AMPOULES REMAINING: 44 Amanda glances up from the notebook, asks, “You’re sure writing it down is the best way to go?”
“When you write something, you focus your full attention on it. It’s almost impossible to write one thing while thinking about another. The act of putting it on paper keeps your thoughts and intentions aligned.”
“How much should I write?” she asks.
“Maybe keep it simple to start? One short paragraph?”
She finishes the sentence she’s been working on, closes the notebook, and rises to her feet.
“You’ve got it all in the forefront of your mind?” I ask.
“I think so.”
I shoulder our backpack. Amanda crosses to the door, turns the handle, pulls it open. Morning sunlight enters the corridor, so blinding that for a moment I can’t see a thing outside.
As my eyes adjust to the brilliance, the surroundings fade into focus.
We’re standing in the doorway of the box, at the top of a hill overlooking a park.
To the east, emerald grass slopes for several hundred yards, down to the shore of Lake Michigan. And in the distance rises a skyline like none I’ve ever seen—the buildings slim, constructions of glass and steel so reflective they border on invisible, creating an effect almost like a mirage.
The sky is filled with moving objects, most crisscrossing the airspace above what I assume is Chicago, a few accelerating vertically, straight up into the deep blue with no sign of stopping.
Amanda looks over at me and smirks, tapping the notebook.
I open it to the first page.
She wrote…
I want to go to a good place, to a good time to be alive. A world I’d want to live in. It isn’t the future, but it feels like it….
I say, “Not bad.”
“Is this place actually real?” she asks.
“Yes. And you brought us here.”
“Let’s explore. We should give ourselves a break from the drug anyway.”
She starts down the grassy slope away from the box. We pass a playground and then hit a walking path that runs through the park.
The morning is cold and flawless. My breath steams.
The grass is blanched with frost where the sun has yet to touch it, and the hardwoods that border the park are turning.
The lake stands as still as glass.
A quarter mile ahead, a series of elegant Y-shaped structures cut across the park at intervals of fifty meters.
Only as we draw near do I realize what they are.
We ride a lift up to the northbound platform and wait under the heated overhang, now forty feet above the greenway. A digital, interactive map emblazoned with Chicago Transit Authority identifies this route as the Red Line Express, linking South Chicago to Downtown.
An urgent female voice blares through a speaker overhead.
Stand clear. A train is arriving. Stand clear. A train is arriving in five… four…three… I glance up and down the line, but I don’t see anything approaching.
Two… A blur of incoming movement rockets out of the tree line.
One.
A sleek, three-car train decelerates into the station, and as the doors open, that computerized female voice says, Please wait to board on green.
The handful of passengers who detrain and move past us are wearing workout clothes. The panel of red light above each of the open doors turns
to green.
You may board now for Downtown Station.
Amanda and I share a glance, shrug, and then step into the first car. It’s nearly full with commuters.
This isn’t the El I know. It’s free. No one is standing. Everyone is strapped into chairs that look like they should be bolted to a rocket sled.
The word VACANT hovers helpfully above each empty seat.
As Amanda and I move up the aisle, the automated attendant says, Please find a seat. The train cannot depart the station until everyone is safely seated.
We slide into a couple of seats at the front of the car. As I lean back, padded restraints emerge from the chair and gently secure my shoulders and waist.
Head back against your seat, please. The train is departing in three… two…one.
The acceleration is smooth but intense. It shoves me deep into the cushioned seat for two seconds, and then we’re floating along a single rail at an inconceivable speed, no sense of friction beneath us as a cityscape blurs past on the other side of the glass, too fast for me to actually process what I’m seeing.
In the distance, that fantastical skyline inches closer. The buildings don’t even make sense. In the sharp morning light, it looks as if someone shattered a mirror and stood all the shards of glass upright in formation.
They’re too beautifully random and irregular to be man-made. Perfect in their imperfection and asymmetry, like a range of mountains. Or the shape
of a river.
The track drops.
My stomach lifts.
We scream through a tunnel—darkness interspersed with bursts of light that only serve to amplify the sense of disorientation and velocity.
We break out of the darkness and I grip the sides of my chair, forced forward into the restraints as the train slams to a stop.
The attendant announces, Downtown Station.
Is this your stop? appears as a hologram six inches from my face above
Y? and N?
Amanda says, “Let’s get off here.”
I swipe the Y. She does the same.
Our restraints release and disappear into the seats. Rising, we exit the car with the other passengers onto the platform of a magnificent station that dwarfs New York’s Grand Central. It’s a soaring terminal topped with a ceiling that resembles beveled glass in the way the sunlight passes through and diffuses into the hall as scattered brilliance, projecting twittering chevrons of light onto the marble walls.
