Horrible things happen to people every day. You hear about them all the time on the radio when you’re driving to work in the morning, or while you’re waiting to fill your coffee mug at work. They crop up in the news stories you read on the web when you’re supposed to be working on the fourth quarter projections. Your mom forwards email about them to you to prove the point that your life isn’t as bad you seem to think it is. Your running partners rehash gory details on your lunchtime run. At night, every commercial break during your favorite sitcom advertises whatever latest tragedy will top the ten o’clock news, which you of course end up watching. We’re surrounded by a constant stream of horrors affecting other people.
We never think they’re going to affect us.

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It was what passed for a normal morning for Maddy. She’d gotten up twenty-five minutes after she accidently turned her alarm clock off, which was fifteen minutes after it had started beeping. The only reason she’d managed to get up at all was because Princess, the yippy little dog that belonged to old Mr. Eilerson upstairs had had a barking fit, which had scared Jordan, her cat, so badly that he’d leaped onto her stomach with all his claws out. She’d woken up sitting up, seen the clock, and leapt out of bed, swearing, unceremoniously dumping Jordan on the floor in the process. As she rushed through her morning routine, she’d managed to cut her leg twice while shaving, get white deodorant spots on her black sweater, and almost lost a contact down the drain. By the time she made it out to the kitchen she’d missed the train, so she grabbed a yogurt smoothie and a granola bar and ran out the door to grab a taxi, swearing as Jordan tried to run between her legs.
At least once she was in the taxi she could relax. She leaned her head back on the seat and sighed, frustrated that once again she was running more than thirty minutes behind schedule, her thoughts scattered and a vague feeling of panic floating around the back of her head. Her days always seemed to start this way, which, she reflected, was probably a direct result of too little sleep and too much stress.
Madagascar Whitney Delmorian, known as Maddy by her friends, was, by all measure, a very attractive woman. She had long, auburn hair that she usually kept in a low ponytail, intelligent brown eyes, a stunning smile, and a figure a bit too voluptuous to be called athletic. She lived in [some moderate place in New York], and she worked as a programmer for a company that made computer security software. She was not a morning person.
“You a model?” the driver asked sudddenly, startling Maddy out of her thoughts. He was staring at her in the rearview mirror, seemingly oblivious to the murderous crosstown traffic. “You look like a model. Wait’ll I tell my kids I drove a model today! They’ll think I’m lying. They never believe me. Kids these days; I tell ya...” He launched into a diatribe that seemed to be directed against everyone under the age of forty, most especially those whose pants “is allus down round their knees with their unders showin’.” Like most midtown cab drivers, he never gave Maddy a chance to respond, which, despite having lived in the city for the last five years, she was still inclined to do. Growing up with “Minnesota nice” had conditioned her to try to make polite, meaningless conversation when prompted, a decidedly un-New York trait.
After another twenty minutes of rambling, ageist soliloquy, she was finally at Secure Computing’s headquarters in Queens. The building itself was nothing special; from the outside it looked more like an abandoned warehouse than an office complex, but the crime in the neighborhood was surprisingly low, as was the rent. Secure was one of those companies that valued a lack of publicity over a fancy building, and many of their clients appreciated the anonymity the nondescript building provided.
Maddy felt a great sense of relief as she paid the driver and escaped into the entryway. She fished around in her bag and fished out her ID holder, which she clipped to her belt. She slapped her ID card against the reader set into the wall by the service doors and pushed them open when the lock clicked. It was a dark, overcast day outside, and the harsh brightness of the fluorescent lights made her eyes hurt as she hurried across the small room to the heavy metal doors set in the far wall. She swiped the card through the wall-mounted reader this time, as well as typing in an amazingly long string of numbers and letters on the adjacent keypad. A small LED on the keypad blinked red for several seconds before turning green. As it did, the locks in the door disengaged with an audible thunk. She grabbed the door handle and pushed it open, revealing a long, brightly lit, vaguely antiseptic corridor with several heavy metal doors set in each side. Security cameras were placed at fifteen foot intervals the entire length of the corridor, including four that swung endlessly moved back and forth, tracking up and down the corridor.
