It was a bright Wednesday morning. The streets of New Haven were filled with people of different walks of life thronging to work and to make a living. Trying to make sense of their miserable lives. The tall towers and skyscrapers, the huge billboards, and the heavy human and vehicular traffic. This was the haven. The grind was effing real. It was a haven indeed.
A bright orange cab pulled up in front of the Anson building. The vehicle’s color suggests the driver was new to the business, and of course, the driver was a man in his mid-sixties. The passengers were Rose Kelly and her son, Tom. The boy was a particularly lively kid; he seemed oblivious to the depression on his mother’s face. Nor the silent, angry, and morose faces the people on the street wore. He was just like an innocent eight-year-old boy. And he was considerably short for his age.
His teachers had grown tired of his overactive persona. He was a bright kid, but somehow he lagged behind in his academics; he had some learning difficulties. This morning, he was prattling about how some kids in his school brought a frog to school.
“Momma, so do you know that frogs are one of the strangest breeds of animals on earth?” Tom prattled excitedly, “Those damn things can be dangerous, and Kevin brought one into his pocket. Actually, no one noticed at first, but when I saw…”
“Here we are, ma’am,” the old driver said exhaustedly, glad that he survived the boy’s rattling.
“Oh,” Grace Kelly said, snapping out of her thoughts. She is a very young woman, in her late twenties. Married to Paul Kelly, a sergeant in the Royal Marines, at 21. She is a petite and voluptuous woman. She is beautiful to behold in her black, long, wavy hair. A stunner.
Last week, she had a rumor of her husband going AWOL. Just completely disappearing during a mission in a foreign land—no message or anything—just completely off-grid. His superiors haven’t been able to find him. They’d told her he was just missing. As much as it broke her heart, she feared they’d sent him on one of those high-risk missions they normally assign to his squad of Kobra M9, and his team had probably been wiped out, and the army was probably just covering their tracks. But she got the shock of her life when the army discharged her husband without any compensation, declared his squad traitors, and put a bounty on their heads.
The news spread like wildfire in the harmattan. The media and news outlets had a field day. National heroes had been declared traitors by the popular Kobra M9 squad. Of course, there was no official announcement, and no one in the army disclaimed it either. Rose felt shattered. The Paul she knew was a very strong nationalist, the most passionate one she knew. He had taken several bullets for his country, and he had indicated on multiple occasions that money would not move him.
As Rose and her kid stepped out of the cab into the bathing sunlight, feeling the thronging and pushing, particularly in front of the Anson building, she felt a cloud of dizziness descend upon her. It had been six days since she heard what happened to Paul, and she hadn’t slept since. The math just doesn’t add up. She wanted answers. She needed answers. She set her jaw and determinedly drew all the strength in her. The blabbering kid by her side didn’t seem to notice anything wrong with his mother today.
Normally, he would have noticed, Rose thought. The poor kid does not understand why his mom was always lost in thought and constantly flipping through papers in their home. He just glided forward like the child with zero worries he is. Sweet kid.
Somewhere, three buildings down the busy street, a tall bloke appeared. From the corner,an alley between two buildings. He had a solid build, one of a bodybuilder. He was wearing a helmet and overalls, black boots, and, oh, he was carrying a big, heavy-looking travel bag. Lloyd Dawson stopped and looked up at the Anson building. Mensely, you fucking bastard, he thought to himself, you ain’t going to see this coming. With that, he kept walking his stride longer than before. New Haven was about to witness history.
He stopped by the entrance of the building. He looked around through the crowd of enthusiastic tourists who were admiring the Gothic-themed architecture and various relics in the building and various office men and women who were oblivious to the rage burning in the random technician standing a few feet from them, who had no idea what shit was about to go down. Lloyd approached security and identified himself as a technician, a maintenance guy.
The bored dude didn’t check on him further and gave him an access card. The plan was working. He ran enthusiastically to catch up with the mom and son, who were about to get in the elevator.
As Rose and Tommy got in the elevator, a huge guy in overalls rushed over to join them. Rose punched 20 in the keypad and glanced at the guy before drifting away in her thoughts. But Tommy quieted, looking intently at the big man beside his mother. The man looked down at him. His cold look sent shivers down the kid’s spine.
Lloyd was feeling powered up. The way the kid beside him kept staring at him gave him the creeps. The brown eyes looked familiar. He tried to shut down every feeling and sensitivity in his body. He had work to do. Brothers to avenge.
