The Real Michael Swann Read online

  2

  The truck rolled down a narrow access road at approximately 4:10 P.M. The man driving knew he was early. He’d driven the road three times in preparation. He followed the same path, about half a mile from where the road ended, replaced by a vast meadow of dry hay grass. When he coasted to a stop, he had already decided the spot was perfect for two reasons. One, it was absolutely remote. For the weeks he’d watched the entrance, not a single vehicle had traveled in or out on that road. Two, that particular bend came within fifty yards of the Amtrak rails. He got out and looked east toward the tracks and the dry grass between that spot and where he stood.

  He did not smile. His face remained set in a hard yet emotionless expression as he walked around the side of the truck. He released the tailgate and leaned forward, his hands reaching for two red canisters of gasoline. Straightening, he stepped to the edge of the grass and placed one on the ground. The second he carried as he moved off the road toward the tracks. The hay swayed around him, brushing his thighs and waist. His one hand reached out slightly, and he let it trail atop the blades. Dry. Perfect.

  He spoke softly to himself as he uncapped the canister and slowly poured out the gasoline as he walked a serpentine trail along the tracks.

  “When the time comes,” he said, his tone strangely flat despite the slight accent, “I’ll be remembered as the patriot that made things right again, not that liar. I’m the real American. They won’t get it at first. They might see me as the bad guy. That’s okay. History will see it differently. I am the one . . . versus the one hundred. That much I know.”

  When the last drops fell from the first canister, he proceeded to seed the field with the second. When that was done as well, he walked back to the truck. Leaning against the side panel, his hand slipped into the front pocket of his blue jeans. His fingers wrapped around the matches. When he pulled them out, the summer sun reflected off the stars and stripes on the top of the box.

  Before pulling out a single match, the man licked a finger and held it into the air, testing the wind. Dry and hot, it blew east, toward the distant Atlantic Ocean. He nodded and removed the match.

  “God bless America,” the man said, striking the red tip.

  A tear of flame licked from the frail wood. Left alone, it could only burn for an instant before running out of fuel. Instead, though, the man flicked the match, the careless gesture of someone who worked with his hands. Maybe he had lit hundreds of charcoal grills in his backyard, grilled up thousands of burgers for his family. The match turned a lazy arc through the air, landing five feet into the brush. In the blink of an eye, a larger flame whipped into the air. It widened, running the path the man had walked a moment before. Thick gray smoke billowed into the air. The man watched it for a second before returning to his truck.

  Before driving away, he leaned to the side and entered a combination into a leather briefcase on the passenger seat. It popped open and he looked at the contents, nodding. Then he drove away, back onto the turnpike and toward the Lincoln Tunnel.

  * * *

  —

  At 4:25, the engineer on an Acela Express out of Washington with stops in Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, and points north could not believe his eyes. He stared out the window of the engine as it raced forward at 135 miles per hour along the straightaway outside Newark, New Jersey, just before the slowdown approaching the station. He blinked, but the heavy smoke drifting across the tracks did not disappear.

  He grabbed the handheld radio at his belt. After identifying himself and giving his location, he said, “There’s considerable smoke drifting across the tracks.”

  The engineer of a transit train joined in, reporting the same thing. Chatter grew as the Acela engineer slowed his train to thirty miles per hour. He entered the smoke. To his left, he could see flames rising among the brush and grass near the track.

  “There’s a fire about ten feet from the rails. Wind is blowing the smoke and flames across both the north- and southbound lines.”

  Both the Acela and the first transit train to respond made it cautiously past. Within two minutes of the engineer’s first report, all other traffic was stopped on the track or held at the stations north and south of the fire until further notice.

  3

  Julia stood on her deck, watching the two women walk up the hill, their children pulling ahead. She could not hear their conversation, but she caught their hands moving with expression. They looked back once and waved. Thomas opened the slider behind her.

  “When’s dinner?”

  “Half an hour,” she said without turning.

  She heard the door slide shut, and she sat back down in her chair. She wondered what they might be talking about. For a second, she wondered if serving popsicles was a weird thing to do. She could still feel the artificial cherry coating her tongue. Evelyn only ate organic at her house. Julia wondered if it might have offended her that Julia allowed the kids to have them without checking first.

  Sometimes, Julia thought she had two brains. Or, more accurately, two distinct halves to her brain. One from her career days and one since she started staying home with the kids. At times, she had to slow it down, be less premeditated, more primal. Kids plus summer equals popsicles. It could be as simple as that.

  Just as she was about to get up and start fixing dinner, a chicken dish that had sat in the slow cooker for about four hours, her phone vibrated again. It was Michael. At first, she didn’t recognize the number. A few weeks before, he had purchased a new phone. Before that, for years, he had only used his work-issued cell. He still carried both. Every time she saw them, though, it bothered her, like a constant reminder of the type of change that hadn’t been one hundred percent their idea.

