“It’s going to be close,” he muttered.
Franklin kept one eye on Melissa, the other on his brother’s face. He couldn’t recall ever having seen Everon like this, this—pure focused rage it looked like—none of his typical sarcastic humor. Franklin’s fingers slid off the triangle base of the small gold cross beneath his shirt, then brushed the soft feathers of the owl’s head.
And then he saw it clearly. It had been a personally dangerous, altruistic and foolhardy thing they’d done to release all those people on the bridge. He and Everon had put their own lives at risk out of grief and desperation. Thinking we’d failed Cynthia and Steve. How could I have let these strangers become more important than my own sister?
Now that they were certain Cynthia was dead, Franklin felt a kind of pure, blind hatred like nothing he’d ever felt before. But nobody knew who to hate. Only a desperate need to somehow strike back, do something drastic.
In the co-pilot seat to Everon’s left, Clarence’s hands clenched around the base of his seat cushion. He felt his stomach rise, the ground coming toward them at an alarming rate, trees, buildings—Fuck! I knew I should have worn the green shirt yesterday! Life is always better, safer in the green shirt! But it was so hard to sell newspapers when he was smelly.
Down ahead of Everon, a power line appeared across their path. But they were committed. A messy crash—death for everyone if he snagged it. He pushed the yoke forward.
They fell faster.
The transit engineer looked at his digital wristwatch. Strange. He hadn’t noticed. The numbers hadn’t changed. Eight-zero-zero. Does it mean something? Can’t be good. Stomach feels like it’s in my throat. Certain numbers had always been lucky for him. Never double zero.
Are we going to make it past this power line? Everon asked silently. With no engine, they were dropping on a steep angle, free-falling, only a small amount of resistance from the main rotor, in full auto-rotate. No time to bring the tail around. He jerked hard back on the yoke. Shoulders hunched, Everon pulled his head into his neck waiting for the tail to strike.
Despite cold air whistling through the cracks, small bubbles of perspiration formed on Tyner Kone’s upper lip. As the Pelican fell, he rushed to make certain he was balanced. With his right hand, nervously he tapped his left shoulder, then more softly with his left hand tapped his right. Too hard on the left, he thought. Must have balance!
There was no deadly tilt, no sudden jerk. Ground flying at them, Everon’s left hand yanked on the collective arm almost ripping it from the floor.
The Russian woman Kat felt like suddenly she weighed a thousand pounds. Despite the security of Petre’s arm around her shoulder, she had known this was how it would end for them since yesterday. That flock of pitch-black crows in Queens landing on a street pole, beaks cawing loudly—right at her! The most evil sign! A warning she hadn’t understood—until now! The bomb! The subway! To die finally smashed into the ground!
They slammed in hard. Then bounced! Off the Pelican’s balloon tires—six, eight, ten feet in the air. Then fell, hit again, not so hard this time, and settled—to near stillness.
Everon’s breath shot from his lips. FFFFffff . . . like air going from the tires. He looked around.
“Alright back there?”
“We’re okay!” Franklin yelled.
“Well I’m not—”
But for the semiconscious Walter van Patter, the again bitching Tyner Kone, they all clapped and cheered.
They were on the airport runway. A hundred feet from the nearest tent.
The Press
Of the people running toward the helicopter, Franklin spotted several hauling video cameras. Photographers and reporters. The rest, wearing pale hospital greens, carried stretchers, pushed wheelchairs. They helped Walter van Patter, now conscious again, into one; Victoria Hill into another.
“Which one of you’s a doctor?” Kone whined indignantly. “I feel like I’m ready to fall over, after everything I’ve been through!”
The wind was calm in New Jersey, Franklin noticed. Just as it had been at the fountain minutes before it changed directions. The black cigar-shaped cloud jutted out. Has it reached the river? How much time does it leave us to get out?
