Naked, Stoned, and Stabbed

by Bradley Denton

  I had saved perhaps fifty out of six hundred. The rest were still going to be killed.

  Unless I did more.

  The amp head that had given me my jolt was on the floor beside one of the fallen cabinets. I tried to crawl toward it, but then I saw it was useless. Its tiny furnaces had gone out. Mr. Entwistle’s other two amp heads were nearby, but they were dark and defunct as well. So the people who didn’t find the new way out were doomed.

  As was I. I had crawled just a few feet before collapsing into porridge. There was no way I would make it to either the stage door or the hole in the wall. The fire would get me first. And by the time my crewmates realized I hadn’t joined them outside, they wouldn’t be able to return. I could feel my smartphone buzzing in the hip pocket of my jeans, and I assumed it was Liam asking what was taking me so sodding long.

  The smoky air was becoming hot, thick, and ever more bitter. So at least I would fall unconscious before I burned.

  In the meantime, with my chest and cheek pressed against the boards of the stage, I could look out over the surging throng and take a shred of comfort in watching a few of them escape.

  I supposed I should have tried to meet my sister after all. While I’d had a choice.

  And then I knew I was dying, because over the rims of my skewed spectacles I saw an angel. She rose from the tumultuous shadows and flew toward me on cobalt-blue butterfly wings.

  She was like a perfect holy creature carved from obsidian and come to life. As she soared over the flames, the smoke swirling away from her beating wings, she was the most beautiful sight I had ever beheld.

  Now that, I thought, is even better than a floating Scotsman.

  Then the angel fuzzed into darkness, and I was done.

  * * *

  I awoke as she lifted me from the stage. Startled, I twisted away and crumpled into a flat sack of bones again.

  Now I was lying on my back, and my specs had popped back into place. I found myself looking up at the “angel” hovering over me, and it occurred to me that she might really exist. She still had huge blue butterfly wings, and she still looked as if she were carved from obsidian. But now I saw that she was also wearing a long-sleeved Union-Jack-patterned “The Kids Are Alright” T-shirt and bright red stovepipe pants. Two slender appendages like insect legs stuck out through extra holes below her shirtsleeves, and they wiggled. As did a pair of foot-long antennae sprouting from her forehead.

  But more striking than any of that were her long, coppery dreadlocks glowing in the light of the fire. Her eyes were that same coppery color—and I could have sworn they glowed, too.

  Other than that, she had the face of a deeply annoyed teenage girl. Perhaps a year younger than me.

  “Cheese and crackers!” she yelped. She landed on the stage, her purple high-top Chuck Taylors on either side of my waist. “Dude, I’m trying to save you!” She was yelling. “A little cooperation, maybe?”

  So she wasn’t an angel. She was a joker. But she was a joker who had flown to me on brilliant blue wings, so she still looked bloody angelic to me. Also, she had those red pants and purple Chuck Taylors. I myself stuck to black jeans and Doc Martens, but I could appreciate red stovepipes and Chucks. I wondered where she’d snagged the purple ones.

  Then she coughed, and I realized the smoke had become still heavier and more pungent. The heat from the flames was getting aggressive, too. My right cheek was trying to decide whether to blister.

  I looked toward the hole I had blasted. The bloke in the kilt was helping more people through, but it wasn’t going to be enough. In a few moments, he would have to give up and save himself, because the fire was about to cut off his access to anyone else. Which meant there wasn’t any point in trying to widen the hole or make another beside it, because no one else was going to reach that spot.

  So I forced myself up to my elbows and looked toward the opposite wall. But there was already too much fire and smoke over there.

  Nor was there any use in blasting through the back of the building, behind the stage. There was already a door there that no one out on the floor could reach.

  I was too far from the main doors, and there were too many people in the way, for me to try to punch a hole there. Over that distance, the shock wave would spread too wide and weaken too much, and I’d only clobber the Wholigans instead of helping them. The same was true for the wall space under the balconies.

  Besides, I couldn’t give myself another electrical jolt anyway.