The door slammed shut behind her, making her jump. She had always thought the security was excessive; they wrote software for a living, and the most valuable things on the premises were the ideas in the programmers’ heads, which weren’t readily convertible into cash for drugs, which meant that nobody had ever even tried to physically break in. There were electronic attacks daily, but, as the CIO was always joking, if they couldn’t repel such attacks, they shouldn’t be in business anyway, right? She made a face at the nearest camera as she walked down the hall to her team’s offices. She knew that the security team that monitored the cameras saved the footage they thought was “hot,” which made all of the women who worked there very uncomfortable. Her boss (and all of the other supervisors, for that matter) didn’t seem to understand why it was a problem, and none of the few women were willing to risk their generous salaries by filing a formal complaint.
She reached the fourth door on the right, which led the her team’s cubes and swiped her card again. When the LED turned green, she entered a different code onto the keypad and pulled the door open. She’d been panicked that somehow she’d be the last one into the office, even though nobody else on the team seemed to care what time anyone else came or went, but the room was empty and dark, with only the glow of the monitors making it possible to make her way to her desk without bruising a shin on the furniture. She dropped her bag by her chair, flipped on her desk lamps and the lava lamp on top of the filing cabinet, and sat down with a sigh.
Maddy’s workspace was by far the neatest of the five in the room. Four of them, including hers, were in cubes arranged in an X in the center of the room; the fifth was by itself against the wall farthest from the door. Empty soda cans, empty and crumpled bags of chips, and piles of paper littered every flat surface in the room, except for Maddy’s cubicle. Her desk was spotless and completely devoid of any human touches. There were no pictures in frames, no cute mementos of trips she’d taken, no indications at all that her desk belonged to someone. Jake, Richard, and Scott, the other three programmers in the group, always gave her a hard time about how insistent she was about keeping her space clean. The standard joke among the programmers was that no matter what group Maddy ended up in, you’d always be able to find her desk, even with your eyes closed, because it was the one with nothing on it. They’d long since given up trying to figure out why it was so important to her that there be no personal traces on it; she was damn good at putting code together, and that was really all they cared about. Having Maddy on your team was a guarantee of success, or so the sayings went; she was adamant about avoiding the “death march” stage of a project and would drive everyone else involved to live up to their commitments so that it wouldn’t happen. Even the directors of Secure were more than a little bit convinced that the biggest reason the company was so successful was her coding ability.
For her part, Maddy couldn’t care less what everyone else said about her. On some level she knew that nobody else cared what time she showed up in the morning, but she’d decided long ago that a proper business day started no later than nine in the morning, and lasted no later than six in the evening, and having decided that, she was incapable of simply ignoring the time like everyone else seemed to. She was not by nature a morning person, but she would sacrifice sleep to ensure that she lived up to her own internal standards of behavior. She wasn’t doing it to live up to anyone else’s ideals; she was doing it to live up to her own.
“I wonder what state Jake left that IPSEC rules subroutine in,” Maddy muttered to herself, logging into her workstation. She had three large flat-panel monitors arrayed in a graceful curve in front of her, and she expertly navigated through the complicated code structure of their latest project to find the section Jake had been working on. He was supposed to hand it off to her once he’d ensure its internal consistency; she was responsible for integrating it into the larger scheme of the project. She frowned as she got to the point she’d been looking for; it looked unchanged from when she’d left the previous day. “That’s strange. Jake almost never drops the ball. I wonder if something came up after I left...” Her voice trailed off and her frown deepened. She’d moved on to look at the section Richard had been working on. It didn’t look like anything had changed, either. Feeling like there was something major she was missing, she quickly checked Scott’s code. He’d added a few more lines, but they didn’t make any sense; they referred to subroutines that didn’t exist, and in one spot repeated a command three times.
