Sunfail

by Steven Savile

  JACOB CARTER IGNORED THE PHONE.

  He was in the shower and he wasn’t about to fumble around the wet room looking for it. If it was important they’d call back. He wasn’t giving up the hot water—hard enough to get at the best of times, with the old building’s antique pipes filled with rust and a boiler barely able to service the five apartments it contained. These certainly weren’t the best of times. With the Dickensian rattle deep in the walls it wasn’t much of a stretch to say they were slowly creeping toward the worst of times. But it was worse for others out there. The New York winter was brutal. He had a roof that didn’t leak, and for a few more minutes at least, hot water on tap. There was food in the fridge, and, tucked away at the back, his Knicks bottle: an ice-cold bottle of Bud he’d been saving since 1999.

  His dad had died the week before Latrell Sprewell broke the Knicks’ hearts with the miss that would have taken the series back to San Antonio and at least made a contest out of it. He was glad his old man hadn’t lived to see it. He died with hope in his heart, which is so much better than crushing disappointment. Jake had uncapped one of the two bottles and poured it out into the freshly turned soil, a commiseration beer, and made a promise to return with the last bottle to celebrate when the Knicks won the championship. One last drink with the old man. Maybe this would be the year? After all, hell might not exactly be freezing over—even if the city was—but some strange shit was happening out there. That had to mean something, right? He’d take any kind of sign he could get.

  He savored the hard pelt of near-scalding water as it stung his scalp through his close-cropped hair, massaging the suds in and rinsing them out again. Water streamed down his slick brown body, clinging to the muscular contours of his abdominals. He gave himself one more minute of bliss then reached out, twisted the faucet, and let the noises of the real world seep back in to the little cocoon of his bathroom.

  The first thing he heard was a gunshot.

  It was always the same.

  There’d be a siren too, soon, but the gap between the two was growing wider and wider these days.

  There were other sounds: people down there looking to get ahead just like they always had, but not knowing what that really meant these days.

  Jake toweled himself off, wrapped the wet towel around his waist, and moved to his bedroom. The phone was on the nightstand. The icons displayed one missed call and a message waiting.

  He checked the message, and then he checked it again just to be sure he hadn’t slipped and banged his head in the shower. Some people saw ghosts, Jake heard them. This one said, “Jake . . . It’s me.”

  Sophie Keane? Seriously? After ten fucking years?

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought about her, and even then when she’d crept into his head it had been bad news. But then, bad news had always been their MO. Bad news and good sex. The worse the news, the better the sex, like some sort of inverse-proportional relationship forged in the crucible of war.

  They’d served together.

  For a while that had been the thing that bound them, even after they’d left the battlefields of Afghanistan behind them it was there, ever-present.

  They’d seen things, done things others couldn’t understand.

  They were the same, or so he’d thought.

  They’d get through anything because they were fighters. Forget all that opposites-attract bullshit, there was nothing more powerful than fucking the female version of yourself. That kind of coming together was primal.

  But sooner or later it would have blown them apart if she hadn’t disappeared in the middle of the night. He’d been twenty-eight when she walked out the door. He’d never heard from her again, and never expected to.

  Something is about to happen?

  Don’t look for me?

  I’m not who you think I am?

  Fuck it.

  He tossed the phone onto the bed and turned to his dresser, ignoring the half-closed drawers for the clean clothes piled haphazardly on top of it. He picked out a pair of heavy jeans, a white T-shirt, and a dark sweatshirt. Five minutes later, leather jacket in hand, he was out the door, phone shoved into his pocket, wondering if the sex would be worth all the shit inviting Sophie Keane back into his life would bring.

  It wasn’t a question he’d ever thought he’d be asking himself, but then, these were the end of days, weren’t they? Surely Sophie riding back into town upon her pale horse had to be one of the signs of the apocalypse.

  A worn-down little Asian woman scrubbed at the steps of the tenement stoop opposite him. She looked up, stared daggers at him. He smiled at her craggy face. She grunted something and went back to scrubbing. The street smelled like stale cabbage and vinegar from the takeout place on the corner. Some things in Dogland, at least, didn’t change.

  * * *

  An hour later, Jake glanced up from the junction box he was working on. There weren’t a lot of jobs for people like him when they came out of the service. An ex had hooked him up with the gig at the MTA after he’d lost six months acclimating to life without people trying to kill him. He’d gotten a certain amount of skill with electrics, so it made sense. It wasn’t hard work. Plus, it was that or private security, and standing around protecting some asshole banker from picking up his bonus wasn’t exactly the kind of thing he wanted on his résumé.

  The background chatter suddenly rose to a near-deafening explosion of white noise. Jake looked up and down the tunnel for the source. Seeing nothing but the looping coils of electrical cables overhead and the rails on the ground disappearing into the darkness, he gave the box one last scan before slapping the lid closed. He flipped the heavy locking mechanism along its side. He hated it down here. The darkness was oppressive. “Good to go on box one thirty-seven,” he reported into the mic clipped to the front of his orange safety jacket. A second later a squawk and a scratchy, Affirmative, board showing green, came through to confirm the job was done.

