Snake Eyes

If that was true then it had put the city to sleep too. There was no noise at all. The billboards that had once blocked the view from his window every few minutes were lying tilted or broken on the rampways or smashed beyond recognition at the street level. Through the occasional break in the canopies below he could look over the edge and down into the streets. Looking up, he saw cracks in the weed’s thick cover and shafts of sunlight bursting through. There was no traffic, no construction, no whine of hyper jets. When the gentlest breeze did occasionally blow, all he could hear was the sighing of leaves.

The silence wasn’t merely due to the impossibility of movement for machines. Johnson supposed that he might well be the only person still alive in the city. Everywhere he looked, the outlines of human forms were sculpted in green along the tubular corridors. Some of them were lying down as if sleeping; others were contorted, the vine capturing their last movements in living sculpture. The entire city was now populated by silent emerald statues and the weed that had mimicked them at the moment of death.

The walk to street level was a long one. Under other circumstances Johnson would have taken an elevator or even a taxi but now walking was the only way to anywhere. The spider made the journey even longer by turning at unexpected moments to indicate a different route to the one he would have chosen.

He eventually came out at street level and was able then to see a little more light coming down from very far above. The tendrils of weed had not blocked out the spaces between the buildings the way it had covered the rampways; the unimpeded daylight was a welcome sight. Following the spider, he walked away from his part of town along the centre of a street that would usually have been clogged with traffic. He took care not to trip on the thicker vines, ever wary of ‘waking’ the slumbering carnivorous garden that overlaid the city.

The smell of fresh cuttings and the sap of trimmed garden plants mingled with the unmistakable stench of rotting meat. The streets were clogged with the partially digested victims of the weed, every one of them mummified by tangles of creeper.

When he reached a dead end, a vertical wall of green, he knew he’d come to the city limit, usually perforated by several gates where the arterial roads lead in and out of Tier Two. Now, all such exits were blocked by the new forest. Johnson realised that following the spider might have been nothing more than folly. It occurred to him that he might have been safer back in the apartment. In the moment he had the thought, he heard a sound behind him. He knew without looking what it meant.

When he turned, however, what he saw was not a stream of thick tentacles reaching for him. Instead, he saw the bodies of the dead tearing away from the rest of the weed and standing alone. The risen corpses, swaddled in green vine, didn’t stand still for long.

They came slowly, as if unsure of their feet, like toddlers when they first stand up. Many of them fell over before hauling themselves upright and walking again. All of them advanced in his direction. Johnson looked at the spider and found it was no longer oriented towards the great wall. Instead it was pointing along it.

He began to run. He left the clumsy revenants far behind at first but everywhere he looked more were rising. Behind him the numbers of green corpses grew; to a gang, to a crowd. Ahead he saw stairs leading upward; that was where the spider was directing him. He took the steps three at a time until he was exhausted. The spider had led him to a staircase which doubled back on itself over and over again, leading endlessly upwards.

Within minutes Johnson was no longer running. Lumbering was the best he could manage and without the help of the handrail, he doubted his legs were strong enough for the ascent. His body acted as though he hadn’t exercised for years and very soon he had to stop and rest. Looking down over the creeper-covered stairway he saw hundreds of green bodies pushing upwards behind him, only a couple of levels below. The vines he was stepping on appeared to be dying and turning brown but the green bodies chasing him seemed to be getting faster, learning not only how to walk with confidence but also how to run.