LOSS OF REASON

by Miles A. Maxwell

  “Sir, what about the fuel they’re burning?”

  “Mmm,” Marsh hesitated, breathed out, resigned to the annoying little prick. Held out his hand. “Let me have that radio.

  “Sergeant,” he transmitted, “take some men around to the museum and stop that helicopter.”

  Nose angled downward in the semi-darkness, a team of six soldiers ran beneath them. Sergeant Page—uniform bunched at the hip—didn’t look happy.

  “And that asshole guard Vandersommen is with them!” Everon shouted.

  “Coast Guard helicopter Bravo-India!” came over the radio. “You have no clearance. Land at once!” Everon recognized the voice of Colonel Marsh.

  “You’ll have to shoot us down!” Chuck yelled back.

  As if they’d heard Chuck, five rifles and a pistol were targeted onto the old Sea Pelican.

  “Did they hear that?”

  “Nope, Bro. Hadn’t keyed the mic.”

  Everon spun the tail around, jammed the big bird over and banked southeast, expecting bullets to come ripping through the fuselage any second.

  A mile later the tension suddenly drained out of him. He felt relieved of the night’s frustration. Just to be in motion. Doing something. Moving.

  He didn’t know how far they would make it anyway. Right at takeoff he’d noticed what appeared to be a slow oil leak somewhere in the Pelican’s turbine seals, but he braced himself with the old dictum silently: All helicopters leak. He didn’t have time to fix it right now. Every minute lost was time taken from Cynthia and Steve and Melissa.

  No one in the dark houses and towers below seemed aware of their passing. A lone flashing police car moved down one of the side streets. Those able to leave had already left.

  Everon scanned the early red horizon, wondering how far they’d get before the military tried something else to stop them.

  Flying Into Death

  High in the distance, a billion gallons of radioactive water vapor glimmered—a giant rising cumulonimbus. Its top had to be more than twenty thousand feet, Everon figured—high enough to be knocked by strong west winds into the familiar anvil head fanning over Long Island.

  Not twenty miles south, Everon’s dad was buried, and his gaze lingered in that direction as if to catch a glimpse of a graveyard too far to see.

  It grew lighter outside as they crossed over the Hudson River, the Pelican’s long rotor blades whumping above.

  Franklin looked out the left side window to the north. The George Washington Bridge surprised him. The long blue-gray span was still connected and appeared undamaged. Cables still hung below their huge curved support pipes where they were supposed to be.

  Franklin pulled a pair of powerful binoculars from his bag. “Looks like the G.W.’s okay,” he yelled, the hopeful sound in his voice rising over the rotor blades. “If the bridge is okay, then maybe—” There were no cars moving over the upper level. A severe jam in the bridge’s middle was blocking all traffic.

  Everon ignored his own growing suspicions about Cyn. Involuntary moisture on the surface of his eyes, he held his own thoughts tightly corked inside. If he recalled correctly, yesterday would have been Franklin’s mother’s birthday. His hope was the same as Franklin’s but he had no time to voice more realistic doubts. He was too busy fighting the Pelican’s unfamiliar feel.

  Across the Hudson, Everon brought them in low against the leafless black-branched trees of Riverside Park, banked south to follow the Manhattan shore, the West Side Highway.

  Franklin watched signs of destruction grow more apparent with every passing block. Black smoke from an occasional building. An abandoned police car, red lights still flashing, locked inside the endless frozen stream of cars that had given up trying to go north.

  A working ambulance would have no better luck transporting a heart patient.

  An isolated glass-front sliver-building burned. Around garbage and frozen vehicles, groups of people moved northward on foot.

  Who could have done a thing like this? Franklin wondered, his thoughts repeatedly interrupted by a horrible image he couldn’t block, a burning fifth-floor apartment ten avenues east, sixty streets to the south.

  What part of this is Cynthia’s?

  The 79th Street Boat Basin had been swept into a violent, soupy mess. Listing sloops, catches and yachts aggregated near the shore. A mast here and there poked above the water, their hulls not visible in the murky muck. Thousands of dead striped bass and bluefish floated on their sides. Hundreds of dead green-and-brown-headed mallards floated among them.

