by Marcus Sakey
But before he could finish the sentence there was a crack of planets colliding, and the ground vanished beneath him, he was flying, his arms out and twisting, and everything—
CHAPTER 14
The noise came first. An overlapping mishmash of sound. Cries of pain. Urgent, indecipherable yells. Rasping, scraping. Solemn voices counting. Sirens farthercloserfarther.
He wasn’t aware of it, really. It was the water he floated through.
Then, slowly, the formless syllables began to shape themselves into words. The words had taste and heft. Hemorrhaging. Amputate. Crushed. Concussed.
The scraping became the wooden legs of a chair or table dragged across concrete.
The men counting backward punctuated the arrival of zero with an exhalation of effort, as though they were heaving something.
The sirens stayed the same. He just came to realize how many he was hearing, some moving, some still, some nearby, some a good distance away.
Cooper opened his eyes.
Canvas stretched above him. The pattern was indistinct, and the colors moved and swirled. For a moment he faulted his vision, then realized it was active camo, smart fabric that chameleoned to match the environment. Military issue. He blinked eyes dry and swollen. The noises around him took no notice, just kept insistently on, each cutting across the other.
“…need more O over here…”
“…breathe, just breathe…”
“…my husband, where is…”
“…it hurts, God, it hurts…”
Cooper took a deep inhale, felt tings and stabs of pain as his chest swelled. Nothing too bad. He raised his right hand and gingerly patted the back of his head. The flesh was hot and swollen and sore, the hair sticky. He must have hit it. How?
Slowly, he rolled onto one side, then swung his legs off the edge of the cot. Also military, he noticed. This was an army triage tent. For a moment the world swam. He clamped down on the edge of the cot with both hands. The pain came now, a whirling thumping, dull and looming.
“Go slow.”
Cooper raised his head and opened his eyes. A trim man in scrubs spattered with blood stood beside him. Where had he come from?
“How did I get here?”
“Someone must have brought you. What hurts?”
“My—” He coughed. His throat was full of dust. “My head.”
“Look at this?” The doctor had a penlight out. Cooper obediently stared into it, followed as the man moved it back and forth. A triage center, he was in a triage center of some sort. But how? He remembered fighting through the crowd, the surging, roiling chaos of all those people. Stalked by two o’clock when…the bombs. He had been trying to stop bombs from going off. He had seen—
“Where is she?” Cooper whipped his head around, felt the pain as a promissory note, ignored it for now. He was in a large field tent packed with rows of cots, the beds nearly touching. Men and women in scrubs pushed across the rows, speaking insistently to one another as they tended the wounded. Maybe twenty racks in here, he couldn’t see all of them, she could be in one.
“Hey.” The doctor’s voice was firm. “Look at me.”
The pain paid what it owed, a crushing feeling like there was a vise in the middle of his skull. Cooper groaned, looked back at the doctor. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” the man said, fitting a stethoscope to his ears, “but I’m sure she’s fine. Right now I need you to relax so I can see how badly hurt you are.”
It all clicked together, finally, the scattered pieces coalescing into a whole. He had been chasing John Smith’s agent, the woman who could walk through walls, the cell phone bomber with the big eyes. He had caught up with her inside the Exchange. But not in time.
“How bad is it?” Cooper felt like something was falling through his chest.
“That’s what I’m checking. Deep breath.”
Cooper did as he was told, the air rattling in his lungs. “Not me. I mean, how bad is it?”
“Oh. Deep breath.” The doctor stared into the distance as he listened to Cooper’s chest. Whatever he heard seemed to satisfy him. “I don’t know how to answer that.”
“How many people…”
“I’m focused on the ones in front of me.” The doctor looped the scope around his neck and glanced at his watch. “You have a mild concussion. There was a lot of smoke and dust inhalation, but nothing I’m worried about long-term. You’re very lucky. You should avoid sleep for a while, eight, ten hours maybe. If you start to feel dizzy or nauseous, go to the hospital immediately.” He started away.
