The Whisper, page 33
His injuries—all those twisted bones, bruises, and torn ligaments—still pained him. Jasper could hardly stand on his feet, let alone get through a panicked crowd.
What can you do? Think faster.
His eyes were rolling from side to side. Meanwhile, the bombs’ timer was thirty-seven seconds shy of detonating. Jasper thought he had even less.
Faster. Faster. Faster.
The streets behind the windows had started darkening. It seemed like it had been forever since he’d last seen Glen, when in fact he’d seen him a little under an hour ago. Jasper kept looking out the windows when it suddenly struck him.
The windows, that’s a way out! Ridiculous! Dangerous! But not as impossible as it might seem!
Jasper had no time to weigh all the possibilities, but he believed if he did everything right, it was possible to survive a fall from the fifth floor.
He checked the man’s pulse once again to rid himself of every last bit of the doubt that the man was dead. Jasper got to his feet, applying the weight of his whole body to his left leg. Using the right one was pure agony. He knew he’d have to use both legs and took a moment to get ready for it. Then Jasper seized the man by the armpits and spent half of the remaining time hoisting him up on his shoulder. The pain slithered around his limbs like barbed wire. Jasper couldn’t resist a moan. He felt like the bones of his legs were fragile as crystal and could crack any second.
He darted to the nearest window. The man’s body nearly slipped off his shoulder before he broke through the glass and found himself in a free fall. The fall lasted about three seconds, during which Jasper could look nowhere but the ground he was inevitably approaching. The wind whistled in his ears. The array of viewers standing at a safe distance from the building let out a collective “OOOOH!” that was filled more with amazement than fear for the falling person’s life.
Quite impressive. Can you do it again?
Jasper was so concentrated on the landing that he heard nothing around him. He had to do everything right. A moment before he landed on the car parked in front of the building, Jasper had moved the man’s body under himself, their faces a couple of inches away from of each other. The car’s roof caved in, and all of the windows cracked. Jasper severely damaged the man’s thorax with his shoulder, not that a corpse would mind. Jasper felt something snap inside the lifeless body, and a splash of blood shot into his face out of the man’s mouth.
The first thing that crossed his mind was to wonder how much more painful this fall would have been if the body hadn’t cushioned the landing. He would have to admit that, even with two hundred pounds of soft flesh underneath him, it still hurt. Sprawled across the body on the car’s roof, Jasper could hardly move. He felt moisture on the left side of his face and involuntarily wiped the blood off.
The task wasn’t finished, not with him a few feet away from the blast site.
A couple of men in APD uniforms rushed toward him, yelling something on their way, but Jasper couldn’t make out their words. His mind was too foggy. When he felt someone’s firm grip, first on his ankle and then on his arm, he wasn’t even able to accept the help. The officers kept yelling as they were pulling him off the car’s roof. Little by little, his vision was sharpening, and then he saw the service vehicles driven to the edge of the street. Altogether they formed a border that people—hundreds, maybe even thousands of them—couldn’t get past. At one point, Jasper was able to hop on one foot, contributing to the policemen, who were carrying him by his arms toward the border. He could still hear people’s desperate appeals from inside the building, but he couldn’t do anything about it. Nobody could because the bombs were going off in exactly…
Four…
Three…
Two…
One…
As it turned out, they were planted at intervals of ten floors. The only explosion that Jasper could feel with all five senses was the first one. The officers hadn’t taken him far enough, and the blast wave knocked all three of them off their feet, hurling them to the border of vehicles as if giving a boost. Jasper fell on the cold asphalt, the policemen on each side of him. He couldn’t see the following explosions behind his back, but every time one happened he felt the ground tremble.
The crowd gawked as the explosions progressed to the very top. The collective “OOOOH!” was longer this time and seemed to be getting louder every time another floor got blown. Debris of concrete and metal was falling on the streets, some of it ruining nearby cars, some fracturing roads and sidewalks. When the seventieth floor struck the final chord, silence hung in the air. Tiny shards of window glass drizzled from above. And then, as people saw the building tilt a little to the left, the whole block broke out with copious screams. The Arlington Building could no longer stand. The lower floors began to collapse under the weight of the upper, and the crowd scattered away from the vehicle border.
Jasper got up, grabbing at a side-view mirror of an ambulance car as the policemen hurried to help. While they were retreating from the spot of collapse, none of the three saw an enormous cloud of dust chasing them.
The spire of the Arlington Building scraped against the facade of an adjacent building like a long, sharp nail. The whole construction was getting diminished floor by floor until the dust was the only thing left of it. It hung in the air like a vague silhouette of the Arlington Building, like its ghost that was gradually passing to another world.
You could see that ghost from any part of Acheart.
Glen couldn’t really assess the scale of his job. Pine Ridge was an excellent spot for viewing the Acheart skyline, but every building looked so tiny from this far away that you could easily lose sight of it the second you blinked. Being the tallest skyscraper in the city, the Arlington Building could hardly stay unnoticed, and yet watching it collapse was as breathtaking to Glen as watching a fly getting swatted.
