Today was different though. The park buzzed with excitement. Manhattan had gotten a new tourist attraction this morning.
The strange black stone had materialised outside the Central Park Carousel and killed three homeless people during the night. Now it was cordoned off, and mounted police officers trotted between the crowds, sharing what they knew and chatting with curious tourists. The stone was deadly, and no one could move it. A few hours ago, the City Council had attached a harness from a truck-mounted crane to the stone. The truck had tipped over before the stone had even shown the slightest hint of shifting. Three people had been crushed. In the last hour, the stone had started to glow.
The crowd grew anxious, but they would not disperse. In fact, the crowd only continued to grow. Thousands of people were now gathered in the park and business had ground to a halt as employees failed to return from their lunch breaks. Even Wall Street was deserted—and it usually took a bomb threat to drag those wolves from their dens. Everybody wanted to be in the park.
New York was a city of togetherness, and people were gathering in mutual support of one another. This strange black stone had inserted itself into their city, and they would stand together until they understood exactly what it was. The citizens of New York were afraid, but they were consolidated.
An old man stood nearby. He smiled at Samantha as she slid from one gap in the crowd to another. “They’re saying it came from space,” he said.
“What, like a meteor or something?”
“Yeah, I don’t buy it either. You looked tired, miss. Here, finish the rest of my coffee.”
“No, that’s…” She smiled, embarrassed, but took the cup anyway. “Are you sure you don’t mind? I could actually kill for coffee right now.”
“Sure, enjoy it. They give you such big cups nowadays that I can never finish.”
Samantha sipped the hot beverage and sighed at the spreading warmth in her tummy. “Makes you wonder when they’ll stop, doesn’t it? One day we’ll all be drinking from buckets.”
The old man put his hands on his rotund belly and chuckled. With his white hair and wizened, grey eyes, he resembled Santa Claus.
“So, why are you so tired, miss?”
“I didn’t realise I looked so bad. You can tell just by looking at me?”
“The bags under your eyes give you away. I used to work night shifts at a grain mill in Buffalo as a young man. I know tiredness when I see it.”
“Wish I could say it was because I was hard at work all night, but it was irresponsible fun, I’m afraid.”
“Partying with your boyfriend?”
“Girlfriend.”
The old man recoiled. “Oh, excuse me, I never…”
“No, it’s okay. Sorry, I don’t know why I felt the need to correct you.”
The old man recovered and shrugged his shoulders. “Because I needed correcting, miss. Why should I assume that you have a boyfriend and not a girlfriend? I should have said partner. I’m afraid you’ll have to forgive an old man for being old-fashioned.”
Samantha grinned, again reminding herself how much she loved this city. If she’d told an old white guy in Utah she was gay, she might have been heckled in the street, but not by this old New Yorker. “You’re forgiven.” She smiled. “My name is Sam.”
“Ha! Mine too. What a coincidence.”
“No way! Your name is Samantha? How weird.” She chuckled.
“You silly thing. No, my name is Samuel, but my friends call me Sam.”
“This might become confusing.”
“It just might be. Maybe we should go our separate ways, miss.”
Samantha giggled. “Maybe. You staying to watch the glowing black stone from outer space?”
“It would feel wrong not to stay. It has a momentous feeling about it, don’t you think? Like something is going to happen worth staying for. You heard identical stones are all over the country?”
Samantha nodded. “Yeah, but this one is ours. This is the New York black stone. I just hope it doesn’t turn out to be anything bad.”
Samuel patted her on the arm. “I have faith it won’t be. All these people gathered… It must be for something good. I think we can all feel it. We’re meant to be here. Something will happen soon, and things will make perfect sense. It’ll be good, I know it. A gift from God.”
A lifelong atheist, Samantha would usually object to such a claim, but the old man had accepted her for who she was, so she was certainly willing to accept him. “You might be right,” she said. “Come on, Sam, let’s go find somewhere to get a better look.”
