Day One: A Novel

by Nate Kenyon

  “Get out,” the rabbi said, one more time, and then he took hold of the second set of interior doors that separated the vestibule from the worship room and slammed them shut, closing off the group and leaving them in relative silence.

  “Well, that was fun,” Vasco said. “Like visiting the in-laws.”

  Vasco still had Young by the arm. She shrugged free, staring at him in a way Hawke couldn’t quite decipher. She stood rubbing her wrist as if scrubbing away something foul.

  Price was pacing back and forth, muttering something softly to himself. Hanscomb pressed herself against the interior doors like a cornered animal, watching them. “What?” Vasco said to her. “You think we’re all killers now? Is that it? Jesus.” He shook his head, the grin-grimace back on his face again, the same one he’d had inside the worship room. I’m humoring a moron, but I’m about to lose my patience.

  “Everybody just needs to calm down for a minute,” Hawke said. “We need to work together—”

  “Is what he said true?” Hanscomb asked.

  “Of course not,” Vasco said. “Look, we’re caught in the middle of this thing just like everyone else. I don’t know what’s going on any more than you do. But I do know we need to be very careful before we open this door.”

  “Might as well have killed Susan,” Price said suddenly. He’d stopped pacing and was staring at Young. “The great Jim Weller just left her to bleed out in my arms. You all did. And nobody’s said a word about her since.”

  “What do you want us to say?” Vasco said. “She was dying. There was nothing anyone could have done to change it.”

  “I watched the life go out of her eyes,” Price said. “I couldn’t help her.” He turned his head from side to side, as if searching for something that would absolve him of guilt. “You have any idea how that feels?”

  “Maybe I do,” Vasco said. “But that doesn’t matter. Right now we’ve got to focus on keeping our own asses alive.”

  “We have to go after Jim,” Young said. “He’s alone out there; he needs us.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Price said. He had turned away from Vasco as if he couldn’t stand the sight of him for another second. “I wouldn’t mind asking him a few questions myself. And I need to get the hell out of here.”

  Vasco shrugged and put up his hands. “Go ahead,” he said. “But before you do, just think this through for a minute. Where are you going? You step one foot outside these doors, you could get beaten, shot, blown up. A bus could come around the corner and turn you into a frog on the freeway. People are rioting, they’re terrified and nobody knows what’s happening. It’s like the Wild West out there, and we don’t know who’s on our side.”

  “You don’t think the police actually want to kill us?” Hanscomb said. She looked at Hawke. “Did you really see them shoot someone?”

  “He was standing there, holding the laptop case,” Hawke said. “They took it from him. He put his hands up, and they shot him in the head.”

  Hanscomb shook her head. “Oh God—”

  “He ain’t going to help you, lady,” Vasco said. “God has left the building.”

  “I don’t know any of you,” Hanscomb said. “You could be anyone. What am I supposed to do, just trust you?”

  “You don’t have a choice,” Vasco said. “If we leave here, and any of us have a prayer of making it out of New York, we’ve got to stick together, like he said.” Vasco motioned at Hawke. “Watch each other’s backs.”

  “Who are you to tell us what we need to do?” Hanscomb had folded her arms across her chest as if trying to protect herself.

  “I served two tours in Afghanistan,” Vasco said. “Okay? That good enough for you? I know what I’m doing. This is like a military exercise. We have an objective; we have rules. Everyone’s got a job to do. You do it, you stay alive.”

  “Okay.” Hanscomb nodded, more tears coming, as if she had released control and was relieved someone was taking over. Military family, Hawke thought. Maybe a dad in the army. She was used to this. She sniffled, wiped her face. “So now what?”

  “The first thing is to stay calm. We plan a course of action, and we stick to the plan. Each of us is responsible for the others in the group. Leave nobody behind.”

  “So where do we go?” Price shook his head. “What’s the plan, exactly?”

  “I need to get to Hoboken, to my family,” Hawke said. Hanscomb might have been ready to hand over the reins to Jason Vasco; he was not. “I don’t care about anything else.”

