In its thundering wake, the water left a trail of destruction. Manhole covers blew sky-high. Sewers exploded. Streets buckled and collapsed. Beneath the ground, a chain reaction had commenced. Like the ocean of which it was a part, the raging water sought only the expansion of its domain; the prize was the island itself, which, after a century of sodden neglect, was rotten to the core.
On the corner of Tenth Street and Fourth Avenue, Michael returned to consciousness with the unsettled sense that the world’s relationship to gravity had altered. It was as if every object were moving away from every other in a state of general repulsion. He blinked his eyes and waited for this feeling to stop, but it did not. A great font of water was jetting from the grate, high into the air, dissolving at the top into a sparkling mist that cast a rainbow above the flooded street. In his mentally fogged state, Michael stared at it in astonishment, not yet connecting the sight to anything else, while also noting, rather blandly, that other things were occurring: loud things, concussive things, things that warranted further consideration if only he could marshal his thoughts. The street seemed to be sinking—either that or everything else was getting taller—and bits of material were sailing off the faces of the buildings.
Wait a second.
The structure he was looking at—a nondescript, mid-rise office building of dark tinted glass—was doing something peculiar. It appeared to be … breathing. A deep respiratory flexing, like a baby’s first breaths of life. It was as if this anonymous structure, one of thousands like it on the island, had awakened after decades of abandoned slumber. Spidering cracks materialized in its reflective face. Michael sat upright, balancing on his palms. The pavement had begun to undulate disturbingly beneath him.
The glass exploded.
Michael rolled and flattened himself to the ground, covering his head as a million shards rained down. Whole plates detonated on the pavement. He was yelling at the top of his lungs. Nonsensical words, vile curses, an aural vomitus of terror. He was about to be diced to ribbons. There wouldn’t be enough of him left to bury, not that there would anybody around to do that. The seconds passed, glass cascading all around him, Michael waiting, for the second time that day, to die.
He didn’t.
He lifted his face from the pavement. The sun was gone, the air grown dim. Tiny, twinkling shards covered his body, clinging to his arms and hands and hair and the fabric of his clothing. A gritty wind swirled the air. The sky, it seemed, had begun to issue snow. No, not snow. Paper. A single page dropped lazily into his hands. “Memo,” it read at the top. And, beneath that, “From: HR Department. To: All employees. Re: Benefits enrollment period.” Michael was momentarily transfixed by the strangeness of these words. They felt like a code. Within their mysterious phrasing lay an entire reality, a world lost in time.
Suddenly the paper was gone; a gust of air had stripped it from his hand. The street was darkening. A roaring sound came from his left. Second by second it increased, as did the wind. He turned his head to look uptown, toward the source of the noise.
A great gray monster was roaring toward him.
He scrambled to his feet. His head was swimming; his legs felt like wet sand.
He ran, nonetheless, like hell.
The first building to fall was not the one Michael saw. By this time, the collapse of midtown Manhattan was several minutes old. From the south edge of Central Park to Washington Square, edifices large and small were in the process of acute structural liquefaction, melting and toppling into the gobbling sinkhole that the island’s central core was on its way to becoming. Some fell independently, crumpling vertically into their foundations like prisoners felled by a firing squad. Others were encouraged by their neighbors, as building after building teetered and toppled into others. A few, such as the great glass tower on the east side of the trapezoidal city block at Fifty-fifth and Broadway, appeared to succumb entirely through the power of suggestion: My fellows are giving up the ghost—why don’t I do that also? The process might have been likened to a swiftly moving metastasis; it leapt across the boulevards as if from organ to organ, it churned through the avenues of blood, it wrapped its lethal fingers around the bones of steel. Dust clouds roared in a great carcinogenic regurgitation, blackening the skies.
An ersatz night fell over Manhattan.
Beneath Grand Central Station, the water arrived from two directions: first via the Lexington Avenue subway line from Astor Place, then, a few seconds later, though the Forty-second Street shuttle line from Times Square. The currents converged; like a tsunami compressing as it approached the shore, the water’s power magnified a thousand-fold as it tore up the stairs.