by Hunt, Jack
Contrary to what others might have thought, a year ago he had a clean record. The worst he had was a ticket for speeding. His biggest problem was hanging out with the wrong crowd. He’d taken a job as a mechanic in Keene, in upstate New York, and his co-worker and closest friend Cole had wanted him to head down to the Big Apple to collect some parts they needed because they were very large and the shipping costs were too much. He did the run, not knowing what was stored inside the engine parts. Unknown to him and Cole, the cops had been monitoring the cocaine business operating out of Brooklyn for several weeks. They waited until he had everything loaded and had driven a mile down the road before they closed in on him. Of course, he wouldn’t throw Cole under the bus, so he just told the cops he didn’t know about the drugs. He got eight months inside, but in Rikers that was like doing five years in a maximum prison. Every day was a test to stay alive. If he didn’t have to watch his back from other inmates, it was the guards he had to worry about. Many had been charged with beating handcuffed inmates then filing false reports to cover up the attacks. It was only one of the many incidents of abuse, corruption and violence that plagued the jail.
* * *
Jesse shimmied up to the crack at the back of the wagon and tried to peer out to find out what was going on. The van was full but by the looks of it so were the hands of police officers who were still manhandling protesters.
“What can you see?” Elliot asked.
“Just a lot of…”
Then something strange happened. All the neon signs, street lamps and hotel lights that brightly lit up the city suddenly went off. They didn’t flicker, there was no delay in one over the other. One second they were on and the next they were off.
“What the?”
“What is it?” Damon asked.
Because of all the commotion in the crowd, it took curious onlookers and police a few seconds to clue into the fact that the entire city was now blanketed in darkness. Not a single light from a cell phone or an office building was on. Jesse watched as cops spoke into their radios but appeared to be getting no response. The few police vans that had been pulling away only seconds earlier had glided to a standstill as if the driver had shut off the engine. Silence swept across the crowd as if people were waiting for someone to plug the switch back in at the main power source, but nothing happened. He glanced up at the towering hotels and skyscrapers through the thin slats while Elliot badgered him to tell him what was going on.
That’s when he saw it.
He took a few steps back and his eyes widened in horror.
Then the roar of the engines grew louder.
“What is it?” Maggie asked.
“A plane. There’s a plane heading straight for the crowd!”
Before he could spit another word, he stumbled over Elliot’s boot and landed on his back. What came next was a mixture of screams, the echo of metal hitting concrete and a gust of wind so powerful it sent the stationary wagon into a roll.
Chapter 4
Darkness dominated. The taste of blood filled his mouth. For a brief moment Jesse thought he had died and had woken up in hell. He saw flames before him, and heard nothing but screams as the world came rushing in, getting louder and louder by the second. He was disoriented, upside down, crushed up against metal by someone else’s body. In between a pair of legs, he saw fragments of the world. Slowly but surely his memories came flooding back in.
Deliveries.
Times Square.
Being arrested.
Seeing the lights go out.
And silence covering everything.
Then the plane. The sight of it sweeping down at an angle heading towards the million people crammed into the square.
He groaned and pushed his way out from underneath a limp arm and emerged crawling over the top of others who were out cold. Were they dead? At some point the doors on the back of the paddy wagon had burst open. One door was wide and providing him with a clear shot of the carnage. For as far as he could see there was blood, fire, and bodies laying everywhere. People were screaming. Police were frantically trying to help those who’d survived. It was pure torture listening to the cries. A father holding his young child in his arms, a mother or sister clinging to the hand of a dead woman and EMTs providing medical attention to others. How many had survived?
Jesse turned his attention to the others inside; he noticed his wrists were no longer bound. The plastic zip tie was still attached to one wrist but the other end was dangling. He rubbed his wrists and felt his head. It was bleeding. His first instinct was to climb out, get away before the cops could shove him back inside, but one glance outside and it was clear that the few that had survived were too busy helping the injured. He scrambled over the lifeless bodies and made his way to the door. The truck was on its side. He was about to slip out when he heard a groan behind him. Jesse turned back and sighed. He couldn’t just leave them here. He had enough guilt to bear with the death of Chloe; he didn’t want their lives on his conscience.
Stepping back inside he carefully made his way over to the woman he’d briefly been talking with. What was her name? Magda? Maggie. That was it.
“Maggie. Are you hurt?”
His eyes scanned her body, but it was hard to see in the darkness.
“I don’t know. My leg is in a lot of pain.”
She had it jammed under someone else so that might have been why. It was one of the protesters. He hadn’t got the guy’s name and by the looks of it he wasn’t breathing. He placed two fingers on the guy’s neck and that confirmed it. Perhaps he broke his neck in the tumble? Jesse rolled the guy off Maggie and helped her out of the mass of bodies. The moment he shifted her, there was another groan, then a third. He shifted Maggie into a different position before moving across to where Elliot was lying. He was face down and as he rolled him over he was now sporting a gnarly gash on the side of his face.
“Elliot. Hey!” He snapped his fingers in front of his face hoping to get his attention.
