It had taken him only a couple of hours to reach flat land and, shortly after that, the city. The collection of structures had risen before him like a small range of hills, low in the foreground, climbing higher in the distance. He had entered the city and made his way through it for three hours, choosing not to rest until he had left it behind him. Other than the sizes of the buildings, he had found little variation marking one area from another.
Now, Vaughn walked on through the city, surrounded by neglect. The buildings, whether one story tall or ten, showed that they had long been deserted. Dirt adorned their sides like spatters and streaks of brown paint—but not just their sides. Every building in the city stood open to the outside, every window shattered, masses of glass shards lying alongside walls like crystalline moats. Land vehicles likewise sat exposed, their own windows reduced to fragments. A patina of dust lay over everything like an immovable veil. Nobody had lived here for a very long time.
But the former inhabitants of the city had not abandoned their homes for some other place; they had left it for death. Bones littered the urban landscape, some scattered about as though strewn by some inimical force, others together in intact or nearly intact skeletons. The remains appeared to be those of humanoids, with two arms and two legs. The skulls were larger than that of a human, and the thoracic cavities were bound by ribs oriented not horizontally, but vertically.
Curiosity drove Vaughn to stop and explore the macabre scene, but he could not take the time away from his journey. Still, as he passed the skeletal remnants of the people who had obviously once lived here, the tricorder and his own eyes told him many things. Beside one fractured set of bones after another sat a handheld weapon. He saw affixed to buildings and lampposts numerous nooses, below which the skeletons of the hanged had fallen in heaps. Other collections of bones lay smashed in the street, the clear result of people plummeting from tall buildings to their deaths.
Vaughn wondered what had driven these people to kill each other, but even as he did so, he understood that no civil war had occurred here. For whatever reason, the hundreds of thousands who had lived in this city had chosen to abandon their homes in the fastest way possible. The fatal wounds caused by the handheld weapons had all been self-inflicted, the nooses had been strung up by those intending to sling them around their own necks, and nobody had been thrown from atop a building—they had all jumped. The population here, Vaughn was suddenly convinced, had committed mass suicide.
As he walked past the dead, he used his tricorder to study the city they had left behind. Readings put its age on the order of centuries, with indications that it had last been inhabited two hundred years ago. Machinery, also long dead, permeated the buildings. Computers and communications equipment spread throughout the city, through every structure and down into subterranean conduits. Circuitry junctions sat on street corners every few blocks, encased in large cubes that stood twice as tall as Vaughn, and that had been dusted brown through the decades.
Vaughn speculated that perhaps technology, or its misuse, had somehow brought these people to their demise, although he could not see how. The other lifeless cities that Chaffeehad flown over had been brought to their ends in different ways—by fire, by panic, by abandonment, by siege—and Vaughn could find no common element among them beyond the deaths of their citizenry. What little information he possessed failed to add up to any obvious conclusion.
At the next intersection sat one of the large circuitry junctions. Vaughn raised his tricorder and took sensor readings of the cube. Like the others he had scanned, this one housed a union of several citywide technologies. He recognized computer and communications relays, set in a sophisticated configuration, but he detected nothing that might send the entire population of the planet to its death, particularly in so many disparate ways.
Vaughn lowered the tricorder and glanced down the street. He was nearing the far border of the city, he knew, beyond which lay more open, undeveloped land. And somewhere close,he hoped, the site of the pulse.If he could put—
Something moved up ahead. Vaughn stopped immediately. He turned his head slowly, peering from one side of the street to the other. He saw nothing. His first inclination was to attribute it to the wind, but the air had been calm, not even disturbing the layer of dust coating everything here. Perhaps just a shadow then,Vaughn thought as he lifted his tricorder, intending to scan the street ahead of him. The result of a random swirl of the unceasing cloud cover—
Movement came again, and this time Vaughn saw its source. A half-block down, on the right-hand side, a figure peered out from around the side of a building. The face looked human. Vaughn watched the figure for a few seconds, and then it moved again, reaching a hand out and gesturing toward him.
No,Vaughn realized. Gesturing him forward.
Vaughn took a step toward the figure—toward the man—and stopped, waiting to see its— his—reaction. The man continued motioning Vaughn forward, and something about the way he did so seemed oddly familiar. Vaughn started ahead again, and as he did, he moved his thumb up onto the tricorder controls and activated a scan.
When Vaughn had closed to within twenty meters, the man held up his hand, palm out. Vaughn stopped. The man peered around, then gestured again, this time pointing across the corridor.
Corridor?Vaughn thought. The man pointed across the street.Vaughn looked there and saw nothing, but a sense of déjà vu overwhelmed him. It seemed ludicrous to even consider that he had lived a sequence of events like this before, but the feeling remained strong. Suddenly, without thinking, Vaughn lifted his empty hand and pointed past the man. The man nodded, as though acknowledging Vaughn, and then he came out from behind the building and into the corridor.
Street,Vaughn told himself, but already his thoughts had moved past that. The man was wearing a Starfleet uniform. An oldStarfleet uniform.
And Vaughn recognized him.
The man turned and started running away, the clap of his boots on the pavement echoing in the empty street. “Wait,” Vaughn called, and sprinted after him. Still running, the man waved back toward Vaughn, as though to quiet him down. “John, wait.” The man reached the next intersection and rounded the corner, disappearing from sight.
Vaughn raced toward the cross street, already knowing what he would find when he got there. He would look where the man had run and see nothing. The man would have vanished, leaving no trace beyond Vaughn’s doubting of his own mental state.
Vaughn reached the intersection, stopped, and peered down the cross street. Almost a block down, the man continued to run, his footsteps still resounding. Vaughn took a step, preparing to follow, but then stopped again. He did not have time for this. Unless and until he could demonstrate that chasing the man would provide a means of stopping the pulse, he had to go on. For all Vaughn knew, he was imagining this entire encounter. And maybe that, some form of mass delirium, had been what had carried the people of this world to their ends.
Vaughn raised his tricorder and scanned the receding figure. The readings indicated a human male, in good health, approximately fifty years of age. Vaughn looked up again and saw now that the man had gone—perhaps around a corner, perhaps back to wherever he had come from. Perhaps back into the recesses of Vaughn’s mind.
In the dust coating the streets, Vaughn saw a set of footprints leading away from him, in the direction the man had taken. Vaughn followed them back down the street, tracing them to where the man had emerged from the beside the building. The footprints ended there.