Burial (55 page)

The building was already trembling. She could feel its strain, feel its anxiety. She heard windows cracking and radiator pipes bursting; she heard a woman whoop in fear. But finally she reached the street, and pushed open the doors, and found herself in noise and chaos and dust and total fear. It was like one of those 1950s science-fiction movies when everybody panics at the appearance of giant lizards.

She walked quickly northwards. She didn't know why she headed northwards: for some reason she felt that it was going to be safer. She heard men shouting, and then she saw a firetruck approaching, on the wrong side of the road, sliding sideways. Its siren was still blaring and warbling; its lights were still flashing; but it was out of control, its tires screaming on the tarmac. Its crew still clinging on to their platforms and ladders, but they were completely helpless. All they could do was wave their arms and scream, ‘Get out of the way! Get out of the way! Get out of the goddamned way!'

They passed her by, like a strange surrealistic comedy. But then they were followed by the battered wrecks of several other cars, their drivers slumped over their wheels, their windows spattered with blood. Then a bus, screeching along on its side, half torn open, trailing bodies and pieces of bodies all along the street. Amelia saw an arm, and most of a leg, including half of a bloodied pelvis.

Amelia herself felt a strong, deep tugging; and by the time she reached 103rd she was beginning to tire. All around her, people and vehicles and objects were being dragged southward. Every scrap of trash and abandoned tires and newspaper stands and bubble-gum machines, chained down or not. Bicycles and railings and baby carriages
and billboards and sofas and chairs and
everything
—all of it sliding along the road in a scraping, jostling, whispering, clattering river.

An old Jewish woman with fraying white hair came up to her and clutched her sleeve and shrieked at her, ‘It's the end, isn't it? It's Armageddon! Judgement Day!'

Amelia managed to prize her loose. ‘It isn't the end, lady. All you have to do is keep on your feet; and pray.'

‘Pray, yes!' the woman shrieked back at her. ‘Pray, that's it! Pray!'

Shaken, Amelia continued to plod northwards, although she found that it was harder and harder to walk with every step. She was knee-deep in newspapers and trash, she could scarcely drag one foot in front of the other. She was like a woman trying to walk through deep snow.

However pretentious and careless Harry might be, she would have done anything right at that moment to have him close. He was the kind of guy who wouldn't have taken Armageddon too seriously.

A tumbling cascade of broken plates and tureens clattered past her; then cruets and napkins and broken bottles, and then heaps of silver cutlery, slithering along the gutter like a shoal of sardines.
Some restaurant's been devastated
, she thought and carried on walking.

But the cutlery had reminded her of something, and after less than half a block, she slowed, and stopped. She thought of what Martin's dead brother had said, about Martin Vaizey's Celtic forks.
The forks that were supposed to trap the devil

She remembered how angry Harry had been because the police at the 13th Precinct hadn't allowed him to take them.

‘
I don't know what they are, for God's sake. I don't even know what they're supposed to do. But from the way that Samuel was talking about them, they could be the only way of ridding ourselves of Misquamacus for good
.'

Amelia hesitated, and turned her head downtown. She heard cars and trucks colliding, and she saw glittering window-glass falling on every side. Maybe there was a chance that
she
could get the forks. Sergeant Friendly had been adamant that Harry couldn't take them. But things were a little different now. The city was starting to fall apart. Maybe she could persuade Sergeant Friendly to lend her the forks, for just a few hours. Her uncle Herbert had been a judge in Connecticut, so she wasn't badly connected; and her mother had organized charity dances for the NYPD benevolent fund.

She looked back uptown. Lightning was flickering like cobra's tongues over the George Washington Bridge, and she could feel a warm wind rising, a wind that was aromatic with burning grass. There was no question in her mind. This was the day when New York was going to suffer the same fate as Chicago. All Shadows' Day. Whichever way she went, she was going to have to struggle her way through sliding debris and collapsing buildings. She might just as well go back downtown and try to do something helpful.