“Wait. That’s it?”
“You can stay if you feel weak, but if you think you can walk, we could really use the space.”
“I can walk.” Cooper took a deep breath and a look around. “Can I help you?”
“Do you have medical training?”
“Basic first aid.”
The doctor shook his head. “Too many people trying to help already. Best thing you can do right now is get out of the way.” And then he was gone, on to the next cot.
Cooper sat on the edge of the rack for a moment, letting his whirling thoughts slowly die down. Collecting himself, rebuilding the memories. He’d had her, hadn’t he? Slapped her cell phone away, had cuffs in hand. He’d won. He’d caught the bad guy. Girl.
And yet, this.
He took a long breath that made him cough until he tasted dust on the back of his tongue. Then he stood up. If the bombs had gone off, there would be victims far worse off than he seemed to be. Best to clear the cot.
He looked in the other beds before he left, but she wasn’t there.
Moving slowly to keep the pain from splashing around his skull, Cooper walked to the exit, pushed the canvas door flap aside, and stepped outside.
Into a graveyard.
For a moment he thought he was hallucinating.
The sky had been replaced by a thick gray scrim of whirling dust. The air tasted charred. In the dim light, trees were skeleton-limbed silhouettes, pointing like Charon across the river to the underworld. And all around him were tombstones. Marble tombstones inscribed with names and dates.
Cooper reached out to touch the tent, pinching the material between fingers scraped and sore. It was covered in a thin layer of dust, but had the tight, satisfying feel of canvas. This was real. It was happening. So, then, the graves…
Trinity Church. This is the churchyard. Alexander Hamilton is buried here somewhere.
It made sense. In crowded Manhattan, space for triage tents would be in short supply. Still. There was an ugly symbolism. He had fallen asleep in one world and awakened in another. The first had been sunlight and fanfare; this one was dust and ash.
There were people all around. Some of them seemed to be part of the organized rescue effort. They carried stretchers and shuttled medical supplies and directed ambulances in a busy dance. But many others seemed dazed. They stood and stared, looked up at the towering spire of the church, or back toward Wall Street, where the smoke thickened.
Wall Street. The Exchange. Maybe she was still there.
Cooper started through the cemetery. His head hurt and his body was sore, but more than anything he just felt thick, altered. Like a guy driving home, singing along with the radio right up until the semi T-boned him and sent the car end over horrifying end, the world spinning, flashes of colors, sky, ground, sky, ground, and then the impact, the sickening crunch, and in that instant, when the world had shifted completely, when everything that had mattered a moment before no longer even rated, the radio would still be playing the same song.
He felt like the song.
Slowly, he picked his way through the churchyard. He climbed the low fence to Broadway, crossed the street where food trucks had blocked his path. Someone bumped him, their shoulder hitting hard, and the novelty of that struck him. He hadn’t been bumped like that in a long time. The world was water; nothing was permanent, all was shift and change. A cop
started to wave him back, but Cooper felt through his pockets, found his badge. The man let him pass. The smoke was thicker, and he couldn’t see more than ten, fifteen feet. Beyond that the best he could do was make out flashing colors, police lights. He moved toward them. People staggered the other way, their faces dirty, clothes torn, expressions shocked. They leaned on one another. Soldiers carried stretchers.
Cooper walked, slow and steady, four-four time in a world gone off measure.
Every step stranger. The bones of buildings had torn through their stone skin and lay exposed. Collapsed walls buried the cobblestones. Shattered glass dusted the scene with razor-edged glitter. The dust clouds were lit brighter by a dozen fires burning out of sight. He reached the corner where he had spotted the woman who could walk through walls. Firemen dug through the rubble, masks on their faces and reflective stripes on their uniforms.
