LOSS OF REASON Page 14

  He wiped the back of a gloved hand against his forehead, as Chuck shoved the rest of the heavy harness over the door edge and its cables untangled. The big hook squared into position, dangling twenty feet below.

  Franklin nodded. Chuck disappeared.

  The helicopter began moving sideways to a spot above the rear of the cab-less orange semi-trailer that took up most of the four inbound lanes.

  Inside, Everon yelled to Chuck, “How’s that?”

  “Five feet to the rear. Okay—perfect! Hold it.”

  Franklin saw Chuck reappear at the doorway edge. Franklin gave him a downward point. A moment later, Franklin felt himself descend.

  His feet contacted the top of the orange container with a clang. Below him on the crowded bridge deck, rotor-blade blast was whipping people’s hair, their clothes. Faces screamed up at him, people shaking fists in the air, flipping the middle finger. He had to focus.

  More hoist cable came down, giving him room to maneuver.

  Chuck’s head appeared. Franklin waved the hook lower. Closer! Chuck vanished in the doorway.

  The helicopter descended—until Franklin was able to grab the big hook and guide it sideways. At shipyards, cranes lifted these containers off their chassis and moved them directly onto ships for transport overseas. An eye was welded at each corner. It was one of these Franklin wanted.

  “Lower!” Everon heard Chuck call out. “Looks like we’re still a couple feet high.”

  They were very close to the minimum altitude Everon could risk. A long row of street lights ran along the sides of the bridge. He calculated the distance: four lanes, each twelve feet wide—forty-eight feet to a side. Two sides: inbound and outbound, a little extra for the center divider—four feet maybe.

  A hundred feet.

  In the operating manual tucked behind the seat, the Pelican’s blades had been listed at sixty-two. Blade tips to light poles, less than twenty feet to spare on a side. Any lower, he’d be down inside them. One bad gust of wind and—

  More people were being forced over the rails. His left hand made the tiniest dip in the collective.

  With a CLANG! that vibrated upward, the hook went into the corner eye. Franklin clung to one of the cables.

  “He’s got it!” Chuck yelled in Everon’s ear.

  Okay! Everon thought. Now if we can— Gently he pulled. The whine of the turbines increased, the blade noise rising with the engine’s RPMs. He pulled the collective all the way up. The Pelican strained to rise several feet, then stopped. He waited. The effort was for nothing.

  Just the rear of this trailer is too much, he thought. The Pelican can’t lift it!

  “It must be full of something really heavy,” Chuck yelled.

  “Stop! Stop!” Kone yelled. “You’ll kill us all!”

  Down below, Franklin shook his head and waved Everon back down.

  “Okay,” Everon admitted, “maybe this was a bad idea. Tell my brother to cut us loose.”

  The helicopter descended enough to slack the cables. Franklin pushed the big harness hook from the trailer eye.

  The helicopter rose, Franklin’s hoist cable retracting with it. It seemed people down there were giving up too. Instead of being crushed to death against the guardrails, they were deliberately jumping off the sides!

  At the very moment his feet left the box’s roof, he felt hands grip his right leg. A slim woman in her thirties with wavy light hair had somehow gotten to the trailer’s top.

  Cynthia!

  But as the woman struggled to hold on, she looked directly into Franklin’s eyes. There was only a vague resemblance. The forehead, the nose. But not the eyes.

  Franklin reached to grab her beneath an armpit. But the woman slipped, down onto the screaming crowd, as if diving backward onto fans in a rock concert.

  Out Of Control

  “What’s he doing?” Bonnie Fisk screamed.

  She watched the woman fall as air was forced from Bonnie’s chest, crushed against a thousand others. She was slowly being pushed toward the bridge’s side.

  Bonnie wrenched her neck back to look at the man with long dark hair rising toward the helicopter, away from the long orange truck-trailer—as she slid another two feet toward the hole.

