LOSS OF REASON Read online

  “Of course.”

  Franklin stepped to the rear of the Sea Pelican’s cargo area and pulled a climbing harness out of his blue bag.

  “What are you doing?” Tyner Kone asked, voice rising.

  “Before we can get you to Teterboro, we have to make a stop,” Franklin said.

  “Stop? You can kiss my ass!” Kone yelled.

  “Our sister, her husband and child live two blocks over. The first floor was blocked when we tried to get inside their apartment building. We were on our way to get the helicopter to do a flyover when we knocked a piece of concrete down onto your train.”

  “These people belong in a hospital!” Kone said.

  Victoria gave the barrel-bodied little bureaucrat a severe look.

  “Maybe we should just give these men the time they need to do what they came to do. If it weren’t for them we’d still be in that damn train. Probably dead.”

  “I agree,” added Mr. van Patter. He looked toward the empty bench. “This helicopter’s not full, and none of us are in worse shape than this young lady here. If she can wait, I think you can, Mr. Kone. If we can locate any more survivors, we ought to do it.”

  “Yeah, man, just shut up,” said Clarence the newspaper vendor.

  The Russians said nothing. The transit engineer gave a small nod of agreement.

  Kone shut up.

  Victoria sat on the fabric cot-seat looking at him silently. Though her knee was swollen nearly twice its normal size, the pain wasn’t that bad.

  If I hadn’t gone out to the television studio in Queens, I’d probably be dead now. Like David, the guy she’d had a first date with last night. David lived in Chelsea. South. She could see nothing but fire in that direction.

  What if I’d stayed at David’s last night like he wanted me to?

  There was probably still a job here—of some kind. If she wanted it. She didn’t. She didn’t want Atlanta either. So then, back to Chicago it would have to be, she figured.

  The helicopter rocked violently as Everon crabbed them over the wrecked building tops.

  “That one!” Franklin said.

  There on the floor of Cynthia’s apartment was the flower-covered four-drawer file cabinet, situated up against that half-broken bit of outside wall. Again Franklin noticed the fluttering splash of pink along the cabinet’s side.

  Everon dodged them around the roaring yellow ball of flame as it expanded again in the middle of Lexington. “I—I just can’t do it,” he yelled. “I can’t get you over top and still keep the blades out of the fire!”

  Franklin studied the building through the ball of yellow as they slowly drifted around it. Something. We aren’t seeing something. Has to be a way down there.

  The flame shrank. Everon inched closer. Expanded again. They could feel the heat from it as it rocked the big Pelican.

  But after two more complete circles, there just wasn’t. Not one debris-covered square foot. To put the winch’s hang point over any part of what was left of the upper floors would put the blades right in the flame.

  At the fireball’s smallest, just as it began to expand, they got a brief look at the apartment floor. The broken walls. Junk littered everywhere.

  Fortunately one person wasn’t looking down.

  “Uh—I think we better GET OUT—OF—HERE!” Clarence shouted. “SHIT!”

  Franklin’s eyes shot upward. Pieces of steel I-beam fell past the blades. Furniture and stone work. A statue of some kind.

  “That tower’s coming down!” The helicopter lurched as Everon jerked them away.

  “Alright, that’s it now!” said Kone.

  The city was still falling apart.

  Franklin watched through the helicopter window—pieces of someone else’s life falling into the alley behind Cynthia’s building.

  There was no movement down there. No one could have survived.

  With a terrible reluctance, Everon turned off. Banked west.

  Giving Up

  Franklin’s climbing harness lay abandoned on the floor.

  “It’s over. She’s gone.” Everon’s face stayed straight ahead, talking loudly at the windshield, “We tried, Bro.”

  Ten survivors turned away from the Manhattan shore, and the Sea Pelican’s windows were filled by the rusty-green of the Hudson River, on their right the blue-gray span of the George Washington Bridge. In the narrow track of blue between the pilots’ seats, the morning sky swarmed thick with giant insects—helicopters of every size and color heading toward Manhattan to rescue whoever they could find.

