by Ryan Schow
Everyone is descending quickly, doing their best.
We make it down three floors when the building’s hit again. The explosions rock through the stairwell, deafening but not immediately destructive. I feel the walls closing in on me. The panic is taking hold. Three more blasts shake the structure, further intensifying the mood.
I can feel it. We all can. The chain reaction of panic is beginning. Down two flights, someone stumbles forward and then—like a stack of dominoes—everyone starts to fall.
In front of me, Marcus tries to avoid the falling bodies, but he stumbles into them, his leg buckling. Quentin goes down behind me, then Bailey hits me and we all go down. Another explosion hits the building, bits of debris now raining down upon us.
The body heat and the earsplitting screams rise to epic proportions.
More blasts hit and chunks of the building start to drop on us. Two women beside me are smashed by falling debris. I’m not sure, but I think one of them is dead. The other looks unconscious, the side of her head gushing blood.
I get to my feet in the pile of bodies, grab Bailey who is closest to me, and we try to get moving. Behind us, more people are toppling on each other. I pull Bailey forward as a huge chunk of plaster smashes down where she was just at. We both look up at each other, and then we scamper over the piles of downed bodies in a mad scramble to get out. Marcus and Quentin are in front of us doing the same.
We manage to work our way over the masses, finding footholds here and there, ignoring the string of insults and vulgarity being slung our way. We even ignore the harsh looks and the cries for help.
I try helping people where I can, but it’s better just to get out of the way. When we get to where the first person went down—the first domino, if you will—I see an older man with his neck twisted, obviously broken.
Two more people look trampled to death as well, but explosions are still rocking the hotel. Below us, part of the stairwell has fallen onto the section below it.
On the wall, we see the number 12. Rather than descending into the pit of death and destruction below, we push with a group of other panicked people into the twelfth floor and hurry to the other side of the hall. Through the glass, we see packs of drones circling the hotel, firing at will, reinforcements joining the spasm of activity.
“We’re screwed!” Quentin screams.
In front of us, a businessman, a mother and her two children race wordlessly toward a crowd of other people heading into the opposite stairwell.
Quentin and Marcus are ahead of us and Bailey is at my side. We’re almost there when drones open fire on the hotel just outside the window. Bullets rip through the hotel glass. I pull Bailey down; Quentin and Marcus are hitting the deck as well.
The woman in front of us, the kids and the businessman all go down, but not by choice. Their faces and bodies are riddled with large blooms of weeping red.
I can’t look.
Bailey’s emotions storm her and for a second it looks like she can’t breathe. Is she hit, too? The gunfire stops but she’s already shaking out a sob. Eyes glistening with tears, she reaches a shaky hand toward the little boy, his face slack, his eyes lifeless.
Bailey draws her hand back, her body pulled tight and nearly immovable against the horror unfolding.
From a prone position on the ground, I turn and lock eyes with Marcus.
“You guys okay?” Marcus and Quentin both nod.
Marcus looks okay, but Quentin’s face is streaked red on the side. Another explosion devastates the building. Stress fractures snake up the wall, bits of debris dusting off the weakened structure. If we don’t hurry, this thing is going to come down on us.
“What about you?” Marcus asks.
“I’m okay, I think,” I say, touching the side of my head and bringing back red fingers. Marcus sees me seeing this. “Is it bad?”
Without looking at it, Marcus says, “Head wounds bleed a lot, you’ll be fine. We need to go.”
Beside me, Bailey is trying to pull herself together. She can’t stop staring at the kids though. The boy’s sister, a little towheaded blonde, is sprawled out in front of us, her eyes as lifeless as her brother’s and mother’s eyes. The businessman was hit in the chest and is now gasping for air. His eyes roll over and see us, but the empty gulping slows and slows until finally his chest sinks and his eyes lose focus.
Bailey is fully crying now. I stand and grab her by the arm, haul her up and say, “We have to go!”