“Okay dokey, Sam. You lead the way.”
“Sure thing, Sam.”
“Thank you, Sam.”
“You’re very welcome, Sam.”
The old man chuckled. “You sure we shouldn’t have gone our separate ways?”
“Too late now. Come on, Sam.”
“Okay, Sam.”
***
They managed to find a spot next to an overcrowded hot dog vendor where Samantha bought them both a foot long. Samuel took his with onions and mustard, her without.
“Taste buds need a kick at my age,” he explained. “Among other things.”
Samantha rose on her tiptoes and tried to see over a large woman’s shoulder. She couldn’t see the black stone, but could see the light coming off of it, and that was what finally made her nervous. At the beginning, the stone had merely been peculiar, but now that it glowed, it seemed alive. Was it really from outer space?
“What can you see?” Samuel asked her.
“Not much. It’s still glowing. I think…” She hopped up and down to get a better look. “I think the light is spreading out.”
Samuel grinned. “It’s happening. It’s going to reveal its secrets.”
The crowd hushed. Several thousand people stood in complete silence. The strange light was definitely spreading, the glowing loop becoming a frame within which a translucent layer shimmered. Sam could see right through it, but her view was distorted, like trying to read a letter underwater. Images flickered and danced inside the transparent layer, but she could make out nothing in detail.
“There’s something inside,” somebody in the crowd cried out.
“It’s like looking through a lens,” someone else added.
The bright archway continued to grow, rising twenty feet above the crowd. The translucent centre shimmered like the surface of a pond.
Samantha couldn’t take her eyes away. “So beautiful.”
“I see it!” Samuel shouted beside her. “Everything is about to change.”
By now, the entire crowd was entranced: a thousand mouths hanging wide open, and twice as many eyes staring in amazement. The glowing archway continued to grow, towering over the nearby carousel. The translucent centre began to thicken and take form.
Samantha reached out for Samuel’s hand and squeezed it. The miracle in front of her was starting to make sense. “I think… I think it’s a gate.”
A blinding explosion of light.
The crowd cried out in shock.
All hell broke loose.
The screaming started at the front of the crowd, nearest the cordoned off area with the stone. It was cries of fear at first, but evolved into cries of agony. Samantha stood too far back to see what was happening, but the crowd turned in on itself, people elbowing to get away.
“We need to get out of here.” Samuel grabbed her arm.
Samantha shook her head in a daze. “What’s happening? I can’t see what’s happening.”
“Something came through,” Samuel told her. “I was wrong. Whatever this is, it isn’t good. It’s not God.”
The screaming continued; it never stopped for a single second.
Samantha glanced back. People flew into the air and crashed against the ground, arms breaking and mangled legs snapping. Something steamrolled the crowd—a charging rhino? Surely something explainable. Then a horrendous thing showed itself and put all hopeful notions of an e
scaped rhino aside.
A man, twenty feet tall and rippling with taut muscles, swiped at the fleeing crowd, breaking backs and caving in skulls with giant fists. He was naked save for a loose robe falling from his shoulder and around his waist. His bare back was pierced by spines of charred bones, and his face was a dark shadow of rage—yet flawlessly beautiful even in its ferocity.
Samantha watched in terror as the monstrous giant snatched up a police officer from his horse and tore him in two, like a Christmas cracker, his wet innards showering the crowd.
“We need to leave,” repeated Samuel, grabbing her so hard on the bicep that she cried out in pain. She understood though. They needed to get away.
They took off towards the playing fields where the park opened up and bordered Central Park West. Maybe there they could get free of the mad panic and bloodshed. People were lying on the ground everywhere, trampled half to death by the fleeing crowd that was no longer united, but selfish and afraid. A young woman with two broken arms lay on her back sobbing, but no one stopped to help her. The crowd moved too fast for anybody to risk being a Good Samaritan.
