Exterior. Upper East Side Manhattan. Evening. Like something out of a World War II movie, shattered buildings, fire and smoke.
If she was going to save her father’s life, it would be up to her, alone. Step One: getting a man nearly twice her weight to the elevator, something she accomplished by hauling at the edge of the carpet he lay on.
Bob Markovic had two cars in the garage below street level, a black Mercedes S-Class roughly the size and weight of a small yacht, and a classic Triumph TR3 with a standard transmission. Simone found both keys in her father’s pocket and chose the Mercedes. Markovic was not a small man, and cramming him, unconscious, into a tiny sports car was not going to work.
Simone dragged her father out of the elevator and out onto the concrete, leaving a slimy trail of blood. The car was a hundred feet away, and she sensibly decided to bring the car to him.
He was moaning and making slight movements, but was nowhere near being able to walk, and it took enormous effort to heft him into the back seat, made no easier by the pain rocketing around her own body, not to mention that her hands were slick with blood.
It had been a while since Simone’s one and only driving lesson, and she moved at creeping speed up the ramp and out onto Fifth Avenue.
The emergency-room entrance to the hospital was jammed with cars, taxis, and ambulances, so Simone had to abandon the car a block away, but she found a helpful passerby who took one of her father’s shoulders while she took the other. Inside the emergency room was chaos, orderlies, nurses, security guards all trying to cope with dozens of people marked by the same pinpricks, as well as some far more seriously hurt. One woman, hauled along unconscious by her two teenaged children, was missing the left side of her face. A woman cried and begged for attention as she cradled a blood-soaked mass of blankets swaddling a blessedly unseen baby.
Simone had no choice but to leave her father lying on the floor, where he risked being trampled, as she competed for the attention of besieged nurses.
After an interminable wait, during which time the numbers of patients doubled every few minutes, orderlies came to whisk Bob Markovic away on a gurney. Then Simone, too, was led to a line of curtained bays, all full to overflowing, and told to sit on the floor and wait. All around her a controlled panic of doctors and nurses dealt with burns, crush injuries from falling walls and roofs, terrible cuts from flying glass, panic-induced heart attacks, and quite a few with injuries like Simone’s.
Simone waited and sat and oozed blood for hours, listening to cries of pain and screams of grief, forgotten in the mayhem. At one point she noticed that she was sitting in a pool of her own blood, that it had saturated the seat of her trousers. But her body was fighting back, deploying clotting factors, doing all that a billion years of evolved survival mechanisms could to keep the blood on the inside.
She managed to use a nurse’s station line to call her mother, who was, thankfully, alive but unable to go anywhere since a piece of rock had blown right through the elevator in her building. Simone also called her current girlfriend, Mary, and snagged a few acetaminophen, which did almost nothing to dull the bruising pain in her body or the migraine building steam in her head.
After hours of waiting, after multiple unanswered questions about her father’s condition, they put Simone through a full-body CT scan. A doctor had ordered an MRI, but that was before another victim had been placed in the machine. MRIs use superpowerful magnets, and no one had realized the shrapnel was magnetic. The first patient
in the MRI had been ripped to hamburger by dozens of bits of the rock being drawn through the meat of her body.
Two hours after the CT scan, and far into the night, they were telling her nothing. But the staff—justifiably exhausted and haggard—looked more than just tired; they looked scared.
Explanation of what had happened came not from any of the doctors but from Mary, who’d had to walk twenty-three blocks through a city lit by police-vehicle light bars and accompanied by a soundtrack of sirens, car horns, and burglar alarms. The subway was shut down. Cabbies had all headed for cover. Buses were being used as emergency treatment facilities.
Mary’s first words were not helpful. “Oh, my God, Simone! Oh, my God!”
Simone tried to smile, but her face was stiff from impact bruises, and a dozen bandages dotted her body. “Yeah, I know, sweetheart, it’s gruesome. And I think my dad is worse off; they won’t even tell me what’s happening with him.” Simone was not prone to hysteria, but she heard the edge of it in her own voice.
“Don’t worry. It will be okay.” Mary’s tone carried no conviction, and her face was a mask of disgust. She kept moving her hands as if about to reach out to Simone, but then kept pulling away, as if she was frightened.
“I don’t even know what happened,” Simone said.
“Haven’t you seen the news?”
“What do you mean?”
“It was one of those rocks. You know, like the ones that turn people into mutants or whatever?”
“Mary, what are you talking about?”
Mary shrugged. “I’m just saying what the news says. They said a big rock, a meteorite or asteroid or whatever, was heading toward Manhattan, so they nuked it.”
The bright pinpoints of light: nuclear explosions going off at the edge of space.
“The nukes broke it up, I guess, but it still hit. There’s buildings burning and all. I had to cross the park, and it’s full of people all scared to death. People are saying it’s worse than 9/11.” Mary had started to cry, which angered Simone: Mary wasn’t the one bleeding.
Still sitting on a floor no doubt crawling with exotic hospital germs, Simone looked past Mary and saw looming over her three people: one in NYPD uniform, two in jeans and blue windbreakers with large yellow letters across the back reading ICE, one male, one female.
A nurse was with them. She said, “This is one of them.”
“All right,” the female ICE agent said. She fixed Simone with a no-nonsense look, like a disappointed assistant principal who’d caught her ditching class, and pointed to a gold shield on her belt. “I’m with ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, operating under emergency presidential decree.”
“Wait, what?” Simone frowned and shook her head not so much to say no, but to try and clear her head. “ICE? But I’m a US citizen.”