by Steve Alten
* * *
The black Chevy Suburban turned slowly onto Stone Street. For the last five hours, Bertrand DeBorn’s driver had squeezed and bulldozed and maneuvered the truck around endless avenues of abandoned vehicles that had restricted their speed to six miles an hour. Reaching another impasse, Ernest Lozano swerved onto the sidewalk, the truck’s thick tires rolling over human speed bumps, crushing rodents refusing to abandon their meals.
Sheridan Ernstmeyer was seated next to him, riding “shotgun.” The female assassin had killed anyone approaching within ten feet of the Suburban.
Bertrand DeBorn stirred in back. The secretary of defense’s glands were swollen, the low-grade fever building in his system. Eyes closed, eyelids fluttering, he rasped, “Are we there?”
“No, sir. We’re about a block away.”
“What the hell’s taken so—” DeBorn succumbed to a twenty-second-long coughing fit, his rancid breath filling the vehicle. The two bodyguards readjusted their own face masks.
Lozano turned right on Broad Street, New York Bay coming into view. The street was completely gridlocked with vehicles, the sidewalks clogged as well.
“Sir, we’re blocked. But the apartment building’s just up on the right.”
“The two of you bring her to me. Shepherd’s daughter, too.”
The two agents looked at one another.
“Is there a problem?”
“No, sir.” Ernest Lozano shifted the gear into park. Exiting the vehicle, he followed Sheridan Ernstmeyer down the corpse-laden, rodent-infested street, heading for the apartment building of Beatrice Eloise Shepherd.
Upper East Side
For Patrick Shepherd, time appeared to have stopped. The floodwaters, the flames, the members of his entourage — everything within the physical dimension Virgil had referred to as the Malchut was frozen.
Several hundred feet below his Park Avenue curbside perch was another reality.
The widening aperture reveals three distinct levels of the seventh circle of Hell. The first, running beneath the CFR Headquarters for as far as his vantage will allow, is a vast river of blood, as long and as wide as the Mississippi, fed in part by the gradually progressing waterfall sweeping its refuse from the Sixty-eighth Street gutter.
The stench of the river is as unbearable as the plight of those caught in its chop. Somehow, Shep can sense their aura — a deep, slowly reverberating malevolent pulse of energy, its negative frequency as asphyxiating as Hell’s stink. Men and women. Naked and bleeding.
The souls of the violent.
Countless thousands, their faces appear, then disappear, like tainted baptized meat within a broiling vermillion broth. Gasping desperate sustaining breaths before being forced to submerge once more. Clawing over one another, their focus is on saving themselves rather than on working together to charge the shoreline.
Patrolling the shallows and shoreline are the Centaurs. Half man, half horse, the creatures greet every emerging soul with the business ends of their pitchforks, stabbing the condemned until they are forced to retreat back into the river.
It takes Shep a moment to realize that these wretched men and women are surfacing en masse not just to breathe; they appear to be attracted to the Light coming from above—
— his Light!
Patrick shudders, terrified. Tyrants and murderers… is this the fate that awaits me?
“Help me. Please.”
Shep’s eyes track the plea to a crater-sized hole just beyond the shoreline. The vent reveals a second level beneath the first — an alien forest, the trees leafless, bearing only thorns. The voice is coming from a man in his forties, wearing a gray business suit, collared white shirt, and patterned tie.
Shep recognizes him. It’s the guy who landed on the van… the suicide.
As he watches, the man’s feet become rooted in the ashen soil. His limbs stiffen into branches, his fingers sharpening into thorns.
Flapping their way from branch to branch on this newly formed suicide tree are Harpies. Half female, half bird, the creatures are searching for leaves, plucking each green growth the moment one sprouts from the human/tree appendage.
Shep cannot see what is happening below the Wood of the Suicides and into the third level, but he can hear the echoes of screams, accompanied by tortured shouts of blasphemy, all aimed at God.
A now-familiar sensation causes Shep to look up. The Reaper is staring at him through eyes composed of hundreds of fluttering pupils, the creature’s grin curdling Patrick’s blood. A bony hand reaches out from the dark robe for him—
— another hand forcefully dragged him away from the seventh circle of Hell.