  “My wife is in Jersey, too,” Vasco said. “I’m with you. But it’s some kind of war out there, and we don’t even know who the enemy is. You might not make it out of the city alone. We need to know more, and we need help. So we get everyone to a checkpoint alive and safe. Lenox Hill Hospital is a couple of blocks away.”

  “What about the police?” Hanscomb said. “What if they … get violent?”

  “I don’t know why they shot that guy,” Vasco said. “But cops don’t just kill people for no reason. Look, maybe he really was a criminal. Maybe he had a gun.”

  “He didn’t,” Hawke said. “He was unarmed—”

  Vasco shrugged. “Okay. Maybe there was something else you didn’t see. I don’t know.”

  “And if they do think we’re a part of this, for whatever reason?” Hanscomb said.

  “We get the chance to explain the mistake.” Vasco shook his head. “Look at us, for Chrissake. Nobody’s going to believe that this group had anything to do with any terrorist attack. It’s ridiculous.” He pointed at Young. “We go out together. You, watch left. Sarah, you watch our right flank. Anyone sees anything at all, threatening or not, speak up. That’s your job; you focus on it. I’ll take point, and you two”—he pointed at Hawke and Price—“take up the rear. If we find Weller and he agrees, we bring him along, but no arguing, no debating. We stay together, stick to the buildings, shadows, whatever cover we can find. You do what I say. Okay?”

  Hawke took a deep breath. He wasn’t sure yet what Weller had been talking about, although he had some ideas, and none of them were pleasant. The alternative was that Weller had completely lost his mind. But at this point, it didn’t matter. Weller was gone, they needed a plan and this was as good as any.

  Get to a safe place; find help; get out of the city to your family. It’s almost over.

  But he was wrong.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  12:57 P.M.

  BY THE TIME THEY PUSHED open the temple doors, easing cautiously through the opening, Jim Weller was nowhere to be seen.

  Vasco stepped out first. He motioned to the others to follow, and they fanned out as instructed, Young on the left, Sarah Hanscomb on the right. Hawke let the doors close softly behind Price, and they took up the rear.

  The street remained strangely empty. Hawke heard someone shouting somewhere out of sight and another’s ragged, high-pitched scream. Smoke wafted over them, bitter and black. The hole in Second Avenue was still burning, and fire was almost certainly licking up the sides of the buildings by now. It wouldn’t take long before the entire block was ablaze. A siren played in the distance, but there was no sign of emergency responders, no trucks ready to put out the fire before it spread.

  The smoke made it tough to see much, but Hawke thought he saw someone ducking out of sight to the east, up 79th Street. Could have been anyone. There was no way to know, and it was a big city. They couldn’t go chasing after ghosts.

  Hanscomb’s Cadillac sat crookedly on the sidewalk across the intersection, still hung up on the stump of the light pole. Other cars were scattered across 79th Street, stalled and left alone with doors still hanging open like mechanical corpses lying battered and broken where they’d crashed. Many of them looked like they had been intentionally run headfirst into buildings or each other, as if half the world suddenly went mad and decided to play demolition derby.

  Hawke couldn’t reconcile what he now saw with the New York he knew and loved, a city full of energy, teemi
ng with life. The scene was surreal, dreamlike, unfathomable. This city was dangerous and unpredictable; anything could happen.

  The cop car was gone. But the body of the man who had been shot across the street still lay crumpled where he had fallen. A dark pool of blood had gathered around his head, a brutal sign of the violence that had occurred just minutes earlier. Hawke saw the others looking at the dead man as the reality sank in with the rest of them. Hanscomb was even paler than before, and she was trembling. Price’s face was a grimly set mask, the blood still covering his shirt making him look like a war victim. Vasco just stared, as if trying to accept what they were seeing.

  Young moved forward slowly. “Where’s the briefcase?” she said. “Did they take it? Where’s Jim?”

