Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (3 page)

His right eye was watering so badly now he
couldn’t see out of it at all and his left eye was full of dust.
His whole body was trembling from coughing and he was having
difficulty breathing. The world around him had turned white. The
ground was white, the air was white, the people were white. Tay
supposed he must be white, too.

He tried to push himself up again so he could
keep going. But his hands were still wet and they slipped out from
under him.

Why were his hands so slick? Why couldn’t he
get up?

He lifted his hands to his face and squinted
at them through the tears and the dust.

Both his hands were covered in blood.

THERE WAS PAPER all over the ground so Tay
grabbed some of it and rubbed the blood off his hands. He wondered
briefly what the papers were that he was using, but he didn’t
bother to look. Paper was paper.

He couldn’t get all the blood off. He tried
to wet his hands by spitting on them, but his mouth was so dry
nothing came out.

Tay sat on the curb, hands bloody, nearly
blinded in one eye by the smoke and dust and in the other by the
hysterical woman who had scratched him. He should be doing
something to help, he thought, but what? The only thing that would
have done any real good would be to have prevented this from
happening in the first place. But now that it had happened, what
was he going to do? Direct traffic?

He could hear sirens now. They seemed to come
from everywhere at once. Half a dozen white police fast response
cars, blue and red lights frantically flashing, flew past him going
the wrong way up Orchard Road and disappeared into the smoke and
dust in the general direction of the Marriott. They were followed
by two white vans with Explosive Ordnance Disposal stenciled on
their sides.

It’s a little late for that,
Tay
thought.

After the vehicles passed, Tay pulled himself
up on a curb and sat watching the overwhelming misery all around
him, just trying to decide what to do. More and more often now he
thought that was really all his job as a policeman amounted to.
Simply witnessing misery. Not actually doing anything about it.

Tay tried to shake off the feelings of
hopelessness and lethargy flooding over him. Somehow he had
survived long enough to find himself in a world where people blew
things up for no purpose but to kill as many innocents as they
could. How could anyone live in a world like that without
hopelessness and lethargy becoming his natural state?

Tay wondered if he was in shock. Perhaps not
medically, but probably in every other way. Maybe, it occurred to
him, he should just lie down right there in Orchard Road and let
the world take a couple of turns. Wasn’t that what you were
supposed to do when you were in shock? Lie down?

But Tay didn’t lie down. He thought about it,
he thought about it for a long time and he felt as if he were
thinking about it very slowly, but he didn’t lie down.

Later, Tay would wonder how long he sat on
that curb thinking about lying down. He remembered looking at his
watch several times before he realized the hands weren’t moving.
They were frozen at 8:09. He must have broken it when he fell.

Perhaps he had only been sitting there for a
few minutes, Tay told himself after a while, but he knew it had
been much longer. How long, he really had no idea at all.

It was then that Tay realized the dust cloud
was beginning to dissipate. His right eye had stopped watering and
he could see now, at least better than he had been able to see
before, so he got his feet under him, stood up, and stumbled in
what he thought was the direction of the Marriott. The roadway was
littered with debris and he stepped cautiously, avoiding anything
that looked nasty. There were shoes everywhere for some reason,
shoes of all sizes and types, both men and women’s. Tay wondered
for a moment why there were so many shoes, but then the answer
suddenly occurred to him and he quickly pushed the question form
his mind.

Up ahead of him to the right, he could see a
mass of flashing emergency lights. He stood up and started walking
toward them.

***

Tay was almost abreast of Lucky Plaza when he
came upon two vans with military markings parked side by side just
past Mount Elizabeth Road. Tay had no memory of seeing the vans
pass, but there they were parked on Orchard Road and there was no
other way they could have gotten there so they must have passed
him. A large space in the rubble field had been cleared behind them
and a neat grid of black blankets had been laid out in the
roadway.

No, not blankets, he realized when he got
closer.

Body bags.