  “Ahhhheee!” she screamed. Someone’s elbow felt like it was going right through her bladder—which reacted, unfortunately, by letting loose, wetting her size-fourteen peach knit slacks. As co-owners of Fiskmart, the sixth largest national chain of retail big box shopping marts, Bonnie and her sister Barbara were worth billions. On the G.W.’s upper deck today, she was no different than anyone else. Mauled and sliding, bumping, moving inexorably toward that goddamn hole.

  The dark-haired man was leaving them. He was giving up. The helicopter couldn’t lift the orange trailer.

  Today Bonnie had clung to only one possession. Her keys. And when the dark-haired man beneath the helicopter glanced her way, she put every bit of her considerable strength into throwing them.

  They sailed in an arc. Hit him right on the neck.

  He stared at her. She pointed.

  At the silver container box on the other side of the bridge.

  Chuck had Franklin halfway up to the Pelican when he saw Franklin wave his right hand and point. He stopped the hoist. Franklin was pointing across the bridge at another 18-wheeler that lay across the outbound lanes. The FedEx and the dumper wedged at its tail against the north bridge railing.

  Chuck ducked back to Everon. “He doesn’t want to come up! He’s pointing to the rear of the silver one!”

  “They’re too heavy! And that one’s got a cab on it too. Reel him in! We have to go back and tell somebody else. Maybe the military can do it.”

  Chuck hesitated. “Okay.”

  As Chuck Farndike went for the hoist controls, he felt a tug on his sleeve. Walter van Patter. He leaned his head in close to the billionaire’s mouth.

  “What color was the first truck?”

  “Orange,” Chuck answered.

  “The orange ones are ocean going,” van Patter said. “They’re made of steel. The silver ones will be lighter. They’re aluminum.”

  Chuck went forward and told Everon.

  Everon doubted they could lift it either.

  “Unless it’s empty,” Chuck said.

  Manhattan, Everon knew, was mostly a consumer. Coming out of the city after a delivery somewhere like the Garment District maybe? He was sure what Franklin would say. Look at how many people are down there! Cyn could be one of them—Steve and Melissa, they could all be!

  “There’s no refrigeration unit either!” Chuck told him. “It’s not a meat or fish packer. Might be coming out empty, right?”

  “We tried!” Kone complained. “Now let’s get out of here!”

  “Shut up!” a half dozen voices yelled back.

  Everon hovered them directly over the back end of the long silver truck, keeping his blade-to-streetlight distance firmly in mind.

  Dangling below the helicopter, Franklin glanced at the sky. Far to the east it looked like the dark cloud had bunched up, upper winds pushing it back into a ball. It’s reversing!

  And then realized suddenly, I’m descending. They’re lowering me back down.

  The soles of his shoes contacted the silver 18-wheeler’s top and registered the shaking pressure of the crowd pushing against it.

  This time Everon seemed to know how long the cables were below him.

  As the helicopter hovered over to the big rig’s corner, Franklin quickly pulled the hook with him, slid it into the corner eye farthest from the crowd.

  He leaned into one of the lift cables to steady himself. Far east, high in the sky, the cloud vied for his attention.

  It’s no longer moving away from us! It’s coming!

  The mob seemed to sense it too. People pushing harder, faster. He could feel it in his feet. Pressure. The force on each person must be tremendous. No oversold sp
orting event has ever seen anything like this. All along the middle of the bridge people were pouring over the sides.

  The Pelican began to climb. Everon could feel it in the controls. He was at the top of the lift harness now. Slowly, slowly up the long box came.

  “Feels like this one’s empty!” he muttered.

  A fuel feed light blinked on, glowing above his head. Power on the right turbine gauge dropped out. “NO! NOT NOW!”

  They were losing power. It felt like the main rotor blades were drooping.

  They were going down.

  Without thinking, his left hand twisted the throttle, yanked the collective arm upward, until it was angled as high off the floor as he could pull. The other turbine strained to keep up, whining, growling, screaming. He eyeballed its temperature gauge as the needle snuck into the red. If they lost the Number One engine here above the bridge like this, rotor blades catching in the bridge piping above these people, it was all over.

  No way! Got to get it restarted in the air!

