THERE WAS PAPER all over the ground so Tay grabbed some of it and rubbed the blood off his hands. He wondered briefly what the papers were that he was using, but he didn’t bother to look. Paper was paper.
He couldn’t get all the blood off. He tried to wet his hands by spitting on them, but his mouth was so dry nothing came out.
Tay sat on the curb, hands bloody, nearly blinded in one eye by the smoke and dust and in the other by the hysterical woman who had scratched him. He should be doing something to help, he thought, but what? The only thing that would have done any real good would be to have prevented this from happening in the first place. But now that it had happened, what was he going to do? Direct traffic?
He could hear sirens now. They seemed to come from everywhere at once. Half a dozen white police fast response cars, blue and red lights frantically flashing, flew past him going the wrong way up Orchard Road and disappeared into the smoke and dust in the general direction of the Marriott. They were followed by two white vans with Explosive Ordnance Disposal stenciled on their sides.
It’s a little late for that, Tay thought.
After the vehicles passed, Tay pulled himself up on a curb and sat watching the overwhelming misery all around him, just trying to decide what to do. More and more often now he thought that was really all his job as a policeman amounted to. Simply witnessing misery. Not actually doing anything about it.
Tay tried to shake off the feelings of hopelessness and lethargy flooding over him. Somehow he had survived long enough to find himself in a world where people blew things up for no purpose but to kill as many innocents as they could. How could anyone live in a world like that without hopelessness and lethargy becoming his natural state?
Tay wondered if he was in shock. Perhaps not medically, but probably in every other way. Maybe, it occurred to him, he should just lie down right there in Orchard Road and let the world take a couple of turns. Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do when you were in shock? Lie down?
But Tay didn’t lie down. He thought about it, he thought about it for a long time and he felt as if he were thinking about it very slowly, but he didn’t lie down.
Later, Tay would wonder how long he sat on that curb thinking about lying down. He remembered looking at his watch several times before he realized the hands weren’t moving. They were frozen at 8:09. He must have broken it when he fell.
Perhaps he had only been sitting there for a few minutes, Tay told himself after a while, but he knew it had been much longer. How long, he really had no idea at all.
It was then that Tay realized the dust cloud was beginning to dissipate. His right eye had stopped watering and he could see now, at least better than he had been able to see before, so he got his feet under him, stood up, and stumbled in what he thought was the direction of the Marriott. The roadway was littered with debris and he stepped cautiously, avoiding anything that looked nasty. There were shoes everywhere for some reason, shoes of all sizes and types, both men and women’s. Tay wondered for a moment why there were so many shoes, but then the answer suddenly occurred to him and he quickly pushed the question form his mind.
Up ahead of him to the right, he could see a mass of flashing emergency lights. He stood up and started walking toward them.
***
Tay was almost abreast of Lucky Plaza when he came upon two vans with military markings parked side by side just past Mount Elizabeth Road. Tay had no memory of seeing the vans pass, but there they were parked on Orchard Road and there was no other way they could have gotten there so they must have passed him. A large space in the rubble field had been cleared behind them and a neat grid of black blankets had been laid out in the roadway.
No, not blankets, he realized when he got closer.
Body bags.
The bags were black and rubbery and glinted in the flashing emergency lights as if they were wet. The whole scene looked to Tay like one of those CNN reports of a suicide bombing in Israel. Only much bigger. And even more chilling.
Grim-faced soldiers with neatly pressed uniforms and gleaming black boots emerged from the rubble to Tay’s right. He was puzzled about what they were carrying until the full horror of it dawned on him. The soldiers were collecting pieces of what had only a short time ago been human beings. They had found a brass-colored hotel luggage cart somewhere and were wheeling mangled chunks of human bodies back to where the body bags were laid out, waiting.
How would they bag the body parts, Tay wondered? One bag for each piece? No, there weren’t nearly enough bags to do it that way. Tay briefly considered how they would have to distribute the parts among the bags. All the arms in one bag and all the legs in another? Or did they reassemble the bodies before they bagged them? Perhaps figure out first which arm went with which torso? Somehow that didn’t seem likely either.
In the heat, he could smell both the body parts and the rubber of the bags. The smell made him sick to his stomach.
***
Tay worked his way around the vans and kept moving west. Somehow he felt he needed to find the place where the bomb had exploded, although what difference that would make now he had no idea. There was more debris here — chunks of concrete, bits of metal, pieces of things that seemed almost recognizable but not quite — and Tay knew he was getting close. At least one of the bombs had exploded somewhere near where Orchard Road and Scotts Road crossed at the busiest intersection in the city, the intersection where the Singapore Marriott stood. He had no doubt of that now.
