Читать книгу The Testimony - James Smythe, James Smythe - Страница 74

The bomb was reported live. It wasn’t like some terrorist attacks, where it’s all whispers until they get footage; Fox, CBS, NBC, they all had people on the streets with cameras. They all filmed the smoke, they all got as close as safety or the police would let them. Honestly? For a second, it just felt good having something else to talk about. I know that’s an awful thing to say, but I had spent every minute since that first static wondering why I didn’t hear it, and this … It was something that I could relate to. I used to live in New York City, before I moved to Des Moines. I had worked there, and every bit of it had memories. And the bomb itself, I got that; I had been a street cop for a few years, back before the office job, before I knew what I wanted to actually do. I had worked bombsites, standing there, keeping the crowds back. I recognized the faces of the guys working the scene, in the background of all the footage. I was back in the bar, because I didn’t have anywhere else to be, but this time everybody was asking me questions, about protocol, procedure. Would they have known it was gonna blow? Max asked me. I don’t know, I said. How did it get through? Why didn’t they catch it? That was the biggest question; the next was about who was responsible, and I didn’t have an answer for either.

I hadn’t said anything about not hearing The Broadcast. I didn’t know what it meant, and nobody else would know either. Most people assumed that it was God, and I suspect that they wouldn’t have been thrilled that I didn’t hear him. I kept asking myself, if it was God, what did that mean? I’m not a bad person; I’ve never ruined anybody’s life. Mostly, I’ve stayed quiet, to myself. I had one vice, and it was nowhere near as bad as those some people who had heard The Broadcast were walking around with. I kept quiet about that, and concentrated on the bomb, and that filled about two hours, then the news cycle began flitting between the two: on the one hand we have a specialist telling us what the presence of a God might do to our evolution as a species, our progress; on the other, we have the shocking footage of the inside of the Apple Store, the hole in New York that left numerous people dead, footage of the smoke, the rubble, the bodies. The news channels flitted between the two as if it was a tennis match.