by Matt James
Jill stumbles, but I catch her, riding the rolling pier underfoot like the siren did the truck’s roof. We watch as the last remaining blocks go down. The crumbling buildings are quickly followed by a cracking sound from the Henry Hudson Parkway. The concrete and asphalt violently split as the red dome of demon light continues to expand, shooting arcs of electricity into the sky.
I turn and run for the canoe, tipping it over with my foot. It thumps to the pier, bouncing and rattling. I then quickly shove with all my might and send it into the water. Thankfully, it’s still tied off and doesn’t get tossed away by the rough chop of the water below.
“I have to put you down, okay?” She nods, shivering. “I’ll help you climb in, and then I’ll untie us, and we’ll be as good as gone.”
She shudders and steps down into the rolling water, finding the metal canoe. Then, she lets go and half-falls the rest of the way, landing in the bottom with a hard bang.
Sorry.
I rush back to the shack housing the ores and lifejackets, searching for a pair of each. I happily find a set of oars, but only see a single lifejacket remaining. If we go in, Jill will at least be safe from drowning, but the cold will get her. Swimming won’t be an option, not with her arm. She’ll have to float and pray she doesn’t freeze to death. I’m screwed either way and do my best not to dwell on it.
Taking my position at the center of the boat, I watch as dozens upon dozens of Unseen flood over the crumbling highway, doing their best to escape the wrath of Abaddon. Damn, I think, seeing that most of them are greys, having themselves been touched by the light. I continue observing their failed escape as some even fling themselves into the churning surf, sinking like stones. The sight of them disappearing into the murky water actually relieves me some. We are finally free of their hunt and won’t have to watch our backs any longer.
Unless the mainland was affected?
It’s a question I have no way of answering.
I quickly slip the lifejacket over Jill’s head and buckle it around her waist. Only finding the one, I just sit back down and begin our torturous journey west, cringing as I pull back on the oars.
We’re making little-to-no progress and are only about twenty feet from the shore. The pier is another twenty or so to our left as it extends farther out into the river.
Cursing inwardly, I stop, not having the leverage or strength to dig as hard as I normally would. My hands are ice, and my shoulder and hand are on fire. The only warmth I can feel is the blood seeping from the wounds. My left hand slips from its oar, covered in blood, compromising my grip.
“Come on you bastard!” I yell at the canoe, watching as water slowly leaks in through the crack in the other end of the hull. If it worsens, we could be in some serious trouble.
I ditch one of the oars and turn sideways, opting for a kayaking type of stroke. Relieving some of the stress on my shredded left arm, we actually start to gain a little more distance from the bank. We even begin to pick up a bit more speed too. This change in momentum gives me a little more hope, but the increasing wind chills it. We just aren’t going fast enough.
Facing west through the swirling wind, I see something pass overhead. It’s hard to get a good look without feeling like my eyeballs are going to freeze, but I do my best.
Whatever it is, it streaks across the sky, heading for the island. They’re flying low and fast and then split apart and head for different parts of the city. Watching them maneuver, I quickly recognize the forms of a trio of fighter jets of some kind. My knowledge is limited to the movies and books so I couldn’t tell you what kind they are. Doesn’t honestly matter right now.
Just before I look away from the aircraft, I see them drop something from their underbellies.
Huh? But I quickly come to comprehend what.
“Frank?” Jill asks, shivering at my feet.
My eyes go wide at the realization, it sinking in firmly.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” I murmur to myself.
“What?” she asks, her skin whitening from the cold and blood loss. She’s becoming lethargic and fading fast, but at least her eyes are still open. I can tell she’s trying to fight through it and stay with me.
“Hang on, babe.” I turn my attention back to the oar, stroking as hard as I can.
“What did you mean? Desperate times…” She starts to ask but doesn’t finish. She’s too cold, her teeth chattering.
I again dig hard, getting us another ten feet farther away from the shore, not even with the end of the pier. A series of massive booms startles me and gets me to look back towards the mainland. As I look back to the coast, I see a set of flashes like the sun just blinked to life.
They’re cutting their losses, and are going to flatten the island. They’ll annihilate everything within the blast’s radius, destroying what’s left of Manhattan.
It’s a bold move. You’re essentially taking the lives of whatever survivors are left and putting them up against the number of the monsters. Some would call it the ‘greater good’ or ‘collateral damage.’ Unfortunately, I agree with the destruction.
Three creatures make it onto the pier and continue running down it towards us, trying to escape Uncle Sam’s wrath. I stand and shoot two of them, but the third—a grey—just flinches as the last of my bullets barely nick it. It pushes on at full speed and looks about ready to jump for it… Into our canoe.
I can’t let that happen.
I look down at my beautiful wife. She’s bleeding from various places and bruised and battered, but she’s still a sight I never want to let go.
She’s alive, I decide. I’ve done what I came here to do.
I glance back up and watch the creature go airborne, beginning its perfectly timed arc. As soon as I see that its aim is true, I make my own move.