Feeling a deepening sense of unease, Maddy logged into her email account to see if anyone had left a message explaining the strange stuff she was seeing. She had the usual crop of spam offering to enlarge her penis and refinance her mortgage, but no messages from anyone else on her team. This wasn’t that unusual; most of the programmers in the building coded in a strange, fugue-like state and were completely unaware of the world around them until they’d completed whatever had captured their attention, at which point all they cared about was food and sleep, not necessarily in that order. She didn’t fully understand how they could forget the rest of the world that completely, but she was used to it; not getting an email updating her on the progress (or lack thereof) was annoying, but it happened two or three times a month. She poked through the comments in the project management system, but there wasn’t anything after 7PM the night before. That wasn’t that unusual, either; the programmers universally hated updating the system and avoided it at all opportunities. Feeling increasingly frustrated and concerned, Maddy started checking the last-modified dates of all the code files, trying to figure out if they’d been working in some other area instead. It quickly became clear that no file had been changed after 7PM, and Maddy decided that she was being needlessly paranoid; they’d probably decided to quit early and head out to a movie or something. It had been a frustrating day, with most of the changes they’d spent the last week working on having to be undone to solve a fatal bug, and when she’d left at six, the other four members of the team had been snapping each other’s heads off. Going out to watch some mindless action flick or, occasionally, to a bar, was a fairly regular way of blowing off steam. Maddy sometimes went along, but it hadn’t been clear when she’d left last night that that was where evening was headed, and she’d wanted to get a long run in before bed anyway.
“I wish they’d said something, though; I wouldn’t have killed myself to get here on time if I’d known there wasn’t anything much I could do,” she muttered to herself, even though she knew it wouldn’t have made any difference if they’d told her or not. “Well, I guess I might as well get started on the UI changes; they’re going to have to get done eventually.”
She sighed and pushed herself away from her desk. The specs for the interface were on Scott’s desk, since he’d been the person who’d gotten stuck with them after the last meeting. Nobody on the team enjoyed creating the interface; they were all much more comfortable poking around behind the scenes. Scott had won an award for some graphic design stuff he’d done back in college, and Tony had found out about it. Ever since, Scott had gotten stuck designing the user interface, at least on paper. In reality, the specs would sit on his desk until the last possible moment, and then whatever member of the team was the least overworked would end up trying desperately to get it finished at the eleventh hour. “It’s a bad system, but at least it’s a system,” Tony would joke, dropping the dreaded folder, which was always purple, on the lucky recipient’s desk.
Maddy walked around the corner of the cubes to get to Scott’s cube, which was to the right of hers. His desk wasn’t as bad as Richard’s was, but it was still several inches deep in papers and empty Doritos bags. She flipped on his desk lamp, hoping to see a glimpse of purple in the upper strata, although she wasn’t very hopeful; one of Scott’s better methods of avoidance was to put whatever he was avoiding onto the actual surface of his desk and then deliberately piling whatever new stuff came his way directly on top of it until it was completely hidden from view. The lamp flashed brilliantly and went dark, and she heard the faint tinkle of the filament breaking.
“Damn!” she swore, turning to make her way back to the door to turn on the overheads. “I swear he goes through a light bulb a week!” She reached the wall switch and flipped it on, turning around as she did so. The overhead flourescents, which the programmers hated and avoided whenever possible, flickered into life, bathing the room in a sullen, yellow light.
Maddy had taken several steps before she realized that the walls of the cubes were streaked with a dull red-brown substance, and several more steps before she realized that it was blood. She faltered, her breath catching in her throat, as she looked around the room and realized that there was blood everywhere. She’d walked through it on the way to her desk, and she could see the smears on the carpet where she’d stepped. There were huge smeared patches on the seat of her chair, and the base of the lava lamp was covered with it.
Goosebumps broke out along Maddy’s arms, and she felt an almost uncontrollable urge to vomit as she realized how much blood she’d been in contact with, without even know it. Her brain seemed to be working sluggishly, and the lights seemed too bright. She backed slowly toward the door, her hands clenched together in front of her. She yelped when her back hit the cold, unyielding surface of the door, and she unclenched her hands and scrabbled feverishly behind her for the door handle.
