Sunfail (12 page)

The next question, Jake thought as he hopped off the bike and started walking it down the street to keep moving, was a big-picture one:
How does all of this fit together?

There was a pattern here and he wasn’t seeing it. First it had been Fort Hamilton, then the subway, the power grid, finally the stock exchange. So how did it all connect?

Despite hitting Fort Hamilton first, that attack didn’t jive with what he’d witnessed at Wall Street. It was violent. Bloody. Lethal. But it was intimate too. Not like 9/11, which was about spreading the fear. Not just the murders, but the fact that the killer had been riding one of the few working engines in the city. It was like one of those damned finger puzzles, those little Chinese torture devices, where the more you worried at them the harder they clung to your fingers.

He had little pieces of the puzzle, things he could extrapolate from, like how the killer had known in advance the power would go out, just like the guys spray-painting the words of their prophets on the subway walls had known the lights were going out. Did that mean they were in this together?

Back in the Army they’d used hardened batteries that were designed to keep working even in the event of an EMP. It wasn’t inconceivable the motorcycle had been shielded in the same way; logically then, the team
could
have been utilizing a shielded battery to power up the computers. Lots of ifs and coulds and shoulds in there, but realistically, there was always going to be a logical solution to each stage of the chaos they’d unleashed. The problem wasn’t working it out so much as working back from the effect to find the cause, and right now, the best he could do was stick with the assumption that the killer knew what was happening. The way the victims deferred to him before he’d put bullets in their heads suggested he was the big man.

But that didn’t mean he wasn’t just a foot soldier answering to a bigger man, because every revolution needed men on the ground who could handle the killing.

Jake reached the corner where Varick angled off West Broadway, leaving a narrow little wedge of brown grass and stunted shrubs. A single row of trees wilted in the middle. The “square” wasn’t big enough to warrant a park bench.

This was usually a quiet spot, depressingly so. The streets were wide, the buildings light-industrial complexes housing utility companies and small manufacturing plants. There were a couple of tech companies and an art academy had moved into one of the old factory units. And, of course, fancy converted lofts for multimillionaires

But not today.

It was so crowded that Jake stopped in his tracks, stunned by the wave of noise that rolled over him. A wall of people blocked his way. The noise was inhuman.

It took him a moment to realize what he was hearing, then the first in a pack of dogs went racing past. They were a mixed bunch—terriers, retrievers, Labradors, mongrels, and fighting dogs. They darted through the crowd, finding gaps in the gathered people that hadn’t been there seconds before, breaching the wall of flesh, howling as they ran. Their voices rose in a loud, mournful wail. It made the hair on the nape of Jake’s neck prickle as a shiver ran down his spine.

Fear gripped the crowd, adding to the cacophony. Some were wailing, others muttering or shouting, with little sense to any of the sound.

They weren’t staring at the dogs, he realized, as the pack moved on. Everyone was looking at the ground around their feet.

Jake pushed his way forward, unwilling to relinquish his grip on the bike.

The grass was littered with small, broken, feathered bodies.

Birds.

Thousands upon thousands of birds, birds of every shape and size—pigeons, usually ground grubbers, made up maybe half of them, along with starlings, crows, magpies, and more brightly colored finches and thrushes.

And all of them were dead. Every single one of them, though some of the carcasses still twitched, clinging to the last shreds of life as their nervous systems shut down.

Jake looked at the sky. There wasn’t a single bird up there.

There were more fallen birds on the sidewalk, turning it into a path of black feathers. Even more lay in the streets around him, the littered bodies spreading far beyond the boundaries of the little park.

Apparently all of the birds across the city had fallen out of the sky. So many of them.

Someone beside him turned, deathly white, and gripped his arm. “It’s happening, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s the end of the world . . . we’re all going to die, aren’t we?”

Beside her someone else asked, “Have you made your peace with God, because if you haven’t you’re going to hell.”