The space is brimming with people.
The long, croaking notes of a saxophone hang in the air.
At the opposite side of the hall, we climb a daunting waterfall of steps.
Everyone around us is talking to themselves—phone calls, I’m sure, though I don’t see any mobile devices.
At the top of the stairs, we pass through one of a dozen turnstiles.
The street is crushed with pedestrians—no cars, no traffic lights. We’re standing at the base of the tallest building I’ve ever seen. Even in proximity, it doesn’t look real. With no differentiation from floor to floor, it resembles a piece of solid ice or crystal.
Pulled along by naked curiosity, we cross the street, enter the lobby of the tower, and follow the signs to the queue for the observation deck.
The elevator is astonishingly fast.
I have to keep swallowing to clear my ears against the constant change in pressure.
After two minutes, the car comes to a stop.
The attendant informs us that we have ten minutes to enjoy the top.
As the doors part, we’re met with a chilling blast of wind. Moving out of the car, we pass a hologram that reads: You are now 7,082 feet above street
level.
The elevator shaft occupies the center of the tiny observation deck, and the pinnacle of the tower is a mere fifty feet above us, the apex of the glass structure twisted into a flame-like point.
Another hologram materializes as we walk toward the edge: The Glass Tower is the tallest building in the Midwest and the third tallest in America.
It’s freezing up here, the breeze steadily coming off the lake. The air feels thinner sliding into my lungs, and I register a twinge of light-headedness, but whether from the lack of oxygen or from vertigo, I’m not sure.
We reach the anti-suicide railing.
My head swims. My stomach churns.
It’s almost too much to take in—the sparkling sprawl of the city and the profusion of neighboring towers and the vast expanse of the lake, which I can see clear across into southern Michigan.
To the west and south, beyond the suburbs, the prairie glows in the
morning light, a hundred miles away.
The tower sways.
Four states—Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin—are visible on a clear day.
Standing on this work of art and imagination, I feel small in the best kind of way.
It’s enthralling to breathe the air of a world that could build something as beautiful as this.
Amanda is beside me, and we’re staring down the gorgeously feminine curve of the building. It’s serene and nearly silent up here.
The only sound is the lonely whisper of wind.
The noise of the streets below doesn’t reach us.
“Was all of this in your head?” I ask.
“Not consciously, but it all feels right somehow. Like a half-remembered dream.”
I gaze toward the northern neighborhoods, where Logan Square should
be.
It doesn’t look anything like my home.
A few feet away, I see an old man standing behind his old wife, his gnarled hands on her shoulders as she peers through a telescope, which is pointed down at the most extraordinary Ferris wheel I’ve ever seen. A thousand feet tall, it looms over the lakeshore, right where Navy Pier should
be.
I think of Daniela.
Of what this other Jason—Jason2—might be doing at this moment.
What he might be doing to my wife.
Anger, fear, and homesickness envelop me like an illness.
This world, for all its grandeur, isn’t my home.
It isn’t even close.
AMPOULES REMAINING: 42 Down the dark corridor through this in-between place again, our footfalls echoing into infinity.
I’m holding the lantern and considering what I should write in the
notebook when Amanda stops walking.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Listen.”
It becomes so quiet I can hear the escalated beating of my heart.
And then—something impossible.
A sound.
Far, far down the corridor.
Amanda looks at me.
She whispers, “What the fuck?”
I stare into the darkness.
There’s nothing to see but the dwindling light of the lantern refracting off the repeating walls.
The sound becomes louder from moment to moment.
It’s the shuffling of footsteps.
I say, “Someone’s coming.”
“How is that possible?”
Movement edges into the periphery of illumination.
A figure coming toward us.
I take a step back, and as they draw closer, I’m tempted to run, but where
would I go?
Might as well face it.
It’s a man.
He’s naked.
His skin covered in mud or dirt or…
Blood.
Definitely blood.
He reeks of it.
As if he rolled around in a pool.
His hair is matted, face smeared and caked so heavily it makes the whites of his eyes stand out.
His hands are trembling and his fingers curled in tightly, like they’ve been clawing desperately at something.
Only when he’s ten feet away do I realize this man is me.
I step out of his way, backing up against the nearest wall to give him the widest possible berth.
As he staggers past, his eyes fix on mine.
I’m not even sure he sees me.
He looks shell-shocked.
Hollowed out.
Like he just stepped out of hell.
Across his back and shoulders, chunks of flesh have been ripped out.