As her hand closed around it, a horrible thought made her freeze. She had suddenly realized that she didn’t know whose blood it was. Was that why nobody had done any work since she left? Maddy took a deep breath and concentrated on forcing herself to let go of the door handle. Her knees felt so wobbly she wasn’t sure she could actually stand up, and she was terrified of what she might find on the the other side of the cubes. Walking very carefully around the bloodstains on the carpet, she made her way slowly back toward the right hand corner of her cube, to see what lay on Scott’s side.

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Meanwhile, Arthur Jackson stood on the sidewalk across the street from ground zero and swore at the cell phone in his hand. It had been acting funny all week: unexpectedly dropping calls, spontaneously dialing people, and refusing to let him look through his phone book. Now it had turned itself off and was refusing to turn on again, despite having spent the night plugged in and recharging. It wasn’t an expensive cell phone, and Arthur didn’t care about it per se, but the phone numbers he had listed in it were his only ties to the few people he knew in New York. He resisted the urge to hurl it into the traffic flowing by on Church Street and turned north, figuring that it was better to keep walking anyway than to stand still.
He’d spent the last of his cash the day before on a pastry from a street vendor, and the gnawing hunger in his gut distracted him from the phone. He knew he needed to figure out some way to get some more cash without being traced, but he couldn’t summon the mental energy he’d need to come up with a plan that had some chance of working. He walked on blindly for five or six more blocks and got caught in a flood of people coming out a subway station. On a whim he turned against the tide of people and went down to the station. He had purchased a seven day unlimited Metrocard a few days before, and he fished it out of his pocket as he fought his way down the stairs. Reaching the turnstiles, he swiped through, went to the platform, and forced his way onto the train, without paying any attention to where it was going.
Collapsing into an empty seat and leaning against the window, Arthur felt defeated, exhausted, and starved. He’d been running on adrenaline for two days, and he couldn’t think clearly anymore. He knew he had to disappear, but the burning urgency had faded into a haze of exhaustion. He closed his eyes and fell asleep almost immediately.
Nobody disturbed him for quite a while. He slept quietly but lightly, and when someone finally settled heavily into the seat next to him he woke up immediately, although he didn’t move for several minutes. When he opened his eyes he was startled to see that the car was nearly full, and everybody seemed to be getting ready to get off. Several minutes later, with a squeal of brakes, the train stopped and everyone stood up and crowded toward the doors. Arthur joined the throng, trying vainly to interpret the unintelligible announcement being broadcast through the cars.
He emerged from the train onto an elevated platform in what looked like an ethnic neighborhood. He had no idea where he was; he didn’t even know what train he’d gotten on. He joined the stream of people moving down the stairs, blinking in the bright sunlight. Reaching the street, he stood for a minute, looking around while he tried to figure out what to do next.

Maddy could feel her heart racing as she crept around the corner of the cube. Knowing that there was probably blood everywhere was not as disturbing as realizing that she’d walked through it without noticing, and she tried to avoid seeing any signs of her previous passage. She suddenly vividly remembered being twelve and seeing a dog get hit by a semi while she walking home from school. She’d screamed and started to run away, but had been unable to leave the poor dog in the road to be hit by more cars. Summoning every bit of courage she’d had, she’d grabbed the poor dead dog by the collar, trying desperately not to see how it had split open like some piece of overripe fruit, trying to not see the rapidly growing pool of blood forming underneath it, trying to not hear the noises its guts made as she dragged it out of the road and onto the shoulder. Every time she’d closed her eyes for weeks afterward she would see the moment of impact.
