The Visible Man and Other Stories by Gardner Dozois Read Free Book Online

it.
    The train pulled into Salem.
    After Salem, the tubeline swung south and then east again to Marblehead, and then on south to Lynn and Boston. But Beverly was about four miles north of Salem, on the far side of the estuary. Rowan supposed that there was some kind of public transportation between the two towns, but he didn’t know what, and couldn’t have afforded to utilize it anyway; the commuter-ticket was dead. He was going to have to walk. Maybe it was better that way.
    Up Essex Street, fumbling and tapping in the dusty sunlight.
    Everything went well for perhaps a mile. Then Rowan discovered, to his dismay, that practically the entire eastern half of town had been razed since the last time he’d been through, and was being made over into a vast industrial complex of some sort. On this side of Essex Street, there were still houses and trees, but on the far side, across a flat expanse of asphalt, he was confronted with a chaotic expanse of factories, trainyards, excavations, construction sites and storage areas. Some of the factories were already in operation, others were still going up. The whole region was crisscrossed with deep gullies and pits, and some areas seemed to have been terraced and stairstepped in a manner reminiscent of strip-mining. Construction was taking place on many different levels among the terraces, and a gray haze of smoke hung over everything. East, toward the ocean, a herd of snaky black machines were busily eating the last of a row of old wooden houses.
    He had hoped to keep to the side streets, but it seemed that there weren’t any side streets here anymore. Unless he circled back to the west, he’d have to keep on following the major thoroughfare north, and that was more risky than he liked.
    Rowan decided that he’d have to take the chance of following Essex Street. He had just started to tap his way forward again when wood-pulp geysered from a tree alongside him, leaving a ragged new hole in the bark.
    Sound slapped his ears a heartbeat later, but by then he was already moving. By the time he consciously realized that someone was shooting at him, he had covered half the distance to the nearest cluster of factory buildings, running faster than he had ever run in his life, dodging and swerving like a madman. Suddenly there was a railing in front of him, with a drop of unknown depth beyond it. He vaulted up and over it without breaking stride. A bullet made the railing ring like a gong a second after he had cleared it.
    He dropped about ten feet down onto hard pavement, took ukemi as well as he could, and was up and dodging instantly in spite of a painfully wrenched ankle. As he ran, he was acutely aware of how hot it was under the glaring sun. The only thought in his head was an incongruous wish for a glass of water. Another shot splintered concrete at his heels, and then he was slamming through a door and into a building. It was some kind of huge assembly plant with a cavernous ceiling, full of cold echoes and bitter blue lights. He bullied his way through it, followed by a spreading wave of alarm as he collided with people and knocked work-benches over, staggering, falling down and scrambling up again. As he dodged out a door on the far side of the plant, he heard another gunshot behind him. Then he was tearing through a narrow alleyway between factories. There were rainbow puddles of oil and spilled chemicals on the ground here, and he splashed through them deliberately, hoping that the bitter reek of them would throw his pursuers off if they were tracking him by scent. Someone shouted excitedly at his heels. He ducked into another factory building.
    It became phantasmagoria, a nightmare of pursuit—Rowan running endlessly through vast rooms full of shapes and stinks and lights and alien noises, while invisible things snatched at him and tried to pull him down. Everything was fragmentary and disjointed now for Rowan, as though he existed only in discontinuous slices of time. In one