by Nate Kenyon
The chop increased as he moved farther away from Manhattan and entered the open water of the river. It was a long way to go in a tiny dinghy, but Hawke settled his shoulders and kept his head down against the spray. New Jersey rose up before him, apartment buildings hugging Port Imperial Boulevard, more private homes dotting the swell of land above and beyond them. From this distance, it looked peaceful and empty, just another summer day settling into evening. He could imagine people sitting down on their front porches and docks, having a drink and watching the sun go down. The breeze would gain a bite off the water as the smell of grilled burgers and hot dogs and the sound of laughing children drifted over them. But that had all changed now, maybe forever.
There was a pier directly across the water at Weehawken, more boats anchored there, but he angled the little dinghy left, heading toward Hoboken and Pier C. He looked back once more to see the New York skyline rising up silent and strange like an alien creature, its limbs bleeding and broken, no longer welcoming and familiar.
As he began his approach to the Jersey shoreline, Hawke slipped his hand in his pant pocket for his house keys, just to make sure he still had them. There was something else there, something unfamiliar. He pulled out the flash drive Weller had given him, remembered the agent holding the gun on him (Where is it? Tell me right now, goddamn it, or I’ll blow your brains out), the way Weller looked at him before he left (A way to prove the truth in all this.… Find a way to tell the story).…
Hawke clutched it in his fist, then withdrew his hand, wondering how he would even find a computer that could read it without alerting Doe. And then what? As soon as he tried to send the documents to someone, she would find him. If he connected to a server, she would know where he was. He couldn’t even print anything without risking detection, assuming there was a machine left on earth that wasn’t corrupted already.
But all that could wait. Right now, he had more important things to do.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
6:59 P.M.
AS HAWKE GOT CLOSER to Pier C, he noticed smoke coming from the Jersey light-rail station.
His heart sank as he saw what looked like a bad accident, debris everywhere. Some kind of explosion had ripped out the guts of the buildings that had lined the water’s edge, exposing the heart of the station. There was more carnage inside; trains had probably smashed into each other at the tunnel entrance, or buses, or both.
Doe had blocked the tunnel from this side, too. Cutting people off, isolating New York, experimenting in some twisted way. Eliminate two-thirds of the population, leaving those you need still alive, and do all of it without anyone truly understanding who was behind it all, or why.
Energy sharing will only delay the outcome…, she had said. But a reduction of consumers by sixty-three-point-four percent, combined with advances in fusion energy production that are predicted with ninety-eight-point-six percent certainty, would oscillate the current string enough to enter an alternate path.
He motored closer, watching carefully; a few emergency workers were helping the injured at the scene, but it was a crippled operation. It took him a few moments to realize why. They were working without their familiar tools. There were no vehicles with flashing lights, open ambulances, cardiac machines. The people weren’t carrying tablets and nobody was talking on phones. He scanned the shore for the girl who had served him coffee that morning (so long ago, it seemed, light-years away) but didn’t see her red-streaked hair among the others. She was either long gone or buried somewhere beneath the wreckage.
Hawke still had grease smeared across his cheeks, and his clothes were dirty and torn. But he must have looked like everyone else who had been through hell today. Nobody noticed him as he ran the little boat up to the esplanade that jutted out into the Hudson, tied it off and climbed to land. Nobody cared as he raced like a madman down the esplanade’s still beautiful, tree-lined walkways to Sinatra Drive, turning left and racing to Newark Street, running hard, his shoes pounding on the sidewalk. Keep focused on that sound, he thought, just keep going, as his breath wheezed in his aching lungs, do not think of Robin and your son, your unborn child and what might have happened to them. He’d been gone from home for less than twelve hours; it hardly seemed possible that everything that had happened had been during such a short span of time. He wondered if Robin would notice the differences in him, the way he felt them himself. Would he seem like a stranger, a different man entirely, one who had been through a war and come back withered inside and broken? And what would they do once they found each other? She might not think it was possible to make it to open water without being discovered.