I say, “What happened to you?”
He stops and stares at me, and then opens his mouth and makes the most terrifying sound I’ve ever heard—a throat-scarring scream.
As his voice echoes, Amanda grabs my arm and pulls me away.
He doesn’t follow.
Just watches us go, and then shuffles on down the corridor.
Into that endless dark.
—
Thirty minutes later, I’m sitting in front of a door that’s identical to all the rest, trying to wipe my mind and emotional register of what I just saw in the corridor.
Taking a notebook from the backpack, I open it, the pen poised in my
hand.
I don’t even have to think.
I simply write the words:
I want to go home.
—
I wonder, Is this what God feels? The rush that comes from having literally spoken a world into existence? And yes, this world already existed, but I connected us to it. Out of all the possible worlds, I found this one, and it’s exactly, at least from the doorway of the box, what I wanted.
I step down, glass crunching on the concrete beneath my shoes as afternoon light pours through the windows high above, striking a row of iron generators from another era.
Although I’ve never seen it in daylight, I know this room.
The last time I was here a harvest moon was on the rise over Lake Michigan, and I was slumped back against one of these ancient contraptions, drugged out of my mind, staring at a man in a geisha mask who had forced me at gunpoint into the depths of this abandoned power plant.
Staring—though I had no idea at the time—at myself.
I couldn’t have imagined the journey.
The hell that actually awaited me.
The box is situated in a far corner of the generator room, hidden away
behind the stairs.
“Well?” Amanda asks.
“I think I did it. This is the last place I saw before waking up in your world.”
—
We make our way back through the derelict power plant.
Outside, the sun is shining.
Descending.
It’s late afternoon, and the only sound is the lonely cry of gulls flying out over the lake.
We hike west into the neighborhoods of South Chicago, walking along
the shoulder like a pair of drifters.
The distant skyline is familiar.
It’s the one I know and love.
The sun keeps dropping, and we’ve been walking twenty minutes before it dawns on me that we haven’t seen a single car on the road.
“Kind of quiet, isn’t it?” I ask.
Amanda looks at me.
The silence wasn’t so noticeable out in the industrial wasteland near the
lake.
Here it’s startling.
There are no cars out.
No people.
It’s so quiet I can hear the current running through the power lines above us.
The Eighty-Seventh Street CTA station is closed—no buses or trains running.
The only other sign of life is a stray black cat with a corkscrew tail, slinking across the road, a rat in its jaws.
Amanda says, “Maybe we should go back to the box.”
“I want to see my home.”
“The vibe here is wrong, Jason. Can’t you feel it?”
“We’re not going to learn anything about flying the box if we don’t
explore where it takes us.”
“Where’s home?”
“Logan Square.”
“Not exactly walking distance.”
“So we’ll borrow a car.”
We cross Eighty-Seventh and walk a residential block of downtrodden row houses. No street sweeper has been by in weeks. There’s trash everywhere. Disgusting, splitting bags of it in huge piles up and down the sidewalk.
Many of the windows have been boarded up.
Some are covered in sheets of plastic.
From most hang pieces of clothing.
Some red.
Some black.
The drone of radios and televisions creeps out of a few houses.
The cry of a child.
But otherwise, the neighborhood stands ominously silent.
Halfway down the sixth block, Amanda calls out, “Found one!”
I cross the street toward a mid-’90s Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera.
White. Rusting around the edges. No hubcaps on the wheels.
Through the dirty glass, I glimpse a pair of keys dangling from the ignition.
Pulling open the driver’s-side door, I slide in behind the steering wheel.
“So we’re really doing this?” Amanda asks.
I crank the engine as she climbs into the passenger side.
There’s a quarter tank of gas remaining.
Should be enough.
The windshield is so filthy, it takes ten seconds of pummeling with wiper fluid to scrape away the grime and the dirt and the plastered-on leaves.
—
The interstate is desolate.
I’ve never seen anything like it.
Empty in both directions as far as I can see.
It’s early evening now, the sun glinting off the Willis Tower.
I speed north, and with each passing mile, the knot in my stomach tightens.
Amanda says, “Let’s go back. Seriously. Something is obviously very wrong.”
“If my family’s here, my place is with them.”
“How do you even know this is your Chicago?”
She turns on the radio and scrolls through static on the FM dial until the familiar warning pings of the Emergency Alert System screech through the speakers.
The following message is transmitted at the request of the Illinois State Police Department. The mandatory twenty-four-hour curfew remains in effect for Cook County. All residents are ordered to stay in their homes until further notice. The National Guard continues to monitor the safety of all neighborhoods, deliver food rations, and provide transport to CDC Quarantine Zones.
