pause, to knock a fish with his boot, to send it back into the water to be with its family, but he never did. He was a man with a knife and metal gloves standing on that deck. And he never did.
Part VI
48 • Jeffery Biggers
The jets were flying low. They rumbled down the Hudson, booms and echoes like thunderclaps amid the walls of glass and steel, and Jeffery was reminded of that September morning so long ago. He’d been a boy, cutting class because it was too beautiful outside, when he’d heard the roar of the jet overhead, a distant grumble, acrid smoke filling the air for days and days.
Most of the pack ignored the whine of the turbines, but it triggered a deep memory for Jeffery. It was the sound of deployment, the noise of good men and women ferried off to another life. It was stub-nosed C-130s and C-5As that left with children and came home mostly empty. Only the bags were full. Laid out on the deck. All black. The color of grief. Plastic zippered up tight.
His head lifted, some primal fear network still intact, still pulling the puppet’s strings. Navy gray slid across the brilliant blue, contrails of speed and the cool atmosphere streaking from wingtips. The lead jet was in a dive. Jeffery remembered jumping out of a plane a long time ago. He remembered thinking the chute wouldn’t open, that he would plummet to his death. He remembered calling his mom from camp, still breathless, her so proud of all the places he was going, the things he was doing.
He only told her about the good places. The good things.
The landing gear was open, hatch doors like little fins on the plane’s belly, clear as day. Nothing sticking out.
Jeffery remembered flying home—he remembered the party they threw. All his mom’s friends had crowded around. They grabbed his biceps and patted his stomach, squealed and told him how handsome he was, showed him their phones, pictures of their daughters.
He had smiled and eaten off his paper plate, standing up, telling himself to eat slow. No mortars would scream into the mess tent. He wouldn’t have to drop what he was doing and find his rifle. Smile and eat. A woman twice his age told him how pretty his eyes were. How the military done him good.
He had nodded, didn’t tell her what his eyes had seen. Five miles driving a jeep, an arm in his lap, a friend laid out in the back seat, wondering all the while if they could put it back on. Ears still ringing, but the screams of anguish that would echo forever. Like that buzzing you get when you’re going deaf to a sound. Going deaf, but there it was anyway. And no digging could get it out.
They had patted his stomach and asked him how many sit-ups he could do. Was he going to college? Jeffery had wanted to lift his shirt and show them. Not his knotted muscles but the scars on top. The white fingers of flesh where the doctors had saved him. Look, his mom had the Purple Heart, the trophy of his wounds there over the mantel. Look. Because even she hadn’t seen. No more playing in the yard with his shirt off. Nothing to see here.
It wasn’t the landing gear that was open, Jeffery saw. This was a different plane. Something else nosed out of that hatch and dropped away, and he knew, with a horror that matched the last weeks of his life, he knew what they’d calculated.
It was a heavy bomb. It didn’t wiggle, didn’t succumb to the fickle air. There was no second-guessing its intent. A city in exchange for a continent. He remembered decisions like that. We’ll give up this town if it means winning the war. Level the streets so there’s no place to hide. A town for a country. Until there weren’t no towns left.
Turbines screamed as the pilot pulled away, a jet arcing up while a bomb slid across the blue sky. It fell forever. Jeffery’s body remained still, that monstrous side of him seeming to understand, to hear his thoughts. It was almost over.
When it disappeared behind the buildings, there was a silent pause, the fear of a dud, of nothing.
And then a flash of light shining through the streets and filling the sky, a billowing bubble of white rising up, a cascade of shattering glass and toppling steel.
Jeffery braced himself in that hollow head he’d been a prisoner in for too long. He watched the destruction roar faster than thought itself. He had but a moment, standing between towers of hope and despair in the shadow of his father’s work—a moment to be thankful that the end was near, that the fire would come to take him and his brothers as well.
49 • Michael Lane
Michael was going to hell. He could feel the inexorable flow downward, gravity and sin tugging on his heels, pulling him toward the center of the earth.
From the apartment to the streets, and now he was about to join the crush that flowed beneath them. He had crawled westward from his shithole neighborhood near the East River and into Tribeca. Neighborhoods that had been worlds apart now looked the same to him, all seen from pavement level. Cars lay scattered, abandoned in the middle of the street, doors left open, hazards blinking, obstacles it took forever to drag himself around. Newspapers tumbled across the pavement like flightless birds to attack his face. They spread themselves across the wrought iron gates and fences that protected walk-ups from the infected sidewalks. They gathered against the gutters in origami nests until a brave soul—the sports page or classifieds—tore off and flapped to freedom.
Shopping bags had better luck. Except for those caught on coils of razor wire, they fluttered up on the breeze like jellyfish pulsing through the air, torn handles hanging like tentacles and stingers.
Michael had pulled himself along for days. He couldn’t remember why he was doing this, but couldn’t seem to stop. It reminded him of a former life, getting up and doing things that made no sense, hating himself, hating his routine, the eternal disgust, and no ability to break free.
He used his palms to lift himself. Pushing down and then bending his elbows made him flop forward a few inches. There was hardly any pause before he did it again. Over and over. The flesh from both hands had been ripped away. Bone made clacking sounds on the pavement. Several of his fingers were bent back and pointed unnaturally toward the sky.
Groups of walkers passed him by now and then. They all grunted and groaned to some degree, weak sounds of agony from those dragging a broken leg or suffering a gaping wound. It was the accordion squeeze of organs like great bellows, wheezing and rattling as they chased down anyone still clinging and surviving, anyone with meat still worth taking.
A pregnant woman in a tattered green dress had made an especial racket. Her groans rose above the others, a noise among the inhuman sounds that stood out for being… human. Michael had watched her as she passed him by, the back of her dress torn open, her underwear riding up, half of her ass hanging out, skinny everywhere except for that bulge of a belly.
He had lost contact with the woman after a block or so. She had drifted uptown on some scent Michael couldn’t nose, moving faster with her waddling stagger than he could ever hope to on his belly. He had followed a different scent, one that pulled jostling masses down flights of stairs, into a station, nearer to hell with every painful pull and lunge forward.
And it wasn’t his addiction taking him there. He didn’t think any god would punish a man for being happy, for victimless crimes. No, he was on this inexorable crawl into the pits of hell for all the things his addiction made him
