LOSS OF REASON

by Miles A. Maxwell

  He stood the light tree in the corner of the tent, back from the patients on their gurneys, and extended the pole. He plugged in the cord. The rectangular fixtures mounted either side threw a brilliant glow into every corner.

  And they all went out!

  There were screams and cries around him in the dark. The nurse swore. More yells outside the tent.

  The soldier fumbled around until he was able to poke his head out. A breaker had blown. They’d hooked up too many circuits.

  From the Williams Learjet, Andréa watched the lights go out, half the glowing makeshift tent-triage-city go dark.

  Several minutes went by as soldiers scrambled dimly, calling back and forth. Finally the other half of the lights came back on. The military had reached the limit of their generators.

  “Colonel Marsh?”

  Marsh looked up from the map he was examining, to the face of an exquisitely beautiful red-haired woman.

  “Yes ma’am?” he gulped. Someone had let this woman into the command tent at the base of the airport tower. He’d have to recheck his men’s understanding of their orders. Can’t have civilians just wandering around.

  “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.” Her hand turned over his as they shook, a slight feminine bend to her wrist. “I’m Andréa Buer. I fly for Williams Power. Have you got a telephone I can use?”

  “I’m very sorry, ma’am, our satellite phones are for military use only. It’s hit-and-miss now anyway. This is a command—”

  “Even if it’s to call Hunt Williams? To get you another generator up here?”

  Two minutes later, Andréa’s call went through.

  “Hello?”

  “Mr. Williams, it’s Andréa.”

  “Andréa! Where are you? Are you alright? How’s Everon?”

  “We’re fine. We took off from Kennedy about an hour before the bomb went off. We’re back at Teterboro Airport now.”

  “This is the first call I—I didn’t think this sat phone was working, Andréa.”

  “I’m on a military phone, Mr. Williams. They say it’s intermittent. Apparently some of the satellites that were overhead at the time of the blast have moved on around the globe.”

  “It’s horrible down here, Andréa. I’ve got four million people without power. The whole system is down. Control systems, substations . . . ”—the connection faded out—“ . . . actually got melted power lines. I don’t know how many of our engineers and technicians . . . at that damned New York conference. I’m very relieved to hear your voice.”

  It sounded like her boss was nearly crying.

  “Can you get Everon to the phone?”

  “He’s gone into the city, Mr. Williams.”

  “What! Isn’t that where the bomb went off?”

  “Yes,” she grumbled.

  “Why the hell did you let him—”

  “I don’t think anyone can stop Everon Student from doing anything,” she said with irritation. “He and his brother went in to see if they can find their sister. Everon was able to get ahold of an old Coast Guard helicopter and they took off about an hour ago on a Red Cross mission. I think they’re planning to search on the Upper East Side, a good distance north of the blast site.”

  The line went silent.

  “Mr. Williams? Sir?”

  “I’m desperate for crew people, Andréa. I need to talk with him as soon as he returns.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll have access to this phone later, sir.”

  “Alright, I’m coming up there. I’ve got Tally. He can fly me.”

  “They aren’t letting anyone fly anywhere near here without special permission from the military. Um, the Army needs generators though.”

  The phone went silent again. “Let me speak with someone in charge.”

  “Hold on.” She turned. “Colonel Marsh?” She handed him the phone. “Hunt Williams.”

  Hunt Williams finished his satellite phone conversation with Colonel Marsh and stared into the dimly lit Williams Power control room at Juniata. One small gas generator chugged outside.

  Every single one of the giant Williams generators was shut down. All of them probably damaged. Thousands of homes and businesses without power, shut down by the bomb’s electro-magnetic pulse that had traveled train tracks and power lines out of the New York area. The whole U.S. grid in Hunt’s part of Pennsylvania was dead. There wouldn’t be any outside power to restart the Williams system.

  He had strong reservations about handing one of their only three spare generators over to the military. Until they were able—make that if they were able—to restart one of the big Williams coal units, the Williams system was crippled.