  All of that left just one option. And there was just one reason it was an option at all: The angel was real.

  I stared up at her. My head was about to split open because someone was hammering an invisible iron wedge between my eyes. But the good news, I supposed, was that I was already hurting about as much as I could hurt.

  Which was a dumb thing to suppose.

  “A lot of people are about to die!” I said.

  The butterfly girl reached toward me. “Some of us are going to make it, thanks to you! My boyfriend and I saw you blast the wall. It was loud! So he’s helping people get out, and I came to help you. I’ll fly you to the hole. Trust me, I can totally carry you!”

  But I was already counting on that.

  I pointed upward. “You can help more people if you fly me to the ceiling. Then drop me.”

  I thought about the venue stats Liam had quoted as we’d prepared for sound check on Thursday: “Room echo won’t be bad once the Wholigans pack in. We’ve got just five thousand square feet, and twenty-four feet to the ceiling.”

  A twenty-four-foot ceiling was fine for a music hall. But it might not give me what I needed. It wasn’t a sure thing, like the filter capacitors.

  The angel interrupted my thought with a non-angelic snort. “You want me to drop you? You already look two-thirds dead!”

  I tried to nod, which only drove the iron wedge deeper. “Yeah, but don’t just drop me. Kick me straight down, hard as you can. Find a spot with some empty floor, and make sure I land on my back. But get out of the way before I hit!”

  She stared at me for a second, then looked out at the main floor. The bulk of the audience was still surging against the doors and trying to jam into the lobby, and the rest had made it to the hole in the wall. So a small space in the center of the room was empty, and the fire hadn’t reached it yet.

  The angel looked dubious.

  “Are you—” she began.

  Then she stopped. She knew I was sure. And we didn’t have more time to waste.

  I dug down for some strength, then grasped her arms and hooked my heels behind her calves. Those glorious blue wings spread wide and pumped hard. We shot upward, and I gasped at the acceleration. But I held tight as we arced out over the main floor, all the way up, as high as we could go.

  The butterfly girl paused then, her wings brushing the black iron braces that crisscrossed the ceiling.

  We were at the point where I had aimed my “Won’t Get Fooled Again” scream. I was looking up at the angel’s face, and she was looking down at mine. I saw from her expression that she was afraid for me. I thought that was nice of her.

  “I’m Adesina,” she said.

  I made myself give her a smile. “Freddie.”

  Then her wings pumped again, and she pressed her spine against one of the iron braces. She brought up her knees and jammed the soles of her Chuck Taylors against my chest as my heels slipped from her calves. I released her arms, and she kicked downward. Hard.

  I watched her shrink and dive away as I tried to suck in as much smoky air as I could.

  Then the sun exploded, and the earth crumbled. The darkness above me blew apart, and all the sky was stars.

  * * *

  I awoke, coughing, with my back against the concrete base of a streetlight pole in the middle of Delancey Street. Or rather, in the middle of the wide median that split Delancey Street. I was halfway between Bowery and Chrystie in a section of the median with planted greenery, although there was nothing green about
it right now. Low shrubs stood stark and leafless on either side of me, and my rump was in the frigid dirt. My breath came out as fog in the cold night.

  The heels of my Doc Martens were hanging over the street, and I was looking across four lanes of asphalt at the green iron railing surrounding the Bowery Station subway entrance on the sidewalk. Beyond that was the limestone facade and the tall, arched, wired-glass window of the Bowery Ballroom. The window reflected steady white streetlights punctuated with flashing red and blue. The steel double doors on either side of the window were still closed, and I thought I heard shouts and screams from inside. But I wasn’t sure because an FDNY fire engine, its siren winding down to a growl, rumbled past me and stopped beside a hydrant just west of the subway entrance.

  Then I saw her.

  At the east end of the subway entrance, turning toward the Ballroom as she emerged from beneath the street, was my sister.

  For a few seconds, I thought I must still be unconscious. After years of wondering what it might be like to be in her presence, what were the odds that she would appear right in front of me, right now?

