Not for this.
* * *
Zach Jonas was doing a standup on the steps of the Capitol Building, updating the reports he had been filing all day. His tie was askew because his producer thought that looked good. In fact, before each new segment the producer messed his hair a little more, jerked the tie a little this way or that, and had the makeup woman touch him up to look more flushed, suggesting urgency and passionate involvement. Zach figured that he’d have been in shirtsleeves if it wasn’t so damn cold, and the producer absolutely would not let him shoot while wearing his parka. He could snug into it for a few minutes at a time, gulping coffee to keep the wind from leeching the last bits of warmth from him, but then the producer was badgering him to take it off and get ready.
Get ready.
That was always the thing. Prior to the last couple of years, nothing in Washington ever happened fast. For a while the network could have put a cardboard cutout of him on the steps without affecting the ratings. That ship sailed, hit an iceberg, caught fire, and sank. Now, instead of having to pad the twenty-four-hour news cycle, there was no damn way to keep up with all of the shit that rained down here every hour or every day. It was Zach’s personal opinion that everyone currently holding office in modern politics was certifiably insane. Didn’t matter which party. Didn’t matter what their job. They were, collectively, a basket of rabid hamsters.
The producer loved that because of the ratings. Zach figured that somewhere in all of that was his first Pulitzer. Oh hell yes.
So, he didn’t complain about the cold or the stage managing of his gradual dishevelment. That was the same process Anderson Cooper used during Hurricane Katrina, and that worked out.
No, Zach was good with it, and he waited for the cameraman to adjust the lighting and the producer to give him a nod.
“The story here in the nation’s capital continues to unfold,” began Zach, “with shocking and tragic new elements being uncovered following the discovery of—”
And then the first shock wave hit.
The first tremblers had been in Virginia, but the real shock punched its way out of the ground before the news of that reached D.C. No one knew it was coming. It did not start small and build. It happened very fast and very big, and lines of force shot along the avenues, up the sides of buildings, across fields, and collectively stabbed the city through the heart.
Suddenly people were running and screaming and … fighting?
Zach stared in dumb horror as the crowds all around him erupted into a mad brawl. The logical part of his mind tried to choreograph it, trying to turn what he saw into a saner flight to safety from the devastation. That worked, too, for maybe three seconds. But the truth won out, even though the truth made no sense of any kind.
People were fighting. Screaming. Smashing their own faces against cars and biting each other and swinging wild punches.
Behind him, Zach heard his cameraman yell, “Say something, you fucker. Why don’t you say something?”
Zach whirled in time to see the cameraman swing his bulky shoulder-cam at Zach’s head. There was one split second where the reporter saw his own horrified reflection in the curved lens, and then the heavy device smashed into him. Zach fell, stunned and bleeding, and lay there while his longtime friend and colleague raised the camera and brought it down again and again.
In one of those perverse twists of probability, the camera still functioned. It caught every last moment. Every newsworthy detail of the utter destruction of Zach Jonas.
* * *
The president of the United States was at his desk when the shock waves slammed into the White House. He looked up from the trade briefing and stared in blank incomprehension at what was happening around him. Flowers danced in their vases, paintings rattled against the walls, the carpet writhed, and even the couches juddered against the carpet.
He said, “What…?”
Then the door burst open and two Secret Service agents came rushing into the room, yelling at him. Telling him to move. Ordering him to comply. In his confusion the president slapped their hands away, bellowing with outrage. They overpowered him, though, and began half walking, half dragging him toward the door.
It was only when the wall behind his desk cracked apart with a huge snap and pieces of masonry struck his abandoned chair and desk did he understand.
“Is it an attack?” he demanded as he began running with the agents. “Are we under attack?”
* * *
The first fires didn’t start until a few minutes after the first shock wave hit the city. Broken gas lines, wrecked cars, crushed homes—all of these conspired to spill flammable chemicals everywhere. It was inevitable that the worst would happen.
It did.
Then the second shock hit.
CHAPTER FIFTY
THE CAPITOL BUILDING
WASHINGTON, D.C.
“Ghost,” I roared, “shield Auntie.”
The command stopped Ghost as he was about to leap forward to kill. Instead, the dog would stand his ground in the gap between me and Aunt Sallie. Anyone who got past me would be savaged and likely crippled, but not killed. It wasn’t nice, but it was what we had. If I’d turned Ghost on the crowd he would keep killing until they dragged him down.
The guy in the bloody sweatshirt lunged at me, and I bashed his arms aside with a chop of my left hand and hit him very hard in the temple with my right palm. I put a lot of thrust into it, not going for a skull fracture but instead wanting to scramble his brains while shoving him at the people behind him. He took four people down with him, and I stepped to my right and front-kicked a fifty-something woman who tried to bite me. She flew backward and bumped down the stone steps.
I pivoted to evade a punch and hit the next person with a reverse elbow shot to the nose, then shoved him, too.
Hands closed on my shoulders, so I ducked, spun, and came completely out of my sports coat, then kicked the grabber in the stomach. Someone else tried to rush past me and I almost kicked her—but then to my absolute horror saw that it was a pregnant woman. Maybe eight months along, and she made a dive for Aunt Sallie.
