Kerry merely rested her chin on her fists and gazed at her partner.
"Take that as a yes." Dar set her phone down and sauntered back over to the room service tray.
"You hear that, boss?" Mark queried. "Hello?"
"Sorry." Kerry wrenched her attention back to the phone. "That sounds like a plan, Mark. Dar was just saying we should wait for you to get here then all go down together. You think you'll be here by eight?It's just ten past six now."
"We can probably do that unless we get held up nearer to where you are," Mark replied. "They going to let us in there?"
"We've got passes." Kerry didn't elaborate. "All right, you guys head on up here. We'll meet you at the office." She waited for the line to drop then closed her phone. "What else do we need to do? Why do I feel like I'm so damned behind the eight ball today?"
Dar came back over with a plate containing a buttered muffin and a steaming cup of tea. She set them down next to her partner's laptop and leaned over, giving her a kiss on the top of her head. "I love you too."
Kerry leaned against her. "Oh honey, I sure know that," she murmured. "Thanks for breakfast."
"No problem." Dar straightened up and went to retrieve her coffee, pausing to watch the silent television screen full of frenetic activity and destruction. More people. More rubble. More talking heads. The scroll at the bottom spat a never ending series of numbers that she had to force herself to realize meant human beings either missing or dead.
It was strange. The whole thing had started to take on a surreal glaze and it was hard to concentrate on the facts that seemed to come at her from the screen in so many different directions. She watched shots of the president down near the still smoking rubble yelling into a bullhorn, an American flag flapping in the wind nearby.
Behind him a fireman sat on a flat, twisted piece of iron, his head down and his elbows resting on his knees in exhaustion.
Dar nodded to herself a little, then went over to the small table and picked up half a corn muffin, taking a bite of it as she tried to focus her mind on the task at hand. She glanced at her new laptop, open on the table, and watched the network metrics, a slowly healing graph of yellows morphing to greens rather than blotches of solid red.
The company was recovering. Things were starting to move back into normal patterns, and along with that her list of tasks shunted aside for the emergency were starting to build.
The world had held still since that morning. Now, she had a sense,that her world, if not everyone else's, was starting slowly to turn again and she had to admit a trace of impatience that she found herself tied up here, working a problem not remotely her own, heading toward a hopefully successful end that probably would get little notice and less credit.
Uncharitable, probably. Dar chewed her muffin and turned to watch the television screen again with a thoughtful expression. "Ker?"
"Hm." Kerry looked up from her laptop.
"Can we get a list of our customers who are still out of service here?" Dar asked. "Let's see what synergy we can get with restoring services to them at the same time we're relieving our obligation to the government."
"We don't have enough to do?" Kerry's tone was, however, rather than accusing. "Sheesh."
"Let's just say we have a responsibility to them, and I'd like to walk out of here with a sense of accomplishment beyond some rubber chicken," Dar replied. "Getting the job done for the markets, but leaving our own customers high and dry ain't my way of doing business."
Kerry smiled. "I want to be you when I grow up." She stood up and popped the last of her muffin into her mouth. "Well, the day's not getting any younger, so I guess I'll go get my shower and start getting ready."
"Be right there with you." Dar sat down to finish her muffin, leaning back and watching the dawn light slowly growing in the window, turning her back to the TV screen.
KERRY LEANED BACK against the driver's partition in the courtesy bus, watching the street roll by outside the window. "At least the traffic hasn't built up so much again."
"You got that right, ma'am," the driver agreed. "People are still in shock, I think. I was talking to a man who came by the bus earlier. His son worked in one of those investment offices up near the top of one of the towers, and he kept saying he was going down there to visit him real soon now."
Kerry grimaced a trifle. "It's hard to take it all in," she murmured.
"Can't imagine it myself," the driver agreed.
They were traveling east, heading toward the disaster site. Kerry eased forward and knelt, resting her arms on the front console as she started to see a dusting of ash on the streets, and the cars, and the buildings.
It was not that strange to her eyes. It resembled a light coating of snow more than anything. As they passed, she could see some shops open, some closed, some in an in-between state where the rolling garage doors were half open and people were standing outside, talking or sweeping the ash.
The bus stopped at a stoplight, and she watched one man carefully sweeping his sidewalk clean of the stuff and putting it into a tiny pile. He then knelt and pulled out a dustpan and hand brush, and whisked ash into a small plastic bag, standing when he was done and looking at it.
Would he throw it away? Save it as a memory of the horror? Or sell it on Ebay? Kerry watched him put a twist tie around the top of the bag and take it inside, ducking under the half drawn door and disappearing.
Could go any of the ways. Kerry sighed. The bus started moving forward again, and on the right hand side they passed a fire station. The big doors were wide open, and she looked inside only to find it completely empty of either trucks or people.
A prickle ran down her spine. She looked at the sign above it. "Ladder 11. Hope they're all okay."
The driver glanced at the empty station then looked at her. "Ms. Stuart, beg your pardon, but no one here's okay," he said. "No matter if they walked out of that mess or not."
True. Kerry saw the coating of ash getting thicker as they turned left on to Houston Street. "What insanity."
Dar came up behind her and looked over her shoulder. "Mess," she said succinctly. "Are we going to end up east of the site?"
The driver nodded, as he turned the big bus right. "Yeah, that's what the cops told me to do. Take the FDR around the end of the island and come up from there. Too much destruction on the west side, and besides, they've got Battery Park there wide open."
Now through the walls of the bus, they could hear sirens, though as yet all they could see was the outline of Staten Island across the water. A pensive silence fell over the bus as everyone picked a window and stared out of it.
"Mark still behind us?" Dar asked in all that quiet.
The driver glanced in his mirror. "Yeah, he's there."
Dar watched out the window at the thick plume of smoke rising from between the buildings and the debris that was starting to line the road. "Jason, break out the case of radios, please," she ordered quietly. "And the masks."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Everyone stay calm. This is going to be hard," Dar added, after another brief pause. "Stay focused, and remember that everyone here has been through a hell of a lot worse nightmare than we're about to experience."
Alastair came up behind Dar and gazed past her, his face quietly grim."Know something, Dar?"
"Wish you'd turned the White House down?"
Alastair's lips pressed into a humorless smile. Then he turned and went back to the side window, seating himself on a stool and staring outside.
Kerry slowly stepped down from the bus, the third one out after Dar and Alastair had exited to deal with the gun toting guardsmen who had flagged their convoy to a halt. She stood quietly for a moment, the wind at her back as she slowly scanned the area around them.