Hero. Майкл Грант
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.
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 teen-aged 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, crushing 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 factor, 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 ibuprofen, 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 super powerful 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 dotting 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