When I had first come to Manhattan with Jesse, I had been astounded by the sheer size of the city's population and lack of space of it all. My experience with D.C. traffic was nothing compared to Manhattan at midday. And the flow of pedestrians had been non-stop, an ocean of faces passing at every hour of the day and night. In a strange way, the same thing had been happening at that moment. But everyone had been moving in one direction. And everyone had been drowning in the panic. Voices and honking horns had taken on a terrible and terrifying new tone.
Jesse started screaming along with everyone else. But I had been stricken silent.
At first, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. There was simply no way, no way, that something that big and alive could exist. All swinging limbs and whipping tail, easily reaching to the roofs of the skyscrapers that in a normal world towered over everything. Its mouth was opened impossibly wide--it could have swallowed a 747 whole--and from it boomed the shrieking metallic roar that made the glass in the countless windows tremble and shatter. Spotlights from above and below were trained on it, making it even more visible. Not that it needed any help.
I was so absolutely mesmerized by its sheer size that it took me over a minute to realize it was starting to move down 8th Avenue, straight towards us. Jesse shrieked even louder and yanked my arm.
"Run, Sheba!!" she screamed.
For a few steps, Jesse was dragging me along while I reoriented myself with reality. Then, my own fear overwhelmed me. My hand was iron-tight on Jesse's as I took the lead, and the two of us were running full-tilt down one side of the street, swerving only to avoid the mess of cars and people.
"We can't outrun it!" I gasped as we were approaching the intersection of West 54th Street. "This way!"
I don't know exactly what I was thinking. But something in the back of my head was saying that if it was following us, we could not be on the same street.
The path down 54th Street was a bit less crowded, though several people behind us seemed to follow our example and turned as we did. I could hear Jesse starting to gasp for breath, but we did not slow down. We had reached Broadway before it finally occurred to me that the footsteps and the screams of the creature were fading away.
"Jesse!" I shouted to her over the noise of the people around us. "Jesse, I think it's gone now. I don't hear its footsteps anymore."
I gently pulled her towards the side of a building, out of the flow of the main traffic, and put my arms around her. Jesse clung to me, shaking and sobbing into my shoulder.
"What was that?" she choked after a few minutes, when she regained a bit of composure. All color had drained from her beautiful face. "It was...it was..."
"Impossible," I replied, biting my lip. Now that I was thinking about it, it was getting harder and harder to keep myself calm. "I know."
Some microscopic semblance of calm was starting to settle around us. People were no longer stampeding past, but walking or jogging by, or otherwise gathering in small groups to figure out--as Jesse and I were--what we had just seen.
"Where did it go?" I heard someone ask nearby.
"It went down 57th Street," someone else replied. "Did'ya see how big it was? Ripped a hole right into the side of that building..."
I didn't pay attention to anything else that was being said, because just then, Jesse pulled away from my embrace and started tugging on me again.
"I want to go home," she said. "Come on, Sheba."
"Jesse, I think we should get out of Manhattan," I protested. "That thing..."
But the look on her face was desperate. And she was so ghostly pale with fear that I couldn't bring myself to argue anymore.
We started walking up Broadway, but it was slow going. We were moving against the traffic, and the further we went the more damage there was to avoid. Dust and cars on fire and chunks of buildings. Somewhere overhead a helicopter thundered past, but the air was still too thick to see it. As we crossed the intersection of Broadway and 56th Street a few cop cars and a fire engine zoomed by, sirens blazing.
The crowd had thinned by the time we reached Broadway and 57th Street. And once again, Jesse and I froze in our tracks. If I had thought the damage I had seen before was bad, it was nothing to what 57th Street looked like. Fire blazed in the upper stories of the building at the far left corner, and the remnants of half the roof the same building blocked the way between Broadway and 8th Avenue. A traffic jam of crashed cars filled most of the intersection, two of which were burning. People were wandering around dazed, shellshocked.
A man staggered past us, covered in dust and blood. He paused when he saw us looking at him.
"What happened?" Jesse breathed, her eyes wide.
The man did not reply. He stared at Jesse a moment longer, and then walked away, his expression remaining blank and dumbfounded. I stared after him, but Jesse seemed eager to keep going.
"We're not far," she said. "Columbus Circle is right there."
But something else had caught my eye now. Partway down the block a glass-fronted store flickered with TV screens. A handful of people had gathered around them. I gripped Jesse's hand more tightly and gently pulled her towards the group.
"Sheba!" she protested.
