"You got a kid?"
Javier almost lied and said he didn't, then decided he'd be a fool not to play up the assumption he was straight. "Not here. A daughter."
"I got a baby boy. Thank God he's back home with my lady. Some fucked up shit going on here."
Sofia. Javier hadn't seen her for nearly two years. What if she saw that hideous mugshot on TV, since they watched American news back home to keep up with the money font of Alejandro's Manhattan business and investments. She'd be six now, almost seven.
"Fucking cops hauling off people's kids," Carlos went on, still in Spanish. "My homie's neighbor got beat up bad trying to keep 'em from taking his boy."
Almost seven. It had been so long. Would she have recognized him anyway...even without the scars?
"Then I got into it with 'em-'cos that's his boy, you know? Ended up throwing a punch. And here I am."
If Sofia didn't recognize her papito, Nana Felicidad would make sure she did. She'd make sure to remind the girl what a monster he was, too.
"I been here nearly twenty hours," Carlos said, "nearly a whole day. Ain't had nothing to eat since last night. Fucking starving. Where's the man?"
Of course, it really had nothing to do with his eye. The scarring was simply the outer manifestation of his inner evil. A sign from God. It never would have happened if he hadn't quit the family business-quit the family-to become a reporter and run off to Gaza for that news program.
With that man.
The man who'd broken up with him in an Israeli hospital, and left him there to rot.
"You know what time it is?" Carlos said. Pleaded, really.
Javier considered how long he'd milled around the station while they attempted to process him without any online access. "Maybe eight o'clock."
"Damn, I'm so fucking hungry."
Javier had eaten around midnight, tapenade and gruyere, but he supposed that despite the numb crush of despair, he could eat again.
Carlos strode over to the barred wall closest to the front desk, pushing between a couple of biker-looking Anglos with tattoos and shaved heads. He pressed his face between the bars, and yelled in English, "When you bringing the man? We're hungry!"
One of the bikers went paler than he already was and backed up. "Get the fuck away."
Carlos left off begging for food and turned toward the biker, bristling. "I didn't touch you, man."
"Are you sick?"
"No, I ain't sick."
"Getting hungry. Real hungry, all the time. That's how it starts."
"How what starts?"
"The baby plague."
Javier could see Carlos was hungry and fatigued enough to start throwing punches just for the sake of giving his pent-up hostility somewhere to go-and as his new amigo, "Timoteo" would be expected to join in...and probably be flattened by the husky biker with the chain links tattooed around his neck. Except that the biker was busy making sure Carlos wasn't within punching range. And Carlos was more concerned about this "baby plague" than he was with defending his besmirched honor. "For real, man?"
"Didn't you hear?"
"I didn't hear nothing. I been in this fucking dump all day and all night."
Javier leaned forward. He realized he was holding his breath. Then he realized that all the other men in the holding cell-the homeless guys, the black teenagers, the unlikely-looking businessman, the Filipino gang-bangers, the assorted riffraff and thugs...they were all holding their breath, too.
The biker, realizing his audience was hanging on his every word, lowered his voice dramatically and said, "They don't know how it's catching-through touching, or breathing the air, or a parasite, or what. But what happens is, people keep getting more and more hungry, like they'll never get full. And little kids-either it hits 'em harder, or they just can't control themselves. But if you don't stuff 'em full of food 'til they're ready to fucking pop, they'll turn around...and start eating each other."
Laughter rippled through the group-because surely, this was some sort of joke. But the laughter was uneasy. And a few men were just staring, and not laughing at all-and not just Javier, who'd had so little to laugh about, for so long, that he'd forgotten the very feel of laughter.
The biker scanned the group, meeting the eyes of each and every one, then nodded his head somberly and said, "It's true. Hand to God."
The businessman started to scoff, but everyone else was murmuring to whomever they'd glommed onto during their time in the holding cell, and the Filipinos were translating for one another in Tagalog with bits of English here and there as if to verify they'd just heard what they thought they'd heard.
Carlos returned to Javier's side, crossed his burly arms in front of his chest, and muttered, "I'm not sick," in Spanish. "It's just been a long time since I ate anything. That's all."
Was he sick? Was anybody?
Or was it just the manna?
Chapter 27.
The spike strips, patrol cars and sawhorses were no longer blocking the streets. That was a relief. Traffic signals were working, traffic itself seemed no worse than a typical rush hour with a little extra aggression thrown in, and Tim and Randy made good time. But even a half-dozen blocks from Chinatown, the smell of smoke began seeping through the vent on the truck's dashboard.
"Holy shit," Randy said. "Is that a parking spot?"
Tim pulled over and slammed the transmission into park. "I guess more people are trying to get out of this neighborhood than get in."
"Don't be such a downer. We found a spot. That's what counts."
