Chapter Thirty-Four

Kristen

For some time Kristen's gaze lingered blankly on the empty row of windows from which Vengelis had so casually flown out. A feeble portion of her mind held on to the wish that she was dreaming, and would soon wake up in her warm bed. But that collapsing enclave of a notion was rapidly giving in to the certainty that all of this was very real.

Kristen wearily approached the rigid and bent body of Professor Vatruvia and leaned down to check his pulse again. His neck felt stiff against her fingers, and she could find no trace of a beating heart. Beside him on the stage floor, his glasses were broken, both of the lenses cracked down the middle. It was hard to recognize him without the glasses on his face. Kristen wordlessly pushed them into the front pocket of his blazer. She was still in shock. All of this was too much to take in, and Kristen would have thought herself drugged were it not for the anchoring sobriety in her mind.

The strange plane crash in Albany, the heightened national security level before the attack of Chicago, the glimpse of dread upon General Redford's face as he had been informed of flying men moving across the country: all of the pieces fit into place. It was a War of the Worlds in true H. G. Wells fashion, with mighty men and their fists instead of towering tripods and their technology. Kristen could not decide which destructor was more unsettling. Of one thing she was certain. Despite the seeming familiarity of Vengelis Epsilon's face and language, he was as unrecognizably cruel as any nemesis of fiction.

For the moment Kristen allowed herself to languish in self-pity as she pushed her palms against her closed eyelids, half sitting, half collapsing onto the end of the stage and letting her sneakers dangle off the edge. She searched the faces of the audience for Ryan, but could not see him. Had he not been in the ballroom when Vengelis barred the doors? A desire to cry rose like a bubble in her throat as she looked in vain for him, but Kristen held it back sternly.

She had to hold on to courage, to logic.

Now with no treacherous otherworldly fiend forcing them into the corner, the audience of professors and researchers began to grow louder and bolder with each passing moment. Yet despite their prestigious educations, their panicked questions of how or assertions of impossible were no more intelligible than the rising screams in the streets beyond the broken windows. A macabre live news broadcast was still playing on the large projection display above the stage. The program had now split in two, with half of the screen showing an ash-covered news reporter stumbling through the devastation of downtown Chicago, and the other half depicting an aerial shot of the East River littered with floating detritus of bridge remnants and half-sunken windshields.

Madison joined Kristen's isolation at the end of the stage and sat down beside her. Kristen wanted to ask Madison why she had been with Vengelis when he entered the Lutvak ballroom, but she could not stir up the words.

"Do you think he's telling us the truth?" Madison asked her after some time.

Kristen shrugged and cleared her throat, her voice cracking. "We have no way of knowing."

"Yeah."

"Although." Kristen ran her hands over the knees of her jeans, "If Vengelis's true intention is to conquer the world—and based on what we've seen, I do believe it's within his capability—all of these theatrics and specific demands seem rather pointless."

Madison nodded. "That's what I was thinking."

"So, I guess I'm not sure. His actions lead me to believe he really does need our help. That said, I do think he's partly lying, or at the very least not giving us a full picture of his intentions."

"What do you think those machines, the Phoenixes or whatever he called them, did to his world?"

"Felixes."

"Yeah, Felixes."

"I can only guess," Kristen said. "If the Felix technology and Vatruvian cell technology really are one in the same, and if my limited knowledge of the Vatruvian cell is accurate, then the Vatruvian replications are definitely more powerful than he is. But I don't understand what he is."

For a while Kristen said nothing and merely listened anxiously to the profound roaring struggle of the city outside.

"I don't understand it," Madison said. "I saw Vengelis run face first into an eighteen-wheeler to prove his strength. Face first. You wouldn't believe the impact. The truck was demolished. I mean . . . demolished. His shoulder . . . flesh and bone . . . crumpled the steel like it was made of paper. Then there's what happened in Chicago. I mean, for god's sake they can fly! None of it is possible."

Kristen shook her head sternly. "According to our laws of science, our constructed reality, it isn't possible. But science is based in observation of the world around us, and in that sense, our witnessing of their power proves it to be irrefutably possible."