Elliot’s eyelids fluttered then he stared back at him. “What happened?”
“A plane came down. The truck rolled.”
“A terrorist attack?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.” Jesse paused. “Can you move?”
Elliot straightened up. He wiped drool from the corner of his mouth before nodding. Seeing that he was okay, Jesse turned his attention to the next guy whose finger looked as if it was broken. It was pointing oddly. He grimaced at the sight and placed his hand on his shoulder. The man twisted over, gasping for air, completely startled.
“It’s okay,” he said, then repeated himself. “We need to get out of here. The truck is on fire, it might explode.” Jesse looped his arm around the man’s huge waist and assisted him in getting up. He pointed at his hand. “It doesn’t look good.”
His ring finger was bent upwards. Without hesitation the man gripped it and snapped it back into place while letting out a howl.
Jesse’s eyes widened. “Holy shit.”
He’d never seen anyone do that.
“What’s your name?”
“Damon.”
“Well Damon. Are your legs working?”
He gazed down at them and moved them. “Think so.”
“Good.”
Satisfied, he turned his attention to the woman who had been across from Maggie. One glance and it was easy to tell that she hadn’t made it. A shard of metal was sticking through her chest and out her back. A portion of the metal grill that separated the front from the back had come loose as the truck rolled. It had twisted and cut deep into her. Jesse ran his hand over her eyelids to close them.
Everything about what was happening brought back the memories of losing Chloe. They’d known each other since college. Back then he had his eyes set on making his mark in the city. Against their parents’ wishes they’d moved in together and any time the topic of marriage came up he changed it. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to marry her as she was everything to him. The problem wa
s too many couples went into marriage with good intentions and ended up getting divorced and he wasn’t ready to become a statistic. In many ways it seemed like a curse to him. Still, as time went by and they both ended up in secure jobs in the city, Chloe began talking about it again. We should get married. We’ve been together for four years. I want to have kids. Her biological clock was ticking and by that point he’d even warmed up to the idea of it. Now as he looked back, he wondered if that had been the reason why it had happened. Was it a curse? They’d only been married a couple of months when the accident occurred. They’d been driving back from her mother’s in Jersey in late January and there was a lot of snow on the ground from what he could remember. He thought that had played a role, but the police said it hadn’t, and that the other driver had been drinking, but he couldn’t help think that had they seen it in time, that maybe, just maybe the outcome might have been different. It didn’t help that a few weeks before that he’d given her all these reasons why they didn’t need snow tires on the ground, and how all-seasons did the job if people drove slowly.
“My parents never once put them on their vehicles and they were fine. It’s all about how you drive the vehicle.”
“And what about others?”
“Keep your eyes peeled.”
“I just think paying the extra eight hundred bucks would be worth it. Peace of mind and whatnot. Besides, once the baby is here…”
“Baby? Are you pregnant?”
She laughed. “No. But we’re gonna have kids, right? Once we do, I want snow tires on this car and I don’t care what your parents did.”
“I’d be driving, anyway.”
“Jesse.”
“Okay. Okay. I’ll make a few calls when we get home.”
It had been quiet that night. Just the steady hum of the traffic on the road. It shouldn’t have happened. He’d spent many a night thinking back. Chewing it over. What if he’d been driving? Would he have seen it? What if he hadn’t told her that joke that caused her to take her eyes off the road for a few seconds? What if, what if…? Even after all this time the what-ifs hadn’t gone away.
Twenty minutes later, somewhere on Ninth Street in Brooklyn, a truck came out of nowhere and slammed into the side, T-boning their vehicle and sending it into a spin. It collided with a streetlight, set off the airbags and shattered all the windows. By the time Jesse came to, firefighters were using the jaws of life to get both of them out. For forty minutes inside that car he had to stare at Chloe’s dead face. The only thing he could do was reach over and close her eyelids.
“Jesse!” A voice from behind him snapped him out of the past. Elliot came up from behind him and placed a hand on his shoulder. “She’s gone. Let’s go.”
He kept a firm grip on Jesse’s jacket as each of them crawled out of that paddy wagon. They’d only been out a few seconds when Damon begun rubbing the plastic ties around his wrists up against the wheel well to snap the plastic. Once he was free, Maggie followed suit. There was no fear of a cop stopping them as all eyes were on the charred remains of a 747. Seats from inside were scattered, some still held dead passengers. Fire flickered into the night, casting ghostly shadows off the crumbled walls of buildings, which had been destroyed by the plane’s huge engines. The entire plane had clipped buildings, shearing off large sections of concrete and bringing it down to crush those beneath. Glass lay scattered everywhere. For several minutes all four of them stood there staring into a huge gouge in the ground where the plane’s nose had torn up the asphalt. It had twisted and somersaulted, spilling fuel everywhere. Chunks of rock, furniture from stores and bodies soaked in airline fuel crackled as fire consumed them. None of them had seen anything like this. The loss of lives had to have been in the thousands.
“We should help people,” Maggie said, stepping over a section of the ground that had been turned up like the corner of a book.