They were less than two blocks from Nelson's apartment. A short jog, then turn the corner...and Tim jerked to a stop as if he'd run into a plate glass window. The scene in front of Nelson's building was like something out of an old war movie-a movie where a bunch of wailing Vietnamese villagers armed with garden tools had been fired upon by tanks and machine guns.
There were no moving vehicles on this block. A pair of fire trucks barricaded traffic. Of the cars and trucks that remained, either parked, or in the middle of the road as if they'd just been driving in the wrong place at the wrong time, not one looked as if it was capable of getting out of there without the help of a tow truck. Windshields were webbed with cracks. Hoods dented. Roofs caved in. And a dozen car alarms whooped and wailed, ensuring that no one could hear well enough to figure out what the hell was going on.
A news crew filmed at one end of the block. The Red Cross had set up a tent at another, but the way people around it were pushing and shoving, it didn't look like anyone was being helped.
"Come on," Randy shouted, above the screaming and the car alarms and the sirens. He grabbed Tim by the upper arm and dragged him forward. Tim tripped over something, and righted himself. It was a brick. In the middle of the sidewalk. He looked around, between the feet of the people pacing up and down the sidewalk calling their loved ones' names, or the people simply wandering in shock, and he saw another brick, and another, and several more. The entire street was littered with bricks.
Randy didn't seem to notice them. He hauled Tim along with a grip on his arm so hard it hurt. "Hey," he said to an Asian man who refused to make eye contact. "I'm looking for...." He lost his train of thought when the man wouldn't pause, but he didn't let it daunt him; he simply started again with the next person in range. "Do you know the white guy who lives in this building? I'm looking for his family. A Vietnamese lady around fifty and a boy named Bobby." He turned and began running after someone else. "Hello? Do you speak English? Do you know the white guy with long hair who lives here?"
Where Randy seemed to be thriving on the act of doing something-anything, whether or not it was effective-Tim struggled to wrap his head around the chaos, the wailing of men and machines, and the smoke, and the water from the fire hoses streaming along the gutters like small rivers swirling with random items-a teacup...a TV remote...a pack of disposable diapers.
"Hey, do you know a white guy? He lives here? Do you speak English? I'm looking for his kid."
Randy stopped yelling, Tim realized, while he'd been zed on the plastic pack of diapers getting caught on a brick, damming the flow of the water, then breaking free when the force of the water dislodged it and floating behind a car. Randy yanked Tim's arm. A punk Asian girl with soot on her face and a pink streak in her hair who'd stopped to answer his questions had turned away from him. She walked away from him with a cell phone to one ear and the other ear plugged, shouting into the tiny receiver as she tried to get a signal.
Randy was pointing at something on the sidewalk to one side of the Red Cross tent. Maybe another tent that was being put up. Erected. Pitched. Whatever the word was.
Randy shook Tim again. Harder this time. "Hey! Are you freaking out?"
Tim looked at the gutter-river to see if he could figure out where the diapers had gone.
Randy shook him so hard his teeth rattled, and yelled in his ear, "Don't you fucking freak out-I can't do this alone."
Randy, big Randy, with his bruised face and his glued-in tooth. Randy needed him. Tim blinked, took a long, slow breath, acrid with smoke and burnt plastic, and nodded. "I'm okay."
"Okay." Randy stared at Tim for a long moment, searching. He had very green eyes. His bruised cheekbone and jaw were nearly the same color as his irises. "Okay."
He spun Tim around to the yards of plastic on the ground, over by the Red Cross tent. "Then let's get over there and look. Because I can't think of a politically correct way to say it-but I don't think I can pick Nelson's kid out of a bunch of other Chinese."
"Vietnamese," Tim said, though the word was lost among the car alarms and the wailing and the sounds of rushing water. Although maybe that was for the best, because their neighbors were probably Chinese, so maybe Randy was actually sort of right.
Randy hauled him over to the unpitched tent that wasn't actually a tent at all, but rather a bunch of brown plastic tarps covering the sidewalk. There were more injured people than Tim had realized-so many of them were lying on the ground, waiting for the medics to see to them.
"Oh my God," Randy said. "I can't...."
So many people. Tim supposed it made sense that there'd be a lot of people. The apartments were small, and numerous, and most of them held multiple generations, or more than one family.
Randy let go of Tim's arm and took a few steps toward them. He was saying something, yelling, but the sound of it was swallowed up by the sirens.
So many people waiting. Patiently waiting. So still. Sleeping. Though how they could sleep through all that noise was anyone's guess.
How they could sleep blackened with smoke, and their limbs torn off.
Randy staggered to the gutter and vomited.
Tim stared at an empty sleeve, red with blood and black with soot. Dead. Of course. He understood it-part of him did, anyway-but most of him just thought everything going on around him was all very, very peculiar.
