Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(18)

She was one of the lucky ones. She’ll live to greet another day in a world that will never be the same. The city feels foreign to her now, her city—the city she loves because, as she so often says, anything at all can happen here.

I’ll never say that again. Never. Never!

She keeps thinking of Mack. He works in midtown. She hasn’t seen him all day or night. She went down and knocked on his door a few times, but no one was home.

Still, he must be okay; he has to be okay, but . . .

Carrie. Mack’s wife.

Kristina knows she worked someplace down in the financial district. Carrie might have been hurt today, or killed.

Kristina can’t bear to let her mind go there. Every time it starts to, shame sweeps over her and she shoves aside the notion of Mack, widowed and suddenly, truly, available.

She didn’t want Carrie to die. Jesus. She didn’t conjure today’s nightmare like some crazy voodoo curse.

Of course she didn’t.

And this isn’t about her. This is a global catastrophe. This was, as President Bush said in his televised speech earlier, an act of war.

War. Here. In New York.

Kristina keeps thinking of her mother, in London during the blitz sixty years ago. Mum used to talk about lying terrified in the dark basement shelter as planes buzzed the skyline; about pulling her blanket over her mouth and nose to help blot the smell of burning rubble.

Did it work for you, Mum? Because it isn’t working for me. The windows are closed, and so are the vents; the fire is a mile away and the wind is blowing south, but I can still smell it.

Kristina’s mother died of lung cancer. Never smoked a cigarette in her life.

But all those nights in London during the air raids, lying awake, breathing toxic fumes . . . maybe, in the end, the enemy bombs got her after all.

Will the same thing happen to me?

Another fighter plane roars over Manhattan.

Please make it stop.

Please let me fall asleep.

Sleep, she knows, is the only way to escape this nightmarish world.

But sleep won’t claim her, not when her thoughts won’t stop and her mind’s eye keeps replaying unbearable images and her entire body is clenched: her jaw, her fists, the muscles of her legs . . .

A spasm seizes her right calf and she squeezes her eyes shut, flexing her toes.

Please make it go away.

When at last it subsides, she opens her eyes to a sight more horrific than anything she’s seen in the last eighteen hours.

Jarring as a plume of toxic smoke in a clear blue September sky, a long human shadow has fallen on the wall beside her bed.

She’s home alone; she lives alone, and yet . . .

She’s not alone.

And she was wrong. Sleep isn’t the only way to escape this world. Before she can escape it, though, the worst moments of her young life are yet to come.

The water runs red with blood, spiraling into the drain.

Blood in water.

Blood . . . everywhere.

Blood on Jamie’s hands, and the white sheets of Kristina’s bed, and the wall beside it.

Blood in the streets of Manhattan . . .

Blood everywhere. So much blood.

I still can’t believe it.

Right before Jamie’s eyes, on a beautiful September morning, the very images that had been pure fantasy for so long blazed to life—although “life” seems to be the wrong term. The polar opposite, really—it was death that was all around.

Disembodied limbs, a head whose eyes were fixed in horror, a stranger’s severed torso spilling entrails . . .

Or was that Kristina Haines?

Jamie can’t remember, exactly, what happened outside during the day and what happened later, much later, in the middle of the night in Kristina’s apartment.

Bloody guts on the streets . . . or bloody guts on the sheets?

Grinning broadly, Jamie repeats the thought aloud, in a singsong whisper, like a recitation from a Seuss-gone-wrong children’s picture book.

“Bloody guts on the streets . . . bloody guts on the sheets . . . I do not like them, Sam I am.” Grinning, Jamie looks up into the mirror above the sink. “Oh, but I do. I do like them, Sam . . . I . . . am . . . not.”

Funny how you manage to forget; how you can look in the mirror and be caught off guard by your own reflection.

But this is me. Jamie turns off the tap and reaches for a towel. This is me, for the time being.

The sink has to be wiped down. When it’s dry and clean, not a trace of blood, Jamie checks to make sure that nice little souvenir is still safely wrapped in a plastic bag. Yes. Good. No one would ever know it was there: no visible back pocket bumps, no telltale stains oozing through the fabric.

It’s time to leave the bathroom; time to rest. It’s been such a long day that it’s hard to remember what it was like before everything went crazy . . .

Before fantasy melded with reality; before the grisly chaos so long pent up inside Jamie’s head exploded in the real world, before the exhilarating realization that it was okay to finally act on another long-forbidden urge.

It was okay, though. Punishing Kristina was the right thing to do.

But it’s not just that. Maybe it started out that way—teaching her a lesson because she was mean to Jerry—but it was more than that.

On this particular day . . . night . . . morning . . . the old rules don’t matter anymore.