I drop my gun and get three solid steps under me and leap, meeting the bastard halfway. My plan works, and we collide in midair, falling into the freezing water in unison. I watch as the grey freaks out, slipping deeper into the murky water, disappearing from sight. My subconscious reacts, and I kick to the surface, reaching my hand out to no one in particular. It breaks the choppy surface water, and I pray that someone will see it and grab hold.
But they don’t, and I start to slip back under.
The last thing I remember seeing before I black out, is the hands of Death plunge into the water, reaching out for me. Its fingers curl into those of a predator and cut through the water like torpedoes, intent on claiming its next prize.
39
I awake full of fear...again. But in this case, if you add in a pinch of unbearable pain, and then a dash of agonizing pins and needles, you’d have what I’m feeling. I thrash, or at least I try to, but my arms and legs don’t move. I’m being restrained, and I’m unsure whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. Until I’m told differently, I’ll react thinking the latter. I clutch my fist and yank, attempting to pull myself free and hit whatever is attacking me.
“Detective Moon, calm down please!”
My eyes flick open as I pull on the restraints, seeing a high-cheekboned woman with deep chestnut skin standing over me. She has a net over her hair and a white apron that’s stained with a darkening red. Blood. Probably mine.
A nurse?
“Arms…and legs…” I croak. “Pins…needles…hurts.”
She quickly nods, placing a warm hand on my chest. “You were in the Hudson for quite a while. We barely got to you in time. You’re feeling the results of the cold fading, like when your foot falls asleep. Stay calm, and it’ll subside as you continue to warm.”
“How—”
“Coast Guard,” she answers, sensing the question that was coming. “They saw you go into the water and got there as fast as they could. Your wife pulled you out and held on until the cutter arrived.”
My body relaxes a little, and I lay my head back. As I hit the pillow, I realize it belongs to the bed of a field hospital. I’m in a tent with a single lig
ht bulb dangling from its peak. There’s a cable zip-tied to the supports above me disappearing from sight.
Power?
The humming just outside the military grade structure tells me otherwise. There’s a generator of some kind nearby, and it’s supplying the power for the light. It’s then I notice the small amount of warmth in the air.
Heat too.
“Where’s Jill?” I ask, watching her hands move quickly. She’s finishing up a set of stitches in my upper arm, the lacerations caused by surfer girl’s claws. I then glance farther up to my shoulder and see that the nurse has also tended to the wound that Betty had patched initially, the one from the broken window glass. I flex my hands, trying to get my blood pumping. I wince at the effort, cringing. My left hand is wrapped and hurts like hell, but it’s actually not as bad as I was expecting it to be. I peek down and see that it’s bandaged through the fingers, so it doesn’t look like a club or anything.
Should be relatively useable.
I glance back up and watch her hands. They work fast and efficiently, like operating under these conditions is second nature for her.
Battlefield nurse?
Her eyes flick to my right.
“I’m here,” says a familiar voice.
I look and see Jill sitting on a duplicate cot. She’s getting her right forearm bandaged by another person, a doctor. The older man is methodically wrapping and rewrapping the appendage, seemingly unhappy with his work. Each time he applies any kind of pressure on the damaged limb, Jill grimaces in pain. But knowing her as I do, I’d say the look is actually mostly one of annoyance. The pain is just the byproduct of the doctor’s indecisiveness.
I smile at seeing her alive. “You okay?” As I ask the question, a soldier unties my restraints and steps away, resuming whatever he was doing before.
“Better than you,” she says, smiling back. Then, she reflexively grits her teeth as the doctor again adjusts her bandages. She burns daggers into the man, growling her disapproval. Recoiling back in fear, he quickly finishes, backing away with his hands raised in apology.
“Please use the sling, Ma’am,” he says before turning away.
She blows out a long breath and slips the support’s strap over her head, doing her best to ward off the fresh wave of pain caused by the movement.
Seeing Jill alive and well calms me some and I replay part of what the nurse said… I don’t think they expected to find any more survivors.
Any more.
“Survivors?” I ask, looking back to the nurse.
She nods. “Thousands made it across the bridges and tunnels, but once they started to thin out, the powers-that-be had to make a tough decision and blew them.”
The horrid look on my face says it all.
“There were reports of those…things…crossing too—following the herd.” Her expression changes to fright when she sees me staring daggers into her. “Sorry. It’s what the bosses called it.” She smiles apologetically and continues. “They had to isolate the island before they could wipe the slate clean.”
The slate… Manhattan and the other boroughs. Gone. The entire island must have been leveled, not just Manhattan.
I close my eyes, rubbing them with my free hand. Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island… All gone. Eight million people dead, give or take the number of survivors. It took just days for it to happen.
“Now that you mention that. Why—”
“I think I can answer that question.”
I look at the foot of my bed and see a muscular man dressed in a military uniform. He looks to be in his sixties and has a face that is hard and grizzled from war. The two stars on his hat and shoulders also tell me that he’s a general. This is the man who most likely ordered Manhattan destroyed.
“Detective Moon, my name is General Lloyd P. Gilmour of the United States Army.”
“Thanks for pulling us out of the water,” I grunt, trying to sit up.