Shep shouted as he wheeled around to face Virgil.
“Are you all right? No, you’re not, I can see it in your eyes.”
Dumbfounded, Shep looked around for the Grim Reaper. Both the Angel of Death and the aperture were gone.
“Patrick?”
“I can’t take it anymore, Virgil. The hallucinations… the guilt. But worse, far worse, is the loneliness… always feeling empty inside. It’s like a poison that slowly eats away at every cell in my body. Only the fear of what happens to suicides in the afterlife has kept me from killing myself all these years. I feel so lost… surrounded by darkness.”
“It’s not too late, Patrick. There is still time to change, to bring Light into your vessel.”
“How? Tell me!”
“Allow yourself to feel again. Where there’s love, there’s always Light.”
“All I feel is emptiness.”
“That’s because you’re afraid to feel. Stop bottling up your emotions. Allow yourself to experience pain and suffering. You must be willing to face the truth.”
“The truth about what? What do you know, Virgil? What did your buddy, DeBorn, tell you about me?”
Paolo rushed over to join them, his eyes wild, his mind in the throes of his own hallucination. “Look! In the sky! Do you see it? A demon!”
Shep and Virgil looked up.
The Reaper drone was hovering just below the swirling brown clouds, its crimson camera lens spying on them from above.
Virgils squinted at the flying object. “It’s not a demon, Paolo; it’s a military drone. Where are the Patels?”
A gray Volkswagen van swerved around the sidewalk, its tailpipe belching exhaust as it skidded to a halt, the mechanical beast’s heavy idle scattering waves across the flooded street. Pankaj was driving, his daughter and wife up front. Francesca was lying down in the third seat.
Pankaj rolled down his window. “Soldiers are coming. Get in!”
Shep yanked open the sliding back panel, ushering Paolo and Virgil inside. The relic bashed and squeezed its way south along Park Avenue, heading for Lower Manhattan.
Eighth Circle
Fraud
“Already we'd climbed as high as we were able to in order to observe the next burial place, standing midway on the bridge with an aerial view over the ditch. Oh Supreme Wisdom, how you embrace the heavens, the Earth, and even Hell with high art, and how justly your power dispenses grace! The sides and bottom were punctured by a myriad of round holes scattered over the livid-colored rock; each was as wide as I, and similar in depth and diameter to those basins found in my cherished San Giovanni, within which the baptizer would stand. From the mouth of every opening a sinner's legs protruded out, from the feet up to the thigh, the rest of the sinner remaining inside the hole.”
— Dante’s Inferno
December 21
Tribeca, New York
6:07 A.M.
(1 hour, 56 minutes before the prophesied End of Days)
The stairwell was empty, a good sign. David Kantor reached the second-floor landing, his legs dead tired, his quadriceps burning with lactic acid from the long bike ride.
Running out of time… come on!
Grabbing the rail, he dragged himself up the steps, each exhaled breath crackling in his headpiece.
* * *
The jo
urney through Manhattan on the ten-speed bicycle had been treacherous. David’s military equipment had played havoc with his balance, his boots barely able to remain on the pedals. But the bike’s narrow width had given him the ability to maneuver through gridlocked streets, and the quiet ride helped keep him from being noticed by the military.
As it turned out, they were the least of his problems.
Racing through the Upper West Side, he had made the mistake of following the Avenue of the Americas. The CBS Building. The Bank of America Tower. W.R. Grace. Macy’s. The stretch of city blocks known as “skyscraper alley” had been transformed by the roiling brown clouds hovering below the glass-slab structures into a gothic scene resembling something straight out of a Wayne D. Barlowe nightmare. Burning cars, flooded streets. Bodies falling out of bizarre clouds… flying sacks of flesh and blood. A woman nosedived onto the roof of a yellow cab. Not from high enough to kill her, so she lay moaning, broken and disfigured.
