Vanished (6 page)

"We can't. We have to keep everyone away from the
Circle until the cops come. Kids. Oh, no, little kids on their
bikes. Jazz, they gotta be told to keep away."

There was no buyer, and there were no drugs. Only a stupid
girl who for two hundred bucks had carried the pack to a spot
where an explosion would devastate the whole neighborhood.
If you can't be safe on a bike path with your little kid and her
little training-wheels bike, where can you be safe?

They stood about three hundred feet east of the Circle on
the edge of the University Avenue path. Ben had tried to get
Jasmine to go to the opposite side to warn people, but she
refused to leave him.

His watch read 9:59.

A cyclist raced toward them, a stern-faced man in fiery
spandex and one of those sleek helmets with the point at the
back. Head down, legs pumping, the guy paid no attention to
Ben as he waved for him to stop.

"No, don't go in there! Stop!"

The guy had to have heard him. No-he had wires coming
out of his helmet, listening to an iPod. Ben flung a rock and
screamed, "There's a bomb, fool!"

The man kept riding, head down.

Go fast, Ben hoped, and then he prayed, God, make him fast.
If the Big Guy wasn't around for times like these, what was His
job description anyway?

Ben's watch turned over to ten o'clock. Traffic on the
Avenue had picked up, people out on errands. Two men ran
across the bridge from Spire Boulevard. Sergeant Logan and
some other guy-which meant Ben and jasmine could finally
get out of here.

"Come on. Let's go." Ben scrambled down the bank and
headed onto University Ave. "Jasmine?"

"Luther. Omigosh, there's Luther!" Jasmine jerked around
and ran back toward the Circle.

The wrong way.

Ben wanted to follow her, to catch her and yank her back,
but before he could find the courage to turn his body around,
the world exploded-

Kaya splinted Angelina's shoulder, still praying about what to
do about Stone when the world made the decision for her.

There was a distant boom, followed by bigger bangs from
further away. Stone stretched and shrank, as if he had become
a rubber band.

Sarah broke out of her stupor long enough to say oh, a tiny
exclamation echoing on and on until Kaya thought she'd go
mad with the girl's everlasting despair.

She swam against the tide, striving against a mighty swell
of the moon as it stretched and snapped every tide that had
ever rolled in and out.

Shrinking and stretching, snapping and shaking.

The world shook into a billion pieces, but Kaya refused to
be shaken because she had splinted a precious baby to herself,
and even if the world insisted on falling apart around her, she
would not. Grace held her steady in the vortex, giving her time to remember a love that was before all things, and so she found
the will to pray-

-please, God, watch over Ben, wherever he may be.

Ben watched as the first blast blew jasmine backward, her eyes
wide with confusion until-

-another blast came, and still another until the earth rose
up in protest and Ben saw jasmine come apart in such painstaking slowness that he was intimate with every bone and
muscle and cell in her body-

-and he cried for mercy for her because God must be
squeezing this world until it bled, for all he could see was
red-

-but that was his blood, not hers, and he watched in fascination as his own DNA wound and unwound, over and over
until-

-the sins of the father came to Ben, who vowed in this
unending moment that he would never visit his sins on his
sons, or his sons on his sins-

-but how could he escape his own blood-

-yet he did because even as the world bent into itself, he
knew one thing with certainty-

-that somewhere in this breaking apart, his mother had
named him to the heart of God-

For some reason, though the train had gone by Jon and Chloe,
it kept on coming-and did so with a huge bang.

The world folded in two, and Chloe bent with it, her mouth
open as if to protest the warping of the air and the stretching of
the tunnel and the persistent train that just kept coming, even
though it had gone by.

Jon saw the particle. One particle that became a hundred,
a million, an infinite array of particles as the big bang from
above split the world into its endless possibilities. Too many to
count, to calculate, to do anything but wonder.

Suddenly Jon was one person, a hundred, a million, an infinite array of flesh and mind and spirit. Disarrayed as was never
meant to be, yet refusing to realign because the stars had lost
their alignment. Give me a minute, Jon told the universe.

