Book One: A Storm of Glass and Ashes

Chapter 16: The Warning from the Universe

The Glass Line had nearly reached their building by the time they reached the street. Hawk's little group had collected the few supplies they were offered. Flashlights. Plastic rope. Some glo-lights. They had more camera equipment than anything else, including both handheld cameras and go-pros they each strapped to their chests. Gotta get that footage for Kaiser, Hawk thought. But what more could they want? Guns? Hawk couldn't shoot. Alex might be able to. Em probably could. Kaiser's words, there's something alive down there, echoed unpleasantly. Far more unpleasant was the thought of oops. Untrained fingers on triggers. Unsure hands guiding shots. No thank you. 

Not that they'd been offered guns.

As they reached the streets Em turned to Hawk's go-pro and said "Morituri te Salutant!" with the Live Long and Prosper salute.

"Ave, Imperator," Alex muttered, then, louder, "Knock it off, Em. This is either gonna be bad, or it's gonna be really bad. The more you joke before..." he trailed off. Humor bleached out of him like color from bone. He reached for the radios they'd been given, microphones pinned to lapels. "I've got a visual on the Glass Line. And a body."

The three other flashlights tracked Alex's. There, in the blank midnight ghost-town was a single man on a park bench. Dead. Blood dripped around his eyes and mouth, all mercifully closed. His clothes were rumpled and damp with an ooze of fluids. That and the glass ashes blowing on the wind had erased his identity. This could have been a businessman. It could have been a tourist, or maybe a homeless person. Someone's father. Maybe their mother. Maybe black or white. None of it mattered. They were unidentified. They were everyone. Maybe they had gone unwarned. No hands had reached them, no cries guided them out of danger. Maybe they'd wondered where everyone was. Maybe they'd known, and come here to loot. At some point they'd begun feeling ill, had sat down here, and their life had drawn closed around them. 

The Glass Line approached. It was far more impressive this time, driven by an exponentially larger hole than the tiny pin-hole in Mrs. Cumming's yard. It curled through the leaves of a nearby plant, burning the color out, turning it to something frail and translucent. Some of these defied gravity and remained, a monument to life now extinguished. Most of them collapsed like the spans of a dying bridge, letting go with the same majesty and dissolving into more dust. It skated across the ground in great billows, matching the swoops of glowing energy that drove on down the street. Great arcs, what Em called aural spikes, rotated through the line as it devoured stem, leaves, petals, wood...and now skin, as it reached the body. It started on the body with a soft, high sound, something that demanded metaphor, dreams breaking, hope dying. It crested through skin, drawing it tight, draining blood, draining life. It etched through organic clothing, causing it to fall around the shoulders of this long-dead human, stopped only by the polyester jacket he had been wearing.

And then it was done, and rolling over them in a great white storm. The light played over Hawk, over Emile, over Alex and Dyson. It had a cool beauty, an evanescence driven harsh by the fact of its lethality. It left them alive. That felt almost worse. It should have killed them with its beauty, left them unable to experience what it left behind. 

The body was now unrecognizable as a human. Its features were blunted by glass. Only the impression of a scream was left, for a handful of seconds before the neck, weakened into inorganic insensibility, shattered under the weight and angle. The head hit the ground, nothing but beige crystal.

Nothing but Glass.

Em said, conversationally, "This is it. This is our warning from the universe. It's only going to get worse from here."

"Oh, my God," Hawk whispered.

And looked in horror at the zoo. There'd been hundreds of people in there when this was set off. Hundreds.