by Scott Britz
“Look! Look at him! He’s sick,” she shouted, before she had even seen what she had done.
He batted her away with his free hand. It felt like a steel beam hitting her, knocking her through the air into the ranks of folding chairs. She fell to the ground, dazed. A second or two later she heard a scream—a woman’s scream—and only then did she realize what she held in her hand.
It looked like a mask of pale gray rubber, with two almond-shaped eyeholes, a mouth hole, and the flabby sock of a nose. But it was no mask. It wasn’t rubber.
It was his face.
Looking up at Gifford from where she lay, she was overcome with horror. Where his face had once been, there remained only a slimy red patchwork of naked muscles and bright white cartilage. Nemesis had destroyed the network of tiny blood vessels that fed the facial skin, dissolving its connection to the muscles below. His face had died. There had been nothing left to hold it in place except a layer of rotting slime.
Cricket fought the urge to vomit. But her reaction was nothing compared to the terror of the gray-haired woman, who—still on her knees—screamed and screamed at the specter of this faceless man, who had eyes so bloodshot they looked like rubies, who—undaunted—still advanced toward her with syringe in hand.
“Have no fear,” said his rasping voice. “I bring you life. Life!”
To the crowd her screams had the effect of an electric shock. With a low rumble like an earthquake, the mass of people surged forward. Those in the rear had no idea what was going on—only that it was happening without them. The Methuselah Vector was being doled out. They had to find a way to get to it.
The screams of the gray-haired woman were joined by thousands more—screams not of terror but of agony. Colliding with the front of the platform, the jostling waves of the crowd had turned violent, like surf hitting a rock shore. Before Cricket’s eyes, people were being dragged under and trampled. Walkers and wheelchairs were being smashed to bits. Punctuating the screams were thuds like dropped watermelons, as people fell or jumped from the parapet of the Upper Plaza—living flotsam of the brawling masses pushing their way forward.
The stage began to shake as the human flood poured over onto it. In the blink of an eye, the still-screaming woman communicant was swallowed up in the mob. Loscalzo, too, disappeared.
A second or two was all Cricket had. Gifford was ten feet in front of her, trying to hold back the stampede. The ice chest lay there, up for grabs. Springing to her feet, she lunged for it, snatching the swivel handle and snapping the lid shut in one flicking motion. She ran—ran in the only direction possible, as the crowd surged in from the front and both sides of the stage. Down the aisle she flew, instinctively, toward the one refuge in sight—the golden statue of Prometheus, which seemed to beckon to her: Come to me, if you want to live.
With a splash she leapt into the outer reflecting pool around the statue, into water that came up to midcalf. Another leap, and she had vaulted into the knee-deep water of the inner pool. Something sharp grazed her shin—the metal casing of one of the half-submerged spotlights just behind the stone rim. Ignoring it, she dashed on toward the narrow cleft between Prometheus and the red granite wall. To squeeze in, she had to step up onto the double row of spotlights behind the statue, taking care to avoid the phalanx of spearlike nozzles that projected from the water. Balancing herself with one hand on the red granite, she trod gingerly upon the spotlights. She had lost her loafers in the pool, and if the glass broke, she knew it would slice her bare feet to ribbons. At last, a sudden deadening of the roar of the crowd told her she had made it to safety. Prometheus himself shielded her from the panic all about her.
Drenched by the wall of water that gushed up from the nozzles and ran back down the red granite, she stood, trembling as she struggled to catch her breath. Adrenaline and reflexes had got her this far. Now, for the first time, she occasion to think.
I’m as good as dead, she thought, looking at her right hand—the hand that had ripped off Gifford’s face. For his skin to have come off as it did, he had to have been in the terminal stages of infection. Every drop of Gifford’s blood and bodily fluids was teeming with viruses. All it would take to kill her was one, if it found its way into a crack in her own skin, or into the mucous membranes of her mouth or eyes.
The screams of the crowd seemed irrelevant as Cricket frantically swished her hand across the sheet of water descending down the granite wall. Did I touch my own face? My mouth? My nose? She noted with horror two tiny droplets of blood on her sleeve. It meant that a spray of Gifford’s blood had shot out in the wake of his skin. She felt an impulse to tear off the sleeve and fling it into the pool.
