A grey brightness outside St. Patrick’s—boom—and Kevin imagined its big cathedral door had thumped shut behind him. But when he glanced back, the doors still stood wide open before the phalanx of security. Something had fallen then. A wrecking ball the size of the moon had snapped its cable and was rolling down Fifth Avenue.
Bong…bong…bong…
No, Kevin thought smiling, the bells of St. Patrick’s would never do. Too artificial sounding. MYCROFT had it much better, softer, funereal.
He found his way to Seventh Avenue and turned left—and felt the sudden commotion like a shock wave emanating from the direction of his destination. But it wasn’t till he crossed Thirty-sixth Street that he saw, heard, and smelled it. He picked up the pace.
A dirty cloud was shooting into the skyas powerfully as an erupting volcano’s plume and his first thought was fire! Then he entered a strange noisy silence, a raving nightmare stillness of whispered commotion and selective clarity: THANA-U…baby…the whole…where’s… Real-time sound and action cut in like popped ears and sirens and people were rushing by him seemingly with nowhere to go but go. Yet more sirens, which urged the wailing to seeming crescendo, but it was far from finished. The whole of Manhattan appeared to be doing Munch’s The Scream. Head soon full of the smell of burning dust.
He would forever remember a woman carrying by its one arm a toddler limp as a rag doll, its lower half just a bloody colourful protuberance of intestines and guts; the woman’s own flayed flesh was spiked with glass shards. Mesmerized, he watched her run, choppy pigeon-toed steps and that side-to-side swaying in the way of hurrying mothers everywhere carrying children—the lower centre of gravity, the wider hips—running to catch a bus that wouldn’t wait, or for cover in a storm. The dead child slipped out of its own arm’s skin and fell to the sidewalk, and the woman, forever falling forward, didn’t notice.
Kevin felt insubstantial, invisible, turning back towards the Garden. That could never be helped. He breathed deeply the white dust like being inside hell’s own cloud, and recognized what he’d been finding familiar: one of those old 9/11 vids they used to watch in silent horror, they being himself and Cyn—
Cynthia’s voice spoke in his head again: Something has happened and everybody is looking the wrong way.
He talked aloud to himself: “I hear you, love. Havre de Grace, the decoy museum. Yes, dear: whatever catastrophe has happened here isn’t what we think has happened here. Michael the Archangel is still looking offstage. Here what looks true is false.”
Oddly becalmed, he crossed the street to the front of Christ-X headquarters, Global Patrol’s ops centre. Most of its Panoglaz had been blown in or sucked out, and Global soldiers in states of undress were leaning from the windows like peering troglodytes. He turned to face the scene.
The Garden made him think of a dollhouse with its front removed. A funnel of now-black smoke was fiercely pouring from its centre, a dark geyser, a pluming oil well. Glass was everywhere underfoot and covering the dead and dying. Blood and other fluids ran in rivulets from the sidewalk opposite, so much so that it coursed along the curb.
Kevin had believed he was up to any scene of mass killing; after all, he’d been through numerous biker wars, and those psychopaths had inventive ways of desecrating the human body. At Havre de Grace he’d seen what an explosion involving residual THANA-U could do, and he’d just watched the dying mother with her dropped dead child; but he’d never experienced anything quite like the number of varied violations at crowded Madison Square Garden. So he was startled and sickened all over again by lumps of pink and rose and blue and red, the running volume of human fluids, the crying and screaming that could strangely be overridden by lower moans and whimpering and suctioning sounds. Many had been pregnant women. Instant dismemberment didn’t immediately kill electrical impulses: detached limbs in the oddest places—the very middle of the street, balanced atop a stop sign—could still twitch. Dying eyes could look down a final time and observe themselves turned inside out like undersea flora.