  “Hey,” she said, laughing. “I’m still not used to this new number of yours.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  When they paused, she noticed the background noise. It seemed even louder than before.

  “Wow,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  When he spoke, she had to concentrate to hear him over the din. “They closed the rails north of Philly. Both ways. You should see it in here. The station is getting pretty crowded.”

  “Was it an accident?”

  “I don’t think so. A guy I was talking to has Amtrak alerts on his Twitter. It said that there’s a brush fire in New Jersey.”

  “That’s not good,” she said.

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. I might head out and just rent a car. It’ll cost more, but this could go on all night.”

  “Yeah,” she said, distractedly.

  Evelyn and Tara passed out of her line of sight. She stood, resting her free hand on the railing of the deck.

  “Whatever you need to do,” she said. “Love you.”

  “I love you back,” he said. “I’ll text you if I hear anything or if I decide to change plans. Tell those monkeys of ours that I love them, too.”

  “I will.”

  “See you soon, babe.”

  “Can’t wait. Stay safe.”

  “I will.”

  She hung up. Looking up the hill toward the more wooded section of the neighborhood, she closed her eyes for a second.

  “Huh . . . ,” she whispered.

  She used to take the train to Washington all the time for her work. That was before the kids, but she’d never heard of anything like the tracks being closed because of a brush fire.

  “Mom,” Evan called out behind her.

  Her eyes shot open and the span of her backyard came into focus, with its wooden play set and lacrosse pitch back. The grass needed to be cut, but they had the weekend for that.

  “Yup,” she said, turning.

  “Thomas just called me a bully.”

  She shook her head. “I’m coming in.”

  * * *

  —

  Julia flipped th
rough her phone as the kids ate at the counter.

  “Are you having any?” Thomas asked.

  “I will . . . in a minute.”

  She’d found both the Amtrak Twitter account and another website reporting the status of the track closures. The latest tweet said that the tracks were closed indefinitely. She closed her eyes and ran a hand across her mouth.

  “You okay, Mom?” Evan asked.

  “Oh, yeah, sure. It’s just Daddy’s going to be really late,” she said.

  “What about the game?” Evan asked.

  Michael had hopes that he would be home to watch the end of the Phillies-Mets game on TV with them. She glanced at the clock. There was no way he’d make it in time.

  “I’ll watch it with you guys,” she said.

  Thomas’s eyes widened. “You will?”

  She laughed. “Of course I will.”

  “But you hate the Phillies,” Evan said.

  “I do not.”

  “Yes, you do,” they said together.

  “Well,” she said with a grin, “tonight I don’t.”

  Julia really didn’t want to watch the game. She would rather read out on the back porch, listening to the sounds of their perfect neighborhood as it slowly quieted down after a long summer day. But that wasn’t in the cards. She’d be okay with that.

  On a whim, she dialed Evelyn’s number.

  “Miss me already?” her friend joked.

  “Definitely. Hey, I was just thinking. We should put together a girls’ night for Tara. She could use it, with everything that’s going on.”

  “Totally,” Evelyn said. “You want me to start the group text or you?”

  “I can,” Julia said. It would give her something to do during the game. “Should we invite Karen?”

  “She’s kind of a drag,” Evelyn said.

  “I like her.”

  “Then invite her if you want. She makes Tara uncomfortable, though.” Evelyn laughed. “It’s like she sees right into your soul.”

  “Ev!”

  “Sorry.”

  Julia shook her head. “She probably won’t want to come anyway. Right?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Okay. I’ll send something out after dinner.”

  “Great.”

  When she hung up, Julia called Michael. He answered after three rings.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Wow, it’s even louder,” she said.

  “Yeah. It’s getting crazy. There has to be about a thousand people down here. The place is packed.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in the Acela lounge, so it’s not as bad. Still standing room only. I’m about to head out and take a look at the board, though. See if I can get an idea about when this might clear up. It looks like a mosh pit filled with business suits out there.”

  She laughed. Michael always kept things light. It was one of the things that had drawn her to him almost twenty years before.

  “It looks bad,” she said. “Have you thought more about getting a car?”

  “I called around.”

  “What?” she asked. “I couldn’t hear you.”

  “I called around,” he said, louder. “Sounds like people beat me to it. I might just get a room. Would that be okay?”

  “Where?”

  He paused. “The Paramount might not be too bad.”

  “Probably three hundred a night,” she said.

  “You’re right.”

  Julia immediately regretted what she said. A few months before, she would not have mentioned it at all. Yet uncertainty had crept into her thoughts, and suddenly $300 sounded like a lot of money for a hotel room.

  “But . . . whatever you want to do is fine. I mean, if everything works out, we’ll be fine.”

  She heard what sounded like a bark. She blinked.

  “Was that a dog?”

  “I don’t—”

  In the midst of Michael’s sentence, the line went dead.

