by Melissa Good
He sounded a touch nervous. Kerry half smiled, understanding the feeling from her first weeks working for Dar, and having to lay out her own decision making. "Great plan," she said. "We need you here badly."
Mark didn't answer for a moment, and then he chuckled. "Thanks boss. So we've got the camper, and we'll pick up the SAT units and the power trucks on our way down there. Where do we go?"
Ah, good question. "For now, come here...well, to the Rock," Kerry clarified."We have to find out where the best place is to start working. I know we'll need stocks of cable and patch equipment, do you know if we've got that on the truck?"
"Hang on, lemme check."
Kerry muted the mic and hissed a small curse as another cramp hit.
Dar came back over to the desk where she was seated and emptied the contents of a packet on the table. "Ah. I'm legal again." She flicked her slim billfold with one finger and pushed the folder of identification cards around. "You don't have to worry about me being deported."
"That's a relief." Kerry managed a smile. "Though I have to admit razzing the admin at the office was pretty funny."
"It was." Dar sat down and extended her long, mostly bare legs across the floor. "Gut still hurting?"
"How'd you guess?" Kerry made a face, resting her chin on her hand. "I feel like dog poo."
"Been there."
"No kidding." Kerry turned her attention back to the phone as she heard rustling against the remote microphone. "I'm surprised we haven't gotten called from Alastair or anyone yet this morning."
Dar picked up her newly reunited cell phone and opened it, triggering it on and watching as it obediently started up. After a quiet moment, it started buzzing and rattling loudly, making her jump."Yah!"
"Holy crap!" Kerry blurted.
Dar dropped the phone and it danced across the table in truly spectacular fashion. "Any ideas how to bulk delete voice mail messages?"
"Okay, boss." Mark came back on the line and paused as he heard the noise on the other end. "What the heck's going on there?"
"Um--not much." Kerry grabbed the phone and tossed it to its owner. "So what's the scoop?"
"Let me put it this way, you got any pull with those guys at ADC?We used all the stuff they sent rebuilding the space at the old P, and we ain't got any more."
"Ugh," Kerry uttered. "So we don't have patch panels or anything like that, right?"
"Right."
She sighed. "What do we have?"
"Got some routers, some little switches, a couple spools of STP, couple spools of UTP, another big roll of that fiber the guys used last night, and a handful of RJ45 plugs."
"My mother could probably do a three dimensional art project with that," Dar commented, her eyes fixed on her now rattle free phone as she thumbed through the alerts and messages. "Want some coffee?"
"Well--I'd say let's get ordering, but you know what Mark?" Kerry sighed.
"We got no idea what to order," Mark supplied. "I know. I thought of that when I got up this morning and took over the driving again. I think we gotta get eyeballs on it then figure it out."
Kerry muted the mic. "Coffee sounds great, except it's going to make my stomach ache worse." She moaned.
"Figured you'd say that. I had them bring tea too. Want blackberry or honey lemon?" Dar didn't even look up from her phone. "Mark's right Let's wait for him to get here, then we will all go down to the Trade Center and see what we've got to work with."
"I love you."
Now Dar looked up, and smiled. "Blackberry?" Her eyebrows lifted. "And we've got some warm muffins. You up for that?"
Kerry merely rested her chin on her fists and gazed at her partner.
"Take that as a yes." Dar set her phone down and sauntered back over to the room service tray.
"You hear that, boss?" Mark queried. "Hello?"
"Sorry." Kerry wrenched her attention back to the phone. "That sounds like a plan, Mark. Dar was just saying we should wait for you to get here then all go down together. You think you'll be here by eight?It's just ten past six now."
"We can probably do that unless we get held up nearer to where you are," Mark replied. "They going to let us in there?"
"We've got passes." Kerry didn't elaborate. "All right, you guys head on up here. We'll meet you at the office." She waited for the line to drop then closed her phone. "What else do we need to do? Why do I feel like I'm so damned behind the eight ball today?"