  Where did those come from? Everon wondered. “Must have been a large swell when the bomb went off,” Chuck yelled in his ear.

  The sunken boats reminded Everon of the time Cyn had convinced him to fly the two of them out to do some surfing north of San Diego—just after an ocean storm.

  Cyn was a fish. She cut through the gigantic waves running seconds apart as if they were hardly there. Fast as Everon paddled, each time the waves slammed him back toward shore, one after another, until an especially huge swell towered above his head ready to smash him down. And Cyn was suddenly next to him, laughing, yelling—“Hang on!”—she reached over and flipped Everon and his board upside down.

  Everon clung to the surfboard, air in his cheeks, eyes closed, waiting . . . ocean crashing around him . . . for the turbulence to pass. It was terrifying. Hang on, he told himself . . .

  When he came up, he opened his mouth above the water and took in huge gulps of air. And in that moment before the next wave hit, he heard Cyn’s joyous laughter. He saw the beauty of it. His sister’s method worked. Avoid the turbulence completely.

  But Everon turned for shore.

  He would never get used to it, never be comfortable with water the way Cyn was. Perhaps some primitive paranoia of drowning would always be there, brought through the ages by the human race. Whatever. He didn’t know.

  He did know water was not for him. He found no single thing more frightening. He would never again attempt to overcome that dull fear. Never again would he attempt to paddle out beyond the breakers. Even now, flying above it, he could feel the pull, that cold water trying to rip the smooth, hard board from his hands—his only means of regaining the surface. No air.

  “The Hudson was never all that clean to begin with,” Chuck yelled over Everon’s left shoulder.

  As they flew south, slowly rising, they saw fewer people walking north. Occasionally, in places where the smoke thinned, bodies lay in the street, on the sidewalk.

  Franklin looked down through his binoculars. In the cold morning air, limbs had been frozen into odd positions: An arm out straight. A leg bent to one side. Heads at weird angles on their necks. Eyes open, eyes closed. Papery, crackled-looking skin; slick, black-pooled blood; hair spiked out like icicles.

  Franklin wondered, Why would someone want to destroy everything—universities, engineers, scientists, inventors, businesses? Who hates us so damned much? “Dear God,” he whispered, “please save our sister. Please bring Cynthia back to us.”

  Soon they were south enough to find no one alive at all. When he couldn’t look anymore, Franklin reached back and passed the binoculars to Chuck.

  Field glasses against his eyes, Chuck muttered, “Someone’s got to find out whatever bastards did this—some vast and highly secret organization to catch us off guard like this—”

  “A bomb can’t leave much evidence!” Everon yelled. “It’s all blown up!”

  Franklin barely heard Chuck add, “The destruction can only get worse as we get closer to its center.”

  Franklin took in the side of Everon’s face, watching as the same thought hit them both: How far away from the center was Cynthia?

  “Look at that!” Chuck handed the binoculars back to Franklin and pointed at the old 72nd Street subway house on Broadway. “Water’s rising!”

  A dark wave flowed up through the subway entrances, black, flooding the street.
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  “The subways must be full,” Chuck added.

  “That’s not water!” Franklin yelled back.

  “What—” Everon dipped the nose. As they came closer, the black tide differentiated into thousands of small dark rodent bodies, running for their lives.

  “Rats! Hundreds of thousands of them!” Everon said.

  “Leaving a sinking ship,” Chuck said. “More than 70 million supposed to live in the city. More rats than people. Way more.”

  There were children lying in the streets too. A small boy face down in a jacket in the middle of Broadway, his right hand out above his head reaching for a book. Red with big bright letters. Franklin could make out the title—Dr. Seuss. Another little girl, maybe ten years old, in her pajamas holding her dead mother’s hand.

  All to be eaten by the rats.