  Franklin got off his knees between the front seats. Left his brother to handle the Sea Pelican’s controls. Moved back to take a space at the forward end of the passenger compartment’s long side-bench.

  “Chopping off body parts one at a time is too good for whoever did this to us . . . ” Chuck shouted over the Pelican’s whomping roar. Franklin let the big man rant. Soon they’d be back at Teterboro.

  Not finding Cynthia filled Franklin with a lowness he’d never felt before. Not the Army. Not the church. He felt like crying—if it would do any good. He couldn’t admit to himself what Everon had already accepted: Cynthia and Steve and Melissa. They have to be dead.

  But his inner eye kept seeing Cynthia’s building. The debris. The walls. The alley behind. There just wasn’t any way down there.

  On the long seat next to Franklin, the pain of the dark-haired woman, Victoria, seemed to have diminished to a level she was able to handle. Next to her, Walter van Patter’s head bandage had bled through. Chuck was replacing it.

  Franklin listened as the MTA transit engineer debated quietly with Clarence over where the bomb must have come from.

  Franklin studied the Russians on the opposite bench seat along the helicopter’s right side. The Russian man, Petre, was holding his wife, Kat. Could it be? The Russians? Or maybe some Al Qaeda-ISIS-Muslim group, like the extremists who brought down the World Trade Center?

  Who cares! Franklin thought.

  Tyner Kone was the only loud one. “How long ’til we get back? Can’t this thing go any faster?”—and was still at it now crossing the river. Chuck looked like he wanted to lean over, open the door and shove the little bureaucrat out.

  Franklin ignored Kone, staring ’til his eyes went out of focus. Something was gone now. Something he knew could never be replaced. He thought of stories he’d heard on the physical weight of the soul, a body losing as much as a pound when it left, and wondered, Do Cynthia’s and Steve’s bodies weigh any less now than they had alive? Does their little daughter Melissa’s?

  But he knew their physical weight wasn’t the thing that was missing. Franklin and Everon had always been somewhat isolated from each other. Cynthia had been their link. Phone calls. News updates, passing information. Now that link was broken. Gone.

  What kind of a person would do a hellish thing like this?

  Everon was right. They would never find out. Like a missing soul, the bomb’s gone. What’s left after an explosion to tell anybody anything about who’s behind it?

  His thoughts were jerked away by a swift movement between two cumulus clouds, a glint of reflected sun outside the helicopter’s left windows.

  “Fighter jet!” Chuck called out. “Probably protection from more attacks.”

  “I don’t know how much good that’s going to do anybody now,” the transit engineer said.

  They watched the tiny jet disappear, then re-appear on the helicopter’s right, over the George Washington Bridge.

  “What’s that?” Victoria pointed.

  “What?” Franklin said, not really paying attention.

  “Right there. There! There—it goes again!”

  “Somebody dumping stuff off the G.W.,” Clarence said.

  Franklin’s eyes focused suddenly. “No they aren’t! Those are bodies! Those are people falling off the bridge!”

  Death

  On The Bl
ue-Gray Span

  As Everon angled the chopper more northward, a long arc of blue-gray pipe, vertical strings of cable, filled the windows. Franklin could see people getting through on the lower level, making their way around stalled cars.

  But on the upper deck, two 18-wheelers jackknifed butt-to-butt on a diagonal across the bridge formed a giant barrier, blocking all eight lanes. A third 18-wheeler, a FedEx rig, lay on its side, pinning the cab of the long silver container truck against a big commercial dumper at the north side of the bridge. Franklin could make out a Volkswagen Bug, its top hacked clear off, crammed beneath the orange semi’s chassis.

  People here and there were struggling to squeeze through narrow spaces. One woman popped out like shot from a cannon. There was blood on her face as she fell limply to the roadway. Those next to escape ran right over her. Like sports fans pushing out a single arena door, they were being compressed in a smashing mass crushing in on itself. But the pileup was acting like a funnel, sweeping the mob toward a wide hole something had broken in the bridge’s south side.

