Anthem's Fall (39 page)

Ryan took off in a dead sprint up Seventh Avenue. He ran straight out into the street, tearing through the lanes of beeping traffic. His eyes were locked skyward as he raced up the avenue. Just as he ran past the biggest digital billboard screen of Times Square, he watched it transition from a bright red Coca Cola can pouring into an ice-filled glass to the gloomy Chicago news broadcast.

Evacuate. The historic and unparalleled martial order would be issued to New York within minutes, he was sure of it. With it would come an anarchy unrivaled in history. Ryan weaved between honking taxis and shouting drivers, his gaze locked skyward as he sprinted toward his dorm, toward his locked trunk. In his peripheral vision, a number people were running toward the nearest subway stations. Others were hurrying along the adjacent streets, perhaps toward the eastside bridges leading off Manhattan. The sound of beeping cars grew louder—in some way more frenzied—as radio stations were no doubt beginning to issue Emergency Alert System messages. The growing panic surrounding the people he had come to love was as palpable as the onset of a biblical storm.

If this day was to be their day of reckoning, of apocalypse, then it would also be the day the human race would embrace him in all of his immeasurable power. Deep down he had been waiting for this moment his entire life, and he was ready to meet his destiny and repay it for the things he had seen.

With an iron determination, he cast aside his masquerade and exploded from the sidewalk of Seventh Avenue.

“S
-stay away from me,” Madison said as she painfully inched and crawled away from Vengelis on scraped elbows.

Shattered glass from the nearby pizza shop’s front window was scattered around her on the sidewalk, and in the middle of the intersection the ruins of the eighteen-wheeler smoldered and smoked. Vengelis regarded her pitiable retreat with a look of silent disapproval, as if her display of pain was shameful and inappropriate.

“You made a promise. Let’s get moving,” Vengelis said without a trace of warmth.

Madison seemed not to hear him. She pulled a thin glass shard out of her thumb and placed her hands on her forehead. Blinking dizzily, she tried to piece together what had just transpired. Vengelis’s eyes widened with disbelief as he saw tiny shards of glass had hewn narrow cuts on her palms, and her elbows were bleeding where they had grazed the cement of the sidewalk. He was taken aback at how delicate she was; the human form was impossibly fragile. How could they even survive in vessels so frail and anemic?

People collected cautiously around the wreckage, and lines of beeping traffic began to spread up and down the avenue. It looked as though the destroyed semi had driven full force into the side of a mountain. The rear of the truck’s mass had accordioned on top of itself from the frontal impact. It had been loaded with wooden pylons of soda, and hundreds of cans sputtered and rolled across the street in a growing puddle of fizzing drinks.

“W-what are you?” Madison said.

Vengelis took a step closer and held out his hand to help her up, changing his expression from a look of disdain to a mask of neutrality. On some level he recognized that he had just shattered everything she knew to be real. Surely some of his race’s strongest had similar reactions when they first witnessed the shock and awe of the Felix.

“I am a Primus,” he said simply. “Now get up.”

“I . . . don’t . . . understand.” Madison looked back and forth from the fizzling wreckage to Vengelis.

He continued to hold his hand out to her. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand. But now you are breaking your promises. Get up.”

“P-please, leave me alone.” Madison winced from a pain in her hip as she tried to rise from the sidewalk, and fell back into the shattered glass.

“You
asked
me to stop that truck. I’m sorry you underestimated my capabilities, but a deal is a deal, and now you need to help me.”

“Help you?
Help
you? How could you need my help?”

“You will lead me the Marriott Marquis, right now. It was the second part of our agreement. Stand up.”

“Are you going to kill me?” Madison asked with growing sobriety.

Vengelis kneeled down to her, and she recoiled nervously away from him. He smiled sympathetically at her reaction. “Right now, at this very moment, you are the safest a human has ever been. Now come. Get up.”

Madison looked up at his outstretched hand. People around them cowered back, all of them too alarmed to speak to the familiar and yet terrifying man before them. Sirens screamed from close by, and an ambulance appeared through the parting traffic at the other end of the intersection. Two paramedics in blue uniforms hopped out of the doors and gaped at the extraordinary accident.

