The Eternal War

CHAPTER 26

2001, New York

Maddy rocked on her heels. Then, for a moment, she was actually airborne, everything on the desk in front of her hovering a bare inch for less than a heartbeat. She reached out for the corner of the desk to keep her balance as the whole archway lurched, then convulsed with the bone-shaking impact of something hard beneath them.

Beneath?

Showers of grit and cement dust cascaded down from the roof, along with dozens of bricks, clattering to the floor and exploding in clouds of redbrick powder.

‘Oh my God … was that an earthquake?’

The computer monitors and the archway’s lights flickered out in unison and from the back room Maddy heard the deafening crash of what sounded like a significant chunk of the archway roof collapsing in.

In the dark she winced at the sound of damage and chaos going on around her, wondering if the entire Williamsburg Bridge was going to come crumbling down on her like a house of cards.

The rumbling outside that had preceded the ‘quake’ faded away, and finally it was quiet save for the patter of grit still trickling down from the loosened bricks above them.

‘Becks? You OK?’

‘Affirmative,’ her voice came back out of the darkness.

Maddy fumbled with her hands along the desk, feeling empty soda cans and pens and pads … finally finding her inhaler. She took a pull on it and it rattled and wheezed, giving up its medication and easing the tightness of her throat.

‘My God … I thought that was a wave.’

‘I believe it was,’ replied Becks. Her voice was further away now. On the other side of the arch.

Maddy’s legs bumped gently against one of the office chairs, she sat down in it gratefully. ‘It’s never felt like that before, though.’

She could hear Becks fiddling with something. ‘There is no power feed to the shutter motor.’

Maddy looked around the pitch black. She couldn’t even see any standby-mode LEDs. No power at all. The generator in the back room should have fired up by now. She should have heard that rhythmic thudding already. Instead, nothing.

‘Do you wish for me to open the shutter?’ asked Becks.

Her heart flipped a beat at the thought of checking the state of the world outside. Given that moment of freefall and the horrendous crash a second later, she wasn’t sure what to expect out there. Still, sitting here in the dark and clutching her inhaler wasn’t going to achieve much.

‘Yes. Go on, then.’

She heard the handle being cranked and the clack of chains, then after a few seconds her dark-adjusted eyes picked out a faint ribbon of light along the bottom. As it widened and brightened, a pall of muted daylight spread across into the archway and her heart sank as she saw their floor littered with rubble and shattered brick. A deep crack ran across it — a palm’s width at its widest, exposing old pipes and dusty stress cables.

She suspected the whole archway, the bridge’s entire support stanchion was structurally unstable. Perhaps even so damaged that if they ever got out of this fix and returned to normality they might need to find a new home.

The thought unnerved her more than anything. She realized she’d grown accustomed to this place. It was the anchor, this grubby dungeon, when all around her was a swirling sea of chaos; it was the one constant. In all the crises they’d been through together thus far, there’d always been here — this archway, this desk, this chair — in which to hide, lick their wounds and ponder a solution.

Maddy got up and picked her way across the floor towards the widening ribbon of light. Where the backstreet was outside, she could make out fallen brickwork, rubble, weeds poking through.

It reminded her of Kramer’s apocalypse. Maybe history had somehow managed to double back on that other alternate world, a nightmare landscape of irradiated ruins and those pitiful mutated creatures who’d once been human.

She stood beside Becks.

‘That’s high enough,’ she whispered. If there were unspeakable horrors outside ready to attack them, then she didn’t want the shutter door wide open.

She chewed her lip anxiously. ‘I’m not sure I wanna see this one.’

Becks said nothing. Her eyes grey, non-committal, impassive. Waiting for Maddy to issue her orders.

‘OK … no point me being all girly, right?’ she mumbled before ducking down, squeezing under the shutter and emerging outside. Still squatting on her haunches, she got her first glimpse.

‘Oh … sweet Jesus …’

Becks stooped down low and joined her outside. Together they slowly stood up to get a better view of the world around them.

New York was barely recognizable. The Williamsburg Bridge above them ended in a twisted mass of cables, railway lines and fragmented road tarmac that angled down into the East River. It looked like it was a casualty of war from some time ago.

