There was one piece of the puzzle left… one final memory — the day he had realized the truth about September 11, the day he had pieced together the treachery—
— the day he had walked out of his barracks in the Green Zone and into the sunshine, the pin in his right hand—
— the live grenade in his left.
From across the lawn, the Grim Reaper opened his cloaked arms wide, beckoning an embrace. Shep leapt off the bench, sprinting awkwardly toward the Angel of Death, ready to end it all.
The Reaper smiled, disappearing into the shadows.
“Shep, wait!” David started after him—
— the old man blocked his way. “You are a doctor?”
“Huh? Yeah—”
“We have a pregnant woman in labor. Paolo, this man is here to deliver your son. Pankaj, get these people to Battery Park.”
“Virgil, what about you?”
“Patrick needs me. Now hurry, there’s not much time.” The old man patted Pankaj on the cheek, offering a wry smile to a transfixed Gelut Panim before following Patrick’s tracks through the snow.
David, Pankaj, and Paolo helped Francesca onto the awaiting vehicle, the interior of the bus fifty degrees warmer. Manisha escorted Dawn. But at the last moment, Dawn slipped past her mother and dashed across the lawn, retrieving Patrick’s mangled steel prosthetic from the short Asian man.
“Are you coming with us?”
“I’d like that.” The Elder turned, looking for the old man.
Virgil Shechinah was gone.
The horizon had turned a light gray by the time Shep reached Ann Street. Ahead was Broadway. Looking up, he saw the Reaper beckon from atop a flipped vehicle, the olive green blade of his scythe again dripping blood.
“Bastard!” Gathering himself, Patrick crossed Broadway, continuing east to the corner of Trinity Place and Vesey Street—
— the World Trade Center construction site loomed ahead.
Pankaj Patel raced the school bus south on Broadway, following the path cleared by the second Stryker. Morning’s first light lifted the veil of a long night, exposing the true horrors of the runaway pandemic. Bodies lay everywhere, strewn across Manhattan as if the Big Apple had been struck by a thirty-story tsunami. Some hung from shattered windows, others still occupied the hundreds of vehicles that clogged every city block. Every sidewalk was a morgue, every building a tomb. Men, women, and children, old and young, ethnic and Caucasian, domestic and foreign — Scythe had spared no one.
The bus passed Trinity Church and the New York Stock Exchange, heading for the southernmost tip of Manhattan — Battery Park.
Francesca leaned back against Paolo’s chest. Her husband entwined his fingers around hers as David Kantor worked between her spread legs, the Army medic having shed his bulky environmental suit aboard the heated vehicle.
“Okay, Francesca, looks like you’re fully dilated.” He turned to his daughter, Gavi assisting him from the next bench seat. “Find me something clean. A towel or blanket would be great.”
Francesca trembled, her body exhausted, her nerves overwrought with fear. “You really are a doctor, right?”
“With all the degrees. I gave up my practice to go into business. Maybe I should have gone into pediatrics, this’ll be my second delivery today.”
Paolo forced a nervous smile. “See, my love, God has taken care of us. The first child you delivered, Dr. Kantor… what was it?”
David swallowed the lump in his throat. “A healthy little Hispanic girl. Okay, slight push on the next contraction. Ready… steady… push.”
“Ugh!” Francesca bore down, her unborn infant sliding farther down her stretching birth canal, the pain excruciating. Looking up, she saw the strange-looking Asian man watching her from across the aisle. “Why don’t you take a picture, it’ll last longer!”
“My apologies. I am simply honored to bear witness to your miracle.”
“Miracle? You call this a miracle! I’m on a school bus, giving birth in a plague-infested city in front of a bunch of strangers.”
“Exactly. In a city taken by so much death, you and your husband have defied the odds and managed to survive. Now, out of the darkness, you bring forth a new spark of Light. And this is not a miracle?”
David looked up. “The man’s got a point. Okay, one more time—”
Hunched down in one of the rear seats, Sheridan Ernstmeyer watched the medic deliver the Italian woman’s child, her anger mounting.
The site had been sanitized. The crime scene scrubbed. Every ounce of rubble inspected, yielding everything from family photos to personal belongings to the smallest traces of DNA used to identify air passengers and office occupants. Everything except the virtually indestructible black boxes that had been aboard the two aircraft safeguarding the in-flight recordings.
Tons of steel shipped overseas. Replaced by gleaming fortified structures rising from Ground Zero’s excavated graveyard. Out with the old, in with the new…
Patrick slipped through a detached section of aluminum fence and entered the construction area, marking the first time he had returned to the site where his fiancée and daughter had been incinerated alive, along with three thousand other innocent people.
Trembling with emotion, he moved to the edge of a massive pit — the foundation of what would soon be another mammoth structure. A gray morning fog had rolled in off the Hudson, obscuring the partially constructed buildings looming across the site.
He registered the now-familiar presence and turned to his left. The Grim Reaper was standing beside him on the overlook, staring into the pit.
“Why have you brought me here?”
The Angel of Death raised its scythe to the heavens. The Manhattan sky was concealed behind a dense layer of swirling brown clouds — just as it had been on that day of treachery.
A dizzying bout of vertigo. Shep dropped to one knee as a sizzling wave of energy rattled his brain and extremities as if he had touched a live wire. Gasping a breath, he opened his eyes, disoriented and beyond confused.
The sky is a maelstrom of swirling dark storm clouds, the rain that pelts his exposed flesh as frigid as droplets cast from a frozen lake and as fierce as a monsoon. He is standing upon a raised wooden structure, towering fifty feet above a vast forest of cedar rendered into acres of stumps and saplings by the axe. The valley below is flooded. The floodwaters rising.
Advancing toward the wooden structure are people. Thousands of them. Carting children and possessions. Desperate and angry and scared. Standing in frigid water up to their knees, shouting at him in a Middle Eastern dialect.
His attention is diverted to a new discovery — he now has a left arm! Only it’s not his. He examines his left hand, then the right… both weathered. Knotty, and arthritic, his flesh bears a Sephardic tan. He palpates a gaunt face, the leathery skin pruned in wrinkles. He grips a handful of shaggy white hair and strokes a matching beard. His rail-thin body is cloaked in damp robes bearing the heavy scent of animal musk.
What’s happening to me? Is this another hallucination? I’m an old man…
The cries of the mob demand his attention. He walks to the edge of the wooden structure and realizes he is standing on the deck of an immense boat.
A crash of thunder rattles heaven and earth. The ground trembles, then the mountainside opens, the fissures belching molten rock, the magma setting the flooded landscape to boil.