New York_A Bridge & Sword Prequel

by JC Andrijeski

  Apart from that, his whole demeanor exuded wealth, and a kind of easy comfort with his physical presence, which bordered on intimidating. I guessed him at late forties, maybe early fifties. His small blue eyes stared at me, lips pursed as if he were trying to figure me out––or maybe like he knew me, like he’d seen me somewhere before. His black suit looked expensive, as did the silk shirt and tie he wore underneath.

  He wore a high-end headset that shone a faint green color, like the type I only ever saw on guys who worked downtown.

  Still staring at me, he folded his large hands in front of him, almost in a prayer position. His fingers flashed as he did, drawing my eyes to the rings he wore. I noted the wraparound monitor he wore on his wrist, also high-end and blinking with pale blue lights.

  He definitely had money.

  I was still staring at him when he bowed to me.

  That’s what it looked like––like an Asian-style bow.

  His prayer hands came apart when the bow finished.

  Feeling my jaw harden, I looked at his two friends.

  Each of them wore black, long-sleeved T-shirts and black jeans. One wore a dark green vinyl jacket, the other, what looked like real leather. The one in the green vinyl had a shaved head and a long, braided beard. His black T-shirt had a virtual symbol on the front that kept changing colors, some kind of spiral pattern I recognized from a few of the Third Myther signs being waved over the crowd.

  His friend had long, reddish-brown, curly hair and a face so covered with freckles his complexion looked ruddy. Despite the antique-looking jacket, which had to be worth a few thousand dollars at least, he looked like someone you’d run into in a biker bar.

  Neither of those two bowed to me.

  I stared between the three of them, trying to decide what unnerved me about them. They looked strangely uniform, yet on the surface, nothing about them fit. They didn’t fit with one another. They didn’t fit with the other protesters.

  They didn’t fit with the scene going on at the curb.

  That bow from the blonde guy in front definitely didn’t fit.

  He looked like he belonged in the board room of some tech company. The bald guy looked European to me––something about the cut of his jacket and his beard, as well as the tattoos I saw on his neck, which weren’t in English. Next to all that writing, a black and green dragon climbed up one side of his neck.

  The red-haired, biker-ish guy looked like––well, a biker.

  There was something off with all three of them, together and individually.

  Reflexively, I looked over my shoulder, sure they must be staring at something or someone other than me. All I saw was the robo-taxi pulling away from the curb, presumably after Jon used his headset and barcode to pay and release it.

  When I looked back at the three men, they were still staring at me.

  Ponytail guy in front was smiling now.

  Jon nudged me while I was still looking at them.

  “Come on. Let’s get inside.”

  Without following my eyes to the men, he jerked his head sideways, indicating towards the glass terminal doors. Cass followed behind him, hips swaying over the four-inch heels of her boots as her head bobbed to something she was listening to through her headset.

  I looked away from the three men long enough to glance at my friends, then to hike the canvas strap of the bag I carried higher up on my shoulder.

  When I looked back at the space where they’d been, they were gone.

  I saw another man standing there now.

  3

  FAST REFLEXES

  WEIRDLY, THE NEW guy was staring at me, too.

  He looked nothing like the three who’d been standing there before, but the coincidence of another person staring at me from the exact same location made me tense.

  He did wear dark clothes, like the other three had, but the similarities pretty much ended there. He definitely didn’t stare at me with that same, smirking, knowing expressions I’d gotten from the other three.

  This guy just looked… blank.

  Unusually tall, maybe around six-seven, six-eight. Black hair. Eyes of some light color––so light I couldn’t make out exactly what color they were, assuming they were any color at all. High cheekbones. Narrow mouth. Darkish skin. Almond-shaped eyes that threw his ethnicity into question. Something about those eyes and his angular features puzzled me.

  I didn’t usually care much, what ethnicity people are.

  With him, I wanted to know.

  He wore dark clothes, like I said, but his looked neither business-conservative nor biker club casual. If I had to call them something, I’d probably go for “high-end functional.” No suit, but a well-cut black jacket, a form-fitting black T-shirt, low boots, and ribbed dark pants that looked like something you’d see in a boutique motorcycle shop.

  Everything he wore looked expensive, and like it fit him perfectly.

  The latter might not have been strange if not for his unusual height. As it was, I wondered if the clothes were tailored to fit him like that.

  Honestly, he was kind of hot.

  There was something weird about him, though, even beyond the coincidence of him standing there, staring at me, right after those three guys had done more or less the same thing. There was a stillness to him, like a held breath––something that felt impenetrable.

  His expression didn’t move.

  Again, I looked over my shoulder, trying to decide what the hell was going on behind me that I was missing.

  When I looked back, the new guy had also disappeared.

  I jumped, shocked by the suddenness of it.

  Then, looking around, I tried to find him. The crowd of protesters seemed to have swallowed all four of them, though. All I saw was people shouting, waving signs.

  “Al!” Jon called from by the glass doors. He tapped his watch meaningfully when I turned, scowling. “We’re already late. We need to check in.”

  Frowning in the direction where I’d now seen four men, all of them staring at me like they knew me, all of them complete strangers to me, I tried to shake it off.