As the two Sams entered the emerald grass of the playing fields, Samuel slipped and almost pulled Samantha down with him. He fell in a mess, but made it up again quickly. He tried to continue, but gritted his teeth and hissed.
“Samuel, are you okay?”
“My ankle’s gone. I’m too old to be dashing around in blind panic.”
Samantha reached out to help him, but it was just as a squad of teenage boys in football jerseys came ploughing along and barged right into them. Samantha hit the ground hard, cursing at the boys from on her back. “You fucking bastards!”
They’d ploughed into Samuel too. He lay on his back, moaning. Samantha dragged herself across the grass to him to check he was okay. The crowd continued its stampede, clattering feet dodging Samantha and Samuel only at the very last second. Soon somebody would not be paying attention and would crash right into them.
There was also the giant to worry about—currently stomping its way towards the playing fields.
“Samuel, get up. That thing is coming.”
“I can’t,” he whined. “My leg.”
Samantha looked down at Samuel’s leg and saw that his sprained ankle had developed into a broken shinbone. The glistening white shard poked out of his trousers and glistened with globs of blood.
“Those goddamn jocks.”
Samuel sighed. “Don’t blame them. They’re just frightened. You go on, miss. Get out of here.”
“I’m not leaving you, Samuel.”
“You just met me. I’ll forgive you.”
“I wouldn’t forgive myself.”
“Better living with guilt than dying with honour, if you ask me.”
Samantha glanced towards the edge of the playing fields. A group of police had assembled there and were discharging their weapons at the towering monster. The giant bent and swung a long arm, scooping them up as if they were matchsticks. The screaming police officers tumbled twenty feet in the air before gravity reclaimed them and smashed them against the ground. A dozen bullets had hit the giant, but it carried on without the slightest concern.
“Get out of here,” Samuel grunted through his pain.
“I can’t leave you.”
“I can’t let you die for me.”
Samantha wished she’d met Samuel years ago. The instant connection they’d made was rare, but it was destined to go to waste. She shook her head, and fought back tears. “I’m sorry.”
“I know you are, miss, but it’s been lovely meeting you. Now get gone.”
Samantha nodded, leapt up, and ran. She wanted to glance back at Samuel, but refused to allow herself. Nothing to be gained by a final look.
Police cars skidded in the grass up ahead, leaving long brown furrows in their wake. Officers leapt out either side in pairs, armed with shotguns and rifles. They wasted no time in heading straight towards the Beast of Manhattan.
The furthest reaches of the crowd had crossed the edge of the playing fields and were spilling into the busy thoroughfare of Central Park West. Traffic screeched to a halt as yellow taxis shunted into the backs of city buses, and unlucky pedestrians got caught in the middle, bleeding out as twisted metal pierced their vital organs. Horns honked so persistently that the individual sounds merged into one long, continuous blare. That seemed far away to Samantha, though, who was running across the playing fields. Her legs started to tire, and young men and thinner women overtook her on both sides. A helicopter zipped overhead, low enough to make the grass shimmer. The sound of machine gunfire arrived like something out of a Vietnam War movie. Samantha was still running as fast as she could when the hair on the back of her neck stood up.
She glanced back over her shoulder.
The Beast of Manhattan was right behind her.
The ground shook.
She was done for.
Something crashed into Samantha, cracking against her skull and knocking her vision sideways. She hit the ground, and something crushed her. Her eyes remained open, but she saw nothing but darkness.
The Beast bellowed.
A stranger’s hand covered her face as she lay there in the grass for several minutes, wondering why she wasn’t dead. The stranger who had fallen on top of her did not move an inch. Was he okay?
Samantha slid the stranger’s arm away from her face and tugged at their clothing until she found a belt. When she finally tugged the guy off of her, she managed to sit up. She gagged when she saw the caved in face of a teenager lying beside her. The Beast must have struck him. His dead body falling on Samantha had saved her life.