Rose, on the other hand, was still reviewing her mission in Anson Tower in her head. Last week, when the news broke that some traitors in the army had fled, she got different calls from different people. Her mother and sister had called to make sure she was okay. Her mother, Lily, had been particularly insistent that she come spend a week with her at their family home.
Her sister, Iris, her twin, with whom she owned an accounting firm, had given her a leave. They both had reservations about the issue, especially Iris, but it is what it is. She had also gotten a couple of calls from a heavy-breathing man who kept yelling some bullshit about blue pills.
But a particularly strange visit she had gotten, which had prompted her to come to Anson, was from the grey suit man. He had a pale face, a slender frame, and wore glasses. He greeted her stiffly and served her paperwork for her husband on account of financial and insurance fraud. Paul’s assets were being frozen. This was totally out of the blue for her; she smelled a fish.
Foul play was in it somewhere. She couldn’t contain her suspicion, but the man just looked blankly as she ranted. On his way out, the man turned, and for a moment, she thought she saw pity in those green eyes. He said, “There are some powers that just can’t be fought.”
But Rose was determined to find those powers and fight them. She was a woman and a mother, and she won’t have her home taken from her. A small hand tugged at her dress. She looked down at her golden kid. He smiled sweetly at her. She rubbed his head and cast another glance at the man in the box. It was at that moment, as if on impulse, that their eyes met. Two strangers with a determined look held gazes.
Tommy looked slowly from his mom to the man.
The elevator dinged, and the door opened. Rose and her boy stepped out. The man stood, waiting. Tom kept looking at the man until the doors closed. And he was looking at him too.
Rose walked through a quiet, large office, past some cubicles and busy workers. Mensely, Inc. was a big company. It had ventured into different sectors of the economy like insurance, mortgages, real estate, investment, health, and so on. It was a mega company as far as New Haven was concerned, as it essentially controlled the commerce and economy of the state. And Anson Tower was, of course, one of the many landed assets owned by Mensely, Inc. The building was built and dedicated to General Ford Anson, a pioneer and frontier nationalist, as a cultural landmark. But Mensely Inc. had taken over the building. Of course, there were protests and agitation, and of course it died down. Mensely Inc. agreed to rent out levels of the huge building to different citizens, of course. And there was no intimidating presence of men in suits. Mensely Inc. ran the state; its influence reached as high into the corridors of power and as deep into the ordinary neighborhoods as your imagination can allow. A corporation whose powers pervade the army should be feared. And Menses Inc. was run by a short man with a storky build. A man called Mensely. The powers that be. On the room clock in the room, 11 o’clock chimed, and somewhere in the building, a timer started counting down from thirty minutes.
As Rose looked around the room uncomfortably, a man who looked more like a senior official approached her.
“Mrs Kelly?”
She nodded.
“This way, please,” he said, gesturing with his hands for her to follow him.
25:45
Fifteen minutes later, she was being escorted by security out of the building. The man who called her led her to his furnished office and gave her some crap about payback and compensation. And when he started ranting off on some legal mumbo jumbo to scare her, she flew at him and punched him in the nose. She was sure she took a couple of teeth as well. Rose then threw the court papers on the table and said, “See you in court,” as security burst in.
1:39
As she crossed the lobby with her son running ahead of her, she felt drained. The whole exchange didn’t even take twenty minutes. She felt she was getting rasher and irritable. Rose walked to the road to flag down a taxi.
00:00
The timer stopped.
A giant ball of flame burst out through the windows of the building. A warm and giant flash of light and heat. The sound was deafening, and so were the screams and screeches of panicked people around. Rose drew Tommy into her room and looked up at the black smoke coming out of the building. The explosion seems to have come from the 24th to 27th floors. The fire was spreading upward. And there were secondary explosions rocking the building. She gasped. The wails of police and ambulance sirens were coming closer.
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Tommy was scared by the deafening noise he just heard and the panicking people scrambling around. He was disoriented. Then, his eyes caught sight of a familiar figure—a man in a baseball cap with a black jacket, trousers,trousers and sneakers—on the opposite side of the road. The man was looking up at the building, oblivious to the chaos around him. The man turned and walked down two buildings. At the third, the man looked back, and this time their eyes met. Tommy’s eyes widened. Rose felt him gasp. The man turned and disappeared into an alley. Just then, New Haven paramedics surrounded the mom and kid to see if they were OK, and the firefighters arrived to douse the building with water. But the boy didn’t take his eyes away from the direction in which he saw the man.
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