Part 4, Chapter 4 (Second Half)

4 (Continued...)

I’ve been toying with the idea of going back to James’ old home. Perhaps, if I’m lucky, I may find James has returned there and is willing to team up with Martin and I. James is the only other person, aside from Martin, who I know I can trust. Despite this, I’m worried that James may know about Hank’s death, and I don’t know how he’ll react to me after such an event. In fact, it’s almost certain that James knows about Hank, as James would have crossed the Birmingham Bridge after me. Perhaps there are even witnesses to the event itself. I don’t care so much about punishment – I don’t see who is going to make justice their responsibility – but I’m aware than anybody I do find, like James, will prefer to ostracize me, and perhaps Martin, than to stick with a known killer. That could spell disaster.

Maneuvering the vehicle through the heart of the city’s devastation is laborious and monotonous. Every few yards I have to adjust our direction to avoid hitting various heaps of junk, burned out vehicles, and the contents of stores pulled into the street. I could have driven along the edges of Downtown, of course, by the Strip District, on the fast track to the East Pittsburgh regions, but curiosity pushes me on this awkward and convoluted route. Downtown Pittsburgh is relatively small, so I know this wont take all day. But then, we have all the time in the world.

The sun is high and bright and bakes vivid detail into everything it touches. Under such a glare, the familiar Downtown surroundings seem all the more uncanny. The sunlight beams down, filtering through thin wraiths of black smoke that rise from charred remains of car, building, postbox, and awning. The only sound is the familiar engine of the four-by-four, like a moon buggy on a dusty, dirty, alien planet. The heat of the fire evaporated any snow in the region. Even so, during the journey to Pittsburgh, I’d noticed a distinct thinning of what was once a perpetual blanket of white. In the outskirts of Pittsburgh the snow still lies thick, but with asphalt creeping up from underneath. Here the blanket is one of unrelenting soot and ash.

Maybe the old man, Saul, was right about one thing: maybe Spring really is on its way.

Martin gazes out of the truck window and watches the destroyed city move past. This is the first time he has seen Pittsburgh since the world went to shit. This may be the first time he has seen Pittsburgh in years. I expected a more visible reaction from Martin, perhaps tears, I don’t know. Although, if the truth is told, Martin, like myself, has been so desensitized by the preceding weeks that he doesn’t know hot to react. I have to keep reminding myself that Martin has already witnessed the deaths of each member in his immediate family. He’s had the horrible opportunity to look upon each lifeless corpse and know that it was once an animate and loving individual in his life. Gazing out of the window, the bodies of these strangers, once frozen in the snow and now charred by the fire, are surely the least of the boy’s concerns.

The truck rolls through Downtown and ahead, I can see PPG Place, with the ice rink by its east side. Looming above it is the complex of towering glass – the same towers that Hank and I had watched from a rooftop in the Southside, as a stranger pushed office furniture out from the windows and yelled obscenities into the wind. The high glass buildings that make up the PPG complex are visible from miles around. Now this huge monolith of the capitalist ideal is a warped and melted tower of weeping glass. Behind it, the thirty-one floored granite Highmark building on Fifth Avenue stands charred and wounded. Its huge pyramid roof that once poked defiantly into the sky now stands dirty and purposeless.

As gusts of wind usher ash out of the ice-rink and into the street, curiosity keeps me edging the vehicle forwards through the debris. Martin, of course, is unconcerned and unaware of what this place could represent. However, I can taste the tension in my mouth; a dry, bitter clogging in my throat.

“Martin, you know there’s a gun in my backpack, right?” I ask. I don’t want to concern him, but I’m unnerved and could do with some company in that feeling.

“Sure, yeah I know.” He looks uneasy.

“Will you get it out for me?”

“Why?”

“Just— please, Martin.” He at least needs to be aware of what’s going on. To keep his eyes open.