The sudden jolt of adrenaline had quelled his fatigue. He sprinted past Rockefeller Plaza, refusing to gaze at the multitudes of dead piled high on the ice rink. He continued on through the Garment District and Chelsea. Passing through the arch at Washington Square, he entered Greenwich Village, a Bohemian neighborhood where he had spent most of his college years. He cut across the sidewalks of his alma mater, New York University’s campus deserted, its student body thankfully on Christmas break. He diverted past his parents’ old row house, traversing by the familiar basketball courts on Desalvio and Bleecker Street, where he had logged thousands of hours of pickup games. Like the ice rink, the asphalt rectangles had become drop-off points for Scythe’s unburied dead, the adjacent playgrounds a battleground for unbridled gang members determined to turn the Village into a shooting gallery.
Without warning, machine-gun fire erupted from out of the pitch, and suddenly he was back in Iraq, the unseen assassins seemingly nowhere and everywhere. One bullet grazed his shoulder, another ricocheted off a manhole cover and struck his bike, forcing him to take cover between rows of abandoned cars. Remaining low, wheeling the ten-speed through the narrow spaces, he managed his way out of the contested turf into SoHo.
The trendy shopping area named for its location South of Houston Street resembled a demilitarized zone. Eight hours earlier, waves of locals had run amok, looting and vandalizing the neighborhood’s shops. They had been met by SWAT teams wearing environmental suits and little tolerance. Bullet-ridden remains had been left over shattered store windows beneath the colorful tattered awnings as a warning to other curfew violators.
It had taken David Kantor almost ninety minutes to finally reach Tribeca.
Situated between SoHo and Manhattan’s Financial District, just west of Chinatown, Tribeca derived its name from its location — the Triangle below Canal Street. Once an industrial district, the neighborhood had become one of the Big Apple’s wealthiest areas, its warehouses having been converted into residential buildings and lofts, many providing second homes to some of Hollywood's biggest stars.
Claremont Prep was located just south of Wall Street in the former Bank of America International Building. The private elementary, middle, and high school consisted of 125,000 square feet of classrooms, art studios, laboratories, a library, café, gymnasium, outdoor play areas, and a twenty-five-meter swimming pool. The student body came from New York's five boroughs as well as New Jersey. Well-to-do parents, seeking the best education for their offspring. Twelve hours earlier, the entire school had been in lockdown.
Now it was left to David to see if anyone had survived.
* * *
Having accessed the Bank of America building’s stairwell, the Army medic continued climbing. He was panting heavily by the time he arrived on the third-floor landing. He tried the stairwell’s fire door. Locked. He banged on the steel barrier, using the butt end of his assault rifle. No answer.
Standing back, David aimed the gun barrel at the lock, then squeezed off a round, shredding the mechanism. Terrified over what he might find, he yanked open the door and entered the dark confines of his daughter’s school.
Lower East Side, Manhattan
6:16 A.M.
They had driven without lights, cruising along sidewalks and tearing through store awnings. Leaving Park Avenue, Pankaj had tried to avoid the major thoroughfares, finding it easier to maneuver south down the less congested northbound streets.
Midtown East was especially dangerous, the military presence still heavy surrounding the United Nations. Diverting west again across Park Avenue, Pankaj managed to work his way through Murray Hill before cutting back to the southeast through the quiet, older areas around Gramercy Park.
Entering the East Village, he had had little choice but to head south on the Bowery.
The crystal around Manisha Patel’s neck immediately began to vibrate. “No, this is the wrong way.”
“What choice do I have? Traffic is backed up from the two bridges; there’s no place to drive.”
“My spiritual guide says no. Find another way. Take us south through Chinatown.”
The Minoses were in the third seat. Paolo comforted his pregnant wife, who was lying down with her head in his lap, her swollen belly contorting. “Your son is abusing his mother.”
“Look how well he kicks. He will be a great soccer player.”
“He wants out, Paolo. I was afraid to tell you. My water broke back in the park while we were waiting for you to return.”
Overwhelmed, feeling utterly helpless, Paolo could only muster enough strength to squeeze Francesca’s hand. “Try to hold on, my love. We’ll be at the docks soon.”
