Authors: A. L. Lorentz
“We were already here,” the woman said without looking up. She seemed eager to talk, hopeful that by sharing her story she’d be humanized beyond her lived-in clothes and stringy hair. At the same time she carried the despondent look of a puppy convinced she’d never escape the kennel until the unfettered sunshine broke on her face. They all hoped they’d see the sunrise somewhere else tomorrow. For now they shared their experiences with the Marines while waiting and watching the northern sky for salvation.
“Even on Christmas Eve they let the people up here. Then our shift started, the cleanup crew.” The other survivors nodded. Only then did the four outsiders from the crashed helicopter notice the survivors stranded on the 86th floor all wore the same gray overalls underneath pilfered coats and blankets.
“We didn’t know anything happened at first. Night is night in New York. The Moon disappeared, but you ain’t lookin’ outside if you mopping the dirt from 20,000 tourist feet.”
“10,000, Sandy,” the oldest survivor corrected her.
“10,000
people
, Burk! 20,000 feet!” she yelled back, even though the old man sat ten feet away. “I thought a four hour shift with the old man was bad enough, been putting up with his shit for days now.” She looked up at the Marines and they awkwardly smiled back.
“That was cold, Sandy. You cold again? I got something warm for ya,” the old man chuckled.
“Unless you plan to pee on me, old man, I don’t know what you’re plannin’ on doing. The only wood you can get now, you moppin’ the floor with.”
The Osprey survivors noticed something else for the first time as late afternoon sun trickled in through thick glass and hopped along the polished stone floor.
“The floors are spotless,” Kam said.
“Damn right,” the old man whispered.
“Damned
is
right!” Sandy crowed. “While we were in here moppin’ and sweepin’, the devil had his way with my city. I didn’t notice anything till my phone stopped. Thought I was behind schedule and got in a hurry. Then I looked back fifteen minutes later and it said the same thing. The network was gone. Only me and the old man have worked in the Empire State long enough to remember the only other time that happened.”
“Nine E-le-ven,” the old man said with the weight of buried heartache.
“I tried to bring up the Internet, but it wouldn’t connect, so I went and found old Burk and we went to the window. We couldn’t see nuthin’ strange. The lights was still on. Cabs still took people uptown.
“One thing odd tho: the planes at LaGuardia and JFK were all leavin’, nobody comin’. They were turnen’ ‘em around, sendin’ ‘em somewhere else. We worried for a minute it was another hijacking, but Burk reminded me . . .”
Burk looked up, happy to report his thought that Sandy deemed worthy to repeat. “The phone’s already down. If they hijacked something again, it already crashed by then. My daddy worked here in 1942, when the building was new and the tallest in the world. They worried about the Germans tryin’ ta Pearl Harbor it during the war, another Black Tom. But, like my daddy said back then, just keep showin’ up to work. Either you brave and paid or you fired. If the worst does happen, better to be brave and dead, insurance don’t pay up if you wasn’t there. So we kep’ on workin’, ain’t nothin’ we could do ‘bout what happening down there.”
Sandy and a few others started to tear up. “I got three kids in Prospect Park. If I’d a left . . .”
“I’m sorry.” Natalie tried to comfort her.
“We all got somebody we lost,” Sandy toughened up and looked at Silversun. “You talk to your husband since it happened?”
Private Silversun, caught off guard, stumbled for her words as she covered her right hand. “It’s not a wedding band, just for decoration.”
“Don’t worry, honey, nobody’s stealing your shit.”
“I-I didn’t mean it that way,” she protested, embarrassed.
Natalie glared at Silversun’s ring, as if more offended by the casual racism than the other minorities in the room. Korea had its own history of slavery, and Natalie’s own grandmother had been a ‘comfort woman’ during the Japanese occupation.
“So you saw it then, the tsunami?” Kam asked, trying to diffuse the tension.
Sandy dabbed her eyes with her blanket and struggled to talk.
“We
all
saw it!” Burk answered for her. “Best view of the worst thing. We went back to work after we came up here the first time. Then Brett came and got us. He had the sense to turn on a radio when he noticed his phone didn’t work.”
Burk looked at another man, middle-aged and severely overweight. He lifted his glasses up on a long nose towering over a thick mustache. His name tag still hung from a pocket on his overalls. Just one word on it: Brett. Kam wondered if it was his first or last name, then realized none of that mattered anymore. Brett had a story to tell, too.
“The radio stations were all the same that’s always on, which is to say nothing at all. No DJs, especially not at night, not for ten years now. We all knew something was going on out there, and eventually, around five in the morning, the emergency broadcast came on, ironically probably from this building. Said tsunami was headed for the city. I rounded everyone up here when the siren started.
“You get used to the sound. I served in the Coast Guard when I was younger and thinner. But this was different. Something just didn’t feel right. You all know the difference between sunrise and twilight, nautical twilight to be exact?”
The Marines nodded, but the rest shook their heads.
“You learn real quick what nautical twilight is when they expect you to get up and be on the water. It’s earlier than the real sunrise, when the first bit of light hits the clouds and you see the horizon. Well, by the time I got everyone up here, it shoulda been twilight.” Brett tapped the old mechanical watch on his wrist. “But I couldn’t see shit. Even worse than shit, I saw things I didn’t understand.
“In the Coast Guard they teach you to navigate by the stars if you have to. Apparently it’s like riding a bike-you don’t think about it till you get on again, but then you remember how everything works. Well, I looked up at the darkness where the horizon should be, then up above it where the constellations, familiar skies should be. Nothing worked. I couldn’t recognize nothing. Nothing!”
“Then you went crazy,” Sandy said.
“Probably how I looked,” he agreed. “I ran back and forth up here. Best place for stargazing in the city, but they all looked rearranged and strange. Then civil twilight time passed us by, then sunrise time passed us by and all we had up here over our heads was the dark, and those unfamiliar stars.”
