LOSS OF REASON Page 9

  “At least the smoke helps block the sun,” Chuck yelled over their shoulders.

  Everon nodded back.

  Across the far east sky, the poisonous anvil-headed radiation cloud stretched even farther and darker—out across Long Island now where snow and rain were likely to bring death to thousands.

  “Hey! Another helicopter!” Chuck pointed.

  A Bell Executive flew into view from behind the broken frame of the Empire State. Its doors bore a huge logo, a gold crown. Underneath in three-foot gold letters was a single word: KING.

  “Nathan King,” Everon said. “He bought the Empire State Building last year.”

  Before Everon could push the stick over to bank them toward Central Park, out of nowhere an F-18 fighter flashed past their windows. A moment later, a fast-attack Cobra gunship rose to hover along their right side, its single machine cannon targeting the old Sea Pelican.

  Beneath the ready emotion, Nathan King’s deep coolness was missing, mutated into a profound sorrow mixed with rage. It twisted his jovial features.

  “Fuck!” he said softly, shoulders slumped, watching his city burn from the side window of his private helicopter. “There’s nothing left!”

  “How is this different?” those who knew him so well—friends, employees, business associates—might have asked. His moods, so volatile—one day intense, the next, wild—sadness, joy, whatever—it doesn’t matter. As long as it entertains! Oh, yeah—and get the hell out of my critical path!

  But anyone could have guessed the answer: “How often does a man lose everyone he cares about, everything his life is built on—in a flash of light?” Everything he loved, even his parents, killed during a night he’d been doing business in London.

  To confirm their deaths King rushed across the Atlantic, came up here to see for himself. The eight sky-piercing buildings he’d created—his parents’ penthouse in one of them—gone.

  He straightened. Louder and with a touch of vehemence, asked, “What do we know, John?” John Mayhew, his executive assistant, had lost people too.

  “Well, Mr. King, the information we have so far from the military shows two to three hundred kilotons. The blast—”

  “No, not that stuff, John. What does the government say? What do our contacts say? Goddammit! I want to know who did this! Don’t you?”

  From the gunship’s open side cargo door, a soldier held up a whiteboard penned with thick black numbers. FREQ 144.44. A clipped military voice over a megaphone echoed the same thing. “Go to frequency 144.44! Now!”

  Chuck leaned up between the seats and Everon handed him the microphone. “Looks like you’re on deck.” Everon dialed the frequency into the helicopter’s radio display.

  “This is Chuck Farndike with a Red Cross mission out of Teterboro.”

  The response was immediate. “You have no authorization to be here, Mr. Farndike. All traffic is restricted.”

  “We’re on an emergency Red Cross mission.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Farndike, your tail number’s not listed as authorized. You’ll have to return to New Jersey.”

  Everon asked over the radio, “What’s the King helicopter doing in here?”

  “That is not your concern!” the military pilot responded. “Follow us back across the Hudson. Now, please.”

  The pilot’s tone offered no options.

  Franklin held out his hand. “Let me give it a try.” Chuck handed over the microphone.

  In a smooth calm voice half an octave lower than he usually spoke, Franklin said: “We have on board potassium iodide and other medical supplies. People down there are waiting for our help. Our mission was a last-minute Red Cross addition. Please check with Teterboro and allow us to continue.”

  “I’m sorry, you’ll have to—”

  “Let them do what they can,” a new voice said. “At least call it in.”

  “This is an emergency channel. Identify yourself!”

  “Nathan King.”

  The radio went silent.

  “King!” Everon said.

  Seconds ticked by, both helicopters hovering over 59th Street, fifteen hundred feet in the air.

  “The tower people have my backup radio,” Everon said. “I fixed their generator too.”

  “Let’s hope your friends in the tower back us up,” Franklin nodded.

  The radio crackled. “Uh—your flight has been authorized. Non-military personnel are not allowed south of Forty-Second Street. Radiation levels are too high. For your own protection.”

  “Understood. Thank you,” Franklin said.

  Everon banked the aircraft left and began descending on a northeasterly course toward Central Park.

  Cheri And Johnny

  As fear gave way to sleep, the pretty Latina woman held her child where they lay on the carpet. Until the dim gray light filtered through the front window. And now Cheri remembered:

  Cheri Enriquez’s house shook.

  “Mommy!”

  The roaring wave of pressure had cut off Stevie Wonder on the stereo, singing to the penalties of superstition. Pounded Cheri and her three-year-old Johnny down to the floor. “Mommy!” he’d cried again as they held onto each other, rocking together on the carpet, eyes closed—waiting for the scary hurricane sound to pass.

  As quickly as it began, the howling noise dropped off until it was replaced by a dead and eerie silence.

  For the longest time Cheri had been afraid to move.

  She looked at the small boy in her arms. His eyes stared silently up at her. He was awake now too.

  She rose and carried Johnny to look out the front window. The sky over east Brooklyn was so dark she could barely make out the tree-lined street. Something overhead was blotting out the light.

  She tried the news. The television screen stared back blankly. She lifted the phone. Nothing. She played with the dial on their portable radio. Only static.

