The Once and Future Kings

Urban Decay-4

Someone needed to say something, anything. The danger in silence was that, post-Flashback, one inevitably heard the emptiness, the melancholy: the sound of the world just breathing in and out, dreaming. So I said: “For her, the Flashback is over”—hoping it would break the spell of her liquefied eyes and deeply sunken sockets, the pale, wispy hair, the fuzzy white fungus in her nostrils and mouth. Hoping, I suppose, that it would drown out the Nothing—if only for a moment.

“No more power lunches for this babysan,” said Lazaro, and spat. He kicked the spilt attaché case at the base of the cycad, where her feet should have been, and paper and cash swirled. “Here one minute—melded with a tree the next. s**t sucks.”

Sam stepped closer, examining where the woman’s face merged with the tree. “Initial Flashback, you think? Or an aftershock?”

I watched the rain—which had lessened to a drizzle— dribble down the corpse’s face and neck. “I don’t know, she seems pretty well preserved. Could have been an aftershock.”

“Probably suffocated,” said Nigel. “Tree manifested and her lungs couldn’t expand. Jesus. What a horrible way to go.”

I looked at Joan who was white as a ghost. “You all right?”

“Yeah. It’s just that ...” She shook her head. “It’s nothing.”

She jumped as our walkie-talkies squawked; it sure looked like something to me. “Go ahead, Sea One,” I said. “What’s your twenty?”

I looked to see the Bell 206 arching over Elliott Bay.

“Just west of you—monitoring pack movements near the Colman ferry terminal. Carnotauruses, by the looks of it. I take it you’re at the Exchange?”

“Affirmative—and awaiting instructions.”

“Through the double doors, left at the first hall, all the way to the end. Austin Dynamics and Land Systems. They’ll be a secure door—you’ll have to blow it. And hurry, because there are predators of the human variety on the move in Pioneer Square.”

I peered at the sky, at what Roman called the Mesozoic Borealis, watching the colors bleed in and out of each other, watching them shift and change shape. “Yeah, ah, about that. Requesting alternative escape route—Over. We have had contact with Skidders. I repeat, we have had contact with them. We—they’re all dead. Over.”

But there was nothing, just the sound of the helicopter.

At last Roman said, “That’s unfortunate. But it doesn’t change a thing. Escape route is still 1st Avenue through Pioneer Square to Edgar Martinez Drive—then I-90 to Issaquah. Do you copy?”

That’s when I saw it: him, the kid, dirty-faced and wild-eyed, his hair like an unkempt mane, listening to us from the nearby stairwell—like the feral boy in The Road Warrior, I swear.

“Hey!” I shouted, drawing the attention of the others, “Hey, kid! Hold up!”

But he was already gone—climbing from the well at its opposite end, bolting up the shattered sidewalk like a gazelle. Weaving right at 2nd Avenue—where he vanished into the primordial mist.

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