Third Interlude Gwen, Under the Shadow #8
saw hit the steel with a tortured whine. A brassy Catherine wheel of sparks flew from the spinning blade.
He was at it for most of a minute before Gwen saw the first thread of smoke.
The slanted concrete platform now had a split running through it, a jagged crack running from one corner of the triangular opening.
The Pole stood with his feet spread wide, his boots on either side of the fissure.
The deeper the saw bit, the more it sounded like a hysterical scream.
Gwen looked, and then looked again. A silky ribbon of smoke was coming from that crack.
The chemical slick on the cement was fuming.
“Hey! Hey, we’ve got smoke!” Gwen cried from the rim of the crater. Erin saw it in the same moment and began to yell with
her. They both stood on the edge of the concavity, waving their arms.
The big Pole didn’t—couldn’t—hear, but Ruffner was in the hole with him, and he heard. Heard, and looked around, and saw the smoke rising beneath him and grabbed the Pole. The saw cut out . . . but the
scream continued for a few moments longer, a choked, panicked, wordless cry. Smoke boiled up out of the rubble beneath the
girder. Wendy was down there at the heart of it, banging her pipe on the bed frame.
“Oh no,” Erin said. “Oh, God. What’s happening?”
“The sparks musta lit something up, lower down. A mattress. Some shitty insulation. I don’t know, I—” Gwen said, but Erin
wasn’t listening. She had leapt into the hole, pushing through the other rescuers, and dropped to one knee.
“Wendy, we hear you. Hang on! Hang on, dear!”
Steel groaned. Something fell between Gwen and Erin, a chunk of rock, which raised a cloud of dust. When Gwen threw her head
back and looked at the east wing, it seemed the whole rotten edifice was swaying, ever so slightly.
“Get out!” Gwen screamed, and leapt into the pit.
She began to push at the men gathered around the saw. She shoved the Pole and made him stagger. She shoved at Mark Ruffner,
shoved at Ben and Julius, who had been moving debris by hand. “Get out!” she screamed again, and they looked up at the torn-open
remains of the east wing and fled.
Gwen whirled to face Arthur’s mother. Instead of running, Erin had flattened onto her stomach across the concrete. She had her face in the smoke coming up out of the triangular hole. Her face was slicked with sweat and ash, and she was coughing and yelling to the girl below.
“Wendy!” Erin Oakes yelled. “I’m here. I’m right here.”
“We have to go!” Gwen screamed and got the woman by her arm and wrenched her up to her knees, then to her feet.
A concrete block fell and smashed, two feet to their right. A steel bed frame slid out of one of the open cells above them,
dropped like a missile, and crashed to the rocks. There was a splitting sound, followed by one crack, and another. One of
the steel braces that had been brought in to hold the structure up folded in the middle with a squeal. Gwen had Erin Oakes
by the arm and hauled her back, to the edge of the concavity, spun her as if she were a child, and shoved her in the ass,
drove her up the side of the hole, pushing her on whenever she tried to turn back. Erin stopped again at the edge of the crater
and Gwen got an arm around her waist and almost lifted her, staggered three more steps, and the east wing fell behind them.
It didn’t topple so much as dissolve. There was a last shudder and the constituent parts suddenly crumbled and thundered down in a smoking blizzard of granite,
Sheetrock, rebar, and cement. Rubble buried the hole and everything around the hole. It was roaring for most of a minute,
this once solid four-story building, coming apart like a glacier dropping into the sea. A flying brick hit Gwen in the small
of her back, and she collapsed.
Erin and Gwen were engulfed in a rolling cloud of white chalk, of pulverized building. It whirled so thickly about them that
Gwen was blinded for a time. The bitter, stale taste of rock and plaster filled her mouth. She couldn’t see Erin anymore,
but she had a hand on her hip and could hear her sobbing. Alive. Still alive.
Gwen turned on her side. Pain detonated in the small of her back, again and again.
Bruised kidney, she thought, and she was right, bled for the next week like it was her period.
She squinted into the gritty, ashy glare.
A thousand sparks spun up from the collapse, flaring and disappearing: a whirlwind of burning butterflies.
The sun was dim, white, distant, and cold.