She held her breath as she looked around the corner. At first glance, it wasn’t any worse than her cube had been; there was certainly blood splattered everywhere, but the surface of Scott’s desk seemed to have fared better than her own. Most of the papers she could see were clean, although the monitor had a large splotch in the middle of the screen. Scott’s chair was pushed up against the desk, and she could see a bloody hand print on the top of the backrest, like somebody had leaned on it or had pushed it in with bloody hands. A faint flicker of curiosity stirred under the panic, and Maddy took a step into the cube, looking for another sign of the bloody hand. As she moved forward she could see that there was a large bloodstain under the chair and the front wheels had been pushed though it, making lines on the carpet, but the back ones had not. There was something strange about the stain, and Maddy stared at it for a moment, trying to figure out what it was that made this stain, out of all the stains in the room, stand out to her. Suddenly she realized that this stain, unlike every other one she’d seen so far, glistened. She took another cautious step forward and bent over a little, peering at the stain. It seemed to still be wet; it was more red than brown, and it was definitely glistening in the light. As she watched, a drop fell from the chair, making a faint “plop” as it landed. Unwillingly she reached out to pull the chair a little way away from the desk, meaning to look at its seat. She had just started to pull when it seemed to push itself towards her, and as it rolled away from the desk, a body, which had been wedged under the desk and held in place by the chair, thumped to the ground.
It seemed like eternity before Maddy became aware enough of her surroundings to notice that the stillness of the office had been shattered by the sound of someone screaming. It was several more seconds before she realized that she was the one screaming.
With an enormous effort of will she managed to clamp her mouth shut. She stared in horror at the body, which lay on its back on the floor, one arm across its chest and the other splayed out to the side. The face was unrecognizable, with empty eye sockets and what looked like a gaping hole where the nose should be. The hair was so matted with blood that she couldn’t tell what color it had been originally, The arm lying across the chest was missing the hand, and the other arm was bent in several places that shouldn’t have been bendable. Her stomach lurched as she suddenly recognized the shirt it was wearing - it was Jake’s Lego Star Wars shirt, which had been his favorite.
Maddy turned and stumbled to the door, one hand clamped firmly over her mouth, the other reaching blindly for the knob. She managed to yank it open and lurched out into the empty hall, her eyes flooding with tears and panic threatening to overwhelm her. Careening off the opposite wall, she ran toward the exit, doubled over and trying not to throw up on the floor. Reaching the doors at the end of the hall, she tried to pull them open and was consumed by panic when she realized they were locked. She pounded on them, sobbing, and it was nearly a minute before she remembered she had to swipe her card to unlock them. She fumbled at her belt to get her ID out, nearly dropping it in the process. She finally managed to swipe it through the reader, pulled the doors open, and stumbled blindly into the parking lot. The sun had come out while she was inside, and the sudden bright, cheerful light was so incongruous that she forgot for a moment the horror that lay behind her. She staggered across the lot to the corner where she paused staring vacantly at the throng of people exiting the subway station opposite her. Everyone seemed so normal, going about their daily routines, and she stared for several minutes, grappling with the idea that nobody else knew what had happened in the building other than her.
Several minutes in the sunlight helped to calm her down. She shook her head finally, trying to clear away the images that kept replaying on the insides of her eyelids, and tried to figure out what to do next.
“I should call the police,” she thought, shaking her head again, somewhat amazed that she’d had to think about it. She reached for her cell phone before remembering that it was in her bag, sitting on the bloody floor by her desk. Looking up, she saw the strange gift store on the other side of the street, just before the end of the elevated train tracks. She’d been in there several times, usually picking up gag gifts for Jake or Scott. The thought made her stomach clench again, and she forced herself to take a deep breath and concentrated on not vomiting. She hated vomiting more than anything else she could think of, although, she thought somewhat wryly to herself, rooms full of blood and mutilated bodies ran a real close second. Feeling slightly calmer, she started toward the gift store, intending to call the police.
She’d taken no more than four steps when a giant hand scooped her up from behind and threw her across the street. A brief, confused series of images flashed before her: the stripes of the crosswalk; a floating tax; a falling traffic light; a startled guy in a brown leather jacket, zooming closer. When she opened her eyes again she was lying in a most undignified way on the sidewalk diagonally across from where she’d been standing, tangled up with the guy in the brown leather jacket.
