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risen since the old days, with less being taken out for power and industry.
Now the surface lapped over the rotting concrete of the walls.
The skyline of Manhattan changed as they moved ever so slowly toward the tip
of the island and upper New York harbor.
Now, at last, there was evidence that the lower parts of some of the scrapers
had survived even the megadeath nuking of 2001. Doc strained his sight and his
memory to try to identify some of the towering hulks that dotted the weed-
wrapped wilderness of the city. But there were no landmarks, nothing to judge
by.
Two monoliths, each at least a hundred feet high, jostled each other close to
the southern spur of the vanished metropolis.
"The Trade Center. Has to be. I flew into New York myself, and I would deduce
the year must have been just before the second millenium. We circled over
Manhat-tan, just above low cloud. I saw the flat roofs of those great towers
jutting above the bank of stratus, and there were tiny people walking on them.
I swear that it was one of the most bizarre hallucinations that I have ever
suffered from."
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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.
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"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 ruined, that stood at its center, bleached to
the palest of greens.
"Missile silo," the Armorer said.
"Lookout post for Newyork," Jak Lauren suggested.
"Pretty house, Doc?" was Lori's guess.
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"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 immigrants who flocked to the land of
liberty." He shook his head sorrowfully. "I disremember the words, but it
carried 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 skyscrapers 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 forward 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 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 continued to blow.
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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
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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 anything, spotting a jellyfish, its skin a leprous
yellow spotted 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 double-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.
They had heard gulls, shrieking and crying, all the way from Manhattan Island,
sounding like demented souls condemned to fly the skies for eternity. Now the
birds started to come closer, gathering above the raft, beginning to swoop
toward the six friends.
It was Lori Quint who noticed them first. "The birds is coming," she cried.
Doc glanced at her, as though he were about to correct her grammar, as he
sometimes did. But she shouted again, "The birds is coming." His face
wrinkled, as though he were trying to recall something half-forgotten, but he
shook his head and let it pass.
The threatening gulls had fifteen-foot wingspans and nine-inch beaks like
hooked
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