Seawater.
Let me repeat that, Roger, for the benefit of your chickenshit bosses behind the mirror. The Pentagon. Decided. That the best way. To take out. Super-advanced. Aquatic. Aliens.
Was to drown them.
Oh, and did I tell you I’ve got this phobia about water? I swear, sometimes I feel like cheering for the other side.
So I hear the jet streak by overhead and I don’t even waste time looking up; I’ve got maybe twenty seconds before it’s far enough offshore to deploy, maybe ten minutes—if I’m lucky—for the wave to drive back through the bottleneck and put us all in hot water. Hargreave’s yelling about getting to higher ground, but what’s higher ground in downtown Manhattan?
I run like hell up Broadway.
Of course it was a bad choice. There weren’t any good ones. What would you have done, hide in a dumpster? Run up fifty floors of some office tower that’s already been so torqued it might go over if you kick it in the shins? Fuck that noise. The farther you get from the waterfront, the higher the ground; the more buildings you’ve got between you and that big fucking flyswatter heading for the coast. Office tower doesn’t do you much good if it comes down around you, but even in a million pieces all that mass is gonna act like some kind of breakwater.
So I’m burning up the boulevard as fast as the N2’s mighty little nanofibrils can move me, and neither CELL nor Ceph nor civilian get in my way. Maybe they didn’t happen to be hanging around on that street, maybe they were and I didn’t notice, maybe the word’s gone out and everyone’s just running for cover; but all I see is cars and corpses, and all I hear is a low steady rumble rising behind me. I know I can’t outrun it—not even NANOSUIT 2.0 can win a race against a tsunami—but maybe it’ll be worn out by the time it catches me, maybe it won’t be a flyswatter so much as a plain old flood. Maybe it’ll just lift me up and carry me along and it’ll be just like river rafting, just a day at the water park.
Right.
That rumbling’s pretty loud by now, and deep, almost subsonic; you hear it with your bones more than your ears. The ground won’t stop shaking. I can feel it under my boots, I can see windowpanes bursting over the street, I can hear car alarms going off. And there are these other sounds too, little metallic popping noises, and I don’t turn around to see what they are because I don’t dare, I can hear the whole Atlantic roaring at my back and no way am I going to break my stride for even a second. But I don’t have to look behind because a manhole cover blasts out of the street right in front of me, and farther ahead, and all the way down the street like a row of space shuttles blasting off on columns of white water. I run through an intersection and something’s blocked off the street to my left and it’s moving and holy Mother of Muhammad the goddamn ocean flanked me, it’s coming at me from all sides now, these huge motherfucking gray-green mountains of water and I barely have time to look up and take one last look at the sky—just this tiny strip of brightness way off overhead, disappearing between two dark heaving walls. It’s like being swallowed whole, it’s like taking one last look at the world through closing jaws.
And I’m squashed like a bug at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
To: Site Commander D. Lockhart, Manhattan Crisis Zone
From: CryNet Executive Board
Date: 23/08/2023, 16:05
CC: CELL Oversight Secretariat; Jacob Hargreave
Commander Lockhart,
We reluctantly conclude that your assessment of Jacob Hargreave’s mental competence is correct at this time, and we herewith relieve him of all board-related duties and shareholder privileges. He is to be contained within the environs of the Prism building until a medical team can assess his mental health. Operating mandate is also revoked in the case of Special Adviser Tara Strickland, pending further investigation. She is to be detained for questioning.
Your request for overall authority in the Manhattan Crisis Zone is herewith granted.
I wake up to a soft distant roar, like the sound of a seashell held to your ear. I hear a river chuckling away somewhere nearby, a seagull squawking Don’t fuck with me, and False Prophet mumbling something about resequencing vectors. I hear other voices, too: Must be around here somewhere, and Yeah, if Gould’s tracking gizmo actually works worth shit, and If the wave didn’t get him. Fucking Pentagon . . .
That last sentiment of which, I gotta say, I’m finding myself more and more in sympathy with. But these guys sound friendly for a change—even familiar—so it is with something close to a sense of hope that I open my eyes.
And what should greet me but a blue sunlit sky full of puffy white clouds. And a giant green fist the size of a bus, ready to punch my lights back out.
I think Jolly Green Giant. I think Incredible Hulk. Statue of Liberty comes a distant third, but that’s what it turns out to be when my eyes finally focus. Big green disembodied fist in a river that used to be a street, still bravely holding aloft the Torch of Freedom or whatever the fuck it’s supposed to symbolize. Too bad statues don’t come with a sense of irony.
Oh, and here comes the gunfire. Naturally.
Regular army, this time. Camo fatigues, no insectile body armor, just a bunch of jarheads and Squids shooting at each other. The Ceph seem awfully undrowned, but maybe they have been rocked back on their heels a bit because our boys don’t seem to be having too much trouble mopping them up.
It’s a nice sight to wake up to, even though I can’t join in the festivities because my suit is still rebooting along with my brain (I swear, Roger, the way this thing crashes I’d swear the OS was written by Microsoft). By the time I can do anything more productive than twitching and rolling around there’s nothing left but backbones. And the best sight I’ve seen all fucking day is the guy who reaches down to help me to my feet.
“Alcatraz. Nice suit, man. Fifth Avenue? You been shopping without me?”
Chino, back from the dead. I thought he went down with the Swordfish, I thought he was rotting on the bottom of the Hudson. I’d hug the dude if I could do it without crushing him to jelly.
“You do remember me, right? Gould said they’d knocked your voice box out, but he didn’t say anything about brain damage.” He leans in, squints through the faceplate, doesn’t see anything but his own reflection. “What the hell happened to you?”
He’s fallen in with some kinda ad-hoc mash-up of marines and airborne and regular army, the closest thing left to a chain of command in this shitstorm. The man who’s holding it all together is one Colonel Barclay—“I served under him once, good man,” Chino says. “Anyone can pull a winning hand out of this pile of shit, he can.” The colonel’s set up a field command at Central Station, way above the high-water line, and he’s keeping the Ceph hordes at bay while the evacuation kicks into gear.