“Come on,” Vengelis said. “Authorities are on their way and I don’t want things to escalate here. That display was not . . . subtle.”

Madison looked up at him, her mouth frozen in an expression of turmoil. Then she suddenly snapped her mouth shut and her eyes came into focus as if she was awaking from a daydream; she took a deep breath, and reached up to take his hand. Vengelis lifted her into a standing position as if she were a child that weighed nothing at all.

Madison stared at him with trepidation. Her hair was awry, her arms were dotted with scrapes, and her white pants were marked from the ground. “Do you promise you won’t hurt me?”

“As long as you do as I say, I promise no harm will come to you. That is, assuming you hold true to your promise. Now, where is the Marriott Marquis?”

Madison looked up and down the avenue with feeble rotations of her head. Her face was as gray as the sidewalk, and she was clearly still in shock. Her hands shook as she brushed herself off with clumsy motions. “It’s . . . it’s that way. Midtown.” Madison pointed down the avenue toward the tallest buildings many blocks to the south.

“Come on, then,” he said.

“No.” Madison flinched as she leaned tenderly on her left leg. “No way. Just leave me alone . . . please. I don’t want anything to do with this, or you.”

A police cruiser barreled into the intersection followed by a monstrous fire truck, both with lights flashing and sirens blasting. The crowd of onlookers grew with each passing second as people exited the surrounding buildings to get a glimpse of the grisly spectacle.

“I can’t ensure your safety if you aren’t with me. If you want to guarantee your well-being, you will come along with me. Otherwise, you will be another face in this crowd to me and my men.”

Madison shifted woozily. Vengelis thought she might pass out, but she did not. He turned aside and peered over the heads of the crowd in the direction she had pointed, thinking he could lift off the sidewalk and fly in that direction. But there were countless buildings, and he did not know which one was the Marriott Marquis. It would be too much of a risk not to bring a local to show him the way and help him through any exigencies that might arise.

“What are you?” Madison turned back breathlessly to the smoking wreckage as they walked. “What . . . the hell. . . are you? That isn’t possible, that isn’t remotely possible.”

“
That
was nothing.” Vengelis shook his head with a note of contempt. “A small glimpse at most.”

As they hurried down the busy sidewalk, he noticed Madison’s strength and cognition began to return. Soon she was walking normally. After a few blocks, she abruptly pulled away from his grasp and stood her ground. “I need some answers. Right now.”

Below his calm face, a fiery anger was rising. “What do you want to know?”

She looked at him with a dubious and scared expression. “Um, how about
everything
? What the hell is going on?”

“I told you, I’m on an errand.” He grabbed her and continued forward. Walking in the other direction, an unkempt teenager wearing headphones and reading something on his phone brushed shoulders with Vengelis and bounced backward, falling to the ground heavily. As Vengelis stepped over him, the kid held up his broken headphones and shouted something with a spit-filled fury, but neither Vengelis nor Madison acknowledged him.

“Why are you here? Is the errand to like, I don’t know . . . kill everyone?”

Vengelis said nothing; he looked down the long avenue at the tall glass buildings on either side. He cringed at the thought of what Hoff and Darien must be doing to the similarly flimsy buildings in the other city, each of them following his command.

“
Well
? I think that’s a perfectly reasonable question,” Madison said.

“No,” Vengelis muttered with little interest. “I’m not here to kill everyone. I couldn’t care less about you people.”

“Then why are you here?”

Vengelis drove his hand into his armor and pulled out the
Harbinger I
remote to see if Hoff had tried to make contact with him, but the Lord General had not. Vengelis opened Pral Nerol’s Felix report and held the screen out to Madison. It was a labeled diagram of a Felix cell. Madison’s eyes narrowed and she slowed her step to look at the image.

“What is that?” she asked.

“That, more or less, is my question as well. There’s a convention of your scientists at the Marriott Marquis. I will put that question before the smartest of your race.”

“I don’t understand . . . what is that thing?”

“Enough!” Vengelis waved a hand. “Take me to the Marriott Marquis.”