Dar came back over with a plate containing a buttered muffin and a steaming cup of tea. She set them down next to her partner's laptop and leaned over, giving her a kiss on the top of her head. "I love you too."
Kerry leaned against her. "Oh honey, I sure know that," she murmured. "Thanks for breakfast."
"No problem." Dar straightened up and went to retrieve her coffee, pausing to watch the silent television screen full of frenetic activity and destruction. More people. More rubble. More talking heads. The scroll at the bottom spat a never ending series of numbers that she had to force herself to realize meant human beings either missing or dead.
It was strange. The whole thing had started to take on a surreal glaze and it was hard to concentrate on the facts that seemed to come at her from the screen in so many different directions. She watched shots of the president down near the still smoking rubble yelling into a bullhorn, an American flag flapping in the wind nearby.
Behind him a fireman sat on a flat, twisted piece of iron, his head down and his elbows resting on his knees in exhaustion.
Dar nodded to herself a little, then went over to the small table and picked up half a corn muffin, taking a bite of it as she tried to focus her mind on the task at hand. She glanced at her new laptop, open on the table, and watched the network metrics, a slowly healing graph of yellows morphing to greens rather than blotches of solid red.
The company was recovering. Things were starting to move back into normal patterns, and along with that her list of tasks shunted aside for the emergency were starting to build.
The world had held still since that morning. Now, she had a sense,that her world, if not everyone else's, was starting slowly to turn again and she had to admit a trace of impatience that she found herself tied up here, working a problem not remotely her own, heading toward a hopefully successful end that probably would get little notice and less credit.
Uncharitable, probably. Dar chewed her muffin and turned to watch the television screen again with a thoughtful expression. "Ker?"
"Hm." Kerry looked up from her laptop.
"Can we get a list of our customers who are still out of service here?" Dar asked. "Let's see what synergy we can get with restoring services to them at the same time we're relieving our obligation to the government."
"We don't have enough to do?" Kerry's tone was, however, rather than accusing. "Sheesh."
"Let's just say we have a responsibility to them, and I'd like to walk out of here with a sense of accomplishment beyond some rubber chicken," Dar replied. "Getting the job done for the markets, but leaving our own customers high and dry ain't my way of doing business."
Kerry smiled. "I want to be you when I grow up." She stood up and popped the last of her muffin into her mouth. "Well, the day's not getting any younger, so I guess I'll go get my shower and start getting ready."
"Be right there with you." Dar sat down to finish her muffin, leaning back and watching the dawn light slowly growing in the window, turning her back to the TV screen.
KERRY LEANED BACK against the driver's partition in the courtesy bus, watching the street roll by outside the window. "At least the traffic hasn't built up so much again."
"You got that right, ma'am," the driver agreed. "People are still in shock, I think. I was talking to a man who came by the bus earlier. His son worked in one of those investment offices up near the top of one of the towers, and he kept saying he was going down there to visit him real soon now."
Kerry grimaced a trifle. "It's hard to take it all in," she murmured.
&
nbsp; "Can't imagine it myself," the driver agreed.
They were traveling east, heading toward the disaster site. Kerry eased forward and knelt, resting her arms on the front console as she started to see a dusting of ash on the streets, and the cars, and the buildings.
It was not that strange to her eyes. It resembled a light coating of snow more than anything. As they passed, she could see some shops open, some closed, some in an in-between state where the rolling garage doors were half open and people were standing outside, talking or sweeping the ash.
The bus stopped at a stoplight, and she watched one man carefully sweeping his sidewalk clean of the stuff and putting it into a tiny pile. He then knelt and pulled out a dustpan and hand brush, and whisked ash into a small plastic bag, standing when he was done and looking at it.
Would he throw it away? Save it as a memory of the horror? Or sell it on Ebay? Kerry watched him put a twist tie around the top of the bag and take it inside, ducking under the half drawn door and disappearing.
