Vespers

Twenty-Three

One day,thought Adrienne Hart,the financial districtis going to have a night life.

The young investment banker hated the fact that after the stock market closed and the traders went to the bars and then home, the streets were empty. There were no movie theaters or museums or galleries, the apartments and most of the hotels were farther uptown, and every shop in and around Wall Street went into hibernation until morning. One day, when she had the money, she was going to open a comedy club that would draw people downtown. And she’d be the headliner. Give up the big bucks for the big yuks. After years in this male-dominated world, she had plenty of stories to tell.

Until then, the World Trade Center was a dead-lonely place after hours, and the smooth, swift elevator ride from the sixty-seventh floor was a quiet, eerie, cocoonlike experience.

She looked at her watch and immediately forgot what time it was. It didn’t matter. By the time she got her car from the garage, drove back to her town house in New Jersey, and went to bed, it would be midnight. Then she’d be up at five-thirty and on-line to the markets in Tokyo and Hong Kong and London. Except for weekends, when the twenty-six-year-old went down to Philadelphia to see her fiancé, that was her life.

It happened so fast that she barely adjusted to one thing before the next thing hit.

The elevator shuddered violently, slapping her against the side wall. She slid into the corner, lost her briefcase, and put her arms out along the wall to keep from hitting the ground. The car stopped shaking.

Adrienne stood there, not moving, waiting to see what would happen.

A moment later the square door on the top of the car exploded in, shattering the lights, throwing the car into darkness, andthunking hard on the floor. The panel ricocheted into her left leg, gashing it just above the knee. The hot pain made Adrienne superalert. She swore and pushed away from the wall.

The car continued to descend as warm air spilled in through the opening. The young woman looked over at the lighted panel. She reached for the red emergency button.

She never got to it.

Something fell into the car. It was large and humid and it soaked up sound. Adrienne could no longer hear the whoosh of the air or the pings of the floor or anything but her own rapid breath. She also couldn’t see the panel. Something had blacked it out. All she saw was creeping darkness, ripples of black, then dark brown, then black again.

Then there was red. Directly in front of her. Two fierce orbs that looked like warning lights but couldn’t be, because what would they be doing right in front of her?

Adrienne turned to the right and reached out again, frantically trying to find the panel. She touched something that felt like satin. It was thin and soft and rippling. It was also moving closer. The woman wondered what the hell could have fallen through-

As the elevator eased to the bottom of the shaft, Adrienne suddenly felt a terrible pressure under each armpit. She stopped moving. Shecouldn’t move. It reminded her of when she was a kid on crutches-only the crutches were reversed. The pointy end was being driven up. She seemed to rise from her feet, but only for a moment. The pressure suddenly exploded into pain that obliterated the hurt in her leg. The nuclear fire raced up her shoulders to her neck, then down her arms to each fingertip. The awful heat ran its course in an instant, waking every nerve along the way. Then it blasted back up through her shoulders again, more intensely than before. She felt bone tear from sinew along her upper back and then something ripped through the flesh there. The pain was so severe that she would have given anything-including her life-to make it go away.

As Adrienne rose, her body quivered violently from her toes to the back of her head. Tides of heat and cold rushed over her in succession, and her heart slapped erratically against her chest. Her mouth fell open in a silent scream. The pain turned her vision swirling red-black to white and her throat filled with saliva and blood.

And then, mercifully, she died.