Her son, Stephen, was in their living room working on a laptop. He was staying home from school for yet another day, as all New York students were. The compounded troubles from several successive natural and unnatural disasters were taking a toll on the city. First there was the hurricane, then the blizzard, and now there was increasing civil disorder resulting from the canceling of the national elections.
Veronica herself hadn’t been able to return to work since Sandy hit. She was a landscape designer at the Brooklyn Bridge Park, and with everything going on post-hurricane, there’d been no need for her to go to work. She’d been told to stay home, and now she and Stephen had been inside for days on end. She thought about it and then counted on her fingers. It was exactly a week ago Tuesday that Clay Richter had helped her son and had stayed the night in the guest room. It seemed longer to her.
She’d grown up in the house of a man who believed in preparation, like his father before him had, a vestigial leftover from colonial-days thinking in Trinidad, when life was uncertain and one had to always be ready to take whatever steps were necessary to maintain it. An aware mind and a preparedness mentality were some of the values that had attracted her to John, who was a survivalist in his own right.
She and Stephen had been protected from the civil unrest raging outside by her foresight in planning for emergencies. They had a generator, and they had always stockpiled food, and had acquired over the years, through self-education, the means to protect themselves from the kind of madness that had increasingly gripped the city. Still, she was getting antsy to get out of the house, and Stephen, too, was looking for diversion.
He was in the living room when the lights flashed and blinked out and the power died. He’d been watching on the laptop at that moment as a daredevil jumped out of a weather balloon and plunged over twenty-four miles toward the earth.
I wonder if he lived, is what Stephen thought as the computer and the room went dark. Strange, he thought. I wonder why the computer didn’t keep running on battery power?
The click of the lights and whirr of the winding-down machinery had been the first signs that there was trouble. Then Veronica heard an explosion down the street, followed by numerous collisions and grindings and blasts. Thinking about the laptop, and why the thing had just instantly shut down, Stephen had been the first to ask why the sounds of cars in the streets had stopped if only the electricity had shut down. Just as Veronica was about to answer, they heard a whistling grow above their heads.
Veronica ran to the door with Stephen just a foot behind her, and they stuck their heads out the door and saw in the space above their street an airplane crossing through the blue sky. It was spooky the way the craft simply hung in the air without the sound of engines whining as it made its descent. It was all Doppler Effect of gravity and the atmosphere pushing against the hunk of metal in the sky. The plane turned in a slow, lazy arc and settled into a pocket of air, which made the whooshing noise they’d heard as wind rushed around its wings.
The crashing noise could not have been more than half a mile away. Veronica could have sworn that she felt the ground rumble under her feet before they heard the awful explosive clatter of the plane crashing into the city. Her thoughtful eyes scanned down to the street and noticed the cars clogging up the main artery of the street down the block, and the people running toward the sound of the crash. Images and fragmented memories of 9/11 flashed through her head. Veronica pushed her son back into the house, and the young man looked at her his eyes full of fright, and he asked her what was happening.
Veronica answered with a single sentence. “Stephen, you see de animal, but you don’t see de beast.” And with that, she sprang into action.
The mother directed her son to go down to the basement and grab two black bags she’d packed with survival gear for a journey. Without hesitation, she ran into their rooms and pulled out warm clothing, changing her own clothes at the same time, all in a flash.
Coming up from the basement with the bags, Stephen asked what was in them. “Don’t ask questions, child,” Veronica said. “Act.” She directed Stephen to change into the clothes that she’d just pulled out for him—hiking gear in layers and warm boots—as she went into the kitchen to gather food and water. Within fifteen minutes, they’d left their house and were setting out on foot through the city… toward Brooklyn.
At the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge was an almost unknown cold war era nuclear fallout bunker. Veronica had come across it while working at the Brooklyn Bridge Park because it was adjacent to a storage facility where she kept all of her tools. She remembered reading about the discovery of the bunker in 2006, when city workers had stumbled upon it during the course of routine inspections. It had been long forgotten, and as soon as it was discovered, it was forgotten again, but Veronica had not forgotten about the bunker at all. She’d previously wheedled her way into getting a key to the bunker from a city clerk who was easily confused by the numbers on a blueprint. Now, the two of them, mother and son, wound their way through the city toward the stone enclosure in the hopes that they would find it still functional.
Having a goal and a plan has a huge impact on the mental state when things fall apart. As they walked, she saw people moving in circles, running heedlessly, or sometimes just standing and gaping with their mouths open and their eyes blank in horror, confusion, or indecision.
The city had been wreaked by havoc in the past week, and now havoc had turned into a conflagration. Fires and destruction were everywhere around them, and Veronica and Stephen took advantage of the mayhem to move silently and purposefully through the city. They moved along the side streets, dipping into Central Park, and then back along the thoroughfares that would lead them downtown, making their way so that they avoided as many people as possible. Before leaving the house, Veronica had slipped a small pistol into her waistband, a gift from her husband on the Christmas before he died, and she hoped that she would not have to use it.
As Stephen followed her, he tried to ask her questions about why they were leaving so quickly, and where they were going, but Veronica simply kept his mind occupied by telling him stories of his father.
“You know, your grandfather was a man who was admired by everyone who knew him. He was an engineer, and he built buildings in Trinidad that were not as tall as these you see here…” she motioned to a building that was ablaze in the distance, its giant face perforated by the wings of a second aircraft that had fallen from the sky only moments before, “…but they were impressive nonetheless.” She focused on blocking out the horror, and directed her mind towards that which she had to do to eliminate panic in herself and her son. There was no shaking in her voice, only calm and certainty.
“When he met your father, he asked him what he’d do if he ever found himself in trouble. You know — what he’d do if things fell apart. He was a cantankerous man, your grandfather, and I was his baby, and he wanted to say a little something that might scare John a little, to see what he was made of. Well, if that is what he wanted to do, he failed. Your father answered with an old Trini proverb that immediately won over your grandfather. Your father said, ‘When yuh neighbor’s house on fire, throw water on yours.’
“Do you understand, Stephen?” She looked over at her son as they hustled through the city, reading his thoughts as they passed people who seemed to be crying out for help.