He stepped over to Gabe and kicked the knife away. The guy’s attention was centered on the pain in his belly, but why take a chance?
“. . . hurts . . .” he grunted.
“So I’ve heard,” Jack said. “But probably not as much as being gutted by a bowie knife.”
Another grunt that sounded like “. . . doctor . . .”
“Don’t think so.”
“. . . please . . .”
Jack rolled Gabe onto his back and pressed the muzzle of the Glock against his chest.
His eyes widened. “No!”
“You made a mistake. You thought you’d brought me into your world, but you wound up in mine. You threatened Gia and put your hands on her. You don’t do that in my world. At the moment, life holds too many threats to me and mine that I can’t seem to do anything about. You, I’m afraid, have the misfortune of being one that I can.”
21
Jack waded back through the crowd until he reached a point where he had a line of sight to Gia. He waited till she looked his way, then waved. Her face lit when she saw him but he motioned her to stay seated.
“Meet me downstairs by the car rental booths,” he called.
She gave him a questioning look.
“ASAP,” he said.
She nodded and began buttoning Vicky’s coat. He turned and squeezed through the crowd.
Far below, he’d left the three bodies where they’d fallen. He’d closed the door to the room and locked them in. No one without a swipe card could open it. After wiping down anything he’d touched, he’d made the long, painful climb back up to the ticketing level.
His hip was on fire now as he entered the crowded men’s room and found he had to wait on line for a stall. When he finally reached one, he removed the sweatshirt and hung it on the hook on the back of the door. He waited a minute, then exited, leaving the hoodie behind.
He found a spot outside on the floor where he could watch the traffic in and out of the men’s room. He thought it would take at least ten minutes, but it took only five before he spotted a tall, lanky kid exit the men’s room with a gray sweatshirt rolled up under his arm. Could have been his own, but his swiveling head and furtive look meant he’d probably boosted it. When Jack spotted a piece of the Nets logo, he was sure.
Wear it in good health . . . but wear it.
Jack headed down to the baggage level and found his ladies waiting near the Hertz booth. Vicky smiled and waved. She seemed to have recovered from the loss of her pretzel. Gia’s expression was more serious.
“Are you okay?”
He nodded as he took the handle of her rolling suitcase.
“Fine.”
“What about—?”
“They’re no longer interested in you.”
She bit her upper lip. “Oh, Jack, I don’t like the sound of that.”
“It’s okay.”
“But what does that mean?”
“Just what it says: They won’t be bothering you anymore.”
“But . . .” She leaned close and whispered so Vicky couldn’t hear. “Did they attack you?”
“As we both knew they would.”
“Then why did you go?”
“To get them away from you.”
“Did you . . . I mean, are they . . . ? ”
He looked at her. “Do you really want to know the details?”
She held his gaze, then looked away. “No. Not really. I have a good imagination.”
“I hope Jack kicked their fucking asses.”
Unwilling to believe Vicky had just said that, Jack turned and stared into her innocent blue eyes.
“What did you—?”
“Victoria Maria Westphalen!” Gia said, hands on hips in the classic shocked-and-angry mother pose.
It appeared to be dawning on Vicky that she’d crossed some sort of line, but she merely shrugged. “Well, he stole my pretzel.”
“That’s not the point. Have you ever heard me talk like that? Have you ever heard Jack talk like that? Where on Earth have you ever heard that kind of language?”
“On the bus. Everybody—”
“I don’t care what everybody does, we do not use that kind of language, understand?”
“Okay, okay,” she said in a my-mother-is-so-not-cool tone. “I hope he kicked their fucking heinies. Okay?”
Jack had to turn away. He could stifle—barely—the laugh that struggled to burst free, but he could not hide the grin. He shouldn’t have bothered because, after a pregnant pause, Gia leaned against him and started laughing out loud. Jack joined her while Vicky looked at them like they were crazy.
When Gia finally composed herself she looked back at Vicky. “We don’t drop f-bombs either.”
“F-bombs?”
“The f-word.”
Vicky rolled her eyes. “Okay, how about—?”
“How about we talk about something else?”
Vicky shrugged. “Okaaaaay.”
Gia looked back at Jack. “What are we doing out here?”
“I thought we’d go for a walk.”
“Back to the city? But—”
“No. One of the hotels. Whichever is closest.”
“I thought you said they were full up.”
“They are, so we’ll camp in a lobby until morning.”
“Why?”
“The airport might not be the best place to stay. Way too crowded in there. Something might set that mob off. And if it does, you two might get hurt.” He put an arm around her and pressed her against him. “Or worse.”
That was one reason. But Jack had another. Since no one without the right swipe card could enter that room, the bodies had a decent chance of remaining undiscovered till morning. But he couldn’t count on it. Someone might stumble on them five minutes from now. Word of a triple murder could panic the crowd. But even if word never reached the crowd, the cops and TSA people would be poring over the tapes. They might see a couple of the dead guys with someone in a gray Nets hoodie. Jack had spotted a good number of gray hoodies in the Central Terminal and, though it was highly unlikely in that packed throng, the tapes might link the hoodie with the dead guys to the hoodie who’d been with Gia and Vicky. That was the way his luck seemed to be running lately.
