Brilliance (17 page)

“That’s what I’m checking. Deep breath.”

Cooper did as he was told, the air rattling in his lungs. “Not me. I mean. How
bad
is it?”

“Oh. Deep breath.” The doctor stared into the distance as he listened to Cooper’s chest. Whatever he heard seemed to satisfy him. “I don’t know how to answer that.”

“How many people…”

“I’m focused on the ones in front of me.” The doctor looped the scope around his neck and glanced at his watch. “You have a mild concussion. There was a lot of smoke and dust inhalation, but nothing I’m worried about long-term. You’re very lucky. You should avoid sleep for a while, eight, ten hours maybe. If you start to feel dizzy or nauseous, go to the hospital immediately.” He started away.

“Wait. That’s it?”

“You can stay if you feel weak, but if you think you can walk, we could really use the space.”

“I can walk.” Cooper took a deep breath and a look around. “Can I help you?”

“Do you have medical training?”

“Basic first aid.”

The doctor shook his head. “Too many people trying to help already. Best thing you can do right now is get out of the way.” And then he was gone, on to the next cot.

Cooper sat on the edge of the rack for a moment, letting his whirling thoughts slowly die down. Collecting himself, rebuilding the memories. He’d had her, hadn’t he? Slapped her cell phone away, had cuffs in hand. He’d won. He’d caught the bad guy. Girl.

And yet, this.

He took a long breath that made him cough until he tasted dust on the back of his tongue. Then he stood up. If the bombs had gone off, there would be victims far worse off than he seemed to be. Best to clear the cot.

He looked in the other beds before he left, but she wasn’t there.

Moving slowly to keep the pain from splashing around his skull, Cooper walked to the exit, pushed the canvas door flap aside, and stepped outside.

Into a graveyard.

For a moment he thought he was hallucinating.

The sky had been replaced by a thick gray scrim of whirling dust. The air tasted charred. In the dim light, trees were skeleton-limbed silhouettes, pointing like Charon across the river to the underworld. And all around him were tombstones. Marble tombstones inscribed with names and dates.

Cooper reached out to touch the tent, pinching the material between fingers scraped and sore. It was covered in a thin layer of dust, but had the tight, satisfyingly tactile touch of canvas. This was real. It was happening. So then, the graves…

Trinity Church. This is the churchyard. Alexander Hamilton is buried here somewhere.

It made sense. In crowded Manhattan, space for triage tents would be in short supply. Still. There was an ugly symbolism. He had fallen asleep in one world and awakened in another. The first had been sunlight and fanfare; this one was dust and ash.

There were people all around. Some of them seemed to be part of the organized rescue effort. They carried stretchers and shuttled medical supplies and directed ambulances in a busy dance. But many others seemed dazed. They stood and stared, looked up at the towering spire of the church, or back toward Wall Street, where the smoke thickened.

Wall Street. The Exchange. Maybe she was still there.

Cooper started through the cemetery. His head hurt and his body was sore, but more than anything he just felt thick, altered. Like a guy driving home, singing along with the radio right up until the semi T-boned him and sent the car end over horrifying end, the world spinning, flashes of colors, sky, ground, sky, ground, and then the impact, the sickening crunch, and in that instant, when the world had shifted completely, when everything that had mattered a moment before no longer even rated, the radio would still be playing the same song.

He felt like the song.

Slowly, he picked his way through the churchyard. He climbed the low fence to Broadway, crossed the street where food trucks had blocked his path. Someone bumped him, their shoulder hitting hard, and the novelty of that struck him. He hadn’t been bumped like that in a long time. The world was water; nothing was permanent, all was shift and change. A cop started to wave him back, but Cooper felt through his pockets, found his badge. The man let him pass. The smoke was thicker, and he couldn’t see more than ten, fifteen feet. Beyond that the best he could do was make out flashing colors, police lights. He moved toward them. People staggered the other way, their faces dirty, clothes torn, expressions shocked. They leaned on one another. Soldiers carried stretchers.

Cooper walked, slow and steady, four-four time in a world gone off measure.

Every step stranger. The bones of buildings had torn through their stone skin and lay exposed. Collapsed walls buried the cobblestones. Shattered glass dusted the scene with razor-edged glitter. The dust clouds were lit brighter by a dozen fires burning out of sight. He reached the corner where he had spotted the woman who could walk through walls. Firemen dug through the rubble, masks on their faces and reflective stripes on their uniforms.

To the south, he could see the New York Stock Exchange, a building that had stood for a hundred years, weathered depressions and wars and unimaginable social change, been a symbol for the unstoppable power of capitalism until that power was, indeed, stopped by the arrival of his kind; a building that had, ever so briefly, represented the hopes of a world struggling for a new balance when every conviction had been upended, every fact proved unstable, every belief turned fragile; a building of stone and steel that by its simple presence declared that the engines that powered the world were running fine. It was in ruins.

Of the six massive columns that fronted the building, only one was still in place. The others had cracked and sheared; one of them had fallen outright, the huge stone smashing into the street. The glass wall behind must have blown out as well, four stories of lethal shards surfing the roar of air and fire. Through the open space that had been a wall, he could see the building, naked and raw. Offices exposed, bathrooms torn open, a stairwell lost and sad.

And everywhere, the dead. Bodies.

Bodies in the street, bodies in the building. Bodies beneath fallen columns, bodies dangling in a spiderweb of cabling.

Torn and broken, the colors of their clothes a mockery in this bleak new world.

Hundreds of them. Thousands.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

You were supposed to stop it.

It was a nonsense thought. He couldn’t hold himself responsible for everything that went wrong in the world. But he’d been so close. It had been he who ran down Alex Vasquez, who used her brother as bait, who implemented the phone taps that led them to Dusty Evans. It had been he playing against John Smith, again, and he’d lost, again, and all of these people had died.

Cooper spun on his heel and walked away. He walked without direction or purpose, without thought or plan. His companions were Frustration and Rage, and together the three of them stalked Manhattan.

A pair of strappy heels on a pair of shapely legs flung akimbo inside a stylish black pencil skirt that ended, along with the body, at the waist.

A sidewalk peddler of cheap purses and flimsy umbrellas shoving all of his wares off the folding table that comprised his livelihood to make a cot for a screaming man carried between two firefighters.

Gray air moving like fabric, like lint, over swirling gray ash. Gray-faced people in gray-smudged clothes. The world gone monochrome.

And then the pink shock of a child’s stuffed animal in the middle of Broadway.

A bank of payphones surrounded by a mob of people waiting in line. A true New York mix, a skinhead next to a broker, two men in blue jumpsuits, a fashion model, a hotdog vendor, a boy and girl holding hands. Everyone patient. No one pushing.

A woman in a business suit walking down the middle of the sidewalk. An expensive leather briefcase slung over one shoulder. Blood trickling down the side of her face. Her arms cradling a potted plant three feet tall.

At the corner of two minor streets, a taxi with open doors, the radio playing at maximum volume. New Yorkers standing near, listening to a stammering news reporter.

“…again, an explosion at the Leon Walras Stock Exchange. I…I’ve never seen anything like it. The entire east side of the building has been destroyed. There are bodies everywhere. The death toll will be in the hundreds, maybe thousands. No one is saying what caused this, but it had to be a bomb, or bombs. I can’t…it’s something I never thought I would see…”