All Together Dead

window. Suddenly I realized the suitcase was intact, had not exploded, and was hurtling straight at me.
    I began to run, flashing back to my softball days when I had sprinted from third to home and had to slide in. I aimed for the park across the street, where traffic had come to a stop because of the emergency vehicles: cop cars, ambulances, fire engines. There was a cop just ahead of me who was facing away, pointing something out to another cop. “Down!” I yelled. “Bomb!” and she swung around to face me and I tackled her, taking her down to the ground with me. Something hit me in the middle of the back, whoosh, and the air was shoved out of my lungs. We lay there for a long minute, until I pushed myself off of her and climbed unsteadily to my feet. It was wonderful to inhale, though the air was acrid with flames and dust. She might have said something to me, but I couldn’t hear her.
    I turned around to face the Pyramid of Gizeh.
    Parts of the structure were crumbling, folding in and down, all the glass and concrete and steel and wood separating from the whole into discrete parts, while most of the walls that had created the spaces—of rooms and bathrooms and halls—collapsed. That collapse trapped many of the bodies that had occupied these arbitrarily divided areas. They were all one now: the structure, its parts, its inhabitants.
    Here and there were still bits that had held together. The human floor, the mezzanine, and the lobby level were partially intact, though the area around the registration desk was destroyed.
    I saw a shape I recognized, a coffin. The lid had popped clean off with the impact of its fall. As the sun hit the creature inside, it let out a wail, and I rushed over. There was a hunk of drywall by it, and I hauled that over the coffin. There was silence as soon as the sun was blocked from touching the vampire inside.
    “Help!” I yelled. “Help!”
    A few policemen moved toward me.
    “There are people and vamps still alive,” I said. “The vamps have to be covered.”
    “People first,” said one beefy veteran.
    “Sure,” I agreed automatically, though even as I said it, I thought, Vampires didn’t set these bombs. “But if you can cover the vamps, they can last until ambulances can take them to a safe place.”
    There was a chunk of hotel still standing, a bit of the south part. Looking up, I saw Mr. Cataliades standing at an empty frame where the glass had fallen away. Somehow, he had worked his way down to the human floor. He was holding a bundle wrapped in a bedspread, clutching it to his chest.
    “Look!” I called, to get a fireman’s attention. “Look!”
    They leaped into action at seeing a live person to rescue. They were far more enthusiastic about that than about rescuing vamps who were possibly smoldering to death in the sunlight and could easily be saved by being covered. I tried to blame them, but I couldn’t.
    For the first time I noticed that there was a crowd of regular people who had stopped their cars and gotten out to help—or gawk. There were also people who were screaming, “Let them burn!”
    I watched the firemen go up in a bucket to fetch the demon and his burden, and then I turned back to working my way through the rubble.
    After a time, I was flagging. The screams of the human survivors, the smoke, the sunlight muted by the huge cloud of dust, the noise of the groaning structure settling, the hectic noise of the rescue workers and the machinery that was arriving and being employed…I was overwhelmed.
    By that time, since I’d stolen one of the yellow jackets and one of the hard hats all the rescuers were wearing, I’d gotten close enough to find two vampires, one of whom I knew, in the ruins of the check-in area, heavily overlaid by debris from the floors above. A big piece of wood survived to identify the reception desk. One of the vampires was very burned, and I had no idea if he’d survive it or not. The other vamp had hidden beneath the largest piece of wood, and only his feet and hands had been singed and blackened. Once I yelled for help, the vamps were covered with blankets. “We got a building two blocks away; we’re using it for the vampire repository,” said the dark-skinned ambulance driver who took the more seriously injured one, and I realized it was the same woman who’d taken Eric and Pam.
    In addition to the vampires, I uncovered a barely alive Todd Donati. I spent a few moments with him until a stretcher got there.