by Bolz, Stefan
Kasey and Aarika looked at each other.
“I talked to some guys down the street and they said they were blind too.” He started to cry again. “I hope the plane was on the ground. I really hope the plane was on the ground,” he sobbed.
“Where do you live?” Kasey asked.
“Oakdale. We just bought a house there two months ago. With Megan’s new job and all.”
“I can drive you there,” Kasey said.
“Really?”
“But I have to… do something first.”
An ambulance drove past the gas station at high speed. The blue and red lights reflected off the shattered glass on the floor. When nobody spoke, Kasey continued. “A friend of mine… I have to help him. He might be in one of the empty warehouses on Corbin Avenue.”
“In Bay Shore?”
“Yeah. Do you know it?”
“I grew up there.”
“We should leave,” Aarika said. He must have noticed Kasey’s expression. “I am coming with.”
“Where?” she asked.
“Anywhere. I do not think it’s safe around here. At least not anymore. And now that the window is smashed in, there will be more… looters.” He looked at the guy.
“Sorry,” the guy said.
“Let’s take what we need and get out of here. Aarika is right,” Kasey said.
“I’ve got batteries and cigarettes,” the guy replied. A fleeting smile crossed his face. “I stopped smoking a few months ago but I sure could use one now.”
Aarika opened the register with the push of a button.
“Too soon?” he said while looking at the guy. He took out the cash and stuffed it into his jeans pocket. “You can take those baskets and fill them with… whatever you want.”
Kasey took a few one-gallon water containers and put them on the counter. Then she put several protein bars into the basket.
“Where do you have peroxide?”
“Aisle three. Toward the end.”
Kasey grabbed a bottle of peroxide and two first-aid kits. The sound of screeching tires reached her at almost the same time as the sound of the crash.
“Somebody hit one of the gas pumps!” Aarika shouted.
“My car’s out back!” Kasey said. The one remaining headlight on the truck cast eerie shadows on their faces as Kasey, Aarika and the guy left the store through the back door. They got into the Jeep and Kasey started it. The sharp smell of gasoline filled the air.
“It’s gonna blow!” the guy said. “It’s gonna blow up!”
Kasey steered the Jeep around the building and to the front. The truck had mowed down the gas pump and was now piled on top of it. A man climbed out of the driver’s door, his face bloody from the impact of the air bag. He watched the Jeep pass them. Gasoline was pouring out of the clipped hose. Kasey could see the pain and terror in his face as he lit a Zippo.
“Shit!” Aarika yelled.
Kasey pushed the pedal down and the Jeep accelerated up the road. She could see the man through the rearview mirror. He was watching them still as he dropped the lighter and the gas pumps exploded in a gigantic fireball.
Kasey stopped the car a few blocks up. She didn’t pull over, she simply stopped in the middle of the street. If there was a threshold for her, for her ability to cope, she had reached it. Of all the horrors Kasey had witnessed today, the sheer hopelessness in the man’s expression brought it from a dream-like state to the here and now — the reality of it all. Something broke inside her; something precious and filled with the memories of carefree days in the sun. The seemingly endless possibility of her childhood, her youth, and her teenage years, permeated with the hope for a bright future — all of it broke. And as much as she tried to hold on to it, she could not get it back. It slipped away from her and all she could do was watch it go.
“You okay?” Aarika asked.
Kasey shook her head no.
“Is there something I can do? To make you feel better?”
She shook her head again.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe a power bar. Would you like a power bar? I’ve got peanut butter crunch and chocolate chip cookie dough.”
“I could use one of those,” the guy said from the back seat.
“Here,” Aarika handed him one. “There is more where this came from.”
“Thanks, man!” the guy replied.
“What’s your name?” Aarika asked.
“Blair,” the guy said.
“Blair? Isn’t that a girl’s name?”
“No it’s not a girl’s name. What’s your name?”
“Aarika.”
“Aarika?”
“No comments please.”
“Why, what does it mean?”
“It means admired for looks.”
Kasey smiled. She couldn’t help it. “I’d love to have one,” she said. “A power bar.”
Aarika handed her one. “You look as if you like cookie dough.”
“I do. Thanks.”
Kasey took a bite from the bar. The taste had something grounding to it, something familiar.
“Can I ask you something?” Aarika said.
“Sure.”
“What the hell happened in your car?”
Kasey took another bite, mostly because she wanted to keep the fleeting feeling of normalcy for a while longer. “The police officer who drove it got shot in here.”
“Shit,” Blair said after a moment of silence.
“Shit,” Aarika said, almost at the same time. “You mean the stuff on the seat and the windows is…”
“Most likely brain. Some skin and blood.”
“Shit,” Blair repeated.
“Shit,” Aarika said. “What now?”
“We have to get Jack. At least try to… somehow... get close to him.”
“Let me guess,” Blair said. “The same people who shot the cop have him.”
“I guess so.”
“What do you wanna do?”
“I have no idea.”
“I think we should scope it out,” Aarika said.
“Like how?” Blair asked. He took another bite of his power bar.