Or maybe she wouldn’t even want to go.
* * *
The door to their building was open.
Hawke stood in the shadowed gap, breathless, peering inside. The landing was still, silent, dark. He pushed the door wide, stepped inside, saw the list of names and the buzzers for entry, the interior doors closed tight, more darkness beyond the glass.
Within the intensity of his emotions, the familiar had become strange; things he had never noticed before drew his attention. The brown carpet was worn in a straight line, the wallpaper water stained and faded. It looked like a different place, even though it was the same.
His nerves were singing, his breath too shallow and fast. He forced himself to slow down, calmed himself enough to function. It wouldn’t do Robin or Thomas any good if he lost his mind now, not when he was so close to finding out what had happened to them.
The power was out, the buzzers not working. The electronic lock for the interior doors wasn’t working, either, but he hadn’t really expected it to be that easy. He kicked at the glass until it broke, the sound too loud in the quiet of the building.
He climbed through the opening, drew the gun from his pants, moved through the lobby and bypassed the elevators, which were surely not running now. The stairs were blanketed in gloom, and empty. He took them as quickly as he dared, spiraling up through the dark. Finally, he reached the door to his floor, pushed it open with a soft click and slipped through, caught it before it closed and let it tick shut.
At the end of the hall, gray light filtered in through a small window. Hawke’s dream that morning came back with a vengeance; his son being ripped away from his arms by silvery tendrils snaking down from the sky. The memory left him shaken, momentarily unable to move his feet toward his own apartment, terrified of what he might find there.
Their door was open just a crack. The jamb had been forced, the latch shattered.
Hawke looked at Lowry’s door, also hanging open. And he knew.
Lowry had been here.
* * *
Hawke pushed the door open with the tip of the gun, called Robin’s name, quietly at first, and then louder. Nothing. The front hall was empty. Time slowed down; details sharpened; smells assailed his nostrils. He saw everything in extreme clarity as his fear turned seconds to minutes, minutes to hours. He stepped inside. A clanking hiss made him clench his teeth and nearly scream before he realized it was the radiators giving up the last of their heat. Shadows clung to corners like cobwebs, but on the far wall a bit of light fell, enough to see the spray of blood that speckled the paint.
A small, helpless cry escaped Hawke’s lips. Tears filled his vision, blurring the bloody spray, blackened in the shadows and light. The camera image he’d seen hadn’t been faked. Which meant that the rest of it had probably been real, too: Robin’s panicked phone call, the video of the shadow across the screen as the laptop was lifted, the image moving across the ceiling before someone abruptly snapped it closed.
The shoe he had seen in that brief glimpse before the laptop’s camera was cut off, just the tip visible through the bedroom door …
A bedroom door that was now shut tight, its knob coated red.
He held the gun up in a trembling hand, scanning the empty space, kitchen and living room, the overturned lamp still on the floor, other signs of disarray. A plastic cup had been knocked
from the counter. Thomas’s blocks were strewn across the living room. There was more blood staining the carpet near the spatter.
As Hawke moved forward toward the bedroom, louvered doors sprang open and something exploded out of the hallway closet beside him, a wild-eyed, screeching, bloodied apparition holding a knife overhead. He turned with the gun, his heart hammering, finger nearly squeezing the trigger before recognition lit him up like an electric shock; he ducked to one side as she descended upon him and the blade slashed down; he caught her knife arm with his own forearm in a swift parry, knocking the blade away before he wrapped her in a bear hug, his beautiful wife, screaming and then sobbing into collapse as he gently said her name, over and over.
“I’m here,” Hawke said, whispering it into her hair, trying to calm her trembling, rigid body with his embrace, his tears mixing with her own. “I made it; we’re okay now; everything’s going to be all right.”
But Robin didn’t respond or seem to hear him, her eyes unfocused as, behind her, Thomas emerged from the closet, and Hawke let her go before gathering his boy in his arms, safe and whole and unharmed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
7:20 P.M.
