The Starving Years (14 page)

And when Bobby had asked where they were going, Nelson had come up with, “Looking for your mother.” Not quite a platitude, not quite a lie…but dangerously close to a falsehood. As a rule, Nelson didn’t lie to Bobby…but, come on. The kid was only twelve.

Images of all the various ways the truck might have been rendered inoperable rose to take the place of Bobby’s pained expression—punctured tires, siphoned gas tank, smashed windshield. Not much of an improvement. But thankfully, the old moving truck was intact, badly painted-over rental logos and all.

“I’ll ride shotgun,” Nelson said. “I’ve been there a million times. If there are roadblocks, I’ll get us around ’em.”
 

Randy, who’d been up front on the trip from the job fair, did a double-take at the cargo area as Javier and Marianne slipped in between the boxes. “What’s all this?”

Tim hunched his shoulders. “Um…things.”

Randy narrowed his eyes, now exponentially more interested. “You don’t say.” He hauled himself up between the stacks of large cardboard boxes, shot Nelson a “do you believe this guy?” look, and closed the door behind him.

Nelson and Tim climbed in the front doors, Tim inserted the key, turned it…and the old truck started. Dead battery had been number seventeen, or maybe eighteen, in the ever-growing things-that-might-go-wrong list that Nelson had been compiling.

Tim eased off the brake and let the truck roll to the edge of the driveway. The street was completely empty. Deserted-looking. Angry mob, number twenty-two. Averted.

“So there’s nothing weird about being prepared,” Tim blurted out.

As far as Nelson knew, they hadn’t actually been having whatever conversation Tim had just responded to. “Okay.” He didn’t mention the lack of context to Tim, since the guy had been cool enough to put his ass on the line not only to pull Nelson out of the riot, but to haul him up to Bellevue to see what was what. “Head east. We want to stay clear of the riot area.”

“I can’t take FDR with the truck.”

“Doesn’t matter—I wouldn’t trust it anyway. If traffic’s not moving, we could end up trapped on the thruway.”

Tim turned right. Still no one on the street. “For instance, you never know when something might…you just never know.” He turned onto Bowery and now there actually was traffic.
 

Nelson had been worried whoever was on the road would say
to hell with the traffic signals
and form an impassable line of bumper to bumper traffic (number thirty-six) or cause an accident that would block everyone (thirty-seven), but then he saw a black-and-white parked conspicuously at the main intersection, which seemed to help the drivers all remember that red lights meant “stop.”

Marianne’s voice piped in from the cargo area. “I can’t believe the phones are still down. That’s crazy.”

It had been more than twelve hours…not crazy. Scary. But at least extrapolating why cell phone service would be out of order gave Nelson something less personal to spin. He’d racked up a dozen ideas including “meteor destroys satellite” when Tim said, “Because it was just a matter of time.”

Nelson didn’t
think
he’d been tuning out a conversation, though he supposed he really had experienced a hell of a day…. “What was?”

“Something big. Something that affected infrastructure…oh, I know, I probably sound like one of those guys who live in the underpass and stand there with cardboard signs that say ‘Ten Days to Armageddon.’ But I’m not, y’know, paranoid. And it’s not a religious thing.”

“Okay.”

“Canaan has lobby groups most people don’t even know about. Directly or indirectly, they’ve got their hands in government on every level: federal, state, even local.”

Though Nelson had never been much for politics, it would have surprised him if Canaan Products
hadn’t
been trying to work things to its own advantage. “So?”

“So…holy shit.”

“Turn. There.”

The truck swung around a caravan of slow-moving delivery vans onto a frontage road.

“So,” Tim went on, “they probably have people in places other than government. Like the phone company and the cell carriers.”

“Why would Canaan Products want to disable a whole phone network—do you realize how dangerous that is? I’m surprised half the city hasn’t burned down by—watch it.”

“I see it.” A cop strode out into the road and held his hands up to stop the truck. “What if it wasn’t the whole city? What if it was just Manhattan—just anyone in the range of Canaan HQ?” Tim slowed for the cop…and then floored it.

Nelson plastered himself against the back of his seat. “Holy shit—what’re you—?”

The truck careened into a bike lane, screeched along a parked car as metal kissed metal, then swerved back into traffic.

“That was no cop. That wasn’t a real cop jacket he was wearing, just a navy bomber. And his hat didn’t fit right.”

