Shots buzz past me and I throw myself onto the ground, collide with a woman who claws at my arm and back. The street is being cleared from the far end forward, everyone is rushing for doorways and side streets—I want to get low but I’d be trampled. I can only just get behind a bin by the lamppost—the police have run right into a group of prisoners with guns flaring on all sides—blasting, moving barrel first they move start stop shoot—the bullets go over me in both directions every instant—police prisoners and bystanders drop clawing their wounds or flop over like sacks of flour—the air is all made of gunshots and thuds of body hits cries howls of rage agony—no one is taking cover, no one is backing off—

I shake with seizure hysterics panic, I’m moving on all my limbs through bullets dying blood and pain they don’t stop they run in among each other killing firing their rifles not a foot away from each other shooting as they are shot all eyes white, white, white.

I crawl away from the shots, booms that seem to drop like walls from the buildings—if only I could find a gun—how can I join in?

The lobby walls were all glass and broken out, no cover for me, I run deeper and deeper into the building followed by breaking glass, metal walls are pocked with bullet holes—

Metal walls are buckled over with rust ... a tree grows here in the outer wall.

I am looking up at a boll of roots that coil down corkscrewing in and out of the metal and down into the floor, form basins of rainwater.

Everything is ruined—smashed, bizarrely old.

I am bizarrely old. Long dead. Low still lives, in the ruins of the city, inside a vast ruined building by myself.

I look down to see my face undulating in the puddle at my feet, step out of the water with an exclamation. The sound rings down the length of a long, wide gallery, its ceiling perforated by roots and trunks, hanging moss of rust, icicles of melted glass, clumps of black wire hang down like scalps. Through gaps in the wall I see high misty air and building tops, I’m up high. The floor is wavy, rolling like hills seen from high mountain tops.

There is a sort of apse protruding from the gallery. It opens itself not far from where I stand.

How did I get here? Where are the others?

I walk down the gallery, lit by panels of thready sunlight from the windy apertures in the walls. The apse is dark, and it does not extend far. What grows at the far end is not exactly a tree; a shapeless tree, with roots and branches intermingled and a trunk like a bulging wall, like many trunks grafted together. There’s a charred cavity in the middle of the trunk, a natural crêche, and something I can’t make out rests in it.