Adrenaline Read Free

“Did you get a new phone?”
    “I lost my old one this morning. Just bought a new one. It’s been a rotten morning.”
    I heard the shaky tension in her voice. “You sick?”
    “Please, just come outside.”
    Bad news, then, to be delivered face-to-face. Not in the office, where emotion might be seen. A coldness gripped my heart. The Bundle. She had gone to the doctor. Something was wrong with the baby.
    I hurried out of our offices; past John the guard, who had abandoned his cricket book for a British tabloid. Down the hallway. “Where are you?”
    “Out on Holborn.”
    “Are you okay?”
    “No… just come find me outside. Please.”
    I raced down the stairs, six flights, not waiting for the elevator. I came out into the lobby.
    No sign of Lucy.
    “Come out into the street,” she said. “Please, Sam. Please.”
    “What’s the matter?” I headed out onto the busy street. It offered a steady stream of pedestrians—office workers, couriers, shoppers, the inevitable London tourists. Two young women leaned against the building in fashionable coats, smoking, sipping tea from plus-sized paper cups between gossipy laughs. I scanned the street. No Lucy. “Where are you?”
    “Sam, now. Please. Run.”
    I ran, even before Lucy said to, because it was all so wrong, I could feel it in every cell of my body. I headed under the covered scaffolding of the building next door, hurrying along the steady march of people. Finally I pushed past a man in a suit, past a woman in a hooded sweatshirt.
    I stopped when I stepped back out of the temporary tunnel; there was no sign of Lucy, on the sidewalks, in the herky-jerk of London traffic. None. I turned, looked every way.
    I heard my pregnant wife crying on the phone.
    “Lucy? Lucy?” I gripped the phone so hard the edges bit into my fingers.
    Now I heard her sobbing: “Let me go.”
    My eyes darted everywhere and I heard a car honk. I turned and saw a truck whip around an idling Audi, thirty feet away, the car facing me on the opposite side of the road, Lucy in the passenger seat. My office building stood between me and the Audi. My first thought was: no onestops on Holborn. The car was silver gray, like the sky in the moments before rain. A man sat in the driver’s seat, bent toward Lucy. Then he straightened and I could see him better. Late twenties. Dark hair. Dark glasses. Square jaw. I saw a flash of white as he turned his head, the pale curve of a scar marring his temple, like a sideways question mark.
    Lucy looked right at me.
    Then the blast hit.

3

    A ROAR, AN ECLIPSE OF THE SUN , like God stuck his hand between me and the sky. I turned and the top floor of our building was shattering, flame spouting out, reinforced glass and ash and steel carving and falling through the air. The ground shook. A person, halved, burning, fell to the street, right by the pretty tea drinkers, who cowered and staggered for the doorway’s cover as debris rained down.
    My office of fake consultants was gone. Brandon, the visiting suits, the scribbling rookie, my friends and colleagues. Gone. Rubble covered the street, people, landing on cars, cabs, and buses, and London itself seemed to give out a scream, formed of the thundering blast’s echo against glass tower and stone courts, the keen of car horns, and the rising cry and stampede of the bystanders.
    I couldn’t see the Audi anymore, and Holborn was a mad jumble of stopped buses and cars, and chunks of concrete, stone, and steel.
    I couldn’t
see
. I didn’t think. I vaulted onto the construction tunnel roof, monkeyed up the bars. I had to get above the haze. I climbed fast, then I saw the flash of steel gray. The Audi, with my wife in it, revved forward. I sawthe back of Lucy’s head, bent slightly as though to catch the breeze in the window. Driving with the window down helped her cope with her morning sickness, I remembered. It was a crazy thought.
    “Lucy!” I screamed. “Lucy!” I scrambled up the scaffold. I had to