  Jake checked to make sure nothing was rumbling down the tracks before he moved quickly along the narrow center lane toward the platform. Gravel crunched beneath his feet, amplified by the tunnel’s weird acoustics. There was something infinitely creepy about the subway tunnels, and not just the stories of the mole people who lived down here. It stemmed from the power pulsing through the third rail.

  Jake emerged from the tunnel, reaching the platform edge well before the headlights announced the next train. He cut across the tracks and hauled himself up and onto the platform.

  It might have been a decade since the last training ground drill or obstacle course, but he’d kept himself fit. Maybe not combat-ready, but he was in good shape. And the job was physical, lots of lifting and carrying and endless hiking through the miles and miles of tunnels.

  He walked down the platform. His orange jacket and hard hat worked like commuter-repellent, clearing a path through the crowd.

  Something was wrong.

  People along the platform looked agitated.

  There was a buzz moving through them like a swarm of angry bees. Jake checked out a couple of the guys closest to him as he passed them. There was an edge to them; they were tense. Up and down the platform he saw plenty of pale faces.

  Shock? That was his first thought.

  Why? That was his second.

  He’d lived in the city long enough to know bad things happened. Who could forget that? This grim recollection led to a third thought, the bleakest of the three: What’s going on up there?

  He hadn’t heard any announcements over the public address system, but that didn’t mean something wasn’t happening. He’d been a long way down the tunnel. He could have missed the announcement, but surely the control center would have given him a situation report?

  Anxiety is contagious. He knew that. He’d been in combat situations often enough to know that fear spread like wildfire, and once it was under your skin there was no shaking it.

  He hurried toward the exit. A young guy in a hoodie with his hands st
uffed into the pouch pocket passed through the turnstiles ahead of him. Jake caught his eye. “Hey, man, what’s going on?”

  The man glanced up at him, startled, then saw the MTA logo on his orange vest and relaxed, trusting that down here he was one of the guys in charge. He shook his head as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was about to say. “Just came over the news—Fort Hamilton. It’s been hit.”

  “What?” Jake stared at the stranger. That couldn’t be right. Hit? No way would anyone assault Fort Hamilton. That was insane. But he started to register fragments of the conversations going on around him and realized he was hearing the name Fort Hamilton over and over again.

  “CNN had footage from their weather chopper, showed the smoke. Not much else. But the place is burning. Fucking terrorists.”

  “Jesus . . .” Jake crossed himself, muscle memory rather than devotion. He now heard the beginning whisper-rumble of an oncoming train, then spotted the headlights approaching around the bend. He was still trying to process what he’d just heard. Fort Hamilton, gone? He couldn’t get his head around that. In some ways it was more shocking than the Twin Towers. The old base had been there almost two hundred years in one form or another. It was a core part of the nation’s defense, not some stockbroker’s castle of commerce. Despite occasional calls to close the last active base in New York City, it was still home to a whole slew of reserve and National Guard units, and the North Atlantic Division headquarters for the US Army Corps of Engineers.

  Jesus indeed.

  A terror strike made a grim kind of sense, but to a man like him, trained in the turmoil of combat, a strike like that was never the endgame, it was just a move toward it. They—whoever they were—were cutting off an Army response to something else.

  And then there was Sophie’s message out of the blue: Something is about to happen.

  Were the two related? They had to be, didn’t they? And if they were, what the hell was she caught up in?

  Don’t look for me.

  I’m not who you think I am.

  He pushed his way against the flow of people rising up toward the street, and emerged into daylight, on some subconscious level expecting to see plumes of smoke. There were a lot of edgy people. He couldn’t see any of the fuck-with-one-of-us-you-fuck-with-all-of-us bravado the post–9/11 movies had propagated. Most of these people were frightened they were about to go through hell all over again. Life had changed a lot in the last decade or so, and often not for the better. The years brought distance with them and a feeling of It couldn’t happen again that was almost complacent. They’d willingly given up so many liberties to ensure it couldn’t.

  But it could happen again, no matter what anyone believed.

  There were enemies within and without, and as far as Jake could tell they didn’t need to be fundamentalists to want to see America humbled. That was the biggest change he’d recognized. He could still remember the anger he’d experienced firsthand when he rocked up to a bar in Paris during his leave. All he’d done was ask for a beer. The accent had been enough to earn a torrent of abuse about interference, being part of the world police, and other bullshit that made him turn around and walk right back out of the bar. He’d only wanted a fucking drink, not a lecture on the rights of man. It was worse than the crap he’d taken growing up because of his skin color. The world was black-and-white in so many different ways.

  This wasn’t an accident.

  He knew it.

  Even without seeing the smoke, he knew it.

  Fort Hamilton was a strategic target.

  The part of Jake Carter that would always be a soldier processed things in a logical fashion. Stage one: threat assessment. What were they facing? Who was the enemy here? What is their endgame? Stage two: intervention. Become an obstacle between the enemy and their goal.

  He heard an old guy explaining to his daughter, “You hit Hamilton, you cripple the Army response to anything on land. Simple as that. Take out the tunnels and bridges and we’re an island of sitting ducks. It ain’t good, kid.” The words carried easily despite the wind and the traffic. Jake stepped away from the stairs and onto the sidewalk beside the subway entrance. “Smart move if you want to inflict maximum damage.” The guy was absolutely right.