“What’s going on?” Randy called.

Tim yelled back, “Nothing, we’re fine, almost there.”

Nelson’s heart pounded so hard he tasted copper, and to make matters even worse, his right foot was going jimmy-leg again. He chanced a look at Tim. Early morning sun slanting into the cab cast harsh shadows on the veins in his temples and neck—and probably would have picked out the sinews in his jaw, if it weren’t for all the stubble. He looked hard-edged and intense.

“We’re getting close to the parking lot,” Nelson said. “It’s…oh, shit.” Dozens of cars and SUVs jammed the lot’s entrance. “We’ll never—”

Tim veered onto a service road, which was eerily empty. “Which entrance is it?”

“On First Avenue, but—”

“If worse comes to worst, I drop you off and keep driving around the block.”

The “block” that Bellevue Hospital occupied, with its clinics and hospitals and even a homeless shelter, was more like an entire neighborhood bisected by a warren of one-way streets that butted up against the thruway. One trip around would probably do it. Nelson was no stranger to the morgue—he’d met Kevin there a few days ago to borrow a decent tie for the job fair, in fact—but he didn’t plan on lingering today. “Sneak up to Thirty-Fifth, that’ll get you through the overpass, and then you can—”

Eerily deserted side street met mob scene at Thirty-Fifth and First. Tim spotted the crowd immediately, and braked hard. Boxes shifted and thumped the back of the cab. “What is it?” Randy called, more anxiously than he had before.

“Nothing we can’t handle,” Tim said calmly.

For a sick moment, Nelson was worried Tim might gun it and plow through the crowd. And worse, he feared it was what he wanted.
 

Instead, Tim threw the truck into reverse and shot backward down the frontage road until he came to a cluster of ambulances parked half on the sidewalks. One ambulance had a shattered windshield and another was missing a tire—and they were just about the same size as Tim’s old moving truck. He backed into formation and hid in plain sight among the out-of-commission emergency vehicles.

Tim put the truck in park and cut the engine. “We’ll go on foot. We can move faster that way.”

“Right. Okay.” Nelson’s head was spinning from the aftereffects of his meds and the constant adrenaline rushes. But he was too close to back down now. He pulled the door handle.

“Wait.” Javier came up and crouched in the entrance to the cargo area. “We can’t all go. It’s not safe for Marianne—and besides, someone needs to stay with the truck.”

“Will you stay?” Tim asked. Pleaded, almost.

“You should be the one,” Javier said gently. He patted the center console. “You know how to handle it. The rest of us could probably drive it in a pinch…but not like you.”

“I don’t give a damn about the truck.”

Javier took Tim’s hand between both of his and squeezed it. “Think. You have food in back, don’t you? And water. Anyone comes looking for something to steal, they’ll see the boxes and tear the truck apart if there’s no one here to defend it. I’ll get Nelson through the crowd. You guard the truck. What if it ends up being our only way out of here?”

“You have water back here?” Marianne called. “Where?”

“Toward the bottom,” Tim said. “It’s heavy. But I don’t know how you’ll…it’s those five-gallon water cooler jugs.”

Randy said, “And wouldn’t you know it? We left both mugs at home.”

Nelson blinked away yet another oncoming wave of shock as Javier took his hand too, and added it to the clasp he was sharing with Tim. The back of Nelson’s hand pressed into Tim’s palm, with both of Javier’s hands holding them together. Everyone else’s hands were much warmer than his, Nelson noted with some detachment. Yep. Shock.

“Nelson.”

He could listen to his own name all day in that Latin-flavored accent. “Hm?”

“Would you leave your phone?”

Nelson dug it from his coat one-handed, unwilling to pull his hand from Javier’s. “There’s probably not even a…” whaddaya know, there it was. The hospital network. He keyed in Kevin’s password and hopped online. Unbelievable. He had a signal.

The thought of leaving the clunky, two-year-out-of-date VOIP phone that was suddenly the best damn phone in Manhattan was nearly impossible, and yet, if they were going to split up….

He reached across Javier and handed it to Tim. “If I call you from inside and tell you to go, you go. Got it?”

Tim looked so affronted it was almost funny. “I’m not leaving without you.”