  “Wait,” Vasco said. “Stay close—”

  Young ignored the warning, calling out Weller’s name as she reached the middle of the street, turning in circles and calling out again before Vasco got to her.

  “Jim’s not here,” Vasco said, his voice low and strained. “I think it would be better not to bring attention to us, don’t you?”

  “He’s putting himself in danger. You have to let me—”

  “I’d rather not join him,” Vasco said. “We follow the plan. We follow the plan.”

  Young blinked, the mask she seemed to carry dropping over her again. Her face remained inscrutable; whatever emotions she carried were buried deep inside. Or maybe she didn’t have any at all, Hawke thought. It wasn’t a comforting idea, but he had never been able to read her, even before everything had gone to hell. The only time he’d seen her look rattled was in the lobby of the building when she realized Weller was missing, and even then she’d barely broken a sweat. It was part of the reason Hawke would describe her as plain; her features were pretty but without animation, a porcelain doll sitting on a shelf. In most crowds, she would fade into the background, almost as if she weren’t there at all.

  “He couldn’t have gotten very far,” Hanscomb said.

  Another scream split the momentary calm. There was no way to tell if it was male or female. The sound echoed through the lonely corners of buildings and streets, then cut off at its height, as if the person was suddenly, violently silenced.

  “Where did everybody go?” Price said.

  “Checkpoints,” Vasco said. “That’s gotta be where people are headed. The explosion probably spooked them, and they’re trying to get out of this area to a safe place. Just like us.”

  Nobody said anything. The explanation was weak, Hawke thought. The fire should have been surrounded by firefighters and police, emergency vehicles dealing with the injured. Instead there was nothing. It was as if eight million people had suddenly vanished into thin air. A chill crept up Hawke’s spine and made him shiver as he imagined Robin standing in the hallway facing the front door, shoulders square, with Thomas behind her. She would be brave for her son; Hawke knew that. But she had never had to face real adversity, had always been blessed with fine, caring parents, good schools, popularity. She’d never had to fight, to claw her way up from the bottom. You never knew how people would react when the world suddenly changed, when there was no warning.

  He remembered finding her in the kitchen with Lowry. Hawke had rationalized it then; Robin had begged him to leave it alone, and besides, the man was just a little off, he had told himself, he didn’t mean any harm, they could handle this on their own. All the things you think when you’re avoiding confrontation. He was overreacting; what would he say if he called the cops? This guy was trespassing? He’s weird and we felt violated? So he did nothing at first. But then it had gotten worse, and he had had to admit that he didn’t know himself as well as he had thought. He’d avoided going to the police for his own selfish reasons, his personal history with the authorities clouding his judgment. When he had finally tried to act, it was too little, too late.

  If something has happened to them, this is your fault. You could have done more to stop it earlier, could have called a lawyer, could have found another place and moved out. His imagination ran wild, punishing him over and over. In his mind, the door shuddered, then burst open, Lowry coming at them like the bogeyman, nothing but a shadow moving across the walls.

  Vasco was in Hawke’s face. “You gonna keep it together? Because we need to move.”

  Hawke wiped his eyes, blinking against the sting. Behind him, Anne Young was looking out across the desecrated streets as if expecting an apparition to appear at any moment.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  They took 79th toward the park. The street here was dotted with trees, giving them a sense of cover. But it was a false sense, Hawke knew, because those branches wouldn’t stop something falling from the sky, wouldn’t block the flames sweeping through the block, wouldn’t deflect a bullet.

  An alarm blared from a bank building nearby, and the sound of shattering glass came from somewhere. A dead man lay crushed under the wheels of an SUV, his head a jellied mess. Another lay sprawled across the hood of a car that had jumped the curb and smashed into a jewelry store entrance, his legs crushed and his right arm nearly separated from his body. Hawke turned his face away, his belly churning. Vasco moved fast, keeping them on the sidewalk, close to the shelter of the buildings, checking as they approached open doorways. Bringing up the rear, Hawke kept his eyes everywhere, watching the shadows and their flank, making sure they weren’t taken by surprise by anything that might be a threat.

