At that moment the moon vanished behind banks of sailing clouds, and the remnants of the city were plunged into darkness.
“Look!” Krysty cried. “Lights! I can see some lights.”
She pointed at the flattened debris, almost level with where Canal Street had once run. All five of the others were on their feet, peering into the blackness.
“I see ’em,” Ryan said. “Like points of pins. A dozen or more.”
“Yeah. Flickering. More a hand’s spread to the right.” J.B. pointed.
“Like oil lamps,” Jak said. “Kind of a gold look to ’em.”
Those tiny spots of lights, moving painfully among the rubble, touched every one of the six.
Doc Tanner dredged deep into his raddled memory for a suitable quote. Eventually he said, very quietly, “And whatever walked there, walked alone.”
After the attack of the amphibian mutie, no one on the raft felt much like sleeping. The dark water carried them along, now slower than walking, moving toward the dawn.
“What’s that?” Lori asked, breaking the predawn stillness.
A small island had loomed out of the opaline mists that hung toward the sea. And there was a building, partly ru-ined, that stood at its center, bleached to the palest of greens.
“Missile silo,” the Armorer said.
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“Lookout post for Newyork,” Jak Lauren suggested.
“Pretty house, Doc?” was Lori’s guess.
“I think I know,” Krysty said. “I’ve seen vid pix from before the long winter. I think I know what it was.”
“More’n I do. My guess’d be along the lines of J.B.’s and Jak’s.” Ryan turned to Doc Tanner. “Come on. Tell us.”
“It was a statue. A great statue of a woman, holding a torch in her hand to light the path for the hordes of im-migrants who flocked to the land of liberty.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “I disremember the words, but it car-ried a message. Something about bringing huddled masses from the old world to the new. I don’t… By the three Kennedys, but the wheel turns and turns again and again. He that is first shall surely be last. And the present one day will be the past.”
The sun was rising behind the tombstones of the sky-scrapers of the city, painting the remnants of the statue with a soft pink light.
“Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair,” Doc Tanner said.
the wind had veered, strengthening with the dawning, raising whitecaps as it poured in from the southeast. It rushed through the gap that men before the long winter had called the Verrazano Narrows.
The current of the Hudson had weakened until it seemed the raft was held motionless, moving neither for-ward nor backward.
“We’ll never make it out to the open sea and down the coast on this heap of shit,” J.B. said.
“Best put in. There’s low land to the right.” Hanging on to the short mast for balance, Ryan stared out to where
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beaches broke the force of the waters. “Give it another half hour. Wind’ll mebbe fall.”
It would have been better if the fresh wind had contin-ued to blow.
It didn’t just ease; it dropped away completely, leaving them bobbing, becalmed, riding a sequence of sullen, swelling waves.
The sun came up like burnished copper from a sky that showed red-purple from corner to corner. Ryan dipped a finger into the water, then spit the liquid out in disgust. The spun-glass clarity of the Hudson upriver was gone. There was the taste of salt, and iron, flat on the tongue. A bitter nitrate and oil flavored the water.
And they were beginning to see things on the water around the raft. Jak Lauren was the first to notice any-thing, spotting a jellyfish, its skin a leprous yellow spot-ted with green patches. Its tentacles trailed behind it for better than a hundred yards. Ryan shouted a warning to the albino boy not to touch the creature as it wallowed near them.
“Heard of a man out in the California lagoons who saw a trailing firefish like that. He touched it and died dou-ble-crazed. They said ‘fore he bought the farm he started t’bite off his own fingers from the pain.”
Almost immediately after that they all clung to the raft as something immeasurably vast moved sinuously under them, just scraping the bottom of the logs with the top of its spine. Lori stuck her head over the side, trying to see what it had been, but the deeps had swallowed it.