  It was far more likely that I was still blacked out. Or perhaps dying. And my scrambled brain was performing one last act of kindness before closing up shop.

  But then I shivered with considerable force, and icy needles shot through what felt like every shattered bone in my body. Also, I was pretty sure the iron wedge had succeeded in splitting my skull wide open.

  So I was alive, and conscious. Painfully so.

  And my half sister, Michelle Pond, the Amazing Bubbles, was standing right across the street.

  Her back was to me now, and she was wearing a bulky, oversized gray sweater and black leggings with knee-high suede boots. So how could I know it was her?

  How could I not?

  She was tall and broad-shouldered, and her long silver-blonde hair was flying in the chill breeze. Her arms stretched upward, spreading in a wide V, and an enormous bubble formed between her palms. It gleamed with flashes of color from the FDNY lights.

  As fast as an eyeblink, the bubble was larger than Bubbles herself, and it rose from her hands with the speed of an express lift.

  “Adesina!” she cried. “Soft landing for your next passengers!” Her voice was clear and commanding. She sounded exactly as I’d imagined.

  I looked up, my eyes following the huge bubble as it reached the top of the Ballroom’s facade. At that moment, the butterfly-winged angel appeared above it, flying through a thin veil of smoke with two hefty middle-aged nats, Wholigans for three or four decades, dangling from her hands. She didn’t struggle with the weight. Carrying me must have been a doddle.

  She let them go, and the two men fell into the bubble, which sucked them inside with a loud kissing sound. Then they floated down to the sidewalk as gently as a tuft of goose down.

  “Awesome, Mom!” Adesina shouted. “This’ll go faster now!”

  Wait a minute, I thought. What—

  The bubble disintegrated as it touched the concrete, and the rescued men stood there dazed. Then a firefighter leaped from the truck and shouted to them to hurry across Chrystie to Roosevelt Park. “EMS is setting up a triage station! They’ll look after you!”

  By this time another huge bubble had reached the roof, and Adesina dropped a lizard-scaled woman and a three-legged boy into it as the two nats stumbled eastward.

  “We have to be even faster!” the Amazing Bubbles shouted as the woman and child floated down. “If they can walk, just bring them to the roof and tell them to run to the front of the building. They can jump into a bubble on their own while you’re flying back down for someone else!”

  Adesina, hovering, gave a quick nod. “Okay, Mom!” She shot backward, out of sight.

  Wait a minute, I thought again. What’d she call her?

  “But hold your breath down there!” Bubbles yelled. “And stop if the smoke is too thick for you to see!”

  I tried to call out that I didn’t think Adesina had heard her. But now the firefighters were shouting too, and there were more sirens. Plus the roaring in my head, and my coughing. I couldn’t even hear myself.

  “You over there, on the wheels!” a firefighter cried, waving her arms. She had a fleshy flap in the middle of her face instead of a nose, and it bounced with every word.

  She was looking west. The fire engine partially blocked my view in that direction, and another engine pulled up and blocked it further. But then I glimpsed a kilted lad leading a string of stumbling, coughing people southward across the intersection of Delancey and Bowery. He had gotten them out through the restaurant supply showroom. And, sure enough, he was rolling along on two wheels joined by a cartilaginous axle at his ankles.

  “Good man,” I tried to say. I was relieved that I hadn’t hallucinated the wheels. And I was even more relieved to see he had managed to lead thirty or forty people to safety.

  “We’ve set up triage for injuries and smoke inhalation at the plaza that cuts through the park at Rivington!” the firefighter yelled at the wheeled lad. “You know the spot?”

  The wheeled lad nodded and waved.

  “Okay! Bring everyone along the south side of Delancey, cross north at Chrystie, and head for the flashing lights!”

  The wheeled lad gestured to his flock, but not everyone chose to come along. A few abandoned the group and staggered off on their own. I hoped they didn’t wind up regretting it.