In the southbound lanes, a convoy of four camouflaged Humvees speeds by.
The threat of contagion remains high. Initial symptoms include fever, severe headache, and muscle pain. If you believe that you or anyone in your home is infected, display a red piece of cloth in a street-facing window. If anyone in your home is deceased, display a black piece of cloth in a street-facing window.
CDC personnel will assist as soon as they are able.
Stay tuned for further details.
Amanda looks at me.
“Why aren’t you turning around?”
—
There’s nowhere to park on my block, so I leave the car in the middle of the street with the engine running.
“You’re out of your fucking mind,” Amanda says.
I point toward the brownstone with a red skirt and black sweater hanging from the window of the master bedroom.
“That’s my home, Amanda.”
“Just hurry. And be safe, please.”
I step out of the car.
It’s so very quiet, the streets blue in the dusk.
One block up, I glimpse pale figures dragging themselves down the middle of the road.
I reach the curb.
The power lines are silent, the light emanating from inside the houses
softer than it should be.
Candlelight.
There’s no power in my neighborhood.
Climbing the steps to the front door, I peer through the large window that
looks in on the dining room.
It’s darkness and gloom inside.
I knock.
After a long time, a shadow emerges from the kitchen, trudging slowly past the dining-room table toward the front door.
My mouth runs dry.
I shouldn’t be here.
This isn’t even my home.
The chandelier is wrong.
So is the Van Gogh print above the hearth.
I hear three locks click back.
The door cracks open less than an inch, and a waft from inside creeps out that doesn’t smell anything like my home.
All sickness and death.
Daniela holds a candle that trembles in her grasp.
Even in the low light, I can see that every square inch of her exposed skin
is blanketed with bumps.
Her eyes look black.
They’re hemorrhaging.
Only slivers of white remain.
She says, “Jason?” Her voice is soft and wet. Tears run from her eyes.
“Oh my God. Is it you?”
She pulls the door open and staggers toward me, unsteady on her feet.
It’s a heart-crushing thing to feel revulsion for the one you love.
I take a step back.
Sensing my horror, she stops herself.
“How is this possible?” she rasps. “You died.”
“What are you talking about?”
“A week ago, they carried you out of here in a body bag full of blood.”
“Where’s Charlie?” I ask.
She shakes her head, and as the tears stream, coughs a bloody sob into
the bend of her elbow.
“Dead?” I ask.
“No one’s come to get him. He’s still up in his room. He’s rotting up there, Jason.”
For a moment, she loses her balance, then catches herself on the door
frame.
“Are you real?” she asks.
Am I real?
What a question.
I can’t speak.
My throat aches with grief.
Tears begin to fill my eyes.
As much as I pity her, the awful truth is that I’m scared of her, my self- preservation recoiling in horror.
Amanda calls from the car, “Someone’s coming!”
I glance up the street, see a pair of headlights rolling down through the darkness.
“Jason, I will fucking leave you!” Amanda shouts.
“Who is that?” Daniela asks.
The rumble of the approaching engine sounds like a diesel.
Amanda was right. I should have turned around the moment I realized how dangerous this place might be.
This isn’t my world.
And still, my heart feels tethered to the second floor of this house in a bedroom where some version of my son lies dead.
I want to rush up there and carry him out, but it would be my death.
I move back down the steps toward the street as a Humvee pulls to a stop in the road, ten feet from the bumper of the car we boosted in the South Side.
It’s covered in various insignia—Red Cross, National Guard, CDC.
Amanda is leaning out her window.
“What the hell, Jason?”
I wipe my eyes.
“My son is dead in there. Daniela is dying.”
The front passenger door of the Humvee opens, and a figure in a black biohazard suit and gas mask steps out and sights me down with an assault rifle.
The voice projected through the mask belongs to a woman.
She says, “Stop right there.”
I instinctively raise my hands.
Next, she swings the rifle toward the windshield of the Cutlass Ciera and
walks toward the car.
Says to Amanda, “Shut that engine off.”
Amanda reaches across the center console and kills the ignition as the driver of the Humvee climbs out.
I motion to Daniela, who’s standing on the porch, wavering on her feet.
“My wife is very ill. My son is dead upstairs.”
The driver stares up through his mask at the façade of the brownstone.
“You’ve got the colors properly displayed. Someone will be along to—”
“She needs medical attention right now.”
“Is this your car?”
“Yes.”
“Where were you planning to go?”
“I just wanted to get my wife to some people who could help her. Aren’t there any hospitals or—”
“Wait here.”
