Nate Kenyon - Day One

For a moment, he thought she wouldn’t answer. The darkness was deeper here, away from the flashlight beam. She was nothing but a vague shape moving beside him.

“And then what?” she said, as if she knew the answer but was afraid.

“I don’t know,” he said. He kept his voice low. “I need to ask you something, Anne. Who was the woman? The one on the screen in the hospital. The one you touched.”

“My mother,” she said. Her voice was soft, tentative. “It was my mother. I haven’t seen her for a long time.” She appeared to be watching the flashlight bobbing in the dark twenty feet ahead. “She died five years ago.”

3:27 P.M.

“IT COULDN’T HAVE BEEN HER, then,” Hawke said. “Right? Someone who looked like her.”

“I don’t think so.” Young kept walking, facing forward. “The footage was altered; an old clip of her was inserted into an existing feed. She didn’t really move on-screen and you could make out some digital noise. It was a good fake, but I knew.”

“Was she at Lenox Hill when she died?”

Young shook her head, her eyes glinting in the dark as she glanced quickly at him and then away. “No, John. She was at home. Lung cancer. She hated doctors; she never set foot in a hospital.”

“Nobody could have known… that would take impossible resources, weeks, maybe months of research, to find her and that footage. Expertise in video editing to put together a serviceable fake. And then to have it ready for just the right moment, when you were standing there watching?”

“It’s psychological warfare,” Young said. “Hitting us where we’re most vulnerable. Classic technique, weakening our resolve, causing confusion, distraction. We’re emotional creatures, not like…” She didn’t go on.

“I still don’t get it.” Approaching Lenox Hill Hospital, Hawke had the feeling that everything was being orchestrated, as if someone was watching from above and directing their movements toward an ending shrouded in mystery.

He swallowed hard against a lump in his throat. “I saw my apartment,” he said. “There was blood.” Maybe that was altered, too , he thought, but didn’t say it. It gave him hope, but that was too much to think about. It would make him careless. We’re emotional creatures….

He caught a toe in the track bed and stumbled, stopped, started up again. They were at war; that much was obvious. You only had to look aboveground to see that. But this was a different level entirely, and one that he still had trouble believing.

Hawke kept coming back around to the same problem he’d wrestled with before. He knew plenty about how much you could find on people online, how much research it took to track down the kind of details that would have been necessary for a fake like that. It wasn’t possible, not on the fly. “Why would anyone do this to us? Why are we so important that we get tracked, get shown things to break us down, lured into traps like Lenox Hill?”

He was thinking aloud, not really expecting her to answer. “We’re a potential threat,” Young whispered, so faint he could barely hear it. “You said it already. But I don’t think it’s just us. I think it’s everyone in New York. Maybe everyone in the world.”

He had no chance to respond. A noise behind them made them whirl, hearts pounding. A scuffling and shout drifted to them from the distance, then more footsteps, like a small crowd approaching quickly. Hawke heard sobbing, voices muttering. Vasco played the flashlight beam into the depths of the tunnel as the sounds grew louder. “Hey! There’s the light!” someone shouted. The sounds of running increased, then the sound of someone stumbling and sprawling to the dirt and a scream and curse as faces came into the light, swarming forward, pale moons smudged with dirt and sweat. Hawke counted at least ten, maybe more, men and women.

“Thank God,” a man said as the new people broke against them like a wave and surrounded Hawke’s group, and then, “Wait, are you cops?” He was overweight, and his shirt was ripped down the front, exposing a large, hairy, heaving chest. He looked from one to the other, bewildered. “We thought you were cops, or emergency workers or something.” He glanced at the woman next to him. “Jesus, Patty, these aren’t cops.”

“Please, you have to help us,” the woman said, clutching Vasco’s arm as he reared away from her. Her eyes were shining like polished quarters in the beam of the flashlight, and she was breathing fast and shallow. “My husband saw your light, and we had to come. We forced a door open and got out through the crack, but the rest of them are still inside and they won’t leave; they said it was better to wait, that someone would be there soon.”

“Look,” Vasco said, shrugging off the woman’s determined grip, “We’re trying to find our way out, just like you. I don’t know what you expect us to do.”

“ Help them,” the woman said. “It’s the number four train, headed downtown before the power went out. There’s an old man on it; he’s having trouble breathing—”

“Fuck the old man,” the fat guy said. “He’s not important, Patty. We need to get to the emergency room.” He waved sausage fingers at them. “I’m diabetic,” he said. “Need insulin.”

“That’s bullshit,” a black man said from the back of the group. “You been saying that ever since the train stopped, but I never seen you having any kind of trouble.”

“You shut your mouth,” the fat man said, pushing forward, pointing a finger. “You’ve been yapping at everyone and driving them crazy. I oughta knock your head off.”

“Take it easy, Lou,” the woman named Patty said, touching the man’s shoulder and stopping him. “It’s not good for you to get upset. Your blood pressure.” He grunted, and she turned back to Vasco. Her voice was eager, as if needing to explain something. “We’ve been trapped inside that train for hours now, no way to know what happened. The damn thing sped up and then slowed down, passed a stop and went dead between platforms. The doors wouldn’t open and the lights went out. At first, the conductor, he said to stay calm, the power would come back on, but then there was some kind of explosion…. He said we’d be rescued soon. But no one came.”

“It was so hot, we could have died,” another woman said, and murmurs of agreement spread through the others, who had gathered up close behind her. Hawke felt them crowding even closer and resisted the urge to edge away. Emotions were high; the energy in the group was at panic level.

“Why couldn’t you have been cops?” the fat man said, peering into Vasco’s face. He was wheezing like an asthmatic. He had gone from angry to bewildered and back to an angry resentment, like a spoiled and disappointed child. But he had at least three inches on all of them and must have weighed three hundred pounds, and he seemed dangerously on edge. “What are you doing down here, anyway? Another stuck train? Jesus, our luck.”

They don’t know, Hawke thought. They had been down here in the dark since the beginning, probably had only the most vague sense of the devastation above them.

“Don’t try to get out of here,” Hanscomb said. She had backed away as the new group came closer, as if they had some kind of disease. Now she spoke from the deeper darkness toward the middle of the double tracks. “You don’t know what it’s like. They’ll kill you.”

Vasco sighed and muttered something under his breath, moving the flashlight over her. The small crowd turned to face her, the murmuring increasing, cries of protest mixed with pleading. “What do you mean, ‘kill’?” someone said. “Are you nuts?”