by James Axler
The small one was being carried, as well, only cradled in two arms like a sack of potatoes.
“I can pay you anything you want. Anything...”
“I know, you’re a god in mortal form. You shit gold ingots. But it’s not your money or your shit that’s required. It’s your expertise.”
“You mean it’s about your physical issues? Take me back to the OR. Take me back and I’ll help you! Whatever you need, I can put the entire hospital’s resources at your disposal!”
“That’s a problem, Doctor.”
“Why?”
“Because then I’d spend the rest of my life in a maximum-security prison. What needs to be done, needs to be done elsewhere. Or perhaps a more accurate term would be elsewhen.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“I want you to do some tinkering on me, all right, but not now. You’re going to do it a hundred years in the future.”
“You’re insane!”
“Doctor, I’m far worse than that, as you will soon discover.”
The pressure being put on Ransom’s arms was making him lose all feeling in his hands. He could see the sides of his captors’ faces as they bore him along. They had crocodile skin. Dark, ridged, horny. And their eyes were yellow.
Surely this can’t be real, he thought. But it couldn’t be a dream, either. He remembered getting up at 4:00 a.m., showering, shaving, eating eggs Benedict for breakfast while he checked the value of his stock portfolio online, driving to work, reviewing the latest laboratory results on Nile Carstairs, then suiting up and washing for the scheduled six o’clock start of the surgery. If it was real, where was the hospital’s armed security!
He had his answer when they reached the elevators. Three uniformed officers lay sprawled facedown on the floor. The pool of their mingled blood was peppered with bright brass shell casings.
Stepping over the corpses, the crocodilians carried Dr. Ransom into the elevator. They held him suspended as the rest of the horde packed in behind them. When the doors closed, the acetone-ether stench in the car made his head spin and his eyes water.
As they marched three abreast down the ground-floor hallway to the street exit, he assured himself there was still the chance of police intervention. But no police were waiting outside. Sirens shrilled in the distance. A black stretch limo sat idling at the curb, its rear doors standing open. The front passenger window was down; there was no one behind the steering wheel.
Over the limo’s roof, across the wide street, Dr. Ransom saw a mob of people hurriedly exiting the door of a posh restaurant. They all wore red, white and blue hats, carried banners and balloons and were roughly the same age, but they weren’t of the same political stripe. Some were supporters of the about-to-be-crowned Democratic President; others were Young Republicans, rightfully still disgruntled over the November election results. On the eve of the presidential inauguration, they were taking their differences to the sidewalk.
Ransom’s shrill cries for help were lost amid the shouting, screaming and shoving match that ensued.
Under different conditions, he would have cheered on the forces of the GOP. But stuffed headfirst into the limo, he had bigger fish to fry than proposed capital-gain hikes and the threat of universal health care.
Chapter Eight
Lieutenant Zach Nathaniel stood calm and detached amid the chaos of the precinct’s war room. All departments were represented, even Traffic Enforcement. Uniforms and support staff were running around like headless chickens. Every phone on every desk was lit up and ringing. No one was answering them. He glanced at one of the video monitors mounted on the near wall; it was tuned to a local TV station. Public panic was understandable, given the press coverage. The news crews had gone Orson Welles–The War of the Worlds hysterical.
In this storm-tossed sea, he was commander.
The mayor and the chief of police had a press conference scheduled in a few minutes. They would be requesting calm and asking people to stay where they were—whether it was offices, stores, whatever—as long as it was safe and behind locked doors. The point was to keep the public from venturing onto the streets to return home, something that would put lives at risk and complicate the situation for law enforcement. Three hours after the first incident, there was no way to deny that the city of New York was under attack—the only questions were by whom and why. In a rare moment of bipartisanship, the still-sitting Republican President and the Democratic President-elect had broadcast statements of sympathy for the victims and their families and promised all available federal support in resolving the crisis.
