Ashes (2 page)

She didn’t know. All she knew was that she did not want to be one of them.

Jennifer started down the stairs. Under normal circumstances eighteen floors would have been nothing more than a good workout. But now the stairwell was full of people, more of them every minute, some of them hurt and all of them frantic to get out before the building collapsed. Now the air was thick with panic and dust. Every time the building let out a groan or shudder they all froze, waiting, and when nothing happened they kept going. Halfway down someone panicked, started screaming that they had to go faster, damn it, faster. But for the most part they made the journey down in grim silence, perhaps afraid that any sound they made would hasten the building’s collapse.

At the third floor, the heel broke off one of Jennifer’s shoes and there was a dull flare of pain as she twisted her ankle. She stopped to take off her shoes and rest her foot for a moment. “Jennifer? You need a hand?” She looked up at the familiar voice. It was Carlos, one of the account managers. “Come on, we need to keep moving.”

“Thanks,” she said. He put one of her arms across his shoulders, and they began to make their way down the stairs. Now that they were so close, some of the panic left her. They were going to make it.

At the second-floor landing she said, “I think—”

She never finished the sentence. There was a grinding roar from above them and something crashed through the wall. The stairway buckled and they fell. Jennifer felt something hit her on the head with a heavy but painless blow, and then felt nothing.

* * *

J
ennifer woke lying on her left side, arm pinned under her. The stairwell was lit only by a flickering fluorescent bulb; the air was heavy with dust that she could taste on her lips and tongue. Her body ached dully. She sat up slowly and pain shot through her shoulder and her head. Her left arm wouldn’t move. With her right hand she touched her head, felt wetness. When she looked at her fingers, they were red.

At least she could see. “Carlos? Carlos are...”

She could see Carlos, lying at the bottom of the stairs, his head cocked at what even to her unlearned eyes was a very wrong angle, eyes open and unseeing. “Oh no,” she whispered.

The building did not just groan; it screamed. So did she. “No!” Jennifer hauled herself to her feet with her good arm, her twisted ankle and lost shoes forgotten, and began limping down the buckled steps.

The door to the lobby was ajar a little bit. She tried to open it wider; it wouldn’t budge. Jennifer sucked in her breath and forced herself through. For a moment she was trapped, thought she would die stuck in this doorway, and if she had been able to breathe she would have screamed. Another burst of effort, the buckled metal tearing her sweater and scraping her back; she was through. The lobby was full of debris, twisted steel and broken glass that she dodged as best she could. Once a huge chunk of metal fell and she felt the wind of its passage as it missed her by inches. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a gaping hole in the lobby floor, dared not look closer. She squeezed through one more doorway and was outside.

Out. But not safe. She saw people waving at her, making frantic
Hurry!
gestures and understood that the last scream of the building had been its death cry. It was coming down.

Jennifer ran. She heard the sound of impact behind her and was lost in a cloud of dust, feeling debris fly around her.

She wanted to run, but couldn't see where to run to. She tried to scream, but could not even breathe.

T
he house was like the others on the block: small, undistinguished. The lawn was a vibrant green well-nurtured by the Florida rain. Jade plants and bird-of-paradise, low-maintenance and pleasant enough to look at, flanked the doorway. The mailbox was bright white, the numbers 606 and the name Anderson neatly lettered in black. The red flag on the mailbox was down; no letters to go out today. A dwelling unremarkable in every way.

The man who walked out of the house was equally unremarkable in appearance. He wore running shorts and a T-shirt that suggested people visit Reno, Nevada; he himself had never been there. He stood in his driveway and stretched, warming up for his morning run. If someone had looked closely they would have noticed a wiry strength that set him apart from an ordinary runner; would have seen watchfulness in his eyes as he gave the street a quick up-and-down glance, a careful assessment of details.

But no one looked closely. In this central Florida town, few people paid attention to much of anything. Not that he cared. After all, it was the reason he was here.

