The night smells like cotton candy no one wanted. Carnival food stalls line the back of the boat launch parking lot, all of them looking lonely. Fried Oreos; bright red candy apples. All for the kids who hadn’t come. Somebody should probably have called these vendors up a couple of days ago, Lilly thinks, scaled it back. Paid them a kill fee and told them not to come. But what did it matter, really? More of Jark’s money pissed away. Who cares? And do carnies even have kill fees?
The night is cold. Snow comes and goes. The Ferris wheel is still dark, looming ten stories high in the night beside her. Music blares through shitty speakers, old holiday hits, Black musicians exploited by white producers.
Lilly accidentally makes eye contact with a woman working one of the food stalls. And so, out of pity, she buys a candy apple. Dark red coating, peanut-studded. She doesn’t intend to eat it. Still has some residual fear, from a prepubescent Coney Island trip where her mother told her Don’t eat those, they sit there for months and the coating is hard as glass and you’ll crack your teeth and the shards will cut your gums to ribbons.
She takes a bite. The coating is soft, the flesh firm. It is delicious. For a moment she feels like she’s gotten away with something, and then she snaps back to the moment. She can’t let down her guard; can’t pretend like they’re out of the woods. Winter Fest only formally started five minutes before. So much could go wrong.
* * *
“HUDSON POLICE DEPARTMENT,” Rebecca says, caught off guard by the call. Almost an hour since the last one.
She should be happy, to have had so few calls tonight. She’s been praying for a quiet night, throughout these past couple weeks of nonstop fuckery.
Instead, she’s afraid.
“Hey, Rebecca,” says a familiar voice.
“Hey, Attalah. What’s happening?”
“Not a whole lot.”
Rebecca hears wind whistling in the background. “Surprised you’re not down at the Winter Fest,” she says. “You’re not scared, are you? You wouldn’t be the only one. Tons of my friends won’t go because they’re convinced some damn lunatic will start shooting people. Or, I don’t know, stabbing people with harpoons.”
“What’s the word from the officers down that way?” Attalah asks. “I’m heading there shortly.”
“All quiet on the western front.”
“That’s good. Listen, Rebecca. I need you to do me a huge favor. It’s kind of an emergency.”
“Of course,” Rebecca says. “Whatever I can do.”
“I know this is going to breach six hundred different kinds of protocol, but you have to trust me that this is the best thing to do.”
“Sure,” Rebecca says, eying the dispatch board uncertainly.
“I need you to radio Dom for me. Okay?”
“Why don’t you call him?” Rebecca says.
“We kind of had a fight. He’s mad at me, and when he gets mad at me he stops taking my calls. And, honestly, every second counts right now. I need you to radio Dom and tell him to go to the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. Park his car on the Hudson side, without turning on the lights or sirens or anything. There’s a jumper, out on the pedestrian walkway.”
“Why don’t we send an ambulance?” Rebecca asks. “If someone is experiencing a psychiatric emergency, we should send some trained professionals. Dom is a great detective, but he’s no therapist. And in a situation like—”
“It’s someone he knows,” Attalah says. “Someone who trusts Dom, who would not trust a stranger. Even a trained mental health professional. Especially if they rolled up with flashing ambulance lights. So please, radio Dom and tell him to do this. And to hurry. And don’t tell him I told you to call, or he’ll think it’s some weird scheme of mine, and he won’t do it. You know Dom, when he’s faced with conflict he shuts down. That’s why he won’t take my calls, and that’s why he won’t go if he knows I told you to tell him. But trust me, Rebecca, this is life or death we’re talking about.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Chief Propst wants all hands on deck down there.”
“I know the chief doesn’t want his officers ignoring valid emergency responses. That’s why you’re there, isn’t it? You have to trust me that that’s what this is.”
Rebecca has always been a little bit afraid of Attalah. She can’t say why. Always assumed it was a tiny sliver of racism on her part, some vestigial fear of a strong Black woman, and so she’s always gone out of her way to ignore that fear. Which is what she does now, as she says, Yes, Attalah, I’ll do it, no, Attalah, I trust you, no need to thank me, talk to you soon.
* * *
HEATHER SHIVERS, alone in the dark at the top of the Ferris wheel. The pods are heated—this is an all-four-seasons kind of Ferris wheel, and whoever imagined that such a thing could exist?—but she has the windows open. She likes the wind. It keeps her present. Alert. Awake. Grounded. Even this high up.
