by S. L. Dunn
With an obvious last-ditch effort, Vengelis buried a fist into Gravitas’s stomach with gathered strength. Gravitas hunched over, but at the same time came up with a wild uppercut.
It hit home.
His fist caught Vengelis square in the jaw. Vengelis fell back, and his body crashed into a window behind him where it did not move. His legs were left dangling out the broken window, but his upper torso was inside the building. Vengelis lay stunned for a moment before pushing himself up onto his elbows.
“Do you give up?” Gravitas blurted.
Vengelis spit to the side and stood up shakily in the thirteenth-story window frame, his head lolling. He murmured something that sounded like “Kristen,” though Gravitas thought he might be delirious himself and hearing things.
“Fel—” Vengelis coughed up blood. “We . . . Felix.”
Gravitas could not do anything but pant for breath. His spinning vision was filled with stars. He was too spent to think anything at all. The two of them stood before each other, each neither defeated nor victorious.
KRRRRRCH!
A strident tearing sound echoed suddenly across the rooftops of the city, drowning out the clamor of the anarchy below. Gravitas drew his blurred vision away from Vengelis. He strained to look up the long crowded avenue. High over the heads of the clogging masses migrating northward, the wounded monolith of a skyscraper shuddered and screamed in tenors of yielding iron and failing steel down into the streets of Midtown. Gravitas felt a terrible desperation as he turned his gaze from the massive skyscraper to the droves of people bottlenecked in the congested intersections below. The collapse would swallow them whole. Thousands were about to die an unspeakable death. The fight was over; Gravitas doubted either of them now had the power remaining to perform a coup de grâce on the other.
KRRRRRCH!
The sound filled the city: another support failing. Gravitas shut his eyes, his upper body rising and falling with heaves for breath.
“You . . . deserve . . . death . . . ” Gravitas said to Vengelis through his split lips.
“I . . . know,” Vengelis murmured and stumbled to a wall for support. “Brought . . . Felix. N-never could have known . . . ”
A new kind of sound carried down to them from atop the tilting building. It was the sound of floors collapsing. Gravitas turned to the skyscraper and watched as the roof and the top floor caved inward. The base of the building gave way, and the bottom floors began disintegrating into rubble. He moaned in wearisome desperation and turned away from Vengelis Epsilon with determined finality.
“Don’t you dare. It . . . it is hopeless,” Vengelis murmured, his jaw hanging open by his shoulder as he regarded the falling tower with a muddled gaze. “Don’t even think about leaving.”
“We’re finished,” Gravitas whispered.
“Nerol! No!”
Without another word Gravitas rushed up the avenue toward the falling superstructure, weaving unsteadily through the air with his final scrap of strength and leaving Vengelis astonished and alone in the lofty recess of the empty window.
Chapter Forty
Kristen
Tears of despondency and dread welled in Kristen’s eyes as she sprinted up the quaking avenue beside Madison. Entering the migrating riot was an immersion into a world with no rules, a scene entirely distant and alien to the life with which Kristen was so familiar. Man’s carefully sewn and timeworn fabric of compassion, kindness, and morality was ablaze and scorching to nothingness before her eyes, leaving only caustic despair in its wake.
In fleeting sidelong glances Kristen beheld unspeakable atrocities. Curled on the pavement, a trampled and broken body of a young teenager, her sneakers twitching from the kicks and stomps of the mob. Marching out of an electronics store, a man balancing a stack of brand new laptops in his arms. Parents desperately holding infants and toddlers into the air to keep them from being swallowed up, while futilely begging for someone to help them.
A drear of chalky dust obscured the afternoon sunlight as the dreamlike conflict between Vengelis and his nameless foe pervaded straight through the towering buildings on all sides, sending wreckage plunging down into the crowds.