“What the hell just happened?” Maddy asked, but no sound came out. She tried to put a hand to her throat, but one hand was trapped between her and the guy, and the other one didn’t seem to be working quite right. She suddenly realized that the entire city had gone deathly silent, that all the sirens and car horns and trains and taxis and people shouting had suddenly decided to stop, just for a moment. It wasn’t until she saw the Leather Coat Guy’s lips moving that she realized that the problem was that she couldn’t hear anymore. Leather Coat Guy obviously didn’t realize this, however, and he seemed to have a lot to say very vehemently to her. After trying vainly to read his lips and deciding that it wasn’t really possible to do that, she tuned him out by the simple expedient of moving her head and took stock of herself. Other than her left arm and her ears, she didn’t seem to be hurt. She had no idea what had happened, but she decided that she should probably free herself from Leather Coat Guy and see if she could figure it out. She paused, trying to figure out the best way to untangle herself from him, and realized with a sudden rush of embarrassment that her right knee seemed to be very firmly pressed against his crotch. She moved it as quickly and carefully as possible, feeling her face turn red as she did so. As she scrambled to her feet his silent diatribe stopped, and he rolled over to one side with both hands between his legs, his face drawn in a grimace of pain.
Maddy, who had grown up with four brothers, felt irrationally guilty. Her arm had started throbbing now, but it didn’t seem to be broken, and she turned partly away from Leather Coat Guy to hide her embarrassment. He had stopped lying in a fetal position and was slowly trying to get to his feet, although his balance seemed to be a bit off. Maddy hesitated, unsure if she should try to help him or just stay out of his way, but he suddenly lurched her direction and she instinctively reached to catch him, forgetting about her sore arm. They almost went down again, but managed to catch themselves and ended up mostly vertical, leaning on each other like they’d had too many drinks.
They were standing in the middle of total chaos. The Secure Computing building had been reduced to flaming rubble and was sending a large plume of black smoke into the morning sky. All of the windows Maddy could see were broken, and there seemed to be a taxi sticking out from under the awning of the gift store she’d been making her way towards. The billboards on the end of the train tracks were burning merrily, and several of the surrounding buildings were beginning to smoke. There were people lying everywhere, although most seemed more dazed than injured. Other people were running around, looks of panic on their faces, and they seemed to be shouting to one another, but to Maddy it was a surreally silent landscape.

Arthur was trying desperately not to be sick. Like most men, he’d been hit hard in the balls at least once while growing up, but hadn’t experienced it fully since. He’d seen it happen on tv shows and in movies, and he’d read about it in books, but nothing had really prepared him for how horrifically awful it really was. A sick ache stretched from his knees to the middle of his chest, and every movement made it worse. He couldn’t even get mad at the woman who had done it to him, because he was pretty sure she hadn’t chosen to come flying through the air at him when that building had blown up. She’d screamed something at him when they were still tangled up on the ground, but she wasn’t saying anything now; she seemed to be intent at staring at the chaos around them. His ears were ringing pretty badly anyway; he wasn’t sure he’d have been able to understand anything she said if she did decide to talk.
He couldn’t stand up straight yet, and there didn’t seem to be anything to lean on that wasn’t either on fire or covered with broken glass except her, so he leaned on her and worked on not throwing up. He had just been regaining some sense of equilibrium when a very large and greasy white man with mangy-looking dreadlocks and a black leather fedora tripped over the remains of the traffic light that was lying near them on the sidewalk and clipped Arthur’s side with his elbow on the way down. Arthur doubled over in pain, clutching the woman’s arm reflexively; she, in turn screamed and lurched toward him. As he hit the sidewalk again, Arthur thought he heard another explosion, but it wasn’t obvious where the sound came from. The people near them who were standing all ducked, so Arthur assumed that he wasn’t hallucinating, which brought a small measure of relief.
The large mangy man struggled to his feet swearing. He glared menacingly at Arthur and took a sudden step toward him. Arthur flinched, afraid that the guy was going to kick him, but he was just bending down to get his hat.

