Still, this is a good way to go, was his last conscious thought.
2
When he eventually woke up in the nearby Temple University Hospital, Jon had a stretch of time alone before anyone visited him. He had no family anymore, very few people that he would call friends and no real ones. He had dated a girl a year earlier, but that didn’t end well, and since then he’d been too married to his job to make another relationship work. As his dying thoughts in the cemetery had implied, stopping crime was all that really mattered to him. He suspected that would probably change someday, but he wasn’t in a hurry. So during the early hours of his recovery, he mostly worried about losing his job, and subsequently his life dream, although he also spent some time staring at and taking some comfort from the hospital’s official motto, posted on the wall near his bed: Perseverantia Vincit, which was Latin for “Perseverance Conquers.”
All he’d ever wanted to be when growing up was a private detective like in Raymond Chandler’s books. He had been raised in a rural area by strict parents who would only let him read old books and watch old movies, because “they were made back when things were cleaner, before they started putting all that trash in.” His parents seemed to miss the fact that, back in the 1940s, Chandler was actually quite risqué himself, for the time. But he didn’t tell them that because he loved books like The Big Sleep and the old black-and-white movie made from it, and ate them up over and over again. He was especially drawn to Chandler because the fictional protagonist Philip Marlowe shared a name with him, and in the fertile mind of an only child he imagined himself as “Philip” and dreamed of being a private eye someday.
So after his parents basically disowned him as a teenager, he worked various jobs to pay for college classes and killed himself to get the best grades possible. Then he entered the local police academy upon graduation, because he knew by then that he probably couldn’t make a living as a private detective unless he first had successful experience in law enforcement. Then he killed himself again to succeed once he was on the force, setting the tone for his current obsessive lifestyle, because it was really the only one he’d ever known. But it did manage to make him a detective by the ripe young age of twenty-five, a significant accomplishment even for a small-town cop.
Jon’s first and only visitor in the hospital was the most important person he’d ever met in his life.
“My name is Anton Versa,” the casually dressed older man said, without extending a hand to Jon. “I’m the Police Commissioner of Philadelphia.”
“I know who you are, sir,” Jon responded, sitting up higher in his bed. “I follow the force here because I’d like to be on it someday.” He thought that big city experience might fast-track his real goal of becoming a successful PI.
“Well, that’s definitely not gonna happen, with the problems you’ve caused us here by muscling in the way you did.”
Jon tensed, but felt himself relax when the gray-haired man looked around for a chair and pulled one up near the bed.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Versa said softly. “You did this city a great service by ending that sick bastard’s reign of terror. But we can’t give you all the credit in the press, or even most of it, because our own people put in a lot of work on this.”
He paused and stared at Jon.
“I … uh,” Jon said after an awkward silence, “I understand, sir.”
The Commissioner shifted in the chair, then said, “You’ve put your own Chief in a tight spot, too, out there in Epherter, or whatever it’s called, because you weren’t supposed to be here.”
“Ephrata,” Jon said, nodding.
“But he told me you were very good out there … and you really outdid yourself by catching this guy.”
“Just doing my job, sir. Hopefully better than the criminals do theirs.”
“This psycho had a good thing going,” Versa continued. “And he could have kept going for a long time with that cemetery setup.… We found the other five bodies in crypts nearby.”
“Just wish I could’ve stopped him earlier,” Jon said.
“Maybe if someone had listened to you,” Versa responded, in what would be as close to an apology as Jon ever expected to get from a higher ranking officer. So he let it ride, and there were a few more moments of silence. Then Versa cleared his throat and continued.
“You know how sports stars—when they do really good, but maybe they have some problems…?” He paused and cleared his throat again. “They get traded, you know. Sometimes. When they’re really good, and they have problems.”
“Yeah…”
“Well, you’ve done really good. Damn good. But you have some problems.”
“Okay … so?” Jon asked, shifting his bandaged body in the bed.
“Rialle King is an old friend of mine.… She’s the Mayor of Manhattan, you know.”
“I’ve heard of her.”
“Well, she’s an old friend and I owe her a few favors. And she recently reached out to other cities for a detective. Someone like you.”
“What?” Jon started, and then instinctively put his hand up to the bandage below his chin as pain shot through the wound there. “You want me to go there? That place is a hellhole, isn’t it? Dark all the time…”
“Oh, it’s not that bad. Still the party capital of the world, they say.”
“Yeah, they all party a lot because they’re so miserable. Isn’t cancer through the roof up there, and mental problems? Didn’t they make it legal to sell antidepressants in all the stores there?”
“Yeah,” Versa said. “But the sun’s coming back.”
“And then it’s gonna get even worse, from what I hear,” Jon said. “It could become one of the most dangerous places in the world.”
“That’s why Mayor King needs help,” Versa said. “To keep it from goin’ there. Did you know that she’s the first female mayor in New York history? And she’s related to Martin Luther King.”
“With all due respect, sir, I only care about solving crimes. Why do I fit the bill so well? I’ve never even been to New York.”
