Anthem's Fall (53 page)

“Are you okay?” Madison said and pulled Kristen away from the glass smithereens now strewn across the floor.

“Y-Yeah.” Kristen ran her gaze and shaky palms over her body to check for cuts. The heavy yellow box had missed her by a foot, and the window had shattered at her feet. Powdery specks of pulverized glass were clinging to Kristen’s shoes and the bottom of her jeans like little diamonds. Beyond that, the shattered pane had done no damage to her.
Don’t Walk
was still flashing in flagging letters on the crossing sign.

Kristen felt a strange swell of heartbreaking sorrow as the flickering words on the sign guttered out and disappeared. What chance did the architecture and unity of the civilized world have against the peril of such supreme adversaries? Maybe it was the initial shock of her quandary waning, or a sudden realization of the worldwide implications of the events occurring around her. Regardless of the cause, the sudden sadness for the vulnerable integrity of her world allowed her mind to focus on the bigger picture.

“Maniacs. I swear they’re going to cause more damage than those giants did to Chicago,” Madison said, and turned to the window farthest from them. Some of the audience members were lowering their improvised rope out of an opened window and tying the other end securely to the leg of a heavy table.

“Where are you planning on going?” Madison called out to them.

“Anywhere!” one of the men yelled back. “We’re not waiting for that goddamn demon to come back, and the Emergency Alert Broadcasts are saying for people not in safe locations to make for the Hudson River.”

Kristen cautiously approached the window to get a glimpse of the street below, taking care to keep herself protected behind the broad framework between the windows in case any more projectiles were sent her way. The crowds outside actually seemed to have pacified slightly, and many of the people crowding around the abandoned cars and ruined sidewalks were not partaking in the anarchy. Instead they were staring skyward and shielding their eyes from the sun’s glare. They were pointing in disbelief into the sky between the tall buildings.

“What are they looking at?” Madison asked behind her as she, too, approached the open window.

“I don’t know.”

They exchanged an anxious glance, and, after scanning the people below for any throwing weapons, Kristen leaned out the window. She craned her neck and squinted up past the long height of the glinting Marriott Marquis. Something was falling through the bright sky. It was the unmistakable shape of a body falling silently from the heavens. The body was gargantuan, its hulking limbs hanging loose in the air. Kristen stared up at the falling being. Although it was plummeting in freefall, the body had a surreal and tranquil look to it as it descended silently toward the earth. Then she saw the familiar glint of armor. It took only a moment for Kristen to recognize the slowly spinning and rotating form.

“Well? What is it?” Madison asked.

Kristen looked back into the ballroom, her expression bewildered. “I don’t understand. It’s—”

A strange thud sounded from the intersection outside and rose over the hubbub of the riots. The impact was reminiscent of a slab of meat smacking down against a butcher’s block.

“What the hell was that?” Madison frowned and stepped forward as Kristen also turned back to look out the window.

A little ways down the avenue, prostrate and still against the pavement, was the body of one of the giants Vengelis had introduced to Kristen. It looked as though in the last moment, the people in the body’s trajectory had managed to move out of its path. A generous width of pavement separated the massive corpse and the surrounding circle of dismayed bystanders. Kristen could not bring herself to comprehend the sheer size of the man—if the giant could indeed be called a man at all. The grotesquely thick legs and arms took up nearly half the street, and the mass of his unmoving chest and midsection was analogous to the girth of the cars adjacent to his lifeless body. The giant’s neck was angled in an unnatural position—as though his spine had been snapped—and it looked as though every bone upon his bloody face had been broken.

“What . . . the . . . hell?” Madison breathed, horrified, as she looked down at the body. This sentiment seemed to be the consensus of the avenue below, as everyone seemed to take a momentary respite in order to stare at the monstrous body and then turn to look into the sky.

Kristen stared, her mouth hanging open. “I have no idea.”

“Is he
dead
?”

Kristen shook her head numbly as she looked at the corpse. “I don’t know. I think so, right?”

