Day One

specialization of America. Why should they hire someone to do it, his father would say, when he was perfectly capable of handling it himself? When he wasn’t writing or drinking too much to see straight, his creative streak urged him to fix or to build things. He would tell Hawke about tree houses and go-carts he’d put together when he was young. Now he built furniture. Or at least he had, until his last book had come out a month earlier and sunk without a ripple and he had hit the bottle harder than ever.

Hawke caught a whiff of smoke in the air. The weather was warm. Many people would be firing up their grills on their tiny patches of lawns or on rear porches. He entered the house, called out for his father and got no answer. Hawke opened the basement door, found the shop dark and empty. When he was a younger boy, he used to sneak down to his father’s woodworking shop and play with the tools, pretending to saw and hammer and glue spare pieces together while ignoring the glinting lines of empty liquor bottles that took up more and more space on the workbench. He used to believe back then that his father could fix anything, build whatever he set his sights on. But he never really seemed to want Hawke there when he was around, and after a while Hawke stopped going down there. As he grew older he realized those were times when his old man had needed to be alone, to drink and try to sort through or avoid whatever disorder was growing inside him. No matter how hard he tried to create order from chaos, he was helpless to do so for his own mind.

Hawke called out again and got no answer. He followed the smell of smoke through the sagging galley kitchen to the back door. His father was outside in the dirt square that stood for their backyard, his back to the house. He was feeding a bonfire that was growing bigger by the moment. Flames licked the air hungrily as he reached down, picked something up and threw it in.

When the back door slammed, the man didn’t even turn around. Hawke came down the short steps to see a box of books sitting at his father’s feet. About twenty of them were already burning, along with chunks of what looked like broken furniture. A can of lighter fluid had been tossed to one side.

“Poison dart frogs,” his father said. “From the family Dendrobatidae, common to Central and South America. One of the most poisonous animals in history. But they’re tiny things, look pretty enough, like you might want to pet them. And did you know that only a few types can kill you? The others are harmless, more or less.”

He took a swig from a bottle of vodka and threw another book into the flames, watching as the pages fluttered through the air like a bird’s wings. “This book was supposed to be a warning to the world,” he said. “But it’s going to kill me, Johnny. It’s the last piece of the puzzle. I’m done.”

Hawke didn’t know what his father was talking about. He glanced at Hawke, bleary-eyed and unable to focus. “You’re going to burn the house down,” Hawke said. He looked at the cover of the book as it curled and blackened in the flames: Socialism from Below: The People’s Revolution.

“It’s coming,” his father said, his words slurring into each other. “Reform from the masses, overthrowing this fucking capitalist system that’s keeping us hostage. Nobody gives a damn what I say, but you wait and see. It might look pretty and harmless on the surface, but we’re going to build and build and build until we create our own end.”

You keep saying it, Hawke thought, as if that’ll make it come true. “We seem to be hanging in there.”

“You and your machines,” his father said. “Locking yourself up in your room all night, staring into the screen. You think that’s a real connection? It’s no substitute for humanity.” He reached down, tossed another book onto the flames. “Look at them,” he said. “Even when they burn, they don’t fight back.”

* * *

Hawke’s thoughts ran in different directions. He couldn’t tell whether the images of his father that filled his mind were accurate or not. But he remembered the heat of the fire, the flames shooting higher as his father had kept throwing in more copies of his books. The fire department had finally shown up to put out the blaze before it caught the house or garage and took up the rest of the block, and he spent the night in jail, sleeping one off.

It had been less than six months before his death.

Hawke watched for the police car as the group kept going across 79th Street, but it didn’t reappear. Vasco remained about twenty feet ahead.

“You think this is a good idea, letting him take the lead like this?” Price said. He had been backpedaling next to Hawke, looking behind them for any kind of threat, and now he turned and edged closer, keeping his voice little more than a whisper as he nodded at Vasco’s back. “I never even saw the guy before today. He’s an office machine repairman, for Chrissake.”

“I don’t know,” Hawke said. “You don’t know much about me, either.” But he’d been thinking the same thing. Vasco had lied about serving in the military. What else might he lie about?

“I know you better than this guy,” Price said. “Besides, you didn’t start ordering us around like you were running the troops through a drill. Just seems like he’s wound a little tight, that’s all.”

“We all are,” Hawke said. “Not much of a surprise, considering what we’ve been through.”

Smoke wafted from the shattered windows of a bakery up ahead; some kind of explosion inside had scattered debris across the sidewalk. A young woman in a sleeveless white summer dress looked like she had taken the brunt of the blast. She lay sprawled among the shattered glass, blood pooled around her motionless body. Vasco crouched and touched her neck, feeling for a pulse, then looked up at them and shook his head.

The rest of them gave the dead woman a wide berth.

Outside the Yorkville Library, a colorful banner imprinted with the profile of a lion and the library’s logo hung from a pole above the door. The lower rope securing it to an iron railing had come loose, and the banner flapped in the breeze, then snapped like a gunshot. Hanscomb let out a short shriek and covered her head, nearly breaking into a wild run. “Stay with us,” Vasco barked at her. “Don’t panic, or you’ll get yourself killed.”

Hawke had the feeling he and the others were being manipulated like puppets, but he didn’t want to think about why. Not yet. That massive jumble of information he’d received was like a shark coming to the surface, the truth circling around this particular group of lies, and he felt like it might just capsize him if he came too close to it. And there was no time to work through it. His senses were heightened, his vision narrowing and sharpening every detail immediately before them.

They turned down Lexington Avenue, passing another bank on the corner. Across the street was a florist’s shop with alarms blaring; Price touched Hawke’s shoulder and pointed to two men in baggy sweatshirts and jeans ducking out from the shattered glass of the front door carrying fistfuls of cash. One of them had a gun.

“Don’t make eye contact,” Hawke said, but it was too late. One of them had spotted the group and nudged his friend, and the two of them sauntered across the street.

“What the fuck you looking at?” the one holding the gun said to Price. He was short, stocky, with the broad shoulders and thick neck of a bodybuilder. A brightly colored tattoo ran around his forearm. The other one, taller and thinner, had the sickly, hollow, twitchy look of a heroin addict. He edged around to flank Price and Hawke but said nothing.

“We don’t want any trouble,” Price said. His voice broke slightly. “We didn’t see anything, okay?”

The gunman grinned. “It’s a fire sale,” he said. “Everything one hundred percent off.” He looked at Hawke. “You see anything, amigo?”

Hawke shrugged, trying to keep his fear from showing. “You want to risk your life for a few bucks, go for it,” he said. “Me, I’d rather get out of the city alive.”

The man’s eyes narrowed, and he took a step closer. “You think you know what the fuck is going down around here, huh? You think this shit matters? My brother’s in Philly, talked to him before the phone went dead. Same thing’s happening there. So where you gonna go at the end of the world?”

A chill ran through Hawke’s body. He had held out hope that the attack had been mainly focused on New York, but if this was true…

“Hey!” Vasco shouted. The others had realized what was going on and circled back, but they stopped short when the man raised the gun. “Whoa,” Vasco said, taking a quick step back. “Take it easy.”

The man pointed the gun at Hawke’s face. “No po po around here,” he said. “Nothing to stop me.” The barrel loomed as he cocked the hammer. “Pow,” he said. Then he glanced at his friend and started backing away, gun still trained on Hawke. “Good luck staying alive,” he said. The two of them turned and ran down 79th, back the way Hawke’s group had come.

“You okay?” Price said.