Dayfall

by Michael David Ares

  He turned back to the truck bed and thought about messing with the timing apparatus, but realized that Williams clearly knew what he was doing, and wouldn’t leave any way to disconnect the chain of bombs without setting them off, or at least alerting him. The former soldier had obviously laid them in such a way that they could not be tampered with, and planned to start the countdown when the other end of the chain was finished.

  Jon was pretty sure where that would be, so he headed into the dark passageway, navigating through it by the little lights on top of the bombs, and trying not to step on any of them.

  30

  Around the corner at the end of the small tunnel was another one just as long, and that one ended in a set of about eight hastily carved steps that led down to a small hatchway only about half as tall as Jon. When the Gotham Builders had created this access to the basement of the Flatiron Building, they were clearly more interested in concealment than appearance or ease of use. Perhaps the mayoral and police offices had already been moved there when GS was securing the underground, or maybe they knew it would happen and had the foresight to construct this access. Either way, it worked for Williams to get in without being detected—the deadly chain of green-lit bombs and wires continued through the open hatch and into the basement of the building.

  Jon crouched and craned around the edge of the hatchway to make sure he wouldn’t be seen by the mercenary from the other side, then quietly squeezed through it and ended up in a tight strip of space between a high metal wall in front of him and an even higher rock wall behind him. He stepped sideways to the right, toward the end of the metal wall, which was about ten feet away, and had to be even more careful in the cramped floor space not to disturb the wires or explosives with his feet. He didn’t have to worry about being heard, however, because of the hum of heavy machinery coming from around the corner of the iron wall.

  When Jon reached it, he peered around and saw Williams at least twenty feet away, laying the last of his explosives at the foot of a big electrical generator that was about the size and shape of the concrete mixer on the back of a cement truck. The killer was crouched down and facing mostly away from Jon, but the young cop wasn’t confident that he could reach the man and jump him before Williams saw him and pulled the gun that was resting on his hip. So Jon scanned the rock wall to his right and noticed a partially open doorway built into it, leading to some kind of recessed room.

  When he could see that Williams’s face was completely turned away from his current position and his hands were well occupied, Jon moved quickly across the floor and stepped through the half-closed doorway. He made sure the bomber hadn’t noticed him, and then looked around quickly. It was a small room, really a large shaft, that was less than ten feet wide but stretched all the way up to a big grate on the street far above.

  When he looked back out of the doorway, he could see that this subbasement of the Flatiron Building was a huge cavern, not quite as big as the one he had fallen into under Grand Central Station, but almost. He estimated that the ceiling of the chamber was about thirty feet high, and he knew there was a basement level above this, since that was where he and Halladay had practiced shooting at the gun range. He also was able to figure out quickly the original purpose of the shaft—ventilation—because across from him there were the decaying remains of two enormous old coal furnaces, which reached almost to the ceiling and looked like something from an old movie set. The far left side of the furnaces was the iron wall that concealed the secret access hatch through which he had entered.

  The modern generator that now provided power for the building, next to which Williams was working, sat to the right of the old furnaces, in the middle of the cavern. To its right were several metal staircases, one winding up to an entrance on the other wall near the ceiling, and the other stretching to nothing that Jon could see, perhaps an old exit to the street that had been sealed off.

  Jon turned his attention back to Williams as the mercenary stood up and dusted off his hands like he was done.

  It was now or never, so Jon summoned every bit of remaining strength he could and exploded out of the ventilation shaft toward the ex–Army man, hoping to grab the gun if he could get to him before being seen, and he almost managed it. But Williams turned at the last second, so all Jon could do at that point was grab his arm to keep him from drawing his gun. Jon tried to make use of the element of surprise and twist him to the ground from that position, but the other man was much more agile and skilled than he looked. When Jon pulled his right arm across his body to keep it from the gun and spin him off his feet, Williams spun his left elbow around and connected hard with Jon’s face. Then he kicked Jon’s legs out from under him while the young cop was still reeling from the blow, and sent him sprawling to the floor.

  The mercenary stood over Jon, not even bothering to draw his weapon. He shook his bespectacled head in disgust, then turned around, crouched down again, and set the timer on a piece of equipment that was like the one in the truck out in the tunnel. Jon saw the numbers appear and start to count down on the timer in front of him, and imagined that the same was happening on the other one.

  Williams turned back to Jon, and this time he did have the gun in his hand. He pointed it casually down at the helpless detective and moved his finger to the trigger. Jon tried to keep his eyes open, but they involuntarily closed when three or four shots thundered out and echoed throughout the huge room.

  Williams’s body jerked violently as he was hit in the back by at least two bullets, and he fell to the ground dead with a thud, right next to where Jon was lying.

  Jon’s eyes had reopened in time to catch Williams’s body falling, and now he shook his head and focused beyond where the mercenary had stood above him. Ari Hegde and Brenda Dixon were halfway down the winding metal stairs that stretched down from the top of the chamber on the other side, still pointing their guns in his direction, and there was another figure behind them that Jon didn’t immediately recognize. When they were sure Williams wasn’t moving, they hurried down the rest of the steps and came running over to Jon.

