Bombshell (31 page)

There was a shrill noise. His phone was ringing. He saw that it had fallen from his pocket and it shivered across the polished floor as the vibrating call came in. The tone of it clashed with the pain in his skull, penetrating his eye sockets as though the bones were broken, throbbing rhythmically and with every palpitation of his heart. It was so great that he could barely move. Reaching for it, he knew that the call would be from his handler, the remote metallic Voice. He grabbed the phone and, lying on his back on the glazed white floor, gasping up at the bright department store lighting, he signed in.

“11, 35, 165, 23.”

“Robert.” It was The Voice.

“What do you want?” he demanded bitterly.

“What is your location, Robert?” The Voice inquired.

“Uh, I'm not certain,” he confessed, fighting with the urge to vomit.

“I can tell you that the GPS track on your phone informs me that you are at Herald Square, West Thirty-fourth Street.”

“Yeah?”

“Why are you in Macy's, Robert?”

“I'm here for the Flower Show. Oh, and I'm dying.”

“Radiation poisoning can work swiftly. A call was made from the Winters Corporation building. It must have been your girl.”

“Who did she call?” Dresner propped himself on one elbow.

“She called your fiancée. Of course, there was no recording because there was no wiretap. However, she lit up the switchboard because there are no other calls leaving Manhattan. You didn't tell us that she was known to your fiancée, Robert. This is beyond the pale. I should not have trusted you to make good.”

“I'll get there.” His pathetic sense of duty made him gag.

“Robert, you don't have to go if you don't want to. At this juncture, whatever happens between you and Varyushka Cash can now only be considered relevant on the level of a personal vendetta. There isn't a future for the investigation.”

“We're ghosts,” Dresner admitted.

“The city will render neither one of you to us. Frankly, it doesn't matter, anymore. It's finished.”

“What about Indian Point?”

“She didn't do it.”

“You could send a chopper in and get me out, for treatment. I mean, you sent me in! You were quite fucking
specific
.”

“Actually, Robert, you insisted. It was your intention. No one will come in. I have appointed Agent Royce as your successor. It is over.”

Dresner wept into the receiver. “When did you know that the fire at Indian Point was catastrophic?”

“I suppose we have always known, I'm afraid.”

“Well, then . . . ” Dresner breathed heavily, from lungs soaked with sorrow and anxiety. He felt himself drowning.

The line was silent for a moment.

“So.” The Voice ended the call. The phone displayed No S
ERVICE
.

Robert Dresner vomited across the white floor.

As he struggled from the department store, between arrays of roses twisting from heavy urns, he looked back over his shoulder. Between the great spray of flowers and neoclassical plastic he saw the disfigured women that had smothered him in his sleep. It was a sick Arcadian scene. Slowly, Dresner limped beyond the venous fur of their scorn. There was a tent on Herald Square that had been part of the Macy's exhibition, now ragged and torn as he approached it. Clots and footprints of soil led away into the surrounding streets like a Victorian murder mystery. He wished that he could at least
see
the radiation in a black fog or a glittering rain, anything to connect the sense that he was being poisoned by the exterior world.

Packs of stray dogs fought in the wide intersections, bloody teeth clashing inside tunnels of abandoned taxis. The batteries of the cars had died, and their alarms with them. He was chilled by the perverse enormity of
his mausoleum. He took stale pizza slices from a ghostly parlor. The cash registers were smashed and emptied. He tried to imagine the scene filled again with men, women, and children, tourists, workers, cops, fireworks exploding in the celebrated skyline, balloons, the ecstasy of crowds watching one date become another. He experienced an itching in his scalp and pulled his fingers away with a hank of his dead hair. The deserted blocks created an ambient drone that could not be heard when the city had been inhabited. Huge shards of glass shone from the glacial sidewalks, grinding and detonating beneath his shoes. Bleaching news pages wrapped his shins before the sheets were lost in the wind.

