The Extinction Event
Page 26
“Because,” Caroline said, “you thought we’d cooperate?”
“I told them you would not be as foolish as Frank,” Keating said.
“They’ll be watching us?” Caroline said. “Listening to us? At work? On the street? At home? In bed?”
Keating nodded.
“You’ll be living as I grew up,” he said. “In a small town in which everyone knew everyone else’s business.”
“And,” Jack said, “what happens if you think we’re going to tell?”
“It’s an insecure world,” Keating said.
* * *
Outside, the sky was clear. There was no wind.
“Remember Dixie’s story about the night life of the gods?” Jack said. “About the scientist and the leprechaun who wondered if there was a place for them in this world?”
Jack saw a flicker in the sky.
“A shooting star,” Jack said. “I’m not as comfortable seeing it as I would have been yesterday. Make a wish.”
Instead of making a wish, Caroline said, “I missed my period.”
The world stopped.
And started again.
Jack kissed her.
And kissed her again.
“So what do we do?” Caroline asked.
About Keating. About the asteroid. About Frank’s death. And Jean’s. And Robert’s. And all the others’.
About their baby.
Jack didn’t want to live in a disenchanted world.
He wanted to believe in UFOs and Peter Pan and vampires and ghosts in motels. And in asteroids that hang above us on a thread, just as there is always something hanging over us. Life can always end in a moment. And in the meantime—
Hand in hand, Jack and Caroline faced the future, which like any other future could be the beginning of the end.
They had to give their lives meaning by what they chose to do.
Above them, along with the asteroid, was a heaven, glorious with stars.
“What can we do?” Caroline asked again.
Quoting Dixie, Jack said, “Be kind.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Black is an award-winning journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and producer. His novel Like Father was named a notable book of the year by The New York Times and listed as one of the seven best novels of the year by The Washington Post. The King of Fifth Avenue was named a notable book of the year by The New York Times, New York magazine, and the Associated Press.
Mr. Black received the Edgar Allan Poe Special Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Fact Crime Book for Murder at the Met. His second Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination was for “Happily Ever After,” an episode of Law & Order. His third Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination was for “Carrier,” also an episode of Law & Order.
He won a Writers Guild of America Award for The Confession. He was also nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award for an episode of Hill Street Blues. He received an American Bar Association Certificate of Merit for “Nullification,” a controversial episode of Law & Order about militia groups, which the Los Angeles Times called an example of “the new Golden Age of television.”
Among his other awards, he has received a National Endowment of the Arts grant in fiction, Playboy’s Best Article of the Year Award, Best Essays of the Year 1986 Honorable Mention, Forward’s Book of the Year Special Mention, and an Atlantic Monthly “First” award for fiction. He has received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for The Plague Years, a book based on a two-part series that he wrote for Rolling Stone that won a National Magazine Award in Reporting and the National Association of Science Writers Award.
Researching articles, David Black has risked his life a number of times, including being put under house arrest by Baby Doc’s secret police in Haiti, infiltrating totalitarian therapy cults, being abandoned on a desert island, and exposing a white slave organization in the East Village.
Among the television shows he has produced and written are the Sidney Lumet series 100 Centre Street, which was listed as one of the ten best shows of the year, the Richard Dreyfuss series The Education of Max Bickford, Monk, CSI: Miami, the new Kojak, Hill Street Blues, EZ Streets, Miami Vice, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: Trial by Jury, the original Law & Order, which received an Emmy nomination for Best Dramatic Show and a Golden Globe nomination, and Cop Shop, an innovative PBS series filmed in one-take, three-camera real time, which won a Prism Award in 2005. He has been nominated for the PGA Golden Laurel Award.
His TV movie Legacy of Lies, a drama about three generations of Jewish gangsters and cops in Chicago, which starred Eli Wallach, won the Writers Foundation of America Gold Medal for Excellence in Writing. It also received an ACE Award for Martin Landau for Best Actor.
His feature The Confession, starring Alec Baldwin, Ben Kingsley, and Amy Irving, was praised in New York by John Leonard and in The Hollywood Reporter, among other places, and was described in Metroland as “an almost miraculous act of storytelling.”
He has published nine books and more than 150 articles in magazines, including The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and Rolling Stone. His novel An Impossible Life has been praised by, among others, Nobel Prize–winning author Czeslaw Milosz, Erica Jong, Bruce Jay Friedman, and Leslie Epstein, who called it the best writing about Jewish gangsters since Isaac Babel. Contemporary Authors describes Black as “a versatile, multimedia writer who has distinguished himself in both fiction and nonfiction.”
He has taught writing at Mt. Holyoke, NYU, Columbia, Yale, where he is a Fellow at Pierson College, and Harvard, where he is a scholar-in-residence at Kirkland House. He is a former board member of the Mystery Writers of America and a member of the Century Association, the Williams Club, the Columbia University Club, PEN, the Writers Guild, the Explorers Club, the Players, and the National Arts Club. You can sign up for email updates here.
NOVELS
The Extinction Event
An Impossible Life
Peep Show
Minds
Like Father
NONFICTION
Medicine Man
Murder at the Met
The King of Fifth Avenue
Ekstasy
PLAYS
An Impossible Life
POETRY
Mirrors
FILMS
The Confession
Legacy of Lies
TV
Cop Shop
CSI: Miami
The Bedford Diaries
The Education of Max Bickford
Sidney Lumet’s 100 Centre Street
The Cosby Mysteries
EZ Streets
Law & Order
The Nasty Boys
H.E.L.P.
Gideon Oliver
Miami Vice
Hill Street Blues
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One: Jack
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Part Two: Caroline
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapt
er Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Part Three: Keating
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
About the Author
Also by David Black
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Geography has been rearranged in some cases: The Mycenae in this book is not the city in Onondaga County, but one in Columbia County, on the Hudson River.
THE EXTINCTION EVENT
Copyright © 2010 by David Black
All rights reserved.
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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ISBN 978-0-7653-2261-6
First Edition: May 2010
eISBN: 9780765386342
First eBook Edition: May 2015