  Cheri had gone along with her husband Jáime’s wishes: “Better to bring Johnny up away from gangs and drugs!” And for three years they had saved every spare dollar for a deposit. Until they were able to move to the mainly Jewish area of southeast Brooklyn. Today she wished they still lived in the old neighborhood. Where she knew everybody. Where she could still go next door to the Gonzalezes or across the street to find out what Francie Lopez knew.

  Jáime would know what to do. But Jáime had taken that job working construction with his cousin in California. When he called last night, things were going so well. He was sending money home again. Oh, why did he have to go? He should be here!

  As she held on, rocking Johnny in her arms, the raw, twisting knot grew in her stomach. A feeling that she would never see Jáime again.

  She set Johnny down and got him bundled in his winter jacket and hat and they went outside into the dim light.

  “Look, Mommy, more snow!” Johnny exclaimed happily. It was cold out, and the ground was covered with a light fresh dusting.

  Cheri looked around. Something was wrong. Snow? It looks so dark.

  When she touched a glove to it then touched the white-gray stuff to her face, it wasn’t cold. And before she could stop him, her little boy had lifted a finger to his lips.

  “No!” she shouted, slapping Johnny’s hand away, scared, hugging him to her. “You didn’t eat any of that, did you? Did you, Johnny?”

  East Side Horror

  “Probably the best place to set down,” Franklin said. “Their apartment’s only a few blocks over.”

  Everon dropped down over the debris-filled remains of Central Park’s Wollman Ice Rink. In a few hours, he thought, on any normal weekday, happy skaters would begin to fill it.

  Not today. At three hundred feet above the rink, Everon hesitated.

  There were not even people running into the open areas to escape the flames and falling concrete here. Just death.

  Gushing streams of water flowed upward from somewhere beneath the ground
, producing a disgusting mixture of wreckage and bodies. Dead skaters, fewer children—it had been eight o’clock when the bomb went off. Limbs separated from torsos, mixed with trash and sewage, brick and steel girder stirred into a killing soup of vast proportion.

  Never before had such common concentrated murder been allowed inside America.

  “When the blast hit,” Chuck commented, “people were just going out on the town—probably having the time of their lives.”

  “Cynthia, Steve, Melissa can’t be part of that!” Franklin said.

  “I wonder how the pigeons made out?” Chuck muttered, looking away. “Especially baby pigeons. I’ve never seen one. They must hide somewhere, sick and limping in the crannies around buildings. Even an atom bomb couldn’t kill all the pigeons in New York City.”

  Watching the mess flow beneath, the big Red Cross man added, “This is going to affect all of us for a long, long time.”

  Franklin felt like telling Chuck to just shut up. But he understood. It was the big man’s way of dealing with something none of them had ever seen before.

  “That area doesn’t look too bad,” Chuck pointed to an open area of ice rink.

  Wet and shiny but mostly clear of debris.

  Everon nodded and set up his approach. The ice glared up at him.

  They were less than two hundred feet above when Chuck asked, “Did you see— I thought I saw something move.” He pointed to the middle of the ice. “Something’s running around down there!”

  Franklin looked through the binoculars. Several dark-colored seals were huddled together in the middle of the rink, heads moving back and forth.

  “Seals.”

  “Okay,” Chuck said, “but what’s that?”

  Everon pulled up suddenly. “No fucking way we’re landing here!”

  Two huge polar bears, nearly invisible until the Pelican had dropped low enough to tell them from the ice, had taken down a pair of seals and were ripping the carcasses to shreds.

  Franklin swept the binoculars around the outside of the rink. A group of five spotted leopards of some type Franklin didn’t recognize padded the rink edge. It was difficult to say whether the leopards were more concerned about the bears or the ice. But they kept their distance. Two of the big cats were ripping at pieces of something. Something that looked like it was covered in cloth or skin.

  Everon gained altitude and crabbed east.

  read the remaining stylish gold letters. The thin wide sign lay in thick gray dust.

  “Looks like the top of the 9 Building was blasted back into the Plaza Hotel behind it,” Everon said.

  “Chunks of the hotel all the way to the zoo cages?” Chuck said. “That’s like four blocks.” A terrible darkness rode on the Red Cross man’s voice. “What about the Sheep Meadow? That’s probably better. Over that way, isn’t it?”

  “Our sister’s place is on the east side,” Franklin replied grimly. “Too far. The Sheep Meadow is in the mid-60s on the west side. Cynthia’s just north of 59th. Altogether, that would leave us a two-mile walk. With who knows what—animals—whatever, in our way.”

  Addressing Everon, he pointed through the windshield, “Their apartment should be straight east from the bottom of the park.”

  “I wonder why the damage is so much worse around here,” Chuck said.

  “I don’t know, dammit!” Franklin shouted back. “Go east, Everon.”

  Everon complied silently, angling the Pelican to the right.

  He took them higher to pass over what had been several taller buildings, hovering above an area depressed as if that same giant’s palm which destroyed Lower Manhattan leaned in here. But more selectively—smashing only certain buildings, leaving others. Down Fifth Avenue, their top halves were broken off but before they’d crumbled had offered their protection to St. Patrick’s. But for a few missing feet of its ornate upper spires, the old cathedral looked untouched.