  Not far away, a young woman, an NYU student judging by her bohemian outfit and the hemp book bag slung over her shoulder, was a lot more alarmed. “What’s next? We have to get out of here. First they take out the Army and the National Guard, what’s next?” she wailed at her friend, clutching her arm tightly. Hysteria wasn’t going to help anyone, natural or not. “They’re gonna start herding us into little pens, like mice, and doing experiments on us! You watch! They hate us!”

  He wanted to go over to her and explain that this was New York, not Auschwitz, and Josef Mengele was dead; if it was al-Qaeda they wouldn’t be interested in turning her into a lab rat—but he didn’t bother wasting his breath. Hell, he knew plenty of people who thought like that, and plenty more who’d argue that the Big Apple was already a major filth-ridden and rotten maze, complete with bits of cheese scattered throughout and a whole lot of panicked mice in business suits bouncing off each other every day of the fucking week.

  Why Fort Hamilton?

  If you were going to hit a major target, why not some place here in Midtown instead of down in Brooklyn?

  He was getting ahead of himself.

  He was thinking like it was a foregone conclusion that al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, or even the Ku Klux fucking Klan was behind the panic. He didn’t even know for sure what had happened, let alone who was behind it.

  He thought about what the vet had said.

  Which is when Jake realized that he was already working on stage two, figuring out the best way to put himself between the unknown enemy and their goals before he’d established who or what the threat was. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t his fight anymore. Once a warrior, always a warrior.

  Chapter Two

  SHE COULDN’T SEE ANYONE, BUT THAT DIDN’T MEAN there wasn’t anyone watching.

  Getting out had been too easy. She wasn’t buying it. Too many years in combat situations and hot zones—and even more spent training others to cope with the demands of both—had drilled an almost preternatural awareness into Sophie Keane. She knew when she wasn’t alone.

  It wasn’t just paranoia.

  It was the middle of the afternoon. Paris was a busy city. Maybe not New York–busy, but it was always bustling with activity and beautiful people. The power brokers of commerce, big businesses, and big bank-balances dominated la Défense. Most of the people working in the neighborhood were inside, hidden away behind the anonymity of plate-glass windows. Even so, there were pedestrians, a mix of locals and tourists, cutting through the quieter streets on their way to livelier, more Parisian locations. Watching them was like seeing the physical laws of the universe played out on the streets. They moved in clusters, together or alone, everything at first seemingly random but ultimately following lines that provided order in the seeming chaos.

  They weren’t what had her on edge. That was something else. Someone else. Someone actively looking for her.

  She’d been made. It wasn’t like her to be sloppy.

  She’d allowed herself to be spooked. And when spooked, she’d allowed herself to make mistakes. She’d been so fixated on just getting out of there that she’d forgotten the basics. She clenched her fist, painted nails digging into her palm. What’s done was done. Her paymasters would send their killers after her to clean up the mess she’d made. Now she had no choice but to work around them.

  She was good at that.

  She was a survivor.

  She checked left and right without turning around. Left, she used the reflection in a shop window; right, a car’s passenger-side window. For behind, she used the windshield of a stalled Fiat stuck in the unmoving line of traffic. It was as if the entire street, everywhere around her, was filled with ghosts. They had no substance. Any one of them
could have been watching her, but no one paid her obvious attention as she hit the sidewalk.

  Sophie moved quickly down the boulevard. She didn’t rush, but her native New Yorker’s gait meant she moved with a purpose the Parisians didn’t share. It was all about acting like you belonged there, giving no indication that you’d done anything wrong. A young French man strolled past, smiled, and nodded at her during that split second where they occupied each other’s space, natural, flirtatious.

  He was a good-looking kid and he knew it.

  She offered a smile back. She didn’t want him remembering her as the woman who was immune to his charms.

  A young couple skirted her, moving up quickly from behind and then splitting apart to go around her on either side only to come together again a few steps ahead. They moved with the familiarity of lovers, barely acknowledging her presence as they swept past.

  A bike messenger rushed by, bag slapping against his left leg as he pedaled furiously, weaving in and out of stalled traffic with the same death wish of bike messengers the world over. The streets were eerie these days, with the lined-up cars going nowhere. It had been like that for a few days now. Ironically, that stillness was the first sign that things were in motion.

  She could feel her tail closing the distance between them.

  She could run, but that turned survival into a game of chance.

  She didn’t know how fast her pursuer was, if they were working alone, or if a cordon was closing in around her.

  She could run, but with no idea of who was chasing her she could never stop running. That was a problem.

  La Défense wasn’t some Parisian ghetto. It was one of the city’s newer areas. It was less than sixty years old and had been revitalized in seventies, the eighties, and the nineties. Sidewalks were long and straight and clean with plenty of space for grass and flowers and low bushes between them and the buildings. The trees grew right along the edge of the avenues and boulevards, warring with the lines of cars for possession of the roads. The district was a wonderful place if modern living was your thing, but it was absolutely appalling for her current needs.