"Just one minute, Jesse," I replied. "I want to see where it went."
A few people made room for us as we approached. I gently pushed Jesse to make her stand in front of me, and I looked over her shoulder. Though none of us could hear sound, a local news station was broadcasting the extensive damage.
"All the routes out of the city are jammed," someone in the group said, sounding frustrated. "How the hell do they expect us to evacuate?"
"They called in the military," someone else replied. "Haven't you heard the helicopters?"
"And what's the military gonna do? Regular guns won't do jack to that thing, and what makes you think they'll get permission to start using missiles and bombs when it's waltzing through Manhattan?"
"They're already using tanks! They just broadcasted them firing tanks!"
"That still doesn't help us! Unless you plan to hitch a ride on the next tank you see."
"What we need to do is get out of here," someone new piped up. "There are docks at the end of 57th Street. If we just keep going west..."
"There's no way in hell I'm going in the same direction that thing did!"
"Where is it now?" Jesse abruptly shouted out, turning to face the arguing people.
Everyone turned to face us. The one that had argued about the military, a big beefy man wearing a shirt that was ripped across the back, waved to the TVs on the other side of the glass pane.
"Disappeared into the harbor," he replied gruffly. "They don't know where it is now."
"If it's in the harbor, then it isn't here," I said, more to Jesse than to anyone else. "We're safe."
"Then let's go back to the apartment," Jesse insisted.
"Where do you two live?" another man asked, smaller than the first and wearing crooked glasses with a crack across one lens.
"Time Warner Building," I replied.
"Don't bother," the beefy man said. "I just came from Columbus Circle. Police ordered everyone to evacuate. One of the towers was knocked over."
Jesse gasped and started shaking again. I could tell she was going to faint if I didn't get her to calm down.
"Then we're getting out of here," I said. "We can't go west, so what about east?" I thought for a moment, trying to remember what other possible escape route there was. "The 59th Street Bridge?"
"Completely jammed," someone from the back reported.
"What about north?" the man with the glasses asked. "Towards the Bronx."
"Why bother walking so far?" a woman asked. I recognized her voice as the one who had defended the military. "The military will be passing by soon enough. We should find a place to bunker down and wait."
A murmur filtered through the small crowd. A few more people had joined us now, attracted by the relative calmness of our gathering. The man with the glasses seemed the most nervous.
"What if it comes back?" he asked the woman. "Where can we possibly hide? I'm not going back inside any of these buildings."
"Did anyone see it break through the street?" the woman retorted. She sounded rather confident. "We should be plenty safe underground. The 57th Street and 7th Avenue subway station is right down there."
"And how will we know who or what's coming if we're huddled in a subway station?" the beefy man asked.
"I can get newsfeed on my Blackberry," one of the new arrivals announced.
"And we can take turns keeping watch at the entrance," the confident woman added.
"Sounds like a plan to me," I said, trying to infuse some of the woman's confidence into my own voice, but failing. Jesse still could not stop shaking. "But I'd still feel better if we knew exactly where it was."
"The Brooklyn Bridge," Jesse said flatly.
Once again, everyone turned. But this time, it was back towards the TVs. Jesse had been the only one watching them during the discussion of what to do. My mouth fell open in shock as the overhead shot of the Brooklyn Bridge flashed. Over and over again, they were rewinding the footage of the massive grey object rising out of the water and smashing down.
"Alright people," the beefy man announced abruptly. "Let's go."
I had to hook my arm around Jesse's waist to pull her away from the TV screens. She barely took five steps with me before her knees buckled. She collapsed onto the ground in a dead faint, nearly dragging me down with her.
"Jesse!" I screamed.
"Is she hurt?" the man with the glasses asked, approaching Jesse's other side.
"Looks like she fainted," someone above me stated.
I was trying to lift Jesse into my arms. But even though she was a relatively small person, I was not strong enough to lift her.
"It's okay," the beefy man said suddenly. "I've got her."
The man approached and leaned down, grasping Jesse around the waist and shoulders and heaving her up over one shoulder. I scowled at the rough way the man held her, but the other patted my shoulder gently.
"She'll be alright," he assured.
"We all will be," the confident woman called from the front. "It can't get any worse than this. The military will be here soon."
"It can't get any worse than this," I repeated under my breath. The man with the glasses did not remove his hand from my shoulder, but I didn't care at that moment. I was too busy focusing on Jesse's limp form draped over the man's shoulder in front of me. "It can't get any worse..."