Lana didn’t need help getting across the platform to the stairs, but she stayed close to Harry, directly against his back, hiding her face against him to keep from seeing. It was just like what she used to do with Ben when they were younger and would go to those haunted houses.
Harry was quiet as he trudged forward.
Was he scared she wondered? He didn’t say a word. Not a word.
There were three other men there, but Abby stuck close to Foster. The woman, Monica, was hysterical and needed help from others to even move.
Yes, she had vomited, that was Abby’s initial reaction, but she felt calm. It actually scared her how calm she felt. Had life made her so numb that nothing fazed her? Not even the massive amount of death around her?
By the time she reached the top level, there wasn’t anything she’d see that would surprise her. Or so she thought.
She believed that until she stepped outside.
Harry stopped about fifteen feet from the doors.
“What is it?” Lana asked.
“The sun is gonna be bright. You might want to shield your eyes.”
Lana nodded. “Harry, what do you think we’ll see out there?”
“Do you want my honest opinion?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Can you see your husband out there? He’s a shadow.”
“Yes.”
“What is he doing?” Harry asked. “He’s sitting down on the ground holding Tyler. At least that’s what it looks like.”
“Oh my God, it’s worse out there then.”
Harry only gave her a knowing look.
“Do I even want to go out there?”
“Do you have a choice?”
Lana shook her head.
Harry held out his hand. “Take it. It’s just as hard for me as it is for you.”
Lana laid her hand in his and Harry gripped it.
Together they walked outside to see what everyone else had already witnessed.
If a person kept their eyes straight ahead, Harry supposed everything looked normal. But shift them an inch and clearly life as they knew it, at least in New York, was different.
“Let the child see,” Harry told Ben. “He doesn’t have a choice anymore.”
Ben slowly turned Tyler from him, whispering that it would be okay. Tyler looked around.
“What happened? I don’t understand.” Tyler said. “Did the terrorists get us?”
“I think,” Harry walked to him and pulled him close. “I think this may be a bit more than terrorists.”
They had emerged in front of Madison Square Garden. Cars were everywhere, blocking the streets. Almost all of them had their doors open and people must have staggered out and died.
Bodies overlapped everywhere; it was the train station spilled onto the sidewalks.
A thick layer of broken glass, like a blanket of snow covered the streets.
But the eerie part was the sky line.
The smaller buildings, with the exception of broken windows, were unscathed. The taller ones were blackened on top and from where they stood they saw at least on divot in the skyline. It had happened between two skyscrapers.
Chunks of the buildings were gone. The remains were blackened. The buildings were crumbling not smoking. It was as if hell had been unleashed and took a fiery bite out of the buildings.
Breathless, Foster spoke, “Is this what nuclear war does?”
Harry shook his head. “Nah, there’d be nothing left.”
Foster chuckled sarcastically, “And this is better?”
Harry just shook his head. They stood in the street like tourists taking it all in. But he knew they had to pause and sort things out and then figure out what they were going to do next.
Because it was closed to the public, the group slipped into the Madison Square Garden where they saw only a minimal number of bodies.
Ben had placed Tyler on top of one of the concession counters as he went behind it. “So we can rule out nuclear attack, obviously. And radiation didn’t do this to these people.” He grabbed a bag of chips and gave it to Tyler. He then handed him a bottle of juice.
Lana added, “And this is obviously, like Harry said, bigger than a terrorist attack.”
“Biological?” Abby asked. “Chemical.”
“Could be chemical,” Harry said. “Biological weapons tend to generate illness, mass hysteria. Some people near the drop site may have gone all at once, but I don’t think everyone would have. Now a chemical agent… maybe it could cause what we saw.”
“How would they disperse it all at once?” Abby asked.
Harry fluttered his lips. “Maybe use a bomb. Again, thinking back to the cold war days, they did have missiles laced with chemical weapons. Whoever did this wanted the whole area wiped out at once.”
From the back of the group, almost as if he were speaking to himself, a man named Brendan spoke up. “Thermobaric. It had to be some form of Thermo baric weaponry.”
Everyone turned and looked at him. He was standing in the back eating from a bag of chips.
“It wasn’t nuclear or anything like that. There are no flames. It was like the people were snuffed out,” he said. “A chunk of that building is gone. I heard explosions three of them.”
“So did I,” Abby said.