Could go any of the ways. Kerry sighed. The bus started moving forward again, and on the right hand side they passed a fire station. The big doors were wide open, and she looked inside only to find it completely empty of either trucks or people.
A prickle ran down her spine. She looked at the sign above it. "Ladder 11. Hope they're all okay."
The driver glanced at the empty station then looked at her. "Ms. Stuart, beg your pardon, but no one here's okay," he said. "No matter if they walked out of that mess or not."
True. Kerry saw the coating of ash getting thicker as they turned left on to Houston Street. "What insanity."
Dar came up behind her and looked over her shoulder. "Mess," she said succinctly. "Are we going to end up east of the site?"
The driver nodded, as he turned the big bus right. "Yeah, that's what the cops told me to do. Take the FDR around the end of the island and come up from there. Too much destruction on the west side, and besides, they've got Battery Park there wide open."
Now through the walls of the bus, they could hear sirens, though as yet all they could see was the outline of Staten Island across the water. A pensive silence fell over the bus as everyone picked a window and stared out of it.
"Mark still behind us?" Dar asked in all that quiet.
The driver glanced in his mirror. "Yeah, he's there."
Dar watched out the window at the thick plume of smoke rising from between the buildings and the debris that was starting to line the road. "Jason, break out the case of radios, please," she ordered quietly. "And the masks."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Everyone stay calm. This is going to be hard," Dar added, after another brief pause. "Stay focused, and remember that everyone here has been through a hell of a lot worse nightmare than we're about to experience."
Alastair came up behind Dar and gazed past her, his face quietly grim."Know something, Dar?"
"Wish you'd turned the White House down?"
Alastair's lips pressed into a humorless smile. Then he turned and went back to the side window, seating himself on a stool and staring outside.
Kerry slowly stepped down from the bus, the third one out after Dar and Alastair had exited to deal with the gun toting guardsmen who had flagged their convoy to a halt. She stood quietly for a moment, the wind at her back as she slowly scanned the area around them.
They had been pulled to a halt on State Street, just across from Battery Park. The roads were eerily silent covered in thick white gray dust and debris with cars and trucks parked every which way. She could look right up Broadway and see more automobiles, more dust, and windows blown out with curtains being sucked out and fluttering in the breeze.
She could smell burning rubber, diesel oil, and the strong scent of the water. Fireboats and barges were churning offshore and a ferry was passing by, its decks packed with uniformed figures.
Small groups of police, firemen, and other workers were clustered around. Some were sitting in the grass of the park; a few resting against trees facing away from the city and toward the water.
Mark came up next to her, his arms folded over his chest as he stood and looked around. "Man."
"Yeah." Kerry half turned, as a car with a siren blaring turned the corner and headed up Broadway, the sound echoing between the buildings and then fading.
"We going all the way up there?"
"Depends." Kerry leaned forward slightly to watch Dar and Alastair with the guard. Dar's body posture was still relaxed, so it didn't look like the situation was getting confrontational. "Let's see where they'll let us go. I told our telecom friends we'd be trying to get over here before we left the Rock."
"It's like a ghost town down here," Mark commented grimacing."That was tacky bad. Sorry."
"Don't worry about it." Kerry walked across the street and into the park, carefully skirting around a pair of firemen sitting in the grass.
One of them looked up at her as she passed. "Hey," he called out. "Where'd you come from?"
Kerry stopped and went over to him, kneeling down in the grass and letting her hands rest on one knee. "That bus over there." She indicated the waiting caravan. "What about you?"
"Me?" The fireman looked exhausted, and his face was coated with the gray dust outlining red rimmed eyes. "I'm from Connecticut. What's the bus for?"
"It's our company bus. We're going to try and help get communications back up and running down here," Kerry readily explained.
The fireman snorted. "Good luck." He picked up his radio lying beside him and let it drop. "Hear more static than talk on these things."
"All these tall buildings," Kerry agreed.
"Ker?"
Kerry turned to see Dar motioning her over. "Well, time to go back to work. Nice talking to you."
