A Hole in the Sky Read Free

“At two o’clock.”
    Kawecki turned slightly and made a minute adjustment to his glasses. “Check! There’s Old Glory! Right where she’s supposed to be. It looks like Lucy is still alive. Thank God for that.”
    Voss nodded. Like Kawecki, he had spoken with the agent named Lucy by radio, but never met her. And that was before they left Arkansas some three months earlier. A lot can happen in ninety days. “If you’re ready, let’s go. We’re supposed to meet her at the Hotel Constantine. My guess is that she’s watching us from one of those buildings.”
    “Roger that,” Kawecki said, as he fastened his binoculars into place. “All right, everybody, let’s move out. And don’t forget to eyeball the windows all around. A stink with an Auger could do lots of damage from up there. Over.”
    Voss heard a crunching sound under his boots as he followed Lang and Kawecki across a field of fresh snow. He knew the stinks could follow and wondered if they would. How many humans remained in New York anyway? Enough to make tracks a common sight? Or were signs of habitation so rare as to merit an immediate follow-up? The politician didn’t know but figured he was about to find out.
    Lang must have been thinking about it too, because he made it a point to walk on bare concrete in the few places where that was possible, and cut through stores when it made sense. Fifteen minutes later they slipped through the front door of a run-down hostelry called the Constantine. It was a residential hotel from the look of it, which made sense given all the factories and warehouses in the area. An imposing reception desk stood off to the left, backed by a key rack, and a framed list of “House Rules.”
    Broken glass crackled under Rigg’s boots as he walked over to the reception desk and slapped the dome-shaped bell that sat next to a black telephone. It made a lonely ringing sound.
    Voss eyed the lobby’s worn chairs, the shoe-shine stand, and the magazine kiosk that was decorated with cigarette advertising. Taking a closer look, he saw that atwo-year-old copy of
Time
magazine was still for sale. The cover photo consisted of an open-mouthed Steelhead. The caption read: “What do they want?”
    The answer, as it turned out, was
everything
.
    Voss’s thoughts were interrupted when Chu said, “We’ve got company,” and a woman walked in off the street. She was decked out in a fashionable fur hat, a pink ski jacket, and a bandolier of red shotgun shells. The rest of her outfit consisted of black stirrup pants and fur-trimmed boots. A Winchester pump gun was tucked under her right arm. She looked like a socialite on a skeet shoot. “Hi,” she said cheerfully. “I’m Lucy. Welcome to the Big Apple. Which one of you is President Voss?”
    Voss stepped forward. The woman in front of him appeared to be in her early thirties. Blond curls peeked out from under the cap. Her wide-set eyes were China blue and her skin was alabaster white.
    Lucy was a beautiful woman, or had been back before something ripped her face open and left a jagged scar that started high on the right side of her face. The white line zigzagged down across a softly rounded cheek to the left corner of her mouth. The stitches looked like the work of an amateur. Voss could tell that she knew what he was thinking as her chin came up and her eyes narrowed. “I’m Tom Voss,” he replied. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. Thanks for agreeing to help us.”
    “You’re the one who deserves thanks,” Lucy replied sincerely as her eyes darted from face to face. “Odds are that the stinks know you’re here by now, so it’s best to keep moving.”
    Lucy led the team out onto Canal Street, and from there to Varick, where they took a right. Voss would have felt very exposed if it hadn’t been for the snow. It was falling more thickly now, reducing visibility to little more than twenty feet, and erasing the team’s tracks within a matter of minutes.
    Warehouses crowded in