  The crowd’s shouts got louder as a second white limousine pulled up to the curb.

  Front and back doors opened at seemingly the same instant, ejecting five broad-shouldered men who looked like private security. I watched them clear a path for whoever was in those back seats, shouldering and arming aside the crowd, grim expressions on their faces, high-tech headsets wrapped around the backs of their thick necks.

  Once they’d created space around the back doors of the limo, a family got out, two adults and two kids, both of the latter under twelve years old. The parents looked more freaked out than the kids by the shouting, chanting and sign-waving of the surrounding protesters.

  From the crowd, a woman only a little younger than me, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, approached the line of private security, a hologram of that same, three-spiral pattern rotating over her head.

  I saw her hock up a mouthful of spit, aiming it at the face of the older woman leaving the limousine.

  When she let it fly, members of the crowd laughed and cheered.

  The woman with the coiffed blond hair and designer sunglasses stared at the protester in horror, wiping her face frantically with her sleeve. I couldn’t help but notice she wore a designer suit that probably cost more than my mother made in a year.

  Airport security grabbed her attacker, dragging the younger woman back as she raised both middle fingers, flipping off the woman she’d spat on.

  Sighing, I glanced towards Jon, who was still frowning at me.

  When he tapped his watch a second time, I gave him an impatient wave. Giving a last glance towards the chanting crowd, I gripped my shoulder strap and turned, walking and dragging my beat-up roller bag towards the glass doors.

  Jon and Cass had already disappeared inside the terminal when I heard footsteps pounding the pavement from right behind me.

  I turned sharply, then flinched, seei
ng the same tall, black-haired man with those freakishly light-colored eyes running right at me.

  I didn’t think.

  I dropped the handle of my suitcase, dropped the canvas satchel––and bolted.

  I got maybe a half-dozen paces before iron-like fingers grasped my arms, yanking me sideways. I tried to jerk away, to elbow him off me––but he didn’t try to stop my forward momentum, which made it harder to fight him.

  It also confused me.

  I found myself still running, stumbling, half-fighting his hands as he pushed and pulled me roughly in the same direction I’d bolted. Gripping me from behind, he more shoved than yanked on me, controlling my direction even as he continued to run behind me, forcing my feet faster when I tried to resist his hands.

  I let out a surprised gasp when he ran us into a cement alcove in the terminal wall, about ten yards from the glass doors. When he shoved me up against the wall, I gasped again, that time in pain when I smacked my mouth into the cement.

  Only then did it occur to me that neither of us had spoken.

  Before I could scream, or even ask him what the hell he thought he was doing––

  An explosion rocked the ground under my feet, wiping out everything else.

  I DUCKED INSTINCTIVELY. I froze in that crouch, my mind and body paralyzed by the sheer volume of it.

  The cement trembled under my hands and feet, throwing me off-balance. The sound was deafening, like thunder going off right where I stood. I couldn’t think through that sound, or even function. It erased the protesters, the man holding me, the airport, everything.

  Before I could turn my head, he forced me tighter against the alcove wall, wrapping himself around me from behind.

  I grew aware of heat, a flush of hot air from somewhere near by, and then I was choking, fighting to breathe. The man held me tighter, and I felt him breathing behind me, his heart beating against my back, through the T-shirts each of us wore.

  In that long-feeling stretch of nothing, I don’t think I was aware of anything else.

  When the rumbling sound gradually ended, leaving a ringing in my ears, there were another few minutes of near-silence, where all I could hear were our gasping breaths.

  Then screams broke out, from among the people behind me.

  The screams got louder as more people joined them.

  I’d never heard screams like that before, even in the riots that happened in downtown San Francisco a few years earlier. These screams were pure animal terror, shocking in part for how inhuman they sounded.

  The man released me, and I staggered, balancing with my hands against the cement wall. I was still gasping, fighting to breathe.

  He moved away from me, half-stepping out of the alcove.

  I did the same, but just enough that I could turn my head. Still gripping the wall with one hand, I squinted through the smoke, looking at him.

  He’d stepped out of the alcove all the way by then, well enough to look in the direction of the explosion. I saw his light eyes narrow, a frown curl his narrow mouth as he seemed to be assessing whatever he saw there.

  There was something oddly clinical in that stare.

  When I stepped away from the wall to join him, he held up a hand before I made it more than a foot, aiming a brief warning stare in my direction.

  “Stay where you are, Allie.”

  I flinched. Staring up at him, I fought to think through the ringing in my ears.

  But I hadn’t imagined that. He said my fucking name.

  I heard it.

  “How do you know my name?” I said.

  I’m pretty sure I shouted it, actually.

  He didn’t even look at me.

  “Hey,” I said, louder. “Who the hell are you?”

  I was still struggling to remain on my feet. I touched my face, and stared at the blood that came away on my fingers from a cut on my lip. It must have happened when he shoved me against the alcove wall, but by then, I’d forgotten all about the pain.

  I wasn’t feeling inclined to complain about it at this point, either.

  “How did you know?” I asked him, still shouting. “How did you know what would happen?”

  He gave me a level stare, those light eyes of his like lit crystal.