The driver hadn’t been able to drive the van to the edge of the cliffside they were standing on. They’d had to cover a few yards on foot. They had made it in time, mere seconds before the floors of the building started lighting up and fading out like fireflies.
Glen lit a cigarette when the dust cloud was creeping through the streets of Midtown. He felt satisfaction but nothing more, which was surprising. Wasn’t this what he had been anticipating for the last three years?
“Now, can you tell me what the hell happened?” the driver standing next to Glen said.
He looked quite athletic for his age, and if it wasn’t for the abundance of silver threads in his hair and a touch of wrinkles around his eyes, you wouldn’t believe he was anywhere near sixty.
“What are you talking about?” Glen asked.
“That whole detour thing. That’s what I’m talking about.”
Glen had assumed he would demand explanations. Frank Whitney always did. His overeagerness to know everything got him in trouble all the time.
From the very beginning, Frank was the problem that needed to be nipped in the bud. He had to know who the big boss in this city was. Frank Whitney and his people had long turned into house mice that squeaked from time to time but never ventured to show themselves—the underworld of the underworld. Arlington knew he had significantly diminished his enemy’s power. What he didn’t know was that all those years Frank had been quietly amassing his strength, waiting for the day he would be able to compete with the devil.
That day had come when he’d seen Glen Harding’s mutilated face. Right away, Frank knew with Glen being initiated into most of the devil’s secrets, his chances of getting the desired revenge were higher than ever. It was Glen who had taken this desire to the next level.
Not the devil’s life but the work of his entire life.
That sounded delicious, but it required time—time to figure everything out, time for Glen to heal, time for Frank to make sure they could trust each other.
Glen still felt a bit strange that he talked to this man without a gun pointed at his face. And that was supposed to be a huge deal. Frank had to remember all his people Glen had taken out on Arlington’s behalf.
“You gonna say anything to me?” Frank uttered.
Glen kept silent for a bit, and then said, “Fuck, this is awkward.”
“What is?”
“Our partnership is supposed to end right here and now. We did what we had agreed on. Aren’t we both free to be back at each other’s throats?”
A corner of Frank’s mouth went up a little.
“Not today.” He turned his head back to the dusted Midtown. “I’m in a very good mood.”
Glen followed his gaze, and they spent the next minute silently contemplating their job.
“I think I know why you hesitated to leave,” Frank said. “I had the same feeling a few times myself.”
“What feeling?”
“Confusion about whether we should go through with this. From the very beginning, I had been so determined, but when the time had finally come I kept asking myself, ‘What are you doing?’”
Poor, dumb Frank Whitney, Glen thought.
With so much experience behind him, he still hadn’t learned to see people for what they were, which was the most important quality of any leader. That quality had put Owen Arlington at the top of the underworld.
Frank was always so sure he knew people, knew what drove them, what made them tick, but the truth was he never did.
Couldn’t he see how thirsty Glen was for revenge all along? Couldn’t he see how limitless his anger was? Glen would’ve never hesitated to think he was doing something wrong. And those who had to pay for Arlington’s sins? They had chosen their fate a long time ago. They had chosen to be content with being a part of the devil’s stronghold.
Glen didn’t want to call Frank out on it and explain the actual reason for his hesitation in Midtown.
“How’d you fight that feeling?” Glen asked instead.
“Reminded myself of all the people we were doing a favor. I reminded myself that Arlington Building was a tumor that needed to be removed. You can’t remove a tumor without cutting through flesh. Now, when Arlington has lost his legacy and Acheart won’t be able to ignore him anymore, I can finally take a deep breath and say I’ve done the right thing.”
Now, you can take a deep breath and say, “This city is mine.”
Glen thought, with Frank’s wise leadership, he wouldn’t hold the newly obtained power for long, and no matter how big the empire he aspired to amass would be he’d ruin it within a few years. Not that Glen cared. Destroying Arlington Building—Owen Arlington’s soul—was the only thing he had longed for.
“Thank you for your help,” Frank said. “There’s not a lot of people you can trust these days.”
Glen turned his head to take another look at the Arlington Building’s ghost.
“You don’t say,” he said.
Jasper sat in one of the numerous ambulance vans. Its open back doors looked out at the vehicles all around that were getting filled with the injured. The dust had spread as far as twelve blocks from the collapse site, and though it was less dense here, Jasper could still hardly see through it. The dust was mixing with the black stream nobody except him could see. The mist covered the streets like a broad blanket, knitted by hundreds of those choking on fear and sorrow.
Jasper had managed to defy the darkness, not without help, but still. He had found a way out when there had seemed to be none. Maybe what the devil had said the other day was true. Maybe all he had to do was be a bit more attentive to the things around him.
An ambulance technician, from the bottom to the top powdered with concrete dust, approached the back of the van and let Jasper breathe through a respirator. Pure air had never felt better. Jasper pressed the respirator to his face with his left hand, perhaps the only limb that was painless to use.
“You did good, kid,” the technician said.
