Inferno: Echoes of the End Book 1: (A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller) by Justin Bell & Mike Kraus

Author:Justin Bell & Mike Kraus [Bell, Justin & Kraus, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Muonic Press Inc
Published: 2023-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The Ellis Island Bridge was a narrow, two-lane roadway that connected the island to the New Jersey mainland across a broad expanse of the Hudson River. Thankfully still intact, it allowed Holly and Bruce to walk instead of swim, though the sensation of being suspended over the Hudson while Jersey City actively burned on the western horizon had been unsettling at best. Holly halted halfway through their crossing, transfixed on the shrouded skyline of Jersey City to the northwest, then craned her neck around to get a view of Manhattan to the east and almost wished she hadn’t.

Both population centers were clouded in thick columns of churning, gray smoke, their landscapes peppered by scattered, flicking glows, and throughout New York City, especially, the fires still raged almost twenty-four hours after they’d begun. Where Metanoia had once rewritten the Manhattan skyline with its sixty-story headquarters, there was a visible gap in the normal wall of glass and steel. Massive, pale clouds of smoke rose from the spot where the building had once been, and two shorter buildings that had surrounded it seemed to be leaning precariously as flames roiled throughout their interiors.

As horrific as the sight was, the silence was almost worse. Seeing all the damage, the smoke and the fires, Holly would have expected a nearly constant wail of sirens or horns, some other signs of activity— attempts to knock the fires back, to extinguish the deadly flames, but she heard nothing of the sort. There were no sirens, no underlying horns, no sounds of emergency vehicles at all, just a deep, bone-chilling, pervasive silence, as though humanity had escaped the burning planet, leaving it to its fate. She squinted against the pale light of smoke-shrouded morning, dark shapes lurking within the low-slung clouds. Helicopters slowly circled Manhattan, though they were too far away for her to hear their familiar rotor turns. From where she stood, she wasn’t sure if they were military helicopters or, heaven forbid, news choppers just trying to catch the last grisly, dying breaths of America’s largest city. An explosion roared from somewhere within the tall spires of Manhattan, a faint, echoing gunshot of noise which faded into the background almost immediately.

“Let’s keep moving.” Bruce gently touched Holly’s arm, drawing her back to reality and she nodded, following alongside him as they walked the second half of the Ellis Island Bridge, reaching Liberty State Park a few moments later. Near the exit of the bridge a congestion of cars blocked the road, several of the workers who had desperately escaped Ellis Island apparently getting caught in a miniature traffic jam. Threading their way through stalled vehicles, the source of the jam emerged ahead, a pair of cars that had smashed into each other, desperate to get free of the roadway first, neither one apparently willing to give the other the right of way. As a result, at least a dozen other vehicles had piled up behind them, then the passengers and drivers had apparently just left the vehicles there, electing to continue on foot.

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