Everon pulled one of the medic’s collapsible stretcher dollies next to the cargo door. Franklin got to his feet with Melissa. His jacket halfway open, the owl poked its head out between his white shirt’s middle two buttons again. A photographer snapped a picture. The flash scared the bird back inside.
“You have an owl in there!” a reporter pointed.
“I found him on top of an apartment building,” Franklin muttered.
“We should call him Harry!” Victoria spoke up. “In honor of our narrow escape.” She pointed to Melissa. “Harry helped find this little girl!”
Flashes flashed. Video cameras recorded. Vandersommen, that same jerk airport security guard who nearly stopped them going into the city, emerged from the crowd. Before he could say anything, Everon said, “Emergency landing. Lost both engines. No choice.”
“You had no authorization in the first place.” Vandersommen wrote something in a small notebook, while looking at the Pelican’s tail number.
An Army major ran over followed by two of his men. “We’re commandeering this helicopter!”
“Go ahead!” Everon barked. He jumped down from the big cargo door. With Chuck’s help, they began to wrestle the Aztec cocoon out onto the dolly.
Franklin heard someone shout, “Victoria!” One of the reporters apparently knew her. He pushed a microphone to her face. Clarence nudged behind Victoria’s chair, freeing the woman in green scrubs.
“We better hustle,” Everon said as he and Chuck passed alongside with the Aztec cocoon. “Look!” he head-pointed. The dark cloud looked to be completely across the Hudson. “By the time that gets here we better be long gone! Meet you at the jet, Bro!”
Before anyone could thank them, Everon and Chuck pushed ahead.
“You were rescued by these men, Ms. Hill?”
“They pulled us out of a collapsed subway. They’re amazing.”
“And these EMS personnel are from where?” another reporter asked.
“They’re brothers,” Clarence cut in. “The pilot’s from Vegas.” He pointed at Franklin. “He’s a Congregational minister.”
“A what?” Victoria looked at Franklin, as surprised as the reporter.
“The big guy told me,” Clarence nodded at Chuck, pointed back at Franklin. “The dark-haired one is Reverend Franklin Reveal. The blond surfer guy’s the pilot, Everon Student. They saved us—and about three hundred thousand other people.”
“How’s that?” the reporter asked. “Three hundred thousand—?”
Franklin walked faster.
“Be ready to expect a lot more survivors in about an hour!” the transit engineer put in. “They set thousands free when they opened a path on top of the G.W.”
Communications must be out, Franklin realized. Nobody even knows what’s happening.
He passed soldiers adding to a row of tall green and white toilets. One woman lined up said to another behind her, “I just hate these porta-things, don’t you?”
Through the nearest tent’s entrance, Franklin saw people crammed on ankle-high cots. Doctors and nurses clearly past overload, bandaging foreheads, arms, legs. Selecting who would live, and who could not be helped, who would die. Franklin thought of the mob coming from the bridge.
People were crying, screaming, searching for the ones they’d lost. As if someone had torn away the reality in which they’d lived. The world was upside down, where nothing made any sense at all.
“Yea, brother!” shouted a homeless vagrant in tattered clothes and cutoff gloves, voice rising like an old-time revivalist. “The end of days is come!”
Mania was taking over.
An elderly bleached-blonde stepped in Franklin’s way. A camel-shaped brown stain ra
n across the bottom of her long torn skirt. Her right hand parallel with the ground just above her head, she asked, “White-hair, about this tall—have you seen my husband? They said they would bring him on the next helicopter . . . ” her thick Jewish-Brooklyn accent trailed off.
“No, I’m sorry,” Franklin answered.
She wandered away screaming violently, “WHO HAS DONE THIS!”
No one told her to be quiet. It was the same question they were all asking. There was no victim list you could check to see if someone you cared about was on it. He doubted there ever could be such a list. There were so many like her. People who seemed not to know where they were or what they were doing. Only that something important had been taken from their lives. “Oh, please God . . .” voices trailed off nearby. A total loss of reason.
“What was it like over there?” a female reporter asked, pushing a microphone into Franklin’s face.
