The next twenty minutes, was something I can only describe in pieces because that’s how it happened.
Disconnected fragments of intensity with no clean transitions between them.
We found the first dropped rifle a block up, lying beside a Chitauri soldier that a man in a bodega apron had apparently beaten to death with a baseball bat.
The man was still standing over it when we passed, bat in both hands, breathing hard, looking down at what he’d done with an expression that was working through several emotions simultaneously.
I picked up the weapon, checked it, handed it to Alvarez to figure out while I kept the Mossberg, and we kept moving.
The rifles were everywhere once you started looking.
The Chitauri weren’t treating their casualties, weren’t recovering their equipment, weren’t doing anything that suggested they considered losing individual soldiers to be relevant information.
They just kept coming.
That was the thing that kept reasserting itself no matter how many you put down.
The hole in the sky kept producing more of them like an assembly in a factory that didn’t have an off switch.
The city was fighting back, which was par for the course for New York.
At first it was scattered.
Random.
Little islands of resistance popping up wherever somebody finally decided they were done running.
A crew of bangers from what looked like Washington Heights had locked down an intersection behind a jackknifed delivery truck, two of them firing looted Chitauri rifles while another leaned out wild with a Tec-9 in one hand and a Yankees cap turned backwards on his head.
Couple security guards had joined them somewhere along the line, still wearing their mall cop windbreakers like that meant anything anymore.
And somehow it worked.
Not because any of them knew what they were doing.
Because somebody had to do something.
A young redheaded girl, couldn’t have been older than sixteen, hovered twenty feet off the ground above the avenue with a red bandana tied across her face.
Her hair burned like a torch in the wind, eyes glowing molten yellow as both hands came up and unleashed a stream of white-hot fireballs downrange.
The heat rolled over the street in waves.
One of the blasts caught a Chitauri skiff dead center and turned the whole thing into molten scrap midair.
Burning metal rained across the avenue while people on the ground screamed in triumph like they’d just watched somebody hit a game winner at the Garden.
Nobody around her seemed particularly surprised.
New York adapted fast.
A big dude in a black tracksuit and a gold chain thick enough to sink a boat stood in the middle of the street absorbing plasma fire directly to the chest while civilians sprinted behind him toward cover.
His skin unmarred under the impacts, blue-white energy exploding across his body uselessly.
“THAT ALL YA GOT!?” he roared back at the aliens in the most stereotypical gambino accent I’ve ever heard in my life.
Then he bent down, ripped a parking divider clean outta the pavement, and hurled it through an aliens hard enough to split the thing in half.
Mutants.
I grew up around the word the way other kids grew up around thunderstorms.
Ever-present.
Dangerous sometimes.
Political all the time, didn’t matter now.
Nobody on those streets cared who had powers and who didn’t.
Nobody cared about registration acts or editorials or protest signs or cable news debates.
The city was under attack.
That simplified people.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it, without really meaning to, I started organizing them.
It happened the way fires spread.
One thing catching another.
A guy asked me where to move civilians.
I pointed toward the subway entrances and suddenly he was relaying orders to three more people.
A woman with a looted Chitauri rifle yelled she it was dead.
I redirected a pair of construction workers carrying dead alien weapons like firewood and ten seconds later they were making supply runs across the avenue.
People started looking at me before they moved.
Not because I was the strongest guy there.
Not because I had answers.
Because I sounded like I believed we’d survive this.
That matters more than people think.
You say things with enough certainty during a disaster and exhausted terrified people will anchor themselves to you just to stop drifting.
By the time Alvarez finally got through to dispatch, crouched behind an overturned bus on 48th with the radio crackling in and out through static, there were maybe forty people moving in rough coordination around us.
Not soldiers.
Just New Yorkers.
Which honestly might’ve been worse.
“Fall back…Evacuate civilians away from Stark Tower…Assist where possible. Army en route.”
Alvarez lowered the radio slowly.
“En route,” he repeated.
I looked up at the portal above Stark Tower.
At the leviathans forcing their way through it.
At the skiffs flooding the airspace like angry hornets.
Then I looked back at the people around us.
The security guards gripping stolen alien rifles with white knuckles.
The gangbangers from Washington Heights crouched behind cover like they’d been born for urban warfare.
The EMT wrapping somebody’s leg with hands so bloody they barely looked human anymore.
The teenage girl calling herself Firestar floated above the avenue like some pissed off patron saint, flames curling around her fists.
Paulie stood in the middle of the street absorbing plasma fire with his chest while civilians hid behind him.
And all of them were looking at me now.
Waiting.
“We can’t fall back,” Alvarez said quietly.
“No,” I agreed.
Then louder.
“No, we can’t.”
The words carried harder than I expected.
People nearby stopped moving.
Heads turned automatically toward the sound of certainty in the middle of chaos.
I climbed onto the wreck of a taxi so they could all see me.
Smoke rolled between the buildings.
Sirens screamed somewhere south of us.
Another space whale roared overhead loud enough to shake loose glass from the windows above our heads.
Still, they watched me.
Scared.
Exhausted.
Waiting for somebody to tell them this wasn’t over yet.
So I did.
“Listen to me!” The avenue quieted a little.
Not fully.
Midtown was still dying around us.
But enough.
“Look around you!” I pointed down the street.
“These things came outta the sky thinkin’ this city was just gonna roll over. Thought people were gonna panic, run, hide.”
