by James Phelan
Okay, she said, that should hold, but keep some pressure on it until the bleeding stops.
I took the underwear and held it up against my cut. I watched the reflections of Anna and me in the glass window, imagining a different version of us.
I looked cross-eyed at the underwear in my hand and said to Anna: Hang on, these aren’t yours, are they?
Despite my injuries, she punched me in the shoulder, a real corker, and went and sat down on the floor, watching the doors at the front of the arcade.
Dave came back holding a big black flashlight. He was speechless for a moment when he saw me pressing frilly pink undies to my head.
They’re Anna’s, I said and laughed at my own joke.
All the phones in this place are out, he said. Power too. Cell-phone network, everything. There’s no one here except a big old guy who worked at the nut shop—I think he must have had a heart attack.
Nuts, I said to fill the silence.
Dave looked at me like I’d just insulted his president, which I’d unintentionally done on the day we met. Really, I liked the guy—it was an accident.
Sorry, I said. My grin didn’t help the situation. Cracking jokes was my default. Then I remembered the people who’d chased us and Mr. Lawson’s hollow stare, like he wasn’t all there, and my grin faded.
Okay, I said. We have to find help. There must be people somewhere, emergency crews on their way here or something. Right?
Dave shook his head.
What? Anna asked.
They would have been here by now, he said. Think about it. Our subway was hit nearly an hour ago. All that shit and destruction out there—nothing in New York takes this long for cops and firefighters to respond. Something like this, there’d be helicopters buzzing overhead and a million sirens all around us by now.
I realized he was right. Almost every block in Manhattan had a police car permanently parked on it for rapid response. Hell, Grand Central Station had about a hundred armed National Guards all around it—
Why don’t we head for Grand Central? I said. There were all those army dudes there this morning.
That was because the President was coming to town today, Dave explained. They’ve been there all week, extra cops too.
So why don’t we go there? Anna said, getting to her feet. It can’t be too far from here. Then we’re closer to the UN building.
Dave looked towards the glass entry doors and nodded.
We’re on 43rd Street here, he said. We go out that door and turn right, cross over Fifth and Madison and we’re there, Grand Central.
How long will that take? Mini asked, shivering with cold and wringing out her scarf. The water pooled with what was already puddled around our feet.
If we run, five minutes, Dave said. Walk, ten.
We run, Anna said.
I nodded and could see the girls seemed relieved. We zipped our parkas up to our necks and I tossed the bloodied underwear into a bin. Anna, the only one with a backpack since the subway, put the medical box inside and tightened the straps around her shoulders.
Want me to take that? she asked Dave, holding out her hand for the flashlight.
He shook his head and gripped it in his fist. It made me feel better to see him holding it that tightly, his knuckles tense.
Wait a sec, Mini said, as we stood looking towards the doors. What if there’s more of... them out there?
No one said anything.
They were . . . they were drinking from people, Mini went on. What the hell is wrong with them?
I glanced at the others. They looked as hesitant as I felt.
I don’t know, Min, I said gently. But we can’t stay here all day. We have to find where everyone’s at.
But—
If we see any people we’re not sure about, we run the other way, all right? I said, trying to look like I knew what I was talking about. Dave, we’re two blocks away from Grand Central. Give us a back-up place.
Back-up place?
You know, some other place we can go, just in case, yeah?
I could almost hear the wheels turning in Dave’s big head as he thought.
We could run into the library, he said. That’s not far from Grand Central. Or we pick one of the tall buildings on Park Avenue, somewhere with a view.
I nodded and moved towards the store entrance. Dave and I each took an end of the bench seat and dragged it back just enough to get a door open.
I quickly motioned the others out. Dave led the way and we set off at a jog behind him, me at the rear.
I didn’t want to think about what would happen if there weren’t any police or soldiers at the station, but as we covered the next block and I saw the devastation around us, my heart sank. I had made up my mind before we’d even reached Grand Central: we had to find somewhere to hide.
3
This had to be terrorists, Anna said and none of us doubted it enough to argue with her now.
There were bodies outside Grand Central Station. Dead bodies lining the street in sickening fan-like patterns, as if they’d been blown out of the doors. Beyond the bodies was a massive crater spanning four lanes of road that seemed to be erupting with junk. Clumps of broken concrete and bitumen made walking almost impossible.
I looked up to where the Grand Hyatt used to loom over the station and saw that only a skeleton of the high-rise hotel remained. Just the H of the Hyatt sign was left and the windows had blown out, revealing the concrete slab floors, some barely hanging on to their metal reinforcing rods. Thousands of tons of glass and concrete were in the station, now a smoking shell without a roof. As I watched, a mattress slid from an open floor of the hotel twenty stories up and fell like a leaf, seesawing earthwards until it was swallowed up in the wreckage below.
Mini and Anna moved closer to me as I turned to Dave and said: We need to find somewhere with a view. Somewhere we can see the extent of what’s happened so we can plan where to go next.
He nodded and looked up and down the section of Park Avenue that split around Grand Central as though the train terminal was a big traffic island. The only place I could think of was the UN building.