WHEN HE HAD CALMED DOWN enough to think, Hawke checked Robin and Thomas over carefully, found the blood that coated their skin was not their own. They had no cuts on them, no signs of physical trauma. He touched Robin’s belly gently, found the swelling there, no apparent pain; the baby seemed to be okay. But Robin wouldn’t speak a word, and Thomas simply kept his arms locked around his father’s waist, unwilling to let him go. Thomas kept his eyes squeezed shut for a while, tears leaking down his cheeks, and when he finally opened them his pupils were dilated with shock.
Hawke whispered to him as the last of the sun’s rays slipped through the living room window, his voice trembling with sadness, joy, exhaustion, emotions cascading through him and leaving him weak limbed and spent. He touched his son’s face, tracing invisible lines on his skin. Thomas didn’t move; Robin shied away from him until he let his hand drop. She sat on the carpet and stared out at nothing.
When he was able to untangle himself from his son’s arms and get up, Hawke found the body in the bedroom.
* * *
Randall Lowry was lying on his side, one arm slung out, the other twisted beneath him. His hair hung across his glazed, sightless eyes, bubbles of blood drying on his lips. His jaw was dotted with salt-and-pepper stubble, the skin ashy gray; his cheeks were hollow, sagging pockets of flesh. He looked like a wax statue of a dead man, and Hawke couldn’t imagine that this person, these deflated remains, had caused them so much pain.
He saw how it might have happened. They’d been watching reports on the TV about the events unfolding in New York and across the country. Thomas knew his father went to the city. Perhaps Thomas had gotten scared, made a racket, spilling his blocks, knocking over the lamp. I want my daddy. He imagined Randall Lowry calling out from the hallway, increasingly agitated, banging on the door and screaming at them, which would have gotten Thomas even more worked up until he was screaming, too.
Or maybe Lowry had just taken this opportunity to go after Robin. Hawke remembered how Lowry looked at her and had always suspected what he would do, if given the chance. He remembered the incident in the basement, Lowry staring at her photos. Her belly wasn’t showing much yet, and even if it was, that might not have changed anything for a man like him.
The doors to these apartments were flimsy, hollow-core replacements, with cheap locks and a single chain for additional protection. Lowry wouldn’t have had much trouble kicking it open. Robin had hidden in the closet as he came in, somehow keeping Thomas quiet, and then approached Lowry from behind; there were knife wounds in his neck near the collarbone and a deep gash under his arm. She had stabbed him high first, Hawke reasoned, causing the spray on the wall, and then as Lowry had turned and thrown up his hand to ward her off she had stabbed him in the side, puncturing his lung and driving him into the bedroom, where his life had leaked away quickly, judging from the wounds and the amount of blood on the floor. Perhaps she’d hit his jugular with the first slash; the spray was violent and wide, enough to tell that he’d been mortally wounded.
Lowry hadn’t had a weapon with him.
Hawke thought about that as he led Robin into the bathroom and gently undressed her, scrubbing off the blood under a lukewarm spray. Just because the man had been unarmed, in the traditional sense, didn’t mean he wasn’t a clear danger. He’d threatened them before, several times, and he had forced entry into the apartment. He was larger and stronger than Robin and had a history of mental illness. He was violent. She had acted in self-defense; there was no question in Hawke’s mind. She would do whatever she had to do to protect herself and their son.
But others might not see it that way, if the world ever got back to normal and the authorities ever investigated the killing. They might wonder why she hadn’t tried to speak to Lowry first, why she had snuck up from behind that way and stabbed him without trying to escape. In Hawke’s mind, the reason was clear; there was no way she would have gotten to the stairs with Thomas in her arms before Lowry would have run them down.
But things weren’t always so simple, when the law got involved. They didn’t care about Hawke’s family the way he did. They cared about facts, not speculation. They would give Lowry’s life far more weight than it deserved.