Ahead of Kristen and Madison, the disfigured skyscraper leaned diagonally over the intersection at a treacherous angle. Kristen stared agape into the dusty sky at the countless teetering windows overhead. The building blocked the warm autumn sunlight that splashed upon the rest of the city, and cast an ominous dark shadow across the block. The air felt suddenly colder in the chill of the building’s shadow. Deadly debris fell from the lofty heights into the narrow chasm of the avenue. Kristen had never felt as small and frail as she did under the eclipse of the vast skyscraper. It was a sensory overload, and all the while the same word repeated over and over in her mind: war.
As they ran, Madison gripped Kristen’s arm tight. They were in this together, and Kristen was glad not to be alone. Madison was strong and fast, and Kristen could barely keep up.
In the middle of the swarming intersection, a hulking black-and-green camouflaged army tank was stationed in the shadows below a set of drooping unpowered traffic lights. The austere tank contrasted starkly with the rest of the posh storefronts. Around the tank, a ring of indomitable Marines was stationed at attention, all shouldering enormous black assault rifles. The guns were pointed outward at the stampede. The men looked ready to fire upon the pressing riot at the slightest provocation. Standing on the hood of the armored vehicle, a soldier with black boots was shouting into a megaphone. You could see the panic in his eyes: he had prepared himself to serve in distant lands, not in the beating heart of America.
“The bridges on the east side of the city have been demolished! Don’t try to evacuate east! I repeat, do not try to evacuate over the East River.”
Kristen and Madison slowed to a jog to listen to the man. The magnified voice barely carried over the uproar around them. He waved his arm to his right, Kristen’s left.
“Make your way to the west side of Manhattan. The Holland and Lincoln tunnels are still operational! There is an evacuation effort underway across the Hudson! Shelters are being erected along the New Jersey side of the river. Please remain calm! But get to the Hudson and out of the city as quickly as possible!”
“Let’s go!” Madison shouted and made to turn west up the clogged street.
“Wait!” Kristen called, and she forced her way through a few shoulders to get closer to the Marines. She waved to them vigorously as she shoved people out of the way.
“I need to talk with you!” Kristen screamed, her voice scarcely audible amid the riot.
The soldier standing mere feet in front of her made no acknowledgement of her presence. He stared coldly past her, the barrel of his gun pointing directly at the chest level of the mob, at Kristen.
“For god’s sake, look at me! I know what they are!” Kristen raised an arm and pointed a finger to the sky and the gaping hole upon the top floors of the leaning skyscraper looming overhead.
The soldiers could have passed for statues. They stared blankly down the sights of their guns.
“Where is General Redford?” Kristen shouted. “I need to speak with someone who is in command here! Hello?”
Madison caught up to her and attempted to pull her back by the shoulder. Kristen forcefully shrugged off her grip and stepped forward furiously. “This is too important!
One of you needs to be a responsible human for one goddamn second and listen to me! I have in my possession a technology of theirs that needs to be taken to safety! Listen to me!”
“Miss, step back right now!” the man with the megaphone roared down at Kristen.
“I need to speak to someone in charge,” Kristen shouted. “Please! I have a sample of their DNA—the DNA of the people who attacked Chicago and are in New York now!”
“Step back!” the man roared into the megaphone.
“No!”
“Come on, Kristen.” Madison pulled again at her shoulder, but K
risten held her ground.
“No! I have in my possession their complete intact genetic code! It has to be taken to safety out of the city!”
The soldier with the megaphone was not having it, and he glared down at Kristen with obvious disbelief. He raised the megaphone to his mouth and was about to assert a threat, when an enormous oak desk fell from the tenebrous sky and landed directly on the shoulder blades of one of the Marines standing in the circle. The soldier’s body crumpled to nothing in an instant, and the heavy desk burst into a few dozen fragments and splinters against the hard street. There was a subdued moment as all the bystanders gawked at the space where the man had been standing a moment before. Kristen and everyone around her slowly raised their heads into the opaque and shadowy sky.
