“Even a tiny spark can light the way. Be the spark, kid.” – Killowog
Ezekiel Bastien Ross
Midtown Manhattan, New York City , New York, U.S.A
May 4th, 2012
There’s a moment whenever disaster strikes.
A silent thrum in the air that seems to pull everything into itself before it explodes outward.
The moment before a tsunami hits the shore.
Before a hurricane tears through a city.
In moments like that you’d think people’s first instinct would be to run, to put as much distance between themselves and whatever’s coming as their legs would allow.
You’d be wrong.
Every time.
Consistently, predictably, frustratingly wrong.
People freeze.
They stand there and stare at disaster until it gets close enough to stop being an abstract thing in the distance and starts being a thing that is specifically happening to them, personally, right now.
It’s not stupidity exactly, or at least not only stupidity.
It’s the brain doing what the brain does when it receives input it has no filing system for, stalling out, demanding more data, refusing to commit to a response until the situation becomes undeniable.
A patch of bruised violet nothing opening up in the middle of a clear May morning above one of the most recognizable buildings in the world is enough to make an entire street full of New Yorkers look up in collective silence.
And I fell prey to it too.
I’m not proud of it.
Probably thirty seconds, maybe less, where I just stood there on 45th with my halal container going cold in my hands and my neck craned back and my brain running its stall routine, cycling through explanations that each collapsed faster than the last.
Weather phenomenon.
Military test.
Some Stark Industries thing that had gone sideways.
Nah.
My gut told me this was different.
The vortex above Stark Tower wasn’t just sitting there.
It looked hungry.
Like somebody had cut a hole into somewhere people were never supposed to look, and now that hole was looking back.
Then the first creature came through.
Massive and armored and moving through the gap in the sky with the slow terrible certainty of something that had done this before, on other worlds, above other cities that no longer existed to describe what came next.
Behind it, smaller, faster, the skiffs dropped through in formation, and on them the soldiers, and in my chest something deep and cold and very certain sank all the way to the floor.
The first wave came low, riding their skiffs in tight formation above the avenue, dropping some alien creatures onto streets, their roars and the sound of the energy weapons discharging was nothing like gunfire.
Sharper and more immediate, the kind of sound that bypassed the ears and registered directly in the chest.
The food stand a couple of feet to my left exploded.
The shockwave knocked me sideways into a parked cab, the impact singing up my back, and the halal container finally left my hands, rice and chicken scattering across the pavement in a wide arc.
I hit the cab door and stayed there for a second, ears ringing, and when I looked back at where the stand had been there was nothing left of it.
Nothing left of Yusuf either.
He had been closer to it than I was.
I looked at that fact for exactly one second, felt it land somewhere deep and permanent, and then I shoved it somewhere behind a locked door in my head.
Not now.
You learn real quick growing up where I did that panic is a luxury.
Grief too, sometimes.
They wait their turn or they kill you.
Right now there were still people alive on this street.
That was the only thing that mattered.
I straightened up.
Glass rained down from the office building above, a cascade of bright fragments catching the portal light as they fell, turning the air briefly beautiful in a way that had no business being beautiful given everything else happening simultaneously.
Around me, Midtown was coming apart at the seams.
People were running in every direction like ants in a kicked ant hill, each person following their own private terror, which meant they were running into each other, knocking each other down, creating new obstacles out of people.
A woman in office clothes had gone down hard on the sidewalk, briefcase sliding away from her, and nobody was stopping because nobody was looking at anything except the thing they were running from.
A cab had swerved to avoid something and mounted the curb, its front end buried in a news stand, the driver’s side door hanging open and swinging gently.
Further up the avenue a skiff was making a slow predatory pass at rooftop height, the aliens aboard it firing down into the street.
My training kicked in before my brain finished catching up.
The muscle memory of six months at the academy and a year of probationary work that had ended badly but had left more behind than I’d given it credit for.
The academy taught you a lot of things you forgot and a few things you didn’t.
How to move people was one of the ones that stuck.
“MOVE!” I put everything I had into it.
“GET OFF THE STREET. INSIDE, NOW! MOVE YOUR ASS!”
I yelled at them as I ran to the woman on the floor before the mob could finish the job the explosion had started, got a hand under her arm and pulled her upright in one motion, and turned back to the street.
“I got you. C’mon. Eyes forward.”
“What are they, what is that, what…”
“Lady, now is not the time. Lobby’s right there. Move.”
An authoritative voice in a crowd of panicking people is a gravitational field.