Nathaniel raised his coffee cup to his lips, found the liquid cold and bitter, promptly spit it back and set down the mug. Across the low-ceilinged room, plainclothes detectives were still sticking pins in the huge, street-by-street incident map of the city. All the crimes had occurred within an hour of each other, a coordinated blitz attack, which seemed to have stopped temporarily. Maybe the latest crimes hadn’t been discovered yet? Or maybe the perps had stopped their murder spree to grab a snack? There was a small army of them at work, all dressed in purple satin hoodies, black tracksuit pants and alligator boots—an army sans fashion sense. As the evening wore on, fatality numbers had continued to climb: commuters, shoppers, security guards, hospital personnel and patients, bystanders—virtually anyone unlucky enough to wander into their path.
And hostages had been taken. The list read like a hospital-staff register: immunologist, neurosurgeon, cybernetician, protheticist, roboticist, electrical engineer, cardiovascular surgeon, thoracic surgeon, ophthalmologist, orthopedic surgeon, organ transplant/anti-rejection specialist. All had been kidnapped from different Manhattan institutions in separate lethal attacks. Only one incident broke this pattern. A doctor had been killed, but there had been no kidnapping, nor even attempted kidnapping.
It was tragic and confounding.
Nathaniel could see a lone crazy with a grudge against a particular doctor or hospital going berserk with a gun. That had certainly happened before. But this was different. This was organized, efficient and synchronized. The perps weren’t using just any guns; early reports indicated they were armed with full-auto AKs. The kidnappings of these particular individuals wouldn’t jeopardize the running of the hospitals; they were all specialists, the best of the best in their respective fields. To this point there had been no ransom demands sent to the hospitals or the doctors’ families. No terrorist proclamations or bag-over-the-head video feeds, either.
It was as if someone was trying to start their own goddamn hospital with conscripted labor. But where? And why? Only one thing was clear—this was no joke. Not with NYPD officers and civilians down and an unknown number of armed suspects still on the loose.
Nathaniel turned to look as surveillance video from the West-Fourth-Street-station attack started to roll on one of the other big-screen TV monitors.
“Shut up! Everyone shut up!” someone behind him shouted.
Then, when the din continued, “Shut the fuck up!”
The show began with the perps jumping the turnstiles, their features hidden by the purple hoods. They were all massively muscled, like ’roided out bodybuilders.
“Can you freeze the video, please,” Nathaniel called out to the officer running the playback. “And zoom in on the hands.”
After a second, the motion of the scene stopped, and a horny, dark-colored hand filled the screen.
“What the heck is that yellow hook?” a detective one desk over exclaimed. “An extra-long fingernail? Some kind of gang thing?”
“That’s no fingernail, Ramirez,” someone else said. “It looks more like a claw.”
“Doesn’t look like skin on the fingers, either,” another detective volunteered. “Hand could be in some kind of glove with the claw attached.”
When the video resumed, there were even more questions.
“Why is the little guy being carried?” someone asked. “Could he be wounded?”
The
playback showed a transit cop rounding on the perp who was lugging the smaller person. Gunshots cracked and the slide of his weapon cycled back and forth as he rapid fired at close range.
It looked as if he was nailing the big guy square in the head again and again. Nathaniel could see it jolting back in time with the impacts. Was the perp wearing body armor on his skull?
In the background of the shot, civilians started dropping as though their strings were being cut.
“The bastards are killing people indiscriminately,” Detective Ramirez said.
“No, look closer,” Nathaniel told him. “Their automatic weapons are still slung. The bystanders are getting hit by ricochets off that wide fucker’s head—friendly fire.”
As the pair of transit cops were shown going down hard, the room rang with shouted obscenities. Curses were still pouring forth when the surveillance camera caught a second group of suspects vaulting over the turnstiles. There were eight of them, normal sized but athletic.
“Jesus, who the heck are they?” someone asked.
“Freeze and zoom in,” Nathaniel ordered.