Virgil was seated in the middle seat next to Shep. Exhausted, the old man snored in his sleep.
Patrick Shepherd leaned against the driver’s side back door, his injured left shoulder throbbing, the constant pain keeping him awake. Through heavy eyelids, he gazed at the young Indian girl seated up front between her parents, his psyche somehow drawn to her aura.
Ever alert, she sensed him staring. “Are you in terrible pain?”
“I’ve hurt worse.”
Unbuckling her seat belt, the girl turned around, kneeling on her seat to face him. “Give me your hand.” She smiled at his hesitancy. “I promise I won’t hurt you.”
He reached out with his right hand, allowing her to take it in her soft, delicate palms. Palpating his flesh, she closed her eyes, her fingertips resting on his pulse. “So rough. So much pain…”
“I was a soldier.”
“This is much deeper… a pain that comes from a prior journey made long ago. A terrible misdeed… so many dead. The burden weighs you down.”
“A prior journey? What kind of—”
“—something else… a great disappointment, all-consuming. Your actions haunt you.”
“Dawn!” Manisha turned around, apologetic. “Patrick, my daughter… she is young—”
“No, it’s… all right.” He looked at the girl. “Your name is Dawn?”
“Yes.”
“You have such pretty brown eyes. When I first looked into them back in Central Park… well, never mind.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s just… they remind me of someone I knew.”
“My mother says the eyes are the windows to the soul. Perhaps we knew one another in a prior life.”
“Perhaps. And what do you see when you look into my eyes?”
She made eye contact, staring easily at first, then deeper.
Patrick felt himself trembling.
The girl’s expression changed. Her lower lip quivered. Losing her composure, she suddenly released his hand and hugged her mother.
Shep sat up, trying hard not to freak out. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
The sobbing girl buried her face in Manisha’s lap.
“Come on, kid, don’t leave me hanging.”
“Forgive my daughter, Patrick, she didn’t mean to upset you. Reading a person’s face is tiring work on a good day. Dawn is e
xhausted, but there is nothing to fear. Dawn, tell Patrick you are sorry for upsetting him.”
“I’m sorry for upsetting you, Patrick. Please forgive me.”
“Yeah… sure, no worries.” Unnerved, he turned away, staring coldly out the driver’s side backseat window. Somewhere in the distance was FDR Drive, beyond that the East River. There was only darkness out there, save for two towering infernos — the Manhattan Bridge to the north, the Brooklyn Bridge to the south. The two expanses had been destroyed seventeen hours earlier, yet the incendiary thermite used in the blasts still burned, the chemical compound melting right through the steel girders—
— just as it had on September 11, 2001.
Three buildings had collapsed at near-free-fall speed. Two had been hit by hijacked planes, the third building — Building-7, a forty-seven-story structure — had folded like a deck of cards hours later, floor after floor, the skyscraper having been hit by nothing more than debris. While most Americans never questioned what their eyes had seen, scientists and engineers were baffled by events that defied every known law of physics, engineering, and metallurgy known to man.
In the end it came down to a simple numbers problem: How could jet fuel, which burned off rapidly at 800 to 1200 degrees Fahrenheit liquefy steel girders, which melt at 2500 degrees, more than twice the jet fuel’s highest recorded heat? There was no doubt steel had melted; molten steel was videotaped pouring from windows moments before the collapse, and a lake of molten steel had burned beneath the World Trade Center foundation for months after 9/11, despite firefighters’ best efforts to quell the fire with millions of gallons of water and Pyroccol, a chemical-fire suppressant.
Homeland Security had shut down all access to Ground Zero, effectively preventing any close inspection of the debris; still, resourceful engineers had managed to collect plenty of particle samples — their analysis revealing the presence of a foreign substance that should not have been in the wreckage: Thermite. A pyrotechnic material used by the military and construction engineers to collapse steel structures, thermite generated temperatures at a superhot 4500 degrees. Thermite also burned for extended periods of time. And it could be applied as a paint.
