Day One: A Novel (8 page)

And then the voices stopped for a moment. Somehow, Kessler had crossed the space between them and spoke close to Hawke’s ear. “You okay?” she asked as he leaned drunkenly and stumbled. She reached out to him just before a tremendous explosion rocked the building.

CHAPTER EIGHT

10:51 A.M.

THE FLOOR SHUDDERED VIOLENTLY
, and Hawke heard a distant whooshing sound, muffled and deep, just before Kessler let him go and ran toward the windows. He wanted to shout at her to get back, but it was too late; the glass exploded inward as the shock wave hit, sending shards hurtling through the air like flashing knives.

A piece caught Kessler in the throat. Hawke saw her whirl and spray blood as he went down, covering his own head, tasting carpet and smoke.

He looked up again through a strange haze as the overhead lights surged and watched Bradbury reach out to catch a desk lamp that was falling. An instinctive reaction, something Hawke probably would have done himself, but Bradbury ended up dancing a jig, his eyes rolling back to the whites, teeth clenched hard together as his huge body went rigid and his skin began to darken before he finally tilted sideways and fell to the floor.

“Oh my God oh my God!”
someone was screaming from the other room. Black smoke billowed up from the street, whirling in through the broken windows, and it smelled acrid and oily, stinging Hawke’s eyes. He blinked, saw Bradbury on the floor still clutching the lamp in rigid, blackened fingers with his eyes bulging like boiled eggs and his tongue poking like a purple rag from his lips, and he thought of his apartment and his wife’s frantic voice over the phone. It hit him like a stinging slap:
What if this isn’t just New York City? What if it’s happening everywhere?

Hawke stood up, legs trembling, covering his nose and mouth with his sleeve. Nothing else mattered anymore except getting out of the building. The black smoke was thicker around his face, and he couldn’t tell if it was coming from outside or somewhere close. Kessler was jerking violently and clutching her throat, a lot of blood wetting the carpet around her head. He whirled at a noise and watched Weller and a dazed Anne Young emerge from the conference room, stumbling through the dim fog that had descended over them all.

Weller looked around, saw Hawke and led Young to him. “Get her out,” Weller said, coughing into his sleeve. “I’ll be right behind you.”

“What?” Young said. “No—”

“Go! Now!” Weller left them standing there, stumbling through the smoke. Hawke grabbed Young’s arm, ignoring her protests, and dragged her toward the suite doors as the fire alarms started blaring. Vasco followed after they had entered the hall, along with Price, the systems analyst, who had helped Kessler to her feet and was half-carrying, half-dragging her along. Kessler’s eyes had lost focus, her face ghostly white, and blood still pulsed thickly between her fingers as she gripped her own neck with both hands. Vasco got his arm around her waist from the other side to help, and she sagged against him as the two men carried her toward the exit.

Young clutched Hawke’s arm, her nails digging into his skin through his shirt. The alarms were piercingly loud in the hallway, emergency strobe lights flashing. Someone was screaming about the building being on fire, but the sprinklers hadn’t triggered and the smoke thinned as Hawke took the lead past the broken elevator toward the stairs. He started to open the door, then remembered something about fire and heat and oxygen levels and touched the surface lightly, finding it cool.

He hit the bar and shouldered the door open, revealing a flood of other people from the building in the stairwell, rushing toward the lobby. Disjointed and terrifying images from 9/11 flashed through his mind as Hawke stood for a moment, trying to judge whether to wade in. There were at least five floors above them, maybe more, and the people coming down from above were out of control and panicked, taking the steps two and three at a time, stumbling into walls, several of them falling as the others ran past.

But they had no choice, and he entered the fray, trying to clear space for Vasco and Price, who were still carrying a now-unconscious Kessler between them. Young was shoved by a large man in a business suit who barreled down the stairs, and Hawke steadied her, keeping his own balance, hearing others coming from above and gaining fast.

They were three flights down when the lights went out.

The stairwell was plunged into blackness, and screams and shouts echoed up through the dark as bodies fell, bones or heads cracking against concrete as Hawke fumbled his way blindly to the wall, heart thudding fast as the emergency lights kicked on and bathed everything in red. Things speeding up now, he grabbed Young’s hand and led her down, abandoning any effort at restraint, moving as fast as he could go while still keeping his feet, stumbling around the same man in a suit who was lying on the stairs and groaning, trying to get up.