She shrugs off my hand, then steps over and around the dead bodies. We pull open the door to the stairwell, find it just as packed as the other side. This crowd hasn’t fallen, even though the levels of terror sound familiar.
We push into the departing crowd, move down the floors in wordless unison. Everyone is too stunned. When we get to the lobby, it’s filled with people pouring out. In front of the hotel we see our burning Charger and the overturned truck, the one that led the drones to our hotel.
Four bodies are laid out on the asphalt in front of it, their bodies shredded by gunfire, fantails of red drying on the concrete in front of them.
“We need a car!” Quentin says, starting toward the parking garage. Marcus stops him, pulls him out of the fleeing masses.
“The drones are going after the people!” he screams. “Follow me.”
The four of us run in the opposite direction, heading not for the cars or E. Harbor Dr. but toward the San Diego Bay. We trample through ground cover and landscaping. We sprint for the park in front of the Hilton and then to the Embarcadero, which is just a walking path along the waterfront.
We’re following Marcus to a line of seven or eight large yachts. On the way we pass a dead guy in fancy shorts and dock shoes. Beside him are two dead women I’m sure are either escorts or hookers. We all avert our eyes, everyone except Marcus, who pulls up short. He suddenly turns and heads back to the dead guy.
“What are you doing?” Bailey asks, out of breath.
Marcus doesn’t answer, he just rifles through the man’s pockets until he finds a set of keys. On the horizon, the drones are thinning out. The ones that are still swarming, however, are firing on the absconding crowd.
Marcus jogs by us and we follow him to the Fifth Avenue Landing where we jog down the ramps heading for the docks.
“You guys check that one,” Marcus says to me and Bailey while pointing to a beautiful yacht, “and we’ll check this one. See if it’s open at all!”
Marcus and Quentin take the larger boat, which looks like a seventy or eighty foot yacht, and Bailey and I take the one next to it, a sailing yacht that’s shorter by twenty feet easily.
Bailey and I board the boat, Bailey speaking up in protest.
“What are we doing?” she asks.
“Looking for someplace not populated to hide and ride this thing out!” I say, checking doors and windows.
“So we’re just going to break in?”
I stop, look right at her. She’s looking back at me, incredulous.
“Are you kidding me right now? Look around, Bailey! This city is under attack! It’s on fire and—”
Behind me, a fresh series of mammoth explosions blow a hole in the momentary silence. We both turn in time to see the bottom of the Hilton buckle and start to lean forward.
“Oh my God,” Bailey whispers.
People are still pouring out of the front. Now they’re running for their lives. Not from the drones but from the toppling hotel. The building continues its lean, glass breaking and showering down, concrete and plaster exploding into huge plumes of dust. The mad scramble of people disappearing into the shadow of the building is a horrifying sight. The chorus of screaming falls silent under the tumbling of the structure on top of them.
Knowing what’s coming, I hustle around the other side of the boat not facing the hotel and start punching the smallest glass window until it cracks and breaks open.
Tearing off my shirt, I push the broken glass out and try not to cut myself.
B
ailey is suddenly there, panic stricken, saying, “Hurry up!”
Through the yacht’s glass windows I see a massive cloud of brown dust rushing our way. I reach inside the hole, open the yacht’s door, slip inside and stuff my shirt into the open hole.
Seconds later the filthy wave of brown engulfs the yacht, all kinds of debris peppering the glass and the side of the boat. We rock back and forth in the harbor, which is saying something considering the size of the vessel we’re in.
For a long time we look out at windows covered in brown filth, Bailey and I sitting next to each other, holding on for dear life. I look at Bailey. Tears are standing in her eyes.
“All those people—”
She can’t finish her sentence. Her eyes are now dripping with fresh tears.
“I know,” I say, not wanting to think about it. If I can only keep my thinking small, I can keep the bigger picture out of my head. That big picture that has hundreds of dead people in it. This big picture that’s chock full of truth and a thousand unanswered questions, such as: how many are actually dead now, why are we under attack, who is doing this, and how long will this last?
