Nate Kenyon - Day One

Hawke peered at the tiny screen, his guts churning. He could see the back of the couch; the TV was on and what looked like news reports were playing. No sign of Robin or Thomas, but the lamp that sat on the end table had been knocked over.

Take it easy. It might be nothing. But that single bit of chaos in an otherwise normal room unnerved Hawke. Had Thomas done it? If so, why hadn’t Robin picked it back up again? She was a neat freak, and something like that would have driven her crazy. Hell, even at three years old it would have driven Thomas crazy, too, with his need for order and symmetry, everything in its place and aligned properly. Just last week, he had thrown a tantrum because he hadn’t been able to line up the bins of toys on the shelf in his room to his own satisfaction, and Hawke had teased Robin about it later: Like mother, like son.

Where are they ?

Hawke turned up his phone’s volume but couldn’t hear any sound through the laptop’s mike; even the TV seemed to be on mute. He flashed back to his conversation with Robin earlier that morning: Lowry yelled at Thomas again yesterday in the hallway, when we went to the store…. He was complaining about something, I don’t know, the TV up too loud, whatever….

Lowry was responsible for Robin’s panicked phone call. Hawke knew it. He thought about the laundry room, Lowry in Hawke’s apartment with his wife pinned against the sink. He put his ear to the phone, thought he heard a thud and muffled voice, but couldn’t be sure. “Robin!” he shouted into the mike, and shouted again, in case she could hear him, but there was no response.

As he was about to try her cell phone again, his own phone appeared to freeze; he tried to regain control, pushing the home button, tapping at it and cursing, and the phone began cycling through some kind of program, raw code running across the screen. Hawke tried to crash it again, holding the power and home buttons down, but at first the phone didn’t respond. Then the screen went white, blinked and went dead again, and this time it was bricked.

He cursed again and stood up, meaning to go plug it in and get better access through a keyboard to the internals, but a wave of dizziness hit him like a punch to the head. You’re in shock. He heard more voices and looked up as Bradbury came into the room, followed closely by Kessler: “…software is doing its job, I’m telling you it’s tracking activity like you wouldn’t believe—”

And then the voices stopped for a moment. Somehow, Kessler had crossed the space between them and spoke close to Hawke’s ear. “You okay?” she asked as he leaned drunkenly and stumbled. She reached out to him just before a tremendous explosion rocked the building.

10:51 A.M.

THE FLOOR SHUDDERED VIOLENTLY, and Hawke heard a distant whooshing sound, muffled and deep, just before Kessler let him go and ran toward the windows. He wanted to shout at her to get back, but it was too late; the glass exploded inward as the shock wave hit, sending shards hurtling through the air like flashing knives.

A piece caught Kessler in the throat. Hawke saw her whirl and spray blood as he went down, covering his own head, tasting carpet and smoke.

He looked up again through a strange haze as the overhead lights surged and watched Bradbury reach out to catch a desk lamp that was falling. An instinctive reaction, something Hawke probably would have done himself, but Bradbury ended up dancing a jig, his eyes rolling back to the whites, teeth clenched hard together as his huge body went rigid and his skin began to darken before he finally tilted sideways and fell to the floor.

“Oh my God oh my God!” someone was screaming from the other room. Black smoke billowed up from the street, whirling in through the broken windows, and it smelled acrid and oily, stinging Hawke’s eyes. He blinked, saw Bradbury on the floor still clutching the lamp in rigid, blackened fingers with his eyes bulging like boiled eggs and his tongue poking like a purple rag from his lips, and he thought of his apartment and his wife’s frantic voice over the phone. It hit him like a stinging slap: What if this isn’t just New York City? What if it’s happening everywhere?

Hawke stood up, legs trembling, covering his nose and mouth with his sleeve. Nothing else mattered anymore except getting out of the building. The black smoke was thicker around his face, and he couldn’t tell if it was coming from outside or somewhere close. Kessler was jerking violently and clutching her throat, a lot of blood wetting the carpet around her head. He whirled at a noise and watched Weller and a dazed Anne Young emerge from the conference room, stumbling through the dim fog that had descended over them all.

Weller looked around, saw Hawke and led Young to him. “Get her out,” Weller said, coughing into his sleeve. “I’ll be right behind you.”

“What?” Young said. “No—”

“Go! Now!” Weller left them standing there, stumbling through the smoke. Hawke grabbed Young’s arm, ignoring her protests, and dragged her toward the suite doors as the fire alarms started blaring. Vasco followed after they had entered the hall, along with Price, the systems analyst, who had helped Kessler to her feet and was half-carrying, half-dragging her along. Kessler’s eyes had lost focus, her face ghostly white, and blood still pulsed thickly between her fingers as she gripped her own neck with both hands. Vasco got his arm around her waist from the other side to help, and she sagged against him as the two men carried her toward the exit.

Young clutched Hawke’s arm, her nails digging into his skin through his shirt. The alarms were piercingly loud in the hallway, emergency strobe lights flashing. Someone was screaming about the building being on fire, but the sprinklers hadn’t triggered and the smoke thinned as Hawke took the lead past the broken elevator toward the stairs. He started to open the door, then remembered something about fire and heat and oxygen levels and touched the surface lightly, finding it cool.

He hit the bar and shouldered the door open, revealing a flood of other people from the building in the stairwell, rushing toward the lobby. Disjointed and terrifying images from 9/11 flashed through his mind as Hawke stood for a moment, trying to judge whether to wade in. There were at least five floors above them, maybe more, and the people coming down from above were out of control and panicked, taking the steps two and three at a time, stumbling into walls, several of them falling as the others ran past.

But they had no choice, and he entered the fray, trying to clear space for Vasco and Price, who were still carrying a now-unconscious Kessler between them. Young was shoved by a large man in a business suit who barreled down the stairs, and Hawke steadied her, keeping his own balance, hearing others coming from above and gaining fast.

They were three flights down when the lights went out.

The stairwell was plunged into blackness, and screams and shouts echoed up through the dark as bodies fell, bones or heads cracking against concrete as Hawke fumbled his way blindly to the wall, heart thudding fast as the emergency lights kicked on and bathed everything in red. Things speeding up now, he grabbed Young’s hand and led her down, abandoning any effort at restraint, moving as fast as he could go while still keeping his feet, stumbling around the same man in a suit who was lying on the stairs and groaning, trying to get up.

They reached the lobby, busting into open space. Hawke took several deep gasps of air, only now realizing he’d been holding his breath for most of the last two floors. The power was still on down here, the alarms screeching relentlessly. A group of about twenty people was already at the front doors, which seemed to be locked or jammed shut. Someone rattled the handles; a woman pounded on the glass and shouted that the building was going to fall, panic lighting up her voice into a high, keening wail, and Hawke thought of a mother he’d once tried to interview who had just lost her baby to a house fire. The sound of panic and despair was similar here, a repetition of words and actions where human restraint and logic disappeared into something mindless and instinctual.