Fall of Man (Book 1): The Break Read online

  He couldn’t imagine what was going on up there, but the room didn’t seem to have gotten any hotter in the hour or so since the 747 slammed down to earth. Chances were the explosion was localized and the block above him was relatively intact, except for the initial damage from the concussive force of the impact. The only way to find out for sure, of course, was to head back to the surface. And he wasn’t about to do that.

  At least, not yet. Or anytime today. Besides the damage, there were all the other dangers out there. The human kind.

  Cole glanced down at his watch. The hands glowed brightly in the dark.

  7:17 p.m.

  Emily had bought him the watch for his birthday two years ago, about the same time they decided to have a baby. It was a big move for both of them, and the prospect of being responsible for a new life was…daunting, to put it mildly.

  Emily…

  He had tried calling her earlier. His cell phone was in his pocket, but he couldn’t get reception down here. The very thing that was keeping him safe was blocking any chance of getting a signal in or out. But he did see that she had tried to call him earlier when he was in the back of the Mercedes, except he had put the phone on vibrate before the meeting and hadn’t changed the setting even when he called her earlier.

  There were two missed calls, both from Emily’s phone. The first one was an hour before Donnie tried to kill him, while Cole was napping, and the second came minutes after the attempted murder. He’d been outside on the street during that part, with the truck driver on top of him. No shock he hadn’t felt the phone vibrating.

  The second phone call gave him hope, because it meant whatever had happened to Donnie, to the trucker, and all the other people with bloodied eyes, Emily had been spared. That second missed call had come after people started going mad around him.

  Unless, of course, he was assuming he had the timetable correct. For all he knew—

  No. I’m right. She’s fine, and home, and waiting for me.

  “She’s probably crazy right now, like the others,” the Voice said. He was surprised to hear the Voice pipe up. It sounded much louder than before, but maybe that was because it was the only thing Cole could hear down here.

  Shut up, Cole thought.

  “I’m just stating the obvious.”

  You don’t know shit. She’s fine.

  “And how do you know that?”

  I would feel it if she wasn’t.

  “Bullshit,” the Voice said, before it started laughing.

  Cole hated it when the Voice laughed, because it was usually laughing at him. It wasn’t a good feeling to have the Devil laughing at you.

  I would feel it, Cole thought again.

  For whatever reason, the Voice kept quiet this time.

  With no phone reception, Cole couldn’t text or use the Internet, which left him staring at a picture of Emily on his phone’s background wallpaper. It was an earlier photo of her, minus the baby bump that would eventually come. Emily was the photographer in the family. Even the photo he was looking at now was a selfie she had snapped and transferred onto his phone in secret. Seeing her on his wallpaper had been a nice surprise.

  There was the brief sound of clothes rustling from somewhere in the basement. Then the woman’s voice, soft, as if she was afraid someone might hear her. “Do you have a name?”

  “Cole,” he said, putting the phone away.

  He hadn’t bothered to keep his voice down. There was no point. No one upstairs was going to hear them anyway.

  “I’m Zoe,” she said.

  “Nice to meet you, Zoe.”

  “What happened? Up there, in the streets?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “People were trying to kill each other. Everyone…” She paused for a moment. Then, “I saw a woman beat her husband to death with a piece of loose brick.”

  I saw schoolboys attack a 300-pound truck driver while he was busy bashing someone else’s head in. I win.

  “Their eyes,” Zoe continued. “There was something wrong with their eyes. Did you see it? They were bleeding out of their eyes.”

  He imagined the girl, Ashley, listening in on their conversation, and Cole didn’t want to think about what the little kid had already witnessed with her own eyes. He still couldn’t forget every bloody moment himself—Donnie, the truck driver, the couple, the old lady—and he’d seen more than most people even before today.

  “I saw it, too,” Cole said.

  “What happened?” Zoe asked again.

  “I don’t know. Their heartbeat…”

  “Heartbeat?”

  “One of them was on top of me, and his heart was beating like a runaway train. Like he was swimming in adrenaline.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Adrenaline lets us do things we wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.”

  “I still don’t understand…”

  “Have you ever heard the stories about mothers lifting cars to save their children?”

  “Yes. Those are real?”

  “It’s not because they’re superheroes. It’s adrenaline.”

  “It lets you lift cars?”

  “It lets you do a lot of things. Lift cars, attack a 300-pound man, or murder someone with your fists.”

  And get shot and keep going, he thought, but didn’t add. He didn’t think she needed to know that much.

  “Where’d you get the sawed-off?” he asked instead.

  “The what?” Zoe said.

  “The shotgun.”

  “Oh. It was under the bar.”

  “How did you get past the fighting outside?”

  “We sneaked in through the back. I crashed our car nearby, trying to get away from a pile-up.” Then, almost as if in afterthought, “It’s not loaded, you know.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “The shotgun.”

  Cole stared down at the sawed-off. He could barely make out its twin black barrels in the dark. He smirked. No wonder she was trying to hit him with it instead of just pulling the trigger and blowing his head off.