  Then, without a word, he moved, gliding away from the alcove so seamlessly and swiftly, I nearly missed it by blinking. I watched him melt away from the opening, heading in the same direction as the explosion.

  After barely a pause where I blinked and breathed, I lurched after him.

  Still gripping the cement wall, I reached the opening an instant after he left it, then came to a dead stop as the curb and the side of the terminal grew visible. Stunned at the devastation unfolding there, I froze in place, clutching the wall, coughing at the smoke and dust.

  I saw the man for only a few seconds.

  Then he disappeared into the smoke, moving fast towards the center of the blast site, which appeared to be about ten yards out from the terminal wall, maybe fifty yards away from where I stood. Briefly contemplating following him, I let the thought go a second later, staring at the bodies moving and struggling on the cement.

  I still heard screaming and now crying.

  One woman was lying on the ground, her eyes blank as she sobbed. Others appeared to be trying to get away, crawling or stumbling through the thick smoke.

  I saw a lot that were lying deathly still, too.

  Then I saw a face and body I recognized. The woman in the designer sunglasses and white suit was gasping, her eyes still covered by the sunglasses, which were now covered in a layer of white powder, along with her face and hair.

  One of her legs was missing from the knee down. I could see it a few yards away from her, looking weirdly benign where it rested on the scorched cement, a high-heeled shoe still encasing her foot. I looked away, fighting bile in my throat.

  Then I realized I had to go there. I had to try and help.

  I didn’t know much, but I’d been trained in basic first aid.

  I was just pushing away from the wall, coughing, my hand over my mouth, when someone grabbed my arm. I turned violently, jerking back, but when I saw the person standing there, I felt something in my chest collapse.

  “Jon.”

  Tears came to my eyes, before I could even think.

  He pulled me closer with both hands. His voice came to me as if from under water, but I could tell he was shouting, just from the way his mouth moved.

  “ALLIE! YOU HAVE TO GET INSIDE! THEY’RE LOCKING DOWN THE AIRPORT, ALLIE! COME! COME INSIDE!”

  Before I could comprehend him well enough to answer, he wrapped his arms around me, crushing me into his chest in a hug.

  Then he was pulling me out of the alcove, his arm wrapped around my shoulder as he began steering me towards the glass doors of the terminal.

  Some part of me was baffled that those doors were still intact.

  Then it hit me that they were probably blast-proof, given everything that had been going on over the past few years.

  My mind seemed to be working from somewhere far away, even as that ringing in my ears grew louder, harder to hear through.

  Jon was still shouting. Now I could feel it through his chest, since he still held me close to him, his arm coiled tight around my back.

  “ALLIE… GOD! WE THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD!” He looked me over then, seemed to realize I wasn’t carrying anything. “WHERE’S YOUR STUFF?”

  I stopped walking, fighting to think.

  Working my jaw in an attempt to clear my ears, I motioned vaguely behind me, wiping blood off my lip as I blinked through the smoke and dust that still filled the air.

  Jon seemed to get the gist of what I was saying.

  He pushed me towards the glass doors, gently but firmly.

  “GO INSIDE!” he said. “CASS IS THERE. I’LL GRAB THE BAGS.”

  I could barely hear him.

  When he walked away, I just stood there, waiting for him by the glass doors while he ran back t
owards the curb. I stared, numb, when he returned seconds later, barely comprehending that he now had my canvas satchel slung over his shoulder, and he gripped the handle of a battered, smoke-and-white-power covered greenish-gray suitcase.

  He held one of Cass’s bags in his other hand.

  He motioned towards me, shouting still.

  “GO INSIDE!” he said. “GO, ALLIE! OR WE’LL BE LOCKED OUT.”

  When I glanced back at the curb, I realized I saw emergency personnel everywhere now. Some part of me marveled that they’d gotten here so fast, but I knew they had an instant response team now, specifically for terrorist attacks.

  More cars and trucks screeched up to the curb as I watched, sirens blaring and rotating on top of their cars. Men and women in white and blue uniforms hopped out of ambulances and police cars, talking into headsets and motioning with broad gestures to one another over the sounds of screaming and feed broadcasts, which only now entered my awareness.

  Holograms ignited over some of their heads, but a lot of those were symbols, so probably in some kind of code accessible only to the emergency responders.

  Then I saw the others.

  Black-clad SCARB agents appeared like ghosts, picking through the rubble.

  Most seemed to ignore the victims entirely, focusing on the scene itself as they stared around at the blast damage, looking at one another without speaking and occasionally dropping into crouches to collect samples in metallic bags.

  I was still standing there when one of those black-clad agents looked at me.

  A muscular woman with strong Asian features and violet eyes ringed with what looked like gold, she crouched on the pavement, a metallic bag in one hand.

  She stared at me, no expression on her face.

  Then Jon grabbed my arm again, and dragged me with him to the glass doors.

  4

  PROBABLY A COINCIDENCE

  JADEN PINGED ME via my headset a fourth time, and I bit my lip, staring at the blinking light in the corner of my virtual display. I tried to decide if I should bother picking up. Jaden had a tendency to get really stressed out about schedule-type things, especially when they were band-related.