  The company’s problem was personnel. There was only one thing to do.

  Search For Cynthia

  As soon as Everon had the radios, battery and generator switched off, he jumped from the pilot’s seat, blades still spinning, and chased after Franklin and Chuck.

  The air was filled with a bitter burning smell. Death. He dodged around girders, shards of glass, an endless sea of brick and concrete chunks big as the cars they’d flattened. And always, the bodies.

  The Red Cross man was only twenty yards up, kneeling on the cracked, tilted sidewalk to check the pulse of a ten-year-old blond child. A blue leash ran out to one side. The boy had fallen face down next to his mother and their dog, a black lab puppy. The puppy’s head protruded from beneath the concrete block that had surely broken its neck. A puddle of dark blood, not quite dry, swept out from the mother’s long blonde hair like a red halo.

  It looked like they’d been pushed over by tremendous force. He thought he heard Chuck say, “Nothing!” as he went by.

  If someone was alive here they’d already be gone. Everon could see Franklin far ahead already, bag slung over each shoulder, halfway into the next block of 59th Street. They had to get to Cyn.

  Along the south side of Bloomingdale’s, smoke was not the only smell. Everon tasted a ragged, putrid stench. It surrounded him, penetrating his sinuses. The morning sun had melted an early dusting of snow, a cold February night turned warm enough to make bodies begin to bloat—warm enough to make hibernating fly eggs hatch, attracted to a feast of scattered carnage. Black specks dotted the humans who were their first meal.

  “People finishing their shopping—ready for a glass of wine and whatever,” Everon muttered with disgust as Chuck caught up.

  “Ready to eat, and being eaten instead,” Chuck huffed. “God, that’s gross. I hate flies.”

  Almost to the corner of Lexington, Everon fell backward onto his butt to keep himself from slipping into a long crevasse. The collapsed subway line they’d flown over.

  Chuck helped him up. They ran on . . .

  There’s no real protection anywhere, Franklin thought as he dodged through the war zone that had been Lexington Avenue. Corpses lay strewn among the debris, some burned to raw flesh, hair fried like black steel wool. Others, a completely exposed hand or foot bone—degloving, he’d heard it was called at Hiroshima. Skin and flesh peeled away like the removal of a glove.

  A two-by-three-foot Mexican oil painting, a Day-Glo Jesus, lay face up in the streaming water, blood-red heart exposed and beating in his open chest.

  Every sidewalk tree was broken. How could Cynthia have lived through this? he wondered.

  But then he saw a single ginkgo, his favorite, most of its prehistoric leaves still on, defiant inside the dark loops of knee-high protective ironwork.

  He ran on . . .

  Everon gave a wide berth to the flaming gas ball expanding and contracting in the middle of Lexington. The heat was intense.

  Most first-floor storefronts were demolished. The remaining buildings had a kind of dark, singed surface. A nail salon, a place that sold sandwich wraps and smoothies were hardly touched. The deli next door, the buildings on its right were collapsed, crushed and filled, pushed in backward by debris. The deli’s mangled a
wning tubes hung out on the sidewalk.

  He found Franklin, on the other side of the street, running back toward him, staring upward at Cyn’s granite-faced five-story. What had once been a large, attractive entrance was filled with brick and steel—huge chunks of blackened concrete swept into it by the blast.

  Chuck caught up, wheezing, bent over. “Any way in?” he shouted over the flaming gas. “It’s so hot!”

  “Couldn’t get into the alley behind,” Franklin said. “I tried going around the block—not around the side either. The first-floor windows in front are barred, no way to get through.”

  “If we had a grinder, dammit! A cutter—” Everon looked up. “Can you scale it, Bro?”

  Franklin looked up. He had been studying the building’s face for just that reason. The broken fascia certainly offered a wealth of hand and toeholds. The fireball reached out again. He would be able to count on nothing. He could see the hot bricks breaking loose in his hands. The concrete crumbling.