The playing fields were quiet. Bodies littered the ground like confetti. The Beast had marched away into the city, where chaos was now visible. The epicentre seemed to be outside the Holy Trinity church, which had caught fire.
Samantha dragged herself to her feet, sobbing. The shock and utter bewilderment finally took a hold of her. The dead stranger’s blood soaked her, and she tasted it on her lips. What the hell had happened? Why was New York always subjected to such horror? She’d been a child in Utah during 9/11, but she often imagined the terror in the city on that terrible day. Now she knew.
She almost fell back down to the blood soaked grass as her knees clashed together like cymbals. The smell of cordite assaulted the air, and from somewhere she heard the faint moans of the injured, but it was impossible to identify anybody alive in such a mess. So she took a walk in the park she loved, no longer pleasant and green, but grizzly and red.
It didn’t take long to find Samuel. She’d left him at the edge of the playing field, and that was where he remained. It was unclear what had killed him, but his sagging chest spoke of badly broken ribs. A slight bruise on his temple might also have been the culprit.
“It was good meeting you, Samuel.”
More moaning, but this time louder, and from many voices. Samantha glanced up and peered toward the carousel where the nightmare had started. The great glowing archway still hovered above the black stone with its shimmering, translucent centre. Whatever it was, and wherever it led to, it was still open.
Someone approached Samantha.
The hunched over man was hurt, his flesh singed and smoking. Flaps of blackened skin hung from his naked body and littered the floor behind him like gory breadcrumbs. His moans were desperate and pained—a walking embodiment of nerve-searing agony. Samantha hurried towards him, tears filling her eyes. “Oh God, I’ll find you some help. Just…just sit down.”
The burned man didn’t accept her help. Instead, he snarled like an animal.
“It’s okay. I want to help you. I-”
The injured man grabbed Samantha’s throat with a crushing grip. “You should concentrate on helping yourself, whore.”
Samantha tried to wrench the hand away from her throat, but her attacker was inhumanly strong. Every time she gained a grip, her fingers slid on loose chunks of burned flesh that sloughed a
way in her hands.
“Please,” she begged.
“Your begging is a song the whole world will be singing. We bring unending torture and eternal slavery. Your cities will crumble, your children will weep blood and shit themselves in misery.”
Samantha choked, the vice around her throat tightening. Her terrified eyes fell upon a legion of horrors.
An army of smouldering, blackened monsters marched across Central Park. A dozen at first, but then more and more. Soon there were hundreds. Burned monsters from some faraway, fiery pit.
Demons.
Samantha felt herself grow weaker. Her eyes bulged in their sockets as she kept on struggling, but it was no use.
Death beckoned, and she could not refuse its call.
“Why?” Samantha managed to ask in her final moments.
But she didn’t live long enough to get an answer.
~GUY GRANGER~
Lower Bay, New York
“What the hell is happening over there, Captain?” Guy Granger’s second-in-command, Lieutenant James Tosco, stared at him with piercing blue eyes.
Guy didn’t have a clue what was happening. The view through his binoculars was difficult to make sense of. It was hard to see past Brooklyn from where the USCG Hatchet floated in the Lower Bay, but Manhattan was at the centre of something bad. The city was in panic. Fires had broken out everywhere, and the sound of chaos made it all the way across the Upper Bay. The Hatchet, a 263 foot U.S. Coast Guard cutter, had been approaching New York Harbour for routine maintenance when it had been halted by a state of emergency being declared. It appeared the terrorists had struck again.
This time there were no exploding planes or toppling buildings. The damage seemed smaller in scale, yet wider spread. The distance between individual fires stretched several blocks, and dozens of helicopters spiralled the skyline from Hell’s Kitchen to Midtown East.
Tosco cleared his throat. “Captain?”
Guy lowered his binoculars. “I don’t know what’s happening, Lieutenant, but it’s bad.”
The Gates: An Apocalyptic Novel Page 4