She walked quickly. In fact she found that she was hurrying faster than she wanted to, in the same direction as all the rubbish and tumbling chairs and tables and news-stands and bicycles. More and more cars and taxis were being dragged along the roadway, their tires smoking, and by the time she reached Columbus Circle the smashed-up vehicles were three-deep, with more and more of them piling into the wreckage all the time. She heard people screaming in pain, deep within the caverns of cars. She saw twenty or thirty people, beating desperately at the windows of a half-buried bus. Cars and vans were piled on top of the roof, and more were piling up by the minute. As Amelia watched in helpless horror, the bus roof collapsed under the weight, and the passengers were crushed into an aluminum coffin that, in places, was no more than nine inches high. One
man had managed to force his head out of one of the windows, but as the roof came down he was guillotined, and his head came tumbling down the heaps of cars, while his neck jetted blood in a grisly parody of an ornamental fountain.

Amelia hurried on. The noise in the city was deafening and frightful, completely unlike the sound of the New York she knew. She was so used to the high-pitched roaring of traffic and the echo of car horns and sirens that usually she scarcely heard them. But this was a low, thick, sinister rumbling, overlaid with the long-drawn-out scraping of twisted metal and the endless warning-bell ringing of falling glass.

She was a little more than halfway along Central Park South when she saw the unthinkable happening, right in front of her eyes. The sidewalk was crowded with people who — like her — had decided it was safer to stay away from tall buildings. She was jostling her way across the tide. Almost everybody else was trying to get into the park. But then a man's voice hoarsely screamed, ‘Look! My God! Will you look at that! The Plaza!'

Amelia couldn't understand what was happening at first. But then she managed to struggle up against the railings, and lift herself up a little, so that she could see over people's heads. With an awesome thundering noise, the huge grey bulk of the Plaza Hotel was slowly sinking, its green chateaulike rooftops dropping faster and faster towards the ground.

It wasn't collapsing. It was disappearing. Floor by floor, gathering speed, gathering momentum, until the upper floors were rushing into the solid rock with a rumble that blurred Amelia's vision and blocked up her ears. With a last shattering explosion and a wind-whipped plume of dust, the Plaza had vanished, leaving nothing but rubble and broken brick, and a twisted bronze elevator door that stood like a surrealistic memorial, a door that led nowhere at all.

There was a moment of shocked silence. Then the crowds all around Amelia began to scream and shout in panic. They rushed into the park in hundreds, pushing and trampling and waving their arms. Amelia saw a young black girl pinned against the railings by the weight of 60 or 70 people. Her eyes were bulging and her lips were frothing with blood and bile. She was being forcefully and effectively crushed to death, and there was nothing that Amelia could do but watch her die.

A security guard pushed Amelia against the railings, too, bruising her shoulder.

‘What the hell are you doing?' she screamed at him. ‘Have you all gone crazy?'

A fat man in a sweaty undershirt gave Amelia a shove with his shoulder. ‘Get out of the way, ya bitch!' he yelled at her.

And a red-haired woman echoed, ‘Bitch! You want us to die? Get out of the way!'

It took her nearly an hour to reach the 13th Precinct. The sky hung over her head like black bedsheets filled with blood, and although it was well past eight o'clock in the morning, it was suffocatingly gloomy. Lights still glimmered in most of the buildings, but all of them seemed to have a glowering, reddish tinge, as if blood were running thinly down the windows.

She made her way down Fifth Avenue because Seventh had been barricaded with derelict automobiles and there were black-and-orange Walpurgis-nacht fires burning all the way along the Avenue of the Americas. She heard a woman saying that Radio City had gone; and the Hilton, too; and the Simon & Schuster Building.

Even Fifth Avenue was blocked with a slowly-moving tide of abandoned cars and buses, although most of the pavements were still passable. A huge refrigerated tractor-trailer lay on its side, scraping its way gradually southward. Its rear doors had been torn open and it was dropping beef carcasses all the way along the street.

Glass and masonry showered sporadically from the buildings all around. A huge stone head dropped only a few feet in front of Amelia and shattered like a bomb. All that remained was a sculptured snarl, and part of a nose.

She climbed awkwardly over the dented hood of a maroon Lincoln Town Car, and then over a tangle of motorbikes and bicycles and baby-buggies. The body of a young woman was lying in the street, her face white, her mouth slack, her eyes staring at nothing. She seemed to have no injuries at all. Amelia watched her in terrible fascination as she slid across the sidewalk, softly collided with a fire-hydrant, and then continued her slow, dead swim down Fifth Avenue, drawn by magical forces which — in life, she had probably never known about.

