Day One: A Novel

by Nate Kenyon

  “We don’t have phones,” the rabbi called out, after a moment. “None of us.”

  Somewhere outside, a faint rumble shook the foundation of the building, like a train passing at a distance. Hawke felt it through his feet.

  Weller turned to Sarah Hanscomb, who was shaking her head. “What if my husband, what if he’s trying to call me?” she said, her voice rising up in a mixture of hope and panic. “He might be trying to reach me right now, if I try to turn it on again—”

  “It’s nothing but a weapon, a Trojan horse to be used against you. Against us.” Weller took a step toward her, and Hanscomb shrank back, as if fearful of being struck. “They’re after us,” he said. “Don’t you get it?” He looked around at all of them again. “The singularity is here, and it’s not what we all thought it would be. It’s not a new beginning; it’s an ending.”

  * * *

  Hawke had written about it before, in a series of early articles he’d done for the online news blog Timeline that explored concepts rather than offering any real insight. Coined by a science-fiction writer and made popular by futurist visionary Ray Kurzweil, the “singularity” referred to the moment when machines would blend with and then transcend their makers, becoming self-aware and independent. Kurzweil argued that the moment would usher in a new utopia. Others felt it made the future unknowable, a black hole in time after which the world would be impossible to predict. But all of them agreed that the time would come, most likely in the twenty-first century, and that it would change humanity forever.

  The singularity. It was nothing more than an idea that framed something difficult to express, Hawke thought. Weller had lost his mind.

  Everyone began talking at once, Vasco coming farther down the aisle as Hanscomb argued more vehemently, holding her small clutch in both hands and pleading her case as the others converged upon her like some senseless mob. It was like she held her husband in that clutch, Hawke thought, rather than a useless piece of machinery that was never going to reach him. Even if what Weller was saying was wrong and the phone was harmless, there was no signal, no way to get through.

  The rabbi came out from behind the table, striding forward in his tallith like a man possessed by a higher calling, his congregation falling in behind him in lockstep. Hawke, nearly at the entrance to the vestibule, faded back, past where Price stood and away from them all, his body shaking now like a junkie coming off a fix. He wanted darkness, quiet, a moment alone. He needed to think.

  Get to a checkpoint. You’ll be safe there.

  As the arguing escalated, the sound of sirens outside made Hawke go to the temple doors. He opened them and peered out, his head and shoulders exposed.

  The street outside was eerily empty, looking more like a war zone than the Upper East Side, except for a police car that had pulled up through the swirling smoke next to the Cadillac SUV. Two cops were advancing upon a man on the sidewalk holding a laptop case. No, not just any case.

  It was the one Weller had carried out from his office. They’d left it somewhere on the street when the crash happened, completely forgetting about it in the rush to safety.

  Where the hell had everyone gone?

  The acrid smell of burning plastic and rubber wafted into the temple. Something Hawke couldn’t quite explain brought chills to the back of his neck. He peered out into the street, the red and blue lights from the cop car bouncing off the smoke and making it harder to see. The man holding the case was close to Weller’s age and build, dressed casually in sneakers, jeans and polo-style shirt, glasses perched on his nose, his thinning hair cropped close to his skull. The cops came with guns drawn and tight, shuffling steps, muscles tense in shooters’ poses, acting like the man was a wanted criminal. They barked orders at him, but Hawke couldn’t make out the words. The man kept shaking his head emphatically. He held out the case at arm’s length, as if making an offering. It was heavy, and he had trouble keeping it there.

  While one cop kept his gun trained at the man’s head, the other grabbed the case and stepped back. He knelt on the broken curb for a long moment, his back to Hawke, apparently examining the security latch, unable to open it. He put a hand to his ear, as if listening to an earpiece, nodded once, then said something to his partner, who glanced at him and then back at the man, who stood frozen in place with his hands raised, the universal expression of surrender.