The cloud of debris eddied around her and for a moment, a black and serpentine shape seemed to rise with it, uncoiling its neck and opening its wings.
It was perhaps only a trick of the eyes and a ringing head, but it looked for all the world as if a dragon of shadow had lifted itself up from the ruin and was opening its jaws .
. . not in a scream of victory but in a laugh of delight.
Almost got you, Gwen, that King of Shadow seemed to be saying. Almost got you both.
15.
They were in the bed together, Gwen and Arthur’s mother, neither of them sleeping, when Erin started to speak.
“Did Arthur ever tell you why I went to jail?”
“Someone told me. I don’t remember who.” She remembered exactly who, remembered Van and Donna and Colin talking about it in
a matter-of-fact sort of way, hanging out in the kitchen while Gwen washed their dishes.
The digital clock on the end table said it was 2:43 a.m. They had been lying there, both of them thinking about Wendy Arthur,
for hours.
“There were six of us,” Erin said. “Harold Mitchell, who was a philosophy professor at the university, was a self-taught electrician.
He got us over the electrified fence, did something with jumper cables to divert the charge without tripping the alarm. We
went in with hammers, garden shears, paint cans, and stencils. This was the navy yard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They had
brought in the Henry Jackson—that’s a US submarine—to arm it with the new Trident One missile, eight warheads on each, each warhead carrying the explosive force of over a million tons of TNT.
A single missile with twenty-five times the power of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima.
They said one would be enough to kill every man, woman, and child in Moscow, and they said it like it was something to be proud of.
Like it was something to celebrate—that now we had a gun pointed at every child in Moscow.
If someone pointed a gun at a child—if someone pointed a gun at ten children—wouldn’t you do anything you could to make them put it down?
So we brought in stencils to spray peace signs on the submarine.
And hammers to dent the tail fins on the missiles.
That was how we were going to stop World War III.
With red spray paint and tools from Ace Hardware.
“We got down to the docks, but we never made it to the sub. We got close enough to see it, but a few navy boys spotted us
and came after us. They thought it was a scream. You should’ve heard ’em. Like little boys playing tag in the schoolyard.
Right up until someone died, it was funny.
Even we were laughing, running from them.
I remember thinking about how I would tell Arthur the story later, my night of true-blue real-life adventure.
Harold and I hid from the navy kids and doubled back.
I was determined to do some damage. I was out of breath and laughing, but I was deadly serious too.
I wanted them to know I was a mother. I wanted to let them know what I thought of threatening to turn children to ash.
Harry and I worked our way back around to this concrete wharf and the sub was right there, right alongside it.
We were still a couple hundred feet away, in a sort of side parking lot, stretched out flat under a pickup truck.
That’s where we were when this retired police officer came up on us.
His name was Jason Einaudi, sixty-one years old.
Three children. Two grandchildren. A Patriots tattoo on his arm.
He grabbed Harold by the foot and dragged him out from under the truck, and when Harry tried to get up, Einaudi dropped onto the small of his back with one knee.
So hard Harold screamed. Jason Einaudi was almost two hundred and fifty pounds, and Harold was built like a skinny eleven-year-old.
As I got out from under the truck, Harry tried to lift his head, and Einaudi bounced his face off the sidewalk.
Einaudi had his teeth gritted—he looked out of his mind.
I thought he was going to kill my friend in front of me .
. . so I sprayed red paint in his face. I didn’t shove him.
I didn’t hit him. I just wanted to distract him.
It wasn’t even going to blind him . . . Einaudi had a big pair of glasses on, so the paint couldn’t get in his eyes.
“But it scared him. He fell back into the next car with a scream. I think he thought it was Mace or pepper spray. Maybe he
thought I threw blood on him. He grabbed his gun, even though he couldn’t see, and both of us took off. We made it four steps
before the gun went off. I don’t know if he meant to shoot. Harold staggered and I thought he had been shot. I screamed and
stopped, but Harry righted himself and kept going. If I hadn’t stopped, I wouldn’t have looked back. I wouldn’t have seen
Jason Einaudi with his throat torn open. The bullet ricocheted off a nearby forklift, bounced back, and took a piece out of
Einaudi’s neck. You could’ve fired that gun three hundred times and never got that result again.