But after Poppy read aloud the time that was left according to his stopwatch, and they started hurrying even more through the first passageway, they faced their biggest problem yet. The super wasn’t the only one who was sweating by now—all four of them were having trouble gripping the small metal casings that had to be unscrewed in order to detach the green wires. No matter how much they wiped their fingers on their clothing, slippery sweat continued to trickle onto them.
“I can barely turn them anymore,” Hegde said. “With either of my hands. It’s gonna take twice as long at least, if we can even get them all off.”
Jon straightened up from the detonator he was working on, having the same problem, and gave voice to something they were all thinking.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’d say we should take off, but I don’t even know if we have time to get far enough away. What does the timer say, Poppy?”
The super pressed a sweaty finger to his watch for a moment, and then let out a loud grunt of frustration.
“Fuckin’ thing,” he said, shaking his head. “I tried to hit the fuckin’ light so I could see it, and I musta cleared the fuckin’ timer by mistake.”
Great, Jon thought.
31
“Use your shirts,” Poppy said, grabbing a small swath at the end of his, showing them how to use it on one of the casings, and redeeming himself for almost killing them twice in the last few minutes.
Jon stood in place for a few moments, his heart pounding, thinking about whether they should continue or not. But then he thought of Amira and Halladay again, and that was enough. He grabbed a bottom corner of his shirt and went back to work on the detonator below him. The others followed his lead, though Hegde and Dixon’s shirts were too short and they had to take them off to use them.
A few minutes later—Jon couldn’t tell how long—they rounded the corner into the last passage before the subway tunnel and kept on unscrewing the green wires, switching to different parts of their shirts when the ones they were using got too wet. The entire time Jon and his eerily silent companions felt like they might be blown to bits at any moment, but though they might all have been tempted to skip out on the others and attempt to save their own skin, none of them did. And before too long, they’d gotten close enough to the bed of the truck to see the timer there, and were relieved that they still had more than two minutes left.
They continued to diffuse the line leading to the truck, and then they all leaned into the bed and took care of all the bombs stacked in there. Soon they were done, with forty seconds to spare, but Jon couldn’t help checking the whole pile in the trunk again, and peering once again down the nearby passage to make sure there were no little green lights still shining.
“Should we try to turn off the timer?” Hegde asked, staring at it nervously while it counted down to thirty and beyond.
“It’s just a timer now, right?” Jon said. “It doesn’t do anything. I guess I don’t want to mess with it, in case it’s rigged somehow.” He looked at the others, unsure. “I don’t know….”
The timer hit twenty, then ten, and all they could do now was watch.
Hegde grabbed Dixon’s arm and leaned into her.
Poppy looked at Jon and saluted him as if to say, Nice fuckin’ knowin’ you, and Jon nodded back.
The timer hit zero and nothing happened, and the four of them started shouting, jumping up and down, and hugging one another.
After the celebration subsided, Hegde pulled out his phone to call for the cleanup of the explosives, and noticed that he and Dixon had been asked repeatedly by text in the last few minutes to come to the park above…. Apparently “something weird” was going on up there. He looked up the platform toward the exit that would lead to the park, and said that was where they needed to go.
Poppy wanted to help with the cleanup, so after a few more hugs he headed back toward the basement of the “ole lady” he loved so much.
“What should we do with you?” Hegde said to Jon, while he and Dixon were putting their shirts back on.
Jon’s head was spinning from the ordeal he had been through, but thoughts of Mallory still somehow managed to find their way into his mind. He thought about how glad he was that she wouldn’t be endangered by the explosives anymore, but he remembered the Mayor’s threat about implicating her in his alleged crimes, and started to consider how he could keep her safe from that.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Hedge said before Jon could respond, “you can walk right now if you want, after what you did.” He looked for a confirmation from Dixon, who nodded.
“Walk if you want,” she said.
“But obviously this’ll go a long way toward clearing you,” Hegde continued. “So if you want to come with us, we’ll help you work it out.”
Jon thought about the reasons why he had first called these two cops, and realized that there was even more reason now to trust them. So he gestured for them to lead the way and followed them up the platform, continuing to mull what his options might be, especially in regard to Mallory, whom he couldn’t stop thinking about.
When they reached the park exit and started up the steps, Hegde and Dixon both visibly reacted to the unfamiliar phenomenon of bright sunlight shining into the stairway from above. They stopped halfway to the top and took out the sunglasses they had been issued as part of the department’s preparation for Dayfall. Then they nervously proceeded up the rest of the steps, with their arms out in front of their heads like they half-expected to be accosted by someone or something.
Hegde was the first one to top the stairs and see what was outside in the park, and he immediately stepped back down and restrained the others from going any farther. At first Jon thought that some kind of apocalypse was going on up there after all, but it turned out to be something else.
“I just realized,” he said to Jon. “I’m sorry, but I’m gonna have to cuff you for now. Half the force looks like it’s out in the park because of the evacuation, and they still think you’re a cop-killer. But if we have you in custody, hopefully they’ll leave us alone till we can get it straightened out.”
This made sense to Jon, and he really didn’t know what other options he had at this point, so he put his arms out in front of him and let Hegde put the handcuffs on him. At least they weren’t cuffed in the back, so he would still have some ability to use them in a fight if he needed to for some reason, or to go for someone’s gun.
With the two cops on each side of Jon, they stepped up and out into Madison Square. The Flatiron was ahead of them as they came out of the exit, and they could see people filing out of the left side of the historic building and crossing the large patio area there to make their way into the park, presumably because it was farther from the endangered building and had a lot of open space for standing and waiting. As Jon scanned the procession of evacuees, he noticed the tall thin tower of One Madison behind them, and the two MetLife Buildings farther to the left, across the park—the one with the clock tower and the shorter one that served as the Gotham Security headquarters.
Hegde and Dixon guided him in that direction, because the person on their staff who had contacted them had said he was in the middle of the park. As they moved that way, Jon started to become overly conscious of how many police were milling about in the park, along with the many civilians. Presumably most of them had come from inside their headquarters and were waiting for the all clear to go back in, and thankfully very few of them even looked at John, let alone noticed who he was. Almost all of them, as well as most of the civilians, were watching one of the two large TV screens, which stood at the north and south ends of the park.