  “There go two more!” Chuck cried out.

  Pressure on the upper deck looked brutal. Tens of thousands crammed against its sides into a space meant to hold eight lanes of traffic. Like the city’s rats, thousands had made their way uptown on foot, expecting to escape across the blue-gray span.

  A long dark overcoat cocooned around a man who had fallen through the hole. Franklin could almost feel the scream from the man’s O-shaped mouth, red power-tie flapping alongside eyes huge with fear. If he hits flat-footed, it’ll drive the bones of his neck right up through his brain.

  Then a woman. She could have had no idea where she was. Long legs, dark high-heels, white underwear high up on her waist, the blue fabric of her long skirt billowing about her head as she plummeted to the water below.

  A single fire boat raced to pick up bodies—people probably dead when they hit the water, Franklin thought. At that speed it has to be hard as concrete. Even if they survive the fall, it’s freezing. Cold’s going to penetrate in seconds. “Closer!” he shouted to Everon.

  “Must be two hundred thousand people up there!” Chuck shouted back.

  “More!” yelled the train engineer.

  “The whole north end of Manhattan is trying to get out over the bridge!” Clarence yelled.

  “Cynthia and Steve. There’s a chance they’re on the bridge too,” Franklin shouted.

  “Not much of one,” Everon shouted back.

  “Why not?”

  “Think about the way their building looked. Their apartment. Think about what time it was when the bomb went off. What do you think they were doing at eight o’clock at night? Out for a stroll with Melissa?”

  Still, the slimmest of chances, Franklin thought.

  “They’re being crushed to death,” Victoria shouted, leaning her face against the window.

  “Transference of pressure,” Everon said loudly over his left shoulder. “People in back are only pushing a little. By the time it gets up front, the pressure becomes enormous.”

  In slow motion, another section of large-diameter railing pipe bent outward to leave an even wider gap, where the monstrous mob launched more bodies into space.

  “It’ll take days to get tow trucks in there,” Walter van Patter rasped.

  Clarence shook his head. “Those semis ain’t going nowhere!”

  It was getting worse. While they watched, people began falling by twos and threes.

  Everon came to a dead hover, halfway between the two mid-span lattice towers, where the bridge’s main support pipeage curved down to the tops of the wrecked 18-wheelers—while half a dozen more people launched off the south side.

  “What’s he doing?” Kone yelled. Everyone ignored him.

  “Think we could enlarge that small opening between the wrecks?” Franklin said. “Use the big hook?”

  “Someone would have to go down there and hook one of the semis up,” Chuck said.

  “No! It’s too dangerous!” Kone screamed. “Let someone else do it! You’ve got to get us to a hospital!”

  “What happens if we land back at Teterboro and the Army won’t let us take off again?” Everon yelled back.

  “All of us might know somebody in there,” the transit engineer said.

  “Can this machine handle the load?” van Patter asked.

  “I think so,” Everon yelled.

  “They’ll have to wait!” Kone said.

  “We can’t just leave them!” Victoria shot back.

  “Da! Da!” Petre and Kat pointed frantically out the right side window, urging someone do something as more were ejected from the bridge.

  “I demand you get us to New Jersey! Now!” Kone shouted.

  While they argued, a dozen more fell to their deaths, dropping through the hole in the bridge’s side. Part of Franklin felt like agreeing with Kone. Cynthia and her family will never be found. What’s the point? But another desperate voice inside wasn’t ready to give up. Not yet. A voice that said: Maybe they’re on the bridge!

  Walter van Patter squinted at the chubby little bureaucrat. “You know, Mr. Kone, some of the most powerful people in the world are probably trapped on that bridge.”

  Kone shut up.

  Franklin shuffled bent over, to keep from hitting his head, into the back of the passenger compartment. On the helicopter’s rear wall, he flipped out a handle and opened a three-foot-square door. He dragged the heavy cable harness across the floor, until its big curved hook caught under one of the seat supports. Petre freed the hook, and with the transit engineer, they pushed the heavy tangle to the side door.

