Michael Ares - Dayfall

When he could see that Williams’s face was completely turned away from his current position and his hands were well occupied, Jon moved quickly across the floor and stepped through the half-closed doorway. He made sure the bomber hadn’t noticed him, and then looked around quickly. It was a small room, really a large shaft, that was less than ten feet wide but stretched all the way up to a big grate on the street far above.

When he looked back out of the doorway, he could see that this subbasement of the Flatiron Building was a huge cavern, not quite as big as the one he had fallen into under Grand Central Station, but almost. He estimated that the ceiling of the chamber was about thirty feet high, and he knew there was a basement level above this, since that was where he and Halladay had practiced shooting at the gun range. He also was able to figure out quickly the original purpose of the shaft—ventilation—because across from him there were the decaying remains of two enormous old coal furnaces, which reached almost to the ceiling and looked like something from an old movie set. The far left side of the furnaces was the iron wall that concealed the secret access hatch through which he had entered.

The modern generator that now provided power for the building, next to which Williams was working, sat to the right of the old furnaces, in the middle of the cavern. To its right were several metal staircases, one winding up to an entrance on the other wall near the ceiling, and the other stretching to nothing that Jon could see, perhaps an old exit to the street that had been sealed off.

Jon turned his attention back to Williams as the mercenary stood up and dusted off his hands like he was done.

It was now or never, so Jon summoned every bit of remaining strength he could and exploded out of the ventilation shaft toward the ex–Army man, hoping to grab the gun if he could get to him before being seen, and he almost managed it. But Williams turned at the last second, so all Jon could do at that point was grab his arm to keep him from drawing his gun. Jon tried to make use of the element of surprise and twist him to the ground from that position, but the other man was much more agile and skilled than he looked. When Jon pulled his right arm across his body to keep it from the gun and spin him off his feet, Williams spun his left elbow around and connected hard with Jon’s face. Then he kicked Jon’s legs out from under him while the young cop was still reeling from the blow, and sent him sprawling to the floor.

The mercenary stood over Jon, not even bothering to draw his weapon. He shook his bespectacled head in disgust, then turned around, crouched down again, and set the timer on a piece of equipment that was like the one in the truck out in the tunnel. Jon saw the numbers appear and start to count down on the timer in front of him, and imagined that the same was happening on the other one.

Williams turned back to Jon, and this time he did have the gun in his hand. He pointed it casually down at the helpless detective and moved his finger to the trigger. Jon tried to keep his eyes open, but they involuntarily closed when three or four shots thundered out and echoed throughout the huge room.

Williams’s body jerked violently as he was hit in the back by at least two bullets, and he fell to the ground dead with a thud, right next to where Jon was lying.

Jon’s eyes had reopened in time to catch Williams’s body falling, and now he shook his head and focused beyond where the mercenary had stood above him. Ari Hegde and Brenda Dixon were halfway down the winding metal stairs that stretched down from the top of the chamber on the other side, still pointing their guns in his direction, and there was another figure behind them that Jon didn’t immediately recognize. When they were sure Williams wasn’t moving, they hurried down the rest of the steps and came running over to Jon.

“Are you all right?” Hegde said to Jon, helping him up as Dixon checked Williams’s neck for a pulse that was no longer there.

“Yeah, thanks,” Jon said. “How’d you know who to shoot from that far away? There’s not a lot of light in here.”

“Your shirt,” Hegde explained, gesturing below Jon’s chin. “I remembered the blood.”

“Why’d you come here?” Jon asked.

“You told us about it, remember?” Hegde said. “We didn’t really believe you after the APB, but thought we should at least check it out since we were coming back down here anyway. Poppy here let us in.”

Now Jon recognized their companion—it was the building superintendent that Halladay had introduced him to, the one whose father had passed the job on to him.

“Oh, no, listen,” Jon said, his relief suddenly turning to panic. “We have to stop these….”

He hurried over to the timer on the bombs and noticed it was down to about ten minutes, which was only twice as long as Amira and Halladay had to diffuse the bombs in the Below, when there weren’t nearly as many.

“No time to get more help,” Jon thought aloud. “But there are four of us,” he added, and didn’t hesitate any further when he thought of what his partners had done back at the Below. “Here’s what we do…. You have to unscrew the green wires where they go into the detonators, and you have to do every one of them, because just one is enough to blow them all.”

“How do you know this?” Dixon said. “I don’t wanna mess with them if we don’t know what we’re doing.”

“Amira knew,” Jon said quickly. “Remember, I was on the phone with them….” He looked at the three of them. “Come on, if we all work together we can do it.”

Hegde and Dixon now looked at each other, and then back at Poppy.

“Awww, fuck it,” the super said. “My dad and I didn’t nurse this ole lady all these years just to see her get blown to shit.”

The two Chaos Crimes cops looked at each other again, then nodded to one another and said, “Okay” to Jon. Hegde made a very brief call to someone above about evacuating the building, though they all knew that there probably wasn’t enough time for anyone to get far enough away. Jon explained that they should start next to the generator with the bigger group of bombs and then work down the line toward the subway and the truck.

“But make sure you get every one,” he added with emphasis. “There are always two together along the line. Don’t just do one and move on, thinking you’re done, or we’re dead.”

Jon showed the other three how to disconnect one of the detonators on the pile of explosives clustered near the generator, and then they all jumped in and went to work. It went quickly while they were working on that pile, but then they moved to the line of bombs stretching across the floor and had to figure out how to do those as quickly as possible without missing any. After a few anxious moments of discussion, they decided to form a line, and when one of them was finished detaching their green wire, he or she would move up to the next one that was undone. At first, this led to some awkward shuffling and bumping into one another, but soon it was going more smoothly.

“Shit, now we can’t see the timer anymore,” Dixon said as they moved away from the generator.

“Don’t panic,” Jon said, clearly the default leader here, because Dixon had looked at him. “Does anyone have a watch?” He knew that none of them could be taking the time to fumble with a cell phone.

“I do,” Poppy said, so Jon told him to use the watch, in case they weren’t going to make it and decided to run, like Amira and Halladay had tried to do. Poppy moved back toward the timer to read the numbers there, and pushed a few buttons on his watch.

When he read off the time left, they all felt a surge of adrenaline and doubled down on their efforts.