...like gaping wounds in their brick skins.

Somehow she found herself walking away from the campus. The street grew increasingly tough. Where before there had been some shops and open stores, now it was all empty buildings, broken glass, and boarded up windows. Small groups of dangerous-looking men lounged at corners and along curbs.

Once, two thuggish teenagers detached themselves from such a group and followed. They called out after her. She continued walking without hearing them. They rushed after her and one reached out to catch her shoulder. “I’m talking to you, bitch…” But, then, at the sight of her face, her blank expression and great staring eyes, they fell back, fearing her for reasons they could not explain.

She went on her way.

The streets more empty still. Finally, even the loungers, the thugs, and the street people mumbling to themselves were gone. She was now among the abandoned mills and shuttered factories down by the river. Around her, they loomed empty and terrible, with black windows and vanished door like gaping wounds in their brick skins.

She could hear the water of the river. The river itself had been long ago covered over. It flowed now through a tunnel under the city, only emerging polluted and lifeless a dozen miles to the east. She could feel it! Cold, wet, black . . . dead. Under the streets. Under her feet. At the roots of the factories that had, long ago, channeled its energies into wheels and rotors, turning machines that produced rifles and pounded the skins of slaughtered pigs into shoes.

I’m home. The words came to her. I’m home.