“Why is this happening, Nick?” Bailey asks, almost like she’s in my head. I hold her eyes with mine. There is almost nothing left of the sassy, cute girl I met in the convention center. Her eyes—once so lively—are now big two orbs rattled with terror.
“I don’t know.”
“Who is doing this?” she asks.
“At this point,” I answer, “your guess is as good as mine.”
I don’t want to look at her. She has someone’s blood on her shirt and when she realizes it she’s going to starting thinking of those kids. I break free of these thoughts, but the dead kids in the Hilton hallway won’t stop haunting me. I can’t shake them loose.
And I can’t stop thinking of Indigo.
Chapter Ninety-Five
In the next slip over, Marcus and Quentin were on the yacht’s deck, buckled down under a canvas, their shirts pulled up to their mouths.
Thinking of 9/11, they were desperately trying not to breathe in the clouds of filth washing over them. Marcus didn’t know anything about Quentin, but he wondered about him anyway as they huddled together trying to stay alive.
A few hours ago, Quentin was just some nerdy guy sitting next to them at a seminar. Now Marcus knew he could drive, wasn’t selfish and could hold his own under fire. Marcus thought of saying something. Nothing came to mind. He wasn’t big on conversation. Not with his history.
Marcus’s father was in the Marines, his mother a hardened military wife. Marcus enlisted in the Army to piss off his father, which worked, but by then he was off to boot camp. He rose to the rank of Staff Sergeant before he even bothered to contact his father. By then his mother had passed and his father was such a cold shell of a man there was nothing left but hatred for his son.
“You broke her heart,” the old man said when Marcus showed up at the house.
Marcus had knocked on the front door. His father answered but didn’t invite him in. Marcus was a bigger, more muscular, more worn version of his old man. He had his father’s eyes, his former disposition. He also had his father’s attitude: short tempered and abysmal.
When he told Marcus how he felt, Marcus’s heart was so encased in steel it hardly registered.
“I broke her heart,” Marcus replied, his insides sharp and mean, “but you crushed her soul.”
The two men just looked at each other until his father, now older and softened by the impossible weight of life, said, “Get the hell off my porch.”
Marcus turned to leave, but his father’s question stopped him.
“Where you been?”
He looked over his shoulder and said, “Fort Irwin.”
“You see any combat?”
“Yes.”
“It change you?”
Marcus gave this a moment’s thought, then: “Killing people always changes you.”
After that, he got into his lifted Nissan Titan and left home, not looking back, trying not to feel anything but feeling no less pain than when he first arrived.
Now he huddled under a canvas with a stranger on someone’s boat under a haze of devastation while the world was literally on fire and caving into ruin. When enough of the pulverized remains of the hotel had blown over, as they sat there a good hour after the Hilton had collapsed, Marcus started to feel it: the upsurge of food in his stomach.
“You feeling sick?” he asked Quentin.
“My head is cracked in half and I’ve been on the verge of puking for the last twenty minutes.”
“Ditto.”
He felt Quentin’s body jolt. His followed. Pretty soon Quentin was sloughing off the canvas on hands and knees, popping his head out into the dust and expelling his guts all over the deck.
Marcus’s insides squirmed, then rolled, and then he felt the convulsions as his half-digested food rushed up his throat.
Pushing his head out of the canvas as well, he hurled into the gray blanket of dust, breathing it in his nose and mouth every time his stomach pulled in then pushed fresh contents out. It was a disgusting affair, one he wasn’t used to, especially having spent years in combat. When he got done puking, he looked over at Quentin who was a snotty, driveling mess.
“You look like old ass,” he said.
Quentin wiped his eyes, spit and said, “Old ass probably tastes better. Nothing like dirty vomit and snot strings to make you feel good about life and yourself.”
He wiped his nose, flung it on the deck then wiped his eyes as well and said, “What now?”