“Precisely because you’ve never been there, and don’t care about anything other than solving crimes. Mayor King can’t fully trust anyone in the PD up there right now, she wants some new blood. There are forces vying, a lot of temptations for the cops.… She can explain it to you. She asked for someone good who’s also ‘incorruptible,’ I think was the word she used.”
“I appreciate the vote of confidence, sir,” Jon said. “But I don’t think I’m the right man for the job.”
Versa smiled slightly and leaned forward in his seat.
“Here’s why you’re gonna go, and why you’re gonna like it: The only serial killer that’s been worse and gotten more press than our own Full Mooner is the Dayfall Killer in Manhattan. That’s who Mayor King wants you to stop, that’s your only job, and when you do it you can punch your ticket anywhere. Or live off the consulting and book royalties…”
Or open a PI office wherever I want, Jon thought.
“Plus it plays into the whole Dayfall situation,” Versa continued. “Everyone is watching to see what happens in New York when it hits there first, to find out what other big cities up north, and in Europe, need to be ready for.” He sat back in the chair. “You not only get to go mano a mano with a very bad criminal, but you get to be a part of something bigger.”
Jon sat still and silent in the hospital bed—no more shifting around or protesting now. He didn’t care much about the “bigger picture,” but he did care about catching the criminal, and he sensed that Commissioner Versa had a subtle wisdom. The old cop was dangling the carrot of competition, which he knew Jon couldn’t resist, and at the same time challenging him to do something more with his life.
“By the time they let me out of here,” Jon said, “won’t there be only a day or two before the Dayfall thing happens up there? And isn’t the Mayor about to get voted out or something?”
“She has a good plan for all that
, like she always does. As I said, I’ll let her tell you about it.
“Besides,” Versa continued, the slight smile returning, “you can’t stay on a police force around here anymore. You pissed yourself twice that night in the cemetery, you know—‘cold diureses’ they call it. Comes with hypothermia.”
“Didn’t notice, actually,” Jon said. “But why would that keep me off a force?”
“Well, that’s gonna get out, and you know how the guys are always giving out nicknames, which tend to stick. You’d be PeeWee or Mr. Dependsable, or some other moniker you wouldn’t want to live with.”
“Good point,” Jon said, and chuckled enough that his chin hurt again. “Like they call you Nurse Versa?”
“They do?” the man said, feigning surprise, then knitted his brow. “Now you definitely have to leave the area.”
3
DAYFALL MINUS 30 HOURS
It was dark on the Saturday night that Jon flew into Manhattan for the first time, but not just because it was around midnight. He knew it would be dark during the morning and afternoon hours as well. The island had been perpetually shrouded in night for more than ten years, until just recently. During the last two weeks, some daylight had broken through for a few brief stretches of time that were growing successively longer and would soon culminate in an event dubbed “Dayfall,” which was expected to take place after the storm system currently above the city erupted on Sunday night, clearing the sky of the last of the black clouds that had caused the constant darkness. This would allow the sun to return on Monday morning for a full twelve hours, according to the scientists, but until then the mixture of the storm clouds and the remaining sun-blockers would keep the inhabitants in one more day of night.
Jon stared in awe at the city from the passenger seat to the left of the helicopter pilot, as they approached it over the water to the south. The heart of New York had always been an impressive sight, but the recent changes to its famous skyline added a surreal quality to the view and made it even more astonishing to the young detective.
Floodwaters on the edges of the island had decreased its size by almost 20 percent, and a wall had been built to protect the remaining parts from the threat of the rising water level. This had all happened because Pakistan and India had a nuclear conflagration (commonly called “the flagger”), which changed parts of the global environment to an extreme degree. Catastrophic ice-melting in subarctic areas and Greenland caused the rising water levels, and the effect on the atmosphere caused both “nuclear night” and “nuclear winter” to fall on some of the Northern Hemisphere. Much of the northeastern seaboard of the United States, including Jon’s home area near Philadelphia, had to adjust to colder temperatures, shorter days, and the gray color of the snow that had been stained with his blood at the cemetery. But the perpetual darkness, like the flooding, had only reached the coastline of the US.
New York City was at the very outside fringes of the effect, and therefore would soon be the first major city to experience full daylight, as Commissioner Versa had mentioned. Boston and Portland (Maine) would be liberated from the darkness within a few weeks, and then the northern European cities like London, Berlin, and Moscow after a few months.
Jon found himself shaking his head with incredulity that the world’s most famous skyline could have changed so dramatically from the pictures and videos that he’d seen in his childhood. But then he remembered that at the turn of the century a similar transformation had occurred when the World Trade Center towers were destroyed. He knew that people had been just as astounded then that such a thing could actually happen, but he still felt stunned that it could happen twice in such a relatively short time.
In addition to the smaller size of the island and the dark ring of the Water Wall along its outer edges, he noticed that much more light emanated from the buildings in the center of the oval than the ones farther out near the wall. Those buildings had survived the not-so-sudden apocalypse of the “River Rise,” as it was called, unlike their adjacent counterparts that had flooded and been torn down to use as raw material for the wall. But obviously many residents and businesses hadn’t trusted the assurances that the water level had reached its peak, and had moved farther inland or left the city altogether.