She’s alone, but not. Because there he is, all of a sudden, knocking on the door of her little pod. A man she met in a dream, who then turned up on Tinder.
“Hey, girl,” he says, reaching in the open window to open the door when she doesn’t move.
“Hi, Tom,” she whispers.
He hands her a book of matches. “Are you ready?”
Heather nods. She looks out at them: the lights of her city. So many. While she sits here in the dark.
Tom’s hand is on her face. His smell is strong—marine, mammalian—but overpowered by the stink of hay. Hay is packed tight into the seat she sits on, the walls of the pod. Into all of them. Sheaves of hay soaked with gasoline are strapped to all the struts with duct tape.
She takes his hand off her face. He grunts and then gets up. Opens the door. “Don’t get cold feet on me now, Heather. You can do it. You can set the fire that burns them all out. But a fire like that? It needs a very special sort of kindling.”
* * *
“WAIT FOR IT,” Zelda says. “You know the signal.”
The man beside her grunts and sends a group text with those words.
Snow, intermittent up ’til now, begins to fall in earnest. The temperature’s dropping, and Zelda loves it. Whatever the hell drug that Tom guy gave her, it’s cranked up all her physical sensations and made her hyperaware. Not like meth does; not even like ecstasy. More like fear. But a fear that exhilarates.
She’s parked on the sidewalk in front of Historical Materialism. Behind the wheel of one of ten bulldozers, evenly spaced around the city. When she sees the signal, she’ll rev the engine and drive the bulldozer straight through the plate-glass windows of the store. She’ll back up and drive through again if she has to. Whatever it takes to completely compromise the structural integrity of the building.
Every dozer has two occupants. One to drive it, the second to step through the breach and place the gas canister and light the Molotov cocktail strapped to the side. For every dozer there are two lookout cars, one at either end of the block. They’ll lean on the horn if a cop on foot comes near, and if a cop car approaches they’ll move to intercept. Block the street. Buy the dozer teams some time. Sixteen minutes, she estimates, will be enough to completely destroy thirty businesses and homes. Twenty-eight minutes and every antique store on Warren Street will be gone. By that time she imagines the cops will be able to overcome the limited defenses they’ve put up and start shutting them down one by one, and the exponential destruction rate will slow down. But she might be wrong. The cops might not have the means to stop them at all. They might get to reduce every nonlocal business and million-dollar home to rubble.
The bulldozer has a radio. Apparently even construction workers need some music sometimes. Zelda switches it on. Rides the tingle, the electric thrum of anticipation.
“This song goes out to all the lovely people shivering in the cold down at the Hudson boat launch,” Miss Jackson says, her voice sweet and happy. “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” comes on, Billie Holiday sounding like love and warmth herself.
* * *
“THIS SONG GOES OUT to all the lovely people shivering in the cold down at the Hudson boat launch,” says a man’s voice through the speakers, sounding sad and robotic. “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” comes on, Dean Martin monotonous as cold and loneliness personified.
She’s not sure why or when it started, but Lilly is afraid. The sugar buzz of the candy apple has worn off. Her teeth are chattering.
The crowd has gotten a little bigger, and that’s a good thing. But then again, an awful lot of them are wearing clothes that are baggy and dark and nondescript.
Probably she’s just being paranoid. This is Hudson, after all. Not exactly a fashion capital. Baggy and nondescript has always been pretty standard. Same as it would be in any town where Wal-Mart was the place most folks went for clothes.
She prays it made a difference, her trip to UPLIFT Hudson. Her offer to Attalah. She’d accepted, hadn’t she? That had to count for something.
But wouldn’t you? Lilly thinks. Wouldn’t you say yes and smile in the face of the naive little girl who came knocking? If only to buy yourself some time to . . . to . . .
Well, Lilly can’t really think of what Attalah might be buying time for, what diabolical schemes might be moving forward behind the scenes even now.
Whatever happens, we deserve it.
She can’t get her night with Heather Scutt out of her head. How broken the woman was. How afraid. She’d never gotten it, before that moment. The depth of the violence of what they’d done in Hudson. Even with the best intentions.
I stole her home. I didn’t mean to, but I did.
At least it’s started to snow for real. Snow and thunderstorms still make her feel like a child again. Full of wonder and awe at what nature can do. She watches how it turns each streetlamp into a cone of drifting orange flakes.
Pretty soon the mayor will get up there and make a speech. He’s running a little late already. Any minute now.