Okay, he said, pointing north. We go left at the first corner and head up Madison to 49th, where we go west one block to 30 Rock, if it’s still standing.
30 Rock? I asked.
I vaguely remembered him talking about a group of us going to the Rock’s viewing platform while we were in town.
Yeah, you know, 30 Rockefeller Plaza—the GE Building? That’s where the Top of the Rock observation deck is. Got 360-degree views up there, far as the eye can see.
Good, I said. Mini nodded in agreement, but I was worried about Anna—she was staring off into the distance. I tugged on her parka sleeve.
How far? she said absently.
She was transfixed on the bodies in the street. I knew part of her was getting farther away from us every second we spent here. I itched to get moving.
Five minutes, Dave said. Come on, let’s bounce.
We started moving at a jog, single file, same formation as before. Dave nearly stopped at a couple of crushed US soldiers. I’m not sure if they were National Guard or Marines; I don’t think any of us would have known the difference—even Dave, whose dad had been an accountant for the US military in the Gulf War. Whoever these soldiers were, they’d done their job. What a job . . .
Madison Avenue’s buildings seemed mostly fine. The rain had picked up again, but aside from the abandoned cars and one body in the street we didn’t see anything. No one complained about the rain or slowed down to look at the body. I silently thanked Dave for not taking us anywhere near it.
I wondered when it was I’d started thinking a dead body on a city street wasn’t worth investigating. Was this what it had been like for our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan? Probably not. There, they were surrounded by people and wouldn’t have known who was friend or foe, or who might have a bomb hidden under their clothes. I didn’t know which would be worse—being
in a country where you might get blown up at any second, or being here, with unknown freaks that chased you and . . . well, drank you. I thought about the pistol back in the subway carriage—should we have taken it?
We rounded the corner of Madison Avenue onto 49th Street. It looked at first like the type of scene I’d been daydreaming about. There were four fire engines, their blue and red lights flashing. Rows of steel pedestrian barriers lined one side of the street; enough to cordon off the entire block. But after a few seconds, I realized this scene wasn’t quite my dream. There were no people. No policemen, no firemen, no survivors. Not even dead bodies.
I kept expecting to come across someone in uniform who’d say to us: Get your butts down into the subway tunnels with the others, or What are you doing out here? Why aren’t you waiting in the buildings with everyone else? I knew from our orientation earlier in the week that New York was home to ten million people, give or take—over twenty if you counted the surrounding sprawl. And so far we’d seen evidence of maybe only a few hundred.
We rounded the first big engine, one of those trucks with the massive ladders that was driven from the back, and came up to a FDNY Emergency Response Vehicle—basically a bus decked out with equipment, a mobile fire-fighting-cum-command center. The back doors were open, revealing more computers and comm gear than a space shuttle.
I’ll check inside, Dave said and he bounded up the stairs of the bus.
Anna and Mini moved away from the trucks and took shelter under the entrance of 30 Rock, about twenty yards away. The building looked untouched among rubble.
Dave reappeared at the front of the bus and sat in the driver’s seat, manning the radio. Between the sound of him switching frequencies and the rain, I’m not sure if I heard distant gunfire or not. All that came out over the radio speakers was static and sometimes a strange sound like a woodpecker, or that sound kids make when they’re playing soldiers, and pretending to fire a machine gun.
There’s nothin’, Dave said, appearing next to me with a hand-held radio. He seemed a little deflated, down to my size.
There’s nothin’ on the radio . . .
All right, I said. We have to get to the top of the building and look.
I motioned let’s go to the girls. Amidst the noise of the rain hitting the steel roofs of the fire engines, I heard Dave sigh.
Maybe just you or I should go up, he said. The girls will be slow. One of us should go and take a look and come back—
Dave, I said, turning to look him in the eye. Mate, whatever we do, we’re gonna stick together, all right? This . . . this is weird shit. You saw Mr. Lawson. You saw those people who chased us. We have to stick together, it’s our best chance. Come on, brother, let’s go.
He looked at the flashlight and radio in his massive hands. His eyes had a big, sad, puppy-dog look I’d not seen before.
Dave, how many floors up is the observation deck?
Seventy, I think, he said. It’ll be getting dark by the time we get up and back.
I looked left and right along 49th. Beyond the steel barriers on the opposite side of the street was a Fox News office. Its massive tickers were blank—even the emergency lighting must have been out in that building. I checked my watch: almost 3 pm. It would be dark by 4:30 and Dave was right—it would take a long time to walk up seventy flights of stairs.
Look, it might be good to stay up there for the night anyway, I said. We stay up there, get warm and dry, and who knows, maybe in the morning we’ll be able to see where everyone else is hiding.
Dave considered the idea. All right, he said, then walked towards the back doors of the FDNY bus.
What are you doing? I asked, as he shone his flashlight inside and started rummaging through some big plastic tubs.
There might be some useful stuff in here, he said, pulling out boxes of blankets and plastic sheeting and gas masks.
I went to the closest truck, opened the door and climbed into the cab. I checked out the front and back and found nothing useful except a big heavy FDNY jacket. I took it, figuring it was more substantial than what I was wearing.
