Douglas Preston - Reliquary

Hayward watched as the emergency medical crew rolled Beal into the waiting ambulance. The back legs of the stretcher folded up as the officer was slid inside. Beal groaned, then raised a hand toward his bandaged head.

“Careful,” Hayward snapped to the paramedic. She put a hand on one of the rear doors and leaned inside. “How you doing?” she asked.

“Been better,” Beal said with a weak smile.

Hayward nodded. “You’ll be fine.” She turned to go.

“Sergeant?” Beal said. Hayward paused. “That bastard Miller would have left me there to find my own way out. Or to drown, maybe. I think I owe you guys my life.”

“Forget it,” Hayward said. “It’s part of the job. Right?”

“Maybe,” Beal said. “But anyway, I won’t forget. Thanks.”

Hayward left Beal with the paramedic and walked around to the driver’s seat. “What’s the news?” she asked.

“What do you want to hear?” the driver asked, scribbling on a log sheet. “Gold futures? The international situation?”

“Take your act to the Poconos,” she replied. “I’m talking about this .” And she waved her hand along Central Park West.

A surreal quiet lay over the dark scene. Except for emergency vehicles and the police cars stationed at every other cross street, there was no traffic on the immediate blocks. Pools of darkness dotted the avenue; a mere handful of streetlights remained unbroken, sizzling and sputtering. The broad avenue was dotted with chunks of concrete, broken glass, and trash. Farther to the south, Hayward noticed, the flashing lights grew much more numerous.

“Where you been?” the driver asked. “Unless you spent the last hour at the center of the earth, it was pretty hard to miss the action around here.”

“You’re not that far wrong,” she said. “We’ve been clearing out the homeless underneath the Park. There was resistance. This guy got wounded, and it took us a long time to extract him. We were pretty deep underground, and we didn’t want to jostle him too much. Okay? We came up five minutes ago at the Seventy-second Street station, only to find a ghost town around here.”

“Clearing out the homeless?” the driver asked. “So you’re the ones responsible.”

Hayward frowned. “For what?”

The ambulance driver tapped his ear, then pointed eastward, as if that was the only answer necessary.

Hayward stopped to listen. Over the squawk of the ambulance scanner and the distant pulse of the city, she could make out sounds floating from the dark interior of Central Park: the angry buzz of bullhorns, shouts, screams, the whine of sirens.

“You know that Take Back Our City march?” the driver asked. “The unannounced one that was going along Central Park South?”

“Heard something about it,” Hayward said.

“Yeah. Well, suddenly all these homeless started pouring up from underground. Kinda hostile, too. Apparently, you cops had been using them for baton practice. Started squabbling with the marchers. Before you know it, there was a full-blown confrontation. People just went nuts, I heard. Screaming, yelling, stomping on other people. Then the looting started up along the fringes. Took the cops an hour to get the situation under control. It still isn’t under control, actually. But they’ve managed to confine everything to the Park.”

The paramedic in the rear gave a signal, and the driver put the ambulance in gear and pulled away, flashing lights striping the limestone facades. Farther up Central Park West, Hayward could see curious people looking out from their windows, pointing into the Park. A few braver souls were standing on the pavement outside of lobbies, staying close to the protective presence of uniformed doormen. She gazed up at the huge Gothic shape of the Dakota, unharmed and seemingly aloof from the chaos, almost as if its narrow, stylized moat had repulsed an angry throng. She found her eyes traveling up the corner tower toward what must be Pendergast’s windows. She wondered if he’d made it back from the Devil’s Attic in one piece.

“Get Beal off okay?” she heard Carlin call out. His massive form emerged out of the distant shadows.

“Just now,” she replied, turning toward him. “How about the other one?”

“Refused medical treatment,” Carlin said. “Any sign of Miller?”

Hayward scowled. “He’s probably in some Atlantic Avenue bar by now, sucking down beer and bragging about his exploits. That’s how it works, right? He’ll get a promotion, and we’ll get letters of caution for insubordination.”

“Maybe other times it works that way,” Carlin said with a knowing smile. “But not this time.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Hayward asked, then continued without giving Carlin time to answer: “No way to tell what Miller did or didn’t do. Guess we’d better report in.” She grabbed at her radio, snapping it on. But torrents of noise, static, and panic came pouring from every band.

... Moving toward the Great Lawn, we need more manpower to… Got eight of them but I can’t hold them much longer, if that wagon doesn’t come soon they’ll just melt away into the dark… I called for a medevac thirty goddamn minutes ago; we got people hurt up here… Christ, they’ve gotta seal that southern quadrant; more keep coming in all the time…

Hayward snapped the radio off and snugged it back into her belt, then motioned Carlin to follow her down to the squad car at the next corner. A police officer in riot gear stood beside it, vigilantly scanning the street, shotgun in hand.

“Where’s command for this operation?” Hayward asked.

The policeman tipped up his face shield and looked at her. “There’s a forward command post in the Castle,” he said. “That’s what dispatch says, anyway. Things are kinda disorganized right now, as if you couldn’t tell.”

“Belvedere Castle.” Hayward turned toward Carlin. “We’d better head for it.”

As they ran down Central Park West, Hayward was strangely reminded of her visit to a Hollywood back lot two years before. She remembered walking down the ersatz Manhattan street on which countless musicals and gangster films had been shot. She’d seen phony street lamps, shop fronts, fire hydrants… everything but people. At the time, common sense had told her that a mere hundred yards away were bustling, vibrant California streets. Yet the still emptiness of the lot had seemed almost spectral.

Tonight, Central Park West felt the same way. Though she could hear the distant honking of car horns and the whistle of sirens—and though she knew that, within the Park itself, police were massing to stop the rioting and confusion—this darkened avenue seemed ghostly and unreal. Only the occasional vigilant doorman, curious resident, or police checkpoint broke the atmosphere of a ghost street.

“Holy shit,” Carlin muttered at her side. “Would you look at that.” Hayward glanced up, and her reverie instantly dissolved.

It was like crossing a demilitarized zone from order into chaos. To the south, across 65th Street, they saw a sea of ruin. Lobby windows were smashed, awnings over elegant entrances were torn to shreds and flapping idly in the breeze. The police presence here was stronger, the blue-painted barricades omnipresent. Cars along the curbs were missing windows and windshields. A few blocks down, a police tow truck with flashing yellow lights was removing the smoking skeleton of a taxi.

“Looks like some pretty pissed off mole people came through here,” Hayward murmured.

They cut across the street, angling toward the drive and heading into the Park. After the destruction they’d just passed, the narrow asphalt paths seemed quiet and deserted. But the smashed benches, overturned trash cans, and smoldering garbage bore mute testimony to what had taken place here not long before. And the noise that drifted toward them from the interior of the Park gave promise of even greater pandemonium to come.