  “Are you all right?” Hegde said to Jon, helping him up as Dixon checked Williams’s neck for a pulse that was no longer there.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Jon said. “How’d you know who to shoot from that far away? There’s not a lot of light in here.”

  “Your shirt,” Hegde explained, gesturing below Jon’s chin. “I remembered the blood.”

  “Why’d you come here?” Jon asked.

  “You told us about it, remember?” Hegde said. “We didn’t really believe you after the APB, but thought we should at least check it out since we were coming back down here anyway. Poppy here let us in.”

  Now Jon recognized their companion—it was the building superintendent that Halladay had introduced him to, the one whose father had passed the job on to him.

  “Oh, no, listen,” Jon said, his relief suddenly turning to panic. “We have to stop these.…”

  He hurried over to the timer on the bombs and noticed it was down to about ten minutes, which was only twice as long as Amira and Halladay had to diffuse the bombs in the Below, when there weren’t nearly as many.

  “No time to get more help,” Jon thought aloud. “But there are four of us,” he added, and didn’t hesitate any further when he thought of what his partners had done back at the Below. “Here’s what we do.… You have to unscrew the green wires where they go into the detonators, and you have to do every one of them, because just one is enough to blow them all.”

  “How do you know this?” Dixon said. “I don’t wanna mess with them if we don’t know what we’re doing.”

  “Amira knew,” Jon said quickly. “Remember, I was on the phone with them.…” He looked at the three of them. “Come on, if we all work together we can do it.”

  Hegde and Dixon now looked at each other, and then back at Poppy.

  “Awww, fuck it,” the super said. “My dad and I didn’t nurse this ole lady all these years
just to see her get blown to shit.”

  The two Chaos Crimes cops looked at each other again, then nodded to one another and said, “Okay” to Jon. Hegde made a very brief call to someone above about evacuating the building, though they all knew that there probably wasn’t enough time for anyone to get far enough away. Jon explained that they should start next to the generator with the bigger group of bombs and then work down the line toward the subway and the truck.

  “But make sure you get every one,” he added with emphasis. “There are always two together along the line. Don’t just do one and move on, thinking you’re done, or we’re dead.”

  Jon showed the other three how to disconnect one of the detonators on the pile of explosives clustered near the generator, and then they all jumped in and went to work. It went quickly while they were working on that pile, but then they moved to the line of bombs stretching across the floor and had to figure out how to do those as quickly as possible without missing any. After a few anxious moments of discussion, they decided to form a line, and when one of them was finished detaching their green wire, he or she would move up to the next one that was undone. At first, this led to some awkward shuffling and bumping into one another, but soon it was going more smoothly.

  “Shit, now we can’t see the timer anymore,” Dixon said as they moved away from the generator.

  “Don’t panic,” Jon said, clearly the default leader here, because Dixon had looked at him. “Does anyone have a watch?” He knew that none of them could be taking the time to fumble with a cell phone.

  “I do,” Poppy said, so Jon told him to use the watch, in case they weren’t going to make it and decided to run, like Amira and Halladay had tried to do. Poppy moved back toward the timer to read the numbers there, and pushed a few buttons on his watch.

  When he read off the time left, they all felt a surge of adrenaline and doubled down on their efforts.

  When they reached the thin strip of space between the iron wall of the old coal furnace and the rock wall of the basement cavern, they had to scrap the method they had been using, because there was no way they could step around one another any longer. After more hurried discussion, Jon made an executive decision for time’s sake, and stepped carefully to the fourth detonator in the narrow corridor, telling the others to get the ones behind him, and then they would all move four ahead when they were done with that one.

  Poppy didn’t grasp the idea well at first, and the first effect of the stress they were under showed up when Hegde blurted out, “It’s not rocket science, for God’s sake,” after trying to explain it to the super. Poppy responded immediately with a burst of profanity, but then they all immediately shut up and went to work in the way Jon had decided, with Poppy jumping in to disconnect the detonator behind Jon.

  More profanity ensued, however, when Jon happened to notice, near the end of the tight corridor, that Poppy had missed one of the green wires going into a pair of bombs behind him.

  “You’ve gotta concentrate,” Jon said to the sweating super. “Do we have to go back and check all the ones you’ve done? I don’t think we have time for that.”

  “No, that was the only one,” Poppy said, wiping his brow.

  “I don’t wanna die because your feelings got hurt,” Jon said. “No offense.”

  “None fuckin’ taken. Let’s go.”

  Jon climbed through the hatch in the wall after he finished his last detonator in the cramped space, and soon the other three did the same. Now they could resume their former method of “leapfrogging” one another, because they had more room to move around in the two long dark hallways stretching ahead of them toward the subway tunnel and the other pile of bombs in the truck.

