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“You’ll kill us all!” Erin cried, but her words were lost when . . .
Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!
Suddenly every gun—and there were now at least a dozen—opened fire.
Justin pushed Erin to the ground as bullets struck him again and again, round after round, all pinging and screeching away, deflected by his armored flesh. He barely felt them, they might as well have been Ping-Pong balls. But the noise was deafening, far louder in real life than movies or TV could convey.
“Can you swim?” Justin asked Erin.
“What?” She was on the tarmac, facedown, hands over her ears.
Justin sliced a third set of suspender ropes, then leaped forty feet in the air, rising to the graceful arc of the main cable.
The power!
The main cables were made of 27,572 wires, woven together and covered in cladding. Each main cable supported tens of thousands of tons of steel and concrete, cars and trucks and pedestrians.
“No!” Erin screamed. “Noooo!”
Justin heard her, but her screams were irrelevant. A part of him noted that it was itself a cliché, an outdated one: the screaming, helpless pretty girl and the superhero. Superman and Lois Lane.
At the top of his rising arc, as gravity seized him and again asserted control, he swung his sword arm down and ch
opped through the main cable in a shower of sparks.
The effect was immediate and drastic. The massive cable whipped back in both directions, yanking Justin with it, spinning him like a wobbly Frisbee. The support ropes snapped or twisted; the road surface sagged sharply to the right and stalled cars slid toward the rail, as frantic drivers gunned their engines and tires spun and burned rubber.
The cop cars slid as well, and the firing stopped instantly as officers and rangers scrabbled to hold on, to save their vehicles and themselves. Everywhere there were cries of panic from terrified pedestrians. A troop of Girl Scouts on a ritual bridge walk screamed in thin soprano as their troop leader fell away from them, pinwheeling toward the churning gray water 220 feet below. And then one by one they slid, helpless, shrieking as they grabbed frantically at any handhold, fingernails torn from their hands as they lost their desperate grips and fell away.
Justin crashed down to the concrete roadway, slid on the precarious slope, dug his claw feet into the ground, and in a transport of mad glee bellowed, “I am Knightmare! Ah hah-hah-hah!”
A taxi tried to run for it, accelerated, fishtailing toward the city, veered down the slope of the tilting roadway, smashed into the railing, and stopped there for a moment held in place, until the road jerked violently and sent the taxi over the side as well.
Justin saw the cabbie’s face looking up at him, his mouth a big O. Justin noticed and filed away the detail of an In-N-Out burger flying from the open window and remaining intact for a hundred feet before the buns separated and the meat and cheese twirled away toward the gray water.
The movable barrier, a string of connected gray blocks used to add or subtract lanes during commute times, slithered like a sidewinder, and temporarily stopped only when it encountered cars that were themselves sliding. Drivers threw their cars into reverse, and tires burned as they fought the inexorable pull of gravity. From the corner of his eye Justin saw a father leap from his sliding car and scramble away as his wife and two children slipped into oblivion.
Hah! There’s a detail to remember!
The concrete of the road surface cracked like a dry riverbed, great chunks of blacktop falling down through the structure or upending like impromptu Stonehenges.
Justin found a terrified Erin, holding on for dear life to a twitching cable end.
“My God, Justin, my God!”
“Isn’t it awesome?” he rumbled. “Come on!”
Justin swept Erin into the crook of his left arm, nearly crushing the air from her lungs, and leaped out into the void.
They fell at the same time as a CHP SUV, the black-and-white vehicle tumbling beside them through the air, lights still flashing, the driver clawing madly at his door handle, as if getting out would help. Car, cop, monster, and screaming socialite fell in a hail of concrete chunks and flailing bodies, accompanied by a soundtrack of howls and screams, racing engines that turned wheels in the air, and twanging cables that cracked like bullwhips.
Justin saw the water rushing up at them. This fall—this identical fall—killed about forty suicides in any given year, but he knew it wouldn’t kill him; he was Knightmare, and Erin was in the crook of his mighty arm, where she would be protected by the chitinous armor.
Even for Knightmare the impact was shocking, a sudden, massive deceleration that tore Erin from his grip and the air from his lungs. Down, down he went. Down and now swept away by the current went Erin. Down through gray water, down and down, impossibly down, and all around Justin like depth charges the police and civilian vehicles, the pedestrians, and the debris plunged, tearing bubble columns in the water. A massive slab of something hit Justin in the back, bounced away, and caught Erin in a glancing blow that expelled the last of the air from her lungs.
Justin sank downward, eyes raised to the horror show. A boy, no more than ten, hit the water directly above him, facedown, a disastrous belly flop that sprayed blood from his ears and mouth and rammed his eyes into his brain.
Justin tried now to swim upward but his sword was less than useless, and he was not quite buoyant. He fell past Erin, past all the bodies that now hung suspended, down to where the trailing end of the great cable sank like a vast orange snake.
