Loss Of Reason by Miles A. Maxwell (reading list TXT) 📖

The 79th Street Boat Basin had been swept into a violent, soupy mess. Listing sloops, catches, yachts aggregated near the shore. A mast here and there poked above the water, their hulls not visible in the murky muck. Among them, thousands of dead striped bass and bluefish floated on their sides. Hundreds of dead green-and-brown-headed mallards.

Where did those come from? Everon wondered.

“Must have been a large swell when the bomb went off,” Chuck yelled in his ear.

The sunken boats reminded Everon of the time Cyn had convinced him to fly the two of them out to do some surfing north of San Diego — just after an ocean storm.

Cyn was a fish. She cut through the gigantic waves running seconds apart as if they were hardly there. Fast as Everon paddled, one wave after another slammed him back toward shore, until an especially huge swell towered above his head ready to smash him down. And suddenly Cyn was next to him, laughing, yelling — “Hang on!” — as she reached over and flipped him and his board upside down.

Everon clung to the surfboard, air in his cheeks, eyes closed, waiting . . . ocean crashing around him . . . for the turbulence to pass. It was terrifying. Hang on, he told himself . . .

When he came up, he opened his mouth above the water and sucked in huge gulps of air. And in that moment before the next wave hit them, he heard Cyn’s joyous laughter, saw the beauty of it. His sister’s method worked. Avoid the turbulence completely!

But Everon turned for shore.

He would never get used to it, never be comfortable with water the way Cyn was. Perhaps some primitive paranoia of drowning would always be there, brought through the ages by the human race. Whatever. He didn’t know.

He did know water was not for him. He found no single thing more frightening. Never again would he attempt to overcome that dull fear. Never again attempt to paddle out beyond the breakers. Even now, flying above it, he could feel the strange pull, that cold water trying to rip the smooth, hard board from his hands — his only means of regaining the surface. No air.

“The Hudson was never all that clean to begin with,” Chuck yelled over Everon’s left shoulder.

As they flew south, slowly rising, they saw fewer people walking north. Occasionally, in places where the smoke thinned, bodies lay in the street, on the sidewalk.

Franklin looked down through his binoculars. In the cold morning air, limbs had been frozen into odd positions: An arm out straight. A leg bent to one side. Heads at weird angles on necks. Eyes open, eyes closed. Papery, crackly-looking skin; slick, black, pooled blood; hair spiked out like icicles. He wondered, Why would someone want to destroy everything — universities, engineers, scientists, inventors, businesses? Who hates us so damned much? “Dear God,” he whispered, “please save our sister. Please bring Cynthia back to us.”

Soon they were south enough to find no one alive at all. When he couldn’t look anymore, Franklin reached back and passed the binoculars to Chuck.

Field glasses against his eyes, Chuck muttered, “Someone’s got to find out whatever bastards did this — some vast and highly secret organization to catch us off guard like this —”

“A bomb can’t leave much evidence!” Everon yelled. “It’s all blown up!”

Franklin barely heard Chuck add, “The destruction’s only gonna get worse as we get closer to the center.”

Franklin took in the side of Everon’s face, watching as the same thought probably hit them both: How far away from that center was Cynthia when the thing went off?

“Look at that!” Chuck handed the binoculars back to Franklin and pointed at the old 72nd Street subway house on Broadway. “Water’s rising!”

A dark wave flowed up through the subway entrances, black, flooding the street.

“The subways must be full,” Chuck added.

“That’s not water!” Franklin yelled back.

Everon dipped the nose. “What — ?”

As they came closer, the black tide differentiated into thousands of small dark rodent bodies, running for their lives.

“Rats! Hundreds of thousands of them!” Everon said.

“Leaving a sinking ship,” Chuck said. “More than 70 million supposed to live in the city, more rats than people. Way more!”

There were children lying in the streets too. A small boy face down in a jacket in the middle of Broadway, his right hand out above his head reaching for a book. Red with big bright letters. Franklin could make out the title — Dr. Seuss. Another little girl in her pajamas, maybe ten years old, holding her dead mother’s hand.

All to be eaten by the rats.

The helicopter bobbled. Franklin watched his older brother at the controls. The beat-up old machine seemed to be running well enough. It was the idea they could be down there too, walking in that human sewage, among the wreckage, flame and smoke. Up to their knees in furry bodies, sharp nips cutting through their jeans —

But the rat-stampede passed them all by, leaving the dead untouched in their run for the Hudson River. The herd joined up with a second group and flowed up onto the West Side Highway on ramp heading north.

The tips of Franklin’s fingers idled around the pointy triangular base of the very old, small gold cross that hung from a chain inside his shirt. People have to be out of their minds to live this way. A loss of reason. And in the next moment it occurred to him who one of those people was.

Everon looked down at his hands. He was holding the stick in a fiercely unnatural grip. An amateur at the controls. Can there really be anything left of Cyn’s building? he wondered. Is Franklin right? Can we find Cyn and Steve and Melissa? Or will the waves of pain and sadness come crashing down on full force? Hell, at least we’re not just waiting, sitting by a phone somewhere until someone calls with the bad news. Some part of him suspected what they really would find. But to know that truth today, they would have to be the ones to find it.

He forced himself to take a long, deep breath . . . another . . . until he could feel the craft again. Then to fly, with grim determination, as fast as the old bird would take them.

The Giant’s Hand

“We should start east around here.” From the helicopter’s left front seat Franklin pointed an upright flat hand at the left window. “Toward 59th Street. Cynthia’s place should be almost straight over. Maybe we can land at the south end of Central Park?”

Everon began a shallow bank to the left.

Chuck leaned forward between the seats to study the cobalt-blue eyes of the dark-haired man who had pulled him into this. “So I’m getting the idea we’re going to look for your sister before we try to save anyone else?”

Franklin turned a hard mouth back on the Red Cross man. “That’s right. Do you have anyone here, Chuck?”

“All my relatives moved to Florida five years ago. I was the holdout. Just asking — I’d do the same.”

To Everon, it felt good to have only buildings to watch out for — instead of people like Marsh and Vandersommen. But the rotor blades were getting close. Columbus Circle was dead ahead. He could feel pockets of heat rising.

He glanced at the engine instruments. Running a bit warm — should go higher okay. He lifted the collective delicately. The whine of the turbine increased. The Pelican began to climb.

By the way he was crabbing, a light tailwind was still blowing from the west. He looked through the top of the helicopter’s front windows and muttered, “High broken clouds. Snow tomorrow . . .”

Out above the radioactive anvil.

“Six hundred feet,” Everon called out. “That should be enough, especially if we head across the park.” He began to level out. “Nothing’s as high as I remember it.”

Tops of skyscrapers in big chunks littered the streets.

He glanced at the turbine temperature gauges. The needle had risen a little but appeared stabilized below the red zone. “Hanging in there,” he muttered.

A huge BOOM answered him, Chuck screaming, “Oh shit!” as the helicopter was pushed backwards, nose tilting high, a huge ball of yellow fire blossoming in the air before them, expanding as if to pull them inside.

Everon yanked up on the collective, maxing the throttle, pulling back the stick, trying to halt their forward path — struggled to keep them from the flames.

As Franklin watched his older brother’s deft touch on the controls try to defy the craft’s desire to kill them all, he felt strangely calmer than he knew he should have. And he wondered if indeed they would all three die — Everon, Franklin, Cynthia — today in Manhattan.

The blades overhead whumped still louder, flexing against the strain.

Everon has abilities in so