He lifted Vicky onto his shoulders. His hip protested but he ignored it. This was Vicky.
“Want to go for a ride?”
“Yes!”
He held out his arm to Gia. “Shall we?”
She hooked an arm around his elbow and they started walking. A couple of hotels waited not half a mile from the terminal. Any other night, it would be suicide to try to cross the Grand Central on foot. But tonight it would be like making their way through a crowded parking lot.
He looked up at the sparkling winter sky and thought of the Lady. With all the concern about Gia and Vicky, she’d slipped his mind.
He wondered how she was doing. It couldn’t be good.
22
“Well, it’s official. A White House spokesperson has announced that the Internet, that globe-spanning conglomeration of computer networks for the sharing of information, has, for all intents and purposes, crashed. Internet data traffic has come to a virtual standstill. Uninfected intranets—self-contained computer networks with guarded Internet access—still remain functional, as do military and some governments networks, but these form an infinitesimal fraction of what the Internet was. No World Wide Web, no Twitter, no Facebook, no chat rooms, no Usenet—it’s all down. The Department of Defense is looking at this as a possible act of war. The Department of Homeland Security has raised the National Threat level to red or ‘severe.’
“In further comment, the White House announced—”
Weezy muted the TV.
She hadn’t checked on the Lady for a while and was afraid to go see her now. She knew the end was near, maybe had passed.
She pushed herself up to her feet, and forced herself down the hall to the bedroom.
She stopped by the doorway,
listening. Again, no breathing. She wasn’t used to that, but she expected it. She stepped into the room. The bedside lamp still burned, illuminating the bed—
The empty bed!
No . . . no . . . someone there, under the covers. But she’d left the Lady lying atop the covers.
“Lady?”
Weezy gasped as she realized she was seeing the covers through the Lady. Her brain kept telling her to run, to flee this madness, but she put one foot in front of the other until she was standing at the bedside, looking down at what was left of the Lady.
Her body as well as her clothing had become transparent, or nearly so. What substance she retained had a faint, misty quality about it, just enough—barely enough—to provide a visible form. Weezy wondered at the transparency of her clothing until she realized that what appeared to be clothing on the Lady was really part of her, as malleable as her flesh—or rather, as malleable as it used to be.
Weezy stared at the two holes in that flesh. When Weezy had first met her last year, she’d shown her a tunnel carved front to back through her torso by a previous attempt to extinguish her. After the Fhinntmanchca attack, a second, larger tunnel had appeared on the other side of her navel.
She lay just as Weezy had left her, but . . . she’d been solid then. As before, her eyes were closed. Still conserving energy, or unable to open them?
She reached a hand toward her and noticed how it trembled. She pushed it toward the Lady’s shoulder, finally touching it—
—and passing through.
She snatched it back. She’d felt something—the best she could describe it was a tepid liquid. The Lady’s substance had sublimated to a semi-solid state. Was this how it would end? From solid to semisolid to . . . what? A vapor, her molecules dissipating into the air? Was that how she would end—a victim of Brownian motion?
And yet . . . why hadn’t that already happened? If the Internet was down, why was she here at all? Weezy could only assume that the damaged noosphere was trying desperately to maintain her existence, and obviously losing the battle.
The mountain lake she’d described was draining dry.
“Lady?”
No motion, no response, not even a flutter of the eyelids. She seemed even less substantial than a moment ago.
Weezy felt a sob building in her chest. No need to suppress it, so she let it burst free. She’d come to love the Lady as a person. She knew she was simply a projection of the noosphere, but she seemed more than that. She seemed to have her own personality. Most likely that was merely a projection as well, but whatever it was, Weezy had come to love it.
She pulled a chair up beside the bed. She didn’t want to look at what was left of the Lady, so she turned out the light. But even though the Lady wasn’t human, she shouldn’t have to die alone. Someone needed to be here to bear witness to her passing.
“I’ll sit with you until . . .”
She couldn’t bring herself to say it.
. . . until there’s no more of you to sit with.
SUNDAY
1
Weezy awoke in the dark with a cold left hand. She remembered resting it on the bed next to the Lady’s earlier. She must have fallen asleep. A cold weight rested on that hand.
Reaching across with her right, she turned on the light and gasped.
The Lady still lay on the bed as Weezy had last seen her, but she seemed more visible. No, she was more visible. She could no longer see the covers through her. The cold weight resting on Weezy’s hand was the Lady’s. It had substance now. Last night she’d been reduced to some sort of strange semiliquid, progressing toward vapor. Now she seemed to be gathering mass and moving in the other direction.
Weezy slipped her hand from under the Lady’s and touched her arm. Definitely solid now.
But how could that be?
She shook her gently. “Lady? Lady, can you hear me?”
Nothing. No breath. No movement. But she was still here. And she must have moved sometime since Weezy dozed off, or else how would her hand have come to rest atop Weezy’s?
She gave the Lady’s arm a gentle squeeze. The flesh rebounded. How was this possible? The Internet was down, and yet she not only survived, she was rebounding.