And then . . . a shadow crossed the sun’s glare in the water. Cricket looked up and saw the muzzle of an automatic pistol inches from her face. A hand in a tight leather glove. A blood-streaked tan trench coat. Two ruby-red eyes staring at her out of a mass of raw, bleeding pulp—like the face of a walking cadaver.
“You have something that belongs to me,” came a rasping, almost metallic voice. “Hand it over.”
Recoiling, Cricket dropped the ice chest, leaving it to bob on the surface of the water. With his gun still trained on her, Gifford squatted down, hit the release button, and slid the cover open to check the contents.
“Now move slowly toward that planter at the end of the pool,” he said, snapping the cover shut again.
The planter looked like a dead end. It sat on a stone shelf set into the recess behind the statue and abutted a sheer granite wall at least ten feet high. “Charles, you need medical help. There’s no point in running. You’ll never make it through this crowd.”
Gifford slammed the muzzle of his gun hard against her jaw, forcing her into the sheet of water pouring down the granite wall. “Don’t underestimate my seriousness,” he shouted. “I should kill you for what you’ve done. But the police will stay out of my way as long as you’re with me.”
The stare of his ruby-red eyes was demonic, implacable. She buried her face in the waterfall rather than go on looking at him. When he drew back the gun, she was so weak in the knees that she almost collapsed. “I . . . I’m . . . s-s-sorry, Charles,” she said, weeping in horror over the ruin she had made of his face.
“Move!” he shouted.
She started forward, picking her way with shaky steps along the rows of spotlights. The roar of the crowd came on full blast again when she emerged from behind the statue. Stepping onto the granite rim of the reflecting pool, she tried to pull herself up onto the ledge of the planter, about three feet higher. She felt too weak to climb, but a jab of the gun focused her effort.
Swinging her leg onto the ledge, she was surprised to see a trickle of blood where she had gashed her calf. Shock had numbed her to the pain. But she didn’t dare stop to look. Gifford was right behind her. Heaving herself up, she edged crabwise along the planter, holding on to the cone-shaped yew bushes and using her bare toes to grip the narrow concrete ledge. Few in the raging crowd looked up to see her crawling only a foot or two above their heads. One exception was a man with a smashed walker, who sat waist deep in the outer reflecting pool, mouth agape, his baggy-lidded eyes wide with astonishment.
Cricket went on until she reached a wall and could go no farther. By then, Gifford had caught up. Swinging his leg behind hers, he nudged her with his body and forced her to lean into the corner of the recess, bracing herself with her outstretched arms. She shuddered at feeling him so close. What the hell is he doing? There’s nowhere to go from here. But Gifford had something definite in mind. When Cricket turned her head, she saw him pocket his gun and reach with his left hand past the edge of the granite wall. Two or three times he made snatching movements in vain. Then he leaned far, far out, grunted, and suddenly pulled back his prize—the banner with the smiling Santa Claus face of Methuselah.
Quickly, he tore from it what had been his real object, the half-inch-thick
nylon rope that fastened it to one of the flagpoles above.
“Give me your hands.” Her first thought was that he meant to tie her up, but all he did was make a slack belay loop around her wrists and thumbs. “Grab the rope. Grab it!”
She obeyed.
“We’re going to climb to the top. You first,” he ordered. Moving back along the ledge, he unbuckled his belt and made a sling with it through the handle of the ice chest and over the crook of his elbow. “I’ll have my eye on you every second, Cricket.” He wiped a drop of blood from his nose with his sleeve. “If you betray me, you will not escape. Remember Subject Adam. I have every bit as much speed as he does.”
“This is insane, Charles.”
“Move it!”
Obediently, she pulled the rope taut and lifted herself off the ground. She wasn’t an experienced climber. For a moment she dangled, clawing at the wall with her bare feet, trying to gain traction against the rough granite. Just below, she could see the heads of those at the back of the crowd who were being pressed against the glass doors to the underground concourse. The doors, locked for the occasion, bowed inward perilously, almost on the point of shattering.