Jill comes to my rescue and helps, adding another pillow behind me. It’s then I notice that the doctor and nurse have both left, giving us a private audience with the general.
“So, General… Why did you flatten my town?”
This gets an angry look out of the older man. Not a good move on my part and he makes sure I know that.
“I had family living there too, son. So please, drop the sarcastic bullshit and listen. You weren’t the only one that suffered dearly. You’re alive unlike the majority of the residents of New York City. It would be wise for you to remember that.”
Knowing when I’m outgunned, I stay silent, and let the man speak. He removes his hat and holds it by his side, combing through his gray, balding hair with his other hand.
“At 5pm local time, on the day of the rock’s arrival, we picked up radio interference… Coming from space.” He lets that sink in and then continues. “Unsure of what to expect, we coaxed the local authorities to evacuate the park and prepare for impact.”
He steps closer. “We had a team on standby, just north of Central Park. They were to examine and recover anything they could from the crash site.”
Crash site?
“Crash—”
He stops me with a raised hand and a glare.
“It’s only until the phenomena that was the red-light started that we began to question what exactly was happening. By then it was too late, and everything was FUBAR.”
FUBAR, I think. Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.
“What of the rest of the country?” I ask. “How far inland did the radiation—the light—reach?”
“Radiation,” he replies. “Good call. It’s what we’re calling it too. Only it doesn’t affect you on the same level as the man-made stuff.”
“No shit,” Jill says.
“Anyways…” he says, ignoring her and getting back on point. “We don’t know exactly how far to be truthful. Power is just coming back online in some areas, and we’ve had zero communication with most of said locations. Our estimates are in the millions, which is actually better than we thought. Mankind still outnumbers the enemy by a large margin, and we have no qualms about shooting first and not asking any questions. We have full confidence that we can restore order.”
“How long?” I ask.
“Honestly…” he says. “I have no idea. Weeks… maybe months. There’s no way to tell.”
“Did you try to evacuate anyone off the island?”
He nods. “We started moving pieces and prepared for a full-scale evacuation of survivors but had no idea how quick the changes started. Hundreds of thousands of people instantly turned into those—”
“The Unseen,” I say, interrupting the general. I wave a hand in front of my face, indicating their blindness. “I call them the Unseen.”
I go on to describe them in detail and quickly relate what I went through to get to Jill and then our escape to the water. General Gilmour just stands still as stone, listening and digesting everything I have to say.
It’s only until I mention the light physically touching a human body and turning into a grey, that I get a reaction from him.
He just stands taller, if it’s possible. “We were…unaware…of this.”
I shrug. “Us too. We only saw it happen once. Didn’t stick around long enough to be a part of the encore.”
Silence fills the tent for a moment, but then I speak up again.
“When Abaddon landed. I—”
“Their king is the angel from the bottomless pit. His name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek, Apollyon—the Destroyer.”
“Is that the Bible?” Jill asks, speaking for the first time since the general entered.
He nods. “The Book of Revelation, Chapter 9, Verse 11.”
“So, you think the rock is actually the fallen angel Abaddon—the devil?” I ask.
“What do you think?” he asks, slightly raising an eyebrow. “Looks to me like it was. At least in our eyes anyway. The bible used a lot of metaphors for the people at the time to unde
rstand things better. Plus, the technology at the time was limited so they used whatever real-world interpretations they could to explain things. Like a fiery mountain falling from the heavens.”
“A meteor, or asteroid,” I add.
He nods again.
I’m not quite sure I’d go that far, calling the meteor the “devil,” but whatever happened here definitely counts as evil.
40
“Where are you going with this, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Gilmour walks over to the other side of the large tent and pulls over a metal chair, hanging his hat on it. Spinning it around to face me, he sits, leaning on his knees.
“The people who study this stuff for a living know a helluva’ lot more about it than me. They would be able to fill you in better than I can, but what I can tell you is that we—they—think that this ‘Abaddon’ wasn’t just some random space rock.”
My expression must say enough because the general continues.
“Now we don’t think it’s Satan or Abaddon—or even Apollyon either for that matter, but what we can all agree on is that whatever the hell it is, is bad news for us humans.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. This man of war is under the assumption that a rock from outer-freaking-space is a damned extraterrestrial—an alien! I ask as much too.
“What if it’s just some random event—a contagion that reacted weirdly when it hit our atmosphere and ignited? There’s more than one answer than to say that E.T.’s demonic second-cousin just landed in Manhattan.”
“I still don’t get something, General,” Jill says. “If you aren’t exactly sure what Abaddon is, then how could you in good conscience drop a bomb on it?”
He rubs his knuckles, thinking. “I read your file, Mrs. Moon. I also know that you’re a smart woman. So, I’m going to ask you the same question I asked the president.”
Jill’s eyes widen a little.
“What if the rock is just a rock? Does that make what it was doing to the island any better? Are we to accept that the killing, or in some cases turning, of thousands—maybe millions—is somehow more acceptable if it’s a natural occurrence? What of the earthquakes too?” He continues before Jill can answer. “What if it is, in fact, little green men from Mars? What if they are here to take over the world? Do we sit back and let them do it?”