  But after Poppy read aloud the time that was left according to his stopwatch, and they started hurrying even more through the first passageway, they faced their biggest problem yet. The super wasn’t the only one who was sweating by now—all four of them were having trouble gripping the small metal casings that had to be unscrewed in order to detach the green wires. No matter how much they wiped their fingers on their clothing, slippery sweat continued to trickle onto them.

  “I can barely turn them anymore,” Hegde said. “With either of my hands. It’s gonna take twice as long at least, if we can even get them all off.”

  Jon straightened up from the detonator he was working on, having the same problem, and gave voice to something they were all thinking.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I’d say we should take off, but I don’t even know if we have time to get far enough away. What does the timer say, Poppy?”

  The super pressed a sweaty finger to his watch for a moment, and then let out a loud grunt of frustration.

  “Fuckin’ thing,” he said, shaking his head. “I tried to hit the fuckin’ light so I could see it, and I musta cleared the fuckin’ timer by mistake.”

  Great, Jon thought.

  31

  “Use your shirts,” Poppy said, grabbing a small swath at the end of his, showing them how to use it on one of the casings, and redeeming himself for almost killing them twice in the last few minutes.

  Jon stood in place for a few moments, his heart pounding, thinking about whether they should continue or not. But then he thought of Amira and Halladay again, and that was enough. He grabbed a bottom corner of his shirt and went back to work on the detonator below him. The others followed his lead, though Hegde and Dixon’s shirts were too short and they had to take them off to use them.

  A few minutes later—Jon couldn’t tell how long—they rounded the corner into the last passage before the subway tunnel and kept on unscrewing the green wires, switching to different parts of their shirts when the ones they were using got too wet. The entire time Jon and his eerily silent companions felt like they might be blown to bits at any moment, but though they might all have been tempted to skip out on the others and attempt to save their own skin, none of them did. And before too long, they’d gotten close enough to the bed of the truck to see the timer there, and were relieved that they still had more than two minutes left.

  They continued to diffuse the line leading to the truck, and then they all leaned into the bed and took care of all the bombs stacked in there. Soon they were done, with forty seconds to spare, but Jon couldn’t help checking the whole pile in the trunk again, and peering once again down the nearby passage to make sure there were no little green lights still shining.

  “Should we try to turn off the timer?” Hegde asked, staring at it nervously while it counted down to thirty and beyond.

  “It’s just a timer now, right?” Jon said. “It doesn’t do anything. I guess I don’t want to mess with it, in case it’s rigged somehow.” He looked at the others, unsure. “I don’t know.…”

  The timer hit twenty, then ten, and all they could do now was watch.

  Hegde grabbed Dixon’s arm and leaned into her.

  Poppy looked at Jon and saluted him as if to say, Nice fuckin’ knowin’ you, and Jon nodded back.

  The timer hit zero and nothing happened, and the four of them started shouting, jumping up and down, and hugging one another.

  After the celebration subsided, Hegde pulled out his phone to call for the cleanup of the explosives, and noticed that he and Dixon had been asked repeatedly by text in the last few minutes to come to the park above.… Apparently “something weird” was going on up there. He looked up the platform toward the exit that would lead to the park, and said that was where they needed to go.

  Poppy wanted to help with the cleanup, so after a few more hugs he headed back toward the basement of the “ole lady” he loved so much.

  “What should we do with you?” Hegde said to Jon, while he and Dixon were putting their shirts back on.

  Jon’s head was spinning from the ordeal he had been through, but thoughts of Mallory still somehow managed to find their way into his mind. He thought about how glad he was that she wouldn’t be endangered by the explosives anymore, but he remembered the Mayor�
�s threat about implicating her in his alleged crimes, and started to consider how he could keep her safe from that.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Hedge said before Jon could respond, “you can walk right now if you want, after what you did.” He looked for a confirmation from Dixon, who nodded.

  “Walk if you want,” she said.

  “But obviously this’ll go a long way toward clearing you,” Hegde continued. “So if you want to come with us, we’ll help you work it out.”

  Jon thought about the reasons why he had first called these two cops, and realized that there was even more reason now to trust them. So he gestured for them to lead the way and followed them up the platform, continuing to mull what his options might be, especially in regard to Mallory, whom he couldn’t stop thinking about.

  When they reached the park exit and started up the steps, Hegde and Dixon both visibly reacted to the unfamiliar phenomenon of bright sunlight shining into the stairway from above. They stopped halfway to the top and took out the sunglasses they had been issued as part of the department’s preparation for Dayfall. Then they nervously proceeded up the rest of the steps, with their arms out in front of their heads like they half-expected to be accosted by someone or something.

  Hegde was the first one to top the stairs and see what was outside in the park, and he immediately stepped back down and restrained the others from going any farther. At first Jon thought that some kind of apocalypse was going on up there after all, but it turned out to be something else.

  “I just realized,” he said to Jon. “I’m sorry, but I’m gonna have to cuff you for now. Half the force looks like it’s out in the park because of the evacuation, and they still think you’re a cop-killer. But if we have you in custody, hopefully they’ll leave us alone till we can get it straightened out.”