  Franklin bent down between the front cockpit seats where he could speak with Everon. “I have to get the heavy-lift harness connected underneath.”

  “Okay,” Everon nodded, gingerly handling the controls.

  “The hook says it’s rated for six thousand pounds,” Franklin said. “Is that enough?”

  “Maybe for one end of a trailer if we can find an empty one. Which one do you want to try?”

  “Hold on.”

  Franklin backed up to where Chuck waited. Together they slid back the big square door. Cold air poured in.

  Clearly, there wouldn’t be much chance they could even slide one of the truck cabs out of the way. The engines alone probably weighed several tons. Of the jack-knifed trailers still on their wheels, the orange one had no cab. Must have gone over the side through the hole.

  He moved back to the cockpit.

  “Forget the FedEx. It’s on its side and it’s probably full. Let’s try the orange trailer, the one with no cab in the inbound lanes. It’s only got that VW jammed under it.”

  “Makes sense. Tell Chuck that’s the one and he can— WHOA!” Everon’s left hand yanked upward on the collective arm as a sudden gust tried to drop them into the bridge cabling. He moved the cyclic stick before his knees with quick, jerky movements until the big bird steadied out twenty feet higher. “I’m going to—hold on!”

  He pushed several overhead switches. Immediately the whole ride smoothed out. “It works!”

  He glanced at Franklin. “Auto-stabilizer. I was afraid to try it.” He let out a deep breath. “That will make it easier. Okay, Bro. Too bad we don’t have all the communications stuff working. Signal to Chuck. He can tell me which way you want me as he lowers you down.”

  “All we need is to slide the back end of one trailer away from the other, right?” Franklin yelled in his brother’s ear. “Those containers—are they locked on their chassis?” Half the trailers on the roads these days were actually a separate container box that sat on an 18-wheeler chassis.

  Everon’s eyes searched his memory. “Not necessarily,” he nodded. “Once we’re hooked on, I won’t raise it too high. Otherwise we could pull the box right off the truck bed!”

  “Okay!”

  Franklin backed up. Picked up the climbing harness where he’d left it on the
floor. Slid his legs in and buckled its upper straps across his chest. Chuck clipped the loop on the front of the harness to the hoist carabiner.

  Franklin showed Chuck the orange container truck he wanted to try. But first they had to get the cable harness attached to the helicopter while still in the air.

  Franklin took one of the heavy cable eyelets in his right hand, gripped the overhead hoist bracket tubes with his left and lowered his weight onto the hoist cable. He hadn’t known what to expect until he swung through the open door. Freezing rotor wind blasted his hair.

  “Okay!” he yelled.

  Chuck held the hoist’s DOWN button until he was two feet below the Pelican’s body. Water ran from Franklin’s eyes. He could barely see.

  With the bulk of the heavy cable harness still inside the door, Franklin pulled himself underneath, around the right streamlined wheel pontoon.

  “More slack!” he waved.

  Chuck dropped him down another two feet.

  Mounted to the underside of the Pelican’s airframe were four metal hooks, arranged in a rectangle. Using his legs he pushed himself into a position nearly horizontal, and reached out for the closest hook with a cable eyelet.

  Chuck’s head appeared over the door edge.

  “A little more!” Franklin yelled.

  The cable dropped him another foot. He pushed with his legs and the first eyelet clipped into place. Chuck lay on his stomach and handed him another. The next two snapped easily into their hooks. The last one would be a stretch, way out to the helicopter’s far corner.

  He strained against the hoist cable, swinging his arm and missed. His feet slipped off the sponson and his weight fell straight down jerking him onto the cable.

  He got hold of the fourth eyelet, scrambled using his legs to push himself back up into position. He pointed his toes. Hand reaching out, lunging away from the wheel sponson, the eyelet scraped next to the hook. He fell away swinging back and forth in the violent wind again, not knowing if he had the strength to try again.

  But the cable was gone. It was hanging from the fourth hook.