  “You were lucky,” the Voice piped back up. “You might not be so lucky tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow? I just hope I live through the rest of today.

  “Now that’s cup-half-empty thinking.”

  “It was still a dumb thing to do, attacking me like that,” Cole said out loud. “I could have really hurt you.”

  “I’m sorry, but with everything happening …” Zoe said.

  Emily would do the same thing, Cole thought.

  No, that wasn’t true. Emily wouldn’t have pointed the shotgun at him and waited for him to see it and react. She would have just pulled the trigger.

  “I know,” he said.

  “What do you think happened up there?” Zoe asked.

  “You already asked me that, and I still have no idea since the last time.”

  “But did you see the way they were attacking each other? They were like animals. What would make people do something like that?”

  He remembered Donnie and the sound of his neck breaking. Then the truck driver, who was nearly unstoppable thanks to a combination of fat and bulk and flooding adrenaline. It took those schoolchildren to save Cole’s life, and he was pretty sure they hadn’t done it on purpose.

  Zoe continued: “A woman in a car next to us just started attacking the driver next to her with her phone. There was blood all over the window. It was horrifying. Everyone just started attacking each other. Teenagers on skateboards, shoppers… It’s like they were possessed by demons.”

  “I don’t believe in demons.”

  “Neither did I…”

  “There’s an explanation for all of this,” the Voice said.

  Like what?

  “I don’t know, but there is one.”

  Let me know when you find the answer.

  “Sure thing, buddy,” the Voice said, laughing.

  “Do you think help’s coming?” Zoe was asking him.

  Help? Cole
hadn’t even thought about that. In his experience, waiting for other people to save you was only begging for disappointment.

  “Not if what happened up there is happening all across the city,” he said instead.

  “It’s some kind of epidemic, you think? Maybe some kind of airborne virus, turning people mad. I’ve seen documentaries about something like this happening. Someone messes up in a lab somewhere, a super strain of disease from Africa mutates…”

  “You’ve been watching too much TV.”

  “So what do you think is happening out there?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t have any theories. Let’s just wait it out and see what happens tomorrow. Chances are there is probably water down here. Maybe spirits.”

  “Spirits?” a squeaky voice said, alarmed. “Like ghosts, Mommy?”

  Cole smiled to himself. “Alcohol. I meant alcohol.”

  “So, not ghosts?”

  “No, sweetheart, not ghosts,” Zoe said.

  “Oh,” the squeaky voice said.

  “This is my daughter Ashley.”

  “Hi, Ashley,” Cole said.

  “Hi,” the girl said, in that shy way kids spoke when talking to strangers. “I’m cold, Mommy.”

  More rustling of clothes, followed by Zoe asking, “Better?”

  “Better,” Ashley said.

  No one said anything after that.

  A minute of silence became two, then five, then almost an hour went by without anyone speaking. Cole swore he had detected a series of small explosions in the background, but he couldn’t figure out what had caused them. Gunshots, too, but again, he couldn’t be sure.

  “Mommy?” Ashley said after a while.

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “Are we going to be okay?”

  “Of course we are. We’ll be just fine.”

  Zoe either believed what she had just told her daughter, or she was a very convincing liar, because Cole could barely detect any wavering in her voice.

  “We’ll be fine,” Zoe said again, softer this time.

  Cole wondered if the repetition was supposed to convince the girl or the mother. Maybe a little of both.

  He thought about Emily instead. Alone, at the lake house. He would have been terrified for her if he didn’t know what she was capable of. Emily was the kind of woman who knew how to take care of herself.

  Even so, he wished the damn phone would work so he could call her and tell her that he was coming home soon.

  And like Zoe with her daughter, he would have been lying through his teeth, too.

  He opened his eyes around midnight to the faint pops of gunfire. And this time, he was sure it was gunfire.

  There weren’t a lot of gun-carrying citizens in the city, thanks to the state’s stringent gun laws. So who was doing the shooting? Cops? Military? Would the military be called in in response to earlier today? It was a reasonable conclusion.

  Pop…pop…pop…

  They were coming from a distance and sounded more like wet firecrackers than the familiar staccato of weapons. Cole would recognize the noise anywhere; he used to go to sleep and wake up to them.

  But that was a long time ago, in a past life.

  He wasn’t the only one who could hear the gunfire, as it turned out.

  “What is that?” Zoe, her voice groggy, asked from somewhere in the darkness.

  “Gunshots,” Cole said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mommy?” Ashley’s voice, just as groggy—if not even more so—as her mother’s.

  “It’s nothing, baby. Go back to sleep.”

  The faded pop-pop-pop continued for some time, occasionally broken by the screeching of sirens.

  Sometime around one in the morning, Cole thought he heard explosions, just close enough for him to know they were happening in the city.

  This time, Zoe didn’t wake up to the noise. He knew that because he could hear her and the girl snoring loudly nearby.

  “They’ve got the right idea,” the Voice said. “Go to sleep. You’re going to need all the rest you can get for tomorrow.”

