“Then get up—”
We prep—Tyvek coveralls over our clothes, layered with rain slacks and hard shells. Smurf-blue PVC-coated gloves, a military-grade first aid kit in case one of us falls or is somehow injured. Flashlights and a compass in case our Adware blinks, a nylon rope and a SHIELD severe-weather-graded tent. Albion tucks her hair beneath her Tyvek hood and tugs the drawstrings tight. She yanks my drawstrings hard enough to collapse my hood over my face. She laughs, and when I work my hood open she kisses me, a chaste kiss—she smells like hardweather lip balm.
“You’ve gone beet red,” she says.
“High blood pressure,” I tell her, feeling my flushed face. “I’m just having a heart attack or something, nothing to worry yourself about—”
“Do you think you can handle all this?” she asks. “This will be difficult—and I don’t mean the emotional toll. Some areas are still very radioactive, others aren’t. We’ll have to monitor our levels. I know how to hike, even in extreme weather, but I’ve never done anything like this, so I might make mistakes, too. The surfaces will be uneven so there will be plenty of things to trip over. We should rest often. We can still head home right now—”
“I want to do this,” I tell her.
Albion unravels a necklace with a heavy plastic badge and places it around my neck, tucking the badge down beneath my Tyvek so it rests against my T-shirt.
“That’s your dosimeter,” she says, wearing one as well. “It starts out clear. We’ll check again in a little while—if it turns red, we’ll need to leave right away. If it’s black, we leave and go to an emergency room—”
We wear gas masks, the same type the cleaners from PEZ Zeolite wear on their shifts—rubber-shelled, insectile, with bulbous filtration systems that hide our faces. Difficult to talk with these things, so we ping text messages to each other, go over our checklist one last time. I bring the bouquet of flowers, thread them through a loop in my pack.
Albion holds my hand as we start—we’re wearing our gloves, but I savor the weight of her hand, the feel of her long fingers cradled with mine. I’m assuming these gestures of hers are meant to succor me through the dead land, but hoping, in a way allowing myself to hope, that we’re falling somewhere deeper. We don’t make it ten minutes before the first drops of rain.
Springtime in Pittsburgh, she writes.
Uncomfortable in all this gear—already sweating. I figured this trip wouldn’t be much more taxing than one of our strenuous hikes through the wildlife refuge, but our water sloshes in my backpack with every step, throwing my weight off-balance, and the paths are uneven through here, knotty with weeds and brambles and pits and pocks of the road, potholes we step over or around. The rain picks up. I load Compass Rose, the graphics vivid against the bleak sky, true north marked, the direction we’re heading—SSE—marked with a flourished green arrow, latitude and longitude displaying in real time. I load the Archive, and the City appears like a transparency glowing in brilliant colors, layering over the blighted landscape. There should be two churches here, side by side—I can see them in the archived landscape, vanished from the true landscape—and there should be houses and bars lining the hills a little further to the west, the tower of Allegheny General. There should be hills. There aren’t hills anymore.
Do you know where we’re going? I ask her.
I’m following directions Sherrod left, she pings. He’s been this way before—
Another military checkpoint and a barbed-wire fence meant to keep people like us from trespassing. The checkpoint’s long since abandoned, the kiosk littered with Mountain Dew bottles and used hypodermics, Snickers and Mounds wrappers and old condoms. A boot, a bird’s nest. Albion leads me along the fence until we come to the GPS marker Mook once set at his entrance point—supposedly a spot where the fence had become unmoored, where someone could peel back the chain-link and slip through. Everything’s been patched, though. Albion spends twenty minutes or so mining PEZ forums, sifting through discussions from people who claim they’ve gained access to the city—thrill seekers, conspiracy theorists, journalists, looters—until she finds solid references to another entry point, another breach in the fence somewhere nearby. Another forty-five minutes to find the gap, nothing but a corner section of the fence that’s been cut away. We push our packs through, then take turns crawling on our bellies—muck slicks our chests once we’re on the other side. Compass Rose reorients and the Archive resets—a ghost image of the Veterans Bridge spans the sky but the actual bridge is nothing more than rubble and rebar scattered on the slopes running to the riverbed.
Sherrod’s directions say the 16th Street Bridge is passable, Albion pings.
We pick our footing along the Allegheny into a strong headwind, the fabric flap of wind against our hard shells like the beating of birds’ wings. We skitter down slopes and find a passable trail across the flats of what was once the North Side, nothing but wildflowers now and saplings sprouting among the guts of incinerated buildings. I have vague memories of the architecture here, but even checking against the Archive, I can’t quite place what was left behind by what’s left—a rectangle outlined in bricks, exposed basements filled in with rubble, a doorway without a door. Most things here have simply disappeared. There used to be a camera store somewhere over here, the last place in the city that would develop actual film—grass, now, as far as I can tell.
The 16th Street Bridge is relatively intact—still standing through some fluke in blast pattern. The span whines in the wind and the sound is like a chorus of infants crying. Cacophonous, steely-pitched, unnerving. As we draw closer I notice that the winged horses and armillary spheres decorating the tops of the bridge columns have scorched and melted, the horses now like blackened hellhounds. The screaming of that bridge as we cross—all I think of is my own child dying with Theresa, that I’m hearing our child among the others, but this is melodramatic, I know, hysterical, but still—my child burned in a concussion of fire, layers of skin, the system of her nerves and of her veins, her profile, hair and eyes, ten fingers and ten toes that I would have counted. Stop it, stop this. The river passes below us, a poison stream flashing silver. I pause halfway across to search out downtown. The Archive layers in where the city once was—nothing, now. Plumes of dust. At the end of the bridge we find a lone brick wall casting a black shadow so we rest for a moment, lifting our gas masks long enough to take swigs of water. Albion’s eyes are ringed red—she’s been crying, and I wonder what tormented her as we crossed that bridge, who she heard screaming, but I can tell by her tenseness that I shouldn’t pry, that she’ll deal with this pain on her own terms, on her own, like she’s dealt with every other pain. The rain sweeps through again, cooling even if it is turning our footing to mud. Albion checks her dosimeter—still clear, so she slips it back beneath her suit.