Chapter 5: Dead Ends

Carlita slumps against the cold cement wall and slides down to sit on the floor. She's been wandering the Embarcadero Crypts tunnels for the better part of the day and now her foot's aching something fierce and she needs to rest.

She leans her walking stick against the wall beside her and fishes in the pockets of her brown-wool knit coat for the protein bar she purchased earlier from a seller in the Church tunnel platform. She unwraps a shred of cloth that keeps the snack held together. She takes a bite—it's good. She knows it's little more than an assortment of ground up insects baked into a compressed brick, but it's well-seasoned and has a pleasant flavor like roasted seeds. Straight from the Market Plaza Bug Farm, she was told.

She takes another bite and chews thoughtfully as she wonders what to do. She can't go back home tonight, that's for sure. Her aunt'll have it in for her, and Carlita's not ready to face her just yet. She doesn't relish the thought of sleeping on the cement floor, though, even if she goes down to one of the communal dormitories. She briefly considers staying at her mother's place, but immediately puts that out of her mind with a scowl. No, she's managed to avoid running into Sonoma all day, and she doesn't intend to meet her now.

Even if she does pass the night on the Crypts floor, what'll she do tomorrow? That stunt she pulled this afternoon could very well get her kicked out of the kitchens. She could be exiled to the Crypts forever! There are worse places to live, of course—Embarcadero's fairly safe, and there's more than enough room for a new tenant with its five tunnels interconnected by a maze of walkways and stairs. But how would she survive? What would she do for food, for jingle? I might starve down here…

Carlita places the protein bar calmly on her lap and takes a series of deep breaths. These fearful thoughts had been racing through her head all day, and they do nothing to help in her present situation. One thing at a time, she repeats in her head like a mantra. Focus on one thing at a time.

She chooses to focus on her dinner for the present. She chews through the rest of the bug-bar slowly, so as not to waste a crumb, and then sits contemplating the feeling of incomplete yet adequate fullness within her belly for a few minutes. It feels good to let her problems wash away like this, to lose her mind completely while also staying hyper-focused on the single problem she just solved.

Eventually, she turns her attention back to her next course of action. "It will have to be the dorms," she decides out loud to herself. The communal sleeping area down on the Judah platform is not that bad, really. Carlita lived there for a few months with her mother and aunt after first arriving in the NBAZ, before they were given job assignments topside. She wishes she’d made more friends down in the Crypts during that short period of her life when she lived here, as it would’ve been nice to have a friendly face to meet today. But Carlita had just lost her father when they first arrived in the community and could hardly have been expected to be sociable.

And it wasn’t too long after they left the dorms before her mother left her too, she recollects with a grimace as she struggles to her feet, leaning on her stick for support. She wonders, as she often does, if Sonoma avoids her on purpose because Carlita looks so much like her father. Miles was a strong black man. He had often told his daughter about his own childhood aspirations of being a linebacker in the NFL, which Carlita is only vaguely aware of being some kind of pre-Fall sport. She had inherited her father's complexion, and her features bear such a strong resemblance to him that every time she looks into her reflection she almost sees her loving Papi looking back at her, which often both comforts and saddens her at the same time. She can only imagine how much harder it must be for Sonoma to face her own child.

As she limps down the corridor sad and alone, more images of her father begin flitting unwillingly through her mind, replaying like a movie that last fateful night on the Golden Gate Bridge. Three huge ice wraiths had swooped down the bridge's suspension cables and slithered toward Carlita's fleeing family like wolves on the hunt. The very memory of the wraiths make Carlita's blood run cold: their long, twisted serpentine bodies covered in angular chiseled ridges and sharp spikes of ice, their faces an awful mockery of humanity, with jaws spread impossibly wide bearing rows upon rows of icicle teeth. The wraiths were massive, each as long as a bus, and together they had completely cut off any hope of escape on that bridge of death.

But there was no turning back to Sausalito Barony—they would have been tried for treason and hanged, all four of them—placing their only safe haven on the other side of those monstrosities blocking their path. Miles had hurriedly tried to convince his family of this, and although her mother and aunt were sputtering with fear, Carlita understood and confidently told her father so. She was ten years old at the time, old enough to work and certainly mature enough to comprehend the political implications of her father fleeing his post during an incursion. And stealing supplies to boot. They had to carry on, or they would all die.