"Same here." The fireman nodded.
Kerry got up and crossed the grass glancing both ways in reflex before she crossed the road. The dust under her boots felt like a light, powdery sand. She joined Dar and Alastair who had moved closer to the bus. "We set?"
"Not quite," Dar said. "They're trying to move heavy construction rigs in--cranes, whatever--we can't pull the trucks down yet. They told us to park them up here until we can move closer."
"Nice fellah," Alastair commented. "Thought we were going to have a dust up again, but this guy seemed like good folk."
"Okay," Kerry said. "So we walk up from here? Is that what you're saying? I know John and the telcom folks are up nearer the site."
"We walk." Dar turned and faced the bus, lifting her hand and waving. "We should pull the sat and power trucks up on that side street there. Get them out of the way." She stared at the bus as Andrew appeared from behind it and headed her way.
Alastair put his hands in his pockets and regarded the scene. "I have a feeling this is the most pleasantness we're going to see today," he said giving Kerry a sideways look. "Shall we go get our togs? This stuff looks nasty." He kicked a bit of the dust with his boot.
"Sounds like a good idea." Kerry turned and cupped her hands around her mouth. "Everyone get your overalls and masks! Sync up radios!"
A swarm of activity started around the bus as the driver got out and popped open the underneath storage and techs started to drag big cases out and open them. Kerry joined Dar near the door to the bus waiting their turn to pick up equipment.
"Dad's getting the trucks parked," Dar said. "You ready for this?"
"Dar." Kerry leaned briefly against her. "How in the hell could anyone be ready for this? I've already got a knot in my gut that has nothing to do with having my period."
Dar looked around and grunted.
"Ma'am, I think this one will fit you." One of the techs approached Kerry with a coverall and handed it and a mask to her. "We didn't have many this small."
"Thanks." Kerry smiled wryly. "I think."
Dar eased past him and rummaged through the bin on her own, removing a set of the clothing. "On the other hand, I have to fight the wolves for mine." She came back to whe
re Kerry was standing, leaning back against the bus and starting to pull the coveralls on. "Someone get the tool belts out! " she added in a loud yell.
Kerry picked a spot against the bus next to her and got her first boot into the leg opening of the thick, dark green garment. The fabric was tightly woven and tough, and it reminded her a bit of a military flight suit.
Not tremendously attractive, even with the company logo bold on the chest and across her back. She snapped the wrists closed that thankfully were, in fact, her length, and bent to unlace her boots tucking the legs into them and lacing them back up again.
She stood up and examined the mask Dar had handed her, a full face unit with lavender filter cartridges poking out both sides of the bottom. She fitted it to her face and found it relatively comfortable.
"Not bad." She removed it and let it hang around her neck, as Dar handed her a smaller, mouth only mask. "What's that for?"
"Wind's right," Dar said. "I figure we can leave these big ones off until we're pretty close, but it doesn't pay to take chances. You see that stuff? Ten bucks it's full of silica particulate." She pointed at the dust in the streets.
"Powdered glass?" Kerry remembered the fireman and his red rimmed eyes. "Ouch."
"Not to mention asbestos." Alastair had come up next to them, clad in his own green outfit. "Nasty stuff."
Andrew circled the bus from the other side already draped in a tool belt and bearing a pack on his back. He had a mask gripped in one big hand, and to all appearances absolutely knew what to do with it. "You gals." He addressed Dar and Kerry seriously. "Keep them damn masks on. Hear?"
Dar had just finished clipping a utility belt around her, and fastening her radio to it. "Got it," she said. "You too." She adjusted the radio and clipped the transmitter to her lapel. "Check." She keyed it. "Check. Mark?"
"Here." Mark's voice crackled back. "I did a radio scan. We're clear on this frequency. Most of the rest of them are using lower band. I've got the base repeater up and going."
"Run radio checks with everyone." Dar looped her credentials around her neck and settled them under her collar. "Then let's meet up near the head of that street there." She pointed.