“I don’t understand,” Madison said. “I thought they were invincible? We must have figured out a way to kill them!”

“I’m not so sure.”

“We
must
have figured out a way.”

Kristen could not look away from the beaten giant. She did not know what to make of this, and she recalled the trace of fear that had claimed Vengelis before he left them. “Vengelis said they were invincible to our technologies.”

“Well, clearly he lied!” Madison said.

Kristen strained her eyes to see the giant’s mortally wounded face. The mangled features looked more like it had received a blunt trauma impact, like it had been bludgeoned. “I can’t imagine what could have done that damage to him,” she said. “It looks like he was beaten to death.”

“Kristen,” Madison exhaled. “Look.”

Kristen hesitantly moved her attention away from the giant body, and she immediately noticed every face in the avenue was staring into the sky. Their upturned expressions made her suspect that whatever it was, it would not prove heartening. Resigning herself to whatever she was about to see, Kristen threw back her head and looked skyward.

Just over the skyscrapers, which cast shade over Times Square, there hovered two dark figures. Kristen squinted at the two dots against the bright blue sky. “What are those?”

“They look like people, don’t they?”

“It’s Vengelis,” Kristen said.

With the undivided attention of the entire city block, the two moving figures suddenly shot toward one another and collided.

KRRRRGGGHHHH!

At once, Kristen and everyone else registered what the thunderous crashes had been: a battle between titans was raging over the city. The realization did not have a pacifying effect on the crowds below, but Kristen could not take her eyes away from the two darting figures above the buildings as she winced with each deafening boom caused by their impacts. She was all but certain that one of them was Vengelis, but who was the other? It was not a giant; the sizes of the two forms looked similar.

“It has to be Vengelis,” Madison gasped.

Kristen nodded.

“But who’s the other one?”

“I can’t imagine.”

The ballroom rattled and shook from the brawl overhead. Back and forth the two bodies soared across the sky, disappearing and reappearing behind the mirrored sides of the skyscrapers. Kristen could barely follow their movements, and quickly lost track of them.

“Oh my god!” Madison suddenly shrieked. Kristen looked to where she was pointing and saw that one of the figures had been thrown straight through the top floors of a skyscraper up the avenue. Like a bullet, the dark body pierced a narrow hole through one end of the building and erupted in a pluming wreckage of rubble and dust out the other end. Kristen pulled back from the window frame and slumped down against the wall, feeling dizzy as the blood drained from her head. What they were witnessing looked so unreal, so impossible, and yet even as she tried to steady her breathing she could hear bits of the falling rubble hit the street some way up the avenue.

“It’s okay. I think the building is going to hold!” Madison called over the rising cries engulfing them.

Kristen tried desperately to control herself as she looked up and watched the rampant chaos unfolding around her. At the far end of the room, men and women were frantically clambering over one another to grab hold of the makeshift rope of clothing and rappel awkwardly down the side of the building to the street. The news broadcast on the projector screen was depicting footage of the gaping hole upon the side of the building just to the north of them, with the word
live
blinking in big letters. Kristen could see the Marriott Marquis among the other skyscrapers in the background of the broadcast. They were in the center of a warzone. The storm of screams rising from the street was now so shrill that Kristen could barely hear her own thoughts. She raised her head and peeked out the window to see the corpse of the dead giant on the pavement. It was as though the corpse was magnetically charged, and repelling the people nearby. They understandably kept their distance, in fear that the monster would awaken at any given moment and start rampaging through the avenue.

“We can’t . . .” Kristen said to no one in particular, her voice drained out by the shouting. She interlocked her hands on top her head. “We can’t be powerless like this. We can’t be defenseless.”

“Who could Vengelis be fighting?” Madison shouted into Kristen’s ear, her eyes still staring intensely out the window.

“This . . . this can’t happen.” Kristen unsteadily rose to her feet and looked at the body of the giant. A not quite tangible idea was beginning to surface in the back of her mind. “Sejero . . .” She murmured, unheard.