The bags were black and rubbery and glinted
in the flashing emergency lights as if they were wet. The whole
scene looked to Tay like one of those CNN reports of a suicide
bombing in Israel. Only much bigger. And even more chilling.

Grim-faced soldiers with neatly pressed
uniforms and gleaming black boots emerged from the rubble to Tay’s
right. He was puzzled about what they were carrying until the full
horror of it dawned on him. The soldiers were collecting pieces of
what had only a short time ago been human beings. They had found a
brass-colored hotel luggage cart somewhere and were wheeling
mangled chunks of human bodies back to where the body bags were
laid out, waiting.

How would they bag the body parts, Tay
wondered? One bag for each piece? No, there weren’t nearly enough
bags to do it that way. Tay briefly considered how they would have
to distribute the parts among the bags. All the arms in one bag and
all the legs in another? Or did they reassemble the bodies before
they bagged them? Perhaps figure out first which arm went with
which torso? Somehow that didn’t seem likely either.

In the heat, he could smell both the body
parts and the rubber of the bags. The smell made him sick to his
stomach.

***

Tay worked his way around the vans and kept
moving west. Somehow he felt he needed to find the place where the
bomb had exploded, although what difference that would make now he
had no idea. There was more debris here — chunks of concrete, bits
of metal, pieces of things that seemed almost recognizable but not
quite — and Tay knew he was getting close. At least one of the
bombs had exploded somewhere near where Orchard Road and Scotts
Road crossed at the busiest intersection in the city, the
intersection where the Singapore Marriott stood. He had no doubt of
that now.

All at once, and for no particular reason, a
hugely disturbing thought occurred to Tay.

He remembered he had heard somewhere that
suicide bombers in the Middle East frequently worked in groups.
After the initial explosions, when the rescue and recovery efforts
were in full swing, a second wave of explosions would occur.

Tay remembered thinking when he first heard
the sound of the blasts that there could be no greater evidence of
the extraordinary cruelty men were capable of inflicting on each
other than the random bombings of innocents, but perhaps he was
wrong. Targeting rescue workers with a second wave of bombing was
even more sadistic, wasn’t it? Sometimes Tay thought the end to
human barbarism would come only when mankind was wiped completely
from the universe. God help him, but he did.

Tay’s eyes scanned the ground around him as
he walked, but he didn’t linger long on anything he saw. He was on
the edge. He knew the sudden sight of a detached leg or a severed
head would push him over. He had no doubt of that, but he did not
know where he would land.

***

There was so much debris on the north side of
Orchard Road that Tay shifted his track to the south and moved in
the direction of the ION Orchard Mall. ION was Singapore’s newest
and glitziest mall and, towering over it in the tallest building on
Orchard Road, was The ION Orchard Residences, 175 of the most
expensive apartments in Singapore. Tay thought he had eaten lunch
in the mall once, but he couldn’t remember where or with whom so he
guessed it wasn’t a particularly memorable meal.

No matter how forgettable the meal might have
been, the structure itself was undeniably memorable. The mall level
was an extravaganza of swooping curves and glass-clad waves that
always made Tay think of a massive drop of quicksilver that had
somehow splashed to earth at the corner of Orchard and Scotts
Roads. Now almost every one of the tens of thousands of glass
triangles set into the building’s silver latticework were
shattered, leaving the place looking like it had passed through the
apocalypse. Perhaps it had.

Tay glanced over at the opposite side of
Orchard where the Marriott was. It took him a moment to process
what he saw there. When he did, he felt his mouth begin to open
very slowly.

The thirty-story Marriott tower that had for
many years been one of Singapore’s most recognizable landmarks had
been cleaved exactly in half. It looked as if it had been sliced
straight through by a giant ax. He could see inside open hotel
rooms, a cut-away view that seemed more like a computer simulation
than reality.

