Devon C Ford
THE FALL
BURNING SKIES
BOOK 1
Dedicated to SJ, my military advisor: a man of bountiful knowledge and fearsome facial hair.
NOW I AM BECOME DEATH, THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS.
[OF A NUCLEAR WAR:] THE LIVING WOULD ENVY THE DEAD.
PROLOGUE
Friday 12:30 p.m. – New York Stock Exchange
Cal walked quickly around the corner onto Wall Street in a state of shock, eyes darting left and right but returning to focus resolutely on the ground in front of him. The uniformed police officers were dashing back and forth, guns raised toward an unseen threat, dealing with casualties, and shouting into their radio mics without success.
All around him people were running and shouting. A screech of tires and a loud smash from behind, echoing from another street, made him jolt instinctively as he glanced back to see a pillar of smoke and flames rising over the roofline of an ornate stone building. Glancing up and behind him, he saw another pillar of smoke and dust, which he guessed was four or five streets away, and the cause of this first rush of desperate foot traffic to escape the area. A uniformed soldier, a national guardsman, thumped bodily into him as he looked away. The soldier looked very young, and scared. Almost as scared as Cal felt.
Returning his eyes to the gray concrete in front of his feet, he sped up as much as the crowded street would allow, his rapid breathing competing for space in his ears over the chaos and multiple sirens. Reaching the access to the subway station, the only way he knew to get back to his hotel and not wanting to check the map of the unfamiliar city he had in his back pocket, he joined the back of a pushing, shouting crowd trying to get below ground.
His genetic code, that of being British, dictated that he could not push through the crowd to get to the front; the unwritten rules of queueing were blindly followed the world over and even more so during a crisis. He was thirty or more pushing, shouting, and panicking people back from the green metal railings funneling the mass of bodies below street level.
He was far enough away to escape the main impact of the blast, but close enough to suffer horribly.
It started as a low rumble, as though the street under his feet was growling at the chaos above, and rapidly became an impossibly loud crack followed by a roiling cloud of dust and black smoke and pieces of debris ejecting from the top of the staircase leading down. The half-dozen people at the threshold of underground and over-ground were catapulted upwards and backwards, their clothing smoldering where it hadn’t been torn clean away from the heat and the flames of the blast.
Cal was flattened on his back, cracking his head painfully on the hard ground. He lay there blinking, deafened, trying to make sense of the huge pressure wave he felt before he saw body parts erupt over his head. The concussive wave, the incredible pressure change he felt, had hurt every organ in his body as though they had all been forcibly relocated. Looking up at the tops of the tall buildings in silence—not complete silence but a high-pitched shrieking in his ears—he watched as the slow-motion dark cloud of boiling, black smoke billowed out of the underground portal which so many people saw as a sanctuary from the disorder above.
The stench of the explosion—like rotten eggs and burning plastic—caught in his throat and made him convulse in a racking, gagging coughing fit, which he felt but could not hear. Struggling to his feet, he staggered and wavered until he steadied himself.
In the gaps between the skyline of buildings, he saw similar pillars of dark smoke rising from other explosions across the city.
Inside of thirty minutes, his miserable solitude had become abject terror.
He turned and fled as fast as he could, shuffling on unsteady feet and resolutely sticking to the middle of the street amongst the terrified crowds, hopefully keeping himself away from any other blasts he might come too close to.
SOLITUDE IS PLEASANT, LONELINESS IS NOT
Tuesday 10:30 a.m. – London Heathrow Airport, 74 hours earlier
“To your knowledge,” said the bored-looking young woman behind the counter, “has anyone placed anything in your luggage without you knowing?”
She didn’t make eye contact with him, and he doubted if she even cared about his answer. He also doubted that she would appreciate him asking her how he would know if someone had put anything in his luggage without his knowledge, as he obviously wouldn’t have knowledge of it.
“No,” he replied simply, keeping his passive aggressive sarcasm shut up tightly.
The young woman, apparently called Haylee—quite why people were choosing to spell their children’s names phonetically nowadays was beyond his comprehension—finally made eye contact with him through layers of thickly applied makeup and smiled falsely. Hidden behind a dense row of fake eyelashes, her eyes didn’t mirror the smile as she handed him his boarding pass and directed him toward security.
Yeah, Cal thought to himself, I’d be bored as shit doing your job too.
Boarding pass and passport in hand, backpack over one shoulder, he shuffled toward the back of the queue to be directed through a gate only to wait in line again until he was called forward to strip himself of anything metallic.
Shoes, phone, belt, loose change, wallet, watch all went into the dull, gray plastic tray on the squeaking rollers in front of him as a suspicious, but equally bored-looking, security guard eyed him coldly. The last item from his pocket, a small dark box wrapped in velvet, nestled securely alongside his other possessions.
“Any computers/laptops/tablets in your hand luggage?” the guard asked autonomously as he put his backpack in a separate tray. With a sigh, Cal opened the bag and removed the tablet, only to be asked to place it in the tray next to the bag.
His anger and irritation bubbled just below the surface at the pointlessness of this; being treated like a terrorist because he didn’t know he had to have his bag and iPad scanned separately irked him, but then again everything got on his nerves recently.
Despite going through wearing only socks and with empty pockets, he still set off the metal detector and was subjected to a personal search, having a hand-held metal detector waved pointlessly fast over his body and having his shoes swabbed. Finally, doing the rushed dance that all Brits did in airport security, he tried to put his belt and shoes on whilst simultaneously stuffing things back into his pockets in haste so as not to cause any disruption to the person behind him in line.
He shuffled through the snaking aisles of the duty-free shopping, ignoring all the offers for the latest fragrance to be doused over him and the slightly cheaper alcohol, and pulled up a stool at the nearest bar and ordered himself a breakfast beer.
After all, he was supposed to be on his honeymoon.
The girl serving his pint looked similarly bored to the girl on the check-in desk and the security guards, and served him wordlessly as the price showed up on a small digital screen in front of him. He paid the exorbitant price with his card by waving it over the card reader and regarded the swirling bubbles of his cheap lager; cheap anywhere except in an airport bar on the wrong side of security. For what he paid for a single pint he could’ve bought six cans from the shop near his house.
Sod it, he thought again, I’m on my holidays. His hand absent-mindedly went to his pocket and to the small box. He retrieved it and ran it between his fingers, pausing with his thumb in the crease to pop open the spring-loaded lid. Instead, he clasped it in his fist and thrust it back into the pocket.