  Hawke hesitated at the doors, itching to move, but the cops’ demeanor gave him pause. There was something about the way they were acting; the tension in the air felt wrong. The man seemed to feel it, too; he was shaking his head again, starting to back away almost imperceptibly, his arms dropping until the cop with his gun trained on him ordered him to halt.

  The cop with the case stood up and scanned the empty street around them, then looked at the other, who took a single step forward. As the man put his hands up again and began to speak, both cops shot him through the palms, twin bullets blowing his brains out through the back of his skull to splatter on the concrete behind him like an abstract painting come to life.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  12:35 P.M.

  WHEN THOMAS HAD JUST TURNED TWO YEARS OLD, Hawke lost him as they left the park three streets over from their apartment. It was a small park, little more than a triangle of green carved out of a block of old brick buildings, their lower floors converted to shops, the upper-section apartments looking out at one another across the grass. They’d been there several times before, but that day was different. It started out innocently enough and ended up dissolving into hell.

  Robin was out for coffee with a friend from college, and Hawke bundled Thomas up for the fall weather and took him out to play, more to burn time before Robin returned than because of any desire either of them had for exercise. It wouldn’t have mattered much; there wasn’t enough space to do a lot of running or have a play structure of any kind. Hawke sat on the single bench near the end of the green triangle and watched Thomas totter around on chubby little-boy legs, clutching that lion he’d had since the day he was born. He was fascinated by all the things little boys were fascinated by: a dandelion gone to seed and poking up through rocky soil, a worm coiling in the sun, a crow that landed on the other side of the park and hopped sideways, tilting its head and staring with watchful, beady eyes until Thomas turned in its direction and it lifted away, flapping its wings and cawing.

  He looked at Hawke, questioning. “That’s a bird,” Hawke said. “A big black bird.”

  Thomas pointed in the direction of the crow, now a speck in the bright sky. “Bud,” he said, his face serious. “Big back bud.” Hawke nodded, keeping his own face carefully neutral, his heart swelling; although bright, Thomas didn’t speak much, and he was already beginning to display a need for order and symmetry and perfection. He rarely took a chance on anything he couldn’t say perfectly. But he was studying things, learning, trying to understand and communicate. This was one of those moments Hawke knew he would remember, another small thread of the web that bound them together. He had been single, and then almost without warning he was married; childless, and then he had a child. Hawke had begun to define himself as Thomas’s dad, rather than John Hawke, and he was surprised by how little that bothered him.

  He wanted to give Thomas the stability he never had, the sense that his father would be there for him, no matter what. Most parents think of themselves as their children’s protectors; they think they are far more important in a child’s life than the other way around. Hawke wondered if that was the case or if he would come to realize, too late, that he could no longer live without his son.

  They stayed for less than twenty minutes. When they left, Thomas wanted to walk in front of the stroller and Hawke let him, following closely down the sidewalk to make sure he didn’t suddenly change direction and stumble into the street. When Hawke’s cell phone chirped, he dug it out of his pocket to glance at the screen: a text from Robin saying she was on her way home. When he looked up again, not ten seconds later, Thomas was go
ne.

  Hawke whirled, looking back at the park, expecting to see him at any moment. But the boy was gone. Hawke’s heart paused and swelled in his chest, blocking his throat like a balloon, the silence drawing out until his pulse began to pound like a jackhammer and adrenaline flooded his veins. He whirled again, scanning the street, the row of buildings to his left, the empty stroller, panic lighting him up, making him wild as he called out Thomas’s name, softly and then louder, his voice cracking at its height.

  A man came out of a bagel shop across the street from the park. “Have you seen a little boy?” Hawke shouted at him, and the man looked at him, startled, then shook his head and put his hands up, palms open.

  Hawke raced forward past a city trash barrel, the next cross street too far away for Thomas to have reached it, but he pounded full speed to the curb, panting as he looked right and left, seeing cars winking in the sunlight but no little boy, the sidewalks empty.

  When Hawke turned back toward the stroller, he saw Thomas crouched down behind the trash barrel in his puffy blue coat with his lion, his little face squeezed up into a private smile, eyes shut, as if by closing his eyes and being still he became invisible. Hide-and-seek, Thomas’s new favorite game at home—he was playing it now and blissfully unaware of Hawke’s impending heart attack.