  He lay down on the cold and hard concrete, while still keeping the door at the top of the stairs within sight. He kept waiting for it to burst open, for a gang of men with bloodshot red eyes to rush inside and zero in on him to finish what they had begun earlier today.

  But no one came.

  At least, not yet.

  Cole’s thoughts were of Emily as he went to sleep.

  They were always about Emily.

  Day 2

  Chapter 6

  “Anything?” Zoe asked.

  Cole shook his head. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Is that possible? After everything that happened yesterday?”

  He didn’t answer her right away. But it was a good question. Last night had sounded like a war zone, only to turn into…this. Whatever “this” was.

  At the moment, “this” was the same eerie silence he had woken up to.

  “What else happened last night?” the Voice asked.

  That was a good question, too.

  “Of course it is. Or I wouldn’t have asked it.”

  Cole snickered.

  “Did you say something?” Zoe asked.

  “No.”

  “I thought…”

  “Just something in my throat.”

  “Oh.”

  “Nice save,” the Voice said, laughing.

  Cole focused on the basement door. The metal surface was slightly cold to the touch and not the scalding hot of something that had been stewing in a forest of fire, which was one of his fears: That the bar, along with the neighborhood, had caught on fire either because of the plane crash or something else igniting last night.

  He pressed his ear against the smooth stainless steel surface and listened. Nothing. Not a damn thing. He hadn’t expected voices or activity on the other side, but some hints that civilization had continued as he slept. If not directly outside the door, then in the vicinity.

  Except, there was nothing.

  “Not good,” the Voice said.

  Nope.

  “So be ready.”

  For what?

  “For anything. And everything.”

  Gee, that’s helpful.

  “Hey, I know what you know, buddy,” the Voice said with a short laugh. “Let’s not make this more complicated than that.”

  Cole pulled away from the door and glanced back at Zoe. Ashley’s mother was three steps down the stairs behind him. Ashley herself was waiting farther down the basement.

  “Nothing?” Zoe asked.

  He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “What do you think that means?”

  “It could be anything. Or nothing.”

  “So what do we do now? We can’t stay down here forever, can we?”

  He thought about Emily, about the baby growing inside her belly...

  “No, we can’t stay here forever,” Cole said.

  He turned back to the door and placed his hand on the cold lever.

  Zoe’s hand grabbed his other arm. “Wait.”

  He looked back. “What’s wrong?”

  “You don’t know what’s out there.”

  “I thought we already went through this.”

  “I’m…scared.”

  She had taken another step toward him while his back was turned, and he could easily make out the fear in her eyes. Like her daughter, Zoe’s eyes were a deep shade of green, and her blonde hair made her easily visible even in the semidarkness of the basement.

  “So am I,” Cole said.

  “You’re scared, too?” Zoe asked. He thought he could detect doubt in her voice.

  “I don’t know what’s happening out there, and I need to get home. I have to get home. My wife and unborn child are by themselves. So, yeah, I’m scared. For them. For us. For everyone.”

  Zoe let go of his arm. “Maybe we should wait.”

  “For what?”r />
  “I don’t know. What time is it?”

  He glanced down at his watch. “Just after eight.”

  “Noon. Can we wait until noon?”

  Cole didn’t want to wait. Besides, what was four more hours going to matter? But seeing the worry on Zoe’s face—not just for herself, but for her daughter, hiding somewhere down there behind her…

  “Leave them,” the Voice said. “You don’t need the hassle. Get home to Emily. That’s the mission.”

  I can’t just leave them.

  “Yes, you can. You don’t know these people.”

  Emily wouldn’t leave them.

  “Emily’s not here. Don’t be an idiot.”

  He sighed, and said, “We’ll wait two more hours. Then we have to find out what’s out there.”

  She nodded, relieved. “Thank you.”

  “You’ve gone soft, buddy,” the Voice said, laughing.

  Oh, shut up, Cole thought.

  He had two hours to kill (“Whose fault is that?” the Voice asked), so Cole spent most of it looking through the basement. Or feeling his way from one end of the room to the other, anyway. Although his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, he still managed to bump into a few shelves and crates and boxes along the way.

  Basements sometimes had emergency power, but Billy’s Pub wasn’t one of them. Which meant it probably didn’t have a refrigerator down here either. But it was still a bar, and though it took a while, Cole eventually found a shelf lined with bottles. He could barely read the labels, but they looked like a wide selection of imported and domestic whiskey. Not a single wine among the collection, though. He was hoping to find some bottled water but located crates of domestically brewed craft beers stacked on the floor nearby instead.

  He considered quenching his thirst with a beer or two but decided he needed all of his awareness when he finally opened the upstairs door. Even though American beer was more water than alcohol anyway, he didn’t want to take the chance.

  “Pussy,” the Voice said.

  Whatever.

  The lack of sounds beyond the basement bothered him. He had been hoping to hear activity—if not first responders, then some kind of signal they weren’t the only people still in the city.