  The problem was, it was impossible to know what that threat might be. Even now, none of them had any real idea what had happened, or how far the contagion had spread. It seemed clear that some kind of terrorist attack had occurred, but how had they pulled it off? Were they still out there, still active? How long would it continue?

  Don’t think about this, not right now.…

  Because what he was imagining was too terrifying, too overwhelming, to possibly be real. Hawke remembered the text messages he’d received: THE WORLD IS IN DANGER.… OPERATION GLOBAL BLACKOUT CANNOT BE STOPPED. IT IS GOING TO GET WORSE. He thought of the message board rewriting itself. How could Rick and Anonymous have done something like this? It just didn’t seem possible. And yet the evidence was mounting, and even Rick himself had admitted that he was the infamous Admiral Doe.

  It’s not who you think, Weller had said.

  If not Rick, then who? Could Eclipse really have orchestrated something like this, and if so, why? And what did it have to do with Weller’s laptop case?

  Hawke’s thoughts were interrupted as they came to a four-car pileup. A brand-new delivery truck had rammed broadside into a Toyota minivan and pushed it into two parked cars, driving the twisted mass of metal halfway up on the sidewalk. There was blood smeared on the trunk of a tree. Hanscomb gave a small sound like a shuddering sigh and pointed at a pair of legs that stuck out from underneath the truck. A man’s legs in dark jeans.

  Vasco held a fist in the air like a SWAT leader telling his team to hold. The Toyota’s passenger sliding door was open, more blood on the sidewalk beneath it. A voice was droning on from somewhere inside one of the vehicles.

  “Is it Jim?” Young said. Price went around the side of the truck and crouched, then came up shaking his head. Hawke started toward the Toyota, drawn by the voice, but stopped when he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. An NYPD security camera mounted high on a pole across the street was monitoring their progress. As Vasco moved back toward the sidewalk, Hawke watched it slowly pan to follow, keeping an unblinking, impassive eye upon them. Just like the cameras in the lobby of the Conn.ect building.

  Hawke realized that the voice coming from the minivan was the same emergency broadcast he’d heard in the SUV. Hanscomb and Young moved closer to listen, but Hawke hung back. Vasco came around to his side, and Hawke motioned to him. “We’re being watched,” he said quietly.

  “By who?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a police security channel, though.” He pointed
at the camera. He’d never realized how many cameras there were in the world these days; they were everywhere.

  “Gives me the creeps,” Vasco said. “You think this has anything to do with that guy getting shot?”

  “I don’t know,” Hawke said. “But I wouldn’t trust the cops to be particularly friendly.”

  “Christ.” Vasco rubbed his face. “Just don’t say anything to the women—or Price, for that matter. He’s wound tight enough as it is.”

  “None of this makes any sense,” Hawke said, keeping his voice low. “Where’s the emergency response? What about putting out that fire?”

  “Maybe they’re busy somewhere else.”

  “So that means it’s even worse in the rest of the city? And what about a bigger response from the military? You were in the army. Shouldn’t the streets be crawling with National Guard by now?”

  Vasco shrugged. “My brother served two tours,” he said. “I was too much of a fuckup for them to take me.”

  “But what you said back inside—”

  “Hey, it worked, didn’t it? I just wanted to calm her down, and I didn’t see you stepping up to the plate. Look, I’ve seen enough movies to know something about military strategy. My brother used to say leadership was less about what choice you made and more about just making one. We need someone to make decisions and keep everyone else in line.”

  The sound of an approaching engine distracted them. They all ducked behind the Toyota. Hawke looked out around the bumper. A squad car was moving slowly west on 79th Street in their direction, nearing the intersection where the shooting had taken place, working its way through stalled vehicles.

  A voice crackled over a loudspeaker, echoing through the streets: “A state of emergency has been declared. Go to your nearest checkpoint immediately and report any suspicious activity. These locations are being broadcast on the emergency broadcast system.”