A few bitter laughs rolled through the crowd.
I pointed toward the Washington Heights crew behind the truck.
“Instead they got Hector and his boys out here runnin’ drive-bys on alien motherfuckers.”
That got a real reaction.
One of the gangbangers barked out a laugh and raised his looted rifle in the air while the others started shouting.
I pointed upward toward Firestar.
“They got a fifteen year old girl droppin’ skiffs outta the sky like she’s been trainin’ for this her whole life.”
Firestar blinked, caught completely off guard by the cheering aimed at her.
Then I pointed at Paulie.
“And they got Paulie over here built like the Holland Tunnel takin’ plasma blasts to the chest and askin’ for seconds.”
Paulie actually grinned at that, spreading his arms wide.
The tension cracked.
I could feel it happening in real time.
Fear turning into momentum.
“They ain’t invading New York,” I shouted.
“They’re gettin’ introduced to it.”
That one landed hard.
People started yelling.
Weapons raised into the air.
Somebody slammed a pipe against the side of a bus like a damn war drum.
I pointed up at the portal.
“Yeah, the army’s comin’. Good. Let ’em come. But right now?” I jabbed a finger into my own chest before sweeping it across the street.
“Right now WE are what’s here.”
I swept my arm across the avenue.
“Cops! Civilians! Mutants! Doesn’t matter! You see somebody fall, you pick ’em back up!”
Then the EMT.
“You keep people breathing.”
Then the gangbangers.
“You ugly bastards keep shooting.”
That got another wave of laughter.
I chambered a shell into the Mossberg and pointed it toward the sky full of Chitauri.
“And every single one of those things that comes down this avenue…”
The shotgun locked with a heavy metallic clack.
“We send it right back to hell.”
The roar that answered me felt physical.
Not panic anymore.
Not desperation.
Belief.
I watched it spread through them like fire catching dry wood.
Shoulders straightened.
Hands stopped shaking.
People started moving with purpose instead of fear.
Barricades got reinforced without anybody being told.
Ammo started getting redistributed.
Civilians were moved deeper into cover while better firing positions got established across the street like we’d all been fighting together for years instead of less than an hour.
Alvarez climbed up beside me on the taxi roof, staring out over the avenue and the growing chaos ahead of us.
Then he glanced sideways at me.
“The hell were you before this?” he asked.
I looked down at the people already moving because I’d told them to.
At the little army forming in the middle of Midtown.
And somewhere deep down, I realized something dangerous.
They trusted me.
“I dunno,” I admitted quietly.
Then I racked the shotgun again and looked back toward the burning sky.
“But I think I’m figuring it out.”
At Paulies advice, we made it over to a parking garage near here, were we could set up a proper defensible outpost.
By the time we reached the parking structure on 49th it wasn’t just a fallback point anymore.
It was ours.
A command post built outta panic, debris, and stubbornness.
People kept arriving in waves.
Off-duty cops.
Construction workers.
Civilians carrying stolen alien rifles with expressions that said they still couldn’t believe any of this was real.
One exhausted EMT running a medical station off a folding table.
Two mutants posted near the upper ramps acting like artillery.
Nobody voted on leadership.
Nobody had to.
I pointed, people moved.
I told somebody to cover the east approach and they did it without question.
I yelled for ammo and three separate people started gathering weapons from where we had stashed them.
At some point Alvarez stopped acting like I was helping him and started acting like I was a CO.
I can’t let them see how scared shitless I am, if I crack they’ll shatter.
And for a little while?
It worked.
We were hurting them.
Every few minutes another skiff dropped outta the sky trailing smoke and fire.
Every alien that hit the pavement got swarmed before it could stand back up.
The rooftop echoed with gunfire and screaming and the constant ugly thunder of a city refusing to die quietly.
But the portal stayed open.
And they kept coming, wave after wave after wave.
I remember thinking, somewhere around the third time I had to drag somebody back from leaning too far over the edge trying to get a shot:
Where the hell is Iron man?
That fake Captain America?
Because this had to be the sort of thing, they deal with right?
Alien invasions.
Giant flying death whales.
Apocalyptic skyline stuff.
Not an explosion.
Not an energy discharge.
Something more deliberate than either of those things, the sustained mechanical scream of repulsor engines moving at a speed that the alien skiffs, for all their alien engineering, clearly hadn’t been designed to match.
A red and gold shape cut through the airspace taking potshots at anything that wasn’t human.
A red-and-
Iron Man.
The reaction around me was instant.
People yelling.
Laughing.
Crying.
Alvarez let out this disbelieving bark of laughter beside me and slapped the side of the concrete barrier hard enough to hurt his hand.
And despite everything, despite Yusuf and the bodies and the smoke in my lungs and the exhaustion dragging at every muscle in my body, I felt it too.
Relief.
The cheer that went up from the parking structure sounded less like celebration and more like relief finally escaping human bodies all at once.
Forty people screaming themselves hoarse at a man in a metal suit half a mile away.
Me included.
Which was why none of us heard the leviathan coming.
Its shadow rolled over the rooftop.
I saw the darkness cross the concrete.
Saw heads turning too late.
Every instinct in my body fired at once.
“MOVE!”
Too late.
The leviathan slammed into the structure with enough force to make the entire building jump sideways beneath us.
Concrete exploded.
The floor vanished under my feet.
Somebody screamed my name.
Then the parking structure folded in on itself, and we went down with it.