  He’d been running the right engine off the rear tank, the left engine off the front. He hit the boost switches. Too late for that. Its flame was already out. The rotor continued to lose RPMs.

  And then Everon felt the automatic stabilizer system drop out too.

  The Pelican rocked in the air, her controls suddenly super-sensitive. Overhead a chip light from the rear crankcase illuminated. He knew what that was. Pieces of metal getting inside the gearbox. This thing is more of a mess than I realized. We shouldn’t even be in the air!

  Down below, Franklin watched with a kind of detached fatalistic awe, the helicopter slowly descending on top of him.

  He didn’t even have time to move.

  Everon glanced at Clarence in the left seat and pointed upward with his chin. “Hit that switch!”

  “Which one?” Clarence gulped.

  “The one marked right engine boost pump, front tank!”

  Clarence flipped it.

  “Move that lever,” Everon pointed with his eyes to the overhead console. “Twist it! From left tank—to crossfeed—the right engine.”

  Clarence moved the lever to the first notch.

  “One more!”

  The newspaper vendor twisted the black lever all the way over.

  “Now this one here,” Everon nosed, “the speed selector lever—to SHUTOFF.”

  He waited a few moments, licked his lips. “Okay, push the start button on Turbine Two.”

  “Here?” Clarence asked.

  “HIT IT!”

  Clarence pushed. Nothing.

  In back, the transit engineer crossed his fingers in front of himself. The Russians joined him, making the sign of the cross.

  Then they all felt it. A vibration.

  Everon glanced at the gauge for Turbine Two. The needle jumped. It was restarting. As the rotor’s torque increased, the blades felt springier. As the right turbine spun up, he felt a power surge.

  They climbed.

  Franklin’s senses were overwhelmed by the screams of people falling off the sides of the bridge now, screams of people smashed against tractor-trailers, legs and bodies forced against cars, breaking glass, crumpling metal.

  He was kneeling on top of the silver trailer, trying to push the big hook out of the box’s corner metal eye, when he realized the helicopter’s pitch overhead was changing. He looked up. The helicopter’s bottom was feet above his head— But—it doesn’t seem to be getting any lower.

  The thick heavy-lift cables tightened. His hand barely moved in time to keep from getting crushed when the hook yanked itself straight in the box eye.

  The trailer’s corner, its entire rear end, slowly rose. Higher. Several inches. Without pause, the helicopter immediately moved sideways. The cables grew tighter, pulling the rear of the whole trailer backward. A foot—two feet—dragging its end away from the other truck blocking the road, away from the cars stuck beneath it. And away from the fighting struggling compressed mass of people pressed against it.

  The now cheering mob!

  As though it were the start of the New York City Marathon—one that might never be run again, like releasing a torrent of water from a breaking dam, thousands burst toward freedom.

  And ran with everything they had.

  A Loss Of Reason

  As Franklin was hoisted back up to the Sea Pelican, his eyes studied the bridge’s structure, followed the lines of its blue-gray girders, the way they connected. Something he could almost see nagged at him, and faded. Something—

  Suddenly, in his mind he saw another structure, as it last lay. His brain had snapped a picture at the last possible moment, an image he didn’t know he had. If it was still like that when they got— He wouldn’t be able to take anything down with him. Did he dare?

  Chuck and the Russian Petre swung him through the cargo door.

  “We have to go back!” he yelled.

  “About time!” said Kone. “We ought to just make it.”

  “No,” said Franklin. “Back to Cynthia’s. I know how to get on top!”

  “WHAT!” screamed Kone.

  “We’ve already tried twice!” Everon yelled. “Bro,” he head pointed, “Look! See that dark stuff out there not making it to the ground? That’s virga. It could turn to full-on radioactive rainstorm in an instant. She’s gone! All that’s left to us is to figure out who did it. Vengeance is all we have left and even that’s extremely unlikely. They’re gone! Let them go!”

  “They’re not! Trust me,” Franklin said fiercely. “I know how to get in. Let me try!”

  Everon shook his head, lips tight. “This bird’s barely in the air.”

