“STAY WHERE YOU ARE! SOMETHING IS HAPPENING SOMEWHERE ELSE IN THE CITY! RIGHT NOW THIS IS THE SAFEST PLACE IN PHILADELPHIA!”
The damage had been done.
The background noise might have been thunder; it was not.
The man and the woman stopped listening. They hugged each other close because that was the only safe thing to do.
“If we’re still here in the morning will you marry me, Caro?” The man whispered in the woman’s ear.
“Yes, of course I will… ”
The new President was appealing for calm.
Nobody in Philadelphia was listening and neither were the lovers.
“STAY WHERE YOU ARE! YOU ARE SAFE HERE… ”
The man and the woman were in the bedroom by then.
Chapter 59
It did not take a rocket scientist to work out that when Dwight Christie was handcuffed to a bench near the back of the first bus, and then left alone in that bus, driven by a wild-haired kid who seemed high on something, that whatever Galen Cheney had planned for him was not going to end well.
The rain had dried up overnight and in the morning ‘the gang’ had brewed coffee on gasoline soaked wet logs. Nobody had brought Christie a mug, just like nobody had unchained him so he could go to the John in the night. He would have worried about why Cheney had not just shot him or cut his throat; but at least the bastards had chained him twenty feet away from the puddle of piss he had been working on during the night.
If he had smoked a last cigarette would have been nice. As for famous last words well, his throat and mouth were so dry it was likely his voice would fail him. Everybody else had piled into the second school bus. The ancient Blue Bird was rolling and smoking along behind Christie’s ‘lift’ keeping fifty to a hundred yards separation along the back roads.
Why no roadblocks?
Maybe they were too far from the city.
Wherever they were headed it had to be somewhere in Philadelphia, nothing else made sense.
Christie was light-headed from thirst and hunger, a little feverish he guessed. If he closed his eyes, drifted away from consciousness for a moment crazy dreams swirled across the front of his mind.
One bus in front, one driver, and one passenger who was a problem?
All the men you trusted in a second bus, following on behind?
What did that add up to?
Still no roadblocks.
Today was the Civil Rights movement’s big day; everything was going on in downtown Philly. Maybe that was where all the cops and National Guardsmen and the troops which had to have been brought into the city would be; a ring of steel around the part of the city which mattered.
But there ought to have been roadblocks out her in the suburbs.
Dwight Christie was still mulling this when the first volley of bullets smashed the windscreen and all the windows down the left hand side of the old bus. Glass showered down upon him as he instinctively dove for the floor; in the heat of moment forgetting that his hands were chained at waist height to the bench. He was brought up agonizingly short of the filthy floor with his hands flapping about in the breeze of ricocheting bullets. Something tugged his left hand and wetness splashed his face.
The bus’s engine was roaring; revving so high it was starting to tear itself apart. The vehicle took a bend, threatened to topple onto its left side before rolling back to the horizontal with a bone-shaking crunch and bouncing forward, faster and faster.
The bus was clanging and juddering, there was burning, smoke in the cab and the engine was suddenly dying.
When it came the crash was like a bomb going off.
The bus ran into something at full tilt, perhaps sixty or seventy miles an hour and kept on going on its right hand wheels. There was a terrible rending noise, the sound of masonry shattering, a deafening, grinding deceleration as all four wheels slammed down on broken ground as the bus slewed sidelong to a halt in one final collision that halted the crash in a fraction of a second.
Dwight Christie blinked uncomprehendingly at a patch of blue sky high over his head.
He did not know where he was just that he was no longer in the bus.
There was a heavy explosion somewhere to his right, followed by small whiplash detonations; grenades, and the burping and rattling of automatic weapons. And in the background screams and whoops of animal rage.
The next moment he was curling into a fetal ball as people stampeded past him, on top of him in a frenzy that might have been panic or the madness of the chase.
A stray boot knocked him senseless.
Chapter 60
With hundreds of others who had been seated in the VIP stalls Gretchen and Dan had been ushered into City Hall and through to the open air quadrangle within the great fortress. Within the monumental castle keep the distant explosions and gunfire were muted, whispers on the wind drowned out by the bullhorns of the soldiers who had taken charge of the situation inside City Hall.
“THERE IS NO CAUSE FOR ALARM!”
“THE AREA AROUND CITY HALL HAS BEEN SECURED!”
“THE WELCOMING CEREMONY FOR THE MARCHERS WILL CONTINUE IN A FEW MINUTES!”
Gretchen leaned on her husband’s arm. Standing for long periods wearied her and made her feel like an old woman. Her doctors had said that she would get stronger as her recovery continued; they had put her back together again and now nature needed to take its course.
“Are you okay, honey?” Dan asked, extending his arm around his wife’s waist and guiding her towards where he had spied a low wall where she could rest.
“Yes, just fine.”
But he guided her to the thigh-high brick wall surrounding a rather anemic looking sapling. The small tree had probably been a gift to the municipality from visiting dignitaries and would have been better planted out along a street than inside the courtyard. Despite her protestations Gretchen was clearly grateful to take the weight off her feet.
“It looks as if we’re not going to have to wait for the British or the Russians to blow up the World,” she observed irritably, “we’ve got plenty of home-grown idiots in this city!”
“Ah, there you are,” Claude Betancourt guffawed with relief as he and his entourage navigated through the press of bodies. “I lost sight of you in all the excitement.”
“Heck of a day, sir,” Dan Brenckmann observed.
His father-in-law had known that the young man would not be more than an inch from his daughter’s side at a time like this. Gretchen was looking a little hot and bothered; for all her bravado and unquenchable ‘can do’ spirit she was still only partially recovered from the life-threatening injuries which had seen her in a coma in the days after the Battle of Washington in December.
“I’m all right, Daddy!” She informed him tartly, reading his thoughts.
The old man glanced to Dan.
“That’s good then!”
The men swapped conspiratorial smiles. Right up until the night of the October War Claude Betancourt had fretted about who — when he died — would take up the great project of his latter days; Gretchen.
Who would there be to watch over her?
To catch her when she fell?
For whom would she become the centre of the universe and the hope for the future?
Inevitably, Gretchen had treated her knight in armor a little shabbily to begin with. Her father had wondered if she had just been testing him in some way but discounted this; young people — even one so driven as his daughter — were simply not that calculating. They had too many hormones at work, too many hopes and fears jostling for attention at that age. But then there had been those scandalous rumors that bastard Hoover had put out about a non-existent, an implausible affair between Gretchen and Nick Katzenbach, Bobby Kennedy’s deputy at Justice. The whole Brenckmann family had rowed in behind Gretchen and the rest was history. Gretchen had formerly been engaged to the heir to a great New York banking fortune; but Dan Brenckmann had been the man who risked his neck searching Washington DC while the fires were still burning in a score of great buildings of state and the streets were blocked with detritus and uncounted bodies. It was Dan who had found their girl more dead than alive at Bethesda, and Dan who had held Gretchen’s hand when she fought for her life in the days that followed.