  His chest violently unclenched; he heaved in a gulp of air and pounded toward his son, his emotions now pouring out in a single grunt of blind rage as he grabbed Thomas’s arm and pulled the boy up toward his face. Whatever Thomas saw there made him go slack with shock and then crumple into tears, and Hawke’s words died on his lips as he hugged Thomas to his chest and rocked him, cooing his apology into the shoulder of the boy’s coat until his sobs began to subside.

  * * *

  Hawke found himself struggling to catch his breath.

  The doors had swung shut on their own, blocking out the image of the dead man. Hawke reeled backward, bumping into Anne Young, who had come up behind him. He was shaking like a leaf in high wind, but she was absolutely still. She put a hand on his shoulder, light as a bird, and kept it there. He glanced back but couldn’t tell from her face whether she’d seen anything at all, her gaze remaining on the closed doors as if she could look right through them.

  Hawke leaned left and convulsed, a stream of vomit splattering onto the rug: the remains of coffee and the energy bar he’d eaten that morning.

  Young kept her hand on Hawke’s shoulder. Everything seemed to press down upon his head, suffocating him. He wiped his mouth and swallowed hard, keeping the sickness down this time as he tried to make some kind of sense of what had just happened. But it was wrong in every way. His mind played over the scene again and again: the man’s face registering what was going down a split second before the cops fired, the way his hands came up to ward off the bullet, twin red holes blossoming in them as if by some dark magic, the back of his skull exploding in a mass of red spatter, his body falling backward to slap lifelessly against the sidewalk. It was an execution, an outrage, the murder of a defenseless person who had probably done nothing wrong. A man in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  But why? Two cops shooting someone in cold blood made no sense, no matter what else was happening out there.

  The feeling of dread had come full force with the sight of blood. It was like Hawke’s dream, tentacles pulling Thomas away from him. The need to get home to his wife and son clawed at Hawke’s chest. What if they were in trouble right now, facing the same kind of violence he had just witnessed?

  “Wait,” Young said, but Hawke pushed past her without bothering to ask what she wanted. He stalked back up the aisle of the worship room to where Weller stood with the rabbi and his group, Vasco and Hanscomb right behind him.

  “Your laptop,” Hawke said to Weller, inserting himself in between the man and the others. “What’s on it?”

  Weller had been in midsentence, continuing the argument about cell phones that had apparently escalated between the rabbi’s people and the rest of them. He stopped, mouth still open, studying Hawke’s face. Then he looked around the room, his gaze finally settling on Young, who had followed Hawke back from the vestibule. “Where’s the case?” Weller said, his voice rising. She shook her head, mute, and Hawke stepped in again to get him focused, the movement bringing Weller’s gaze back around.

  “What the hell is going on?” Hawke said. “You seem to know something. Why did a man carrying your laptop just get executed?”

  “Hold it,” Vasco said. “What did you just say?”

  Hawke kept his eyes trained on Weller’s face. “Two cops,” he said. “They just shot someone outside who was carrying Jim’s laptop case. Maybe he was trying to steal it; I don’t know. But it seemed like a pretty harsh punishment to me. Excessive force, don’t you think?”

  “Are you serious?” Hanscomb shook her head, backing away until her legs hit a pew behind her, as if trying to escape. Her voice was shrill and loud, and she sounded like she thought it might be some kind of bad joke. “Oh my God.”

  “That makes no sense,” Vasco said. “Why would cops be shooting people in the street?”

  “I don’t know,” Hawke said. He gestured at Weller. “Ask him.” Hawke kept seeing the blood, the man’s skull exploding in red chunks of bone and brains, the way the body fell straight back and nothing cushioned its fall, as if that mattered anymore.