They were perched at an awkward angle at the bottom of a large shallow crater. She took a dozen tentative steps up the side and looked out over the uneven lip.

Halfway across the East River she could see the stumps of the bridge’s midway support stanchions. On the far side, swathed in a thin mist, Manhattan island looked like a moonscape of grey rubble, punctuated with the barely standing skeletons of bombed-out buildings, like a dozen hands’ worth of broken fingers pointing accusingly at the sky.

A long time ago, a lifetime ago it seemed now, Maddy used to play a computer game called Call of Duty, a Second World War shooter. One of the better multiplayer levels had been set amid the bombed-out ruins of Stalingrad, a twisting maze of gutted, half-collapsed buildings, craters, blown-open cellars. What she was staring at now was pretty much just that.

She turned to look at the state of things on their side of the river. Brooklyn was almost equally unrecognizable. Although the devastation seemed one degree less total on this side of the river, all the buildings were gutted skeletons — shattered, artillery- or bomb-damaged and blackened with soot. There were, however, some almost complete frames of buildings standing still. A factory building to their right, across a pockmarked and cratered quay, had no roof, but at least it still had four complete walls lined with empty window frames, scarred, splintered and gouged by shrapnel and gunfire.

‘It’s a war zone,’ said Maddy.

Becks joined her and nodded. ‘Affirmative. There is extensive evidence of prolonged war.’

Maddy looked at her. ‘No kidding.’

‘Look!’ said Becks, pointing up at the sky.

Maddy followed her finger and saw through a haze of fog that seemed to fill the whole sky like a low-hanging autumn mist, the ghostly outline of several large shapes that moved slowly and purposefully together like a pod of whales.

‘What the hell are those?’

‘Aircraft?’

‘Too slow for airplanes,’ said Maddy. ‘And too large. They look like balloons or Zeppelins of some kind.’

They watched the faint shapes manoeuvre, their profiles long and nautically slender, topped by an irregular outline of stacked protrusions that made them look eerily like battleships.

Then through the haze Maddy caught a strobing flicker of light on the ground. A distant flash through the haze that momentarily revealed the broken-teeth outlines of far, far away bomb-damaged buildings. A moment later they heard the faint percussive thump of explosions.

‘Sounds like some place is being bombed,’ whispered Maddy.

‘It is a war that is still in progress,’ said Becks.

Maddy looked across the river at the ruins of Manhattan. The hazy air over there was clearing momentarily and she was able to see a little more detail. She saw movement. The glint of metal, something that looked like a gun turret slowly rotating on an artillery platform. In among all the chaos of gutted skyscrapers, knotted and rusting support cables, sagging floors and slopes of rubble and dust she thought she detected the regular, ordered geometry of pillboxes and bunkers.

She turned her back on the river and Manhattan to look north-east towards Brooklyn and Queens, or what was left of it. Across warehouses with collapsed roofs, and twisted industrial cranes no good to anyone now, low apartment blocks pockmarked and deserted, she thought she also saw the telltale signs of an entrenched front line.

‘Great,’ she muttered. ‘Just great.’

‘What is it, Madelaine?’

She turned to gesture at their archway — little more than a crumbling mound of red bricks somehow still managing to hold together and not collapse in on themselves.

‘That’s a front line over the river … and on this side, over there, that looks like another front line. Which of course makes where we’re standing … no-man’s land.’

Their pitiful-looking archway was half buried at the bottom of this large crater. It looked like it was an old crater, from an older war. It was bisected by a shallow trough lined with sandbags in places, and almost completely filled in in other places. Abandoned trench works. Abandoned some time ago by the look of them … an old battle line left to slowly fill itself in.

She wondered who the soldiers hunkered down amid the rubble of Manhattan were. She turned to look at the signs of defence structures amid the shattered industrial ruins of Brooklyn and wondered who was dug in there. Not that it mattered.

We don’t want to be stuck here.

She glanced back at the archway, looking like a pile of bricks salvaged, recycled, from some old tenement block pulled down to be replaced with something else; a mound of broken masonry at the edge of a building site. She supposed back inside — while it was still managing to hold itself up — the news wasn’t going to be any better. Sensitive equipment, computers, motherboards … how any of that could have survived that impact …

‘We’d better go back inside and see if anything’s working,’ she said eventually.