a lopsided smile over her shoulder. “Weird, but okay. The grandkids are gonna love this story. If I, you know, have grandkids.” She drives on.
Then at last they’re on FDR, moving faster toward that vague-but-rapidly-sharpening sense of wrongness. Manny is clinging to the old-fashioned leather handle sewn into the seat back before him because she’s still doing the race-car-driver act, whipping around slower cars and cresting hills with enough speed that it feels a little like riding
the Cyclone? what is
a roller coaster. But they’re getting closer to the source of all the trouble. There’s a knot of small aircraft over and boats crowding along the nearby East River, all of them generally centering on something farther south. All Manny can see from here is smoke. Maybe it has to do with that bridge incident he heard about on the train? Must be; they’ve begun to pass signs warning of delays, detours, and police activity below Houston Street.
But it’s also clear that they’re much closer to the wrongness than to the bridge disaster. Now they’re passing more cars, over on the uptown side of FDR, that seem to be infested with the weird white tendrils. Most are growing from the wheels, same as on the Beemer they saw before. It’s as if the cars have rolled over something noxious that’s allowed a kind of metaphysically opportunistic infection at the site of the damage. A few vehicles have it in their front grilles or curling up from their undercarriages. One car, a newish Beetle, has the tendrils in a spray up one door and crawling over the driver’s window. The driver doesn’t notice. What will happen if it touches her when she opens the door? Nothing good.
Then the traffic slows sharply… and the city’s second, unseen disaster comes into range.
His first thought is that it’s like an explosion, kind of. Imagine a fountain bursting up from the asphalt and flaring twenty or thirty feet into the sky, and wiggling. In lieu of water, the fountain flares with tendrils—dozens of them, anemoneic and enormous. Some writhe together in a way that is both mesmerizing and vaguely phallic as they tower above the roofs of the cars. Manny can tell that the root of the… growth… is located somewhere up ahead on the downtown side, probably in the fast lane, which must be how it’s getting so many cars on the uptown-going side despite the median barrier. He sees a shiny new SUV with Pennsylvania plates pass that is so covered in the tendrils that it looks like a spectral hedgehog. Good thing the driver can’t see them, or his vision would be too occluded to allow driving. But an ancient, rusty Ford Escort with missing hubcaps and peeling paint comes right behind it, and the tendrils haven’t touched it at all. What’s the pattern? He can’t begin to guess.
This explosion of ick is what’s causing the traffic jam, Manny sees, as the flow of cars slows to a crawl and the Checker comes to a near halt. Although most people can’t see the flare of tendrils, they’re still somehow reacting to its presence. Drivers in the fast lane keep trying to pull into the middle lane to get around the thing, drivers in the middle are trying to get into the right-hand lane to get around them, and drivers in the right-hand lane aren’t budging. It’s as if there’s an invisible accident up ahead that everyone’s trying to avoid. Thank God it’s not rush hour or the traffic wouldn’t be moving at all.
They’ve stopped for the moment, so Manny opens the rear passenger-side door to get out. A few of the cars behind them immediately set up a banshee chorus of horns, protesting even the possibility that he might slow things down more, but he ignores these and leans over to speak into the window when the driver rolls it down. (She has to lean across the seat and turn a manual crank to do this. For a moment he stares in fascination, then focuses.) “You got emergency flares?” he asks. “Triangle reflectors, stuff like that?”
“In the trunk.” She puts the car in park and gets out herself—there are more horns at this—but she’s glancing over at the tower of tendrils. Its tips wave above the pedestrian bridge that crosses this part of the FDR. “So that’s what this is all about?”
“Yep.” Manny pulls out the emergency kit when she opens the trunk. He’s keeping most of his attention on the thing, though.