“Yes,” he replied as he unclipped his own swipe card, “service elevator to the top.”
Jake said nothing but glanced to Cal. His eyes said, You coming? and Cal nodded. He looked to Sebastian, then to Louise, and the concierge nodded back. Inside of a second, the three men had communicated a great deal without saying a word.
Cal limped alongside Jake who swiped the card over the elevator controls. The doors opened straight away and the two men entered the small space, both unbeknownst to the other saying a silent prayer that the generator power held up. Riding upwards fast in the undecorated space in stark contrast to the decadence of the guest’s elevator, neither said a word. It creaked to a stop and the two walked out, still in silence. They scanned the horizon until Jake’s sharp intake of breath made Cal spin around.
There, in the very furthest reaches of his vision to their north east, was a glowing orb. Neither man could see it clearly, and neither knew what it was with any certainty.
But both knew that it wasn’t good.
Moments after the cop had got into the elevator with Cal, Sebastian was leading Louise through to the comfortable seats further inside the lobby. As he was doing so, a shout from the lounge made him divert.
“I got something,” shouted an excited voice, as the volume of a TV screen grew louder. “Oh, Jesus…”
On the screen, on some obscure news channel nobody had heard of, was the obvious devastation and recognizable profile of a nuclear detonation.
“Where is that?” shouted a guest. “Is that the west coast?”
“That’s LA,” responded a voice full of dreadful certainty.
“Everybody quiet!” snapped Sebastian as he sat the shocked Louise down in a chair. “Please, turn that up.”
“…confirmed reports of between six and ten nuclear explosions in the United States,” said the anchor’s strained voice. Sebastian didn’t hear any more as the gathering of guests who had refused to go back to their rooms erupted with gasps and shouted curses and questions.
Just then Jake and Cal returned to the ground floor and followed the source of the noise. As they rounded the corner into the lounge, both saw the iconic and unmistakable profile of a mushroom cloud, only this one was hanging over the earth instead of rising up from it. Both then knew, with absolute and utter horrified certainty, what the glow they had seen from the roof was.
“Boston,” Jake said quietly, making Cal’s mouth open. Between the report on TV and the information he had gathered with his own eyes, he put together the information in the only way it could logically go. East and west coast alike, the USA was being bombed by nukes.
“It’s the Russians, it has to be,” shouted an old man in a tuxedo, angrily shaking off the restraining arm of his wife and personally reliving the cold war.
“What the hell are you doing about this?” screamed a woman with tear-streaked makeup running down her face. She directed this at Jake, as though his membership of the NYPD had made him the keeper of international relations and that he was somehow solely responsible for this. He knew it was fear transference; people when they panic look for the nearest uniform, the nearest authority figure, and either plead for help or blame them personally.
“Okay everyone, let’s all just calm down for a minute,” he said, holding up both hands to try and restore order to the small group. This only had the desired effect of making people shout louder and advance on him like a pack of hungry animals. The mob fragmented between the majority going after Jake and demanding he do something, and a smaller group who had singled out an Arab businessman in a perfectly cut shiny suit.
Cal didn’t see this, he was advancing himself toward the TV screen, reading the text scrolling across the bottom.
Los Angeles, San Francisco. Seattle. Vegas. Portland. North Carolina. Florida, and now Boston.
“How far away is Boston from here?” he asked nobody in particular.
“Couple hundred miles, straight line. Maybe less,” Sebastian said behind his shoulder.
“Prevailing wind?” Cal shot back.
“This way, more or less,” Sebastian answered, grasping the point immediately. “We need to move west or north. Fast.”
They turned, and Cal squatted down in front of Louise. He held her hand, seeing that she was coming out of the other end of whatever shock she had fallen into. Cal told her the country was under attack, and that they had to go. Now.
“My bag,” she said. “I need my bag.”
Cal glanced between her and the mob yelling at Jake. He saw that the young cop had taken a step backwards, then bladed his stance and placed a hand on his right hip; the classic stance for facing a threat and gently reminding everyone there that he had a gun. He had three actually, given that he still had Troman’s duty belt over one shoulder and his off-duty weapon in the rig under his left arm, but his instinctive stance to rely on his service weapon was ingrained. Cal heard him shouting at the others to stay back. He knew just by looking that the situation would not end well. Wordlessly he took the chrome semi-automatic from the waist of his jeans after he had retrieved it from Louise’s grasp, and went to stand beside the beleaguered NYPD officer.
The change in odds served to quiet some, whilst the others were snapped from the moment by Cal’s interruption and recognized that their own behavior was simply not acceptable.
“Enough! Everybody, listen to me!” came an authoritative shout from behind the group. Almost as one, heads turned to see Sebastian stood on a polished mahogany table with his arms out wide. “The United States is under attack.” He paused for the rising noise level to react to his repetition of the obvious.
“It’s the fucking Al-Qaeda,” a voice shouted, the owner of which pointed a finger at the terrified businessman.
“Don’t be so bloody ignorant,” snapped Cal loudly. “For one, Al-Qaeda barely even exists anymore and you’re just being bigoted, and two, why would he have anything to do with it?”
“Enough!” said Sebastian again, raising his voice but still not quite lowering himself to shout. “We all need to evacuate the city and head west. We have probably a day before the fallout reaches New York so again, I urge you to leave.”
“How do you know?” shouted a man in a suit.
“I don’t,” Sebastian answered equably, “but I doubt staying in the city is the right thing to do, so I think we should try and leave. How you do this is up to you. Thank you.”
With that he skipped down from the table and undid his tie, symbolically taking himself away from his duty to ensure everyone visiting the hotel was thoroughly cared for. People milled around, uncertain of what to do without instruction. Sebastian strode through the crowd, ignoring all the shouts and pleas to help them. Glancing back, he caught Cal’s eye, then Jake’s. Cal involuntarily stepped forward to follow before he remembered Louise and turned back for her. She was already on her feet, walking toward him with some sparkle back in her eyes.
“It’s all on the coast,” she said, “we need to go inland.”
“What?” Cal said, slightly behind her logic.
“I saw it on the news,” she said looking straight at him. “All those bombs dropped on the coast, so we need to head inland away from them. I need to go home.”
That was a concept Cal understood perfectly, only he knew now with utter certainty that he would probably never go home, even if he found an airport with something capable of crossing the Atlantic that would take him. He misunderstood her point in its entirety, however, because her need to get home wasn’t for need of a feeling of safety, but because she knew they would be far safer there than anywhere else.