"But flying . . . ?"

"I would imagine a higher civilization's technologies are always first perceived as unattainable or fantastical when first witnessed." Kristen looked at Madison intently. "Imagine explaining to someone from the Dark Ages not only what the moon in the night sky really is, but that man has walked—hell, played golf—on its surface. So I'm not dealing in any absolutes here, I'm trying to keep my mind as open as possible. Modern knowledge might be able to provide no answers, but science can. Vengelis said their extraordinary power is inherent, that it lies within their genetics. If that's true, then mechanisms of science bestowed that power there. There is nothing impossible or supernatural about them, they are simply foreign to us."

By the windows in the far corner of the ballroom, a small group of scientists had given up on attempting to pry open the blocked doors or sinking into a folding chair and fruitlessly lamenting their situation. Now, wearing white undershirts and tank tops, they were roaming the ballroom and collecting any heavy shirts or blazers people were willing to give up. Two men were tying the arms of the various articles of clothing together to form a makeshift rope. Kristen immediately recognized they were planning to climb down to the street from the shattered windows; they would rappel out of the ballroom.

But where were they hoping to escape?

Together, Kristen and Madison hopped off the stage. Hands buried in the pockets of her sweatshirt, Kristen cautiously stepped across the shattered glass and approached the broad windows overlooking Times Square. She leaned against the window frame and looked out on the city as cool air touched her face. With the breeze came a shiver and a vision that shriveled her soul. Neither she nor Madison could come up with words as they looked out upon the avenue.

New York City was unrecognizable.

If Kristen had thought the dreamlike roar of the riot rising from the streets below was unsettling, the sight of the vast sea of people under her second-floor vantage point was outright nauseating. Midtown looked more like a despairing third-world refugee camp than a metropolitan hub. People were crowding shoulder to shoulder across the entire width of the streets as far as the eye could see, their bodies pushing and leaning in an attempt to move toward the north. The very cars lining Broadway and Seventh Avenue were buried under the cover of humanity, and provided the appearance of rising swells and undulations in the crowd. With nowhere else to occupy their bodies, people were standing on the depressed hoods and caved in roofs of abandoned cars and taxis. Some had even climbed atop street lamps, where they perched with hands held to their foreheads peering northward into the endless bottlenecked multitudes. The first floor storefronts looked looted and mangled. Restaurant and retailer signs hung dangling by wires, and broad awnings were tattered to shreds.

Individual police officers, firemen, and SWAT members were scattered here and there throughout the crowd, their gear lost and their uniforms serving no better purpose than costumes against the incalculable horde of the Manhattan populace. Kristen watched a young man about her age wildly swinging a thick riot shield with the words NYC SWAT over his head, the shield now a mere relic of what it once symbolized.

The sheer mayhem was a sight Kristen never could have conjured up in her most vivid dream, for no imagination could fully capture the breadth of this terror. Her legs went weak, her stomach raw. In this hysterical screeching sea of humankind before her, there was no foothold, no niche upon which the enforcement of civil obedience could cling. Words such as order, law, restraint, and authority were all merely indulgences that perhaps had held a place in the city earlier that morning. But such reassurances held no sway over a million-strong mob.

"Dear god," Madison muttered from behind her.

Kristen turned back into the ballroom to see that people from the audience were gathering the courage to move from the rear of the room and look out the windows. They, too, were staring with awe at the collapse of civilization occurring below. At the other end of the windows, shouts began to rise from their ranks as people were demanded to part with their blazer or fall coat so as to add another link to the makeshift rope. Kristen turned shamefully away from a scuffle between two PhDs over a heavy twill sports coat, and saw Madison was looking across the Lutvak ballroom to a navy banner that had been draped across the far wall.

The banner read: ICST The Future of Man.

"These people are the future of man?" Madison asked scornfully, indicating the two grown men who were now wrestling across the carpet. "Give me a break. Why do they even want to make a rope? Look outside, there's nowhere to go! We're trapped."

"Yeah." Kristen unwillingly brought her attention back to the miserable sight of Professor Vatruvia up on the stage floor.