“Please.”
“Wait,” he snaps.
The driver steps onto the sidewalk and climbs the stairs to where Daniela is now sitting on the highest step, leaning against the railing.
He kneels in front of her, and though I hear his voice, I can’t make out the words.
The woman with the assault rifle covers me and Amanda.
Across the street, I see firelight flickering through a window as one of our neighbors looks down on whatever is unfolding in front of my house.
The driver returns.
He says, “Look, the CDC camps are at capacity. Have been for two weeks. And it wouldn’t matter if you got her into one anyway. Once the eyes hemorrhage, the end is very close. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather pass in my own bed than a cot in a FEMA tent filled with dead and dying people.” He looks over his shoulder. “Nadia, would you grab this gentleman some auto-injectors? And a mask while you’re at it.”
She says, “Mike.”
“Just fucking do it.”
Nadia goes to the back of the Humvee and opens the cargo doors.
“So she’s going to die?”
“I’m sorry.”
“How long?”
“I’d be surprised if she makes it to the morning.”
Daniela groans in the darkness behind me.
Nadia returns, slaps five auto-injectors into my hand along with a face mask.
The driver says, “Wear the mask at all times, and I know it’s hard, but try
not to touch her.”
“What is this stuff?” I ask.
“Morphine. If you give her all five at once, she’ll slip away. I wouldn’t wait. The last eight hours are ugly.”
“She has no chance?”
“No.”
“Where’s the cure?”
“There won’t be one in time to save the city.”
“They’re just letting people die in their homes?”
He studies me through his mask.
The face shield is tinted.
I can’t even see his eyes.
“If you try to leave and hit the wrong roadblock, they’ll kill you.
Especially after dark.”
He turns away.
I watch as they climb back into the Humvee, fire up the engine, and drive
off down the block.
The sun has gone below the horizon.
The street is getting dark.
Amanda says, “We should go right now.”
“Just give me a second.”
“She’s contagious.”
“I’m aware.”
“Jason—”
“That’s my wife up there.”
“No, it’s a version of your wife, and if you catch whatever she has you’ll never see your real wife again.”
I strap on the mask and climb the steps to the front porch.
Daniela looks up as I approach.
Her ruined face breaks me.
She’s vomited blood and black bile all over herself.
“They won’t take me?” she asks.
I shake my head.
I want to hold her and comfort her.
I want to run away from her.
“It’s okay,” she says. “You don’t have to pretend it’s going to be all right.
I’m ready.”
“They gave me these,” I say, setting the auto-injectors down.
“What are they?”
“A way to make it end.”
“I watched you die in our bed,” she says. “I watched my son die in his. I don’t ever want to go back in that house. Of all the ways I thought my life would go, I never imagined this.”
“This isn’t how your life turned out. Only how it ended. Your life was beautiful.”
The candle falls out of her hand and extinguishes on the concrete, the wick smoking.
I say, “If I give you all of these at once, this can be over. Is that what you want?”
She nods, tears and blood running down her cheeks.
I pull a purple cap off one of the auto-injectors, hold the end against her thigh, and press the button on the opposite end.
Daniela barely even flinches as the spring-loaded syringe fires a dose of morphine into her system.
I set up the next four and administer them all in quick succession.
The effect is nearly instantaneous.
She falls back against the wrought-iron railing, and her black eyes glass
over as the drug takes hold.
“Better?” I ask.
She almost smiles, then says, her words thickening, “I know I’m just hallucinating this, but you’re my angel. You came back to me. I was so
afraid to die alone in that house.”
The dusk deepens.
The first stars appear in the eerily black skies above Chicago.
“I’m so…light-headed,” she says.
I think of all the evenings we’ve sat on this porch. Drinking. Laughing.
Bullshitting with the neighbors passing by as the streetlamps up and down the block winked on.
In this moment, my world seems so safe and perfect. I see now—I took all that comfort for granted. It was so good, and there were so many ways it could’ve all gone to pieces.
Daniela says, “I wish you could touch me, Jason.”
Her voice has become hoarse and brittle, little more than a whisper.
Her eyes close.
Each cycle of her respiration becomes longer by a second or two.
Until she stops breathing altogether.
I don’t want to leave her out here, but I know I shouldn’t touch her.
Rising, I move to the door and step inside. The house is silent and dark, and the presence of death clings to my skin.
I pass the candlelit walls of the dining room, move through the kitchen, and into the study. The hardwood floor creaks under my footsteps—the only sound in the house.
At the foot of the stairs, I stop and stare up into the darkness of the second floor, where my son lies rotting in his bed.