Maddy lay on her back on the sidewalk, watching with detached interest as the world sort of slowly swam back into focus. When Leather Coat Guy had grabbed her arm she’d suddenly realized that it had been aching because it was in fact broken, but she’d only had a fraction of a second to be glad that there was a logical explanation for the pain before the thermonuclear explosion had gone off right above her elbow and the world had receded to a small white point. Now she was trying to figure out if it was actually being crushed under a steam roller or was only being ground up in a meat grinder. It was hard to tell, what with the constant black dots floating all around her and distracting her. She tried to sit up and got about half way before cracking her head into some big greasy mangy looking guy’s forehead and falling back again; luckily Leather Coat Guy’s arm got between the back of her head and the sidewalk. Greasy Mangy Guy reeled backwards, his face contorted in pain and his hands coming up to his forehead, but somehow before they got all the way there the top of his head had disappeared in a fine red mist.
Maddy thought she was screaming, but she couldn’t tell. She thought she wanted to get up and move, but her body wasn’t responding anymore. She was vaguely aware that people all around them were scrambling and crawling away from them as fast as they could go. Leather Coat Guy’s face had gone creepily white, and he yanked his arm out from under her head as he rolled away from her.

Arthur was terrified. There was a small corner of his brain that kept screaming but why would the terrorists come back to New York? It doesn’t make any sense!, but the rest of his mind was now solely occupied with Getting The Hell Out Of There. He yanked his arm out from under the screaming woman’s head as he rolled out of the way. He couldn’t tell where the shot had come from, but he was pretty damned sure that the greasy mangy guy had had the top of his head shot clean off, and he was even more sure that he didn’t want to stick around to find out what happened next. Scrambling to his feet, he started to run away, hunched over to make himself as small as possible. He’d gotten about five feet when he realized that the screaming woman wasn’t moving; she was still lying where he’d left her, screaming. Cursing his chivalrous instincts he whirled around, ran back to her, scooped her up and threw her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and staggered toward the elevated tracks, thinking that there’d be more cover underneath them. The small part of his brain that wasn’t occupied with Getting The Hell Out Of There had stopped screaming and was now marveling at how much he’d evidently learning from all those hours he’d spent watching movies like the Die Hard and Bourne Identity series, in terms of getting “under cover” and the like.
A bunch of pins stabbed into his ankle, followed closely by another gunshot, but he had made it to the tracks now, and he ducked around a car in a desperate attempt to put as much stuff between him and whatever nut-job had the gun as he could. The rear windshield of the car exploded from yet another shot, but he could see the next street now. The screaming woman must have fainted or something, because she’d finally shut up, and she was kind of floppy. He hitched her up a little higher on his shoulder and kept on going, focused on getting around the corner and out of range. At least, he hoped he’d be out of range.
As he staggered around the corner he saw a shopping cart abandoned by the curb. Almost sobbing with relief, he dumped the woman as gently as he could into it, took a second to make sure she was still breathing and didn’t seem to have sprouted any obvious bullet holes, and began pushing the cart across the street toward an alley he could see on the left. The street wasn’t in very good shape, and it wasn’t really any faster to push the cart than it had been to stagger along with the woman on his shoulder, but it was a hell of a lot more comfortable, so he kept it up. The alley, strangely, seemed to have been repaved much more recently than the street, and he managed to pick up some speed again as they entered it.

The vibrations were incredibly uncomfortable, and every few seconds they’d be joined by a jolt that made a nova explode in her arm. Maddy struggled to open her eyes, wanting desperately to make the pain stop. She seemed to be moving between a row of houses and the backs of buildings, but she couldn’t figure out where she was. She looked around her and was very startled to realize that she was riding in a shopping cart from Enrique’s, the bodega around the corner from Secure. She couldn’t figure out who was pushing the cart, and she couldn’t twist around far enough to tell; she was having a hard enough time keeping the world from receding into a little point again. The alley opened up into someone’s back yard; they moved past another house and she suddenly realized they were about to come out onto 117th street, which was only two blocks from Secure. She wondered if maybe she and Richard were playing a practical joke on someone, but thinking about Richard made her feel sad and afraid, and she couldn’t remember why. Everything was creepily silent, too; she wondered if she was dreaming.
