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They passed through the station. The water was rising fast; soon it would be over their heads. The next station would come at Fourteenth Street—much too far. Ahead, a faint glow appeared. As they neared, the light congealed into a discrete shaft—an opening in the roof of the tunnel.
“There’s a ladder!” Alicia cried. Her head went under again.
“What?”
Her face reemerged; she was fighting for breath. She pointed. “A ladder on the wall!”
They were sailing straight for it. Alicia grabbed hold first. Michael spun around her body, then, using his left hand, reached out, seized a rung, and hooked an elbow through it. At the top of the ladder was a metal grate, daylight beyond it.
“Can you make it?” Michael said.
They were being pummeled by the current. Lish shook her head.
“Try, damn it!”
Her strength was gone; she had nothing left. “I can’t.”
He would have to pull her up. Michael reached above her head and drew himself free of the water. The grate presented a different problem; unless he could find a way to open it, they were going to drown anyway. At the top of the ladder, he raised one hand and pushed. Nothing, not the slightest tremor. He reared back and shoved the heel of his palm into the slatted metal. He punched the grate again, and again. On the fourth blow, it burst open.
He shoved it aside, climbed out, and pressed his body to the pavement. The rising water had lifted Alicia halfway up the ladder. The light seemed to make a kind of halo around her face.
He reached down. “Take my hand—”
But that was all he said, his words cut short as a wall of water slammed into her—into both of them—bursting like a geyser through the open grate and blowing Michael halfway across the street.
—
The collapse of the bulkhead just south of the Astor Place station—one of eight retention dams protecting the subway lines of Manhattan from the greedy Atlantic—was the first in a series of events that no person, Michael included, could have anticipated. Freed from incarceration, the water shot through the tunnel with the hammering power of a hundred locomotives. It ripped and tore. It blasted to bits. It detonated and crushed and destroyed, plowing through the structural underpinnings of lower Manhattan like a scythe through wheat. Eight blocks north of Astor Place, at Fourteenth Street, the water jumped the tracks. While the main body churned straight north beneath Lexington Avenue, toward Grand Central, the rest veered west on the Broadway line, roaring toward the bulkhead at Times Square, which would subsequently fail as well, flooding everything beneath the pavement south of Forty-second Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue and opening the whole West Side to the sea.
And it was only just getting started.
In its thundering wake, the water left a trail of destruction. Manhole covers blew sky-high. Sewers exploded. Streets buckled and collapsed. Beneath the ground, a chain reaction had commenced. Like the ocean of which it was a part, the raging water sought only the expansion of its domain; the prize was the island itself, which, after a century of sodden neglect, was rotten to the core.
On the corner of Tenth Street and Fourth Avenue, Michael returned to consciousness with the unsettled sense that the world’s relationship to gravity had altered. It was as if every object were moving away from every other in a state of general repulsion. He blinked his eyes and waited for this feeling to stop, but it did not. A great font of water was jetting from the grate, high into the air, dissolving at the top into a sparkling mist that cast a rainbow above the flooded street. In his mentally fogged state, Michael stared at it in astonishment, not yet connecting the sight to anything else, while also noting, rather blandly, that other things were occurring: loud things, concussive things, things that warranted further consideration if only he could marshal his thoughts. The street seemed to be sinking—either that or everything else was getting taller—and bits of material were sailing off the faces of the buildings.
Wait a second.
The structure he was looking at—a nondescript, mid-rise office building of dark tinted glass—was doing something peculiar. It appeared to be…breathing. A deep respiratory flexing, like a baby’s first breaths of life. It was as if this anonymous structure, one of thousands like it on the island, had awakened after decades of abandoned slumber. Spidering cracks materialized in its reflective face. Michael sat upright, balancing on his palms. The pavement had begun to undulate disturbingly beneath him.
The glass exploded.
Michael rolled and flattened himself to the ground, covering his head as a million shards rained down. Whole plates detonated on the pavement. He was yelling at the top of his lungs. Nonsensical words, vile curses, an aural vomitus of terror. He was about to be diced to ribbons. There wouldn’t be enough of him left to bury, not that there would be anybody around to do that. The seconds passed, glass cascading all around him, Michael waiting, for the second time that day, to die.