And so, with fateful solemnity, her father declared that he was going for his Hail Mary. Just like that, he was gone, barreling forward toward the monsters with a war cry bellowing from his lungs. He zigged and zagged to and fro, luring all three of the wraiths together, darting in and out until he saw his opening—then he launched himself off the top of an upended van toward the creature in the center. He grabbed hold of the other two and twisted his body with such force off the edge of the bridge that all three wraiths lost their balance and toppled over with him, disappearing into oblivion as they fell through the fog to shatter into a million pieces on the frozen sea far below.

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"No … no. No!"

His heart leaping into a sudden pit of despair, Soda surges forward toward the massive ice wall that looms out of the fog ahead of them like a mountain cliff. Twenty feet high at its lowest point and thick and rugged as a mountain boulder, the ice wall stretches straight across 16th Street, bridging between the two-story buildings on either side. It completely blocks their way forward.

Dead Boy and Soda had just made it past the crowd of Frozen in front of the Mission Delores cathedral, with the last seven or eight bodies still visible in the fog behind them. The jog was incredibly nerve-fraying for Soda. Scurrying through a throng of hundreds of corpses was nightmare-inducing enough on its own. Add in the slowly rousing wraiths and the fact that Soda lacks a proper bludgeoning weapon to fight one with, and his heart was practically thumping out of its chest. And now this! How can they get past this ice wall?

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Dead Boy runs to inspect the buildings on either side, but it's useless. Soda can plainly see that not only have the doors and windows all been encased in thick ice, but the alleyways between the houses are buried in ice, too. There's no way to go around it—they'll have to go over it or backtrack through the Frozen again to go around.

"What the hell's going on?" Soda cries as Dead Boy rejoins him. Panic is clear upon Soda's face, completely taken aback as he is by this incredulous turn of events. Behind them, the Frozen wraiths are slowly swaying free from their corporeal prisons.

"It's almost like someone laid a trap for us."

"Someone?" Soda shoots back, staring at Dead Boy in disbelief. "More like something!"

Dead Boy takes a swing at the ice wall with his axe, but it's immediately clear that the ice is too thick for the tool to be of any use. The wraiths would be upon them before he's even halfway through.

"This is unreal!" Soda continues. "You ever seen anything like this before?"

"I’ve seen plenty of ice, but not quite like this."

Dead Boy sighs, a deep melancholy washing over his face. He clasps Soda on the shoulder. "See if you can climb this thing. It might be the quickest way. I have to hang back and do something first, but I'll be with you soon."

Soda glares at him like he's out of his mind. "Do something?" he asks, but Dead Boy gives no response. "Fine, but what if we can't climb it? Looks slick."

"Won’t know until you try. Now come on—get a move on!"

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"What the hell are you doing here?"

Carlita glares at her mother, completely taken aback to be greeted in such a rude manner. She's just as surprised as Sonoma to meet in the Judah women's dorm, but at least Carlita managed a shy "Oh, hello" when she turned the corner and suddenly came face to face with the one person she most wanted to avoid. And now, after this insulting response, she even more desperately desires to get out of here.

"Well?" Sonoma stands with hands on hips, an angry pout on her face. She's a short middle-aged woman who would still be quite pretty but for her evident malnutrition and the dirt encrusted over her tan skin and in her curly brown hair.

"I came down here for the night," Carlita replies coolly, her composure once again collected. She brushes past her mother and makes for an unclaimed pallet, trying her best but failing not to limp.

"You still live topside, don’t you?" Sonoma quickly snaps back, panic creeping into her voice.

Carlita gives a casual shrug. "Yeah. So?"

"Well, you can't stay here, then," Sonoma says. She stomps over to Carlita's pallet, placing herself obdurately in front of her daughter once again. "You've got work first thing in the morning, and your Tia will be worried sick about you."

Carlita dodges the demand and retorts, "Why are you in the dorms? Aren't you supposed to be in the Ratway? Aren't you supposed to be working?"