They reached the lobby, busting into open space. Hawke took several deep gasps of air, only now realizing he’d been holding his breath for most of the last two floors. The power was still on down here, the alarms screeching relentlessly. A group of about twenty people was already at the front doors, which seemed to be locked or jammed shut. Someone rattled the handles; a woman pounded on the glass and shouted that the building was going to fall, panic lighting up her voice into a high, keening wail, and Hawke thought of a mother he’d once tried to interview who had just lost her baby to a house fire. The sound of panic and despair was similar here, a repetition of words and actions where human restraint and logic disappeared into something mindless and instinctual.

Hawke looked around, didn’t spot the security guard or the building manager. There was nobody in charge. The entire world had suddenly gone insane. Who had locked the doors, and why? It made no sense.

Vasco and Price came out of the stairwell and put Kessler down on her back. Hawke’s stomach rolled greasily as he watched Kessler’s hands flop lifelessly away from her neck to reveal a deep slash like an ugly, lipless mouth, blood slowly bubbling up and oozing across the tile floor. Price’s shirt was soaked with red. He clapped his own hand down over her neck wound, pressing hard, and started shouting for someone to call 911.

Vasco was pacing, pressing his phone’s screen and cursing. “Check your cell,” he said to Young over the sound of the alarms, and she pulled out her own phone.

“No service,” she said.

“Check it again!” He whirled, questioning, to Hawke, who shook his head. He couldn’t take his eyes off Kessler, the blood spreading out below her body in spite of Price’s frantic efforts to stop it. Hawke thought of the electrocution of Bradbury; how had that much power come through the lamp’s cord? The breakers should have popped.

Vasco was in Hawke’s face, breathing hard and smelling like sweat. “Check your fucking cell,” he said.

“It’s bricked,” Hawke said. “Happened upstairs.”

“Fuck!” Vasco whirled again, suddenly looked around the lobby. “Where’s everybody else?”

“Bradbury’s dead,” Hawke said. “I saw him … he was electrocuted. Weller, I have no idea. He was supposed to be right behind us.”

“He’s still up there,” Young said. She looked at the door to the stairs. When she started toward it, Hawke grabbed her. Her pupils were dilated, her breathing fast and shallow.

“You can’t go back,” he said.

“He might be trapped,” she said. “We can’t just leave him. You don’t understand; they’re going to—”

“
You can’t go back up there,
” he said. He took her by both her arms and stared into her pale, shivering face. “You get that? This is real; people are getting
killed
.”

More people came tumbling out of the stairs and into the lobby, none of them familiar; they barely glanced at Hawke and Young but went straight for the doors, joining the others. The noise level increased as more of them pounded at the glass, rattled the handles. “What the hell is going on out there?!” a man shouted. “Let us out!” And someone else screamed as a screech and rending crash came from somewhere on the street, some kind of accident.

The alarms were relentless, drilling into Hawke’s head. Young pulled herself away and he let her go, noticing something else strange; the security cameras mounted in the corners of the lobby that normally panned slowly back and forth were now moving deliberately, as if someone was controlling them.

He watched one of them swing around in his direction and stop, the camera’s unblinking eye fixed on his location. The effect was both eerie and menacing. There was nobody at the front desk, and he walked toward it, hypnotized by the eye, peering at the monitors behind the counter and watching himself reflected back through the camera.

The big man in the suit who had fallen in the stairwell came up next to him, shouldering him aside and breaking his trance. “Get the fuck out of the way,” the man snarled, panting hard. Hawke caught a glimpse of a purple, knotted welt above the man’s left eye as he picked up the desk chair and lifted it over his head, the chair wheels spinning as he turned and ran toward the lobby entrance.

“Get the fuck out of my way!” he shouted again, and the crowd parted just before the man heaved the chair at the glass doors.

The chair was heavy, solid metal and leather, and it caught the impact-resistant glass pane at its center, leading with one leg like a spear. The glass groaned and gave way with a tremendous, shattering crash, spilling out onto the sidewalk as the chair went tumbling and bouncing into the street.