In the background, the sound of sirens bounced off the tunnel-like acoustics of the side streets. Nelson decided that now wasn’t the time to argue, not before they saw whatever there was to be seen at Bellevue. “Okay, let’s go.” He pulled Javier by the hand. Javier began to follow, but then he paused, considered, and dragged Tim into a kiss.

As far as Nelson knew, he was still conscious and lucid. But he was too surprised to do anything more than gape.

Tim sat stiffly, as if he had no idea what to make of the big, gay kiss he was getting—and for a big, gay kiss happening to a straight guy, it lasted an awfully long time…until Tim’s free hand came around to cup the back of Javier’s head. Nelson stared at those long, knuckly fingers threading through Javier’s black hair.

And then Javier broke the kiss, nudged Nelson toward the door, and said, “Let’s go.”

Nelson needed to let go of Javier’s hand to swing down out of the truck—and how weird, he realized, that he’d been holding onto Javier’s hand that whole time he was sucking face with Tim. Tongue, and everything. Nelson might have felt a bit jealous, if he hadn’t been so damn baffled. They skirted the medical library, then backed into a gap between a couple of construction trailers to assess the crowd, and once they were well clear of the truck, Nelson said, “What was that?”

“What was what?”

“The kiss.”

Javier was watching the roiling crowd up ahead so intently, Nelson almost thought he wasn’t going to answer, but after a long moment, he said, “A clever man taught me the value of taking one good memory with me.”

Chapter 14

Nelson’s first impression of the crowd was that it was the job fair riot all over again. Same surging and shoving and explosive bursts of violence—and thank God they hadn’t brought the truck this way, because an ambulance on its side gave a pretty good indication of the way that course of action would have turned out. But as he and Javier waded into it, holding hands once they found each other after the first bodyslam knocked them apart, Nelson sensed this crowd was somehow different. Focused, rather than random. And much more desperate—because this mob wasn’t just trying to protest something, or to flee a group of agitated morons. This mob was trying to get into the hospital.

Since it catered to the uninsured, Bellevue was always crowded, but nothing like the sea of wailing, bleeding humanity that surged against the E.R. door now. A stout, balding guy in a lab coat with a coffee stain down the front stood on a planter with a bullhorn and said, “Non-ambulatory patients, form a line to the right. If you can’t stand or walk, form a line to the right.”

Yeah. That made sense. Plus, he was pointing to
his
right, which was the crowd’s left.

Thankfully, none of the teeming masses were scrabbling to get into the morgue. Once Nelson and Javier fought their way through the lobby the morgue shared with the methadone clinic, falling into the morgue elevator, feeling the doors whisper shut and block out the hum of the crowd, was almost peaceful. Almost.

If it weren’t for the actual reason for their visit.

“So, you and Tim,” Nelson said, in an effort to not remember the photo of the face—anything but that. “I didn’t think you knew each other.”

“Of course we do.”

The elevator sighed past the administrative level, then down to the subbasement, where Kevin worked. “Really? Because he thought I was you, outside the job fair. Since I’m about as white as they come, I find that a little weird.”

“We knew each other online.”

“And what? Your webcams were broken?” The doors opened, and Nelson got out of the elevator and strode toward the security guard before Javier could reply. “Ricky, hey, it’s not a social call. I gotta see Kev.”

Ricky had circles under his eyes and his hair looked greasy, like he’d just pulled a double shift. But Nelson supposed he might as well. It was probably a lot easier than trying to get home through that mess. He paged Kevin, then shot a bleary-eyed look to the elevator. “Got any idea what’s going on out there?” he said. “No one’s giving us nothing. Just a couple extra truckloads of deliveries and mandatory overtime.”

“It started outside that job fair I was at,” Nelson said. “That’s all I know.”

“Guess you’re not gonna be splurging on that karaoke bar for us anytime soon.”

“Nope, I’m as broke as ever. Guess not.” Nelson did his best to stay calm and act casual, even make small talk, but the familiarity of the morgue—of the antiseptic smell, of Ricky’s voice, of the clunky tick of the industrial clock in the elevator bay—all of it felt grossly unfamiliar suddenly, as if it had gone through the wrong wash cycle and come back several sizes too small.
 

Even Kevin, when he emerged from the double doors, looked the same…but different. The same, because his thinning hair stood up in the front like he’d just run his hand through it and his glasses were crooked, as usual. But different, because he wasn’t smiling. And there was a big red smear on his lab coat.