The immense skyscraper leaned down upon them like a tremendous tree about to fall with a catastrophic crash. The darkened windows of the tower hung over the intersection and depicted a grand portrait-like reflection of the riotous avenue. It was a stunning refracted mirror image of the insanity, like a nightmarish portrait in a still lake. All along the length and width of the great structure, bits of office furniture slid across uneven floors and crashed through the thick panes of glass, falling freely into the crowd in which Kristen stood. The skyscraper trembled and hitched. Shattered glass and bits of the superstructure fell through the open air, and iron supports shrieked deafeningly. The structure had transformed into a horrendous monster, ready to ravenously devour them all.
The building was going to collapse any second.
Immediately there were no words, save rasping screams. The reaction was animalistic: a herd of prey running from a gargantuan primordial predator. Kristen pulled her gaze away from the dreamlike overhead reflection. Madison stood in a stunned silence as she stared up the length of the collapsing skyscraper. Reaching out, Kristen pulled her by the shoulder and Madison snapped back into reality. Kristen looked to the Marines, perhaps to jump aboard their tank, but they had all thrown their duty aside and joined the growing charge westward up the confined street. Kristen felt her own legs suddenly thrust forward, and she followed the fleeing crowd in a dead sprint, her backpack jostling against her shoulders.
Adrenaline pounded through her arms and legs. Kristen ran faster than her feet had ever taken her; she ran for her life. All around her people fell and stumbled, instantly disappearing underfoot. Side by side, Kristen and Madison hurdled over obstructions and clawed on all fours over the abandoned cars and taxis, disregarding the bruises and deep gashes they got on their way.
BOOOM!
The collapsing skyscraper roared at Kristen’s heels, rumbling through the pavement and sending reverberations up through her knees. She could not comprehend how many people were about to die—including herself. As the street lurched and cracked beneath her rushing feet, Kristen turned her head and raised her eyes to catch a glimpse of the impending avalanche of cement and steel. The roof’s spire was caving downward upon itself. The windows along the top floors shattered in unison, exploding outward in great waves.
In her momentary distraction, Kristen’s ankle caught the curb and she fell forward, crashing onto the sidewalk and skinning her palms. Heavy feet kicked out and stomped on her arms and legs as the multitude sprinted past. A familiar hand reached down to Kristen and she desperately grasped hold of it as she raised her other arm to shield her face against an incoming boot. Madison pulled Kristen upright with all her strength just as a heavyset man collided into both of them. Kristen and Madison were sent heaving to the side. Kristen’s back came to a sliding stop on the hood of a car. All she could do was simply stare in resignation at the impending doom. It was too late, and happening too fast; she was about to die. The building was collapsing directly onto her.
Her thoughts blurred into an obscure mosaic of emotions as her world untethered itself from all the things she had once believed. She was scared and fearful for everyone around her, so soon to depart the things they loved. But mostly Kristen felt alone. She wanted to bury her face against someone and give up, to entirely surrender, if only to find some small sanctuary as she died. A heartrending longing to be with Ryan in some faraway place surfaced deep within her. Kristen hoped in that moment he had somehow managed to escape.
The looming skyscraper encompassed her entire vision. One by one, the bottom floors began to flatten and disintegrate with cataclysmic booms. Kristen’s body bounced off of the hood of the car from the tremors. A tsunami of cement dust erupted from the base of the building, and then a massive cracking rupture splintered down the center of the entire superstructure. For a fraction of a second Kristen watched the main section of the skyscraper lose its reinforcement and fall inward as if imploding. Then a wave of gray-black dust and ash detonated downward like a pyroclastic volcano eruption. The cloud of destruction thundered and discharged down upon her. Kristen screamed in terror and sucked in one last breath while covering her face from the thick noxious flow as it inundated her world. She shut her eyes tight and held her breath as the powerful rush of poisonous dust blew past her skin and buffeted her hair.
The dense wave of death consumed her. Kristen rolled and writhed as specks of cement pelted and stung her body. In her blind torment she felt her body slip off the hood and land hard on the pavement. Her vision became a shifting black kaleidoscope from the lack of oxygen, and her chest heaved and burned for air. She held her breath with all her might. The thick dust accumulated on her firmly shut eyelashes and eyebrows like snow. At last, Kristen could stand it no more, and her body forced her to take a gulp of the toxic air. She opened her mouth and, by no will of her own, sucked in a deep inhalation. The breath sent biting particles to the depths of her lungs. It felt as though she had been pepper sprayed. She hacked and coughed and violently gagged in an attempt to expel the awful toxins. Nestled in her position between two cars, Kristen felt as though she were trapped in a trench being bombarded with mustard gas.