“Get moving!” shouted Gifford.
At last she managed to grip the rope between her bare feet and thighs and began to inch upward, hand over hand. Ten feet to the top—by then her upper arms were trembling with fatigue, and her fingers were raw from the rope.
As she paused at the parapet, trying to summon the strength to haul herself over, a gray-mustachioed gentleman reached down and offered her his hand. “Take hold, my dear. Up we go!”
In a second she was over the top, panting and clutching at the fatigue burn in her shoulders. “Thanks.”
“What a mess down there,” said the man. “My wife told me it was too good to be true. We should have stayed in Pittsburgh.”
Cricket looked over the parapet. Gifford was already halfway up. He climbed quickly, with the ease of an orangutan, the red-and-white ice chest flopping from its sling around his arm. It was her one chance to get away. She had five seconds’ head start—long enough to disappear into the crowd. Anything to get away from that pitiless metallic voice, those ruby eyes, that hideous face dripping blood more deadly than poison.
But she didn’t run. She couldn’t turn her back on him—not while he still carried that ice chest.
Pushing aside the aid of the mustachioed man, Gifford came swinging over the parapet. His hat blew off as he came over the top, exposing a splotchy purple scalp where only a few bloodstained patches remained of his once-lustrous silver-gray hair.
“My God,” said the man. “What happened to you?”
Gifford showed him the pistol. “Get back!” he shouted. The man quickly complied. Turning to Cricket, Gifford pointed with his gun hand toward the other side of the Plaza, toward the entrance of the seventy-story, obelisklike 30 Rock building. “In there!” he commanded, grabbing her arm.
The crowd in the Upper Plaza had thinned as it pushed outward in the mad rush for the stage below. A scream from a fleshy woman in shorts and a halter top was enough to open a corridor around Cricket and the faceless, hairless, ruby-eyed, six-foot-three-inch specter who held a gun at her back.
“Keep away!” Cricket warned.
“Yes,” added Gifford, chuckling at the horror he inspired. “By all means keep away.”
Approaching the brass doors, Cricket looked up at the titanic sculpture of Wisdom that leaned over all comers—not Wisdom serene, but a stern, uncompromising god with a windswept beard. Wisdom that brandished a golden compass in his hand, as if to take the measure of all who passed under his gaze. And uttering the words of the prophet Isaiah:
WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE
SHALL BE THE
STABILITY OF THY TIMES
Gifford pushed her into the revolving door. Just as she emerged from it, she glanced back and felt her heart stop. Across the Plaza, she saw Hank climb over the parapet. He wasn’t alone. Bobbing up just behind him on the rope, with the mustachioed man excitedly offering his hand in support, was the square chin of Officer Dayton.
The revolving door bumped her from behind, bringing her to her senses. For God’s sake, don’t tip off Charles by looking back.
Cricket stepped into the lobby. Its black marble floor made it seem like a cavern compared to the bright Plaza outside. Straight ahead was a long, black counter marked FIRE COMMAND STATION. Two men stood behind it, both wearing dark blue uniforms with the Rockefeller Center logo—four vertical lines rising out of a circle. They looked at Gifford with wonder and fear.
“You want an ambulance, sir?” asked one of them.
Gifford prodded Cricket past the counter without returning a word. Cricket hardly dared to breathe as she listened for footsteps behind her. She tried to slow her pace, to give Hank and Dayton a chance to catch up.
Then, as she and Gifford approached a large, square pillar—just as she was about to give up hope—out of the corner of her eye she saw one of the uniformed men duck behind the counter.
An instant later: Dayton’s voice. “Halt! Drop the gun or I’ll shoot!”
Cricket was pulled off her feet as Gifford caught her around the waist and swung her about. Dayton stood between two columns, gun drawn, in a marksman’s crouch. Cricket saw his look change from resolve to horror in the split second it took him to realize she was blocking his line of fire. Suddenly—a flash of light. Intense heat scorching her underarm. An earsplitting blast. Dayton’s gun clattered to the floor as he crumpled into a fetal position to the ground.
