Skeletons (24 page)

Mrs. Garr switched off the radio.

When we reached the outskirts of Queens on the Long Island Expressway, the traffic thickened. There were more trucks now. Mrs. Garr moved away from the window, toward the center of the front seat. An overhead message sign said there were delays on all the bridges, and that the Lincoln Tunnel was closed.

Mrs. Garr pulled into the right lane and stayed there, getting off when the signs said THROGS NECK/ WHITESTONE BRIDGE. On the Cross Island Expressway, which led to the bridges, the traffic was lighter, especially in the left lane. Mrs. Garr pulled into it.

As we approached the off ramp for the
Throgs
Neck Bridge, Mrs. Garr studied the thick line of cars and trucks waiting to get off in the right lane.

"We'll take the Whitestone, she said, speeding ahead in the left lane.

The Whitestone Bridge was nearly empty. When we were halfway over, Mrs. Garr slowed down, driving with one hand as she desperately dug through her bag. "Oh, please," she said.

She found her change purse, searched through it. Ahead, a truck swerved into our lane, and Mrs. Garr nearly hit it.

She reached back over the seat and pushed the change purse into my hands.

"Claire, please find two dollars and fifty cents in change. We have to use the exact-change machine."

I dug into the purse. We were hemmed in by trucks, moving toward the pay toll. Mrs. Garr craned her neck, saw that we were in a lane with a skeletal attendant taking money in a booth ahead. She looked to the left and right.

Suddenly she cut hard right in front of a truck in the adjacent lane. It honked its horn but let us in. The sign over the booth said, EXACT CHANGE ONLY. NO PENNIES.

"Claire, please!"

I found six quarters, four dimes, and two nickels. Two dollars. There was nothing else but pennies in the purse.

"Claire!"

I put the change into Mrs. Garr's hand. We were almost to the pay booth. She counted through it. "This isn't enough!"

The truck in front of us huffed to a stop. A skeletal arm reached out, dropped coins into the pay booth's basket.

"God, we'll have to run through!"

Ahead to the right was parked a blue-and-white police car, a skeletal skull watching the cars as they passed through the gates.

The truck in front of us rumbled into gear as the booth light turned green, the gate went up.

It passed through.

The gate came down behind the truck. The light turned red.

In Mrs. Garr's purse I felt a flap behind the purse with a round flat rise in it. There was a small zipper. I pulled it back and reached in.

Behind us the truck Mrs. Garr had cut off hit its horn angrily. Mrs. Garr rolled up to the change basket. She looked over at the cop in the blue-and-white car, who was drinking from a Styrofoam cup, steam rising around his skeletal head.

In the little zippered pocket was a large round coin. I pulled it out. It was a half-dollar with John Kennedy's profile on it. I reached over the seat and pressed it into Mrs. Garr's hand.

She looked at it blankly for a moment. The truck behind us hit its horn again.

"Oh, dear God, thank you," Mrs. Garr said. "Claire, get down."

I saw the cop look our way over his coffee cup as I ducked down.

Mrs. Garr turned to the machine, dropped her handful of coins into it, turning her head away from the cop. As soon as the light turned green and the gate went up, she hit the accelerator and we went through.

I looked back surreptitiously at the policeman as we drove on. He was drinking his coffee again, ignoring us.

"That was too close," Mrs. Garr said.

The spans of the Whitestone Bridge retreated behind us. Mrs. Garr stayed to the right. Most of the cars and trucks passed us in the left lanes. I looked back at the water we had passed over. A boat lay half-sunk below, steam rising from its cracked skull. Nearby, a tug pushed a garbage barge as if nothing had happened. The sails of docked yachts dotted the marina shoreline behind us.

In the near distance I saw the Whitestone's sister bridge, the
Throgs
Neck, jammed with unmoving car lights all across its span.

"You know, Claire," Mrs. Garr said. "I don't believe in miracles. But that Kennedy half-dollar was a little one. When I was a girl, after President Kennedy was shot, my grandmother gave me that coin. It was one of the first minted. She loved John Kennedy. She told me to keep that coin with me always, that someday it would be valuable. I thought she meant it would be worth money. For a long time I kept track of how much it had gone up in value. I forgot it was in there." She turned briefly to look at me, her tired features relaxing in a smile. "Do you know that coin was worth fourteen times what it originally cost, the last time I looked?"

She turned back to the road, shaking her head. "You never know—"

There was the scream of a jet engine. I turned my head just in time to see a silver fighter heading straight for the bridge behind us.

Mrs. Garr sucked in her breath.

At the last second the jet swooped down, underneath. Quickly I looked to the other side of the bridge where it streaked out toward the
Throgs
Neck Bridge.

The pilot in the cockpit was human.

There was a whoosh, and something detached itself from the jet's wing.

"It's a missile!" Mrs. Garr cried.

The jet banked off to the right as its missile shot straight toward the
Throgs
Neck Bridge.

From the left another jet roared beneath the White-stone Bridge, then another. These two held skeleton pilots. They banked right, chasing the first jet.

The first jet's missile arched toward the
Throgs
Neck Bridge and struck it
midspan
.

There was a white-orange flash. The bridge held, dreamlike, for a moment and then collapsed into two falling halves. I watched the span cables collapse, twisting like strands of spaghetti. I heard the distant honking of horns and watched tiny truck and car lights spin down into the night. Where the bridge had been, trucks fell from the newly made ledges along with debris from the blasted roadway.

The jet fighters had reached land. The human pilot angled up. At that moment both of his attackers fired missiles. The human tried to outrun them. He shot straight up but the missiles were fast and gained on him.

The pilot slid left as the first missile streaked by. But almost immediately the second missile found him.

