If any of those tendrils come at them… well, hopefully they won’t.
“You better hurry and do whatever you’re going to do. Cops are probably already on the way to deal with the, uh, obstruction. I don’t know if they’ll see it—nobody else seems to, or a lot more people would be getting out of their cars and walking—but they’re not gonna help much.”
He grimaces in agreement. Then he notices the way she’s glaring at the fountain of tendrils. He has a tiny epiphany, beginning to understand. “You from here?”
She blinks. “Yeah. Born and raised right over in Chelsea, two moms and everything. Why?”
“Just a guess.” Manny hesitates. He’s feeling strange again. There are things happening around him, to him—a rise in tension and power and meaning, all of it pulling toward a moment of truth that he’s not sure he wants to confront. Beneath his feet there is a vibration, a pulse like wheels clacking steadily over track segments that thrums in time with his pulse. Why? Because it does. Because, somehow, everything on this road and under it and around it is him. The pain in his side is awful, but ignorable because somehow the city is keeping him functioning, feeding him strength. Even the idling of the traffic-bound cars feeds him, pent energy just waiting for its chance to leap ahead. He looks around at the drivers in the nearby cars, and sees that most are glaring at the tendril thing, too. Do they see it? Not really. But they know something is there, blocking the flow of the city, and they hate it for that alone.
This is how it works, he realizes in wonder. This is what he needs to defeat the tendrils. These total strangers are his allies. Their anger, their need for a return to normalcy, rises from them like heat waves. This is the weapon he needs, if he can figure out how to harness it.
“I’m Manny,” he says to the cabdriver, on impulse. “You?”
She looks surprised, then grins. “Madison,” she says. “I know. But Number One Mom says I got conceived via IVF in a clinic just off Madison Ave, so…”
Too Much Information. Manny chuckles anyway, because he’s all nerves and could use a laugh. “Okay, here’s the plan,” he says. Then he lays it out for her.
She stares at him like he’s crazy, but she’ll help. He can see that in her face. “Fine,” she says at last, but it’s just a show of reluctance. Maybe New Yorkers don’t like to be seen as too helpful.
They lay out the flares and triangle markers to encourage people to go around the fast lane. Because the cab isn’t moving, angry commuters glare and honk as they pass, assuming that the cab is somehow making the traffic worse. It probably is. One guy starts screaming at Manny loudly enough to spray the inside of his door window with spittle, though fortunately he’s also too angry to remember to roll the window down first. It’s a measure of how much everyone is picking up on the weirdness, though, that no one veers back into the fast lane even after they pass the parked Checker cab.
The mass of tendrils is growing as Manny watches. There is a low, crumbly sound that he can hear from that direction, now and again when the wind carries it to him: probably the sound of roots digging into asphalt, and probably into the rebar within the asphalt, and maybe into the bedrock that’s under the road. He can hear the tendrils, too, now that they’re close enough: a choppy, broken groan, stuttering and occasionally clicking like a corrupted music file. He can smell it—a thicker, much-fishier brine scent than that of the nearby East River.
Trimethylamine oxide, he thinks out of the blue. The scent of the deep, cold, crushing ocean depths.
“What now?” Madison asks.
“I need to hit it.”
“Uh…”
Manny looks around before spotting exactly what he needs—there, in a convertible sports car’s open back seat. The Indian woman driving it stares at him in blatant curiosity. He steps toward her quickly and blurts, “Hey, can I have that umbrella?”
“How about pepper spray?” she suggests.
He holds up his hands to try to look less threatening, though he’s still a six-foot-tall not-white guy, and some people are just never going to be okay with that. “If you loan it to me, I can clear this traffic jam.”
At this, she actually looks intrigued. “Huh. Well, for that I guess I can give up an umbrella.