Half an hour later, I sat at a desk in the OEM war room quietly watching the big screen. It was divided up into a grid of nine screens, just like it was at the beginning of The Brady Bunch, but instead of seeing Carol and Mike and the gang smiling, various parts of the city were visible. The center was losing hold, and things were falling apart.
What looked like war footage was being beamed in from the traffic-light cameras. In SoHo, Times Square, Central Park, Harlem, and everywhere else, the streets were packed with cars and the sidewalks were filled with people carrying things. Knapsacks, rolling suitcases, paintings, dogs. On the screen that showed Broadway and 72nd Street, I watched as a short black guy in a gray business suit pushed a shopping cart up the middle of Broadway with an old black woman, probably his mother, lying in it.
I’d never seen so many people in Grand Central Terminal. They were packed in like sardines, a lot of them pushing and shoving. As I watched, a tall, curly-haired old lady by the information booth went to the floor as her cane was kicked out from under her by a group of stupid kids pushing past her. She was trampled by three or four other thoughtless jerks before some nice Asian teen boy stepped in. I was almost heartened as he dragged her back to her feet, but then as I watched, blood began gushing from her nose.
Then there was the eighteen-wheeler on fire in the middle of the Verrazano Bridge. The whole thing—the cab and the trailer—just blazing along. It would continue to do so, I knew, until it burned out, because a fire truck had as much chance of getting through the stalled traffic as I had of becoming the starting power forward for the Knicks this season.
No one was listening about not panicking, and who could blame them? It was every man for himself now, as hard as that was to believe.
From time to time, I looked away from the sickening screens to just stare at the items on the desk I was sitting at. I blinked at a bottle of hand sanitizer, a LEGO Movie mouse pad, a tube of ChapStick. All of it was going to be underwater in a few hours?
Beside the computer was a framed picture I couldn’t stop staring at. Two coltish girls and a tall blond mom smiling as they waded among the rocks of a river.
It looked like it was taken in New England somewhere, with autumn-yellow leaves on the trees. The girls were adorable, with braces, and the smile on the mom’s face was room-brightening. It looked like an old Coca-Cola ad or something. Americans being happy. It was time to say sayonara to that now?
Squinting angrily at the photo, I suddenly didn’t want to just catch the sons of bitches responsible anymore. I wanted to hunt them down and kill them with my bare hands.
When I called Martin for the twentieth time in the last twenty minutes, it kicked into voice mail. Martin was on the road now. Everyone was with him except Brian. They were in northern Manhattan, trying to get across the Harlem River to meet up with Brian at Fordham Prep. The problem was that Brian wasn’t picking up his phone, which meant he had forgotten to charge it. But Martin had called the school and left word to have Brian stay there for pickup, so maybe all was still good.
I balled my hands into fists as they started to shake.
Who was I kidding? I felt completely helpless.
I looked up as Emily came in.
“Did you get your kids out?” she said.
“Almost. How about you? Are you near the coast in Virginia?”
“No, thank God. My brother got Olivia out of school, and they’re at Costco stocking up,” she said glumly.
Emily’s face lit up suddenly as she got a text.
“Mike, get up! C’mon!” she said, grabbing my hand.
“What?”
“Arturo and Doyle are at the scientist meeting on six. They say they might have something.”