I feel the pull to go up there like the irresistible gravity of a black hole.
But I resist.
I grab the blanket draped over the couch, take it outside, and cover Daniela’s body.
Then I close the door to my house and walk down the steps and away
from the horror.
I get in the car, start the engine.
Look over at Amanda.
“Thanks for not leaving me.”
“I should have.”
I drive away.
Some parts of the city have power.
Some are in the black.
My eyes keep welling up.
I can hardly see to drive.
Amanda says, “Jason, this isn’t your world. That wasn’t your wife. You can still go home and find them.”
Intellectually, I know she’s right, but emotionally, that just ripped my guts out.
I am hardwired to love and protect that woman.
We’re passing through Bucktown.
In the distance, an entire city block is hurling hundred-foot flames at the sky.
—
The interstate is dark and empty.
Amanda reaches over and pulls the mask off my face.
The smell of death from inside my home lingers in my nose.
I can’t shake it.
I keep thinking of Daniela, lying dead under a blanket on our front porch.
As we pass to the west of downtown, I glance out my window.
There’s just enough starlight to profile the towers.
They’re black, lifeless.
Amanda says, “Jason?”
“What?”
“There’s a car following us.”
I look in the rearview mirror.
With no lights, it looks like a phantom riding my bumper.
Blinding high beams and red-and-blues kick on, sending splinters of light through the interior of the car.
A voice booms through a megaphone behind us: Pull your vehicle onto
the shoulder.
Panic swells.
We have nothing to defend ourselves with.
We can’t outrun anything in this piece of shit.
I take my foot off the gas, watch the speedometer needle swing
counterclockwise.
Amanda says, “You’re stopping?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I ease down on the brake pedal, and as our speed falls, I veer onto the shoulder and bring the car to a stop.
“Jason.” Amanda grabs my arm. “What are you doing?”
In the side mirror, I watch a black SUV pull to a stop behind us.
Turn off your vehicle and drop the keys out the window.
“Jason!”
“Just trust me.”
This is your last warning. Turn off the car and drop the keys out the window. Any attempt to flee will be met with lethal force.
A mile or so back, more headlights appear.
I shift the car into PARK and kill the lights. Then I lower my window several inches, stick my arm through, and pretend to drop a set of keys outside.
The driver’s-side door to the SUV opens, and a man in a gas mask steps out with his weapon already drawn.
I throw the car back into gear, hit the lights, and floor the accelerator.
I hear a gunshot over the roar of the engine.
A bullet hole stars the windshield.
Then another.
One rips into the cassette deck.
Looking back, I see the SUV now several hundred yards down the shoulder.
The speedometer is at sixty and climbing.
“How far are we from our exit?” Amanda asks.
“A mile or two.”
“There’s a bunch of them coming.”
“I see them.”
“Jason, if they catch us—”
“I know.”
I’m doing a little over ninety now, the engine straining to maintain speed, the RPMs inching into the red.
We blow past a sign giving notice that our exit is a quarter mile ahead on the right.
At this speed, we reach it in a matter of seconds.
I hit the exit at seventy-five and brake hard.
Neither of us are buckled in.
The inertia slams Amanda into the glove box and shoves me forward into the steering wheel.
At the end of the ramp, I take a brutal left turn through a stop sign—tires squealing, rubber burning. It slings Amanda against her door and nearly sends me flying into her seat.
As I drive across the overpass, I count five sets of flashing lights on the interstate, the closest SUV now speeding onto the exit ramp with two Humvees in tow.
We tear through the vacated streets of South Chicago.
Amanda leans forward, stares out the windshield.
“What is it?” I ask.
She’s looking at the sky.
“I see lights up there.”
“Like a helicopter?”
“Exactly.”
I scream through empty intersections, past the shuttered El station, and then we’re clear of the ghetto, speeding alongside abandoned warehouses
and train yards.
In the boondocks of the city.
“They’re getting close,” Amanda says.
A round thunks into the trunk of the car.
Followed by three more in fast succession, like someone taking a
hammer to metal.
She says, “That’s a machine gun.”
“Get down on the floorboard.”
I can hear the anthem of sirens drawing near.
This antiquated sedan is no match for what’s coming.
Two more rounds pierce the back window and the windshield.
One rips through the middle of Amanda’s seat.
Through the bullet-riddled glass, I see the lake straight ahead.
I say, “Hang on, we’re almost there.”
I make a hard right onto Pulaski Drive, and as a trio of bullets peppers the rear passenger door, I cut the lights.
