Day One

CHAPTER NINE

11:17 A.M.

OUTSIDE, people were rushing everywhere in a panic, shoving one another to get away. Smoke swirled in the air; abandoned cars sat up on the sidewalk with their doors hanging open while other drivers honked their horns against snarled traffic. A series of wrenching crashes echoed through the street as a taxi tried to race around a jammed intersection and slammed into a shiny silver Mercedes sedan, sending it spinning into a Nissan that had been left by the curb. Screams and shouts mixed with the rending of metal, booms of secondary explosions that came from every direction, the shriek of rubber and the growing rumble of something far larger and more terrifying, like the collapse of entire buildings somewhere out of sight.

Hawke helped Price move away from the Conn.ect building to an empty spot on the curb, where he sat Price down and crouched next to him. The man seemed unable to support his own weight. “You hurt?” Hawke said. Price shook his head no. He was crying silently, looking down at his hands, still sticky with Kessler’s blood.

Hawke stood up and looked around with a fresh sense of shock. A block away, a gigantic, gaping hole had swallowed the intersection of Second Avenue and East 78th Street, smoke and flames shooting up from below, asphalt buckled and melting in all directions. He could feel the heat from where he stood. A city bus, barely visible through the rippling flames, had toppled into the hole, upended and tilted sideways, the ads that adorned its sides blackened with smoke. The Mexican restaurant on the corner with the brown plastic booths and corrugated metal roof was gone, the building that had contained it gaping open and licked by fire. The other side of the street had fared slightly better, but Girardi’s market had been defaced with flames and smoke and the awning on the Vietnamese place next door was burning like a torch.

He flashed back to his nightmare: Thomas, being yanked away from him by slippery-smooth tentacles whipping down from above. The heat of the fires nearby washed over Hawke, bringing tears. More smoke billowed up over the city, pillars of it swirling through the blue sky and winding away like balloon strings. The chaos was absolute; Armageddon had descended in a split second’s time. He hadn’t had time to process this. Everything had gone down so fast, and getting down to the lobby was a blur, fueled by adrenaline and a focus on survival. It was all too big, too overwhelming, completely alien and wrong in a way that made him feel numb. This couldn’t be happening, there was no reason or explanation for it, and yet it was; the mental pressure was building around him, strong as an approaching tornado, sucking air from his lungs, whipping dust and debris into every crack and crevice.

“Gas explosion.” Weller appeared as if from nowhere, nodding toward the hole in the street. He spoke loudly to cut through the din, but he appeared eerily calm within the madness around them. “That’s what took out our windows on the seventh floor. Easy enough to do, if you overload the systems and force a rupture.”

The sound of Weller’s voice brought Hawke back to himself. Weller had Young and Vasco with him, and he was carrying the hard-shelled security case from his office in both arms, hugging it like it was a child. Was that why he had lingered in the office suite? Hawke thought of Young, ready to charge back upstairs to rescue Weller without a second thought. Anger flared, white-hot at Hawke’s core. Suddenly he wanted to get his hands around Weller’s throat, and the urge was so strong he balled his fists to keep from leaping at him.

“What the hell happened to you?”

“Got disoriented up there for a few minutes, with the smoke,” he said, “but I found my way down.”

Gas explosion. He was right about the hole on Second Avenue; Hawke could smell it in the air. But it didn’t explain the other plumes of smoke rising up across New York, or the number of cars run off the street and crumpled into one another. It didn’t explain the traffic lights cycling randomly down 79th Street as he watched, or the way Bradbury had danced a jig across the office floor with the office lamp, hair standing on end.

Something else Weller had said finally registered. “What do you mean, it’s easy enough to do?” Hawke said. “You think this was deliberate?”

“We need to get somewhere safe,” Weller said. “Things have changed.”

“What’s changed? And where is safe? People are dead. Don’t you give a damn about Susan Kessler? She bled out in the lobby. And Price over there needs to be treated for shock. What the hell is going on?”

Weller turned toward Hawke, who realized that the man’s calm was an illusion; his eyes held that same glittering light they’d had earlier in his office, pure energy pouring off him like some kind of gospel preacher at the pulpit as another distant explosion shook the ground. “They’re not just coming after me now. I think she’s involved. This is going to get worse.”

CHAPTER TEN

11:23 A.M.

WHO WAS INVOLVED? Did he mean Kessler? Before Hawke could say a word, Weller took a step into the street, still clutching his laptop case. Young shouted a warning as a brand-new Cadillac Escalade, careening on and off the sidewalk around the choked traffic, suddenly swerved violently to the left through an opening and accelerated toward him, its engine screaming.

The huge machine missed Price by less than three feet. Hawke shoved Weller out of the way and dove to the ground, getting a split-second glimpse of the terrified face of the driver, her hands completely up and off the wheel as the vehicle slid past and slammed into a light post.

The post toppled over, crashing into the face of the office building, bouncing off and sending sparks flying as the SUV hung on the light-post base, engine still growling. Hawke lay still for a moment, stunned, the fresh surge of adrenaline making his stomach lurch.

He tasted grit, spat on the concrete and grimaced. His palms were scraped raw. The pain was like a stinging slap to the face, enough to rouse him again, and he sat up as Young tried to get Weller to a sitting position. The man’s head lolled loosely on his shoulders. He was out cold after cracking his head in the fall. Young spoke into his face, “Come on, Jim, wake up….”

Hawke got to his feet and went to the Cadillac, where Vasco was yanking at the driver’s door. He could hear the woman screaming inside, battering at the window with her fists. “Unlock it,” Vasco said, cupping his hands to the glass. He repeated it slowly, as if to a stubborn child. “Unlock… the… fucking… door!”

“She okay?”

Vasco turned to glance at Hawke, breathing hard, and shook his head as the engine continued to race out of control, nearly drowning him out. “It’s in neutral, but if she hits that shifter it’s gonna go like a bat out of hell…. I can’t get through to her; she’s out of her frigging mind here….”

Hawke looked around for more speeding vehicles. Most drivers seemed to have given up amid the traffic and left their cars where they stood. People were still running away from the fire on 78th.

Another low, deep rumble shook the street, something far away or underground. He found a fist-sized chunk of concrete torn loose from the light post’s fall, hefted it and went to the SUV, shattering the window as the driver cowered away from him. He reached in to unlock the door and the woman tumbled out into the street, sobbing and scrambling on all fours away from the vehicle.

She got to her feet a few yards away and turned back to them, holding a small leopard-print clutch, swaying like a drunk and shivering, her mascara running down her face in two black lines. She wiped snot from her nose with a sleeve. “That… fucking thing… it tried to kill me….”

“Easy,” Hawke said. He took a step toward her with his hand out, but she screamed and shrank back, and he stopped dead, not wanting to spook her further. “It kinda looked like you tried to kill us.”