Even in this semi-apocalyptic state, however, Manhattan was still far more imposing and important than any place Jon had ever lived or worked. And he had a nagging, recurring feeling somewhere inside of him that he wouldn’t be able to succeed here like he had back home. But he desperately wanted to impress Mayor King, so he suppressed those negative thoughts by constantly reviewing in his mind the conversation he’d had with her before he left, on a secure cell phone that Versa had given to him on her behalf.
“You’re gonna hit the ground running,” she said, after she had outlined her basic plan and purpose for hiring him. “The storm’s supposed to happen tomorrow night and Dayfall the next morning, so you’ve only got about a day to do this. We’ll fly you in to a crime scene in an office building at One Hundred Park Avenue, where you’ll meet Officer Halladay in the lobby.”
“Yes ma’am,” he answered, then wondered aloud, “Will the pilot know where to land?”
“He’ll know where the nearest helipad is.”
Jon asked that because he had spent the last three days in his hospital bed researching everything he could about the island (including transportation), and had read online that normally no one was allowed to fly helicopters close to the big buildings in the city. The police and EMTs could only do it in emergencies … so this spoke of the importance Mayor King had placed on him and his investigation.
“I hope I can help you with this,” Jon told her.
“I hope you can, too,” she responded. “I really think the only way we can keep the Nazis from gaining power in the city is if we find and stop this killer before Dayfall. The vote is scheduled for the day after that, and there’s no way we’ll win if people ‘Fear the Day,’ like they’re being told to.”
“The Nazis” was the Mayor’s way of referring to a man named Gareth Render and his henchmen at Gotham Security—a private company that was poised to become the primary law enforcement authority in Manhattan, if the upcoming referendum passed in their boss’s favor. For various reasons, many of the cops in the MPD sympathized with the goals and philosophy of GS, and some were even on its payroll. Rialle King saw herself and her remaining supporters as the last bastion of light for the city, fighting an uphill battle against a conspiracy so broad that she was required to bring in someone new and unadulterated like Jon.
“I also hope you have a strong stomach,” the Mayor continued, “when you see what that sicko did at the office building. And I hope you’re as good as Versa said, ’cause this killer seems to be some kind of ghost who can walk through walls.”
“I might not be better than some of the people you have there,” Jon said, trying to keep her from expecting too much from him.
“Maybe not, but unlike them I actually do have you—at least you’re working for me. I don’t know about any of them anymore, except maybe for your new partner. Maybe. I don’t know exactly what to think about him.”
That had been the end of the conversation, the Mayor having been interrupted by another call.
Jon leaned forward in the helicopter to study the city more, now that they had reached its south end. The cluster of skyscrapers that had formerly filled the tip, including the tallest one that had replaced the Twin Towers, were now gone, victims of the River Rise. In an eerie twist of fate, the 9/11 Memorial had been prophetic as well as commemorative, because its inverse fountains conjured images of the buildings descending into a watery grave.
The not-quite-as-tall buildings that still stood just inside the Water Wall were mostly dark and silent, but the lights and activity increased considerably as they flew farther into the center of the city, where everyone was presumably safer from any encroaching flooding, and where most of the businesses and citizens had moved. In a few minutes,
Jon could see Madison Square Park, heavily lit with the otherworldly light of the UV lamps that kept its trees and grass green and surrounded by buildings that had taken an exponential leap in value and importance because of their location in the very center of this new New York. He especially noticed the historic Flatiron Building, which gave this now-central district its name and was also where he would be working, because it was the new MPD headquarters, and for security’s sake, the Mayor’s office as well. Jon remembered reading about how the Flatiron District used to be a downscale satellite to the more prestigious offices and apartments of Lower Manhattan, but now as a result of the flagger it had become the core of the Big Apple.
As the helicopter passed farther north, Jon saw that regardless of how many buildings and businesses the city had lost from its edges, much of its interior was still thriving. The towering buildings of Midtown still shone with lights fueled by commercial interests like advertising and entertainment, and even though the tourist industry had definitely taken a big hit, the brightest blast of white still emanated from Times Square. Jon wondered how many people below him were working and how many were playing, because he had read that the uninterrupted darkness had upended the normal cycle of jobs during the day and parties at night. The New York night now lasted all twenty-four hours, so the “night life” did as well, giving new meaning to the label “the city that never sleeps.”
He also wondered what it was like in the almost total darkness beyond the North Wall of the city, which he had also read about and could just barely see on the other side of Midtown. The North Wall had been built across the south end of Central Park, and unlike the other stretches in the southern, eastern, and western parts of the city, it was not designed to keep the water out. There had indeed been flooding on the northern half of the island—the expensive real estate on the Upper East and West Sides had been almost entirely lost to it—but the wall there was primarily built to keep people out. There was great fear among the denizens of the southern half that vagrants from the north would invade their more protected and coveted neighborhoods, especially when many of the displaced started squatting in Central Park. And the city of New Manhattan didn’t really mind losing that big landmark, because it quickly lost its appeal when it became a veritable cemetery of dead grass and trees. There was no way anyone could supply enough UV lamps or artificial heat to keep a park that size alive.
Dayfall Page 2