I am known for never hesitating in a fight, but let’s face it, some things give anyone pause. I froze for maybe a microsecond as my combat mind ran through ten thousand possible responses. If we’d been alone, just the two of us, stopping her without injury would be no problem. If it had been two or three attackers, I could have figured something out.
That wasn’t this. My back and shoulders were hurt. Aunt Sallie was down, and if the woman slipped past me, then things Ghost might do to stop her were appalling. If I punched her, she might fall and hurt the baby. If I broke her leg, ditto. If I grabbed her and tried to quiet her, we’d both probably get swarmed. If I grabbed her hair to try and sprain her neck—and, yes, I can do that with some degree of control—again, she’d fall. My options were insanely limited.
The microsecond ticked slower than the wheels of eternity.
Then time caught up and I was moving. My body turned, and as her foot came down on the step just below Auntie, I lunged and stamped down on her instep. I could feel the bones break. There was no way to tell if she could even feel pain, but broken bones are broken bones. The structural integrity of the foot is part of the overall scaffolding of the body. Gravity is constantly trying to force us down, and the bones have to be intact to fight the pull.
She screamed—more in hate than in pain—but buckled, falling toward me. I caught her and turned, lowering her down as gently as I could while stabbing backward with a mule kick that caught someone else in the crotch.
Once the pregnant woman was down I said, “Sorry!” And punched her in the nose. She fell back, gagging on blood in her Eustachian tubes and feeling the swirl of a light dose of whiplash. She was done for the moment, and although she was alive and the baby safe, there was no way I was ever going to be okay about beating up a pregnant woman. Mr. Hero. Pretty sure I’d book some vacation time in one of the hotter pits of hell
for what I just did.
Ghost was snarling and snapping, and when I flicked a look at him I could see badly injured people all around him, and his white fur was splashed with bright red.
Christ.
Then two new people came at me like defensive tackles, driving low with their shoulders like they’d practiced this a hundred times. I stepped into them and palm-smashed their heads together. There was a loud melon-smack sound and they went right down. I ran over them and jump-kicked a Pulitzer Prize–winning news anchor, dropped a DCPD cop with a forearm smash across the face, broke the leg of a Secret Service guy I recognized from the old Linden Brierley days, swept the legs out from under a skinny teenage girl with magenta hair, and clocked the junior senator from Idaho with an overhand right that knocked the lights from his eyes.
All of this happened in fragments of seconds. So fast. Insanely fast. While all around us Washington, D.C., tore itself apart.
My back was white-hot fire and I couldn’t get a good breath. Sweat stung my eyes and I knew that I could not win this fight. Ghost yelped in pain, but I wasn’t able to help him.
But then I felt movement behind me and I whirled, ready to hurt someone else.
It was Aunt Sallie. Somehow she’d gotten to her feet. Blood ran down her legs from where she’d hit the edges of the steps, and her clothes were torn. She had something in her hand that looked like a roll of quarters, but then she gave her arm a whiplike shake and a dense polycarbonate telescoping rod snapped into place. With a growl, Auntie stepped past me and began attacking the crowd, breaking knees and ribs and hands and elbows with savage force and ruthless precision. Ghost jumped forward to fight beside her, with me on her left.
Together we met the charge of the last eight attackers.
In all the years I’ve known Auntie, I’ve never seen her fight. She was old, sick, injured, but goddamn if she wasn’t one of the best fighters I’d ever seen. Like … ever. If this was how she fought now, I knew full well that I would never have wanted to face her back when she was in her prime. Church hadn’t partnered with her for her charm.
There were three of us, and we were injured. There were eight of them and they were driven by insane fury and evident madness.
It lasted maybe three full seconds and we fought our way down to the bottom step.
Then it was over.
We stood panting, exhausted, nearly feral as we crouched there, ready for more, almost wanting more. I could see four or five people in the street with cell cameras aimed at us. Capturing it all.
A moment later an awful sound filled the air, and we looked up in horror to see the Statue of Freedom, the nineteen-and-a-half-foot-tall bronze colossus that has stood on the cupola above the Capitol Building since 1863, lean outward. She seemed to bow her head as if admitting defeat, and then the fifteen thousand pounds of her mass crashed down on the edge of the dome, cracking it like glass. The statue turned as it struck, and went rolling and tumbling down onto the upper structure and then falling outward and down to the steps. The crested military helmet punched through the flat stone and broke the statue’s neck. The rest of the massive body crashed down onto D.J.’s body and came to rest where Auntie and I had been mere seconds before.
Auntie leaned against me as a sob broke deep in her chest. I caught her and held her. The earthquake, as if satisfied with this dramatic finale, abated, and everything faded out into screams and weeping, to sirens and despairing cries. I held Auntie as the tears ran like cold mercury down our cheeks.
“It’s okay,” I said, “we’re safe.”
She said my name, but it came out wrong.
So wrong. Garbled and wet and slack.
I looked down and saw her staring up at me with mad, desperate eyes, and for a moment I thought that she had fallen victim to whatever insanity had made D.J. kill himself and some of the people erupt into violence.
