Sunfail

by Steven Savile

  As she turned back toward the door, she heard a faint scuff.

  Cabrakan had caught up with her.

  Sophie flattened herself against the wall so her shadow wouldn’t reach the door. She’d sheathed the knife when she’d gone for the go bag. Close quarters a knife was better than a gun, though she had no intention of sticking around to fight.

  One of the things that had drawn her to this apartment was the way it invited the warm sunlight in through the glass double doors that dominated the lounge’s outer wall. The doors led out onto a small balcony, just big enough for a tiny round table and two folding chairs surrounded by a cluster of bright potted plants. In nice weather it was somewhere to relax, sip strong black coffee, and eat a pastry from the shop across the street while she watched the people down below. Today it was her way out.

  She opened the doors, looking back over her shoulder as she stepped out. This was going to be fun.

  Without thinking about what she was doing, Sophie gathered herself and leaped from the balcony. Misjudge it by a couple of inches and it was suicide.

  She threw herself to the left and for one sickening second thought she was going to miss the top of the iron rails of her neighbor’s balcony and cannon back off them. She slammed into the rusty iron, kicking out and scrabbling for purchase fifty feet above the Parisian walkway.

  For another long sickening second she thought her boots wouldn’t find anything to grip onto, then the steel toecap caught between two of the railings and gave her just enough traction to haul herself up. She folded over the railings and dropped down onto the worn tiles of the balcony.

  Behind her, she heard the impact of her apartment door being thrown open, hard.

  Her apartment was in the middle of the building. The balcony ran around the entire span of the apartment, giving it a beautiful double-aspect. It also meant that in five steps Sophie was out of sight—unless they had eyes below.

  She grabbed the wrought-iron railing and swung herself over the edge, grasping the rails with her other hand as she lowered herself. The iron bars had vertical beams for hanging lanterns and clinging vines. Those beams were as good as a ladder down to the balcony below. The decorative curls of the wrought iron made easy hand- and footholds.

  Sophie descended quickly, jumping the last few feet to the ground. Looking back up, she saw the assassin’s dark figure leaning over her balcony, scanning the streets. She couldn’t make out any signal between Cabrakan and someone down on the ground, meaning he was almost certainly alone. That was all that mattered. She ran for the Vélib’ rack, intending to grab another bike and lose herself in the crowds on the Boulevard de Magenta, but stopped short.

  There was a motorbike parked outside her apartment building, a beautiful beast of red and chrome: a classic Swiss Egli-Vincent. It hadn’t been there when she’d gone inside. No one in her building owned one.

  It was the assassin’s.

  Never one to look a gift horse in the burning chrome, Sophie stepped up to the bike. It was an Egli-Vincent, but it was brand new, not just beautifully maintained. It looked exactly like the original model, complete with analog gauges. No circuitry.

  Throwing her leg over the chassis, she straddled the machine. The ignition key was missing, but that wasn’t a problem. It took her half a second to pull the multitool from the outside pocket of her bag and jab the narrow screwdriver blade into the ignition. With a twist the makeshift key worked just fine.

  A tug on the throttle, and the motorcycle’s engine roared to life beneath her. Sophie flipped up the kickstand, gave the bike some gas, and then she was gone, weaving through the logjam of unmoving traffic. She saw men in the cars, trying to make sense of why they weren’t moving.

  She started humming, It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine) . . .

  And it was. It really was.

  Chapter Seven

  JAKE COULDN’T FIND THE MEN IN THE CROWD.

  Out in the open, night-vision goggles gone, the self-proclaimed warriors blended in. That was the trick: looking like anyone meant you looked like everyone. It was midmorning but the winter sun offered no warmth. The cold hit him hard and fast with its punishing kiss. His breath corkscrewed in front of his face.

  He gave up and walked away from the dead square and the milling people before the shouting died down.

  He tried calling in again, but his radio was dead. All he heard was cold empty static.

  He listened to it for longer than was healthy, trying to make out anything in the white noise, a voice, a hint, a shred of hope. There was nothing.

  A couple of cops tried to maintain some semblance of order, barking out commands, telling people to back off, to go home. It was the same message over and over. He heard it clearly as he approached. They didn’t know what was going on either. The best course of action was simply to stay safe, go home, batten down the hatches, and wait it out. Some even listened.

  Jake walked, trying to take it all in.

  The city was strange. He hardly recognized it. So much had changed in the few months since the dogs went feral and turned the island into Dogland. Something very fucking weird was going on. Yes, it was still his city, but for all it had been battered by storms and the tremors and everything else, it had changed more starkly in the last few hours than all of those weeks combined. He wasn’t a superstitious guy, not really, he had enough trouble dealing with real-world prejudices in a time when being black meant shit like Stand your ground! could get a brother killed and fear could see a six-year-old girl Tasered by trigger-happy cops. Sure, life wasn’t all Driving Miss Daisy, Roots, and My name is Kunta Kinte. Not while rappers like Jay-Z and Kanye hooked up with all that celebrity pussy and gave the average black kid in America something to aspire to: being a fucking Kardashian. Talk about the ninth circle of hell.

