The Darkest Day

FIFTY-ONE

The street was empty when they left. The rain fell in a light but steady drizzle. The breeze was intermittent and cold. The moon pierced through the clouds above. The city beneath was dark and quiet — a rare instant of peacefulness in an otherwise chaotic metropolis.

Raven said, ‘Floyd Bennett Field is at least twenty miles away. It’s right on the bottom of Brooklyn. That’s a hell of a lot of ground to cover as fugitives.’

‘What choice do we have?’

They kept their eyes moving as they walked, looking out for cops or Halleck’s men.

‘Would you have done it?’ Raven asked.

‘Done what?’

She frowned. ‘Don’t play dumb. You know what I mean. The stuff about the kid. The daughter. Was it a threat or would you have followed through if he hadn’t talked?’

Victor said, ‘We’ll never know, will we?’

She was quiet for a moment. ‘I wouldn’t have let you, had it come to it.’

Victor didn’t respond.

Raven said, ‘Maybe you only want me to think there’s no line you won’t cross. Maybe that’s why you won’t tell me.’

‘Believe whatever you wish.’

No one gave either of them a second glance as they threaded their way through a crowd of citizens out to pick up supplies of perishable goods being sold cheap by a local supermarket looking to offload them before they spoiled. He paid for a loaf of sliced white bread and ate three slices as he walked to get some simple carbohydrates into his system. Raven took a slice for herself. Victor gave the rest of the loaf to the next person he passed.

He felt a little light-headed from the fight with Guerrero. Not concussed, but hard blows to the head made the brain rattle inside the skull. He could have some swelling, or in an extreme case an aneurysm. If it was the latter, it didn’t matter about the people after him because he would be dead soon regardless. If it was only the former the light-headedness might progress to feeling faint or dizzy or nauseous. Neither of which would help him get out of this situation. He needed his mind sharp and fast, not dulled and slow.

They passed a man in an astrakhan fur hat who stood sheltering in the doorway of a closed store. The man was laughing to himself. About what, they would never know.

They walked south for almost an hour, back into Manhattan until all around Victor tall buildings rose high into the night sky, but whereas their façades should glow from lit interiors and glimmer with the infinite lights of the city at night, they were dark and featureless. Moonlight shone off their glass windows and the windscreens of abandoned cars. Traffic lights suspended on long beams hung useless. A homeless guy lay next to a bin on the pavement, buried under a deep pile of blankets, lost in the slumber of alcohol, unaware of the blackout and its effect on the city.

Something was wrong.

Victor did not see or hear anything that alarmed him, but he sensed it regardless. He noticed the change within himself. He felt the physiological adjustment to danger. His subconscious had detected some threat and had responded by sending out messages to release hormones, which in turn resulted in the elevation of his heart rate and a heightened state of alertness.

He didn’t yet know why, but the organism wherein his consciousness existed knew all it needed to prepare him for fight or flight.

This was the innate feeling of something being wrong — the inexplicable bad feeling — that modern humans sometimes experienced but often ignored. For Victor, his life often depended on heeding its message.

He saw no other people. He heard no one approaching.

He moved anyway. Raven detected it also, or saw his reaction to it, and followed his lead. Victor did not know where the threat would come from, but standing still and waiting for it to manifest was not his style. That would be idiocy. He picked his own battlefields. He had not survived this long by being reactive.

A few metres along the street, he understood. On a storefront up ahead were pinpricks of floating red light, growing larger and further apart.

Vehicle tail lights were red, but if these were tail lights they would grow smaller and closer as the car moved further away, not larger and further apart as they drew closer. Which only left one type of red light they could belong to.

They were the lights of a police cruiser approaching, maybe a block away, light bars glowing but siren silent not to alert him.

His subconscious, always alert and processing data, had noticed anyway, many seconds before his conscious mind was aware of those pin dots of red light and had worked out what they meant.

Now, they were both heading straight towards the threat.

Raven saw it too and they backtracked, turned, walking fast. They took a set of steps leading down to get off the road, heading into an alleyway, narrow and stinking, and louder with the ambient sound of the city, trapped and intensified.

The cop car approached, out of sight behind them and up the steps, but he heard the rumble of its exhaust becoming louder despite the attempt at stealth. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the cruiser drive past the mouth of the alleyway. He glimpsed two cops inside. The red glow of the light bars played over the concrete steps, casting shadows where once had been darkness.

They waited, wrapped in shadows and leaning against a damp wall, until the rumble of the exhaust had faded into the background murmur of the rain.

For now, they had avoided the cops, but those inside the cruiser would not give up so soon. The car would circle the area searching for them and only leaving again if they were sure the sighting they were responding to proved to be false. Or maybe they wouldn’t go at all, convinced of their presence, or they might call in reinforcements to join the hunt. There was nothing for it but to keep moving.

Active, not reactive.

They passed under a bridge. The rain struck riveted steel in a jarring patter. Junk burning in a charred barrel sent yellow and orange flames licking beyond the blackened barrel rim. The smell was abhorrent. Three homeless men stood around it, forming the corners of an equilateral triangle, warming their hands. Their faces were empty and thin, worn down to masks of skin and hardship. Firelight flickered on empty wine bottles around them. Glowing embers floated skyward.

Victor and Raven walked past the men, knowing they stared the whole way, but he kept his focus ahead. He had seen from their body language that they were not going to bother them. This was no more than a curiosity to them. The homeless men might speculate why they were down here with the lowest of the low, but the vagrants were not any kind of threat. These men had bigger problems to deal with, like staying alive for one more night.

They emerged from under the bridge and back into the rain. They took a set of concrete stairs back up to street level. He did not want to end up trapped with the river on one side of them and cops on the other. They would become hypothermic long before they reached the other side, even if they were fortunate enough not to be struck by some barge or ferry. Victor had no desire to die, and even less so in a river, freezing and drowning, body washed out to sea, maybe never found, remains eaten by sharks.

He pushed on, crossing a metal footbridge over a road, his steps more like shuffles, splashing water from puddles up his legs. The noise of the traffic below was a loud roar of engines and exhausts, echoing under the bridge.

Sirens sounded behind them, growing louder with each passing second. Maybe the one from before, or a new arrival. He straightened his back and focused on his gait to appear not as a man fleeing but as a pedestrian walking. Raven did the same. A couple not worth investigating.

In the darkness and rain, the deception worked. The cruiser sped past. It didn’t even slow.

Not the one that had been looking for them before, but another. Maybe responding to some other emergency.

They waited until it had gone and walked fast — a couple in a hurry, stressed and harried, but not chased. They had to find somewhere to hold up, and soon. No one they passed paid them any attention. Civilians were more concerned with the rain and the blackout or so used to keeping themselves to themselves it made no difference how fast he and Raven walked or how suspicious they acted.

The rain was falling harder as Victor and Raven entered a plaza. He began to shiver as he weaved past people, avoiding the umbrellas that seemed determined to find his eyes. People still struggled in fruitless attempts to get their phones to work through the downed networks. The collective glow from the screens up-lit their faces, disembodied in the otherwise darkness.

Raven said, ‘We’ve got company.’