Kim Robinson - New York 2140

Gen worked overtime day after day. She couldn’t remember if it had ever been like this before or not. Every waking moment given to the work. Everyone on the force doing the same. The storm was over, the world’s interest had gone away; the National Guard had come for a few days and then gone away; the people in Central Park didn’t go away. Food and sanitation were becoming huge problems, followed closely by violent person-on-person crime, also drug overdoses. The usual bad inputs creating the usual bad outputs, in other words. Utterly predictable, but now out in the open field of Central Park where everyone could see it. Feel it blowing up in their faces. It was not a sustainable situation, and yet there was no obvious next step, and meanwhile the impasse was something everyone could see and feel, something they were living moment to moment, day to day.

Then on the night of July 7, 2142, a huge bonfire on the Onassis lawn illuminated an enormous gathering, basically everyone in the park plus more, and somehow this turned into a riot. It happened under a full moon; no one saw the origins of it, but fighting spread through the park. The cops on hand put out the call for backup and crowd control. Some of them said it looked like gang-on-gang violence, but when Gen got there, coming up on a packed police cruiser, she couldn’t see anything resembling sides; it was just a scramble, knots of people roaming the park, roaring, setting fires with brands from the big bonfire, throwing burning brands, and fighting other groups. She got the sense that most of the real damage consisted of people falling down and getting trampled underfoot by the crowd. Most of the shouts and screams came from ground level; when she noticed that, she felt a jolt of fear and called headquarters.

“We need major medical, quick as possible, Central Park, Onassis Meadow. And there’s a crowd headed north from there, looks like.”

“We know,” said Chief Quinn Taller, an acquaintance of Gen’s. “Up Broadway, Amsterdam, and St. Nick.”

“They’re headed uptown?” Gen said.

“Looks like it.”

“Have we got reinforcements coming?”

“The National Guard has been ordered by the governor to come back, but we don’t know how long they’ll take to get here. They were slow last time.”

Gen took a deep breath. “Have you called in all the off-duties?”

“Yes I have.”

“What about the fire departments?”

“I don’t think that’s happened yet.”

“You should call up fire right away.”

“Are there fires?”

“There are going to be fires. And we might need their hoses for people too.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“I’ll pass the word along.”

Gen got off. She had stopped to talk, and the other cops had gone ahead. Now she hurried north after them, pausing to break up fights if it looked like she could, using her height and uniform and the darkness to support a fairly brutal approach, knocking aggressors down with her nightstick and then handcuffing that person with plastic quickcuffs, and ordering the people around to leave the scene. Nightstick in one hand, hand on pistol in holster, ready to shout if she had to. Putting her size and copness to work. People were generally happy to run off into the night. On she moved north, trying not to see fights that looked serious enough to be beyond her capacity to stop. Someone threw a Molotov cocktail at her and she dodged it and continued north at speed. She needed backup, it had to be teamwork now or it was nothing. And there before her was a team of six cops, not the same ones she had come with, looked like beat cops, gathered together for safety. “Okay if I join you?”

“Shit yeah, what is this?”

“Riot, I don’t know why. There was a bonfire on the meadow, I heard.”

“Yeah but still. They’re burning in their heads.”

“I heard there was more of that bad shit out there, wonder if that’s it.”

“But it’s everyone.”

“True. Let’s get north, try to get ahead of the crowd. There’ll be more of us up there.”

“You think we can hold the line up there?”

“Not sure, but the island is awful narrow there, it might work. We need fire and the guard though.”

They moved up together. Gen was relieved to be with other cops. They cut through the crowds, calling for calm, asking for people to disperse, to go to their homes or their camps, wherever, just disperse. Head south. One of their little platoon had a mini-bullhorn, and she took the lead vocally, with the rest deploying flashlights, trying to blind people who looked aggressive. “Go home!” she shouted over and over. “Go home!”

“We are home!” someone yelled back.

It would be so easy to get shot on a night like this. One had to hope the idea wasn’t occurring to anyone of bad intention near them. All of them were on point like a patrol in enemy territory, and the shouting around them reinforced the feeling. Lot of ill will tonight. People were fed up. Moments came when no one liked NYPD. Moments like these.

They got to St. Nick Park and were hurrying up the shore path at the high tide mark, still a shambles of wrack from the storm surge, when a branch hurtled out of the dark and struck the cop right next to Gen on the head. A helmet would have made it so much less disastrous, but the guy went down and then they were holding his scalp to his skull and trying to stem the bleeding, which as usual with a head wound was prodigious. Black blood, as always at night. Always the same shock when a flashlight beam turned it from black to red. He was still conscious, seemed like it was more a cut than a blow, but they needed to stop the bleeding. First aid in the dark, Gen working the downed cop, the rest bulling around ordering dispersal, angry but lacking any way to take it out appropriately. Settle in around the downed one, radio for help, shout through the bullhorn at people to go south, to go home, to go away. Roar of crowd pouring north around them, ignoring them. Nothing to be done until a medevac arrived, after which they could hustle north again one fewer, that much more anxious and on point.

The medevac came in two police vans, so they got in one and caught a short ride up to Morningside Heights, siren screaming all the way. Quieter in the back of the van than it would have been outside it, but still noisy enough that it was hard to talk.

They got out at the first of the superscrapers, at 120th. There were a lot of cops there, and whoever was in charge tried to get them to form a line from river to river; the landfilled area behind them was the narrowest part of the whole island.

But not narrow enough; the crowd heading north was huge, and unhinged, and there were only police on hand, no National Guard or firemen, or army. They had to give way. The crowd was intent on the towers.

The police on hand collapsed into groups that stood there like subway turnstiles, letting the crowd pass and thus avoiding a bloodbath which might very likely have seen them on the bloody end of things. No one had seen anything like this, and no one with a sense of the overall situation seemed in charge. There weren’t many protocols for moments this out of control, except Don’t get killed or kill people just to stop them moving somewhere, now the standard first rule in every cop’s education. In the chaos and noise the reasons for it were becoming obvious.

Electric power seemed to have gone out up here, and Gen wondered if that had started the riot. The only illumination was the full moon, which made things look pale and somehow very strange—finally she got it that all the shadows were pointed in the same direction, making it look like the whole island had been tilted. The group of cops Gen was part of tried to figure out what to do next, but it was too loud to talk, too loud to think. So now they were in effect one clump in a tide of clumps, pulled north with the rest, not even trying to reason with the mob around them, just pulled by the flow. Faces white-eyed, openmouthed. People who didn’t appear to speak English or any other language. The noise incredible, a hair-raising roar punctuated by shrieks, but the noise wasn’t what was causing the furor, because no one was listening anyway. Something had seized them up. On the plus side, being in police uniform now didn’t appear to put them in any particular danger; this wasn’t about them, and they were all part of a general movement, a human storm surge, drawn on by some lunatic tractor beam.