  “Look out!” He pushed Everon and Chuck out of the way. A slab of gray granite the size of a breakfast table shattered in the street.

  Franklin shook his head as he looked back up. “Take too long. If I made it.”

  “If you lived through it,” Everon agreed.

  “There’s got to be a way to get me on top somehow.” Franklin squinted at his brother. “We didn’t really try, did we? How long is the hoist cable?” He measured the gas ball visually as it shrank back again. “Maybe when it’s like that?” The towering fireball had shrunk to hot air balloon size. It was already expanding.

  “There’s got to be a few feet on the far corner, somewhere clear from the flame enough where Chuck can lower me down.”

  Everon nodded slowly, eyeing with trepidation the blazing yellow fire thundering up out of the street.

  Boom!

  Up ahead, a huge chunk of sandstone rolled into Lexington. “Better stay away from overhangs,” Franklin said as they ran the increasingly difficult obstacle course back toward 59th Street. “This part of the city is still falling down.”

  Everon’s eyes followed a trail of smoke drifting toward them from the east. Fifteen minutes ago it had been moving straight up.

  “The wind is changing too,” he muttered.

  They rounded the corner of Bloomingdale’s into the narrow entry of 59th again, where the fly-pestered corpse of a gray-haired man lay face up across the sidewalk, his head hanging down over the edge of the subway ditch.

  “Ouch!” Chuck said as he stepped around the body, his ankle knocking an eight-inch block of gray concrete to tumble down the side of the pit. It landed with a metallic bang on the partially exposed metal corner of a subway car.

  Franklin turned his head and stopped. “Do you hear something?”

  The three men listened. The sound of people yelling, and a dull banging from beneath the earth.

  “Voices!” Everon said.

  “Down there!” Chuck pointed into the ditch.

  “Hold on!” Franklin yelled, looking for a place to climb down.

  “What about Cyn!” Everon said.

  “What if she’s down there?”

  “She’s not!” Everon said, puzzled, a little irritated at his step-brother’s sudden change of direction.

  “We just leave them down there?” Chuck shot back, nodding toward the train. “There could be hundreds of people trapped down there.”

  Franklin looked back toward Cynthia’s apartment. “How do we know?” He pointed to a subway sign up the street by a staircase that went down into the ground. “The subway stop is a block from here. Right by her house. We take a few minutes, open a way out for them if we can. They can find their own way off the island.”

  Everon’s lips tightened doubtfully. He looked over the edge. The asphalt was painted with big white block letters: FIRE LANE. “Yeah, no kidding,” he muttered.

  Franklin turned to the ditch and pulled a large coil of blue and red climber’s rope from one of his two blue canvas bags.

  Chuck watched Franklin walk quickly along, carefully examining the ditch’s edge. “What are you looking for?”

  “An entry point.”

  Everon pointed out a small intersecting collapse in the roadway. “What about that?”

  “It’s got potential,” Franklin agreed.

  “How deep would you guess?” Everon asked.

  “Fifty-five, sixty feet. Looks pretty unstable.”

  Everon picked up a dusty yellow brick, hauled back and flung it into the unbroken plate glass in one of Bloomingdale’s four brass-framed doors behind them. The window exploded. The door glass to its right was already missing. Now the center bands of polished brass between were clear. “First guy to ever smash a department store window without stealing anything. Can you tie off to that?”

  Franklin ran a loop around the door frames, tossing the other end into the pit. The rope uncoiled smoothly, its bulk slamming onto the partially exposed corner of the subway car.

  The muffled voices grew louder.

  Franklin unzipped one of the duffels. It contained another climbing rope. He uncoiled it too, dropping it into the pit. Then pulled out a shorter ten-foot length. “To tie off the hoist, if say, you were to run back and pull it off the helicopter.”

  “I guess I can do that,” Everon answered reluctantly. He ran for the helicopter.

  The pavement’s broken edge was jagged. Bloomingdale’s was running a sale on bedding. Franklin grabbed a bunch of lime-green dust-covered pillows from the broken display window next to the doors and made a pile of all but one on the subway’s edge.

