Oh, and I lock the front lobby door. Just in case it matters.
I come across a couple of people on other floors of the building, but they holler through their doors and refuse to come out. I get no response from most of the doors I knock on.
Then it’s time for the next step.
I go on foot at dawn, slipping from doorway to doorway. The newer-model cars parked around the neighborhood don’t notice me if I stay out of their line of sight. I always keep a bus bench or a lamppost or a newsstand between myself and the cars.
And I sure as hell don’t step off the curb.
I find the demolition gear where I left it three days ago, before the New War started. It’s undisturbed in the back room at work, only a few blocks from where we live. I carry my gear back home and make a second trip, at dusk when the light is trickiest. Domestic robots can see just fine in the dark and they don’t have to sleep, so I figure nothing is to be gained from going at night.
On my first trip, I spool detonation cord around my forearm, then push it over my head and wear it like a bandolier. The cord is long and flexible and girlishly pink. You can wrap it five times around a wooden telephone pole to blast it in half. Fifteen times to launch the pole twenty feet in the air and shower the area in splinters.
But all in all, detcord is pretty stable stuff.
On the next trip, I fill a duffel bag with shoe-box-sized packs of blast caps. Ten to a box. And I grab the initiator box. Almost as an afterthought, I grab safety goggles and earplugs.
I’m going to blow up the building across the street.
With the sledgehammer, I make sure nobody is holed up in the top three floors. The robots already targeted this place and cleaned it out. No gore. No bodies. Just that eerie cleanliness. The lack of clutter scares me. It reminds me of those ghost stories where explorers find empty towns with dishes set on the table and the mashed potatoes still warm.
The creepy feeling motivates me to move fast and methodically, as I throw canned food onto a sheet that I drag down the dark hallways.
On the roof I lay out a few lines of detcord. I stay away from the water tower. On the top floor, I line the walls of more apartments with more detcord and drop a few blasting caps. I keep my distance from the central skeleton of the building. I don’t want to bring down the whole thing, just do some cosmetic damage.
I work alone and silently and it goes fast. Normally, my crew would spend months wrapping the walls with geotextiles to absorb flying shrapnel. All explosions throw chunks of metal and concrete for surprising distances. But this time, I want the debris. I want to damage nearby buildings, chew them up and blow out their windows. I want to tear holes in the walls. Gouge out the apartments and leave them like empty eye sockets.
Finally, I dart across the street and into my building’s open parking garage door. The rolling metal door is already torn off its hinges from when the smart cars left the garage on the first day. The door hangs there like a scab about to fall off. Nothing is inside but dumb older-model cars and darkness. The initiator in my hand, I creep way down into the garage, doubling the range because I haven’t kept to the usual safety precautions.
It only takes one fist-sized chunk of concrete to make your head into a bowl of helmet spaghetti.
I find Dawn waiting inside the garage. She’s been busy, too.
Tires.
Tires piled up five high. She’s raided the garage and found the old-model cars down there. She stripped their tires off and rolled them up to the doorway.
It smells funny, too, like gasoline.
Suddenly I understand.
Cover.
Dawn looks at me, raises her eyebrows, then splashes gasoline onto a tire.
“I’ll light it, you roll it,” she says.
“You’re a goddamn genius, woman,” I say.
Her eyes try to smile, but the sharp line of her mouth seems to have been chiseled from stone.
From the safety of the garage, we roll about a dozen burning tires out into the street. They fall over and burn, sending coils of concealing smoke up into the air. We listen from the darkness as a passenger car approaches, slow. It stops in front of the tires, maybe thinking about how to get around.
We retreat deeper inside the garage.
I hold up the initiator and turn the fail-safe. A cherry-red light hovers before me in the darkness of the garage. With my thumb, I feel the cold metal switch. I put one arm around Dawn, plant a kiss on her cheek, and throw the switch.
We hear a sharp snapping sound from across the street, and the ground heaves beneath us. A groan echoes through the dark cave of the garage. We wait in darkness for five minutes, listening to each other breathe. Then Dawn and I march up the sloping driveway, hand in hand, toward the smashed garage door. At the top, we peer through the torn gate and blink into the sunlight.
We look into the new face of the city.
The roof across the street is smoking. Thousands of panes of glass have shattered and plummeted to the street, where they now form a crunchy layer, kind of like fish scales. Chunks of rubble litter the ground, and the entire front of our building has been cratered and sandblasted. Street signs and lampposts have been thrown down across the road. Chunks of pavement, bricks and mortar, thick black wires, knots of plumbing, twisted balls of wrought iron, and tons of unrecognizable debris are piled everywhere we look.
The passenger sedan is still parked near the heap of burning tires. It has been crushed under a pie-shaped chunk of concrete, its rebar poking out like a compound fracture.
The choking black loops of tire smoke cloud the air and blot out the sky.
And the dust. Firemen would hose down the dust on a typical job. Without them, dust settles in layers everywhere like dirty snow. I see no tire tracks, which tells me no cars have been around here—yet. Dawn is already rolling a lit tire toward the intersection.
I stumble over rubble into the middle of the street and for a moment I feel as though, once again, the city is mine. I kick the side of the destroyed car. I really throw my weight into it and leave a boot-sized dent in the quarter panel.
Got you, you son of a bitch. And your friends are gonna have to learn to climb if they want to come get me.
With my sleeve protecting my mouth, I survey the damage to the building facades. And I begin to laugh. I laugh loud and long. My hooting and howling echoes from the buildings, and even Dawn looks up from rolling her tire and cracks a little smile at me.
And then I see them. People. Just a half dozen, emerging into the light from doorways farther down the street. The neighborhood isn’t gone, I think. It was just hiding. The people, my neighbors, step out one by one into the street.
The wind sweeps the inky black smoke up over our heads. Small fires burn up and down the block. Rubble is strewn everywhere. Our little slice of America looks like a war zone. And we look like the survivors of some disaster film. Just like we damn well should, I think.
“Listen,” I announce to the ragged semicircle of survivors. “It won’t be safe out here for very long. The machines are going to come back. They’re going to try to clean this up, but we can’t let them. They were built for this place and we can’t have that. We can’t make it easy for them to come after us. We’ve got to slow them down. Even stop them, if we can.”
And when I finally say it out loud, I can hardly believe my ears. But I know what has to be done here, even if it’s hard. So I look into the eyes of my fellow survivors. I take a deep breath and I tell them the truth: “If we want to live, we’ve got to destroy New York City.”