Martin clambers into the back seats, finds my bag, and tugs at the straps holding the gun. I slow the truck further as we round the corner of Stanwix and Fourth. Aside from the cars, which were already there, now hundreds of filing cabinets, desks, office chairs, wastepaper baskets, photocopiers, fax machines, computers, telephones, and notice boards litter the street. A few of the items have been scattered into separate clumps, perhaps with an attempt at some kind of order, but the majority stand in a huge man-made mountain. I can only guess at what many of these objects once were. Now they are blackened, charred, and crumbled out of existence. They sit in a broken ash pile, bits of steel and scrap poking up here and there amongst solitary surviving pieces of desk-frame and filing cabinet. This monolith must have taken days of non-stop labor to build. It must have been under constant construction since I last saw the plaza, when I was leaving Pittsburgh. Martin climbs back into the front passenger seat, handing the unloaded gun to me and staring at the pile in wonder. “Whoa,” he says as he drops the ammunition clip into my lap. The street is impassible in the truck, but I want to examine this tower of destroyed corporation, on this cold and still day amongst all these other high rises. If I drive away, this moment will stand as another of those many moments in the past few weeks, where witnessing the signature instances of mankind’s decline took a backseat to my own health and stoicism. This moment will stand next to the time I left the Oakland riots when they became too intense, and I returned to my apartment on Craig Street to find Emily worried and waiting. It will stand alongside my decision to hole myself up in my apartment for a week, while all around me the world changed, devoid of my input.

I open the driver-side door and step onto the ash. The sound of the door’s mechanism and the light tap as my foot hits the ground echoes in the otherwise total absence of sound. The fire has even scared the birds away. Every so often, I hear the rustle of a light breeze, like flicking the pages of a book, and see the flitter of drifting ash.

“I’m going to take a closer look,” I tell Martin. “Stay in the car, ok?”

He looks at me and raises his eyebrows; he doesn’t want to be alone. I nod my head and he in turn opens his door, sliding off the seat and placing his feet on the ground.

Completely calm with my heart racing, I load the ammunition magazine into the gun and hold the weapon loose by my side. I’m conscious of the weapon’s misleading weight. Martin comes up a few steps behind me as I approach the blackened tower of office junk in the middle of the street.

In a way, the tower’s beautiful, stood there in all of its sooty haphazard grandeur.

Once I arrive at the edge of the tower, I begin to climb. It’s the only sensible option that faces me. The grime is thick, but enough metalwork is contained within that climbing is much easier than it initially appears. Occasionally, pieces of the furniture shift as the tower accommodates my weight. Then sometimes my foot slips on the thick ash, which covers the tower, and also my torso, legs, arms, hands, and face. Behind me, Martin is following a similar route.

We climb in silence; save for our own ragged breaths. I reach up, landing my hand on a wastepaper bin, which tumbles away beneath me, clattering and bouncing to the ground below. I watch the billows of soot that rise in its wake.

Finally, I attain the summit of the structure, pulling myself up onto the flat edge of a filing cabinet. The manner of its placement makes it look like pedestal. I’m confident that the tower’s builder placed it here (though I couldn’t guess how) so they could survey the surrounding courtyard. This unnerves me because, all along, I’ve known who the builder is. This tower exists because a twisted mind decided to put it here and I’ll never forget seeing, from across the river, the twisted mind in this building’s windows.

Finding my feet upon the filing cabinet’s side, I turn in circles, taking in a panorama of the unbelievable carnage. Moments later Martin joins me. Looking down on the ground below, I can see five other small piles, stacked only a few objects in height, arranged in a ring around this central peak.

Martin has also noticed these stacks. “That’s weird,” he mutters.

I nod in response as I puzzle over their significance. Five of the smaller stacks stand around this central cone. A realization clicks in my mind – an image from the past. I try to explain to Martin what I see, and the possible significance of the pentagram.

“Who put all of these here?”

“I saw someone here, weeks back…”

Martin waits for me to continue.

“He was in one of the PPG buildings, throwing all of this junk out of the windows.” I want to tell Martin that the madman was yelling, swearing to the heavens, and that he sent chills down my spine, which remained there for days, but these aren’t the kinds of things you should tell a kid.

We stand in silence for a moment. Martin stares at the base of the giant tower. I stare down the street, at the eastern corner. This is why Martin is the first to notice the corpse lying a few feet below us, on the far side of the mound. The corpse of a large dog, burnt and charred, destroyed save for its bones: its distinctive skull and a small wiry rib cage.