"You . . . knew him?" Madison asked.

Kristen nodded slowly.

"I'm sorry."

"He was my boss." Kristen cleared her throat in a detached manner. "Somewhat ironic that Vengelis killed him before they had a chance to speak. He murdered the very man he was aiming to exploit."

"Yeah."

Kristen turned to Madison. "Why were you with Vengelis?"

Madison let out a long fatigued exhale and shrugged her shoulders. "I don't even know. These men attacked me at my work. One had a knife. And then Vengelis came out of nowhere to help . . . he must have been in the crowd. For the life of me I can't imagine what he was doing there."

"Strange," Kristen said.

"He told me New York wasn't safe, and he said all the insane things he later proved without explanation to everyone in here. I thought it was a joke at first, some weird reality TV prank or something. Then he hit the truck. He wanted me to show him where the Marriott Marquis was, so I brought—"

Krrrrghhh!

An immense clapping noise suddenly emanated from outside their building in the far distance. Everything—even the ruckus of the avenue outside—immediately fell quiet. The boom had been loud enough to silence the entire city. Kristen was unconsciously locked in stunned eye contact with Madison, both of their mouths agape. They stared straight through each other's gaze, both straining to listen to the dead silence that now pressed down upon them.

Krrrrrrrgggghhhhhh!

K-K-K-K-Krrrrrrrghhhhh!

The sounds were eerily reminiscent of a violently intense thunderstorm, though somehow different and unearthly. The cracks were sharper, louder, and more pronounced than a roll of thunder, with a less drawn-out rumble. They were unmistakably the sounds of tremendous impacts, though not of pushing clouds in the lofty ceiling of the atmosphere. The crashes were so loud that it sounded as if the very tectonic plates of the planet were splintering apart, except the noise came from the sky to the south.

Then, as quickly as the strange overhead crashes had begun, they ceased. A long hush ensued, filled only with nervous glances and apprehensive breaths. Then the masses awakened. The crashes, or explosions, or whatever they had been, were the last traumatic nudge necessary for the multitude filling Times Square to reach its final tipping point. An earthquake began to shake the very floor of the ballroom as the avenue outside erupted into a unified and earsplitting wail of stampeding dread. If the masses had been a downtrodden sea of humanity minutes previous, now it was a violent maelstrom of thrashing limbs and screaming faces. The roar of men and women coming in through the open windows was equally as alien to Kristen's ears as the crashes in the sky; the communal roar was a calamitous requiem for the fallen order of their world.

KRRRRGGGHHHH!

The loudest bang yet reverberated from a point directly over their heads. It was as though the center of the storm had shifted to sit above them. A descending torrent of fire and brimstone would have been an appropriate counterpart to the thunderous crashing, yet only clear afternoon sunlight spilled onto the floors through the tall windows. Kristen, along with everyone in the ballroom, visibly flinched and stooped in shock with her arms raised above her head. For a moment she thought she was dead—that the hotel had collapsed down on them. This louder series of cracks sounded from just above them and shook the walls of the ballroom. The chandeliers rattled and swayed against their brackets.

"What is happening?" Madison shouted.

Kristen shook her head, her hands raised to cover her ears. "Don't know!"

"Do you think it's Vengelis?"

Kristen's eyes lingered uncertainly on the ceiling tiles as the booms rattled over and over again from somewhere far above the Lutvak ballroom. She could not bring herself to envision what could possibly be generating the decibels shaking the world around her, though she knew it had to be related to Vengelis.

Madison winced. "It must be him!"

Kristen felt paralyzed. She had seen it on Vengelis's face—something had concerned him. Whatever it was had forced him to leave, and Kristen did not like the idea of what that might entail. Something that concerned Vengelis Epsilon would surely prove to be a concern to her as well.

An upsurge of fierce bangs sounded from the clear skies outside the windows. Instantly the clamor became deafening, and the floor shook violently beneath their feet. Kristen was forced to her knees, and Madison grabbed hold of the windowsill, barely able to stay standing. Her chin tucked to her chest and her hands pressing against her ears, Kristen's painful scream went unheard even to herself.