“What if this building collapses?” Madison asked as she recoiled from the terrified insurgence outside the window. The researchers were now pouring down the makeshift rope, obviously concerned of the same threat. “What if the hotel isn’t safe? Kristen what should we do?”

“Listen!” Kristen shouted and grabbed Madison by the shoulder. “We’re not safe!”

Madison looked at Kristen as if she had uttered the most apparent exclamation imaginable. “No kiddin—”

“I mean, we, as a world, are not safe!” Kristen screamed at the top of her lungs directly into Madison’s ear. “Whoever, and whatever the hell they are, they’ve already proven they don’t give a damn about us. Do you know what happens when two societies clash and one is inferior?”

“I—” Madison could barely hear her.

“The lesser society gets wiped out!” Kristen screamed. “Whether it happens in a day or a hundred years—they get
wiped out
! We won’t be able to survive against them! We won’t endure, in my heart I know we won’t!”

“I’ve noticed!” Madison yelled.

“We—as a race, as an entire way of life—are
doomed
if we can’t figure out a way to stand our ground!”

“Yes, I realize this!”

“Listen!” Kristen stepped closer to Madison, the gathering audience by the windows pressing against them on all sides. “I—I have an idea!”

Kristen turned back and strained to look at the bloodied giant. People were pouring past the huge body, not daring to go near it. She then turned to Madison and shouted into her ear, “We have to get down there!”

“What?”

Kristen sprinted across the ballroom, moving from table to table madly pushing laptops out of the way and throwing papers and exhibits off of the assembled display tables as she frantically searched for something. Any box she found she upturned violently, spilling the contents across the floor.

“What the hell are you doing?” Madison demanded as she followed her.

“Looking for something!”

“Why?”

“Because,” Kristen called as she ransacked a bovine lymphocyte display table. “What’s the need to
understand
a technology if you can
copy
it? We may only have one shot at this!”

“What do you mean? What are you talking about?” Madison shouted, trailing Kristen in confusion.

At last Kristen opened a small cardboard box and glared triumphantly at what she had been looking for. She reached into the box and pulled out an empty glass slide. It was a simple tissue slide, two thin pieces of glass that were clear against her fingers. Kristen carefully placed it back in the case as Madison called out more questions. She jogged to the Vatruvian cell table and picked up her backpack, placing the box with the glass slide inside and throwing the bag over her shoulder. She tightened the straps around her shoulders and turned to Madison with a rising look of passion.

“I’m going to get a sample of their blood.”

“What?”

With the fear that the Marriott Marquis would collapse any moment, the researchers were now simply jumping out of the windows of the Lutvak ballroom and onto the heads of the crowd below.

“I may not be able to understand Sejero genetics, or even the most fundamental aspects of their strength. But if I can get their DNA, if I can get a sample of their genetic code, I can try to replicate their power.”

“Replicate their power with what?”

Kristen’s face hardened, and she cast Madison a sobering look. “The Vatruvian cell.”

V
engelis watched Gravitas rub his fingers over the enormous dark red marks left by Darien’s arm on his neck. Tiny capillaries had ruptured under Nerol’s skin and left deep purple blotches. Together the two of them lingered over the clustered rooftops and spires in a momentary respite from their struggle.

“You killed him for trying to help you?” Gravitas called to Vengelis over the roar of the streets.

A gust of wind touched Vengelis’s face and he could feel its presence thicken the blood running down his cheek. The thumping of his pulse was sending surges of pain past his forehead to the back of his skull and down his back. It took all of his willpower not to visibly wince from the sharp pain. He was encouraged by Gravitas’s battered state, but he was in no better condition.

“Darien had no place interfering in a fight beyond his abilities,” Vengelis said.

“So you killed him?”

“I’m a man of principle, Nerol, even if you choose to believe I’m simply a tyrant. I have the courage to act on my convictions; a trait in which you and I are evidently alike, I suppose.”

“The only thing you and I have in common is that neither of us belong here, and very soon one of us won’t be.”

Vengelis smirked despite the pain coursing through him.