“What?” Martin says. He’s crying again, with tears running through the soot on his face, leaving streaks like the reverse of mascaraed drunks crying outside of nightclubs and bars on a loud, after hours Southside or Strip District evening. Martin’s appearance would be comical if it weren’t so heartbreakingly tragic to see the boy’s soul crushed.

He looks to me and we simultaneously understand what we stand upon. The dog was a gift and this tower is no pedestal, but a sacrificial altar. And furthermore, the pentagram indicates that this was no innocent ritual.

Martin’s look of panic is contagious. “Time we got out of here, eh?” I ask and usher him ahead of me, down the tower, back in the direction of our truck. Utter fear replaces the sense of uneasiness that has possessed us for the last thirty minutes. Fear of an unknown malevolence that holds too much sway where we stand. I tighten my grip upon the machinegun and hold it at hip level, looking around to the ground far beneath us. Martin is only a few feet lower than me and I’m panicking — fear taking over my better judgment. I need to get off this tower.

We clamber down, our faces into the ashen dirt, missing handholds and footfalls in our rush.

We’re several meters from the ground when the architect of this grand alter makes his appearance. His casual manner makes it seem that he’s been hiding for the past few minutes, aware of our presence, and waiting for us to become scared enough for his theatric entrance to have its full effect. My face whitens beneath its soot covering as I crane my neck at the sound of his approach. He holds a small handgun in one hand and a burning torch in the other. Frozen on the edge of the precarious tower, I feel like a butterfly pinned into a collector’s book.

This new character is too far away to make out details, yet I’m convinced that on his face a smile has spread. He stands by the truck, gun in hand, and looks up at Martin and I. I’m no longer so sure that I want to be off this wretched tower and closer to this gun-wielding madman. A heartbeat passes and he tosses his torch through the vehicle’s open door. He looks back to us, to gauge our reaction, I suppose, and our horror is clear. Then he takes a step away from the truck and towards the tower. “Everything must burn,” he says in the still silence of midday, his voice deep and old. “This is our punishment,” he gestures to our shared surroundings. “This is retribution for mankind’s sins. Now everything must burn. Everything must flicker and burn and die.”

“Don’t go any further,” I say to Martin in a cracked voice. “Stay where you are.” I clamber past the boy. Ash cakes my throat and my breath comes out in ragged gasps.

“The world was supposed to end,” the stranger announces as he observes my descent. “Both of you, it was supposed to end. But some things lingered on. We did, for instance. And that’s not good enough, you see. We’re still here. ”

Standing directly in front of Martin, his hand on my shoulder, I gain enough of a footing to turn my body towards the dark haired stranger.

“You see, it’s not good enough!” He raises his gun and points it at me; the second time I’ve had a gun pointed at me today. “Not good enough. Something went wrong, but I’ll fix it! I’ll fucking fix it as easy as—”

And there’s a crack in the air, and a ping sounds immediately afterwards on the metal frame of an office chair a few feet to my right. The bullet pulls soot behind it and caves a segment of the structure.

Another heartbeat passes, I try to raise my own weapon, but two more cracks ring out. One of the bullets strikes me in the leg, spins me around, heavy and clumsy and with excruciating pain. I lose my balance and look down: a few of meters of jagged burnt scrap. I meet the ground with astonishing swiftness.

The next thing I’m aware of, Martin is an impossible distance above me and I’m rolling from my back onto my stomach. I look ahead and see the anonymous gunman strolling towards me. Then I notice my arm extends out in front of me, along the ground, pointing towards him. A second ticks by like an hour and I notice that the machinegun is still in my hand and still within my control.

So I pull the trigger and swear through my teeth.

A series of cracks rattle through my ears into my skull, and simultaneously along my arm, into my torso. My entire body convulses with the force and shock. The stranger’s body convulses significantly more my own as bullets shred through him. I’m filled with relief because I know he’s dead and that Martin and I are safe. This thought comes as I lose consciousness for the second time.

And the world fades to black.