  A long, uncomfortable silence descended over the temple. Even the rabbi and his people remained still, watching, waiting. Weller glanced back at Young and then away, a look coming over his face as if he’d just figured out the world’s biggest riddle. “They think it’s a threat,” he said, almost too softly to be heard. “Things are out of control, just like I told them, and it’s a loose end. And we’re a scapegoat.”

  “For who?”

  “Eclipse. They’re tracking us.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding—”

  “You can’t imagine the power,” he said. “The sheer size and scope, the capability. It’s breathtaking, in its own way.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, Jim?” Hawke said.

  “Don’t you get it yet? They’re going to find a way to make us disappear.” Weller smiled, but his eyes were distant. “We’re all wanted terrorists,” he said. “Every one of us from Conn.ect. Starting right now, every law enforcement officer in the city is looking for us.”

  “For what?”

  “Crimes against humanity,” he said. “The downfall of modern civilization.” He spread his arms in the direction of the doors. “According to every cop in New York, we’re responsible for what’s happening outside. We’re on every list in every database in the world, and I’m quite sure excessive force is not only going to be justified, but encouraged.”

  “You’ve lost your fucking mind,” Vasco said. His voice had grown dark. “They can’t do that. This is crazy.”

  “Has Google mapped the inside of this building?” Weller said to the rabbi, dismissing Vasco’s outburst.

  “Google? I don’t know what you mean—”

  “Does it show up on Street View? Is that how you found it?”

  “Google Maps,” the young woman explained, the one the rabbi had called Ana. “He’s talking about the maps on the Internet. They’ve started to do interiors, not just roads. You can walk around inside buildings, on your computer.”

  The rabbi closed his mouth, opened it again, a fish out of water. Weller didn’t wait for a response. He wheeled around and walked to where the remains of Hawke’s cell still lay in the aisle and crouched, studying them for a moment before turning again and looking over their heads at the ceiling. “It’s unusual,” he said as if to himself, staring at the walls, “the lines of the windows.…” He stood up. “Consumer GPS chips are accurate to within a few feet, but inside a building like this the error could be more. They thought we were outside, but they’ll be looking to confirm location.”

  “Jim,” Young said. Her face was like a white moon in the shad
ows.

  Weller walked over to Hawke and both stood there nose to nose, Weller’s glasses winking in the faint light. “I hope you got something important out of that conversation,” he said. “It won’t take long before they verify the ID, but they’re already mapping images from your cell. It’s going to bring them right to our door.”

  “Who?” Hawke said. “Who are they?”

  “Eclipse’s secret service,” Weller said. “The police, the FBI. Whoever else they convince to come after us.”

  “I’ll ask you again. What the hell is this all about, Jim?”

  “Only one way to find out,” Weller said. He spun on his heel and marched through the vestibule, opened the door of the temple and walked out, the door slamming shut behind him.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  12:45 P.M.

  IT WAS AS IF WELLER’S WORDS HAD FROZEN them in shock, his actions so bizarre that they couldn’t react. Hawke didn’t move, waiting to see in which direction things would go. The room grew quiet again, and then Young tried to go after Weller, but Vasco grabbed her and everyone exploded into action at once. The rabbi waved his arms as if to usher them right out of the building, shouting something about terrorists, the rest of his flock surging forward behind him. Vasco began to protest, his face red, veins standing out in his temples, as the rabbi came up to him with arms still out like a rancher herding cattle. Hanscomb shrank away from it all, creeping backward along a pew toward the wall.

  “Out!” the rabbi shouted. “All of you! Leave us in peace.” The others shouted with him, their faces flushed with anger. Only the young woman, Ana, tried to calm him, her protests lost in the cacophony of voices crashing over the worship room.

  They gathered for a moment in the vestibule, Hanscomb coming last with her own hands up. Two of the people behind the rabbi had picked up heavy candelabras and were brandishing them like clubs.

  “Don’t hurt me,” she said. “I’m not with them, I’m just trying to get my husband and go home.” When she reached the vestibule, she looked back, saw Hawke, Vasco, Price and Young and blanched, as if she were being thrown into a jail cell with a pack of murderers.