By the time she reached the precinct house she was exhausted — not so much from walking or climbing over car wreckage, but from fighting against the dragging sensation which kept pulling her more and more powerfully southward. She was surprised how few people she saw. It seemed as if most New Yorkers had decided to stay in their apartments and close themselves off, and hope that this blood-red day of judgement would simply pass them by and leave them alone. She saw a few looters — a crowd of teenagers of all races, smashing in the windows of camera stores. But they were obviously finding it difficult to fight against the dragging force, too; and she saw one youth being pulled on his knees across the sidewalk, his jeans literally smoking from the friction, yelling in pain, but desperate not to drop the three JVC video-recorders which he was cradling in his arms.

At the brownstone precinct house, three squad cars were lying wrecked against the front wall, and Amelia had to climb over a thicket of wooden POLICE LINE barriers before she was able to reach the front doors. A thickset uniformed sergeant with prickly hair was manning the desk, although he was gripping the edge of it with one hand to prevent himself from being slowly dragged away.

‘Don't tell me,' he greeted Amelia, even before she had opened her mouth. ‘It's the end of the world and you need somebody to hold your hand.'

Amelia said, ‘It's the end of the world and I need to see Sergeant Friendly.'

The sergeant stared at her with piggy, pale-lashed eyes. ‘Friendly's busy. We're all busy.'

‘I'm not a crank,' said Amelia. ‘But Sergeant Friendly has something in his possession which may be able to stop this happening.'

‘Friendly has something in his possession which may be able to stop this happening? Are you kidding? The north Trade Tower just vanished.'

‘Please,' said Amelia. ‘I've walked all the way from 98th Street'

The phone rang. The sergeant picked it up and put it down again without even bothering to answer it.

‘Please,' Amelia begged him.

‘I'm sorry,' said the desk-sergeant. ‘Friendly isn't here.'

‘Is he coming back?'

‘Who knows? It's a war-zone out there. You've seen it for yourself.'

‘Well, could I talk to one of his colleagues?'

‘Lady, why don't you just come back when this has blown over?'

Amelia pounded her thin-knuckled fist on the desk in front of him. ‘This isn't going to blow over! This is going to get worse! This is going to be worse than Chicago and worse than Las Vegas and worse than Phoenix! You're right! You don't even know that, do you? You're right! This
is
the end of the world!'

The sergeant kept his grip on the edge of his desk. ‘Listen, lady, Sergeant Friendly isn't here, and that's the truth. He went back to check on his family, if you want to know the truth. There's nothing else we can do, except to look after our own. I mean, what would
you
do?'

Amelia said, in a low and forceful voice, ‘Sergeant Friendly is holding onto two antique forks. They don't belong to the NYPD and they don't belong to me, either. But they belong to a man who could stop this happening, given luck. So what I'm asking you is, do you think somebody could check out the evidence relating to the death of Martin Vaizey, the psychic medium, and
find those fucking forks before it's too late
!'

The desk-sergeant lowered his head for a moment so that Amelia could see right into his prickly scalp. Then he turned, and snapped his fingers to a pimply young uniformed officer who was standing in the doorway, his back wedged against the architrave in order to stop himself being dragged away.

‘Officer Hamilton, escort this lady to Sergeant Friendly's office and give her all the assistance she needs.'

Amelia breathed a deep sigh of relief. ‘Thank you, sergeant. You won't regret this, I promise. They may even give you a medal.'

The sergeant fixed her with a pale stare.'
Who's
going to give me a medal? It's the end of the world, remember?'

Amelia blew him a kiss, ‘With any luck, pal, it won't be.' She followed Officer Hamilton up to Sergeant Friendly's office. Officer Hamilton didn't seem to appreciate escort duty and hummed monotonously all the way. When Amelia smiled at him he didn't smile back. The elevator made an alarming screeching noise as it slowly hauled them upwards, but at last they reached the seventh floor and the doors juddered open. Officer Hamilton managed to say, ‘This way,' through one nostril, and led her along the silent, wax-floored corridor. He walked in a kind of arrogant mince, and his shoes squeaked, but just like Amelia he had to keep his hand against the wall to prevent himself from being dragged sideways.