He thought of entering a camera store, taking snapshots of the scorched towers, the vandalism, and the frightening emptiness that surrounded him. He fantasized about stalking the city with a camera. He studied the red-black soot of bricks and slate and ashes exposing the numinous beams of the Chelsea Hotel. Without emotion, he stared into the looted façades, the suicidal arsons and eviscerations of so many structures, discarded possessions and ripped clothing, the hollow silent subways, and those spaces that would mourn and drone with weird music in the wind. He might take self-portraits of his deteriorating form in those dead spaces. He could find a computer and email the horror pictures to Janelle Gresham, or upload them to the Internet, since no one would ever return to witness or tend these strange phantasmagoric graves. Perhaps, he thought, I might upload a picture of Varyushka Cash's defeated corpse. The irradiated atoll could be explored from cyberspace, mapped by imaging satellites in all of its ash-blown panoramas. Corporations would render video game scenarios from the untenable zone. Mutated pixel dogs would convulse in rabid froth on sticky arcade monitors. In time, sick children might seek to obtain return visas, dragged back to the high-rise sepulchers of their natal memories.

He reached the Winters Corporation building. Even in the daylight, lamps burned in the lobby beyond the glass of the automatic doors. He drew his gun from its shoulder holster and studied the tall building from the cover of a taxi's smashed fender and the detached yellow door leaning against a blown streetlamp. He watched for several minutes, his heart pumping violently in his chest as he strained, listening to the silent cells behind the large windows, anticipating everything, yet discerning nothing but the rhythms of his own fear. Cautiously, he made his way to the doors, moving slowly across broken beer bottles and trash. Inside the building, he found crystal chandeliers, financial journals, and lifestyle magazines on glass coffee tables, dark, coffee-hued carpets across tiles of granite. He slipped in something tacky that he thought was blood. Yet, retreating from the smeared floor, he saw that the white lobby tiles had been recently spray-painted with a red graffiti message: D
RESNER
—C
ENTRAL
P
ARK
.

SHE HAD NOT GONE FAR. AS DRESNER RUSHED OUT OF THE WINTERS
Corporation lobby and into the naked streets of the Financial District, he caught a glimpse of her, this small skinhead girl running her fingers along the bronze flanks of the
Charging Bull
statue. She inclined her head toward it, mouthing something as she caressed its immense curled horns. Poor Toro . . . Poor Taurus . . . She loitered there, he thought, insouciant, suicidal, or both. The abandoned buildings loomed over them and the corrosive breath of the wind hissed from the north, seething through vast metal teeth. Dresner's breath followed it as he drew his pistol from its shoulder holster. Moving slowly, crouching, he rested his grip upon the dented hood of a dead car, sighting her as she circled around the heavy metal animal. His hangover raged in his skull. The cold trigger eased into the flesh of his index finger. Finally, for the briefest of moments, she lifted her head from studying the bull and their eyes met. Lightning flashed between two poles.

The bullet missed her, cracking into the great
morillo
between the bull's shoulders. Yet a flash of blood misted about her for an instant before she fell. The shot had deflected from the statue and struck her somewhere. The gunshot echoed from the cobblestones of Bowling Green and along the vacant canyons of Wall Street. Bowling Green. Dresner thought of John Wilkes Booth.

A stripe of blood whipped across her face as Dresner's shot blasted a tube of flesh from Varyushka Cash's right breast, forcing her down into an accelerated bloom of pain. She suppressed the scream that struggled in her throat. As the reverberation of the gun receded she could hear his footfalls as he ran toward her, pistol extended. She closed her teeth over her lower lip and began to sprint, not looking back, but weaving, imagining the bull blocking Dresner's sight, denying him constellations of gunfire. No further shot came. She knew that she must be on Broadway, but in the delirium of her agony, for a moment she could not tell if she was running on the east or west side. Instincts and messages misfired in the scarlet fog of her wound. Suddenly, she was under fast food awnings on Beaver Street and knew that she was heading east. She tried to pump her arms, but the right was stiffening as blood flowed from her breast, leaving a trail of spattered paving. She crashed though the door of a wrecked pharmacy. The interior had been ransacked; a bright mosaic of crushed pills and broken glass was underfoot. At the back of the store, Cash located a plastic bottle of isopropyl and a box of bandages.