To the south, he could see the New York Stock Exchange, a building that had stood for a hundred years, weathered depressions and wars and unimaginable social change, been a symbol for the unstoppable power of capitalism until that power was, indeed, stopped by the arrival of his kind; a building that had, ever so briefly, represented the hopes of a world struggling for a new balance when every conviction had been upended, every fact proved unstable, every belief turned fragile; a building of stone and steel that by its simple presence declared that the engines that powered the world were running fine. It was in ruins.
Of the six massive columns that fronted the building, only one was still in place. The others had cracked and sheared; one of them had fallen outright, the huge stone smashing into the street. The glass wall behind must have blown out as well, four stories of lethal shards surfing the roar of air and fire. Through the open space that had been a wall, he could see the building, naked and raw. Offices exposed, bathrooms torn open, a stairwell lost and sad.
And everywhere, the dead. Bodies.
Bodies in the street, bodies in the building. Bodies beneath fallen columns, bodies dangling in a spiderweb of cabling.
Torn and broken, the colors of their clothes a mockery in this bleak new world.
Hundreds of them. Thousands.
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
You were supposed to stop it.
It was a nonsense thought. He couldn’t hold himself responsible for everything that went wrong in the world. But he’d been so close. It had been he who ran down Alex Vasquez, who used her brother as bait, who implemented the phone taps that led them to Dusty Evans. It had been he playing against John Smith, again, and he’d lost, again, and all of these people had died.
Cooper spun on his heel and walked away. He walked without direction or purpose, without thought or plan. His companions were Frustration and Rage, and together the three of them stalked Manhattan.
A pair of strappy heels on a pair of shapely legs flung akimbo inside a stylish black pencil skirt that ended, along with the body, at the waist.
A sidewalk peddler of cheap purses and flimsy umbrellas shoving all of his wares off the folding table that comprised his livelihood to make a cot for a screaming man carried between two firefighters.
Gray air moving like fabric, like lint, over swirling gray ash. Gray-faced people in gray-smudged clothes. The world gone monochrome.
And then the pink shock of a child’s stuffed animal in the middle of Broadway.
A bank of payphones surrounded by a mob of people waiting in line. A true New York mix, a skinhead next to a broker, two men in blue jumpsuits, a fashion model, a hot-dog vendor, a boy and girl holding hands. Everyone patient. No one pushing.
A woman in a business suit walking down the middle of the sidewalk. An expensive leather briefcase slung over one shoulder. Blood trickling down the side of her face. Her arms cradling a potted plant three feet tall.
At the corner of two minor streets, a taxi with open doors, the radio playing at maximum volume. New Yorkers standing near, listening to a stammering news reporter.
“…again, an explosion at the Leon Walras Stock Exchange. I…I’ve never seen anything like it. The entire east side of the building has been destroyed. There are bodies everywhere. The death toll will be in the hundreds, maybe thousands. No one is saying what caused this, but it had to be a bomb, or bombs. I can’t…it’s something I never thought I would see…”
On the bright expanse of Columbus Park, a mile from the explosion, three large buses parked on the green of the soccer field. Red Cross mobile donation units. A mob of volunteers, hundreds of people rolling up their sleeves.
Just north of Houston, the building was exploding again.
The tri-d billboard was mounted on the second story of an office tower. Instead of the usual advertisements and spinning corporate logos, an image of the Exchange hovered in the air, the Exchange as it had been hours before, a massive American flag dangling above the stage. The image shuddering and bouncing, the camera swerving vertiginously, and not just the camera, the building, suddenly consumed in thick smoke. There were blurry objects flying through the air, growing chunky and pixelated as they reached the edge of the projection field.
“My God,” whispered the woman standing beside Cooper.
The image changed, the smoke suddenly lessening, the angle different. The building was shown ripped open. Firemen sprayed water. Paper and insulation drifted on the eddies. Police guarded the scene as emergency workers looked for survivors. A ribbon at the bottom of the screen declared, LIVE FROM STOCK EXCHANGE EXPLOSION.
“Hadda be the twists,” said a rough voice behind him. Cooper fought the urge to deck the bigot. After all, he was right.