She braced herself.
But almost at once she felt the dust cloud dissipating rather than thickening. Her coughing was lessening in severity, and the burning in her throat was calming. The dust was not drowning her. She did not hear what she expected—the impact of the plummeting skyscraper parts against the ground. Kristen flopped onto her back on the ash-covered pavement and shook the accumulation from her face, her eyelids still locked tight. Rubbing her eyes and wiping off the cement dust and plaster before opening them blearily, she stared in wonder all around her. A pall of dust blotted out everything. She looked upward into a swirling blizzard of dark gray snow. A blanket of the sawdust-like material covered her sneakers to her head, along with every other surface of the street. But it was not the layer of ashy dust, or Madison recovering beside her that caught Kristen’s attention.
They were still in the shadow of the skyscraper.
Through the diminishing storm of dust, Kristen could clearly see that the top of the tower had collapsed inward fifteen or twenty floors. The tiered apex of the building was nowhere to be seen. The bottom portion of the skyscraper was gone, disintegrated into nothing. Kristen realized it had been relocated to everywhere around her, pulverized to ruin. Yet despite the structural damage, the vast majority of the building stood prominently intact. Kristen gaped in confusion at the gigantic standing facade. It held true with no foundation and no supports, as though it were floating in space.
“Kristen,” Madison’s voice was hoarse.
Kristen breathlessly turned to her. Madison was also covered in the dust. Around the two of them, hundreds of other powder-covered people also stared up at the building.
“Look,” Madison said.
Kristen matched Madison’s gaze, and looked halfway up the length of the broad structure. There, clearly evident in the jumble of huge gnarled steel garters and rivets was a man. Impossibly bent iron supports bent and stacked atop his shoulders like a car wrapped around a tree. The man was holding the entire skyscraper—and all of their lives—on his shoulders. It was the most alien
and impossible sight Kristen had ever imagined. Her chin trembled, and she began to cry at the overwhelming display of strength. Vengelis was right; Kristen had not witnessed their true power. There was no refuting it to the hushed and awed crowd of pale faces surrounding Kristen and staring upward; they were in the presence of a god.
With great effort, Kristen drew her welling gaze from the unreal vision.
“Madison!”
“Y-yes,” Madison was transfixed with the sight above them.
Kristen pulled at Madison’s shoulder. “We need to go, now!”
Madison nodded, drew her gaze away from the grand vision, and together they began running westward through the dust cloud and away from the balancing skyscraper.
Chapter Forty-One
Vengelis
Vengelis stared dazedly at the backside of Gravitas as he soared northward, his tattered Imperial First Class armor growing smaller in the distance and finally disappearing into the cloud of doom that was billowing from the falling skyscraper. Suddenly alone in the shadow of the afternoon, Vengelis slumped against the side of the broken window and watched an unhinged billboard sway back and forth across the avenue. He tried to compose his body and his mind but found himself unable. His broken ribs made even breathing a painstaking struggle, and when he tried to make a fist, he realized his forearm and most of his knuckles were broken.
Strange calamitous noises echoed across the city from the falling skyscraper, and a developing dark cloud expelled from the streets around its base. Gravitas was holding up the building, Vengelis had no doubt about it. It was an unspeakable insult. Gravitas had turned his back on him, as though he were no longer even a threat. Bitter hate brewed in Vengelis’s chest. It was Gravitas’s fault the skyscraper was in danger of collapsing at all. Inflicting damage to the buildings of New York had never been a part of his plan. Gravitas’s rashness was to blame for the failing skyscraper, and yet here he was acting as though he were the decent and respectable one between the two of them. Vengelis could not believe how much he hated the Nerols, father and son both.