And that terror spread like wildfire.

Jake wasn’t listening, he was thinking.

Birds flew on air currents. Their brains adjusted in order to read the wind. But it wasn’t just the wind, was it? They flew according to magnetic fields. Without magnetic fields to follow they couldn’t fly right. If something had interfered with the magnetic fields across New York, every bird in the sky would have fallen.

There was science behind this end-of-the-world horror.

An EMP would’ve overridden the magnetic field, like when you skipped a stone across a still pond. The waves rippled out, affecting the whole surface. It made sense. He liked when things made sense.

It fit with the notion that the killer had been forewarned. It wasn’t supernatural bullshit. This supported his first guess: an EMP or something like that had hit the city, and the killer knew exactly where and when it was going to be set off. That was why he was on the old motorcycle; it wasn’t reliant upon the kind of circuitry that would have been fried by an electromagnetic pulse.

This might also explain why his sat phone had survived while he was deep underground.

A burst of static caused him to turn around. Across the street, right by the Franklin Street station’s stairs, he saw a group of college-age kids clustered around a working radio. He could hear the crackle, and as he closed the distance between them, the voice of the newscaster: “. . .
similar outages have been reported in Los Angeles, Boston, Dallas, and Atlanta so far. We’ll keep you up to date with all developments when news comes in, but we now understand that most of the United States has been affected, with unconfirmed reports of trouble in London, Paris, and Berlin as well
. . .”

Everything he thought he knew was wrong. It couldn’t be an EMP. Not on that kind of scale. It was impossible.

An EMP could perhaps take out a city, but not an entire country. There was just no way. And reports of London, Paris, and Berlin being hit? It couldn’t be an EMP.

Not unless it was some sort of concerted terror effort, hitting strategic locations, triggered remotely. But the kind of planning and precision that would require? Occam’s razor came into play, surely. Sometimes the easiest possible answer was the right answer and the rest were all just conspiracy theories. It was hard to believe anyone could pull off something that big without attracting the attention of the NSA, Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA, or any of the other law-enforcement acronyms out there. No. This was something else. It had to be.

A glassy-eyed little man hoisted up his
End of Days
placard.

Jake wasn’t laughing.

Was it? Were all the whackos finally right?
Even a stopped clock’s right twice a day
, he thought, unhelpfully.

Maybe it
was
the end of the world and God had kicked things off by cutting the electricity first.
Go fuck yourself
, he thought bitterly, not buying the whole apocalypse crap. It didn’t work. For one thing, if it was divine, surely the air would be fucked, the sun black or something a bit more . . . Hollywood? The biggest threat now was snow as day faded into evening. As raptures went, it was pretty lame.

And if it really
was
the end of the world, why had that guy hit the stock exchange? It’s not like he could take stocks and bonds with him into the afterlife. Which meant something else had to be going on. Something much more mundane, that could be explained with good old-fashioned science, with the same two things at its root, money and power.

Jake wasn’t a scientist, he was a soldier. He had the basic skill sets of an engineer, more than enough to get him the job with the MTA, and a decent understanding of the stuff he needed to know, but when it got into the realms of hard science, quantum entanglement, dark matter, string theory, and all of the other buzz words of the day, there were better men than him to talk to. Men like Dr. Harry Kane, who was pretty much the smartest person in the room, no matter what room he happened to be in.

He’d met Harry when his unit had been paired with a British team for a joint exercise. Harry was old money. His family owned a castle somewhere in the highlands of Scotland. His pet theory was how everyone misunderstood Time’s Arrow, how it was all about nature trying to find equilibrium rather than flowing in a direction of past to future. He explained it using a coffee cup he’d watch gradually go from steaming hot to tepid to cold. The molecules in the liquid weren’t in a pure state. They were affected by their environment, just like people were—people living in the projects found a different equilibrium to those living in the high-rises of Manhattan, it was all about the choices life presented and the levels it offered—trying to find a state of equilibrium with the world around them.