  The helicopter bobbled. Franklin watched his oldest brother at the controls. The beat-up old Sea Pelican seemed to be running well enough—just the idea they could be down there too, walking in that human sewage, among the wreckage, flame and smoke, up to their knees in furry bodies, sharp nips cutting through their jeans—

  But the rat-stampede passed them all by, leaving the dead untouched in their run for the Hudson River. The herd joined up with a second group, and flowed up onto the West Side Highway onramp heading north.

  The tips of Franklin’s fingers idled around the pointy triangular base of the very old, small gold cross that hung from a chain underneath his shirt. People have to be out of their minds to live this way. It’s a loss of reason. And in the next moment it occurred to him who one of those people was.

  Everon looked down at his hands. He was holding the stick in a fiercely unnatural grip. An amateur at the controls. Can there really be anything left of Cyn’s building? he wondered. But maybe Franklin is right. Maybe we can find Cyn and Steve and Melissa.

  Or will waves of pain and sadness come crashing down full force? Hell, at least we’re not just waiting, sitting by a phone somewhere until someone calls to give us the bad news.

  Secretly, some part of him suspected what they really would find. But to know that truth today, they would have to be the ones to find it.

  He forced himself to take a long, deep breath . . . another . . . until he could feel the craft again. Then to fly, with grim determination, as fast as the old bird would take them.

  The Giant’s Hand

  “We should start east around here.” From the helicopter’s left front seat Franklin pointed an upright flat hand at the left window. “Toward 59th Street. Cynthia’s place should be almost straight over. Maybe we can land at the south end of Central Park?”

  Everon began a shallow bank to the left.

  Chuck leaned forward between the seats to study the cobalt-blue eyes of the dark-haired man who had pulled him into this. “So I’m getting the idea we’re going to look for your sister before we try to save anyone else?”

  Franklin turned a hard mouth back on the Red Cross man. “That’s right. Do you have anyone here, Chuck?”

  “All my relatives moved to Florida five years ago. I was the holdout. Just asking— I’d do the same.”

  To Everon, it felt good to have only buildings to watch out for—instead of people like Marsh and Vandersommen. But the rotor blades were getting close. Columbus Circle was dead ahead. He could feel pockets of heat rising.

  He glanced at the engine instruments. Running a bit warm—should go higher okay. He lifted the collective delicately. The whine of the turbine increased. The Pelican began to climb.

  By the way he was crabbing, a light tailwind was still blowing from the west. He looked through the top of the helicopter’s front windows and muttered, “High broken clouds. Snow tomorrow . . . ”

  Out above the radioactive anvil.

  “Six hundred feet,” Everon called out. “That should be enough, especially if we head across the park.” He began to level out. “Nothing’s as high as I remember it.”

  Tops of skyscrapers in big chunks littered the streets.

  He glanced at the turbine temperature gauges. The needle had risen a little but appeared stabilized below the red zone. “Hanging in there,” he muttered.

  A huge BOOM answered him, Chuck screaming, “Oh shit!” as the helicopter was pushed backwards, nose tilting high, a huge ball of yellow fire blossoming in the air before them, expanding as if to pull them inside.

  Everon yanked up on the collective, maxing the throttle, pulling back the stick, trying to halt their forward path—struggled to keep them from the flames.

  As Franklin watched his older brother’s deft touch on the controls try to defy the craft’s desire to kill them all, he felt strangely calmer than he knew he should have. And he wondered if indeed they would all three die—Everon, Franklin, Cynthia—today in Manhattan.

  The blades overhead whumped still louder, flexing against the strain.

  Everon has abilities in so many places, he thought, things I have no understanding of—solar power, electronics, his ability to fly—his competence in business and in everything he touches.

  The earsplitting whine of the turbines rose higher.

  Why can’t I do the things Cynthia or Everon know how to do? Why can I never think my way through the air the way Everon can—or do statistical analysis like Cynthia does?

  Those processes escaped him. He knew the words, the concepts, even the histories of the sciences involved. But there was some barrier he couldn’t get past. Sometimes he wondered if it was self-imposed, something he wouldn’t allow himself to see. To feel even.