Right in front of him a bus with all its
windows blown out sat sideways across Orchard Road. Tay stopped
next to it and gaped at the Marriott. The bomb must have been
detonated in the driveway somewhere near its entrance. This was no
suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest. This had been a truck
bomb, a big one. But he had heard three separate explosions, Tay
remembered. Where had the other two occurred? And were they this
bad? If they were, God help them all.

Tay took a couple of steps backward in an
involuntary retreat from the horror in front of him. His left foot
slipped in something slick and he stumbled over a tattered
mattress. He tried to steady himself, but he was off balance and
fell across the mattress and up against one of the bus’s big
tires.

Tay’s first thought was how embarrassed he
was by that. Surrounded by so much misery, and here he was lying on
a mattress. It just didn’t seem right to him.

***

And that was exactly where Tay was — lying on
the mattress, his back up against the bus tire — when the whole
world abruptly turned white.

The first surge of light was followed a
moment later by the blast wave of a mammoth explosion from the
direction of the ION Orchard. A powerful pressure wave blew a
rolling wall of flames across what was left of Orchard Road
directly toward the Marriott. The very oxygen in the air ignited
and the release of gas, heat, and light felt to Tay like the world
was ending.

And maybe it was.

This fourth bomb collected the hundreds of
thousands of shards of broken glass at the shopping mall that had
been created by the first three explosions and hurled them back
like a cloud of razor sharp knives. Rescue workers caught in the
open were shredded. Most of them would later have to be identified
by DNA. Nothing left of the bodies was big enough to recognize.

Tay’s body was protected by the heavy rubber
bus tire, and that was what saved his life.

The tire was less effective in protecting Tay
from the compression wave than it was from the cloud of glass, but
it was effective enough. The wave rolled over the ground like a
tsunami, battering and in some cases entirely demolishing the
internal organs of those who took its full force. Tay did not take
its full force because of the big rubber bus tire.

The wave snapped his head first one way and
then back the other way. He felt like he had been stabbed with
sharpened pencils in both ears. He wondered if his eardrums had
been broken.

Then the nausea overcame him and he began to
lose consciousness. His last thought before he passed out was
this.

Goddamned motherfucking barbarians. I’ll find
every last one of them and I’ll kill them myself.

WAKING UP IN a hospital is a disorienting
experience for anyone. And when Tay woke up, that’s exactly what he
was: disoriented.

For a moment — pretty much like almost
everyone else who has survived a traumatic event, lost
consciousness, and awakened in a hospital — Tay’s first thought was
that he just had a horrible dream. But then he registered the drip
running into a vein in his left arm, the electrodes stuck to
various parts of his body, and the slightly ominous beeping of
medical equipment somewhere just out of sight, and he knew it had
not been a dream.

“Hello, sir. Welcome back.”

Tay rolled his head toward the voice and
found his Sergeant, Robbie Kang, sitting in a straight-backed chair
to the left side of his bed. Kang had been Tay’s sergeant ever
since he came to CID. He was tall and gangly for a Singaporean and
he wore black glasses that were forever sliding down his nose.

“How bad?” Tay asked.

“They say you’ll be fine, sir. A week or so
of rest and you’ll be right as rain.”

“Not me.” Tay lifted a hand weakly and
pointed a finger in the direction where he thought the outside
world probably was. “Out there. How bad?”

Kang took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes
with his free hand. Tay could see now how tired he looked.

“Bad,” Kang said. “Really bad, sir.”

Tay said nothing. He just waited for the
rest.

“They find more bodies every day,” Kang went
on, rubbing his eyes some more. “Two days ago the death toll was
about two hundred. Now it’s over three hundred with several hundred
missing and a thousand more injured.”

“Two days ago? How long have I been in
here?”

“Since Wednesday, sir. The night it
happened.”

“What’s today?”

“Saturday.” Kang put his glasses back on. His
mouth formed a smile, but his eyes didn’t join in. “You had us
worried there, sir. The doctor said you’d be fine, but…well, when
you didn’t wake up, we all started to wonder if—”