but kept walking. “Bad fire. Be careful,” she said to one of the firemen as they passed.
“Should we go back?” Saraub asked, panting, once they got to the doorman’s podium. “See if we can help get some of those people out of the building?” His shoulder was bleeding badly, and he needed to go to a hospital.
She shook her head. “No. They’re not worth it.”
Just then the chandelier dropped and the old lobby’s ceiling caved in. Plaster fell. Cops and firemen headed for the exit. With a loud, ear-rattling moan, The Breviary died, trapping the drunks and monsters and gray-haired children within its corpse.
Holding hands, Audrey Lucas and Saraub Ramesh limped out the door and into the world. They did not look back.
Epilogue
Flight
Dratted Upper West Side Inferno
October 27, 2012
Gothamites with keen noses know that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. As by now most readers have heard, the landmark building The Breviary in Manhattan’s tony Morningside Heights went up in flames last night. Eighteen residents, with the aid of New York’s bravest, escaped the towering inferno. Tragically, another thirty-four locked themselves in their apartments, where help could not arrive, and were consumed by the hellfire. The angels must have been watching, though, because not a single cop or fireman was injured.
Fire Chief Warren Otis gave a brief statement this morning, “Preliminary investigations indicate arson at more than one point of origin, with more than one type of incendiary—basically we found evidence of gasoline in the basement, nail polish remover dumped all over the lobby rugs, and lighter fluid and newspaper stuffed on top of burning stove pilots in many of the apartments.” When asked whether the residents had participated in a Jonestown variety mass suicide, he declined comment.
The building was, until recently, privately owned by its blue-blooded occupants, whose median age was eighty-five. Most were related to each other, and all were members of a cult called Chaotic Naturalism. The pseudoreligion predicted a slew of dastardly deeds, such as the death of mankind and a return to the age of beasts. Their masses reputedly took place Monday evenings, in the form of cocktail parties, where they drank the blood of a slaughtered animal. Over the years this ritual apparently proved too onerous, and they converted instead to booze and that rare African delicacy, chocolate-covered ants. Occupants were known for erratic behavior, such as discharging BB guns from their roof, stealing from their cleaning staffs, and making obscene gestures at pedestrians down below.
In keeping with the city’s recent love affair with the maudlin, there will be a five-borough moment of silence at noon today to honor the victims, as well as a memorial service at St. John the Divine. Strangers with time on their hands might also want to add their flowers to the six-foot-high clump of baby’s breath and hydrangea in front of the building’s burnt-out shell.
After the Twenty-sixth Precinct finishes its investigation, the building is slated for demolition. In a new development, it turns out that The Breviary’s residents had recently sold their shares in The Breviary to Columbia University Graduate Student Housing in order to cover back taxes. Several months ago, they received letters from the University, as well as the city housing authority, asking them to vacate by summer for reasons of public health, which some reporters believe sparked the mass suicide.
This investigation is ongoing. Turn to page 5 for eyewitness accounts.
From The New York Post
We Are All Architects
It wasn’t a switch, but a button. A November day in Lincoln, the trees out the window were all barren. She straightened Betty’s jagged bangs. Her hands had thinned, and her closed eyes were more sunken. An IV tree fed the tube in her arm.
Audrey knew then why she’d thought her alarm clock read 5:18 that first morning in The Breviary. Because that had been the same time that Betty had entered her coma. It really had been Betty who’d come to her at her darkest hour. She’d broken through Audrey’s dreams to warn her and make her whole again. Because love endures all kinds of things. Hurt, betrayal, hatred, bad luck, and even death. “I love you, Momma,” she said. “I hope you rest well, now.”
The doctor she’d never before met pushed the button, and the respirator slowed, then stopped. The beeping things got quiet. Betty left her flawed, iron-winged body, and Audrey hoped that she was free now, to fly someplace good.
Two days later, she and Saraub boarded a flight from Omaha back to New York. She was