“We’ll park a few blocks away and go there, on foot, to see what is going on. It is all dark so nobody is going to see us.”
“They were able to see,” Kasey said.
“What do you mean?” Blair asked.
“They were able to see during the blindness.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, but when I was on the parkway, I was attacked by several of them. They knew where I was. They walked right to my car and pulled me out. They saw me.”
“You think those were the same people?”
“I don’t know.”
“So, we can see now too, which means we’re even,” Aarika said.
“Except for the sniper rifle they used to take out the cop and someone who can handle that kind of a weapon,” Blair replied. “And probably at least a half dozen more.”
“We should use the side roads,” Blair continued.
For a moment, Kasey looked at him. His almost bald head was still red. He was sweating profusely. Aarika seemed cheerful. Relatively speaking.
“You don’t have to come with me,” she said. “I can’t ask you to… come with me. Blair, if you want, I’ll get you to your car right now. It’s not that far. And Aarika, I’ll get you—”
“I am coming with you!” Aarika said. “I guess I lost my job as of today and I don’t know if the University is going to open anytime soon. I’ve got a room in a four-bedroom student rental in Garden City. I doubt we will be able to get there. Also, you need someone to take care of you. I’m almost certain you haven’t had enough water to drink today. Have you?”
“No.”
“You see! Dehydration is much more serious than you can possibly understand.” Aarika handed her one of the one-gallon containers.
“I… can’t make it to JFK,” Blair said quietly. “Even if I tried. If it’s like this he
re, I can only imagine what happened at the airport.”
From afar, a single headlight approached. It came closer fast. Then there were two. A third one dropped in and out of view.
“Motorcycles?” Aarika said.
“We should get off the main roads,” Blair replied.
Kasey drove the Jeep into the next side road.
“Turn the lights off,” Blair said.
Kasey pulled the car to the side of the road and turned it off. The distant sound rolled in like approaching thunder. They came from the west. A few moments later, the bikes passed the street one by one.
“Why are there so many?” Aarika asked.
“I don’t know,” Blair answered. “The better question is where are they coming from?”
“I’ve counted seventeen so far.”
While both watched the passing bikes through the rear window, Kasey noticed the ambulance in front of them. It was out of place, parked at an odd angle halfway up on someone’s lawn. She heard a muffled scream but couldn’t identify it at first.
“Did you hear that?” she asked. She had to speak up against the cacophonous sound of the bikes. Then the last one passed and the noise dissipated.
“Forty-four. I counted forty-four,” Aarika said.
“At least one guy had a twelve-gauge,” Blair said.
“Shhh, listen,” Kasey said.
Another muffled scream. This time it was followed by a banging sound.
“There’s someone in the ambulance,” Aarika said.
“I thought so too,” Kasey replied.
She opened the driver’s door.
“What are you doing?” Blair asked.
“I wanna take a look. See what’s going on.” For a moment, based on his expression, she was sure he’d try to talk her out of it.
“Shouldn’t we… all go?” he said.
“Yeah,” Aarika added.
“Sure,” she said. She had been by herself too long.
They climbed out of the Jeep. Kasey walked toward the ambulance and before Aarika and Blair could voice their opinion to not do that, she opened the door.
Jennifer Wang grew up in a trailer park in River Head. Her mother died of a brain tumor when she was two. Her father remarried a year later. His new wife had three children of her own — all boys who were much older than Jennifer. One day, the police came to their house and arrested her father. She found out much later that he was a cocaine dealer. She was seven at the time. There were prison visits for a year that ended abruptly when her stepmom brought another guy to their house one night and Jennifer told her dad about it. From that moment on, life for her was hell.
She ran away when she was fourteen and again when she was fifteen. Both times she got picked up by the police several towns over, sleeping in cars that she’d broken into. The day of her high school graduation, she took a bus to Long Island City and walked into the Armed Forces Recruitment Center to enlist in the Marines. She knew deep down that this was the only choice she had. She needed to get away, start fresh, become someone other than who she grew up to be.
Two months later, she stepped onto the yellow footprints of Parris Island in North Carolina. She finished boot camp at the top of her class thirteen weeks later and experienced the scariest day of her life when, at the Eagle, Globe and Anchor emblem ceremony, her Staff Sergeant approached her.
“Wang,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jennifer whispered back.
They had never before spoken quietly to each other at boot camp.
“Look at me.”
It was very difficult for Jennifer to meet her Staff Sergeant’s eyes. For three months, she had been trained never to look directly at her drill instructor. When she did, her Sergeant placed the Eagle, Globe and Anchor emblem into her left hand, while firmly shaking her right saying, “You’ve earned this, marine.”
Later on, even the possibility of losing her life in Afghanistan had less of an emotional impact than that day.
During her second tour, after her unit barely escaped an insurgent attack and two of her men were severely wounded, she realized that she wanted to be a doctor. When she went back home — she was enlisted to the 6th Communications Battalion out of Brooklyn — she applied to Stony Brook School of Medicine and was honorably discharged from the Navy as a Sergeant with a bachelor’s degree. From there, she went on to medical school.