There was a flash, a thudding boom. The human pilot's plane stopped, frozen in the sky, then tumbled to earth in pieces.

The debris of the plane hit the far shore. There was one flashing explosion, a rain of fiery shards. A sailboat lit up, its sail a fiery triangle, before folding in on itself in flames and sinking.

Another jet appeared in the distance behind us, streaking toward the Whitestone Bridge. I saw a flare as its missile fired.

There was a huge explosion in the center of the span behind us. The ground rumbled. A rolling ball of fire rose and rose—and then rolled toward us.

Mrs. Garr stepped on the accelerator and we shot ahead.

The explosion nearly filled the rear window, and then collapsed back on itself. I watched a tanker truck drive out of the flames, on fire. It thumped into explosion. The cab twisted to the side. The truck tumbled over, in flames, consuming nearby cars.

Behind the tanker truck the Whitestone Bridge was gone.

We were now on the Cross Bronx Expressway, with increasing traffic. We drove for two miles, until suddenly the traffic thickened to a stop. Mrs. Garr craned her head, trying to see.

She said, "Oh, no."

Ahead of us the two outer lanes of the roadway were blocked by blue-and-white police cars. A flock of skeletal policemen were checking each car as it passed through the bottleneck.

Off to the right, just before the roadblock, was an exit ramp that said BRONX RIVER PARKWAY. There was a service lane, littered with debris, but passable.

Mrs. Garr began to pull into it to get to the exit, until she saw the ramp blocked by police barricades. At the top of the ramp was a huge vehicle, a school bus it looked like, blocking the top of the ramp.

Mrs. Garr got quickly back into lane, sought to push over into the center lane.

Two trucks were close by. Mrs. Garr cut the back one off, moving between them, ignoring the blare of the truck's horn.

She looked desperately into the left lane. It was blocked tight with cars. A little figure, a girl, I could just make out around the eerie little skeleton frame, stared at our car from the back window of a car up front. She had a human doll, stripped naked of clothing and marked all over in crayon with bones.

Mrs. Garr waited for a gap between two cars. One moved up, leaving a bare space before the one behind followed. Mrs. Garr angled her car sharply left, cutting off the car behind, and tried to wedge us in. The car behind, a huge Cadillac, wouldn't let her, moving up so that there were bare inches between our car and that one. Mrs. Garr persisted, until the car behind suddenly braked hard to avoid a collision and Mrs. Garr squeezed in.

The door to the car behind us opened. An angry large skeleton with the vague features of a burly, muscled, black T-shirted man surrounding it got out and slammed his door, heading toward us, yelling.

Mrs. Garr reached for the gun on the front seat.

Cars around us began to honk their horns. Five cars ahead, a cop looked up, yelled at the man to get back into his car. The man stopped near the backdoor of our car, hesitating.

"I said get back in!" the cop yelled.

"What the hell is going on, anyway?" the man yelled.

"We had some humans through here a little while ago, car loaded with weapons. Just get in your car and be quiet."

"Get 'em?" the man asked.

"Yeah, we got them. Now you—"

"Right, right," the burly man said, throwing up his hands. He smacked the back of Mrs. Garr's car hard with the flat of his hand, stalked back to his car, got in.

Neither the cop nor the man had looked in at us. But the little girl in the backseat of the car in front of us was still staring, holding her little doll.

We inched ahead. Four cars ahead, the cops were looking in windows, waving cars
 
on one at a time as they squeezed through the single middle lane.

We were angling toward the center as Mrs. Garr searched the highway divider to our left.

"There."

Just before the bottleneck, a gap in the fenced divider appeared. It looked like it had been punched through by an accident. There was a high curb. As we watched, a car in front of us decided not to wait, jumped the curb, turned around, and drove away from us.

A cop yelled, "Hey!"

Another one said, "Better get that blocked up." The first cop nodded, moved to get a couple of orange highway cones from a nearby stack.

Cars inched ahead.

"We're turning around, Claire."

The cop found the cones he wanted. We were still a car length behind the hole. The car in front of us jerked ahead, almost hitting the cop returning with the cones, leaving just enough room for us to get by.

Mrs. Garr yanked the car to the left, bumped us up over the curb.

There was a scraping sound under the car. For a moment we were suspended.

Mrs. Garr gunned the engine. The car scraped over the bump and through the hole, turning us around on the other side of the divider. An oncoming car blared its horn at us, swerved around, and sped on.

The cop had stopped to yell at the car in front of us for almost hitting him. In the back window the little girl stared at us. As we pulled onto the roadway and sped off she waved, holding her doll out.

Behind us I watched the cop block up the hole with the pylons.

"If we can't get out north, we'll have to go through New York City," Mrs. Garr said. She left the Cross Bronx Expressway for the
Deegan
Expressway. But the northbound lanes of that road, too, were blocked by police cars. All of the exit ramps leading to northbound routes were closed off or guarded by armed police.

We drove on, toward New York City.

We passed the huge three-quarter circle of Yankee Stadium, burning on our left. The sign on its front, visible through the lighted smoke, said, YANKS VS. TWINS, JULY 2, 3, 4. FIREWORKS, JULY 4.

As I watched, a top part of the stadium, already chiseled by fire, crumbled in on itself, shooting a stream of sparks into the sky.

There was less traffic now. Mrs. Garr turned on the radio again. From one end nearly to the other there was static. But suddenly a strong station blared out, "We've blown up almost all of the major bridges! This war will not end until the human race once again rules the world!" The breathless voice drew away from the microphone, conferring with other muted voices.

"The George Washington Bridge is gone! We've hit the George Washington Bridge!"