Nate Kenyon - Day One

Hawke took a deep breath. He wasn’t sure yet what Weller had been talking about, although he had some ideas, and none of them were pleasant. The alternative was that Weller had completely lost his mind. But at this point, it didn’t matter. Weller was gone, they needed a plan and this was as good as any.

Get to a safe place; find help; get out of the city to your family. It’s almost over.

But he was wrong.

12:57 P.M.

BY THE TIME THEY PUSHED open the temple doors, easing cautiously through the opening, Jim Weller was nowhere to be seen.

Vasco stepped out first. He motioned to the others to follow, and they fanned out as instructed, Young on the left, Sarah Hanscomb on the right. Hawke let the doors close softly behind Price, and they took up the rear.

The street remained strangely empty. Hawke heard someone shouting somewhere out of sight and another’s ragged, high-pitched scream. Smoke wafted over them, bitter and black. The hole in Second Avenue was still burning, and fire was almost certainly licking up the sides of the buildings by now. It wouldn’t take long before the entire block was ablaze. A siren played in the distance, but there was no sign of emergency responders, no trucks ready to put out the fire before it spread.

The smoke made it tough to see much, but Hawke thought he saw someone ducking out of sight to the east, up 79th Street. Could have been anyone. There was no way to know, and it was a big city. They couldn’t go chasing after ghosts.

Hanscomb’s Cadillac sat crookedly on the sidewalk across the intersection, still hung up on the stump of the light pole. Other cars were scattered across 79th Street, stalled and left alone with doors still hanging open like mechanical corpses lying battered and broken where they’d crashed. Many of them looked like they had been intentionally run headfirst into buildings or each other, as if half the world suddenly went mad and decided to play demolition derby.

Hawke couldn’t reconcile what he now saw with the New York he knew and loved, a city full of energy, teeming with life. The scene was surreal, dreamlike, unfathomable. This city was dangerous and unpredictable; anything could happen.

The cop car was gone. But the body of the man who had been shot across the street still lay crumpled where he had fallen. A dark pool of blood had gathered around his head, a brutal sign of the violence that had occurred just minutes earlier. Hawke saw the others looking at the dead man as the reality sank in with the rest of them. Hanscomb was even paler than before, and she was trembling. Price’s face was a grimly set mask, the blood still covering his shirt making him look like a war victim. Vasco just stared, as if trying to accept what they were seeing.

Young moved forward slowly. “Where’s the briefcase?” she said. “Did they take it? Where’s Jim?”

“Wait,” Vasco said. “Stay close—”

Young ignored the warning, calling out Weller’s name as she reached the middle of the street, turning in circles and calling out again before Vasco got to her.

“Jim’s not here,” Vasco said, his voice low and strained. “I think it would be better not to bring attention to us, don’t you?”

“He’s putting himself in danger. You have to let me—”

“I’d rather not join him,” Vasco said. “We follow the plan. We follow the plan. ”

Young blinked, the mask she seemed to carry dropping over her again. Her face remained inscrutable; whatever emotions she carried were buried deep inside. Or maybe she didn’t have any at all, Hawke thought. It wasn’t a comforting idea, but he had never been able to read her, even before everything had gone to hell. The only time he’d seen her look rattled was in the lobby of the building when she realized Weller was missing, and even then she’d barely broken a sweat. It was part of the reason Hawke would describe her as plain; her features were pretty but without animation, a porcelain doll sitting on a shelf. In most crowds, she would fade into the background, almost as if she weren’t there at all.

“He couldn’t have gotten very far,” Hanscomb said.

Another scream split the momentary calm. There was no way to tell if it was male or female. The sound echoed through the lonely corners of buildings and streets, then cut off at its height, as if the person was suddenly, violently silenced.

“Where did everybody go?” Price said.

“Checkpoints,” Vasco said. “That’s gotta be where people are headed. The explosion probably spooked them, and they’re trying to get out of this area to a safe place. Just like us.”

Nobody said anything. The explanation was weak, Hawke thought. The fire should have been surrounded by firefighters and police, emergency vehicles dealing with the injured. Instead there was nothing. It was as if eight million people had suddenly vanished into thin air. A chill crept up Hawke’s spine and made him shiver as he imagined Robin standing in the hallway facing the front door, shoulders square, with Thomas behind her. She would be brave for her son; Hawke knew that. But she had never had to face real adversity, had always been blessed with fine, caring parents, good schools, popularity. She’d never had to fight, to claw her way up from the bottom. You never knew how people would react when the world suddenly changed, when there was no warning.

He remembered finding her in the kitchen with Lowry. Hawke had rationalized it then; Robin had begged him to leave it alone, and besides, the man was just a little off, he had told himself, he didn’t mean any harm, they could handle this on their own. All the things you think when you’re avoiding confrontation. He was overreacting; what would he say if he called the cops? This guy was trespassing ? He’s weird and we felt violated ? So he did nothing at first. But then it had gotten worse, and he had had to admit that he didn’t know himself as well as he had thought. He’d avoided going to the police for his own selfish reasons, his personal history with the authorities clouding his judgment. When he had finally tried to act, it was too little, too late.

If something has happened to them, this is your fault. You could have done more to stop it earlier, could have called a lawyer, could have found another place and moved out. His imagination ran wild, punishing him over and over. In his mind, the door shuddered, then burst open, Lowry coming at them like the bogeyman, nothing but a shadow moving across the walls.

Vasco was in Hawke’s face. “You gonna keep it together? Because we need to move.”

Hawke wiped his eyes, blinking against the sting. Behind him, Anne Young was looking out across the desecrated streets as if expecting an apparition to appear at any moment.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Let’s go.”

They took 79th toward the park. The street here was dotted with trees, giving them a sense of cover. But it was a false sense, Hawke knew, because those branches wouldn’t stop something falling from the sky, wouldn’t block the flames sweeping through the block, wouldn’t deflect a bullet.

An alarm blared from a bank building nearby, and the sound of shattering glass came from somewhere. A dead man lay crushed under the wheels of an SUV, his head a jellied mess. Another lay sprawled across the hood of a car that had jumped the curb and smashed into a jewelry store entrance, his legs crushed and his right arm nearly separated from his body. Hawke turned his face away, his belly churning. Vasco moved fast, keeping them on the sidewalk, close to the shelter of the buildings, checking as they approached open doorways. Bringing up the rear, Hawke kept his eyes everywhere, watching the shadows and their flank, making sure they weren’t taken by surprise by anything that might be a threat.