On Saturday morning, at the very moment when Kasey woke up on the beach with Jack, Jennifer had begun her shift at South Side Hospital in Bay Shore. She was in her third year of med school and scheduled to ride along on one of the ambulances that day as part of her training. The first call came at 7:07. An accident on Ocean Parkway. A tractor-trailer had smashed into a parked car. When Jennifer arrived at the scene, together with her two EMT’s, she saw two kids jump into a blue Jeep, an older model, leave the scene of the accident and speed eastbound toward Robert Moses Causeway.
The driver of the truck was unconscious and had lost a lot of blood but someone, most likely the two kids who had called in the accident, had already removed the windshield, which had saved the fire department valuable minutes, enough for them to get him out and save his life. On their way back to the hospital, they witnessed two more accidents but couldn’t stop, as they had to get the truck driver to the OR as soon as possible.
Nothing, not her training as a Marine, not the two tours in Afghanistan, or the subsequent medical education she’d received, could have prepared her for what she’d experience during the eighteen hours after that call. For her, the blindness was complete. There were memory lapses she couldn’t explain. Only much later would she be able to fill in the gaps. It was hard to tell whether the lapses were caused by the blow to the head or if they had another reason altogether. For some of the time she drifted in and out of consciousness, unable to stay awake for more than a few minutes.
Jennifer Wang regained consciousness when she heard the sound of motorcycles passing by in the distance. And for an instant, a terrible foreboding gripped her heart and she knew that this, all of this, was merely the beginning. Then the back door of the ambulance opened and a girl with a baseball bat in one hand and a gun in the other looked at her and said:
“Shit! Help me get her out!”
Sunday, 02:48 a.m. to 3:25 a.m.
Kasey opened the second door and climbed inside. The woman lay on her side next to the door. Her mouth was covered with tape, her hands and feet were tied. There was dried blood on the side of her head.
“My name is Kasey Byrne. I’m not going to hurt you,” Kasey said when she approached. She knelt in front of the woman and gently pulled the tape from her mouth. “I’m gonna cut the ties. Somebody have a knife?”
Blair handed her his souvenir knife. She freed the woman’s wrists and feet. The woman moaned in pain when she tried to bring her arms forward.
“What happened to you?” Kasey asked.
“I can’t remember.”
“How long have you been in here?”
“What day is this?”
“Sunday morning,” Kasey said. “About 3 a.m.”
“All I remember is that we answered a call for a victim of DV and when we got there, the woman was dead. The husband had killed her. Beat her to death. He was also dead. Killed himself. The cops weren’t there when we arrived. They’re usually first at the scene.”
The woman sat up.
“You want water?” Aarika said.
“Please.”
She drank for a long time. In the distance, Kasey could still hear the motorcycles. For a moment she wasn’t sure if they were moving away or coming back toward them.
“What happened next?” she asked.
“The TV was on in the apartment. The two EMT’s I was riding with were watching and there was something about a slaughter of dolphins up and down the coast. And then one of the EMT’s went crazy all of a sudden, cursing at us. Then I blacked out. I woke up a few minutes ago. Can’t remember... It was dark most of the time.”
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“You a doctor?” Blair asked.
“I’m in med school. Can you see if you can find some ibuprofen in there? I also need to take a look at the wound on my head. Someone must’ve hit me.”
“There’s a lot of dried blood but it’s not bleeding right now,” Kasey said.
The woman nodded, holding her head in pain. The sound of the motorcycle came closer. When she saw the headlight on Deer Park Avenue through the open door of the ambulance, she knew they were in trouble.
“Come inside. Close the door,” she said. “Hurry!”
Aarika and Blair climbed in and she shut the door.
“What is it?” Aarika asked.
“One of the bikers.”
They all heard it now. The low gurgling noise of the two-cylinder engine crept closer until the bike stopped next to the ambulance. They couldn’t see it. The two rectangular windows faced the right side of the street, not the left.
“Shit,” Aarika whispered.
Kasey’s neck hair pricked up.
“How many bullets in the Glock?” the woman whispered.
“What you mean?” Kasey answered.
“Your gun. How many bullets you have left in there?”
Kasey hadn’t thought about that.
“None.”
“You got another magazine?”
“I... I don’t know. I think so.”
“Give it to me,” the woman said quietly.
Something in her voice left no doubt in Kasey that she should give her the gun. She took the spare magazine out of the holster and handed it to her, together with the gun.
“You a cop?” Blair whispered.
“No,” the woman said. She changed the magazines as quietly as possible and put the empty one in her pants pocket.
Kasey had trouble focusing. The fear that had crept up in her took hold. “I can’t breathe,” she said.
It was as if the low sound of the motorcycle filled her mind, pushing her toward something. A cliff. A precipice. An abyss. She put her hands over her ears to try to shut it out, but the sound was inside her head, not outside.
Aarika grabbed her hands. “Look at me,” he said quietly. “Look at me!” He held his hands over her hands and when she looked at his face, his crooked glasses and his smiling eyes, the fear lifted a bit. “Breathe,” he said. “Breathe.”