  “The pattern’s different here too,” Franklin said. “Look how the pressure turned away here, more toward the Upper West Side.”

  Everon gritted his teeth at his brother’s unrealistic hopefulness.

  They crossed Park Avenue. Far down to their right, Everon recognized the top of the big hotel that spanned the avenue, broken off and sitting amid other rubble in the wide divider.

  And around the wreckage, more bodies! In the streets. On the sidewalks. Always the bodies.

  Franklin peered through the smoke ahead. A Roosevelt Island Tram car hung slanted by a single wheel, like a child hanging from a clothesline by one finger, stalled within shouting distance of its station. A tickle, a breath of wind, and down it would go. No one looked back through its cracked windows.

  He began to feel that same sense of dread he’d felt hanging there under Ash Cave rising inside him; changes in his face, his body’s posture. Seeing the trail of death below was like tracking the worst serial killer of all time. Why, he wondered, are there so many stories about biblically-influenced serial killers? What is it those psychopaths aren’t supposed to feel about something like this, the average person does?

  “One thing’s certain,” he whispered, “there’ll be a lot to talk about at the church Sunday morning.”

  “Cynthia’s apartment should be somewhere over there. Within a two-block radius. About—”

  Franklin was pointing right at another ball of flame in the middle of Lexington Avenue. Almost as large as the one that nearly brought them down at Columbus Circle, the big yellow fireball expanded, from the size of a misshapen hot air balloon to something much bigger, completely blocking their view of the building behind and below. Heat rocked the craft.

  The balloon shrank back. They tried to see around it.

  “I think that’s—just off that corner there. It—it doesn’t look as though there’s anything left,” he said dismally. “Hold on!”

  “What?” Everon asked, hovering them above a row of converted red and yellow brick five-story walk-ups.

  “That file cabinet! On the corner of that building. Right there! It looks like the one Cynthia decorated with those big yellow sunflowers.”

  “Where?”

  “There!” Franklin pointed.

  There was so much smoke. Determined, Everon edged in closer.

  “Oh—sure as hell does!”

  Other than a few partial walls between apartments, the entire floor looked like it had been flattened.

  “They keep that file cabinet in Melissa’s room!” Franklin said. “Cynthia added those plastic flowers herself to make it fit the nursery. They didn’t have a separate office. Only the two bedrooms.”

  Jagged teeth of red brick jutted upward, part of the remaining nursery-office wall, acting like a shield against the cabinet’s east fire-blasted Lexington Avenue side. The fireball began to expand again. Roiling hot air buffeted the blades hard on the close side, pushing them away.

  “Maybe they weren’t home,” Franklin said as he looked through the binoculars. A two-inch-wide corner of some pink material hung from the front right of the third drawer down, fluttering in the wind caused by the flame. And then a bizarre thought fluttered through his mind. He closed his eyes for a moment. No! he mouthed silently, shaking his head.

  But the thought wouldn’t leave.

  “I don’t see any place to land around here,” Franklin said. “Let me rappel down on top!”

  “I can’t fly directly over the building with that burning gas right next to it,” Everon yelled back. “Too dangerous. That empty lot there would be good. But it’s too uneven with all that shit in it. Have to keep the blades level.”

  Chuck leaned closer to the brothers and cupped a hand, “I thought I saw another open spot—a block up.”

  “Where?” Everon asked.

  “Around the corner of that squat building. Over there—that ten-story on the corner. We can run back from there and take a closer look. Follow that crevasse,” Chuck pointed.

  “Looks
like a collapsed subway,” Franklin said.

  “Then around that one—” Chuck said.

  Everon flew east, over the collapsed center of the street. “What do we show for radiation?” he shouted.

  Chuck held the gray box closer to his face. “Level’s between zero-point-one and zero-point-two rads. Less than a chest X-ray an hour.”

  “Alright.”

  A block farther on, Everon let the Pelican hover over Chuck’s spot. Its middle appeared to have once been a wide fountain. Only the outer rim remained.

  “Looks clear,” Franklin called out, looking down through the binoculars. “Is it wide enough?”

  “It’ll do,” Everon said. He descended straight down. Light winds had been following them from New Jersey—from the west. Now Everon noticed a change. He no longer had to compensate. There seemed to be no drift at all.

  The wind is changing, he thought, picturing the deadly cloud anvilled out over Long Island.

  Not good.

  To their left a marble statue, a trumpeting angel, looked like it had been blasted from the middle of the fountain into a plate-glass window. He put the Pelican’s wheels gently onto the fountain’s concrete center and hesitated. He hadn’t yet shut the helicopter down. He had no idea if he’d be able to restart it.

  He took a deep breath and pulled the mixture back. And the engine fell away.

  To the sounds of a burning city.

  Andréa Tries

  To Get Through To Hunt

  “Another tree, ma’am?” the soldier asked the nurse.

  “Oh, that would be a big help. Thank you.”