New York’s first responders were, of necessity, well practised. So the site was quickly triaged and cleared of those who might benefit from medical attention; then of the dead, their wayward parts and scraps. Small fires were soon extinguished. Miraculously (as Macro reporters were already repeating), the deeply buried central THANA-U container had kept its cool, as had the small nuclear reactor. The levelling of most of Madison Square Garden had been fuelled by residual THANA-U and the supplies kept in individual offices, and of course by the still considerable explosive power of the degraded photon egg, which had detonated high in the air and, by a freak, blown the whole Panoglaz roof and frontage streetward, where everybody was waiting.
In overdrive the Garden’s own systems had vented all oxygen surrounding the blaze and soon smothered the central fire in foam, and continued pumping the white stuff, so that the disaster area was already looking wintry scenic.
None of the Global soldiers had to be told to leave Detective Kevin Beldon alone. He was still stuck in the wet road when LaPhoc found him.
“Kevin! You’re all right, thank God.”
Kevin said, “You too…Phil. Where’s Brigid?”
“In the ops room and worried about you. She’s hurt but okay, a few major lacerations already sealed, a bit of a concussion being treated with Neurovac, fully functional. It could have been a lot worse for us. People farther back were sliced and diced—when will security learn: Panoglaz makes the most effective shrapnel—but Brigid was miraculously spared because, believe it or not, she was inside the atrium and the whole thing sort of blew outward. She was also saved from the force of the primary explosion by—”
“I have to see her.” But he didn’t move.
LaPhoc looked around shaking his head, almost in admiration: “The scale of it, the timing at closing rush hour…”
“Along with Havre de Grace, this proves once and for all that Malachai is now way over the top. But you don’t sound too disappointed he got past you, LaPhoc?”
“It was Malachai, Kevin, and we’ve apprehended. I think it safe to say there’ll be no more letters added to Randome’s signifying nothing. This quotation closes at nnn… Hey, did the bard stutter?” He laughed lightly, exploratorily. Kevin smirked and LaPhoc proceeded: “I expect this is going to cost me my limb lengthening, because Dr. Fitzgerald was killed in the explosion. So far, some thirty-five doctors dead, all those with THANA-U active in their clinics at the time. Scores more injured, the death toll will be climbing.”
“Malachai?”
“Kevin, I don’t like to bra—”
“How’d he do it?”
“Just how he fooled the SENSEC we don’t know yet. But he had a photon egg secured in his … well, up his ass. MYCROFT has identified it as an old North Korean device that had degraded a lot, thank God. It was enough, though, obviously, it set off all that residual THANA-U we’d worried about. Only the instantaneous hyperventing kept the explosion from taking out the whole block. You haven’t by any chance seen a pair of legs lying around, have you, Kevin? Average-length would do me just fine.”
Kevin laughed, which still surprised him. It hadn’t been only the many Irish cops in Ottawa who’d taught him the value of black humour; it was his first partner, Frank Thu, had introduced him to the cop’s coping tactic: at the scene, publicly, be sure to wear your best solemn face, for Macro consumption too, but don’t treat death-on-the-job respectfully. And never touch death, because it’ll tag you back. Then you’re it, and finished as a cop. …If not done yet as a poet, Kevin thought, smiling to himself. Or as a dying detective.
“You say you’ve got him, Phil? Malachai did this and survived?”
“Sort of. He pitched the egg far from himself and Brigid.”
“Where’s he at?”
LaPhoc pursed his lips briefly. “We put him in our part of the ops room for immediate attention, for all the good it’ll do. He looks…well…Medic’s with him now. Global has ordered me to Radio City to make the official statement. Commander Tierney …Dad, as Louise insists I call him. Dad told me some things to say. I was just on my way.” LaPhoc could joke, too, because he trusted Kevin now. “Big boys waste no time taking credit. I’ll admit, though, that the publicity will boost my stature more than new legs, as, uh, Dad is surely thinking.”
LaPhoc waited but Kevin was distracted.
“I’ll hustle back when the Macro’s done with me. I’d really like to acknowledge your contribution publicly, Kevin?”
“No. But mention Chief Ertelle, and frequently.”
“Will do.”