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…”
On the bright expanse of Columbus Park, a mile from the explosion, three large buses parked on the green of the soccer field. Red Cross mobile donation units. A mob of volunteers, hundreds of people rolling up their sleeves.
Just north of Houston, the building was exploding again.
The tri-d billboard was mounted on the second story of an office tower. Instead of the usual advertisements and spinning corporate logos, an image of the Exchange hovered in the air, the Exchange as it had been hours before, a massive American flag dangling above the stage. The image shuddering and bouncing, the camera swerving vertiginously, and not just the camera, the building, suddenly consumed in thick smoke. There were blurry objects flying through the air, growing chunky and pixelated as they reached the edge of the projection field.
“My God,” whispered the woman standing beside Cooper.
The image changed, the smoke suddenly lessening, the angle different. The building was shown ripped open. Firemen sprayed water. Paper and insulation drifted on the eddies. Police guarded the scene as emergency workers looked for survivors. A ribbon at the bottom of the screen declared, LIVE FROM STOCK EXCHANGE EXPLOSION.
“Hadda be the twists,” said a rough voice behind him. Cooper fought the urge to deck the bigot. After all, he was right.
“Maybe,” said another voice.
“Who else would it be?”
“Who knows? All I’m saying, I don’t think they’ll know for a while.”