When I stepped out of the truck I saw Dave was wearing a backpack with an axe handle poking out the top like an antenna. He tapped a large object by his feet—it looked like an engine and was about the size of a household microwave.
Generator, he said as I walked over to him. He put a gas bottle on top and I draped the FDNY coat over it. He used his left hand, I used my right, and together we picked up the generator by the metal piping that ran around its edge. I grunted as I stood. Dave smiled at me.
Come on, let’s get this over with, I said as we made our way towards the entrance of 30 Rock. At least the rain was starting to ease.
As we headed towards the door, I noticed that Mini and Anna had wandered off and were now looking at something in the middle of Rockefeller Plaza. We left the generator by the entry and went over to join them. Above us, a forest of flags on poles flapped in the winter breeze.
The girls were gazing down at what had once been the ice-skating rink. By the time I was standing between them, I wished I was in the arcade again, only the one I’d dreamed of; the one with the nice lady and the hot drinks and the busy policemen. . . Before us, it looked like more than just a bomb had gone off. All that was left was a massive crater. The whole space that had been the skating rink was gone, reduced to a hole in the earth that steamed and hissed.
This is Rockefeller Plaza, Dave said, his voice as distant and unbelieving as his expression. I’ve skated in here . . .
I watched a tear roll down Anna’s cheek. We’d toured Rockefeller Plaza on our first day in New York. I decided it was hardest when we saw something we recognized reduced to this—something we had directly experienced at some time, taken away with violence. The underground level of the plaza bore ominous cave-like mouths; jagged, black holes that I imagined went to the center of the world. There were uniformed bodies everywhere. It was as if the earth had opened up here, swallowing the city and anyone who’d tried to stop it, those fine men in uniform who ran into harm’s way.
Come on, I said. Let’s go.
Mini put an arm around Anna’s shoulder and pulled her in close, and we turned to head into 30 Rock.
A horn blazed, piercing the air. It seemed like the loudest, most foreign noise I’d ever heard. I looked but there was nothing, yet the sound grew louder and all of a sudden a car went flying along Fifth Avenue. In the view we had from 49th, it was gone in under a second, but we had all seen the same thing: the car, one person at the wheel and obviously leaning on the horn, several people on the hood and roof trying to get to the driver inside.
A few seconds later, a crowd of twenty or more people went running along in pursuit. The horn grew more distant until it faded to nothing. Nothing but deathly silence.
Minutes passed before any of us moved. Mini was the first to turn around and make for the entrance to 30 Rock. We followed her in shock. At the entrance I took a deep breath, preparing to pick up the generator again, when I heard another noise. A jet aircraft—low, fast, ripping through the grey sky somewhere above us. We all craned our necks and looked, but it was gone as quickly as it had come. No use shouting at it to come back. It seemed to be heading northeast but I wasn’t sure.
We heard a deafening boom that could have torn a hole in the sky, and it echoed around us in surround-sound as we pushed open the doors. The slush at our feet was left behind as we entered our new home. It was cold and hard and dry and quiet, and I loved every bit of it then and there.
This was 30 Rock.
4
Dave was right. The main observation deck was seventy floors up.
What can I say, Dave? I told him. When you’re right, you’re right.
Wow, Dave was right? Mini said.
He grunted and passed over a water bottle he’d pulled from his FDNY backpack.
The lobby said the Top of the Rock is on floors sixty-seven to seventy, Anna said.
Great, I
said, catching my breath and rubbing the soreness out of my arms.
We were sitting on the fire stairs at the 21st floor. The emergency lighting was on, so at least we could see where we were going. I made the mistake of looking up the void between the handrails: if there were a stairway to heaven, this could have been it. It was a depressing distance to travel with baggage.
Anna had my FDNY jacket stuffed into her backpack, and she and Mini carried the twenty-litre gas bottle between them. My arms ached as if I was carrying everything myself; carrying it all and then some.
Okay, this is messed up, Mini said. I’m sick of carrying this friggin’ piece of shit up all these stairs.
I loved it when Mini swore. She was from Taiwan, yet she knew more English swear words and used them more frequently than anyone I’d ever met. Earlier in the week, when we’d formed into our little groups on our second night at the hotel, she’d taken a bottle of vodka from the mini-bar and got drunker on that tiny bottle than I’d seen my uncle after he’d sunk a whole case of beer. We’d called her Mini after that. It was also short for her name, Min Pei, and it suited her.
Can’t we leave it here? Anna said, rubbing her arm. I can’t carry it anymore.
Dave went to the generator and unscrewed the cap on top. He dipped his finger in and sniffed at it.
This is gassed up already, he said. He pulled out his flashlight and starting reading from the side of the generator: Evopower generator . . . blah blah . . . Here we go—three sockets, nine-quart capacity, nine-hour running time.
He flicked the flashlight off and turned to me, his eyebrows raised.
What? Does that mean it uses a quart per hour?
Doesn’t say, he replied. Let’s just assume it does, as a worst case.
Okay, that will be enough to run for a few hours tonight if we want, I said. And a few hours tomorrow if we need it. We’ll leave the gas bottles here.
I got to my feet and readied to move on.