Anthem's Fall (56 page)

Without hesitation Gravitas erupted downward, the sound of his approach drowned out in the welter of the streets. Vengelis’s vulnerable side was facing an open intersection, and Gravitas descended with a swooping approach to mercilessly blindside him. It appeared as though Vengelis was preoccupied, or perhaps he had considered Gravitas defeated; either way he had left himself completely undefended as he stood by his fallen soldier. Gravitas barreled downward and pulled up at the last second, coming level to the street and sprinting as hard as he possibly could toward the emperor. His vision blurry, Gravitas watched Vengelis lift his arm out to someone, leaving his fragile midsection wide open for an ambush. Thundering up the street with all of the force his beaten body would allow, Gravitas lowered his shoulder and thrust himself forward with every drop of his remaining strength, plunging his flexed shoulder straight into Vengelis’s ribcage.

The impact was ferocious. Gravitas could hear a number of Vengelis’s ribs crack from the impact. Together the two bodies—Gravitas on top of Vengelis—reeled across the street and crashed through a plate-glass window into a deserted five-star restaurant. Weakened by his injuries, Gravitas simply pushed forward, pumping his legs one after the other. He drove Vengelis backward, his shoulder buried into the tender space below Vengelis’s armpit.

Vengelis let his own body fall underneath Gravitas and flipped him over with a heave. Gravitas’s momentum carried him booming through a hostess table with a discharge of splintered wood. He rolled across the restaurant in a calamity of tablecloths, shattering plates and silverware.

“You don’t quit, even when you’re beaten!” Vengelis screamed hoarsely. He rose to his feet on the mahogany floor, wincing from his ribs.

Gravitas grunted and ripped a white tablecloth from his body. He ran straight at Vengelis, swinging out with a right fist. Dodging his head out of reach, Vengelis sent his knuckles up into Gravitas’s stomach. The blow sent him straight through the ceiling, and Vengelis ascended after him. They interlocked arms and began to wrestle through the walls and ceilings of the building. Floors and walls crumpled and disintegrated around them, the structures yielding to their bodies without the slightest resistance. Gravitas reached down and grabbed Vengelis behind the knee, pulling Vengelis’s left leg into his grasp and pushing his shoulder into his stomach. Vengelis fell backward; their two bodies smashed through drywall and mortar and out into the daylight of the city.

Vengelis swung his fist and caught Gravitas behind the ear. The blow forced Gravitas to relinquish his hold on Vengelis’s leg, and sent him careening through the air and into a billboard. Back and forth across the open street they fought, even Gravitas now disregarding the massive damage he was inflicting to the buildings around them. Concrete and steel broke against them like porcelain. There was not a trace of defenses now between the two of them. Every swing from either one of the Sejero warriors struck its mark as they exchanged blows like wild animals. Gravitas could barely see, and his limbs felt like they were filling with hot lead. He was beginning to even forget whom he was fighting or why.

With an obvious last-ditch effort, Vengelis buried a fist into Gravitas’s stomach with gathered strength. Gravitas hunched over, but at the same time came up with a wild uppercut.

It hit home.

His fist caught Vengelis square in the jaw. Vengelis fell back, and his body crashed into a window behind him where it did not move. His legs were left dangling out the broken window, but his upper torso was inside the building. Vengelis lay stunned for a moment before pushing himself up onto his elbows.

“Do you give up?” Gravitas blurted.

Vengelis spit to the side and stood up shakily in the thirteenth-story window frame, his head lolling. He murmured something that sounded like “Kristen,” though Gravitas thought he might be delirious himself and hearing things.

“Fel—” Vengelis coughed up blood. “We . . . Felix.”

Gravitas could not do anything but pant for breath. His spinning vision was filled with stars. He was too spent to think anything at all. The two of them stood before each other, each neither defeated nor victorious.

KRRRRRCH!

A strident tearing sound echoed suddenly across the rooftops of the city, drowning out the clamor of the anarchy below. Gravitas drew his blurred vision away from Vengelis. He strained to look up the long crowded avenue. High over the heads of the clogging masses migrating northward, the wounded monolith of a skyscraper shuddered and screamed in tenors of yielding iron and failing steel down into the streets of Midtown. Gravitas felt a terrible desperation as he turned his gaze from the massive skyscraper to the droves of people bottlenecked in the congested intersections below. The collapse would swallow them whole. Thousands were about to die an unspeakable death. The fight was over; Gravitas doubted either of them now had the power remaining to perform a coup de grâce on the other.