The first few seconds of driving without headlights feels like we’re flying
through total darkness.
Then my eyes begin to adjust.
I can see the pavement ahead, the black silhouettes of structures all around us.
It’s as dark as the countryside out here.
I take my foot off the gas, but I don’t touch the brake.
Glancing back, I see two SUVs make aggressive turns onto Pulaski.
Up ahead, I can just make out the pair of familiar smokestacks spearing the starlit sky.
Our speed is under twenty miles per hour, and though the SUVs are gaining fast, I don’t think their high beams have touched us yet.
I see the fence.
Our speed keeps dropping.
I steer across the road, and the grille smashes into the locked gate, splitting the doors apart.
We roll slowly into the parking lot, and as I maneuver around the toppled light poles, I look back toward the road.
The sirens are getting louder.
Three SUVs streak past the gate, trailed by two Humvees with machine-
gun turrets mounted to their roofs.
I kill the engine.
In the new silence, I listen to the sirens fading away.
Amanda climbs up from the floorboard as I grab our pack from the backseat.
The slams of our doors bounce off the brick building straight ahead.
We move toward the crumbling structure and all that’s left of the original signage: CAGO POWER.
A helicopter buzzes overhead, a brilliant spotlight scraping across the parking lot.
Now I hear a revving engine.
A black SUV skids sideways across Pulaski.
Headlights blind us.
As we run toward the building, a man’s voice through a megaphone orders us to stop.
I step through the hole in the brick façade, give Amanda a hand inside.
It’s pitch-black.
Ripping open the pack, I quickly dig out the lantern.
The light reveals the destroyed front office, and the sight of this place in the dark takes me back to that night with Jason2, when he walked me naked and at gunpoint into another version of this old building.
We move out of the first room, the lantern piercing the darkness.
Down a hallway.
Faster and faster.
Our footsteps pounding the rotten floor.
Sweat runs down my face, stings my eyes.
My heart beats so hard it rattles my chest.
I’m gasping for breath.
Voices call after us.
I look back, see lasers cutting through the black and splotches of green from what I assume are night-vision goggles.
I hear the noise of radios and whispered voices and the rotors of the helicopter bleeding through the walls.
A torrent of gunfire fills the hallway, and we flatten ourselves against the ground until the shooting stops.
Struggling back onto our feet, we push on with even more urgency.
At a junction, I take us down a different hall, mostly sure it’s the right way though it’s impossible to be certain in the dark.
We finally emerge onto the metal platform at the top of the open stairs
that lead down into the generator room.
We descend.
Our pursuers are so close I can pick out three distinct voices
reverberating through the last hallway.
Two men, one woman.
I move off the last step, Amanda right on my heels as heavy footfalls clang on the stairs above us.
Two red dots crisscross my path.
I sidestep and keep running, straight into the darkness ahead, where I know the box has to be.
Gunshots ring out above us as two figures in full biohazard gear launch off the bottom of the stairs, hurtling toward us.
The box stands fifty feet ahead, the door open and the metallic surface gently diffusing the light of our incoming lantern.
Gunshot.
I feel something zip by my right ear like a passing hornet.
A bullet strikes the door with a spark of fire.
My ear burns.
A man behind us screams, “There’s nowhere to go!”
Amanda is first into the box.
Then I cross the threshold, turn, dig my shoulder into the door.
The soldiers are twenty feet away, so close I can hear them panting through their gas masks.
They open fire, and the blinding muzzle flashes and the bullets chinking into the metal of the box are the last I see and hear of that nightmare world.
—
We shoot up immediately and start walking down the corridor.
After a while, Amanda wants to stop, but I can’t.
I need to keep moving.
I walk for a full hour.
Through an entire cycle of the drug.
My ear bleeding all over my clothes.
Until the corridor collapses back into a single box.
I throw off the pack.
Cold.
Coated in dried sweat.
Amanda is standing in the center of the box, her skirt dirty and ripped, sweater torn off completely from our run through the abandoned power plant.
As she sets the lantern on the floor, something inside of me releases.
The strength, the tension, the anger, the fear.
Everything flooding out at once in a stream of tears and uncontrollable
sobbing.
Amanda turns off the lantern.
I crumple down against the cold wall, and she pulls me over into her lap.
Runs her fingers through my hair.
AMPOULES REMAINING: 40 I come to consciousness in the pitch-black, lying on my side on the floor of the box, my back to the wall. Amanda is pressed up close against me, our bodies contoured together, her head resting in the crook of my arm.
I’m hungry and thirsty.
I wonder how long I’ve slept.
At least my ear has stopped bleeding.