  Somewhere behind him, he heard a busker singing the ghetto anthem “Hard Knock Life,” and couldn’t help but smile. You could turn the lights out and the world on its head, but some aspects of the city would never change. The guy was banging out the rhythms on an upturned bucket.

  Everywhere there should have been a spark of power there was nothing. It didn’t take a genius to realize something had taken out the electronics, transforming New Yorkers into a shuffling horde cut off from the constant stream of life and social media that was their lifeblood.

  The cell towers were down.

  But it was more than just that.

  The traffic lights were dead. Radios dead. The bank of TVs in the Best Buy’s windows, dead.

  It was the same with the cars. They were all stopped along the streets, cars and buses and even motorcycles. He saw drivers pounding on the wheel like they were trying to give their vehicles CPR even as they flatlined. He saw men hunched over engines, trying to make sense of what wasn’t going on under the hood.

  Most of the abandoned cars were newer makes and models, all of them with onboard computers and electronic ignitions. He’d seen an ancient Ford Torino, brown as dirt and twice as battered, that was boxed in by dead engines, its own still rumbling even if it couldn’t go anywhere.

  He saw a couple of bike messengers weaving through the congestion, heads down, pedaling hard. They rode with the same death wish they’d always ridden with, but without the fear of fast-moving traffic and distracted drivers to slow them down.

  Jake saw an old man who looked dead on the side of the road. He’d simply fallen where he stood. Jake’s first thought was that his pacemaker had failed along with all the other electronics in the city. A woman was on her knees beside him, pushing at his chest. She looked up at Jake with tears in her eyes.

  There was nothing he could do, so he kept on walking. No one else stopped to help her.

  There were more than eight million people in the city. Many thousands kept alive by pacemakers regulating their heartbeat. He didn’t want to imagine how many times this scene was being played out across Manhattan.

  The shuffling, disconnected zombie horde made
walking difficult, though Jake wasn’t in a hurry. He was walking without real purpose. He’d given up on the idea of heading out to Fort Hamilton. Without the subway running it would take hours to get out there and there was nothing he could do. He knew the protocols. Hamilton would be cordoned off while they waited for the military to send reinforcements—and that would be a serious operation. They couldn’t just drop-ship troops in if the blackout was down to an EMP—electromagnetic pulse—or something like that. Maybe by sailboat, or a diesel engine, something without any computer parts or circuits driving it. The military were smart; they would find a way. It would only be a matter of time.

  He was young. He was strong. Military training. There was stuff he could do here before panic genuinely took hold. The longer the blackout, the worse it was going to get. He knew that much.

  In the perpetual quest for status, the brightest, the shiniest, and the newest, New Yorkers had bought themselves into helplessness.

  Jake was still thinking about the irony of it all as he reached a break in the buildings to his left. He glanced around, surprised to discover an entire block that was nothing but steps and benches and a few scattered trees. He recognized it, but didn’t understand how he’d wound up all the way down by Zuccotti Park. The natives still crowded the benches, but there were other groups in the park this afternoon, just as there had been for weeks now, people gathered together for comfort and support.

  He spotted one cluster with their heads bowed and hands linked. The sight both warmed and disgusted him. A prayer group? Now? What the fuck did they think was going to happen? Maybe their god would give them a holy miracle to make everything all right? Well, God had given them light once before, Jake figured bleakly, so maybe he’d turn the lights back on.

  As he stood in judgment over them, Jake noticed a man walking down the opposite side of Trinity Place, moving parallel to him. On a normal day he wouldn’t have paid him the slightest attention, even though the guy moved with real purpose. But all New Yorkers moved with real purpose; it was only the tourists who walked with their heads up, looking around, trying to take it all in before someone lifted their money roll in a big old fuck you from the Big Apple.

  The walker took long, solid strides, eyes focused straight ahead. He didn’t deviate from his path once in the minute that Jake watched him, causing people to get out of his way. That single-mindedness was quintessentially New York. But today he was the only person Jake had seen who looked like he knew where he was going, and that included the cops he’d come across trying to keep order.

  That made the guy interesting.

  Jake wanted to know what the guy was up to. He followed him, keeping his distance as the walker headed down Trinity Place. He stayed on the opposite side of the street.

  The guy was shorter than Jake, but a bull of a man, dressed in faded black jeans and a black leather jacket. Jake checked out his shoes. They were Timberlands or a generic copy, solid and practical, common enough not to draw attention but comfortable enough for real use.

  They passed under the footbridge to Trinity Church. Then the guy changed tack, crossing the street toward Jake.

  He thought about slowing his pace, but that would only make it obvious he was tailing the guy, so instead he stretched his stride. It was just as easy to follow someone from the front if you knew what you were doing. It was a basic maneuver, but surprisingly effective because most people don’t pick up on it.

  The entrance to the Rector Street R stop was right in front of him. Jake darted down the steps, disappearing into the subway.

  Like most stations, Rector Street had two separate entrances, both on the same side of the street, a few dozen feet apart and facing in opposite directions. Jake didn’t venture down into the station proper—he crossed the landing and emerged from the other side, on the corner of Trinity Place and Rector Street.