The sirens grew even louder, but then words formed, Randy yelling again, yelling for the children.
Tim walked away from him, stepped over the man with the empty sleeve, and began to check each body carefully. He'd only met Nelson's Vietnamese family once, but if he concentrated, he could recall enough detail to go through and eliminate these people. A woman, too old. Another woman, too plump. Most of the Asian women on the tarp were thin, but Nelson's mother-in-law was particularly petite. Birdlike. She'd had her hair in that tight ponytail...though of course the ponytail could have come undone. And she'd been wearing that...sweatshirt.
The Knicks sweatshirt.
"Randy?" Tim whispered.
The floaty, shock-induced bubble Tim had been lingering in came crashing down all around him at the sight of the poor woman's face. She didn't look like she was sleeping. Not at all.
"Randy!" he cried.
"Is that...oh no. No, no, no." Randy hauled on Tim's arm and dragged him out from the sea of burnt and broken corpses. Making it back to the truck was straightforward enough, but finding the key seemed to be another matter entirely. The lock pre-dated keychain power locks-you needed to insert an actual key, and turn it. Tim tried to jam a key in, and realized it wasn't going anywhere because it was the key to his front door. His mailbox. His laundry room.
Randy snatched the keys out of his hand, found the car key and opened the door. "Are you even good to drive? Shit, we should have brought the scotch, I'd pour you a shot or two."
"I don't drink."
"And I'd hold your nose and make you swallow it. Come on, snap out of it." Randy climbed in the driver's side, then ducked into the back. "And it never occurred to you to stock up on some normal-sized bottles of water? These water cooler things...not exactly convenient."
Tim climbed into the cab and pulled the door shut. "Who has water at all? Me or you?"
"I'm just saying."
Tim glanced in the rear-view and saw a disheveled man wandering up the street, stopping at every car and trying the door to see if it opened. He locked his door and pressed his forehead into the steering wheel, taking deep, cleansing breaths, in an attempt to stop seeing the very dead look on the face of Nelson's mother-in-law every time he closed his eyes.
In the back, water glugged out of a five-gallon bottle. The door latch clicked as the wandering man tried it, and Tim flinched, but waited a moment before he raised his head to look up. The man was gone, not even noticing that there'd been someone inside the truck; he was already at the car in front of them, trying the door. Looking for something to steal, or somewhere to hide? Or maybe going through the motion for some reason he didn't understand, because when the world turned into a bad Sunday afternoon horror movie marathon, what did anyone do?
"Here, drink this." Randy nudged the plastic cup into Tim's shoulder until he took it, and drank. He hadn't realized he was thirsty. The water tasted sweet against the smoke that coated his tongue and throat. "Better?"
"Yeah, better."
They both sat and stared out the windshield for a minute or two, and finally Randy said, "Did you see Nelson's kid back there?"
Tim shook his head, no.
"Because I was talking to one of the cops," Randy said. "He told me they took all the kids to The Tombs."
"To jail?"
"That's what he said. He said they're sick...but not all of them. And they're trying to get them sorted out, release the ones who aren't, the ones who pass some kind of test, if there's someone there to sign for them."
"Nelson's boy...."
"Bobby. He called him Bobby."
The Manhattan Detention Complex was only a few blocks away. Maybe they'd taken the children there to keep them safe during the emergency. Safe from people like the guy who'd just broken into the car at the end of the block. "We've got to be missing something," Tim said. "You can't just go and sign out children."
"They probably don't have enough space to keep them all. I don't know. That's just what he said, that they're signing out the ones who aren't sick. Look, we know where he is. We've done all we can do here. Let's go."
"But who's going to sign him out?" Tim said. "His mother, his grandmother-they're all.... Who's left?"
"We'll get Nelson."
"He's tripping all over the place on his meds. We're only a few blocks away-look, you can see it from here. By the time Nelson wakes up and we get him back down here, any freak or pervert off the street could go and...."
"All right, I get the picture." Randy pulled out his cell phone and checked to see if it was working, shook his head, and slipped it back in his pocket. "I think it's a long shot. But you're right. We need to at least try."
Nelson's leg kicked a few times. Fucking jimmy-leg. Maybe he should take up tap-dancing and give it something useful to do. The sun was bright-who the hell opened his blinds? And then the sniffling and sobbing, Tuyet crying. Again.
All the explaining in the world just couldn't bring her around to the idea that she didn't actually need to fit in. Who the fuck cared if the airheads at work thought she was dumb? How many of them spoke two languages? And who cared what that bitter, single, middle-aged laundry lady at the end of the hall thought of their living arrangement, either?
Despite the numerous times Nelson had broken out the Vietnamese-English dictionary to try to explain why it shouldn't matter what other people did or didn't approve of, Tuyet still cared. It wasn't a language thing. It was a cultural thing. And probably a gender thing, too.