It’s impossible to deny the reality of our helplessness.
Aside from each other, this box is the only constant we have.
A very tiny boat in the middle of a very large ocean.
It’s our shelter.
Our prison.
Our home.
—
Carefully, I untangle us.
Pulling off my hoodie, I fold it into a pillow and slide it under Amanda’s
head.
She stirs but doesn’t wake.
I feel my way around to the door, knowing I shouldn’t take the risk of breaking the seal. But I have to know what’s out there, and the claustrophobia of the box is wearing on me.
Turning the handle, I drag it slowly open.
First sensation: the smell of evergreens.
Shafts of sunlight slant down through a forest of closely spaced pine trees.
In the near distance, a deer stands motionless, staring through its dark, wet eyes at the box.
When I step outside, the deer bounds off soundlessly through the pines.
The forest is startlingly quiet.
Mist hovers over the pine-needle floor.
I walk out a little ways from the box and sit on a piece of ground in direct morning sun that feels warm and bright against my face.
A breeze pushes through the tops of the trees.
I catch a hint of woodsmoke in the wind.
From an open fire?
A chimney?
I wonder, Who lives here?
What sort of a world is this?
I hear footsteps.
Glancing back, I see Amanda coming toward me through the trees and register a pang of guilt—I almost got her killed in that last world. She isn’t just here because of me. She’s here because she saved me. Because she did a brave, risky thing.
She sits beside me and turns her face to the sun.
“How’d you sleep?” she asks.
“Hard. Awful crick in my neck. You?”
“Sore all over.”
She leans in close and studies my ear.
“Bad?” I ask.
“No, the bullet just trimmed off part of your earlobe. I’ll clean it up for you.”
She hands me a liter of water we refilled in that futuristic Chicago, and I take a long sip that I wish would never end.
“You doing okay?” she asks.
“I can’t stop thinking about her. Lying dead on our porch. And Charlie up in his room. We are so lost.”
Amanda says, “I know it’s hard, but the question you should be thinking about—we should both be thinking about—is why did you bring us to that world?”
“All I wrote was, ‘I want to go home.’ ”
“Exactly. That’s what you wrote, but you carried baggage through the
door.”
“What do you mean?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Obviously not.”
“Your worst fear.”
“That type of scenario isn’t everyone’s?”
“Maybe. But it’s so perfectly yours I’m surprised you don’t see it.”
“How is it perfectly mine?”
“Not just losing your family, but losing them to illness. The same way you lost your mother when you were eight years old.”
I look over at Amanda.
“How’d you know that?”
“How do you think?”
Of course. She was Jason2’s therapist.
She says, “Watching his mother die was the defining event of his life. It played a critical part in why he never married, never had kids. Why he sunk himself into work.”
I believe it. There were moments, early on, when I considered running from Daniela. Not because I wasn’t crazy about her, but because on some level, I was afraid of losing her. And I felt the same fear all over again when I found out she was pregnant with Charlie.
“Why would I seek out a world like that?”
“Why do people marry versions of their controlling mothers? Or absent fathers? To have a shot at righting old wrongs. Fixing things as an adult that hurt you as a child. Maybe it doesn’t make sense at a surface level, but the subconscious marches to its own beat. I happen to think that world taught us a lot about how the box works.”
Passing the water back to her, I say, “Forty.”
“Forty what?”
“Forty ampoules left. Half are yours. That gives us each twenty chances to get this right. What do you want to do?”
“I’m not sure. All I know at this point is that I’m not going back to my world.”
“So do you want to stay together, or is this goodbye?”
“I don’t know how you feel, but I think we still need each other. I think maybe I can help you get home.”
—
I lean back against the trunk of a pine tree, a notebook resting on my knees, my thoughts teeming.
What a strange thing to consider imagining a world into being with nothing but words, intention, and desire.
It’s a troubling paradox—I have total control, but only to the extent I
have control over myself.
My emotions.
My inner storm.
The secret engines that drive me.
If there are infinite worlds, how do I find the one that is uniquely, specifically mine?
I stare at the page and begin to write down every detail of my Chicago that comes to mind. I paint my life with words.
The sounds of the children in my neighborhood walking to school together, their voices like a stream flowing over rocks—high and burbling.
Graffiti on the faded white brick of a building three blocks from my house that was so artfully done it was never painted over.
I meditate on the intricacies of my home.
The fourth step on the staircase that always creaks.
The downstairs bathroom with the leaky faucet.
The way my kitchen smells as coffee brews first thing in the morning.
All the tiny, seemingly insignificant details upon which my world hangs.