“What the fuck?” Ramirez said. “That guy in the lead looks like Snake Plissken!”
Yeah, Nathaniel thought, as if this wasn’t weird enough. One of the women was dressed like a proper Manhattan business woman, except for the big handgun strapped to her chest. The other two females looked scruffy, as if they hadn’t washed their clothes or showered in days.
Were they the rearguard of the purple people? The mop-up crew?
As they ran down the concourse, they weren’t shooting anyone, even though their weapons were drawn and there were plenty of unmoving targets of opportunity. Of course it was always possible they had already run out of ammo.
The video jump cut to a subway platform. It showed the purple crew crossing the tracks, then taking a train in the opposite direction.
“Why did they do that?” Ramirez asked. “Are they morons? Don’t they know we can see where they’re going?”
He was right; that didn’t make sense, either.
Add one more to the growing list.
By the time the Plissken gang reached the same platform, the trains in north-and southbound directions had come and gone and it was deserted on both sides. After a brief discussion that the video-camera microphones couldn’t pick up, they jumped down into the northbound rail bed and disappeared into the tunnel. That could have meant they had become accidentally separated from the purples.
Or that they had a different mission to complete.
“Get stills of their faces and descriptions sent to all units, and hand them out to the media,” Nathaniel said. “Let’s find these bastards.”
A uniformed cop approached him and said, “Sir, witnesses from the explosions in the Village are waiting for you in the interview rooms.”
“I want to show them a feed of the metro attack. Arrange it at once.”
“Yes, sir.”
Detective Murphy was waiting for him in front of interview room one.
“Who have we got in there?”
“Mrs. Adela Blair, age eighty-one, widow, claims to have seen everything from her top-floor apartment.”
Nathaniel entered the interview room, with Murphy following. He took a seat and introduced himself as commander of the detective squad. The white-haired woman on the other side of the table was tiny, maybe four foot five, her face made up like a doll, heavily powdered, big rouge spots on her cheeks and bright red lipstick bleeding into the creases above her upper lip. She was wearing one pair of dark-rimmed glasses and had a second pair in pearlescent pink suspended on a lanyard around her neck. Mrs. Blair seemed remarkably clear-eyed and sharp for someone who had just escaped a war zone—the indomitable Manhattan spirit in full force.
The door opened behind them, and the uniform wheeled in a monitor and DVD player. After quickly plugging them in, he handed Nathaniel the remote and left.
Before starting the video, he told the woman, “If you see anyone you recognize, just say so.”
“There!” she said, pointing almost immediately. “Those look like the same monsters who blew up our block and fired machine guns.”
“Are you sure?” He glanced down at the glasses around her neck.
“Of course I’m sure,” Mrs. Blair snapped back. She held up the glasses in question. “These are for up close. My corrected distance vision is perfect. I was wearing my distance glasses the whole time.”
Nathaniel fast-forwarded through the slaughter to the second group of suspects, then zoomed in on their faces, one by one. When he got to the woman in the business suit, Mrs. Blair’s eyes suddenly widened.
“That’s Veronica!” she said in astonishment. “Veronica Currant! She lives in the brownstone three doors down from me. Such a lovely young woman, always so well dressed. Keeps cats, like me. She’s a book editor. She works for a publisher in Midtown. What’s she doing with them?”
Now, Nathaniel thought, we’re getting somewhere.
Chapter Nine
Dr. James Nudelman tossed another double handful of chopped cabbage into the huge pot and watched the mush of overcooked green contents quickly return to a rolling boil. He wasn’t home sick as he’d told his colleagues; he was home experimenting. On the other side of the spacious, spot-lit, marble-counter-topped kitchen and across the sunken living room, floor-to-ceiling windows revealed a panorama of twinkling lights above the tops of Central Park’s dark trees. The greatest city in the world absolutely throbbed with power.
Polluting, expensive, nonrenewable power.