KRRRRRCH!

The sound filled the city: another support failing. Gravitas shut his eyes, his upper body rising and falling with heaves for breath.

“You . . . deserve . . . death . . . ” Gravitas said to Vengelis through his split lips.

“I . . . know,” Vengelis murmured and stumbled to a wall for support. “Brought . . . Felix. N-never could have known . . . ”

A new kind of sound carried down to them from atop the tilting building. It was the sound of floors collapsing. Gravitas turned to the skyscraper and watched as the roof and the top floor caved inward. The base of the building gave way, and the bottom floors began disintegrating into rubble. He moaned in wearisome desperation and turned away from Vengelis Epsilon with determined finality.

“Don’t you dare. It . . . it is hopeless,” Vengelis murmured, his jaw hanging open by his shoulder as he regarded the falling tower with a muddled gaze. “Don’t even think about leaving.”

“We’re finished,” Gravitas whispered.

“Nerol! No!”

Without another word Gravitas rushed up the avenue toward the falling superstructure, weaving unsteadily through the air with his final scrap of strength and leaving Vengelis astonished and alone in the lofty recess of the empty window.

T
ears of despondency and dread welled in Kristen’s eyes as she sprinted up the quaking avenue beside Madison. Entering the migrating riot was an immersion into a world with no rules, a scene entirely distant and alien to the life with which Kristen was so familiar. Man’s carefully sewn and timeworn fabric of compassion, kindness, and morality was ablaze and scorching to nothingness before her eyes, leaving only caustic despair in its wake.

In fleeting sidelong glances Kristen beheld unspeakable atrocities. Curled on the pavement, a trampled and broken body of a young teenager, her sneakers twitching from the kicks and stomps of the mob. Marching out of an electronics store, a man balancing a stack of brand new laptops in his arms. Parents desperately holding infants and toddlers into the air to keep them from being swallowed up, while futilely begging for someone to help them.

A drear of chalky dust obscured the afternoon sunlight as the dreamlike conflict between Vengelis and his nameless foe pervaded straight through the towering buildings on all sides, sending wreckage plunging down into the crowds.

Ahead of Kristen and Madison, the disfigured skyscraper leaned diagonally over the intersection at a treacherous angle. Kristen stared agape into the dusty sky at the countless teetering windows overhead. The building blocked the warm autumn sunlight that splashed upon the rest of the city, and cast an ominous dark shadow across the block. The air felt suddenly colder in the chill of the building’s shadow. Deadly debris fell from the lofty heights into the narrow chasm of the avenue. Kristen had never felt as small and frail as she did under the eclipse of the vast skyscraper. It was a sensory overload, and all the while the same word repeated over and over in her mind:
war
.

As they ran, Madison gripped Kristen’s arm tight. They were in this together, and Kristen was glad not to be alone. Madison was strong and fast, and Kristen could barely keep up.

In the middle of the swarming intersection, a hulking black-and-green camouflaged army tank was stationed in the shadows below a set of drooping unpowered traffic lights. The austere tank contrasted starkly with the rest of the posh storefronts. Around the tank, a ring of indomitable Marines was stationed at attention, all shouldering enormous black assault rifles. The guns were pointed outward at the stampede. The men looked ready to fire upon the pressing riot at the slightest provocation. Standing on the hood of the armored vehicle, a soldier with black boots was shouting into a megaphone. You could see the panic in his eyes: he had prepared himself to serve in distant lands, not in the beating heart of America.

“The bridges on the east side of the city have been demolished! Don’t try to evacuate east! I repeat, do not try to evacuate over the East River.”

Kristen and Madison slowed to a jog to listen to the man. The magnified voice barely carried over the uproar around them. He waved his arm to his right, Kristen’s left.

“Make your way to the west side of Manhattan. The Holland and Lincoln tunnels
are
still operational! There is an evacuation effort underway across the Hudson! Shelters are being erected along the New Jersey side of the river. Please remain calm! But get to the Hudson and out of the city as quickly as possible!”

