Hero (Gone 9)

Markovic made an effort to shift the conversation to less fraught grounds. “How are classes working out?”

“Fine.” The all-purpose conversation-killer: fine.

Markovic frowned. He was a good-looking man. Back in the days when Simone still had friends over, they’d often made sotto voce comments on her “hot dad.” But a full head of dark hair, broad shoulders, and fine features went only so far in distracting from dismissive brown eyes and what might be called “resting prick face.”

“Hey, look!” Markovic pointed up to where dark blue seemed ready to smother the setting sun. He leaned forward against the carved, waist-high balustrade.

Simone joined him and saw a bright pinpoint of light, far to the southwest. At first she thought it might be a star, but t

he light . . . actually, now that she squinted it was two lights . . . while tiny, were piercing. The lights had appeared suddenly, grown, and blinked out. But now, from that same direction came trails, sparks of fast-moving brightness.

“Shooting stars?” Simone suggested.

Markovic shook his head. “Damned if I know.”

Simone was just about to plead homework as an excuse to get away when it became suddenly, terrifyingly clear that the fast-moving sparks were not dimming or going away. In fact—

BOOOM!

A window-rattling concussion as the sound barrier was broken, and a heartbeat behind that, a shattering crash that literally shook the ground beneath Simone’s feet.

“What the hell?” Markovic cried.

BOOOM! BOOOM!

Across the park, the Majestic, a luxury apartment building that rose in twin twenty-nine-story towers, exploded outward as a massive boulder blew through it like a baseball thrown through a Lego structure. The meteorite boulder tumbled across the park, annihilating anything in its path. Behind the boulder came tons of brick and steel and eviscerated bodies that fell on the street and into the park like a landslide, completely blocking Central Park West, crushing trees and burying the bridle path.

Neither Simone nor Markovic had time to move, time even to react, when something like hail but infinitely faster hit them and knocked them flat. Simone had a flash of herself flying backward through the glass balcony door that had been blown out by the same hurtling shrapnel a millisecond before her head would have crashed into plate glass.

When she opened her eyes, the view was inexplicable. She was staring sideways at a dark fireplace at the far end of a stretch of carpet. There was a ringing in her ears and a pounding in her head so intense she half believed someone was beating her with a stick. Tiny pebbles, some barely larger than dust or sand, littered the floor.

Simone sat up and was overwhelmed by a feeling of nausea that nearly made her vomit. Then came the pain. Pain everywhere in her body; arms, chest, face, all hurt like she’d been battered. It felt as if every part of her was bruised.

Only then did she notice the blood.

Close-up on blood-smeared hands.

Simone stared in horror and realized that it was her blood, her own blood seeping from half a dozen punctures in the side of her left hand, more on the back of her right hand, more still up both arms, holes, most so tiny they could almost be insect bites that she’d scratched bloody. But other holes were bigger, like the hole an ice pick might make.

Blood seeped through her clothing, dots of red growing like poppies, and she felt a scream rising inside her. She scrabbled to her feet, nausea and pain making the world tilt and spin, and lurched on wobbly legs to the big, framed mirror over the mantel.

It was like a scene from Carrie. Her face was red with blood dribbling from half a dozen tiny holes, one within an inch of blowing out her right eye. It was like she’d been attacked by a porcupine. But this was Manhattan, for God’s sake; there were no porcupines.

She tore off her T-shirt and gaped at similar puncture wounds across her shoulders and chest, down to her belly. Only her legs had been left untouched, protected by the stone balustrade.

“Dad? Daddy?” she cried in a wavering voice. “Daddy?”

She found him, unconscious, pierced as she was, bloody, and with his left hand hanging by veins and viscera. She screamed and fell to her knees beside him, looking for signs of life. His chest rose and fell; he was breathing, but the blood, the blood was gushing from his wrist. Simone pulled out her phone—it was pierced and dead. She ran for the landline and dialed 911 with trembling fingers and blurted out her fears to a harried operator. Then she ran back to her father, pulled off his belt, and used it as a tourniquet for his wrist.

She succeeded in slowing if not stopping the arterial flow, dragged an ottoman over, and elevated his feet as she’d learned in some half-forgotten first-aid course. Then she ran back to the balcony, thinking of shouting down to the street for help.

But one glance told her that help would be slow in coming.

The Majestic had only been the first building to be annihilated. The apartment building half a block south had been hit, and its wreckage now spilled across Fifth Avenue. Flames rose in huge columns, south near Rockefeller Center. Only then did she begin to realize the extent of the horror.

Mom! I have to call Mom!

But now the phone circuits were jammed. Manhattan had suffered the equivalent of a bombing attack.