“Maybe,” said another voice.
“Who else would it be?”
“Who knows? All I’m saying, I don’t think they’ll know for a while.”
“Why not?”
“Look at it, man. Mess like that, how you gonna tell the good guys from the bad guys?”
The video had flashed back to the explosion. They’d probably run that loop for three straight months. But as the eyes of everyone in the crowd watched the building blow up, again, Cooper turned and stared at the men behind him. They looked like guys who bet on sports. As he stared at them, first one and then the other turned his attention to look at Cooper. “What?” The bigger one. “Help you with something, buddy?”
How you gonna tell the good guys from the bad guys?
“Thank you.”
“Huh?”
But by then Cooper was already gone, sprinting at full speed.
* * *
“It’s easy. Everybody else on the field, they look where the opposing line is. I look where they’re going to be. Then I just head somewhere else.”
—BARRY ADAMS, RUNNING BACK FOR THE CHICAGO BEARS, ON HOW HE WAS ABLE TO RUSH 2,437 YARDS IN A SINGLE SEASON, SHATTERING THE PREVIOUS RECORD (2,105, BY ERIC DICKERSON IN 1984)
* * *
CHAPTER 15
Located west of DC’s Naval Observatory, Massachusetts Avenue Heights was a charming neighborhood of redbrick row houses whose proximity and small yards belied the affluence within. While not quite equaling the mansions and political swing of Sheridan-Kalorama, it was a wealthy neighborhood, the kind of place people said was great to raise kids, and home to numerous politicians, doctors, and lawyers.
The house on 39th Street NW was quaint and carefully maintained, with a pretty porch, manicured hedges, and an American flag. What wasn’t quite as evident were the security cameras mounted not only on the house but along the walkway and in the tree, the steel-reinforced doorframe, and the discreet gray sedan that passed the house at random intervals twice an hour.
Cooper had been here many times. He’d sat on the picture-perfect back patio and sipped beer while the kids played. He’d helped design the security and, for several months, even served as a driver. During a mousetrap operation in which they’d leaked supposed weaknesses to terrorist elements, he’d run a team out of the place, sleeping in the spare room and hoping that John Smith mi
ght take the bait. He wasn’t a stranger to the house on 39th Street.
Still, showing up unannounced after dark, wearing torn clothes and smelling of sweat and diesel, well, it wasn’t something he’d normally do.
He rang the doorbell. Opened and closed his hands as he waited for what seemed a long time, conscious of the security measures trained on him.
When he opened the door, Drew Peters looked at Cooper for a long moment. His accountant’s eyes took in every detail and gave nothing back. Cooper didn’t say anything, just let his very presence speak for him.
Finally the director of Equitable Services glanced at his watch. “You’d better come in.”
Cooper had interrupted dinner, so Peters brought him through the kitchen to say hello. The space was bright and homey, with hardwood countertops and glass-fronted cabinets. It had always struck Cooper as out of character with the cool gray he associated with Director Peters.
Of course, at home, he wasn’t the director; he was Dad, and Cooper was sometimes Uncle Nick. The girls usually squealed when he came in. Maggie harbored a teenage crush, while Charlotte often begged helicopter rides.
Tonight, though, Charlotte pushed broccoli listlessly around her plate, and Maggie stared at her hands. Finally, Alana, the eldest, rose. “Hi, Cooper. Are you okay?” She’d been eleven when her mother died, and since then she’d become the de facto lady of the house, watching over the others and taking care of meals. Cooper had often felt sorry for Alana—nineteen years old and forced to act forty. He wondered who she would have turned out to be if Elizabeth had lived. Imagined she wondered that, too.
“Sure,” he said. “I’m as okay as everybody else.”
“It’s awful,” she said, and immediately looked as if she wanted to amend that, find a stronger term, a word that could encompass the bodies and the smoke and the pink shock of a child’s stuffed animal in the middle of Broadway.