“Let’s go!” Madison shouted and made to turn west up the clogged street.

“Wait!” Kristen called, and she forced her way through a few shoulders to get closer to the Marines. She waved to them vigorously as she shoved people out of the way.

“I need to talk with you!” Kristen screamed, her voice scarcely audible amid the riot.

The soldier standing mere feet in front of her made no acknowledgement of her presence. He stared coldly past her, the barrel of his gun pointing directly at the chest level of the mob, at Kristen.

“For god’s sake,
look
at me! I know what they are!” Kristen raised an arm and pointed a finger to the sky and the gaping hole upon the top floors of the leaning skyscraper looming overhead.

The soldiers could have passed for statues. They stared blankly down the sights of their guns.

“Where is General Redford?” Kristen shouted. “I need to speak with someone who is in command here!
Hello
?”

Madison caught up to her and attempted to pull her back by the shoulder. Kristen forcefully shrugged off her grip and stepped forward furiously. “This is too important!

One of you needs to be a responsible human for one goddamn second and listen to me! I have in my possession a technology of
theirs
that needs to be taken to safety! Listen to me!”

“Miss, step back right now!” the man with the megaphone roared down at Kristen.

“I need to speak to someone in charge,” Kristen shouted. “Please! I have a sample of their DNA—the DNA of the people who attacked Chicago and are in New York now!”

“Step back!” the man roared into the megaphone.

“No!”

“Come on, Kristen.” Madison pulled again at her shoulder, but Kristen held her ground.

“No! I have in my possession their
complete
intact genetic code! It has to be taken to safety out of the city!”

The soldier with the megaphone was not having it, and he glared down at Kristen with obvious disbelief. He raised the megaphone to his mouth and was about to assert a threat, when an enormous oak desk fell from the tenebrous sky and landed directly on the shoulder blades of one of the Marines standing in the circle. The soldier’s body crumpled to nothing in an instant, and the heavy desk burst into a few dozen fragments and splinters against the hard street. There was a subdued moment as all the bystanders gawked at the space where the man had been standing a moment before. Kristen and everyone around her slowly raised their heads into the opaque and shadowy sky.

The immense skyscraper leaned down upon them like a tremendous tree about to fall with a catastrophic crash. The darkened windows of the tower hung over the intersection and depicted a grand portrait-like reflection of the riotous avenue. It was a stunning refracted mirror image of the insanity, like a nightmarish portrait in a still lake. All along the length and width of the great structure, bits of office furniture slid across uneven floors and crashed through the thick panes of glass, falling freely into the crowd in which Kristen stood. The skyscraper trembled and hitched. Shattered glass and bits of the superstructure fell through the open air, and iron supports shrieked deafeningly. The structure had transformed into a horrendous monster, ready to ravenously devour them all.

The building was going to collapse any second.

Immediately there were no words, save rasping screams. The reaction was animalistic: a herd of prey running from a gargantuan primordial predator. Kristen pulled her gaze away from the dreamlike overhead reflection. Madison stood in a stunned silence as she stared up the length of the collapsing skyscraper. Reaching out, Kristen pulled her by the shoulder and Madison snapped back into reality. Kristen looked to the Marines, perhaps to jump aboard their tank, but they had all thrown their duty aside and joined the growing charge westward up the confined street. Kristen felt her own legs suddenly thrust forward, and she followed the fleeing crowd in a dead sprint, her backpack jostling against her shoulders.

Adrenaline pounded through her arms and legs. Kristen ran faster than her feet had ever taken her; she ran for her life. All around her people fell and stumbled, instantly disappearing underfoot. Side by side, Kristen and Madison hurdled over obstructions and clawed on all fours over the abandoned cars and taxis, disregarding the bruises and deep gashes they got on their way.

BOOOM!

The collapsing skyscraper roared at Kristen’s heels, rumbling through the pavement and sending reverberations up through her knees. She could not comprehend how many people were about to die—including herself. As the street lurched and cracked beneath her rushing feet, Kristen turned her head and raised her eyes to catch a glimpse of the impending avalanche of cement and steel. The roof’s spire was caving downward upon itself. The windows along the top floors shattered in unison, exploding outward in great waves.