The Secret City Read Online Free PDF Page A

me, as I am her. She’s pushing at them. Punching them. We get in each other’s way.
    They laugh. They don’t realize how strong they are compared to these people and especially compared to an old lady. They pull her away and I hear her arm crack. I hear her cry out.
    How can they do that?
    I use the freeze. I use it as if I’d always used it—had practiced it on more than just one mouse. As if it was my first instinct instead of what I’d always kept myself from doing.
    They pause. It’s working. Except I can only hold one at a time. They’re laughing again. Even more. I think they’ll fall down from laughing.
    I go crazy just like Mother was always afraid I’d do. I yell. I fight. I’m in better shape than they are. Also I know how to fight and they don’t. I hit and kickbox. I use all the strength I never dared use. As they fall, they disappear, back where they came from I suppose. Except the third one. Before I can get to him, he turns a tube on me and on Ruth. Then he disappears.
    I’m burned, but not too badly. Ruth is…. I see right away she can’t be alive. I suppose they thought… I
know
they thought, as Mother would have: It’s just one of
them
, she doesn’t matter.
    Where they stood are three man-shaped clouds. They dissipate quickly.
    I carry Ruth inside and put her on the couch. I straighten her arm. She hardly looks like Ruth anymore. I cover her with the afghan she made. The days are hot, but the nights are cold. I touch her burned cheek with my lips. It’s not Ruth.
    I gather up food into the little backpack that’s by the door. I take a poncho. I take a cane. I open the door and let the cat go free. “Come on, Red. We’re on our own.” She heads for her favorite tree, while I head up the road that goes toward the trail. I’m not lost now. I take Ruth’s favorite hike. She said, “Walk up steeply for a mile from the trailhead, and after that there’ll be a cliff, pass under it, take the rocky switchbacks up the far side. Soon there’ll be a lovely hanging valley with glittery pebbles full of mica. Farther on, cross the stream on the stepping stones, after that, the lake called Long. On the way down the other side, you’ll round a corner and it will suddenly open out to a view of snowy mountains all in a row. It’ll be so beautiful you’ll shout.”

THE SECRET CITY
    IT’S HIGH AND FAR AND LONELY AND SECRET AND
LOST …
around every corner a blank wall or a cliff, streets that end up against a rock face, or that curve and curve and come back on themselves. Trees grow from the middle of the avenues, and from the roofs of houses. They have to for camouflage. Every wall is covered with vines, every roof collapsed or covered with bushes. There are entrances, tall as three men and wide as six, that lead nowhere, or into narrow hallways that end in cul-de-sacs in which one may find a packrat’s nest. Why make it as if thousands of years old, cover it with moss and vines, tumble it into ruins? Why build a park and playground in the center of the city where there’s a jungle gym for the children, but one can’t tell it from the jungle around it? Even standing right on the main square, you’d not guess there was a city here
.
    Deer and foxes walk down the streets more often than people and don’t know they’re streets. Wild goats jump from roof to roof, pediment to pediment, and see no difference here than jumping from their cliffs. Owls hoot all night or scream
.
    But the animals depicted over the doorways and along the pediments are none of these, they’re of a kind never seen on this world. Birds that have no feet and look like fish with wings, feathered creatures with five eyes. There’s an animal that’s all mouth and hardly any body. There’s an animal that looks like a flower but with teeth and six long leafy legs
.
    All this, not only so the young ones can see something of the world they’re missing, but so they can grow up among their own kind and not be contaminated