  4

  Within ten minutes of the track closure, the crowd in Penn Station started to bulge. It did not happen all at once. The usual trickle of passengers arriving for future departures continued. After twenty minutes, two trains that had boarded but not pulled away from the station let their passengers out of the cars. They pressed back up the stairs and into the station. After an hour, hundreds of people milled around the giant message board in front of the ticketing area. It listed dozens of trains either coming or going. By that time, every status read delayed.

  Dispatchers, men and woman inside the Penn Station Control Center, stared at a massive screen across the wall. Over seventy feet wide, it showed the location of every train within a 150-mile radius of the city. Normally, the dispatchers tracked movement. On that day, their mouths hung open at the utter standstill each and every one of them witnessed.

  On a typical day, over a thousand trains ran in and out of the station that sat like a labyrinth beneath Madison Square Garden. Hundreds of thousands of commuters filtered in and out aboard trains, boarding subway cars or climbing stairs or escalators to the bustling city above. The dispatchers in the control center were tasked with somehow putting the pieces of this massive and moving puzzle into the right places, all the while knowing that the crowds outside seethed at even a fifteen-minute delay. Every minute that ticked off the giant digital clock above the screen simply stoked their anxiety. They had seen bad days. But few had seen a day worse than that Friday in August.

  These dispatchers, more so than most, understood what was about to happen. In a manner of speaking, the fire had dammed up the flow of commuters through Penn Station. Just as water would pool on one side of the blockage, people continued to press into the station. More and more arrived, and fewer and fewer left. First the cavernous center of the station filled to capacity. Then the area around the bookstores, pizza shops, and other vendors. People leaned against walls, milled in thick groups wherever space opened, or dipped their heads, hands cupped over ears, trying to update loved ones on the delay.

  Word of the brush fire spread throughout the station, adding to people’s reluctance to leave. Something like that, they thought, might be cleared at any moment. Without simple alternatives, most waited it out as hundreds more arrived. Within an hour, over two thousand people milled around Penn Station, making the best of a bad situation.

  By 5:43 P.M., the number of New York City Transit Police there doubled. Men in dark uniforms moved among the crowds, eyes scanning, lips thin. Handlers led trained dogs along the edges, looking for signs of the unthinkable. The temperature rose, and the smell of sweat and damp wool hung in the humid air, clinging to people like cobwebs.

  At 5:58, a sharp bark pierced the underlying noise. Voices rose in response. A deep male voice shouted out in alarm, then with a series of orders. People froze from one side of the crowded station to the other. Two minutes later, at 6:00 P.M. sharp, a bomb detonated. The explosion ripped through people and walls alike. Shards of blue plastic from the chairs in the Acela lounge pierced cement-block walls beyond ticketing. Smoke, fire, and chaos swallowed New York’s Penn Station, killing or injuring hundreds instantaneously. The subsequent rupture and explosion of natural gas lines killed even more, and left thousands injured, bleeding, blind, deafened, and changed forever.

  5

  Michael?” Julia said after the line went silent.

  She paced out of the kitchen. Whatever conversation the boys had been sharing trailed off. They listened in nervous silence as she walked to the far end of her living room and stared out the window. Outside, life was peaceful. Birds sang as the summer sun still hung above the easy hills to the west. A car rolled slowly by, someone’s father just getting home from work. She heard the faintest sound of children laughing from somewhere down the street.

  “Michael?”

 
She pulled the phone away from her ear. The call had ended. She dialed his number, but it went straight to voicemail. She tried his other cell phone, the work-issued one; same thing. Figuring he was dialing her as she dialed him, she ended that call without leaving a message. To be honest, she hadn’t expected him to pick up the call to his old cell number. He hadn’t been using it much recently. It was probably in his briefcase. Plus, calls got dropped all the time, she thought.

  It was nothing, she kept saying to herself. Unfortunately, the more she repeated it, the more worried she felt.

  6

  My eyes opened to nothing. At first, I thought I couldn’t see. Everything was white, everywhere. It surrounded me, cutting me off from whatever was around me. I existed within a color, alone and inhuman.

  What am I?

  That was the first thought. In that moment, I had no idea. I could not see my hands or my arms or my legs. I could not feel my face or my body. Instead, I seemed to float outside reality, more a thought than a real physical being.

  Who am I?

  That came when sound returned to my world. The silence around me simply ceased. In its place, horrid noise pressed in on me like the crushing hands of some awful giant. They pressed and squeezed, screams of pain and moans of the dying. The crash and crumble of concrete and the shriek of rending metal. Alarms, sharp and so loud, sounded all around me.

  Next came the smell. It filled my mouth like thick liquid, like some bitter poison. Tinny and sweet with a hint of putridity, it came from everywhere all at once. Instinctively, for that was the only level of brain function I managed in those first few moments, I took air in through my mouth. The dust coated my throat and filled my lungs. I hacked and coughed, and with each shudder a splitting pain radiated out of my head like an iron spike had been driven through my temple.