People orient toward it automatically, the way plants orient toward light, not because they’ve evaluated the source and found it credible but because the alternative is continuing to run in a direction chosen by pure fear, and something in the lizard brain understands that this is suboptimal.
A few heads turned.
That was enough.
People moved toward people who were moving with purpose.
It was a crowd dynamic as old as crowds themselves and I used it, stepping into the middle of the sidewalk and directing the flow of bodies toward the nearest lobby entrance with both arms, the way I’d been taught to direct traffic during the months when that had still been my job.
The woman I’d pulled up was moving on her own now, swept along by the current of people heading for the lobby, which meant my hands were free.
I scanned the street.
There.
There was a man pressed flat against the wall of the office building behind me, big guy, construction build, hard hat still on his head somehow, staring at the sky with his mouth open and his feet completely unresponsive to the situation.
I got in front of him, put myself in his line of sight, and waited until his eyes came down to mine.
“Yo.” I pointed at him.
“Big man. You’re with me.”
He blinked at me.
Not processing.
“Hey.” I snapped my fingers once, sharp, directly in front of his face.
“Stay with me. What’s your name?”
“D-Danny.”
“Aight Danny, listen to me.” I kept my voice steady.
Grounded.
“Everybody out here lookin’ for somebody to follow right now. You built like a whole linebacker. Congrats, today that’s your problem.”
Something twitched behind his eyes.
“I need you helping me get people inside. Can you do that or am I givin’ this speech to the wrong dude?”
He looked past me at the crowd.
At the screaming.
At the people stumbling over each other trying to get away.
Then he swallowed hard and nodded.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Yeah okay. I got it.”
“Good. Take that entrance. Keep people moving. Nobody stops in the doorway, nobody falls behind. If somebody eats pavement, you pick ’em up first. Got me?”
He was already moving.
“Got it.”
I turned back to the street.
The avenue was thinning as people found lobbies and subway entrances and the narrow gaps between buildings that offered at least the illusion of cover.
The skiff had moved further up the block, which bought maybe a minute before it completed its pass and came back around.
I used it, moving fast, scanning faces and body language for anyone who hadn’t found their direction yet, flagging them toward the entrance with quick decisive gestures that left no room for interpretation.
Then I heard it.
Gunfire.
Service pistol, the sharp report of a Glock, coming from behind an overturned cruiser about forty meters up the block.
I tracked the sound and found him, an NYPD officer, young, maybe mid-twenties.
Crouched behind the driver’s side door with his weapon up and his radio screaming static in his other hand.
He fired twice at the skiff making a low pass above him, the rounds sparking uselessly off the hull, and then ducked as the return fire tore through the cruiser’s roof and hood in a line of bright cratered impacts.
The second Chitauri in the skiff leaned out and fired down at an angle, the blast blowing out the cruiser’s rear window and sending the officer scrambling to the front of the vehicle on his hands and knees.
He came up against the front bumper, back to the engine block, and racked a fresh mag.
“OFFICER DOWN!” His voice cracked through the radio, raw and high.
“OFFICER DOWN, 45th AND SIXTH, REQUESTING BACKUP, MULTIPLE HOSTILE CONTACTS, REQUESTING IMMEDIATE BACKUP!”
The skiff banked wide, coming around in a slow arc to get a better angle on him.
The officer saw it happening and knew exactly what it meant, his eyes tracking the movement, but the look on his face told me enough.
He thought he was dead already.
I was already moving.
I crossed the distance at a dead sprint, closing the gap in the seconds the skiff was still banking, and put myself between him and the incoming angle just as the Chitauri aboard it leveled its weapon.
The blast hit the overturned hot dog cart I’d dragged in front of us instead of either of us, the metal erupting in a shower of fragments and scalding steam that sprayed across the pavement and painted the side of the cruiser in a mess of what had recently been someone’s lunch.
The officer stared at me from behind the engine block with the expression of a man who had just been pulled back from the edge of a cliff.
“What the hell are you doing!?” he demanded, breathing hard.
“Same thing you’re doing,” I said, dropping down beside him.
“Fighting back.” I checked the sight lines over the hood of the cruiser.
The skiff was completing its bank, repositioning about two hundred meters up the avenue, taking its time.
Whatever they were, they weren’t worried about us.
“You hit anything yet?”
“Hull. Twice. Didn’t do much.”
“Try the riders instead of the hull.” I looked at his nameplate.
ALVAREZ.