  “That should keep it from cutting your rope,” Chuck said. “What’s that one for?” he asked as Franklin stuffed the last pillow into his jacket.

  “You never know—can you keep these here for me ’til the rope’s set?”

  “Sure.” Chuck knelt down and held the pile in place.

  From the other canvas bag, Franklin pulled a lightweight rappelling harness sewn together out of three-inch strips of black webbing. He pulled a second harness from his bag and set it aside for Everon. He pulled on a pair of thin, tan leather gloves.

  “You always wear gloves when you climb?”

  “Rappelling only.”

  Franklin clipped in, feeding rope through the brake—a big lever attached to his harness. He leaned back and walked over the edge. The rope paid out and dug into the stack of pillows.

  For the first twenty feet, he was able to simply walk backward down the crevasse wall, paying out rope as he went, purposely kicking away chunks of loose debris so they wouldn’t fall on him. The street was made of layers built up over many years—slabs of asphalt on top—beneath that, concrete and rebar.

  Farther down were chunks of ancient mortared stone and brick. Pieces of one type of stone or another tumbled away with every step . . .

  Back at the helicopter, Everon brought out the portable drill. With an attached socket, he began zipping off the bolts that held the hoist to its supports over the helicopter’s side door . . .

  At the cliff’s twenty-five-foot point, Franklin’s feet landed on a wide iron grate—part of the drainage system that protruded from a large block of concrete. He kneeled on the grate’s rusty brown edge, pulled out the last pillow and balled it underneath his rope at the point where it contacted the grate. He swung his chest over, then hung by one arm.

  The remaining thirty feet went easily, a smooth vertical rappel, past dark-brown soil mixed with random-colored tile. His feet made a scraping noise as he touched down.

  The dull voices echoed up louder now. The banging vibrated into his feet. He couldn’t see but the one shiny metal corner. The train must be at an angle. Its east end buried in dirt and asphalt, probably sloping downward toward Roosevelt Island and the East River.

  He unhooked and walked across the exposed silver corner, its ridged metal top—away from his landing point in case any loose rock decided to f
ollow him down.

  Up above, Everon returned to the ditch lugging the hoist under his left arm, its wires thrown over his right shoulder. He ran over to an abandoned cab, popped the dented hood and used the portable drill to loosen its battery clamps.

  As soon as Everon had the hoist tied off, he explained to Chuck how to operate it.

  “Okay?” he asked.

  Chuck examined the controls. “Pretty simple. Forward. Reverse. No problem.”

  “How’s it look?” Everon called down.

  “Feels stable enough,” Franklin yelled up. “Come on.”

  “All right.” After laying his rope over another stack of pillows, Everon walked backwards following his brother’s path down the cliff.

  Franklin knocked on the metal roof. “Hello?”

  Faintly: “We’re here! We’re here!”

  “Hold on!” Franklin hollered into the earth.

  His path predetermined, it took Everon half the time it had taken Franklin to get down.

  “How ’bout there?” Everon pointed at a large boulder along what had to be the train’s high side.

  Together they struggled to push the rock off the car, where it picked up speed and rolled down into the side of the ditch.

  “We don’t really have time for this shit, you know,” Everon said.

  “I know.”

  “Temperature’s dropping. The wind could change anytime now, blow the radiation this way.”

  Franklin unfolded a two-foot army shovel from his belt. After removing a quick few inches of dirt and rubble, they exposed the top of a wide window. A little more digging, its shape and depth became apparent. It was one of the long horizontal ones, split where the upper half could be opened. Impossible to squeeze through.

  Franklin leaned over the silvery steel and squinted to see inside. And jerked.

  A dark-haired woman with huge eyes stared back. A trail of blood ran down the right side of her face. Hit by a sense of recognition, Franklin was almost certain he didn’t know her. “We’re trying to find a way in!” he yelled through the glass. “Can you open this?”