  He unclipped his radio from his safety vest, pulled the orange top over his head, rolled it up, and shoved it in a trash can along with his tool belt. It was a small change, but a very visual one, hopefully enough to throw him off if the guy hadn’t gotten a close look at his face.

  Jake emerged as the man cut left on Rector.

  Rector dead-ended at Broadway, offering a fork in the road. He chose left. At the next corner, he turned right onto Wall Street. Cement pylons meant the street was closed to cars. Not that there were any trying to get in.

  The man headed straight down the center of the street, walking along the white line.

  Jake stayed off to one side, hugging the Bank of New York’s towering walls, and turned again, this time going left.

  The walker slowed as he rounded the corner, then stopped.

  Jake lingered half a block back. He could observe the man freely now.

  The Federal Hall building was across the street, but the guy was looking down Broad Street at a massive white stone building. The structure had enormous columns running from the middle of the third floor up to an impressive cornice. Stone rails ringed the building in place of gutters. Below the columns was a row of balconies brooding over wide double doors. To the side of them, a single set of glass double doors with golden latticework above them and a black band that would normally scroll company abbreviations and stock prices over and over until they made no sense to the common man.

  The New York Stock Exchange.

  It was one of the many iconic buildings in Manhattan, and in the age of the psychopath, the very heart of the city. Even one of the most powerful financial centers in the world wasn’t immune to the blackout. Though of course it had generators and contingencies, it couldn’t be allowed to go offline.

  A group of men filed in through that solitary set of glass doors. They weren’t dressed like stockbrokers.

  Their faces were covered and they moved with the grim efficiency of military men, at pace, in tight formation.

  The fuck?

  One guy held the door. He was the lookout, scanning the street for signs of trouble. Trouble walked toward him in the form of the stranger Jake had been tailing.

  The guy stepped back into the shadows and watched.

  Jake tried to process what he was seeing. The walker hadn’t come down to rendezvous with the crew, but he clearly knew they would be there. That posed its own set of questions, not least of which was still his identity: Who was he? FBI? Homeland Security? If he was either, he was here without backup. He was armed, though. Jake could make out the telltale bulge of a holstered gun at the small of his back. The leather jacket did a good job concealing it if you didn’t know what you were looking for. Jake did; his training ran deep.

  He heard the gunshots before the last member of the group stepped inside, letting the door swing shut after him.

  The walker rushed out of the shadows, catching the door before it fully closed.

  Jake was already moving. He wasn’t thinking, it was all instinct. Once a warrior . . .

  He stepped through into total darkness, with no idea what he was getting himself into.

  Chapter Eight

  A FEW HOURS AGO THE NYSE’S LABYRINTHINE CORRIDORS were bright, garishly lit by the sleek fluorescent panels running along the wall’s length.

  Now everything beyond the door was pitch black.

  One wall was tiled while the other was mirrored. He only knew that because he’d seen through the open door. With the outside world locked away, he might as well have stepped through into nothing.

  Supposedly the loss of one sense would heighten the remaining ones, but that was bullshit. The darkness just meant he heard the blood of his pulse in his ears louder, not that he was more attuned to the sounds of the dark.

  Soft footsteps echoed up ahead. Jake could just make out the slumped shadows of dead guards. He knelt to check for a pulse: nothing. Same at the second and the third. No survivors. He picked a path through the dead.

  Jake closed his eyes, counting through eleven Mississippis, then blinked and started after the footfalls. It wasn’t foolproof, but the short co
unt had given his eyes a few more precious seconds to adjust to the dark. Not that he wanted to see more than he already could. There was a faint light at his back that added definition to it now.

  He kept one hand on the wall and moved forward until he reached a glass door. It opened with the slightest touch, which felt inherently wrong. Security should have been airtight. Without power, though, and without the computer systems online, nothing was working. And that meant there was nothing to stop him from walking right down to the trading floor. Not that anyone was trading.

  The place was a mausoleum to money. Jake crept forward until he reached a pair of steps. Beyond them, the hallway split, running left and right to ring the floor.

  He peered down the left-side passage. He saw nothing as it disappeared into absolute darkness. To the right, though, he caught the tiniest glint of something shifting through the blackness of the corridor. He tried to focus on the shape as it resolved into the shadow of a man. Ahead of both of them came the sudden, shocking detonation of concussion grenades. There was no alarm—which meant they had to be inside the system as well as the building. This was rapidly escalating from really bad to a whole new plane of existential torment.

  Jake didn’t move. Fumbling in the dark was going to make noise, and even after the concussion grenades, noise was going to bring trouble. The only smart thing to do was turn around and get the fuck out of there. But the smart choice was a coward’s choice. He wasn’t a coward. He could handle himself, even if the only thing he had in common with any of the action heroes of the world was that he was expendable. He wasn’t walking away, not now. Not ever. The fact that he was a black man breaking into the still heart of capitalism didn’t pass him by either. His would be an easy death to explain on the evening news if things went south.

  His one advantage was that no one was expecting him to crash the party. His only tool, the mini-Maglite, wasn’t the kind of thing he could use to break a few skulls, and lighting up the trading floor wasn’t an option. This was an advance recon. Simple as that. Do not engage the enemy, soldier.