Being of a generous nature, the universe gave him far more.

A flash of fire and the boom-boom-boom of one blast after
another. Logan spent a lifetime in the air, a lifetime in
which-

-a fist of fire swept down from the sun and up from the
heart of the earth, roaring a song that couldn't be heard anyway
because who was left to listen?

Pappas perhaps, but where was the man in black now?

Where was Logan now? Where was now, now?

Why didn't the air stop screaming?

Why didn't the sky stop shredding?

Why did the fire rise up only to cool and rise up again until
each finger flame wiggled its own self into existence?

As the blast ripped Logan out of the air and slammed him
against the pavement, he uttered the only words he could
think of.

Jesus, my Jesus, what is happening?

HEN THE WORLD CEASED ITS STRETCHING, LOGAN
sat up and tried to figure out what to do next.

"The trains," he said, taking a strange pride in
figuring out the obvious. "They've blown up the trains."

A knot swelled on the back of his head. A thousand bits of
dust had pinpricked his skin. He looked down, not surprised to
see he had been blown right out of his sneakers.

Pappas's feet were bright white in crisp sport socks, though
debris and smoke were everywhere. His face was frozen with
shock, but his mouth streamed steady curses aimed at the
explosion, the panic, and Osama bleepin' bin Laden.

The bleeping was real, alarms from the cars crashed along
University Avenue. People cried out, their hands on their heads,
looking skyward as if trying to find someone to blame and
someone to save them.

Surely Kimmie was in the gated estates where no bomb could
get her. Please, God was all the prayer Logan could summon,
because he had work to do. He stood, pain like a second blast
erupting in his lower back. Must be a broken vertebra or
ruptured disk. If that was the worst of it, he'd be grateful.

The Circle blazed, the greenery dissolved in flame. If he and
Pappas had been on the bike path instead of the boulevard,
they'd be feeding the conflagration right now.

Why was the fire silent?

Logan's hearing had become selective, that was it. Which
must be why he wasn't hearing sirens though it had been at least two minutes, and maybe more, since Pappas had called for
the bomb squad. Yet he could hear the car alarms and people
crying, cursing, screaming.

One motorist-insurance info in hand-motioned to a
woman to roll down her car window. The familiar amidst the
terrible.

Logan held out Pappas's sneakers. "Come on, man. We've got
to get moving."

"My shoulder is dislocated. You need to fix it for me. Grab
here and here." Pappas pointed to a spot above his elbow and
another behind his shoulder. "Now pull that way, and when I
yell, push it into the socket."

"The ambulances are coming-"

"Do it!"

Logan did.

Pappas cried out once, then hung his head. "OK, OK. It's
manageable now, but I need to splint it."

Logan ripped up his own shirt and fashioned a sling. Pappas
pulled it over his head and gingerly slid his arm in.

Logan tied Pappas's sneakers for him, thinking of this
morning when he had buckled Kimmie's sandals. All he
wanted was to dash up to Walden Estates and make sure she
was all right.

And he would do that as soon as help arrived.

A woman ran at him, cradling a young boy. "Someone help,
please! My son's not breathing!"

Logan laid the boy on the grass, mindful of burning embers
all about. The boy's lips were blue and his eyes rolled back, only
white showing. No pulse and no respiration.

"What happened, ma'am?"

"Josh was out with his friends, skateboarding. There was the
blast, and he took a bad spill. I ran out, and he sat up and said,
`My head hurts.' Then he just ... went over." The woman sobbed,
took a breath, and found her voice again. "Please, help him."

"Does he have any condition I should know about?"

"A seizure disorder, but it's controlled. He takes medicine."

It had been a good minute since the bomb. Almost four
now since Pappas had called Central. Logan needed to begin
CPR, but he could paralyze this kid if he had a neck injury.
Then again, if he didn't revive him soon, that would be a moot
point.