“What’s your name?” I asked him anyway
“Ruben, Alvarez.” He responded
“Alvarez, got it, I’m Ross. How many rounds you got?”
He did a fast check.
“Two mags after this one.”
“You got backup coming?”
“Called it in.” He glanced at his radio.
“Nobody’s answering.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Whole city is on fire, they’re probably busy.” I looked at the trunk of the cruiser and made a decision.
“You got a key for that?”
He looked at the trunk.
Then at me.
“Why?”
“Because I need what’s in it more than it needs to be locked right now.”
“You a cop?”
“I was a boot, flunked out,” I said.
“Six months academy, one year probationary. Didn’t finish.”
Something shifted in his expression that started as disbelief and was working its way toward outrage.
“You’re telling me you’re a civilian.”
“I’m telling you I know how to shoot, I did the training, I can help.”
A blast from the skiff tore through the air above the cruiser close enough to feel the heat displacement of it.
Alvarez ducked instinctively, his objection evaporating mid-formation.
“Ah, fuck it,” he muttered, and unclipped the key from his belt.
I moved along the side of the cruiser in a low crouch, keeping the vehicle between me and the skiff’s current angle, and got the trunk open.
Standard patrol loadout, flares, first aid kit, a spike strip still in its bag, and there in the mount along the left side, a Mossberg 500 in its bracket with a shell carrier velcroed to the stock.
I pulled it free and checked the load.
“Seriously?” I muttered.
Rubber slugs.
Less than ideal, but the shell carrier had six brass-hulled alternates clipped alongside it, the real kind, and I broke the weapon open and started swapping them out by feel, keeping my eyes on the skiff’s position over the top of the trunk lid.
“You know how to use that?” Alvarez called from the front of the cruiser.
“Second in my class, I wasn’t as good as Davis, but hell who is.” I said.
The Mossberg was familiar in the way of things you’d handled enough times that your hands remembered even when the context was different.
Six months of qualifications.
A year of carrying one in the cruiser and never firing it outside a range.
The weight of it settled into my grip like it recognized me.
I moved back to the front of the cruiser, keeping low, and came up beside Alvarez.
“Covering fire,” I said.
“I need you to make them look at you.”
He looked at the skiff, which was coming back around for another pass, low and slow and contemptuous.
Then at me.
Then at the Mossberg.
“That’s not going to punch through their hull either,” he said.
“I’m not aiming at the hull.”
He worked through that for a second.
Then he nodded once, squared himself behind the cruiser door, and waited for my signal.
I moved to the rear corner of the cruiser, putting the engine block between me and the skiff’s direct line, and found my angle.
The skiff was coming in from the northwest, which meant it was going to pass broadside to me for approximately three seconds before it had a firing angle on Alvarez’s position.
The rider in front was the driver.
The rider at the rear was the gunner, or whatever the equivalent was for a vehicle that didn’t have a steering wheel in any conventional sense.
I wanted the one at the rear.
“Now,” I said.
Alvarez rose from behind the door and put three rounds toward the skiff in quick succession, the shots sparking off the hull exactly as expected, accomplishing nothing structural but doing exactly what I needed them to do, drawing the gunner’s attention forward and away from my position at the corner.
The skiff adjusted its angle toward Alvarez.
Which meant it turned.
Which meant the rider at the rear came around to face me.
I took the shot.
The Mossberg kicked hard against my shoulder and the slug crossed the distance in a fraction of a second and connected with the Chitauri in the front position with an impact I felt rather than heard over the ringing in my ears.
The rider went sideways off the skiff.
The skiff lurched.
Without direction it lost whatever was keeping it on its flight path, the front end dipping, the whole thing yawing hard to the right before the momentum carried it forward and down in a long uncontrolled arc that ended in the facade of a parking structure halfway up the block.
The impact was significant.
The fireball that followed was more so.
Alvarez came around from behind the door and stood beside me, both of us watching the smoke rise.
“Huh,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
My shoulder was going to feel that tomorrow.
Assuming there was a tomorrow in the conventional sense, which given the current state of the avenue above us was not something I was prepared to take for granted.
“Hey,” I said.
“C’mon. Maybe we can jack one of their guns.”
Maybe it was the way I said it, or maybe it was the fact I’d dragged him back from becoming a scorch mark on 45th, but Alvarez stopped arguing after that.
He gave one last look at the overturned cruiser, at the body still half inside it, jaw tight in a way that told me he’d be seeing that later when he closed his eyes, then he nodded once.