He jogged in place a moment, then began his run. Up and down the suburban streets with names like Sunflower and Cypress and Sycamore. He had seven different routes for his run, one for each day of the week. It kept the routine from getting stale, kept his observation of the surroundings sharp. There was no need for it in this place, after all this time, but old habits died hard.

Old fears died hard as well.

He ran until his lungs burned and ran some more, as he always did. He came back, as he always did, with his shirt and shorts plastered to him with sweat; with the nagging feeling that he had not run enough; with the unwelcome awareness that he was not as fast as he used to be. As he walked up the drive to his house he saw his next-door neighbor, out tending her roses. He went quickly through his bag of disguises and came up with the placid suburban smile. “Hello, Gladys.”

“Oh, hello Mr. Anderson,” she called out. “You know, you shouldn’t run like that when it gets so hot. You’ll have a stroke.”

“I'll be careful. I promise,” he said.

She waved goodbye to him and watched him go inside. Such a nice young man (Gladys was pushing ninety and any person under sixty qualified as young to her). She felt sorry for him, here on his own. An early retiree, he said. He’d taken a big pension and lived here. Alone. No wife, no children. But so nice and polite.

She went about tending her roses, unaware that her next-door neighbor had not been a telecommunications professional, and that he was not a retiree — at least, not the usual kind of retiree. And that his name was not Anderson.

* * *

H
is name was Sean Kincaid, and like everyone else in America he watched the day’s events unfold on television. It was the time-honored ritual. They’d done it when Kennedy was shot and they’d done it for the space shuttle explosion, for Waco and Oklahoma City, for 9/11. And, he thought with a sardonic grin quite unlike the smile he’d bestowed on Gladys, they’d likely do it for the Four Horsemen.

Why not? What could be more truly American than to watch disaster from the comfort of an easy chair, the remote ready to skip from network to network, snacks just a few steps away in the kitchen? The audiences at the gladiatorial matches in Rome never had it half so good.

It was strange to be on the observer’s side of the television screen. But this was the first catastrophic event to rock the U.S. since they’d put Sean out to pasture, and it was apt that he sit here in his bungalow with its tasteful Navajo White exterior, and watch the horror unfold on the idiot box like the rest of his neighbors.

It made him one of them. After all, blending in had always been his best talent. The Chameleon, Fredericks had called him. Not that Sean had liked the nickname, or Fredericks, either. Fredericks had clever nicknames for all the agents, and for himself as well; thin and fast and wiry, he’d called himself the Snake. Behind Fredericks’ back they’d called him the Ferret, hyperactive and sticking his nose where it was likely to get him in trouble. Though, when Sean thought about it, maybe the Snake had been appropriate; when Fredericks had come back from the mission in Chechnya it had been in pieces.
Don’t tread on me.

Sean blended in, more than he wanted to. What he saw on the TV should have made him angry. It should have roused the quiet, cold anger that made everyone — even his superiors — walk carefully around him. The Chameleon could bite. He should have said,
How could you not see this was going to happen? When a wasp stings you, don’t shoo it away. Kill the son of a bitch before he brings his whole nest down on you.

But he was out now, had been for four years — long enough to let cheerful cynicism take over. It was what all the “retirees” did. That, or eat a bullet one night, and despite everything he still liked to live.

Even in Florida.

Sean wondered if any of the old crowd — those who were left — were watching. Wondered what Robert, especially, thought of it all. Wondered if Halsey was regretting all those walking papers he’d issued.

He hoped Monique was nowhere near L.A., but did not worry too much. Her business travels seldom took her to the Left Coast, as she called it, and no doubt she was safe from this trouble. He might call, though. Just to be sure.

The volume of the TV was low; his experienced eyes saw more than any newscaster could tell him. A federal building in Los Angeles, half of it torn away by a bomb blast, the other half ready to collapse at any moment. Soon, it would be very soon. Pieces were coming down already, the whole thing was beginning to shiver like a man in a dying tremor. Anyone who wasn’t out by now was most likely — 

Hold on.

The camera whipped from the newscaster to the building. They’d all seen it.