  I looked back up at the Bowery Ballroom facade, despite the fact that a hot spike shot through my brain every time I moved my head. Enormous bubble after enormous bubble was floating up to the edge of the roof, and Wholigan after Wholigan, young and old, male and female, nats and jokers, were jumping off into the rubbery spheres and floating down to the sidewalk.

  The firefighter who had shouted to the wheeled lad now ran up to the Amazing Bubbles.

  “There are a lot of people inside, Ms. Pond,” she said in a rush, the flap on her face bouncing wildly. “You won’t be able to get them all out like this. And Morpho Girl isn’t wearing a respirator, so she needs to get herself out.”

  Wait a minute, I thought yet again. What kind of girl?

  “We can’t just leave people in there!” Bubbles snapped.

  “We won’t!” the firefighter said. “That’s my job! But someone chained those doors on the inside, and we need them open—faster than we can pry them, because if anyone tries to come through that glass, it’ll be ugly. So if you could blast ’em, that’d be great!”

  The Amazing Bubbles released another giant bubble as two more popped on the sidewalk and their occupants fled eastward. She lowered her arms and faced the firefighter. I could see her in profile now. Her nose was the shape of a small, inverted strawberry, and her jaw was like the corner of a shoebox. Both looked just like mine.

  She was much slimmer than when she’d come up from the subway, and her sweater was hanging like an empty sack. She had “bubbled off” most of her fat while making the rescue spheres. That meant she’d have to jump off a roof herself, or have some big bloke punch her a few times, before she would bulk up again. Which was what made her one of the world’s toughest aces: If you tried to hurt her, you just made her stronger.

  Bloody hell, how my screaming head, ribs, and spine made me envy that.

  “I would have already blasted the doors,” Bubbles said, “but there are people on the other side. I could kill someone!”

  The firefighter shook her head. “We’re on a phone call with one of the trapped individuals. He’s conveyed our order to move back, and we believe they have. We have to breach now!”

  At that, Bubbles didn’t hesitate. She faced the Ballroom and thrust out her arms in another V, this time horizontal. A silvery bubble the size of a cricket ball shot from each of her palms, moving so fast that I heard the air sizzle. The bubbles hit the double doors on either side of the arched window, and the doors blew inward with a tremendous clang. But they stayed on their hinges, and one of them swung back. I saw a
heavy chain dangling from its inside handle.

  The firefighter had been right. Someone had chained the doors.

  Someone had meant for all of us to be locked inside while the Bowery Ballroom burned.

  * * *

  I expected smoke to start pouring from the open doors. Instead, there was a sudden low whistle as air began rushing into the Ballroom. I looked up and saw a wide column of smoke rising from the roof, venting through the hole I’d blasted.

  Four firefighters entered through the east doors and began hustling people out, while eight more firefighters in respirators went in through the west doors with a pair of hoses. They shouted for the civilians to head for the east exit, and a steady stream of coughing, crying Wholigans complied. Firefighters from the second truck began giving oxygen to some of them as a third truck stopped in the street between me and the Ballroom. Some of the third truck’s personnel began helping the escapees toward the triage station in the park.

  I heard more sirens coming. NYPD cruisers and motorcycles had already closed Delancey to civilian traffic from both directions, and they were also stopping vehicles from turning north onto Forsyth at the far side of the park, more than a hundred yards from where I sat. There was no traffic entering or emerging from Chrystie on the near side of the park, either. That meant Chrystie was closed not only at Delancey but at some point to the north, probably Houston Street. So fire and rescue vehicles had a clear path, and so did the people fleeing the Ballroom.

  With the third FDNY truck sitting in front of me, I could no longer see the Ballroom doors or the Amazing Bubbles. But I saw a ladder go up the center of the building facade, and firefighters ascending to the roof. Four more giant bubbles of rescued people floated down past them.

  The noise of trucks and sirens, and of shouting and screaming, was making my skull reverberate like a church bell. But the rest of my body was beginning to hurt a little less. So I pushed against the base of the streetlight, and managed to get my feet under me.