Harry had mustered his way out a couple of years after Jake, moving over to the States for work and switching from applied engineering to chemical engineering research. He’d been teaching up at Columbia since then, though he traveled across the world.

They’d celebrated his appointment the last time they were together. Hard. Jake had very few memories of that particular weekend beyond the fact he’d woken up with someone, feeling like shit, dazed and confused and looking to get out before she woke up, which was always a classy move. Still, no point crying over some one-night stand. She’d live. He’d live. It was all about perspective. They were both consenting adults, they’d had a good time, and he’d saved her the walk of shame.

He didn’t need to be a scientist to know he shouldn’t be wasting his time thinking about a one-night stand. First and foremost, he needed to work out what was going on, what it meant, and how long it was going to last. Without those three pieces of information there was no way he’d be able to counteract it.

And there was one more nagging question he couldn’t shake:
Where does Sophie Keane fit into all of this?

I’m not who you think I am.

Jake shouldered his way through the crowd and mounted up again. It was going to be a long ride up to Columbia and he had a lot to think about on the way.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CIVILIZATION TEETERED ON THE BRINK. The only conceivable positive was that priorities had changed overnight. Values shifted. Value itself shifted away from Xboxes and PlayStations, designer labels, and all that other stuff the ad men told us to crave. If it wasn’t food or some other life-giving necessity, it was losing value fast. Things hadn’t quite degenerated to the point that gold, diamonds, and paper money were worthless, but as people slowly began to realize what was happening around them the obsession with wealth changed beyond all recognition.

It had only just begun, but that tidal shift wouldn’t be long in coming.

She knew how they’d react, she’d been trained to think the same way and act differently: protect the important stuff of life; after food and shelter it was medicine—ibuprofen, aspirin, insulin, inhalers, things people needed to survive. Company databases were a long way down the list of essentials. And when a cataclysmic event had rendered said company databases nothing more than a bank of inert computer hard drives, the natural thought was:
Why bother when there are other more immediate concerns?

That’s what she was banking on.

The difference between Sophie Keane and just about everyone else out there came down to a single fact: she knew how temporary the blackout was. Knowing that, she understood just how useful it could be to gain access to things like those corporate databases before the systems came back online.

Money and power. It always came back to one or the other, or a mixture of both.

This was no different. Money and power.

Which was why Sophie was contemplating infiltrating the London Stock Exchange as she rested in the back of an SUV outside London.

The drive from Paris, through the Channel Tunnel and then up from Folkestone to London, had been grueling. As the crow flies it was only a two-hundred-mile journey, but with the gridlock of dying Paris and London on either side it meant weaving in and out of abandoned vehicles, looking for the points of least resistance along the hard shoulder, and tearing along the dotted white line in the middle of the road where she could. Two hundred miles meant scavenging gas not once, but twice along the way. Neither time had been easy, but on the English side of the border they already had a makeshift home guard in place trying to protect the pumps. They made a fight of it. It was almost a pity to have to hurt them, but she was good enough not to have to kill them. Had they known what they were up against they would have realized just how lucky there were to be breathing.

She drove away hard, not listening to their cries for help. They weren’t her problem. They wouldn’t bleed out unless they were very unlucky. And if they were that unlucky, then maybe it was just their time.

She had to concentrate. Focus. A single pothole in the road could become the difference between making it out alive and not. That level of focus for such a prolonged time was exhausting. She had wanted to keep going, but that would have been a dumb move. It would have left her open to mistakes, and she couldn’t afford to make a single one. Not now. Too much was at stake. So, she pulled over before reaching the city proper and stashed the bike, taking refuge in a small parking lot half-filled with abandoned cars. With minimal fuss she broke the passenger-side window of a Range Rover because the backseat was big enough for her to stretch out in, set her internal alarm clock to two hours, curled up under a checkered blanket, and fell asleep.