with blood. She saw someone lying flat on his back with six people huddled around him—maybe family, maybe strangers. Nine or ten meters beyond him, a small horde of travelers and airline personnel had formed a sort of spontaneous rugby scrum, putting their shoulders into an ambulance whose driver had attempted to cross the terminal lobby, only to set off a fault line in the floor and get his vehicle trapped.
Mariko finally figured out what was so odd: none of these people were bystanders. The crowd that inevitably formed whenever there was a house fire or a downtown car wreck hadn’t formed here. These were average civilians, not gawking but forming teams and getting down to business. That’s what was strange about the old man with the head wound: he was alone, doing his part to aid in the relief work, without a mob of rubberneckers surrounding him. His part wasn’t much; he only had to keep pressure on a wound. But he was doing his part.
Mariko wondered how long she’d been standing there, staring. Only a few seconds. She’d scarcely crossed the threshold into the lobby and already she felt so overwhelmed she feared she might drown. This was so much bigger than anything she’d been trained to handle. But no one had trained any of these civilians either. If they didn’t have time for gawking, neither did she.
She made it two steps into the terminal when the whole world went to hell.
One moment she was on her feet. The next she was airborne, then flat on her back. Her head spun. She couldn’t hear. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t breathe.
It took a few seconds to realize she wasn’t blind. A cloud of white had enveloped her, leaving nothing else for her to see. Mariko smelled smoke and dust and blood. Another explosion. What else could it have been? It had knocked the wind out of her, and now that she was gasping for air it shoved its gritty, smoky fingers down her throat.
For a while she could concentrate on nothing other than getting her breath under control. Mercifully, the cloud began to dissipate almost immediately. By the time Mariko was breathing normally, the smoke had risen, the dust had settled, and she could see again. A ringing still flooded her ears. She felt a constant rumble, and knew instinctively that she should have been able to hear it. She couldn’t. She was deaf but for a high-pitched ringing cloying in her ears. Whatever it was, the rumbling pressed against her back and it was very warm.
Still punch-drunk, she tried to roll herself to her feet. Instead she fell about a meter and landed on her hands and knees. She’d thought she was lying on the ground. Now the world sorted itself out: the explosion had thrown her onto the hood of a squad car. The engine was still running; that explained the warm rumbling she’d felt. It also explained why the back of her head hurt so much: she’d left a skull-sized depression of spider-webbed glass in the squad car’s windshield.
Now that she’d had a chance to register her injuries, everything else in her body spoke up. Her back was a cacophony of pain. Every muscle hurt like hell. The backs of her arms too; she guessed she’d probably performed a breakfall on the hood of the squad. The TMPD’s aikido instructors would reprimand her for forgetting to tuck her chin.
Once she was on her feet the world slowed its spinning. She made her way toward the terminal, staggering across the five-meter expanse of rubble between her and the blown-out doors. Inside, the ambulance was a black, flaming skeleton of its former self. Of the people who had been pushing it, nothing recognizable remained.
A car bomb, she thought. She’d only seen images before, on the news or in gangster movies. Now, standing amid the wreckage, she recognized this for what it was: a double bombing. She’d heard of the tactic—always in some far-flung country, never in Japan, but it made sense in its own warped, sadistic way: the first explosion drew all the first responders and the second one blew them to bits. After that, everyone on-site would have to wonder if a third bomb was about to go off.
Mariko looked for the old man with the head wound. He was dead too, laid out flat and staring at the ceiling. At least he seemed to have died peacefully. Closer to the bomb, victims were hit so hard