Meeting a killer. Really? This wasn’t at all like her. She didn’t get involved.
But Donny had pierced her defenses, slipped under her skin. His sense of right and wrong, his moral outrage at Septimus had reached her. The two of them had been marooned together on another planet—dear God, another fucking planet—and endured an attack by alien slime creatures. Even now, so soon after, those words running through her head sounded insanely absurd. And yet it had all happened. And they’d both survived it together.
Two people can’t experience something like that and not form a bond.
And then this morning they’d made mad passionate love, or had mad hot sex—call it what you will, world, they’d pleasured the hell out of each other and had been planning a return engagement.
But then reality stepped in and changed all that. What was the saying? People make plans and God laughs. The Old Boy must be in hysterics right now.
The weight of it all—seeing Donny die before her eyes contributed no small measure to her madness, she was sure—coupled with the fact that Donny was unable to see this through himself, had spurred Hari to make this grand futile gesture of revenge against the man who’d killed Donny’s brother.
And then the sun had set late, confirming her suspicions that a world of darkness and famine lay ahead. So what did she have to lose?
Hari wasn’t a killer, couldn’t imagine herself in a million years shooting or stabbing someone. But she’d seen what the Prime Frequency generator had done to Ellie. So if she couldn’t kill the killer, she could at least mess him up beyond his wildest nightmares.
Of course, she had no idea this would even work. Maybe Ellie had been a special case. Maybe being in direct line with the Prime signal would do nothing to anyone else. But this was the best she could come up with on such short notice.
She did a slow turn. She had plenty of company in the Sheep Meadow. Scattered groups and solos, little more than shadow shapes, strolled or stood around. Some sat on the grass and smoked and drank, some made out. Belgiovene would be coming alone so she ignored the groups. She’d never seen him—Donny hadn’t been able to find a photo—but his description was a slim man with a black mole on his chin. Not that the mole was much help since she wouldn’t be able to see it until he was in her face.
She spotted a thin figure making purposeful strides straight for her. A sudden urge to forget all about this insanity and run for it nearly overwhelmed her, but she fought it and stood her ground.
He stopped before her. He had close-cropped black hair and the moon rising over the trees cast enough light to reveal the mole on his chin.
“You’re standing in my spot,” he said in a deep voice.
His words caught her off guard. “Your spot?”
“I’m supposed to meet a woman I do not know in the center of the Sheep Meadow tonight.”
Hari found herself at a loss for words. She hadn’t planned this out too well. How to keep him in this spot while she backed off a safe distance. And what was a safe distance?
“Are you that woman?” Belgiovene said. “Because if you—” He broke into a harsh laugh as he looked to his left. “You see everything in Central Park, especially after dark.”
Hari followed his gaze to the west where a naked man stood with his back to them, looking up at the buildings along Central Park West.
Hari was about to comment when a voice started calling out her name behind her.
“Hari! Hari!”
She turned to see the writer guy, Winslow, trotting toward her. Of all people. Talk about bad timing. She was about to tell him to get the hell out of here when he skidded to a halt.
“You!” Winslow cried, staring past her.
“Is this a setup?” Belgiovene said.
And just then the ground started vibrating. That could only mean the signal was about to fire. She didn’t want to be here when it did. She’d just taken her first running step when the earth gave way beneath her feet.
Suddenly nothing lay beneath Hari’s feet. She twisted frantically as she began to fall along with Winslow and Belgiovene and the make-out couple and the drinkers and smokers—everyone except the naked man, now above her, floating over the emptiness.
She screamed as down she went, and down and down and down…
BARBARA
“Oh, my God!” I cried. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”
Horror engulfed me as I clapped a hand over my mouth to seal off my broken-record cries.
Next to me, Tier Hill muttered, “What the—?” He tugged on our arms. “Get back! Back!”
“It’s all right,” Ellie said, as if something like this happened every day. “We’re safe here.”
The moonlight shone on a perfect circle of black emptiness where the ground had fallen away, vanishing from sight and taking Hari and Winslow and everyone else within its two-hundred-foot perimeter with it.
“A giant sinkhole?” I managed after catching my breath.
Hill shook his head. “Can’t be. The park rests on solid schist. No place for the ground to sink to.”
“Then how—?”
“He knows,” Ellie said, pointing at the hole.
And there, in the empty space where the center of the Sheep Meadow had been, floated a naked man with outstretched arms that gave him the shape of a cross.
Floated!
Ellie added: “He did it.”
“But who…?”
“That’s the One. His time has come.”
As I watched, he slowly sank into the black depths.
“Where’s Hari?” I said, my throat tightening. I’d only just met her but I’d liked her forthrightness. “Is there any chance…? I mean, how deep is that hole?”
“No chance,” Ellie said with a note of dreadful finality. “The hole
