Loyalty in Death

"Cleared six, four to go. Have to stick. Dallas, we lose it down here, we take out Pe

Eve dumped the boy over her shoulder in a fireman's carry and pulled herself onto the steps. "Get them out, A

She stumbled through the seats, kicking aside the bags and coats and food people had left behind.

"Seven, down to three. We're going to make it."

"For God's sake, A

"Good advice."

Eve blinked the sweat out of her eyes and saw Roarke just as he plucked the boy off her shoulder. "Get him out. I'm going for Malloy."

"The hell you are."

It was all he managed before the floor began to tremble. He saw the crack in the wall behind them split. Eve's hand was caught in his.

They leaped off the platform and ran for the door where cops in full gear were pushing, shoving, all but tossing the last of the civilians through. She felt her eardrums contract an instant before she heard the blast. The wall of sizzling heat slammed them from behind. She felt her feet leave the ground, her head reel from the noise and heat. And the tidal wave force of air shot them through the door. Something hot and heavy crashed behind them.

Survival was paramount now. Hands gripped, they scrambled up, kept moving blindly forward while rock and glass and steel rained down. The air was full of sounds, the shrieks of metal, the crash of steel, the thunder of spewing rock.

She tripped over something, saw it was a body trapped under a concrete spear as wide as her waist. Her lungs were on fire, her throat full of smoke. Diamond-sharp fists of glass showered down, propelled by vicious secondary explosions.

When her vision cleared, she could see what seemed to be hundreds of shocked faces, mountains of smoking rubble, and too many bodies to count.

Then the wind slapped her face, cold. Hard. And she knew they were alive.

"Are you hurt, are you hit?" she shouted to Roarke, unaware that their hands were still fused together.

"No." Somehow, he still had the unconscious boy over his shoulder. "You?"

"No, I don't think… No. Get him to the MTs," she told Roarke. Panting, she stopped, turned, blinked. From the outside, the building showed little damage. Smoke billowed from me jagged opening where doors had been, and the streets were littered with charred and twisted rubble, but the Garden still stood.

"They got all but two. Just two." She thought of the station below – the trains, the commuters, the vendors. She wiped grime and blood off her face. "I have to go back, get the status."

He kept her hand firmly in his. He'd looked behind as they'd flown through the door. And he'd seen. "Eve, there's nothing to go back for."

"There has to be." She shook him off. "I have men in there. I have people in there. Take the kid to an MT, Roarke. He took a bad spill."

"Eve…" He saw the expression on her face, and let it go. "I'll wait for you."

She crossed the street again, avoiding little pots of flame and smoking stone. She could already see looters joyfully racing down the block, crashing in windows. She grabbed a uniform, and when he shook her off and told her to move along, dug out her badge.

"Sorry, Lieutenant." His face was dead white, his eyes glazed. "Crowd control's a bitch."

"Get a couple of units together, get the looting stopped. Start moving the perimeter back and get some security sensors up. You!" she called to another uniform. "Get the medical teams a clear area for the wounded and start taking names."

She kept moving, making herself give orders, start routines. By the time she was ten feet from the building, she knew Roarke was right. There was nothing to go back for.

She saw a man sitting on the ground, his head in his hands, and recognized him as part of E and B by the fluorescent yellow stripe across his jacket.

"Officer, where's your lieutenant?"

He looked up, and she saw he was weeping. "There were too many. There were just too many, all over hell and back."

"Officer." Her breath wanted to hitch, her heart to pound. She wouldn't let them. "Where's Lieutenant Malloy?"

"She sent us out, down to the last two. She sent us out. Just her and two men. Only two more. They got one. I heard Snyder call it over the headphones, and the lieutenant told them to clear the area. It was the last one that took them. The last fucking one."

He lowered his head and sobbed like a child.

"Dallas." Feeney came on the run and out of breath. "Damn, goddamn, I couldn't get closer than half a block by the time I got here. Couldn't hear a damn thing over the communicator."

But he'd heard her heart on the tracker, loud and strong, and it had kept him sane.

"Sweet holy Jesus." His hand gripped her shoulder while he looked at the entrance. "Mother of God."

"A

His hand tightened on her shoulder, then his arm was around her. "Oh hell."

"I was one of the last out. We were nearly clear. I told her to get out. I told her to abort and go. She didn't listen."

"She had a job to do."

"We need search and rescue. Maybe…" She knew better. A

"I'll get it started. You ought to see a med-tech, Dallas."

"It's nothing." She drew in a breath, blew it out. "I need her address."

"We'll get done what needs to be done here, then I'll go with you."

She turned away, sca

And below the streets, she thought, in the transpo station, it would be worse. Unimaginably worse.

For money, she thought as the heat rose in her like a geyser. For money, she was sure of it, and for the memory of a fanatic without a clear cause.

Someone, she swore it, would pay.

It was an hour before she got back to Roarke. He stood, his coat rippling in the wind, as he helped MTs load wounded into transports.

"The kid okay?" Eve asked him.

"He will be. We found his father. The man was terrified." Roarke reached out, wiped a smear off her cheek. "The talk is casualties are light. Most were killed in the panic to get out. Most got out, Eve. What could have been a death toll in the thousands is, at this point, less than four hundred."

"I can't count lives that way."

"Sometimes it's all you can do."

"I lost a friend tonight."

"I know that." His hands lifted to frame her face. "I'm sorry for that."

"She had a husband and two children." She looked away, into the night. "She was pregnant."

"Ah, God." When he would have drawn her to him, she shook her head and stepped back.

"I can't. I'll fall apart, and I can't. I have to go tell her family."

"I'll go with you."

"No, it's a cop thing." She lifted her hands, pressed them to her eyes, and just held them there a moment. "Feeney and I will do it. I don't know when I'll be home."

"I'll be here awhile yet. They can use extra hands."

She nodded, started to turn.

"Eve?"

"Yeah."

"Come home. You'll need it."

"Yeah. Yeah, I will." She walked off to find Feeney and prepared to deliver news that crushed lives.

Roarke worked another two hours with the wounded and the weeping. He sent for oceans of coffee and soup – one of the comforts money could buy. As bodies were transferred to the already overburdened morgue, he thought of Eve and how she faced the demands of the dead every day.

The blood. The waste. The stink of both seemed to crawl over his skin and under it. This is what she lived with.

He looked at the building, the scars and the ruin. This could be mended. It was stone, steel, glass, and such things could be rebuilt with time, with money, with sweat.