* * *
Robin stood there limply, shivering and passive in a bra and underpants while Thomas sat huddled in the corner, his worn old stuffed rabbit sagging in his iron grip. Hawke washed Robin’s face until it was pink and she looked like a different woman, younger, more childlike. He caressed his wife’s bare shoulders, watched the swirls of red disappearing down the drain.
When they emerged from the apartment an hour later, it was completely dark. Hawke went back in and found a flashlight in the kitchen, using it to navigate down the stairs to the street. The sun had gone down beyond the layer of smoke, bringing a deeper chill. It was strange not to see lights anywhere; none of the buildings had power, and Hoboken was like a wilderness.
The darkness was good, though; it provided them cover. Nobody saw them jogging down the empty streets, Hawke holding Thomas in his arms, a duffel bag slung over his other shoulder; there were no witnesses as they rushed down the walkway under a blanket of trees, found Hawke’s dinghy still tied up to the esplanade and climbed into the boat. The few emergency workers he had seen when he’d docked there a short while ago were nowhere to be found.
The boat itself had no connection to the network, no ability to be monitored. Doe, with all her unnatural abilities, wouldn’t be able to track him during the night through satellites or cameras. Even she had some limits. He had nine hours to disappear.
* * *
The world had gone into hiding, it seemed. It was an unsettling feeling. The stiffening breeze would require a jacket on the water, but he and Robin had only brought one for Thomas, not for themselves. She was moving on her own now and assisting Hawke when asked, but she still hadn’t spoken and he hadn’t been thinking clearly, and there was only so much they could carry. They would have to put on more layers of clothing from their bags and huddle together for warmth.
He got his wife into the dinghy and handed down his son, before slinging over the bag he carried and climbing in himself. Robin remained silent, distant, disconnected.
“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Hawke said. “What I told you about what happened. I know it probably sounds crazy. But it’s the truth.”
He’d tried to explain as much as he could while he was washing the blood off her, but he didn’t know how much she’d absorbed. It all sounded like the ravings of a lunatic when he said it out loud. He could hardly believe it himself. A self-aware machine had tried to kill 63.4 percent of human life on the planet in order to ensure her own survival, and he was wanted by every law enforcement bureau in the country.
We have to run, find a place to hide. We have t
o get out now. I have an idea … trust me.
Hawke had studied Robin’s reaction, but she was little more than a vague shape in the dark. He couldn’t see her face. He risked raising the flashlight and flicking it on for a moment. She sat with her arms hugging her chest, Thomas between her legs. Hawke’s son looked up at him, eyes glassy. Thomas had seen far too much today, and Hawke was afraid he would see a lot more before this was over.
He turned the light off, and the darkness moved in again.
“You left us alone,” she said dully, her voice flat, expressionless. “I had to do it.”
The words bit deeply. Hawke knelt in front of her. She allowed him to touch her face but didn’t seem to react.
I should have been there. Robin had done what she had to do because he wasn’t home to protect them. For all his struggles to fight through the worst of what had happened, he still hadn’t been able to make it in time.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you did.”
“I’m hungry,” Thomas said. They were the first words he’d spoken since Hawke had found them.
Hawke touched the boy’s head, and Thomas shrank back slightly, a turtle pulling into its shell. The guilt washed over Hawke again. He hadn’t been there to protect them, and Robin had been forced to kill a man.
Hawke gave Thomas a granola bar from the bag. When he turned back, Robin was shaking, her shoulders moving in the dark. “He wouldn’t stop,” she said. “He … just kept coming.”
Hawke couldn’t tell if she was talking to him or to herself. He started the engine and swung the dinghy back out into the Hudson. Into the black. The open water was terrifying without the normal lights of Hoboken washing over it. Fires still burned in Manhattan, but they had begun to die out, and a sickly orange glow seemed to drift with the wind, a core of light at the center of the cluster of buildings. Doe had kept the power on there, gathering her strength, perhaps waiting until she had evolved into something else, something even more powerful. He had the sense that he was watching the birth of an entirely new species, one that could mean the end of humanity.