At this, both of their faces flush and Sonoma replies in a hurried rush, "Oh, I quit rat-catching ages ago. It’s a terrible job, just awful."

"But what do you do for food then?" Carlita can't help but feel a tinge of concern.

Sonoma shrugs. "Beg, mostly. Ask for favors. Sometimes, I do odd jobs."

Carlita gasps. "Oh, Mamá, how could you?"

Her mood turning on a dime, Sonoma suddenly jabs a bony, claw-nailed finger at her daughter, as if threatening to stab her in the eye. "You’ll be begging in the Crypts too if you get kicked out of the kitchens, young lady," she snaps. "Don’t think for one moment that you’ll find a better job down here with that foot of yours!"

Carlita sits back on her pallet, her mouth wide open and brows knit in a fit of indignation and incredulity. She just wants to be left alone for a single evening, but her mother's barrage brings her mind straight back to that jail of a kitchen she's spent her life in.

Sonoma's adamant, now slicing her claw through the air to point at the door with a forceful holler: "Go back home, right this instant! Now!"

Sighing in exasperation, Carlita rises and ducks around her mother again, almost clipping Sonoma's shin with her walking stick as she goes. "Fine!" she yells. "I'll just find somewhere else to sleep tonight!"

She ignores Sonoma's angry shouts behind her as she storms around the corner and down the hall in an awkward shuffling lope, her stick thunking down on the cracked floor tiles in regular two-second intervals as she ignores the pain radiating up her leg. She has no idea where to go now, but she's certain her day can't possibly get any worse.

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Dead Boy takes hold of the Frozen's left hand with his right and raises his chin to face it head on, gazing deeply into the corpse's terrified glazed eyes. The wraith within squirms, emitting a faintly audible clicking sound as it reacts to his closeness. He ignores it, focusing on the ice sculpture that was once a living person. It was a man, perhaps in his mid-thirties—mid-sixties now—with a short, frosted beard above a fist clutched passionately at its breast.

Focus. Dead Boy forces himself to stop observing the corpse and bring his gaze level with its eyes once again. To look into its eyes. To let it happen.

Dead Boy's eyes darken, seeming to disappear within the tattoos that cover them. He trembles, clutching the man's hand tightly for support. He feels himself being pulled, falling into the corpse's eyes and into his own psyche, like he's being sucked into a black hole until all is dark and cold. Gooseflesh prickles across his entire body in a wave of stimulus that leaves him on edge, as if anticipating the cold slap of water a mere second before the plunge.

And then, with a sudden blinding flash, his whole world becomes white. A heavy brilliant opaqueness floods his vision for a few moments, then just as quickly lulls into a melting mess. This rearranges itself into a scene showing a foggy city street—though as if he's looking through a thin layer of translucent ice. Directly in front of his field of view, Dead Boy can see his very own body standing before him, his own face staring back at himself.

He's looking through the eyes of the Frozen.

Dead Boy concentrates for a moment, and then the scene blurs, rearranging into a new streetscape from a different time in which the ice wall does not yet exist. Everything else about the street is identical, but for the way forward being unblocked. Instead, dozens and dozens of wraiths are moving to and fro, some dragging their icy bodies across the ground while those that are still incorporeal fly through the air, their serpentine forms undulating as hushed screams ripple from their throats.

Then, a massive shape lumbers into view: a mountainous bipedal ice monster at least three stories tall. It's formed of chunky glacial blocks piled on top of one another at wild angles to make a roughly humanoid shape. It has limbs thicker than cars and a torso the size of a dump truck, atop which huge shoulders as large as boulders slope up toward a small round head void of any facial features whatsoever.

The creature—what is this thing?—stomps past the place where Dead Boy “stands,” the wraiths zooming in and out around it, between its legs, under its great arms. They're as friendly as puppies, Dead Boy realizes. Like the wraiths are acknowledging one of their own.

And then, with a hollow, stifled roar, the ice monster swings its great arms wide. A massive blast of ice explodes underneath it, filling the entire width of the street and propelling the giant creature to the top of the building it had been standing next to. With a sound like thunder that shakes the very ground, the beast screams a long, bellowing howl, then leaps off the other side of the ice wall, vanishing from sight.

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