  “You can fly anything.”

  Everon studied the severe, begging intensity in his younger brother’s face. Franklin shouted over the whining engine, “If you don’t go back, it’s not that I won’t forgive you—you’ll never forgive yourself!”

  Everon’s hand left the stick for only a second. To wipe across his eyes.

  “You’ve got to get these people to a hospital first!” Kone yelled.

  “If we land, they won’t let us take off again,” Franklin shouted back.

  “What about radiation?” Kone pointed out the Pelican’s east windows. “That cloud doesn’t look any farther away.”

  Franklin didn’t answer. It’s not. It’s closer.

  “Let them have one more try,” said van Patter.

  “You owe your life to these men, Mr. Kone!” It was Victoria and she pointed a finger at Franklin while looking at the little bureaucrat. “He nearly drowned getting us out! And now you say they can’t take every chance, any possibility to find their family?”

  Franklin looked at her gratefully. “I didn’t know you knew about that.”

  “The engineer told me,” her voice rising to reach Everon. “Put us down somewhere on the Manhattan shore.” She pointed at Kone, “Let him walk back!”

  Kone yelled. He screamed. He went for the cockpit. At one point Franklin thought he was going to try to wrestle the controls out of Everon’s hands.

  But with the support of Victoria, of Walter van Patter, the others physically restraining Kone who refused to agree to get out, Everon turned back into Manhattan. They were going back into it. Back toward the cloud.

  Bits of ash clung to the Impala’s old white body. Edie’s left hand gripped Lou’s right thigh as she rode next to him in front—while Cheri Enriquez, their new neighbor, tried to comfort her son Johnny in the back.

  Kid looks pretty sick, thought Lou Goodman. Another quick look in the rearview mirror. And his mother isn’t looking much better.

  The Goodmans were an old Jewish couple in their seventies, Lou balding, his wife Edith’s hair whiter than the Brooklyn snow from the bomb. They had planned to take the girl and her kid to their son’s house in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Lou and Edie’s grandkids had moved away to Vegas. Jake and his wife were out there visiting. The apartm
ent was empty.

  But a couple miles after they’d left Kings highway, Edith made another whispered suggestion. “Let’s take them to Brooklyn Hospital, Louie. Something’s really wrong with that kid.”

  Which would have been a good idea. Except the Belt Parkway was out. Not just closed. From what Lou could make out three blocks away, long sections had cracked and slanted out of alignment.

  For the next three hours, Lou wound their way through east Brooklyn neighborhoods, and little Johnny got sicker. Cheri too. The young woman was hyperventilating and the kid looked green. He couldn’t stop crying either.

  When they got into Queens, Edie agreed they should give up and try again to get over to Jake’s place in Jersey.

  But at the George Washington Bridge turnoff, it looked like no one was getting anywhere. And there was still no cellphone signal. When the minivan ahead slowly veered off a northbound exit, Lou followed. Maybe we can get up across the Tappan Zee Bridge? Drop down into Fort Lee from there?

  Another three hours, traffic channeling them this way, that way. Lou grabbed a look over his shoulder. Kid isn’t breathing too well. Looks sweaty. Somehow they’d narrowly avoided getting completely stuck, but they weren’t making great progress either. They were still in Queens. Lou turned on the radio. The announcer said something about emergency hospital services at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. Hmmm . . .

  “Lou! Stop!” Edie screamed. “Louie! Stop the car!”

  Lou Goodman mashed the brakes as Cheri Enriquez flung open the rear door.

  Too late. Little Johnny was already puking his guts out on the back seat. The Goodmans helped Cheri and Johnny outside. The kid was really heaving it up when the thick dark clouds over their heads began to drizzle.

  What started as a mist soon thickened. Within a minute all four of them were being pissed on by stinging black rain as the clouds grew even heavier and pushed in toward the city.

  Cynthia And Steve

  The huge ball of fire was still in the way. From the look on Everon’s face, the jerky movements of his hands on the controls, the wind had strengthened and was gusting from the east. Out 60th Street, a wall of black mist was moving toward them.