“Mmhmm,” Burk agreed. “Ain’t confidence-inducing. My granddaddy used to be a real devout man. Always church goin’, never strayed too far from the good book. Memorized the signs of the last days and always kept it on his mind. He used to tell us that when the rapture came it would be joyous, that’s why the word means that. Rapture. All I could remember right then when Brett started talking about sunrise not coming is what the scriptures say about it.”
The old man raised his finger and attempted to sound like a pious preacher. “Thessalonians: ‘
For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them
,’”
Brett nodded. “Yeah, well, when we looked down from up here we didn’t see anybody disappearing. They joke about this city being depraved and soulless, but if it was the Rapture, there ain’t a New York accent heard in heaven.”
Sandy regained her composure and rejoined the conversation. “The streets flooded with brake lights and running mothers carrying their babies long before the water came. The bridges couldn’t hold all the people. We could hear the gunshots, see the explosions. The city was tearing itself apart before Mother Nature—or God—could get the chance. If Burk hadn’t stopped me I might have been on that bridge with my own baby. At least now I got hope, maybe my babies made it somewhere higher, like me.”
Brett reached over and patted her arm. “We’ll see, Sandy.”
“Baby or not, it came all the same,” Burk insisted. “That was when I knew it wasn’t no Rapture, the dark never lifted before the wave hit, it just got darker. We watched it work up to the city like a blanket over the lights of Long Island. The shadow just kept rolling, and the closer it got the more we saw the sparks of electric lines and gas explosions and other things.
“When it finally reached the East River we got a good look. A mass of roiling surf overwhelmed the Brooklyn Bridge, pulling the damn cables out like broken guitar strings. And it was still fast, too! I yell for everyone up here to hold on, but it hit us like the fist of God. Felt like it was gonna lift the whole building and snap it in half. Knocked me off my feet and I thought that was it for me. Woke up when the Sun finally did show up.”
“Why were the rest of you here?” asked Silversun.
The man that took them to the broadcast equipment room spoke up.
“Morning ticket and tour crew. Building’s open even on Christmas. We usually come in by six. We were already on our way before the sirens started-it’s a long ride in from the boroughs and beyond. Once we got here Brett told us we didn’t have time to go home, it was either head to the top and ride it out or die trying to go somewhere else. He saved our lives. We got a backup generator and food from the office vending machines to last for weeks. Hope we don’t need it though, we’re getting a ride with you, right?”
The Marines stiffened.
“We’ll take who we can, but our mission is to get Doc here to safety.”
“What makes him so special?” Burk asked. “In my day it was women and children first, and he don’t look like neither.”
Kam raised his hands, ready to absolve himself of responsibility for the decision, but another voice called out from the other side of the room.
“They’re coming from the south! I see a chopper!”
They rushed to the other side and pressed against the glass. A dot silhouetted by the dim winter sunset approached from the east.
“They doin’ a caravan or is there just one?” Brett asked, as everyone streamed into the cold outdoor observatory.
In minutes, a single Huey arrived and hovered over the Empire State Building.
“Doctor Douglass, please come to the observation railing,” a megaphone instructed.
“Why he first? Women and children supposed to be first!” Sandy echoed the old man’s earlier proclamation as anger and fear welled in the survivors and they followed the Marines outside.
The Marines backed against Kam and trained their rifles on the survivors.
The Huey rotors pounded icy wind down as they lowered a soldier to lift Kam. “I don’t go until she goes!” Kam shouted and the soldier reluctantly clipped his harness to Natalie instead.
“Who’s next!” Brett shouted, ushering a few of the younger female survivors forward on the crowded observation deck. They circled the two Marines and Kam. The Marines both had their backs to the scientist and frantically moved their rifles to new targets as the dozen survivors bustled and reached towards the soldier lowering a second time.
Without any discussion the soldier clipped his empty harness to Kam and rolled up the winch.
“Next trip is for you,” Minor whispered in Silversun’s ear.
“What about these people?”
“Remember your mission, soldier!”
“They gonna leave us!” Burk shouted.
From the side of the open Huey Kam peered at the commotion below. He could no longer hear what Brett and the others were shouting, but their hope was turning to anger quickly.
When Silversun grasped the harness she had to kick off several reaching hands from the survivors. The nervous soldier grasping her kept a radio ready to inform the pilot to drop the line if necessary, this close to the building any tug from the winch might upset the delicate hovering maneuver and smash the chopper into the radio tower, killing them all.
Silversun made it up and unbuckled, urging the winchman to hurry, but the winchman never made it back down. The crowd bottled up around Minor. Rather than shoot into the crowd he screamed and waved for the helicopter to leave. The line, almost to him, wavered just long enough for a survivor to climb over the others and leap, catching it just under the harness and the soldier. Others leapt after to grab her as the pilot pulled up. They fell to their deaths instead.
The chopper hung over Fifth Avenue while the winch started reeling the desperate survivor up. Minor’s gun went off, firing a single bullet. Kam, who’d been watching the soldier delicately attach the harness to the young woman dangling from the line, refocused on the observation deck. The shot hadn’t been fired by Minor: he was gone, trampled by the crowd. Kam couldn’t hear what Brett yelled, but it looked like “Come back!” as he aimed again and fired another shot just over the rotors.
The winch rolled up and Silversun helped pull the young survivor in as the Huey made a steep banking turn, dipping around the other side of the Empire State on West 34th Street before ascending and speeding west.
The young woman breathed rapid-fire puffs of air too quickly to speak, but put her hands up in surrender. The Marines glared at her, but didn’t say a word. “S-sorry a-about your friend,” she whispered as her voice caught up with her lungs.