All that was about to change.
The world was about to change, thanks to him.
Over the course of two years, the physicist PhD had turned the pricey, five-room, eighteenth-floor apartment he’d inherited from Granny Nudelman into his own private laboratory, stripped off the wall-to-wall Berber carpeting, cleared all but one of the rooms of furniture and redecorated it after the style of a chemical plant. Chest-high rows of twelve-by-eight-by-eight black plastic boxes divided more than half the interior space. The battery terminals on the ends of the cases were linked by heavy electric cable; inside each was thousands of neat stacks of a specially laminated paper that had been presoaked in copper chloride. Suspended by heavy chain from the ceiling, at intervals above the rows were twenty-gallon translucent plastic tanks filled with a lemon-orange-tinted fluid. Spiderwebs of clear tubing containing this liquid ran from the bottoms of the tanks to the tops of the rows of boxes.
The whole system was drip fed. Tubing at the bottoms of the stacks was clustered and duct-taped in bundles to the floor, leading off to the bathroom. Gravity pressure forced the waste products of the chemical process straight into his spare-room’s toilet. With this prototype design and a DC-to-AC inverter, he had successfully powered a toaster, blender, fan and clock radio. And now, the thousand-watt benchmark: a burner on his electric stove.
If Granny Nudelman’s apartment smelled like a public urinal, there was good reason.
The impossible dream of a reusable, pee-powered battery had become a reality.
Standing in the rising, cabbage-reeking steam, staring out at the twinkling lights, he saw a brave new world. Urine would never again be flushed away. It would become a precious commodity, something to be saved, gathered, trucked to pollution-free power plants. He envisioned Manhattan’s 8.3 million sets of kidneys, 8.3 million bladders working in unison around the clock, seven days a week to produce enough clean energy to light the largest city in the United States.
Thomas Alva Edison might have given the world light, but James MacArthur Nudelman would supply it with endless, renewable power.
Yellow is the new green, he thought
Of course there were still a number of critical questions left to answer. Was the technology really scalable? What were the limits of the current system design? How far could the life span of laminated paper cells be extended? He had to wait until his contract with the university expired before taking
his ground-breaking discovery to the next level, otherwise he would have to share the patents and royalties with the institution—something he had no intention of doing. Ensuing steps were going to require serious venture capital, but he was confident he would find it with very little difficulty.
Although secrecy was vital, he had been forced to involve select members of the hospital cleaning staff in his experiments. He had had no choice. By himself he couldn’t supply sufficient quantities of urine to fuel the electrochemical process. For many months he had been paying cash under the table for topped-off catheter bags. These were hush-hush transactions conducted in the facility’s parking garage. He lugged the bags home in an ice chest in the trunk of his car.
Behind his back he knew his black-market suppliers referred to him as “the pee-o-holic.”
Let them scoff, he told himself. In the future, every time someone stands or sits to relieve himself they will think of me and be eternally grateful. Instead of “taking a piss,” they will call it “taking a Nudelman.”
With the cabbage hard on the boil and banks of scented candles burning on every horizontal surface, he removed a can of spring-bouquet air freshener from an open case at his feet and sprayed liberally between living room and the entry foyer. The other people on his floor had been complaining bitterly that the hallway outside his apartment smelled like a zoo. The boiling cabbage, the vanilla candles and the aerosol helped to mask the odor of his clandestine operation.
Waving the container back and forth, like a beauty queen on a parade float, he retraced his steps. Halfway to the kitchen, from behind, there came a terrible crash. As he instinctively hunched at the sound, the solid wood front door of his apartment splintered from the hinges and triple dead-bolt locks, cartwheeled past him and landed on the steps of the sunken living room.
He jerked his head around, thumb frozen, still pressing the can’s spray button.
Huge figures in purple and black poured through the ruin of his entryway. The faces under the hoods looked dark and warty, eyes as yellow as the fluid in the suspended tanks.