Dresner saw the thread of blood and followed it into the doorway of the pharmacy. He did not hear the gunshots, only experienced the glass exploding around him and the sparks flashing off the metal frame as he fell back to the concrete pillars of the shopping arcade across the street and into the screen of smoke billowing from what had been a coffee chain. He knelt there coughing and checking his body for wounds that adrenaline
had covered. Running his fingers over his torso, the sweat through his shirt, he reassured himself that she had missed him.

Cash burst from the shattered pharmacy and plunged behind a chain-link fence erected around a ragged hole in the street. A shot peeled behind her and rang against a fire hydrant before she made William Street and put an angle between herself and the CIA man hunting her. Crossing Wall Street again, the broken windowpanes of the Museum of American Finance ground against the sidewalk beneath her boots. She hurried, trying to regulate her labored breathing, listening for Dresner behind her. Cash leaned against a smoldering yellow taxi and looked inside her torn Bikini Kill T-shirt to where the bullet had struck her right breast. A Rorschach of gore developed in the fabric. The burning metal had carved out a rivulet. Shaking, Cash removed the cap of the isopropyl and poured it into the open wound.

Dresner heard the scream from two blocks away, the banshee sound racing beyond him and disappearing in the hard surfaces of the skyscrapers and the sparkling blade of the wind. It was difficult to orient to it. He spun his pistol like an old western gunfighter as he passed under a lattice of scaffolding and emerged at the intersection of Beaver Street and Hanover. A black dog startled him, erupting from a pile of trash and barking south toward the heliport. Dresner wondered how long the dog could survive the radiation, the fallout rinsing Manhattan. He wondered how long he had left. Instinctively he touched his hair again, and another dead frond of it came away with his trembling fingers. With it came the nausea. He could not distinguish his hangover from the possibility that he was incubating death. The gun felt heavy and he pushed it into his trouser pocket, feeling it engorged against his thigh as he walked. He thought: At least I've seen her in the flesh. She would probably bleed out on Park Avenue.

Shivering with pain and shock, Cash ripped the T-shirt from her torso and pushed it into the steel mailbox at the corner of Cedar Street. Moving between the red brick and brown façades, she wrapped her small and disfigured breasts in a coil of bandages and hung her backpack by one strap on her left shoulder. Paper blew between her boots, some of it evacuation warnings that the helicopters had dropped on the city. The name Indian Point whispered from the creases of New York. Vapors of alcohol rose from her body, as though she were being embalmed in half-life, she thought. The rats would drip into the salt waters of the Upper Bay and the hollows of this giant irradiated mausoleum would rattle and ring and decay in thousands of years of alienation. As she moved north, Cash found the ramps of Brooklyn Bridge choked with abandoned vehicles where the inhabitants of the city had finally despaired of the congestion and had forced themselves out on foot toward the relief flights from La Guardia and JFK or down to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge over to Staten Island and the uncontaminated continent. Possessions lay strewn about the Brooklyn Bridge ramps: sacrifices, totems of birdcages, cat carriers, baby strollers, eviscerated suitcases, all mangled and crushed between the silent tract of vandalized cars and looted trucks. Slow mounds of food waste lapped against bloody hubcaps as the ravens poured in like a funnel of black smoke. She thought of the birds carrying the fallout, imagined grotesque mutations and ebony corpses raining on Jersey City. Lying on its side, in the shadow of vast gunmetal girders, Cash discovered a white Lambretta scooter. The keys had been dropped into the estuary of trash, yet now they caught the sunlight as she approached. With her injury, Cash knew that pulling the scooter upright would be agonizing, but if she could free it, she could be more certain of reaching Central Park, where she was resolved to kill Robert Dresner. She hauled the scooter from the gathering dunes of junk and it howled through the deserted streets.

The city of her future was conforming to the city of her past.