There. Coming out of the building. A young woman, mid-twenties, in a gray skirt and pink sweater. She knew what was happening; Sean could not read her expression but saw her fear in the way she ran.

He had been sitting back in his chair, watching disaster unfold. Now he leaned forward. His hand crept to the TV’s remote and he turned up the volume.

“A person just got out of the building,” the newscaster was saying in a surprisingly composed voice. “This is the first we’ve seen come out in almost a half hour and...Oh God.”

The building was coming down.

“Holy fucking shit!” yelled a voice from somewhere off camera, the live feed uncensored. America had bigger problems than profanity today.

Down. It was down, and a huge cloud of dust and debris billowed out, swallowing up the woman in the gray skirt.

Babble of voices from the TV.

“—collapse—”

“—chances of survival are—”

A firefighter ran into the dust cloud.

Sean waited. They all did, millions across the nation forced into an unwilling communion, all waiting to see if the woman was going to make it.

Seconds passed. He wanted to look at his watch to see how long, but dared not take his eyes off the screen.

Something coming through the dust cloud. Blurred, indistinct. Then, a firefighter, carrying something in his arms. The woman. For a moment, mere silhouettes in the dust, they might have been lovers, he carrying her away to some romantic destination. Then they were out of the dust cloud, into the clear.

Sean leaned forward, closer to his television. For the first time, something flickered behind his eyes.

Both firefighter and woman were covered with dust. Dove-gray with it, they reminded Sean of the human statues in Pompeii caught by the volcano’s ashes. Her left arm dangled limply, broken. Her scalp was lacerated and blood trickled down the side of her head, making dark trails through the dust. Her shoes were gone, her feet scored and bloody. Her right hand clutched at the firefighter’s coat, and he cradled her in his arms as if she was a weary child who needed to be carried to bed.

Sean, quite unaware of what he was doing, rose from his chair. He knelt in front of the television and placed a hand on the screen, as if he could reach across the miles to the two people there. He watched as the woman let her head fall against the firefighter’s shoulder and she began to cry, tears mingling with her blood. Sean's eyes, which had looked on countless sights of destruction and death with nothing but businesslike detachment, brimmed with tears.

C
radled in the safety of an ocean to the west, three thousand miles of country to the east, Los Angeles was late in falling prey to a terrorist attack. Until now, the City of Angels’ demons had come from within.

Nevertheless, its citizens had been well-schooled by countless hours of television news. The stage was set, and all the actors knew their roles.

First came the firefighters and the rescue workers, sifting through wreckage. They searched for survivors, and found fifteen. After that, bodies were all they found, and as time went on and hope waned, bodies were all they looked for.

The lawmen were present as well. They fenced off the site, and soon the chain-link border was garlanded with yellow police tape that looked strangely cheery, like party streamers. The city’s men and women in blue came to stand guard and keep order. Representatives of a larger law came in as well, black-jacketed FBI agents searching for evidence, and shadowy men in suits whose purposes were less clear.

The citizens came as well. Those who worked in the area came, beholden by job demands and paychecks to walk past the wrecked building every day. Some stopped and stared. Some wept, some were stony-faced. Some walked past, head down, refusing to look, only to be lured to their office windows during coffee breaks, where they gazed silently at the site.

The curious also came, driven by many things: a desire to help, a need to see and therefore believe the unbelievable, a dark wish to look upon death and feel themselves more alive, a simple offering of support. Some stood and watched, others joined in the rescue and cleanup efforts. Nearly all left some mark of their pilgrimage and soon the chain link was hung not just with police tape but cards and poems, pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe, messages of sympathy in all the languages of the polyglot city. Flowers real and artificial, teddy bears, American flags, and other tokens were laid there in a pledge of condolence, vengeance, and unity.

Those who had lost husbands, wives, children, lovers, or friends in the blast came, easily recognizable by their manner — equal parts desperation and dignity — and by the tokens they carried — recent photographs, happy scenes at odds with the demeanor of those who held them. The days went on and the chances of anyone surviving burned low, guttered, and finally died out. Still the bereaved came, hoping their dedication would bring about a miracle.