Unless . . . had the Internet somehow rebounded just in time? It seemed too good to be true, but . . .
She looked around for a clock but couldn’t find one. She dug out her cell phone and touched a key. The display lit to show no service and no time. She’d left the TV on in the front room and heard it now. She hurried out to see if she could learn anything from the tube.
The time was posted in the lower right corner of the screen: 2:32. A harried looking newsreader on one of the local stations sat at his desk, reading a press release.
“. . . of Homeland Security says that Jihad-four-twenty, the virus responsible for the crash of the Internet, originated from a server in Tehran. In an unprecedented step, the intelligence services of the world are uniting to hunt down the hacker or cabal of hackers or the terrorist organization responsible.”
He switched to another sheet of paper.
“The DHS has also revealed that shortly after the myriad servers and routers that feed the Internet crashed, terrorists launched a well-organized and widespread attack against the Internet’s physical infrastructure. All across the globe, but mostly here in the United States, explosions ripped through the fiber-optic cables that crisscross the country and the oceans, linking data centers and nations. This will make rebuilding the Internet even more difficult. Not only will the countless crashed servers and routers need to be reprogrammed, but the damaged cables that link them will have to be repaired or replaced.”
Weezy hit the mute button and stepped to the window. Clearly the Internet had not rebounded, and would not for some time. Below, the traffic was still snarled. Only a few headlights remained on. Nothing moved except a rare pedestrian.
The Internet crashed . . . the noosphere further weakened . . . the Lady should be gone. But she was hanging on.
No, more than hanging on—rallying.
How? Whence was she drawing strength?
2
The clock on the wall behind the Marriott’s registration desk said it was a little after six-thirty. Jack looked out the front door. The sun hadn’t yet cleared the horizon, but the sky had lightened enough to make travel feasible.
He’d spent the night trying to think of a way back to Gia’s place that didn’t involve a six- or seven-mile walk through the cold. Even if he could fit Gia and Vicky on the motocross bike, he couldn’t guarantee their safety. He couldn’t rent a car because the roads—at least all the roads he could see—were still jammed. The side streets here in Queens had probably eased up, but the problem was getting to them. Enough people had abandoned their cars, at least temporarily, to create a near-permanent snarl.
The fact that it was Sunday, without millions trying to get to work, would help, but it still might take all day to untangle this mess. They couldn’t wait for that. The hotel coffee shop was out of everything but coffee, and that was in short supply. He’d managed to snag a couple of cups for Gia and himself, and an OJ for Vicky.
“Are we ready for this?” he said.
Gia and Vicky nodded. They were both well bundled up. Good thing they’d been returning from Iowa instead of Florida.
Gia looked at him. “How long do you think it will take?”
Jack had borrowed a map from the concierge during the night and checked out the shortest route to the Queensboro Bridge. Gia lived in its shadow.
“If we take the Grand Central to Northern Boulevard to the bridge, it’s between six and a half and seven miles. It shouldn’t be too hard to move at around three miles an hour—”
He caught Gia’s glance at Vicky, then at his hip.
“I’m okay. The rest has helped.” True enough. He’d checked it in the men’s room: big bruise, but much less painful. “And Vicks will be on my shoulders. I think we’re talking two and a half hour
s, less if we’re lucky.”
Gia smiled. “Home by nine. You have no idea how good that sounds. I’ll have scrambled eggs and coffee on the table by nine-thirty.”
“You have no idea how good that sounds. Let’s go. I’m starved.”
Jack had paid the bell captain to check Gia’s bag. So, unencumbered, they stepped out into the cold. Jack swung Vicky onto his shoulders and the three of them set off for Manhattan.
Vicky started singing “We’re Off to See the Wizard” and Jack thought that was somehow appropriate. He would have sung along, but he feared that after last night, the Wizard’s name was Rasalom.
3
“I . . . live?”
The Lady’s voice was faint, hoarse, like a broom sweeping sand. She lay as she had before, but her eyes were open and she was conscious. Weezy had been watching her, talking to her, touching her. She’d seen her mouth move a few times, but these were the first words she’d heard her speak since last night.
She leaned closer. “Miraculously, yes. How?”
“Don’t . . . know.”
Speech seemed a war, each word a victory.
“Well, your enemies succeeded in bringing down the Net, but I guess the noosphere is stronger and more resilient than anyone imagined.”
“No . . . not.”
“But your continued survival is proof that it is.”
“No . . . not.”
“Not what?”
The Lady closed her eyes again. Weezy wanted to shake her—gently, of course—and ask her to explain, but she seemed to have slipped back into her sleep mode. The Lady had said she didn’t sleep, but she was doing a convincing imitation. Except for the not-breathing part. Weezy couldn’t get used to that.
She leaned back. No . . . not. What did she mean? That the noosphere was not sustaining her? How could that be? She was a creation of the noosphere, a projection of humanity’s neuromass. Weezy had come to conceptualize her as a sort of hologram. But if the hologram’s projector suffered a power failure, or its light source fizzled to a point where it could no longer sustain the projection, the hologram vanished.