No.
It wasn’t that.
Her eyes were glazed and staring. Her lips tried to speak, tried to form words. My name. Any words. But they couldn’t. I could see them fail in the attempt. The skin on the right side of her face looked like melting wax, losing its natural shape, sliding, turning to rubber. Her right arm and leg twitched once and then lay slack as if half of her had died there in my arms. Her eyes looked through me and if they saw or recognized me, I couldn’t tell. Drool ran from the corners of her mouth. I knew the symptoms because I’d seen the effect before. In my grandfather. In a neighbor’s uncle.
Aunt Sallie had just suffered a massive stroke. She lay dying in my arms. The world was broken and there was no help coming.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
THE OVAL OFFICE
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The shelter beneath the White House was so heavily reinforced that even the earthquake could not destroy it. The shock waves tried, though. Chunks of concrete had broken loose from the walls, exposing sheets of steel that were buckled but not ruptured. Cracks ran along the ceiling, but the concrete up there was veined with wire netting to prevent falling debris.
The president sat on a sofa which was innocuously ornate, a leftover from some previous administration and moved down here for want of something better to do with it. He sat in the corner of the couch, fists balled on his thighs, eyes blinking too often, lips parted and rubbery with shock. Eight other members of his staff were there, but not the chief of staff, who had gone over to the Capitol Building after Howell’s suicide. Eight Secret Service agents. Eleven military officers. Aides and advisors. Jennifer VanOwen sat beside him. The president’s wife and children were elsewhere. Safe, he was told.
The air filtration was working perfectly, as were the lights. The sounds of the troubled earth had faded now, followed by a long, expectant, dreadful silence.
“I think it’s over,” someone said, but no one acknowledged the statement. The earthquake had been big. Way too big. Too furious. The TV screens showed feeds from news services, and the stories unfolding made no sense. People had turned on each other. That was as big a story as the quake itself. So much violence. So much blood. Some of the video footage came from cameras that stood on unattended tripods or lay abandoned on the ground where they’d fallen, and God only knew what happened to the film crews.
“Is it over?” asked the president after another few moments.
One of the generals was on his phone and turned toward him. “I … I think so, Mr. President. But we should stay down here a little longer just in case.”
“Yes,” agreed the president quickly. “As long as we’re safe down here.”
“This bunker was built to withstand a direct nuclear hit on the White House, Mr. President. We’re quite safe.”
The president licked his lips and nodded. Then he fished his cell phone out of his pocket and composed a tweet.
It’s okay. I’m fine.
One of his senior advisors, his director of communications, asked if he could see the text. The president shook his head and sent it.
The tweet hit social media with the same unstoppable force as the earthquake had struck D.C. And did nearly as much damage.
It’s okay. I’m fine.
I.
Those words would haunt the president for the rest of his time in office.
As the others in the room checked their Twitter feeds, which had become automatic actions for them, they saw those words. Many stared in horror, or shock. A few turned away to hide more telling expressions.
Only Jennifer VanOwen smiled, but she hid that, too.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
BUSBOYS AND POETS VEGETARIAN RESTAURANT
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Valen and Ari sat at a corner table of the restaurant, watching the drama on the big-screen TV, checking news feeds on their smartphones, listening to the people all around them talk about it.
When it started, the building had rattled, but that was all. Valen knew that sometime soon the staff and patrons would talk about how lucky they were. They’d
tell all their friends about what a miracle it was that that whole block, and a few blocks on either side of the restaurant, were virtually unscathed, while everywhere else seemed to get the full brunt. Fires were already raging out of control because the firefighters were unable to fight through streets choked with debris, crashed cars, or rioting people. All that happened to the restaurant was a single jagged crack in one corner of the plate-glass window. Only that.
It was a different world there than what was on TV, like watching a big-budget disaster film.
The patrons began asking questions and buzzing with theories. Was this an earthquake? Was it a bomb? Did someone drop a nuke? It wasn’t until the news crawl declared that it was an earthquake that everyone accepted it, though with some reluctance. Earthquakes were rare on the East Coast of America, but in an age of global terrorism, bombs were not. As the chatter shifted, the self-appointed experts who manage to be in any given crowd began holding court. It was an earthquake, they pronounced, and when the majority of the crowd began to nod in agreement, the experts started throwing numbers around—5.4, 6.1, 7.6. They mostly got it wrong, Valen noted, citing the Richter scale, which nobody used anymore. Then one black man with a grizzled white goatee and a Shakespearean brow took it upon himself to correct the error.
“It’s the moment magnitude scale,” he said, pitching his voice to be heard over the car alarms outside. There was such authority in his voice that others turned to listen. “That’s what they’re using now.”
The black man actually launched into a lecture on the subject. Valen listened for a few moments and found himself mildly impressed, even nodding when terms like “body-wave magnitude, logarithmic scale,” and “shear modulus” floated to the top. But soon he tuned it out and cut a look at Ari, who was trying hard not to grin. The little Greek was actually biting his lip so hard his eyes were watering. If anyone else noticed, though, they probably thought the man was fighting tears of shock or horror.
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