As they came out on the sidewalk by 117th street Maddy saw a number of cars stopped in the road with people standing around staring back they way she’d come. Suddenly, without warning, the rear window of a little blue Honda parked by the curb exploded in a shower of glass. At the same time, most of the people standing on the street ducked and scattered, and the grocery cart lurched to the right and sped up. She seemed to be being pushed toward a white car sitting in the road with its doors open; as the cart reached it she felt hands grab her under the arms and was dumped unceremoniously into the front seat. The pain in her arm made the world recede, and she was only dimly aware of the car door closing and someone sliding into the seat on her other side; by the time the car started moving she had fainted again.

Arthur drove as fast as he could without hitting anything. He had no idea where he was going; his only goal was to put as much distance between him and whoever was shooting as he could. He didn’t really think they were shooting at him; he’d pissed off the feds, but as far as he knew, they didn’t shoot white collar criminals on crowded city streets, even when said criminals had had the nerve to fleece the government of nearly four hundred million dollars. Logic said that they’d been shooting at the unconscious woman slumped next to him. He stole a glance over at her, but he couldn’t see anything obvious about her that would drive someone to take pot shots at her.
After what seemed like several years of driving aimlessly through the streets of New York in the stolen car, he found himself in the Lincoln Tunnel, making his way toward Weehawken. He’d always thought Dr. Suess had made the name up, but there it was, written on an enormous road sign. Completely inappropriate giggles threatened to overwhelm him, and he decided the stress of the day was getting to him.
After another hour of driving he found himself entering the charming urban hell of Piscataway, New Jersey, although he was completely incapable of discerning how anyone could draw any sort of line separating Piscataway from any of its surrounding communities. He had a pounding headache, he was plagued by fits of trembling so strong he was afraid they’d force him off the road, and the woman beside him was still unconscious. Deciding that he’d had enough (and that he should probably get rid of the car), he got off the turnpike to see if he could find a place to rest for a bit.

“What an awful dream,” Maddy thought, waking up. She thought she was forgetting it already, but there were some parts that were still horribly clear to her. She’d always thought dream theory was completely nonsensical, but she figured anyone who did believe would have a field day with this one!
She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling, trying to wake all the way up. It took several seconds before she realized that the room was completely silent. She couldn’t hear Jordan’s claws clicking on the hardwood floors, and Princess was uncharacteristically silent as well. She tried to lift her arms to push away the covers and realized suddenly that her left arm seemed to be bound to her chest, and that she ached all over. She sat up suddenly, terrified that it hadn’t been a dream and almost threw up as the room spun. The room, she realized, that she’d never seen before. The guy sleeping on the floor beside the dresser looked familiar, though. When she realized that he was Leather Coat Guy she started to cry.
Several minutes and a half a box of kleenex later, she felt calm enough to try to take stock of the situation. She was in a strange hotel room (and a cheap one, based on the decor) but she didn’t know where. Her left arm was strapped pretty tightly to her body, and it seemed to have been done by somebody who knew what they were doing, but the bandages were ripped up cheap hotel towels. She was completely deaf, which she was guessing was because of the explosion, but it was really strange to not even be able to hear the constant low-level ringing that was left over from too many years with her iPod (and her Walkman before that) turned up too high. She had bruises, small cuts, and scrapes all over, but the worst of them had been cleaned and had Bob the Builder bandaids on them. She was still fully dressed, except for her shoes. If she moved too fast, black dots swam through her vision and her stomach felt funny. It was 3:56 in the afternoon, if the clock bolted to the table next to the bed was right.
What she could remember of the morning was horrible, but she could tell there were some pretty large gaps, including how she’d ended up leaving the scene with Leather Coat Guy. She looked over at him, lying curled up on his side on the floor in front of the battered dresser. His leather coat was draped over the back of the one chair in the room, and she could see deep scratches and several holes in the back of it that looked fresh. He wasn’t a bad looking guy, she decided, although he was sporting an impressive black eye, and the bare arm she could see was at least as badly cut and bruised as she was. She desperately wanted to know where they were and what they were doing there, though; she didn’t remember all of the morning, but she was pretty sure she’d remember at least something about agreeing to run off to a cheap hotel room with a stranger if she’d actually agreed to it.