Jasper took the respirator a few inches off his face.
“What?” he said.
“Your jump from the fifth floor, you must have guts to do something like that.”
“You have no idea how far one is willing to go to save his life.”
Jasper took another breath through the respirator.
“Seems like you did the impossible.” The technician smiled.
At that moment, Jasper could swear that smile reminded him of someone. He put the respirator down and furrowed his brow. In the next half a minute, they didn’t exchange a single word as they gazed upon each other.
“You okay?” the technician asked.
“I uh… I’m not, actually.” Jasper giggled to make up for the awkwardness. “My whole body is falling apart.”
“Sorry about this. We’re almost finished. A few more minutes, and we’ll be heading to General Hospital.”
The man smirked at Jasper and left him alone for a moment. Through the open back doors of the ambulance car, Jasper was watching the emergency vehicles in close proximity. All the people in uniforms were as full of human poison as anyone else, but they refused to show that.
A couple of ambulance workers were rushing to the van opposite the one Jasper was sitting in. They were rolling a stretcher with a man on it. Amid the chaos, Jasper wouldn’t have paid attention to that man if the voice of one of the workers hadn’t been so loud and edgy.
“We’ll need more blood! He’s barely holding up!”
Jasper couldn’t help but peer out. The stretcher was about to be brought into the van, but he had a moment or two to recognize the man lying on it. It wasn’t so much the man’s pale, expressionless face that gave him away as his injuries. The legs of his pants were rolled up, and both shins were thickly bandaged, but the blood was coming in such a heavy flow that it had soaked the bandages through. The man had been looking up at the darkening sky with half-closed eyes before it got hidden behind the car’s roof.
Jasper wondered if he had done the right thing by informing the receptionist of that investment bank about a person trapped on the seventy-third floor. He wondered what the devil would have preferred if he’d been given a choice: to die or to realize that he had lost everything.
Either way, it would’ve been his choice. Jasper concluded he had no right to make that choice for him. After seeing Glen, after realizing that a friend this close could turn out this way, Jasper realized how cunning the ways of darkness could be. There was always an excuse to justify cruelty. Glen could easily say the devil deserved to suffer. Jasper could easily say the world would be a better place without him. But then, what was the difference between them?
Jasper wanted to stop this darkness before it could spread further. After all, he had only had to tell the receptionist that the owner of the building could be reached by the freight elevator. At that point, Arlington himself didn’t give a damn about who would cross the border between the two worlds.
Jasper Newman was one of the few people who had seen all sides of the devil, and now he could tell Owen Arlington wasn’t any different from anyone he knew, from Glen, from Ben Elliot, from Gordon J. Donovan, from himself. The disease they all shared presented itself differently, and in the end Jane was right.
Everyone is cruel in their own way.
EPILOGUE
His wrinkled hands hung above the keyboard as he struggled to pin down a proper thought. He had been writing for four hours now, but the result was only half a page. God bless the twenty-first century. God bless technology. Writing on a computer was so much easier. He recalled from time to time how he’d been writing his first novel—those piles of crumpled papers with hardly a sentence on each one—and was glad that now he only needed to push a button to delete what wasn’t relevant to the story.
It had been over forty years since his first novel came out, and all this time had proved that an epilogue was the hardest part to write. Wasn’t it supposed to be a reasonable conclusion that would linger in your head once you turned the last page?
This office used to be his bedroom. The window in front of the desk looked out at the small lake that always helped him concentrate. The stillness, the quiet—it all kept his head clear. He took off the glasses and rubbed his eyes. Sitting in one place and staring at the blank screen had exhausted him, and though his stiff joints no longer favored unnecessary movements, he thought he could use a bit of fresh air. His shaking hand—the one that lacked the little finger—reached out for a pack of cigarettes lying next to the keyboard, always at the ready wherever he went. His lungs already screeched like rusted door hinges. He knew it was too late for him to worry about health risks, but sometimes he caught himself thinking that if he had the chance to go back in time he wouldn’t have the willpower to get rid of this habit.
He went out of his office and strode past a few empty rooms. The office was probably the only reason he had to climb up and down the stairs. The rest of the second floor was all bare walls. He considered maintaining his parents’ house, one of the few things worth his time and money. However, he didn’t think it was necessary to take care of the rooms that would never accommodate anyone. He went downstairs and stopped for a second in front of the back door, looking at his reflection in the glass patch. Wrinkles furrowed his skin all over. His hair had completely lost its color. But he thought, on one hand, his age helped him conceal some features he had used to dislike about himself. Quite unreasonable thinking, given that in a town as small and distant as Summerhold, there were hardly any people to look at him.
Here, Jasper Newman had found the freedom he’d been looking for his entire life.
Sometimes, he felt his parasites pressing on his loneliness, but it cost him nothing to ignore them. He knew there were things worse than being alone. Plus, Jasper never felt completely alone. One person was still around, and even though he couldn’t see her, he knew she would always be there for him. Jane had promised to wait for him, and he had never stopped to doubt her promise.