“Move!” said Gifford. He swung her around again and hustled her down a long, softly lit corridor, past bank after bank of elevators. They passed a blue-uniformed monitor at the turnstile of every elevator bank. One stepped forward to question them. A wave of Gifford’s gun sent him scurrying for cover.
Cricket heard frantic voices from the lobby. A crowd had formed around the stricken policeman. Where’s Hank? Cricket hadn’t spotted him when Dayton was shot. Cricket was afraid to look back. But she felt as if she died a little with each step she took down the dark, polished marble squares of the corridor.
She saw an escalator ahead, and a broad staircase to her left.
“Take the stairs,” said Gifford.
Their heels pattered against the marble steps as they hurried downward. There were two flights, making a 180-degree turn at a small landing. The handrail was polished brass. When they came around the landing, Cricket noticed an ornate brass newel, a column of alternating disks and spheres. A pair of open fire doors at the bottom led to the concourse, the underground shopping mall that connected the buildings of Rockefeller Center. She could see the legs of shoppers passing by.
Just as they stepped off the bottom stair, a commanding voice rang out from above—a man’s voice, dry and warm, like musk wafting over charcoal. “Stop right there, Charles.”
Gifford grabbed Cricket and pivoted, shielding himself with her body. “Well, well! Hank Wright!”
Hank was pointing a gun at Gifford over the handrail at the very top of the stairs. He went white as he got a look at Gifford’s face. “Holy shit, Charles. Did you get trampled?”
Gifford seemed annoyed by the question. “Is that the policeman’s gun?” he asked condescendingly. “Know how to use it?”
“Yeah. Point and click. Now let Cricket go.”
“Come and take her.” Gifford tried to draw a bead on Hank, but the brass rails were in his line of fire. “Your hand’s shaking, Hank. Sure you don’t need a drink to stiffen you up?”
“When did you start hiding behind women, Charles?”
Cricket saw a shadow moving toward Hank from behind. Hank noticed it, too. As he turned to get a better look, he unwittingly stepped into the open, offering Gifford a clear target. Gifford took aim, but before he could get off a shot, Cricket lurched, throwing
him off-balance. By then Hank had disappeared. A few seconds later he was back, holding at gunpoint the source of the shadow—Loscalzo.
Loscalzo’s shirt collar was askew and a shock of hair dangled over his forehead. His beady eyes turned to saucers when he saw Gifford. “What the fuck happened to you, Doc?” he gasped.
Hank brandished the gun against Loscalzo’s temple. “Listen, Charles. I’ll make a trade. Cricket for this piece of shit.”
“You’re no chess player,” said Gifford, “or you would never attempt to trade a pawn for a queen.”
“Don’t let him shoot me, Doc.”
Gifford chuckled. “He’s not going to shoot you. He hasn’t got it in him. I, on the other hand, only moments ago demonstrated that I can and will shoot when necessary. Isn’t that right, Hank?”
Cricket was terrified by the guns. “Leave it, Hank,” she said, on the verge of tears. “You’ll get us both killed.”
“You should listen to her,” added Gifford. “Give the gun to Mr. Loscalzo.”
Hank stood his ground.
Gifford grew impatient. “Give it to him now.”
“Here—you want it?” Hank heaved the gun over the handrail. As it clattered down the stairs, Cricket cringed, expecting it to go off.
Gifford dove after it, shoving Cricket down onto her knees with him. Distracted, he missed seeing Hank wallop Loscalzo with a hard left to his face. Loscalzo tottered for a second, then slammed a barrage of punches of his own into Hank’s midsection. Cricket had never seen Hank hit anyone before—not even drunk—and she was frightened by the wild look in his eyes. He tore into Loscalzo with blows that seemed powerful enough to crack ribs. But Loscalzo was nimble. He crouched low like a prizefighter, darting in and out of reach. Half the time Hank wound up swinging at air. But Loscalzo’s punches connected: kidney, solar plexus, groin. To Cricket the thump of knuckles against flesh was sickening. Each man groaned; each roared. She wanted to shout out for them to stop, but she was paralyzed by fear.