  He studied Everon’s profile. His brother’s arms, jaw flexing as he willed the old helicopter to stay in the air. He could feel the heat of the fire reaching out for them.

  Despite Everon’s usual fun-loving sarcasm, his brother never had anything darker underneath. The way you and Cynthia are so good at living in the moment— Not like me, romanticizing the past, philosophizing over some random future that may never come. Worried too much over what I’m making of my life.

  Somehow you guys always live in the now.

  I wonder what Cynthia is thinking? Is she trapped somewhere in the apartment with Steve and Melissa? Is Cynthia even with her family?

  Everon released a huge exhale. Franklin looked outside. I guess if I’m worried about being in the moment, I’m not in the moment now.

  The craft was responding, backing away from the flame’s edge. The broken tops of buildings dropped below.

  “What is that thing?” Franklin asked as the old red and white helicopter climbed above the fireball.

  “I’ve seen one before,” Everon yelled back. “With Cyn and Steve, one night, having drinks on the eighth floor of the Marriott Marquis. Down Broadway, at 41st Street was this flaming ball of fire maybe five stories high. The three of us took a walk after dinner. It was still burning. Roaring up out of the street. The buildings acting like a chimney. A cop at the barricades said a major gas main was broken.”

  “Gas main?” Chuck said, looking back out the side windows. “This one’s a lot more than five stories. ”

  “Yeah,” Everon nodded. “The whole city’s underlain with hundreds of ’em and the pressure’s on.”

  The city flattened out before them. Through the smoke over middle Manhattan, the fire and destruction, was a vision of Hell on Earth. Building tops appeared bowled over. As if a giant’s hand had slewn across them sideways.

  “Oh my God!” Chuck gasped. “It’s gone!”

  The top half of what had once been the tallest building in the world, the symbol of the city, was missing. Like dozens of other skyscrapers around it, the Empire State had been cut in half like a broken saguaro cactus, leaving only the nubs of uneven girders sticking up above lower ragged concrete floors and shell.

  The U.S. had weathered all kinds of things—civil war, world war, financial collapse. Can it weather this? Are we at war now? Franklin wondered. Some countries rose and fell i
n a matter of years. The U.S. was unique. Of all the places he’d traveled to, he’d seen no other country founded for the purpose of protecting the individual. Something that strong had to corrode first on the inside.

  South of 20th Street or so, not even steel frameworks remained. The giant’s hand had swept out, destroying everything in its path from somewhere near the bottom tip of Manhattan Island. Until up around 42nd, where a kind of transition zone appeared.

  While Times Square was a flaming wreck, just blocks north, less than half were on fire. There was a new pattern. Those close to street corners were gone—but structures in blast-shadows of what had been taller buildings remained standing. But for their missing window glass, some looked completely untouched.

  “Crossing one thousand feet,” Everon said loudly.

  “Look at Broadway,” Franklin said. “The blast must have been channeled by the open spaces—”

  “Like the avenues were rivers,” Chuck said. “The lower end of the city is gone. The damage up here is selective.”

  “Overpressure decreases with the cube of the distance,” Everon yelled.

  “Maybe there’s a chance that Cynthia—”

  “Of course there’s a chance,” Everon yelled back. “But let’s not start painting false pictures like you do on Sundays.”

  Franklin hung a piercing blue stare on his brother, sucked his lips inward, taking deep breaths. “That way,” he pointed. “Straight across the bottom of the park.”

  Everon softened. “Sorry, Bro.”

  Bro. He hasn’t called me that in a long time and it’s the second time today, Franklin realized. He and Everon were step-brothers. Not bro, but Bro. Like he’s trying to connect himself, bond more tightly to the family. He’s as upset as I am—

  Cynthia’s chances were slim. Franklin knew it. The likelihood of anyone still alive on the Upper East Side—he closed his eyes and hallucinated finding Cynthia’s building completely blown away—nothing but rubble. He could smell the burning drywall, hear the flames. The hallucination became stronger as he saw in his mind the corpses—his sister, Cynthia’s husband and daughter—lying there, sightless eyes staring up at him.