Free The Pure Cold Light by Gregory Frost Page B

unprecedented turn the story was about to take.
    The sounds of Mad John and Celine’s sex act had degenerated into groans, followed by silence. Background conversations drifted like body odors along the narrow alley—people debating the best way to get rid of head-lice, somebody else claiming that Knewsday had pictures of the sea creatures that were coming ashore to rape women in Italy. The weird mixture always surprised her.
    The dull murmurous voices lulled her brain and combined with the warm, confined air to send her drifting into a light doze.
    She jerked awake as there came a rap on the roof of the box next to hers. She leaned up on her elbows and listened to a conversation in hushed tones.
    “Ya ready to go, Pete?”
    “Jist lemme git on my boots.”
    “Naw problem.”
    “Hamany you figure you can eat?”
    “Fuck do you care how many? What you don’t, I’m eating. Bet on that. I axed Bucca and he said it’s gonna be a major feast, like hundreds of burgers an’ stuff.”
    “Oh, man .”
    When their voices drifted away, she counted to five, then ducked out under the blanket. Mad John’s foot protruded beneath Celine’s curtain. He’d managed to keep on one dirty sock.
    The two speakers—her neighbor, Pete, and the other—were heading along the nearest east-west aisle. Pressing her elbow, she strolled after them, disking the sights and sounds of box life. Only the smells eluded posterity, which was a pity in its way.
    The two men led her far up Market Street and around City Hall to an office plaza of broken concrete pavement and the skeletons of dead trees in big, poured stone pots. Blocks of pink granite lay here and there as if spilled by some giant infant. She counted three dozen Box City dwellers milling about aimlessly, and more arriving. Word had gotten around.
    Lyell hung back at the edge of one building. The two men she’d followed went up to a short fireplug of a character and began chatting with him.
    She recognized some of the people from the fires up on the quadrangle. Among the Boxers there were a few deranged characters. Tended by friends, these examples of untreated madness were settled on the granite blocks, where some immediately engaged in conversation with invisible companions or made faces at nothing.   Many of them had open sores, and most wore one or more meals like embroidered designs down the front of their clothes. A bald man, with suppurating stigmata at his temples and invisible bare feet, crawled upon one of the blocks and began castigating everybody around him. His cause could not be fathomed and no one but the other “mads” paid him any mind.
    Through a slit in two buildings, Lyell glimpsed the statue of William Penn atop the gothic City Hall building, but almost at once turned her attention overhead, where the others were looking and pointing.
    Between the towers directly above, skywalks formed a dark cross against the gray clouds. Out of the center of the cross, a tube was descending. Lyell, who had never seen such an emergency exit in operation, was as transfixed as the derelicts by the telescoping vertical tube.
    It touched down lightly, with barely a thump. A big, curved door revolved halfway around to one side. On their feet now, the beggars held back. Even the mad ones had fallen silent. Fearfully, they shifted from one foot to the other and twitched and flexed their hands, ready to stampede at the first sign of treachery.
    Four armed guards emerged from the opening.
    The wave of Boxers ebbed. Some wasted no time in deserting the square. Lyell pressed back against the wall as two characters came scurrying around past her. When she looked again, she found that the vast majority were hanging on at a distance, waiting to see how things went.
    The guards set up a perimeter. They nudged the majority of the mob back further but ignored the truly demented, most of whom were left seated and incoherent on their slabs of granite. As the mob backed toward her, Lyell stepped