He stepped around her.
Franklin had no desire to talk about the city. He didn’t want to hate Vandersommen or this reporter or anybody. The only person he hated was someone he couldn’t see or touch or find. Someone who had set off a bomb that had caused fire and agony and so much pain.
Who’s Responsible?
The mob of G.W. Bridge survivors was halfway to Teterboro when drops of black goo began to fall from the sky. Fifty-one people squeezed in together atop a narrow raised concrete oval that housed the pumps of a Quick-N-Go GAS U-POURIUM.
On the platform’s front side, barely protected by the station’s overhang, the woman who’d hit Franklin with her keys struggled to keep her weight off her bloody right leg without being pushed off the pump platform into the growing black muck. Bonnie Fisk’s torn pants did not protect her from the goo’s backsplash, each cold ricocheted drop a little bit of fire.
The wind picked up, and where small globs of the black stuff splattered, bare skin turned red and began to burn. They tried to rub it off. Blisters formed. They screamed and cursed and packed in tighter. It was like being jammed into the bridge all over again. The cloud pushed west.
Franklin’s survivors hurried past the medical tents to where long yellow school buses were filling with people. A shake of Franklin’s hand, a pat on his back. “Thank you,” they said quickly. “The pilot—he leave so fast,” Petre said in Russian, “You thank him for us?” then, “Do svidaniya,”—Goodbye, echoed Kat. Kone continued into the lot without a word.
An old white sedan with several people inside pulled up sharply. A young guy in a long heavy coat rushed from the driver’s side. Victoria smiled at him as he moved behind her chair.
Head out the window, Kone returned in the back of a black town car bearing U.S. government plates. Asked if he could offer Walter van Patter a lift. “No thank you, Mr. Kone,” van Patter declined. Kone’s jaw bulged and he told the driver to move on.
Clarence, the train engineer, the Russians, even Mr. van Patter, found seats on one of the yellow buses.
As Victoria’s friend began to push her chair away, she reached up, pulled Franklin’s shoulder down and kissed his cheek. “You did a wonderful thing for us. Thank your brother for me, will you?” She studied his face, “You’re really a minister?”
“First Congregational Church, Erie, Pennsylvania,” Franklin replied, feeling strangely warm around the collar.
“You and the pilot—” she said. “Your hair’s so dark. He’s so blond. You don’t look much like brothers.”
“We each share—a parent with Cynthia . . . ” A lump formed in his throat. He looked down at Melissa in his arms, his niece’s accusing eyes staring up at him. “We’re both her uncles,” he rasped.
The guy from the car rolled her to the rear side door, helped her from the wheelchair into the back seat. She looked back through the rear window as they drove away.
Harry—as Victoria had named him—was shaking inside Franklin’s shirt. I have to do something about this bird.
Someone had left a cardboard box on the ground. Campbell’s Chicken Soup. Inside was a stack of thin USA TODAYs. The headline read:
WHO’S RESPONSIBLE?
A computer-drawn image took up the whole first page. In his mind’s eye he saw what no eye should ever see: an expanding fireball, bright and red and gold and lethal in all its evil glory. The blast was centered at Manhattan’s south end—below Wall Street, labeled: South Street Seaport.
Balancing Melissa, Franklin slipped his free hand along the stack and set half the papers on the ground. He tugged out his front shirttails. Down inside his shirt, the owl’s talons clung to the top of Franklin’s pants. Harry didn’t want to leave, the owl’s speckled brown feathers shaking, shivering, all the way down the bird’s fluffy white chest, his long feathery cape.
Franklin sucked in his abs and gently prised beneath the bird’s talons with a finger, coaxing the owl into letting go. Finally, Harry released his grip and Franklin lifted him out of his shirt. Set him in the box.
The owl kept his large yellow eyes focused on Franklin as he scooped up the box in one arm, Melissa in the other. As Franklin hustled for the jet, spots of blood weeping across his shirtfront, Harry began a soft “hup-hup-hup.”