All at once, and for no particular reason, a hugely disturbing thought occurred to Tay.
He remembered he had heard somewhere that suicide bombers in the Middle East frequently worked in groups. After the initial explosions, when the rescue and recovery efforts were in full swing, a second wave of explosions would occur.
Tay remembered thinking when he first heard the sound of the blasts that there could be no greater evidence of the extraordinary cruelty men were capable of inflicting on each other than the random bombings of innocents, but perhaps he was wrong. Targeting rescue workers with a second wave of bombing was even more sadistic, wasn’t it? Sometimes Tay thought the end to human barbarism would come only when mankind was wiped completely from the universe. God help him, but he did.
Tay’s eyes scanned the ground around him as he walked, but he didn’t linger long on anything he saw. He was on the edge. He knew the sudden sight of a detached leg or a severed head would push him over. He had no doubt of that, but he did not know where he would land.
***
There was so much debris on the north side of Orchard Road that Tay shifted his track to the south and moved in the direction of the ION Orchard Mall. ION was Singapore’s newest and glitziest mall and, towering over it in the tallest building on Orchard Road, was The ION Orchard Residences, 175 of the most expensive apartments in Singapore. Tay thought he had eaten lunch in the mall once, but he couldn’t remember where or with whom so he guessed it wasn’t a particularly memorable meal.
No matter how forgettable the meal might have been, the structure itself was undeniably memorable. The mall level was an extravaganza of swooping curves and glass-clad waves that always made Tay think of a massive drop of quicksilver that had somehow splashed to earth at the corner of Orchard and Scotts Roads. Now almost every one of the tens of thousands of glass triangles set into the building’s silver latticework were shattered, leaving the place looking like it had passed through the apocalypse. Perhaps it had.
Tay glanced over at the opposite side of Orchard where the Marriott was. It took him a moment to process what he saw there. When he did, he felt his mouth begin to open very slowly.
The thirty-story Marriott tower that had for many years been one of Singapore’s most recognizable landmarks had been cleaved exactly in half. It looked as if it had been sliced straight through by a giant ax. He could see inside open hotel rooms, a cut-away view that seemed more like a computer simulation than reality.
Right in front of him a bus with all its windows blown out sat sideways across Orchard Road. Tay stopped next to it and gaped at the Marriott. The bomb must have been detonated in the driveway somewhere near its entrance. This was no suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest. This had been a truck bomb, a big one. But he had heard three separate explosions, Tay remembered. Where had the other two occurred? And were they this bad? If they were, God help them all.
Tay took a couple of steps backward in an involuntary retreat from the horror in front of him. His left foot slipped in something slick and he stumbled over a tattered mattress. He tried to steady himself, but he was off balance and fell across the mattress and up against one of the bus’s big tires.
Tay’s first thought was how embarrassed he was by that. Surrounded by so much misery, and here he was lying on a mattress. It just didn’t seem right to him.
***
And that was exactly where Tay was — lying on the mattress, his back up against the bus tire — when the whole world abruptly turned white.
The first surge of light was followed a moment later by the blast wave of a mammoth explosion from the direction of the ION Orchard. A powerful pressure wave blew a rolling wall of flames across what was left of Orchard Road directly toward the Marriott. The very oxygen in the air ignited and the release of gas, heat, and light felt to Tay like the world was ending.
And maybe it was.
This fourth bomb collected the hundreds of thousands of shards of broken glass at the shopping mall that had been created by the first three explosions and hurled them back like a cloud of razor sharp knives. Rescue workers caught in the open were shredded. Most of them would later have to be identified by DNA. Nothing left of the bodies was big enough to recognize.
Tay’s body was protected by the heavy rubber bus tire, and that was what saved his life.
The tire was less effective in protecting Tay from the compression wave than it was from the cloud of glass, but it was effective enough. The wave rolled over the ground like a tsunami, battering and in some cases entirely demolishing the internal organs of those who took its full force. Tay did not take its full force because of the big rubber bus tire.
The wave snapped his head first one way and then back the other way. He felt like he had been stabbed with sharpened pencils in both ears. He wondered if his eardrums had been broken.
Then the nausea overcame him and he began to lose consciousness. His last thought before he passed out was this.
Goddamned motherfucking barbarians. I’ll find every last one of them and I’ll kill them myself.