Chapter 3: The Forever Tower – Part 3

The thing that frightened me the most about the plague sectors was how thin the line of walkers was drawn. I couldn’t take my normal path along the edge of the group, couldn’t jump forwards or push through; I was forced to the same crawling pace as everyone else. I kept my hands close to my chest and my eyes darting around as we moved forwards, my attention jumping from frozen to frozen as I watched their movements with care.

Not everyone treated danger with the same precaution. Sometimes I came across people whose survival into adulthood was nothing short of a miracle, if miracles could really be believed in, who seemed to possess such dwindling regard for their own security or that of those around them that I had to wonder how they even made it through a single day. It wasn’t that they were brave beyond their merits or hurled themselves willingly into danger; it was just that they paid so little attention to the world around them. I would see them walking with their heads down, their pace hurried, along the outside of the line, no matter the circumstance. Where I knew when to join the crowd, their impatience drove them ever faster.

There was one approaching now. The first I knew of it was the vague sound of muttering and shuffling, a noise that drew a turn of the head from me as I glanced over my shoulder. This particular fool had more obstinance than most, pushing people out of his way as he shoved alongside the line. There was a little awareness in him, at least, as he tried to keep close to the centre, but his haste to move on was putting himself and all those around him in danger. As he reached me, I took a small preemptive step as far sideways as I could afford in good confidence and muttered a few words of hurried advice.

‘Slow down or you’ll get someone infected.’

He didn’t pay me any mind. Perhaps he hadn’t heard me, or if he had, perhaps the words had simply drifted in one ear and out the other as a leaf upon the wind. That was always the way with things when I tried to help someone. If they listened to my advice enough to grasp the meaning of the words then they’d still consciously discard it. I’d spent a while wondering if it was the way I worded things, or something to do with my looks, but everyone in the world was gruff and tired and dirty; I’d long since concluded that many people simply didn’t want to be helped. To do that, they’d have to admit they had a problem.

Was that how the old man had felt, the one who’d told me so long ago to keep going? Had he longed for years, decades even, to have but a single word he spoke heeded by those who needed it? Had I provided him some solace, then, in his final moments, that his last act would have at least some impact, on someone’s life, somewhere, even if in the end that life would amount to just as little as his own? Maybe then it was duty that spurred me to try again and again, after every failure. To pass on the legacy. If his words carried me to help another, and them to another, over and over, then in some small way he would live forever.

My thoughts fading away into a cold blankness of mind, I watched the careless man push ahead. Wise people stepped aside as I had. People like him were shoved aside. One stumbled, and I held my breath as I thought they might fall, but they caught themself and slipped back into the line; a lucky survivor. I watched as the frozen they’d wavered beside slowly retracted their hand. The fool pushed on, disappearing around the corner and out of sight.

I thought I might make a silent bet with myself on whether I’d see him again, but as I turned that same corner it was already over. I watched, shuffling forwards with the line, as he sank to his knees by the side of the corridor and stared at his hand. When I reached him I looked down and saw his eyes were wide with fear. Beside him, one of the frozen still sat with their arm outstretched. I closed my eyes briefly.

‘I’m sorry,’ I told the man quietly as we moved past. ‘I warned you.’

He didn’t reply.

I never believed in gods in my youth. You grow up hearing the legends of creators and protectors, rulers on high who forged the world from nothing and raised humanity from the earth, who made the world as it is all in aid of some great and unknowable aim. Some people call them benevolent, others call them destroyers, and some people say they just are. I never believed in gods because I didn’t think any of them would make a world like this, not because they wouldn’t condemn their creations to such damning existence, but because if I were a god, this world would bore me terribly.

But over the years I had found faith in something beyond the world of matter and sense. Not exactly a will or intent, nothing quite so advanced as all that, but a thing which given a watchful eye and an attentive mind I was sure anyone should be able to observe. I saw it then, looking back at that kneeling man who had until that moment lived with such disregard for himself and his actions. The memory that the future holds of the past, it holds strong. Sometimes the repercussions were swift, sometimes they were slow, but every action impressed itself upon an individual like a mark on their skin. A seed sown without care will always reap a cruel crop.

Then something shattered my thoughts. There was a commotion ahead. Shouting, a scuffle between two figures I couldn’t make out at the base of the stairs. The line came to a halt. My breath caught in my throat as my heart quickened. Such a thing, this cessation of the ever-upwards movement, had only happened once before in all my time. It had terrified me then as I’d lost myself in the thought that walls might sing to me, but now, here, with the infected all around…

I lowered my head and placed a hand over my eyes, counting slowly under my breath. That was the way my mother had taught me, before I lost her. Count. One. Two. Three. All the way to fifty. Slow your breath. Slow your heart. Be calm. But be alert. I slid my hand down below my eyes and looked up. Whatever was happening hadn’t quietened down. It was getting louder. I glanced to my right and saw one of the corridors, its shadowy lengths receding from me so far away until the darkness consumed them altogether and I could see no further.

When the faintest cool breeze tickled my hair against my neck, it seemed that the corridor had breathed a whisper so faint it was almost silent. The ridiculousness of my situation drew a small laugh from me, and in turn a frown and a glance from the person behind me. When my eyes returned to the corridor, I saw someone flit past. They were quick, quiet, dressed darkly, moving from one door to the other in almost the blink of an eye. But I saw them.

No one was in the corridors. No one went there. No one even spoke about the corridors.

I glanced back towards the stairs. The commotion was growing. Somehow something had sparked the people there to furious confrontation, and a fire once stoked flares all the brighter. I saw a fist thrown. I had never seen violence before, and yet something about these people… they were all so ready to indulge, to rain blows against one anothers’ bodies until someone’s gave in. And that chaos had begun to spread back the way; as some people tried to stop the violence and others tried to propogate it, it jumped from mind to mind like a song that begs all who hear it to tap their feet in time and join the dance.

I looked to my left. One of the frozen sat there, infected, staring towards the fight. The fight that was falling down the line towards me. I couldn’t move left. I moved right, sidestepping out of the line, between the grasping hands of two more infected and into…

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