She stumbled and Jesse stepped in to steady her. “You’ve taken a nasty knock to the head. I don’t think you’re in any state to help anyone,” Jesse said. “You should probably head home. Where do you live?”
“Brooklyn,” she replied.
“Huh, that’s where I am,” Jesse said.
Jesse caught Elliot staring up at all the buildings. For as far as the eye could see, none of the buildings had lights. The power in the entire city had gone out.
“You think it’s terrorists?” Damon asked.
“Well if it is, they’ve managed to take out the power,” Elliot replied. He trudged on, heading over to a police officer who was trying to help a woman out of a car.
“Elliot, what are you doing?”
“Finding out what’s happened.”
“I think it’s pretty clear.”
Elliot ignored him and continued to walk without any thought to the fact that the cop might try to arrest him. There was little fear of that happening. The surrounding chaos consumed the attention of emergency services. They watched as he spoke with the officer whose face was blackened by smoke. Jesse couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he was nodding when he turned back.
When he returned, he wiped some blood off his face with the back of his sleeve.
“So?” Jesse asked.
“She has no idea. They heard nothing. But I have a gut feeling I know.”
Elliot walked past them and Jesse grabbed him by the arm. “What?”
“Well there are only two things that can take out the power, stop cars and make planes fall out of the sky. Either a solar flare or a nuke. And with all the shit that’s been happening in the news my money is on a nuke.”
“A nuclear bomb?”
“An EMP. Electromagnetic pulse.”
“You want to clarify?”
He sighed. “Imagine for a minute a nuclear bomb is detonated two hundred miles somewhere above the United States. It has the power to fry anything that relies on electricity. Computers, phones, newer vehicles that rely on computer circuitry. Look around you. Can you hear anything besides people crying? No sirens. No vehicles operating. That’s why that plane dropped out of the sky. That’s why all these lights are off in the buildings, and why none of these survivors are on phones calling home. Nothing works. It’s thrown us back into the 1800s.”
He shrugged Jesse’s hand away and walked a short distance. Jesse stood there trying to process it all. His life had been hard enough as it was but what now? He turned and jogged over to where Elliot was.
“Okay, so the power will come back on, right? I mean. Maybe not immediately but in a day or so, yeah?”
He scoffed. “Maybe. Maybe not. I wouldn’t bank on it.”
Damon looked at the carnage around them as he walked over. “For someone who looks and smells like he lives on the streets, you sure know a lot about this. How come?”
He didn’t hesitate in responding. “I was in the military. We were taught about it.”
“How to survive it?”
“Something like that,” he said walking over to a dead body and beginning to root through the person’s pockets.
“What the hell are you doing?” Maggie asked.
“Seeing if there is anything useful.”
Maggie hobbled over. “Have some respect for the dead.”
“I do. I’m going to use whatever he might have to stay alive. I’d recommend you do the same.”
“Are you joking?”
“No, and you better get with the program quick because if this was a nuke or solar flare, things are only going to get worse.”
“Program? What are you on about? The lights have gone out, a plane has crashed, we should be helping, not stealing.”
“You do whatever you have to do.”
He moved on to the next person and continued rooting through pockets. Jesse scanned the area looking at those that were on the ground but still moving. He knew first aid, but it had been a while since he’d gone through any of it. While he thought about getting out of there because he had no idea what danger they were in, how could he leave
these people? The police were overwhelmed. Many of them were dead themselves. The plane had literally cut through people like a hot knife through butter. They didn’t stand a chance. There was nowhere they could go. Some of them had been trampled underfoot but most had been swept away by the plane, crushed or decapitated. The arm of a young child came into his line of sight and he felt his stomach lurch. Jesse had never been in a war but he imagined that the battlefield must look and sound a lot like this. Through the thick black smoke that drifted over the bodies of the living and dead, he spotted a woman whose pant legs were covered in blood. He hurried over and stooped down to check on her.
“Ma’am.”
Without hesitation, she pointed off into a crowd of people.
“Please. My daughter.”
He cast a glance over his shoulder.
“What does she look like?”
“Blonde, wearing a pink jacket.”
“What’s her name?”
“Hailey.”
Jesse double-timed it over to a mass of bodies that were stacked up on top of each other, as if the wing of the plane had scooped over the top of them and blown them over. A quick glance at the surrounding area, and it was clear that wasn’t what had happened. A portion of the plane had collided with the masses. Those on top were either decapitated or knocked unconscious, those below them wouldn’t have been able to escape. The pure weight of bodies pressing down might have killed people.
“Hailey!” Jesse called out the kid’s name, his eyes frantically searching. As he squeezed into a gap, Damon came up behind him.
“I’ll check around the other side.”
Over the next five minutes they called out her name without any luck and then Damon spotted her jacket. “There she is.” Jesse went around to give him a hand to drag her out. From the moment they got a look at her face they could tell she was gone. Her skin had turned a light shade of blue. She’d been crushed beneath the weight of people. Jesse stared at her for a second before Damon placed his hand on his shoulder.