The Bird
There’s another one! Sal thought . . . And another one . . .
Along the highway berm were stranded cars with no apparent damage.
“I think they’re running out of gas!” he said softly.
“How are we, Saly?” Margarete asked. “Will we make it to Momma’s?”
Sal glanced at the Chevy’s gauges. “Eighth of a tank,” he muttered. “I don’t know.” They were up to forty. At least we’re moving again. Another hour should do it. Margarete dialed in a local radio station.
“Evacuees who try to return before their home areas are officially open are being blocked by military personnel; they will be required to turn their vehicles around. Those not yet allowed to go home may have to spend another grueling night in their cars.”
“What’s an evacee, Daddy?” their son asked.
“Listen!” Margarete shushed. The station’s voice continued,
“Traffic is still extreme. Apparently some drivers unable to take the stress have flatly refused to move. The Army is using giant transport trucks to shove any such cars aside.
“Soldiers were forced to return fire on one man with a handgun who died after receiving two bullets to the head—”
Sal turned it off. “Those poor bastards.” Not even a glare from Margarete. “We’re lucky we got out when we did.”
“When are they going to figure out who’s behind this, Saly?” Rita asked, echoing the very thing he’d been thinking. She had a way of doing that.
As they came off the freeway the engine quit for a moment, then restarted. Sal ran a red light. When they turned onto Momma Conti’s street the engine stopped running completely.
They coasted into the driveway.
Their arrival was a complete surprise to Momma Conti.
“Oh, my children,” Daniella exclaimed as she opened the door. It was the first time Sal had ever heard such desperation in his mother-in-law’s voice. Almost as if she included him in her affection.
“Oh, darling,” Margarete’s mother gushed all over her daughter. “And you drove that car!” An eyeball glanced at Sal. “I’m so relieved to see you. The news said there are no airlines, no trains at all east of Buffalo. And my two little pumpkins!” she knelt down, arms reaching out to hug the kids. “I’m so glad we’re all together.”
“Hello, Daniella.”
“Hello, Sal.” She turned back to Margarete.
“There was no way to call you!” Margarete said. “When the sirens started and the power went off—we hadn’t planned—we barely had any food. We packed everything we had.”
“Don’t worry,” Daniella said to her daughter, Sal thought eyeing him a bit snidely. “Momma has no electricity at the moment. But our food’s still cold. Plent
y for everybody.”
Margarete kissed her mother’s cheek and turned to the kids. “Time for you two to have a quick bite and get to bed.”
But the moment the kids were down, the power came on. For how long, Sal couldn’t say. “They’re transmitting from New York!” Daniella called.
The first thing Sal saw on his mother-in-law’s television was a man with an owl’s head sticking out of his shirt.
“That bird!”
Sal ran out of the room like a nut—Who cares! Daniella already thinks so anyway—to the room the kids were using, silently slid out the yellow toolbox by its black handle. Flipped up the lid, pawing through, dumping his daughter’s dolls onto the floor—
There! Narrow brown stripes painted in streaks across its entire length . . .
Rita and her mother, staring at him as he ran back in. He held the feather to the television screen.
It’s the same!
He could still picture the restaurant’s dock. That Middle Eastern man with the boat. Letting go of that bird beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.
And then the picture was suddenly replaced by snow, the sound by static.
Hunt’s Desperation
A giant of a helicopter roared in low overhead. The largest Franklin had ever seen—long and fat.
Suspended beneath on four cables was slung a semi-truck container. Its crisp white paint job, like that on the chopper, bore a huge red WILLIAMS POWER logo on its side. The amount of air the giant moved as it passed was like a small windstorm.
Franklin walked faster until he was up with Everon and Chuck again. “I thought you wanted to get out of here? That black mist looks like it’s crossing the river,” Franklin pointed.
But Everon wasn’t listening.
The helicopter descended near the end of the row of big tents.
LOSS OF REASON Page 17