“You want to try to get inside?”
Marcus pulled off the canvas, covered his nose and mouth, then turned and saw the long heap of collapsed hotel laid out before them.
“Good God,” Quentin said.
Marcus was speechless.
Inside the yacht it was almost musty, but spacious and clean. Marcus looked around, found some dried food, a water purification unit and a shotgun.
Deeper inside, he found a .357 with a box of rounds. The gun wouldn’t stop the machines, but a gun was a gun and he felt better having one.
“I can’t get the hotel out of my mind,” Quentin finally said. He looked like a lost kid. Like someone whose mother left him at the grocery store and he hadn’t figured out what was going on just yet.
“I need to check on Nick and Bailey,” he said. “Stay here.”
“Why would I leave this little slice of paradise?” Quentin replied, his eyes clearing. “For heaven’s sake, it’s nicer than my house.”
Marcus stepped outside, into the toxic air. He pulled his shirt over his mouth and nose, hurried to the dock, then moved quickly to the boat next to them, careful not to slip on the surface slicked with dusty vestiges of the collapsed building. He started calling out to them the second he set foot on deck.
Nick popped his head out. “Thank God, man,” he said.
“Let’s go,” Marcus said, his eyes running, his mouth dry with the same dust floating through the air.
“Where?” he asked. Bailey was suddenly behind him, her eyes red and wet.
“Out to sea. It’s the only way to get away from this mess.”
“You know your way around a boat?”
“Yeah,” Marcus said, raising his eyebrows as if to say, let’s go already. “You?”
“Somewhat,” he said, pulling on a shirt he took from a small broken window.
Nick and Bailey hustled out and the three of them made their way back to the three story yacht. Through the fog of vaporized concrete, Marcus saw the lettering V68 on the side of the boat Marcus had chosen. On the second deck, along the fiberglass side, it said Horizon. He didn’t know yachts, but he knew enough about boats to figure it out. Besides, if they had to ride out an attack on the city, doing it on a sixty-eight foot yacht wasn’t a bad way to go.
Marcus climbed up to the fly bridge, took a seat at the helm, started the boat with the key he’d taken from t
he dead man with the dead hookers. His luck was never this good. He’d already decided he’d try every boat in the marina if need be to get out to sea and away from this nightmare. That he didn’t have to do that wasn’t lost on him.
Down below, Marcus yelled at Nick to untether the ropes from the dock’s oversized cleats. Nick was competent enough to know what Marcus was talking about and went to work immediately.
When they were clear, Nick gave the boat a shove and jumped on deck. Slowly, Marcus eased the yacht out of the slip and into the bay. He trolled slowly through the still waters of the San Diego Bay, careful not to attract the attention of the drones, which looked busy further inland.
Downstairs, everyone was getting familiar with the accommodations. For a second Marcus was jealous. The air quality outside was for crap, his body was cut and beaten and all he wanted was a moment to relax and breathe better air. What made him want inside even more was, from what he’d initially seen, this yacht was the absolute lap of luxury.
Yet he was out here…
For now, he’d have to suspend his own yacht tour and hope he could get the four of them free of the bay and out to sea alive. Once he cleared the hot zone, he told himself he’d be able to relax. Maybe.
Hell, he might even take a nap.
Chapter Ninety-Six
As we’re ambling through the bay, I fish out my cell phone and call Indigo. At first the call doesn’t go through, but just as I’m about to hang up, it starts to ring.
Indigo picks up right away.
“Dad?”
“Sweetheart,” I say, a bit frantic because I’ve missed her so badly. “Are you okay?”
“I am.”
“Good, good,” I say, relieved. “Something’s happening here, Indy, and it’s not looking too good.”
“Fires?” she asks.
“I…I think…I think we’re being bombed. The city I mean. San Diego is under attack but we’re not sure by whom or what. Have you seen it on the news? Are they saying anything about San Diego? Because none of us know what’s going on here.”