Madison was about to press the issue when the avenue transitioned into Times Square. Vengelis noticed that what she saw took her aback. Sprawling several blocks before him, a multitude of people was frozen in place on the sidewalks, their faces upturned to the giant screens and live-action billboards that hung among the tall buildings. Lines of cars and taxis were parked in the middle of the street, the drivers and passengers leaning out their windows and staring agape at the huge screens. As Vengelis and Madison approached the subdued crowds, the billboards were still out of sight; they could not yet see what had so completely captured seemingly the entire city’s attention.

“What the hell is going on?” she murmured, looking out across the countless frightened faces in dismay. Knowing exactly what was going on, Vengelis suddenly reached down and took Madison by the arm and quickened his pace, knocking people out of the way before him.

“They must have begun,” he said.

“What? Begun what?” Madison was forced to break into a jog in order to keep up with him.

"Which building is it?” Vengelis demanded, his tone harsh.

As they pushed through the transfixed pedestrians, Madison turned her head and strained to look up at the giant screens. Vengelis noticed her trip, nearly falling, as she saw what was being depicted on the billboard screens. Each one was flipping from colorful products and celebrities to a single unified news broadcast. Within moments, all of the billboard-sized screens were flashing the same breaking headline:

CHICAGO UNDER ATTACK
.
HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS FEARED DEAD
.

It was a live video feed from a helicopter, and the camera moved wildly as it recorded a broad landscape shot. Underneath a harsh gunmetal sky, a city skyline was barely identifiable. Gray-brown dust formed a thick blanket over the area. Giant plumes of black ash and smoke rose into the low clouds.

“Oh no . . .” Madison said. She would have fallen to her knees if Vengelis had not yanked her upright.

“I don’t have long!” Vengelis said. “Which building is the Marriott Marquis?”

“You . . . ordered?” she said through short breaths.

“Yes.” Vengelis glanced up at the screens. The destruction was having the exact effect he had hoped for, but time was no longer on his side. The convention would be cancelled any second, and a citywide evacuation would begin within minutes. People would begin migrating out of every major city—that is, if they had any sense whatsoever.

“But,” Madison gasped.

“Which building is the Marriott Marquis?” Vengelis suddenly screamed at her and throttled her body.

Madison’s head hung droopily by her shoulder, her eyes still trained with dread on the screens. The broadcast was now zooming in on random spots in the dust-filled massacre. It was unmistakable; the buildings in the heart of Chicago were being utterly destroyed. Gasps and terrible cries broke out from the crowds watching the feed alongside them. Hands reached up and covered gaping mouths and eyes unwillingly watched with sick disbelief. A number of panicked voices began to break the anxious silence around them. People started aggressively pushing bystanders aside as they made for the subway. Vengelis watched the escalating panic with no pleasure, only a hope that the scientists would be encouraged by the dread he was now witnessing. He heard a man alongside them mutter that it could not be terrorists, and a young girl holding her father’s hand ask him if they were safe in New York.

All at once, as though practiced in a chorus, the screams rose. Like the crescendo in a brutal symphony, Times Square began to surge and thrash, the very cement beneath their feet shaking from the unified wail of fear. Madison’s face went pale, but she held her ground against Vengelis.

“You ordered that attack!” she screamed over the crowd.

“Yes, I did. Where is the Marriott Marquis?”

“How
could
you?”

Vengelis pulled her close to him, inadvertently lifting her clean off the ground. His face was mere inches from hers. “WHERE IS THE MARRIOT MARQUIS?” he shouted in her face. “If you do not tell me
right
now, I’m going to leave you here to die with the rest of these people! You can be another nameless face in this hysteria. And believe me, if I don’t get what I want, this city will get it just as hard as the one you are witnessing now. I have to get to the convention right now or all of this will have been for nothing!”

Madison’s face twisted with conflict. She breathed heavily and looked from the images of the carnage in Chicago to Vengelis’s enraged gaze. A man in a flannel shirt pushed into Madison’s back as he sprinted toward the subway. She fell forward, narrowly missing another man who was shoving through the crowd with his messenger bag swinging wildly at his side. A stampede had begun.