He looked past her at where Dawn stared at the TV screen. 'What about her?'
'I'll have to leave her.'
'Yeah. The truth might be hard to explain.'
'Too hard.'
Jack smiled. 'Momma Weezy.'
'She needs someone, Jack. She's all alone in the world.'
Jack hadn't realized how true that was. Parents dead, baby stolen, cut off from whatever friends she'd had… the kid had no one.
'Going to leave her here?'
She shook her head. 'She'll be safe in her place.'
'Okay. Give the Lady my best. I'll stay in touch as best I can.'
He grabbed his coat and headed for the door. He took the stairs down and hit the sidewalk at a trot, heading west toward where he garaged the Crown Vic. Traffic on the side street was stopped dead. As he loped past a taxi he saw a young couple get out and start to walk, leaving behind an angry-looking driver.
'It's cold,' the girl said, tightening her coat around her neck.
The guy laid a protective arm over her shoulders. 'Yeah, but at least we'll get there before it's over.'
When Jack reached Amsterdam, he stopped. Always a jam here, but at least with some sense of movement, even if only inches at a time. Right now-nothing.
He looked up and saw why: The traffic lights were blinking yellow in both directions. In this city a yellow caution light translated as Hit the gas. Yellow both ways meant everybody had the right of way. Yielding was for pussies. No surprise at the ironclad gridlock.
A traffic cop might have helped-if one could get here-but as Jack fought his way uptown along the crammed Broadway sidewalk, he doubted it. Every intersection was the same. This called for a cop on every corner and even that wouldn't work. There didn't seem anywhere left to go. It looked like every car in the five boroughs had been plunked down on the streets. The only solution Jack could see was to pave them over and start anew.
He passed an angry crowd outside the Beacon Theater, complaining about the inability to buy tickets for the Allman Brothers because the theater's computers were down. A waiter was taping a CASH ONLY sign to the window of a bistro. The subtitle read: 'Can't run credit cards.'
The faces around him showed a mixture of anger, frustration, bemusement, and bewilderment. At least no one looked bored.
It dawned on him that his car was useless.
Okay, he'd go subway. Catch a train down to Times Square and switch to the 7 out to Queens. It would drop him off with a good walk to the airport, but maybe he could grab a cab out there. Traffic couldn't be as bad as here.
He found a subway entrance and was halfway down the stairs when a haggard-looking suit coming up said, 'Don't bother.'
Jack stopped. He'd had a niggling worry about this.
'Not running?'
He shook his head. 'Got a 1 just sitting in the station with its doors open. Conductor says he doesn't know what's up. They got the word to sit tight. Something about switching or signal problems, he thinks.'
Yeah, that made sense. They were controlled by computers, right?
Jack slammed a fist against the railing.
'I know how you feel,' the guy said. 'Well, there's always a cab.'
'Not always.'
Jack turned and followed him back up to the surface.
'Christ!' the guy said, stopping short as he saw the traffic. 'What the fuck?'
Jack slipped past him and headed for Julio's.
12
'Where's the remote?' Weezy said.
The Lady sat at the big table and pointed to the empty shelves built into the wall of the front room of her apartment. 'Up there.'
She didn't look so hot. Not as pale and frail as she'd been after the Fhinntmanchca assault, but not as good as she'd looked just yesterday. Weezy was worried about her.
But at least she was still here.
She found the remote where the Lady had indicated-and also found a thick coating of dust on it. She blew it off and coughed.
'I take it you don't watch much TV.'
'I don't watch any.'
'Not even news?'
'Of human events, the state of the world? I know whatever I wish to know.'
Of course she did. Stupid questions. She was the product of the collective human consciousness.
'And the rest?'
She shrugged. 'The fictions-the dramas, the comedies, the commentaries hold no interest for me.'
'They do for me.' Weezy pressed the ON button. 'Especially now.'
'-appears that preventive measures are failing,' said the channel seven newsreader.
'Too little too late,' Weezy muttered.
'Servers and routers all over the world are failing as they are inundated with a tsunami of video feeds that is overwhelming the bandwidth of the entire Internet. Here in the city…'
Weezy heard a groan behind her and turned to find the Lady slumped forward on the table. She dropped the remote and hurried over to her.
'Are you all right?'
Another stupid question-of course she wasn't all right. She looked anything but all right.
'So weak.' Her voice was thin, husky, fragile, as if it might dissolve to dust if she spoke too loud.
Weezy's heart clenched. This was it. They were losing her.
'You need to lie down. Which way's your bedroom?'
'I don't have a bedroom.'
'You don't-?'
'I don't sleep.'
'Okay. Fair enough. We'll find you a bed.'
Glaeken had given her a furnished apartment. One of the rooms down the hall had to have a bed.
She put one of the Lady's arms over her shoulder and one of her own around her back, then lifted. She'd expected near dead weight, but the Lady came right off the chair.
So light… too light… much too light.
Was this how she was going to go? Lose her substance bit by bit and fade away?
She walked her down the hall. The first room on the right had a queen-size bed. Weezy stretched her out on it.
'Should I get you a blanket?'
'I don't feel cold. Or warmth. Temperature doesn't affect me. But I do feel terribly weak.' She raised an arm and let it fall. 'Weaker and weaker by the moment… as if the life is draining out of me.'
Weezy felt her throat constrict. 'Don't leave us.'
'I will not go willingly. I will fight this.' She waved a hand. 'Let me lie here alone. I need to conserve my strength.'
Weezy left her and returned to the front room. She sat before the TV and stared at the screen. It was running feeds from street cams, showing massive traffic jams.
How was Jack ever going to reach LaGuardia?
