Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,53
about this.”
He pulls it out and reads a text from Meghan:
Dad. I can’t do this anymore.
I don’t know who I am. I don’t
know anything except I don’t
belong here. I’m so sorry.
I love you always.
He slides off the stool.
“What’s wrong?” Gwen asks.
And starts running for the door.
* * *
Meghan’s cell keeps going straight to voicemail, and in the aftermath of the Big Bend’s appearance, the city streets are still clogged.
As Barry drives toward NoHo, he grabs his radio’s hand mic and calls New York One to request that a unit in the vicinity of Meghan’s apartment stop by for a welfare check.
“New York One, 158, are you talking about the 904B on Bond Street? We have multiple units and fire companies already on scene and ambulances en route.”
“What are you talking about? Which building?”
“Twelve Bond Street.”
“That’s my daughter’s building.”
There’s silence over the airwaves.
Barry tosses the hand mic, hits the lights, and screams through traffic, weaving in and out of cars, around buses, tearing through intersections.
As he turns onto Bond Street several minutes later, he abandons his car at the police barricade and runs toward fire engines shooting streams of water at the façade of Meghan’s building, where flames are curling out of windows on the sixth floor. The scene is pure chaos—an array of emergency lights and cops putting up tape to keep the residents of neighboring buildings at a safe distance while the occupants of Meghan’s building flood out of the front entrance.
A cop tries to stop him, but Barry rips his arm away, flashes his badge, and pushes on toward the fire engines and the entrance to the building, the heat of the flames making his face break out in beads of sweat.
A firefighter staggers out of the entrance, whose door has been ripped off its hinges. He’s carrying an older man, and both their faces are blackened.
A fire lieutenant—a bearded giant of a man—steps in front of Barry, blocking his path. “Get back behind the tape.”
“I’m a cop, and that’s my daughter’s building!” He points up at the flames peeling out of the top floor window at the far end. “That’s her apartment flames are coming out of!”
The lieutenant’s face falls. He takes Barry by the arm and pulls him out of the way of a train of firefighters carrying a hose toward the nearest hydrant.
“What?” Barry asks. “Just tell me.”
“The fire started in that apartment in the kitchen. It’s spreading through the fifth and sixth floors right now.”
“Where’s my daughter?”
The man takes a breath, glances over his shoulder.
“Where’s my fucking daughter?”
“Look at me,” the man says.
“Did you get her out?”
“Yes. I am very sorry to tell you this, but she died.”
Barry staggers back. “How?”
“There was a bottle of vodka and some pills on her bed. We think she took them and then tried to make tea, but lost consciousness soon after. Something on the counter got too close to the burner. It was accidental, but—”
“Where is she?”
“Let’s go sit down and—”
“Where is she?”
“On the sidewalk, on the other side of that truck.”
Barry starts toward her, but suddenly the man’s arms are gripping him from behind in a bear hug.
“Sure you want to do that, brother?”
“Get off!”
The man lets him go, Barry stepping over hoses, moving in front of the truck, closer to the fire. The commotion dies away. All he sees are Meghan’s bare feet poking out from underneath the white sheet that’s covering her, which is soaking wet and almost translucent from the spray of the fire hoses.
His legs fail him.
He sinks down onto the curb and breaks as the water rains down on him.
People try to talk to him, to get him to come with them, to move, but he doesn’t hear them. He stares straight through them.
Into nothing.
Thinking—I’ve lost her twice now.
* * *
It’s been two hours since Meghan died, and his clothes are still damp.
Barry parks at Penn Station and starts walking north from Thirty-Fourth Street, just like he did after returning from Montauk on a midnight train, the night he stumbled into Hotel Memory.
That night, it had been snowing.
Now it’s raining, the buildings cloaked in mist above their fiftieth floors, and the air cold enough to cloud his breath.
The city stands strangely silent.
Few cars on the road.
Fewer people on the sidewalks.
The tears are cold on his face.
He pops his umbrella after three blocks. In his mind, it’s been eleven years since the night he wandered into Hotel Memory. Chronologically, it happened today, just in a false memory.
As Barry reaches