It was like a dam had broken. The crowd surged forward, knocking away the rest of the glass that still hung from the frame, pushing and shoving one another to get through the opening.

Hawke looked around the lobby, trying to find familiar faces among the people who kept coming from the stairwell. He couldn’t see Weller or Young. Price was crouched over Kessler’s lifeless body, hands still clapped hard against her neck. A woman hit Price’s shoulder as she ran by, nearly knocking him over; he reached down and pulled Kessler to him, cradling her against his chest.

Hawke fought his way against the rushing crowd, pushing through to Price’s side. Price looked up at him, his face white with shock. “Call nine-one-one,” he said. “She’s bleeding. Someone has to help her.”

Kessler’s face was slack, her eyes open and fixed. The wound in her neck had stopped bubbling. “She’s gone,” Hawke said. He could smell smoke. “We need to get out of here.”

Price looked down at Kessler, shook his head. “No,” he said. But he set her gently down and let Hawke help him to his feet. His shirt was soaked in Kessler’s blood.

One arm around Price’s waist, Hawke followed the others out through the broken glass doors, away from the noise of the alarms and into hell.

CHAPTER NINE

11:17 A.M.

OUTSIDE,
people were rushing everywhere in a panic, shoving one another to get away. Smoke swirled in the air; abandoned cars sat up on the sidewalk with their doors hanging open while other drivers honked their horns against snarled traffic. A series of wrenching crashes echoed through the street as a taxi tried to race around a jammed intersection and slammed into a shiny silver Mercedes sedan, sending it spinning into a Nissan that had been left by the curb. Screams and shouts mixed with the rending of metal, booms of secondary explosions that came from every direction, the shriek of rubber and the growing rumble of something far larger and more terrifying, like the collapse of entire buildings somewhere out of sight.

Hawke helped Price move away from the Conn.ect building to an empty spot on the curb, where he sat Price down and crouched next to him. The man seemed unable to support his own weight. “You hurt?” Hawke said. Price shook his head no. He was crying silently, looking down at his hands, still sticky with Kessler’s blood.

Hawke stood up and looked around with a fresh sense of shock. A block away, a gigantic, gaping hole had swallowed the intersection of Second Avenue and East 78th Street, smoke and flames shooting up from below, asphalt buckled and melting in all directions. He could feel the heat from where he stood. A city bus, barely visible through the rippling flames, had toppled into the hole, upended and tilted sideways, the ads that adorned its sides blackened with smoke. The Mexican restaurant on the corner with the brown plastic booths and corrugated metal roof was gone, the building that had contained it gaping open and licked by fire. The other side of the street had fared slightly better, but Girardi’s market had been defaced with flames and smoke and the awning on the Vietnamese place next door was burning like a torch.

He flashed back to his nightmare: Thomas, being yanked away from him by slippery-smooth tentacles whipping down from above. The heat of the fires nearby washed over Hawke, bringing tears. More smoke billowed up over the city, pillars of it swirling through the blue sky and winding away like balloon strings. The chaos was absolute; Armageddon had descended in a split second’s time. He hadn’t had time to process this. Everything had gone down so fast, and getting down to the lobby was a blur, fueled by adrenaline and a focus on survival. It was all too big, too overwhelming, completely alien and wrong in a way that made him feel numb. This couldn’t be happening, there was no reason or explanation for it, and yet it was; the mental pressure was building around him, strong as an approaching tornado, sucking air from his lungs, whipping dust and debris into every crack and crevice.

“Gas explosion.” Weller appeared as if from nowhere, nodding toward the hole in the street. He spoke loudly to cut through the din, but he appeared eerily calm within the madness around them. “That’s what took out our windows on the seventh floor. Easy enough to do, if you overload the systems and force a rupture.”

The sound of Weller’s voice brought Hawke back to himself. Weller had Young and Vasco with him, and he was carrying the hard-shelled security case from his office in both arms, hugging it like it was a child. Was that why he had lingered in the office suite? Hawke thought of Young, ready to charge back upstairs to rescue Weller without a second thought. Anger flared, white-hot at Hawke’s core. Suddenly he wanted to get his hands around Weller’s throat, and the urge was so strong he balled his fists to keep from leaping at him.