All The Way Here

The connection had been cut and Mello raced to the window again, the mobile 'phone warm in his hand. Matt rushed beside him, altering the view of a camera, then dashing back to the monitors. Chaos didn't cover it. It looked like Armaggeddon outside, the mob unleashed like the Bacchae of old. Even though the window, the cacophony of sound wasn't at all muffled. A helicopter circled overhead and the people shouted in a mass frenzy of rage, then disbelief.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck." Matt breathed by way of commentary, but he had the picture now. High detail, sharp focus on the entrance doors of Near's building. It looked like it was going to go up in flames at any second. "They're all going to get killed."

"I think it's fair to say some people might get trampled underfoot." Mello replied, blankly. The sky was raining money, carried on the wind for whole streets, but mostly falling on the square outside. "You ever seen anyone dead, Matty?"

"I can see just into the entrance hall. There are people coming." Matt's heart was in his mouth. Very few things would have persuaded him to leave this room, less still to enter the streets below, but this was precisely what was being asked of Near. Mello was at his side, peering closely at the screen. He pointed suddenly to the prisoner and raced back to the window. "This lot are...?" Matt began, but saw what Mello was doing. Fear broke through him and calmness descended in its wake. He was always calm in a crisis. "What...?"

Freezing in the icy air, Mello pushed the rifle through the opened window, fixing the eyeview onto the group emerging from the entrance hall. Lines of police in full riot gear forged a path through the mob and Near had to be in their midst. The sight was terrifying, but Mello was still, just watching with his finger poised on the trigger. His eyes scanned constantly those at either side of a specific section of the train, then up to the window where he knew the Japanese policemen were watching.

A riot van collected them and the black uniforms disappeared out of the way, with shrieking signals and a lot of shouting. Mello withdrew, closing the window with a slam. He glanced at Matt. "I don't know why you picked up an automatic. You wouldn't have had the range." Carefully, Mello propped the rifle against the windowsill and pulled out his own self-loader. "Are we agreed that Near just got out of there alive?"

"Yes." Matt recovered himself, turning back to the monitor to cover his expression of incredulity at the persistent belief that Mello had just covered Near's back. He switched to a second monitor and rewound the footage he had filmed at close range. Ranks of police officers, anonymous in their armoured uniforms, flashed by on the screen, but he paused it at the frame he had seen before. "Here. That short thing in the middle. I'm certain that's Near." He opened an editing programme and started manipulating the footage. "Ok, got it. Look here." He had blow up the image of the individual until it covered the 30" monitor, blurred and hardly distinguishable from those around it. "Look at his hands."

"Could be weapons." Mello leaned in closer. "Could be anything."

"No, look how everyone else is holding their weapons. This one is out of sync. I think they are toys."

"You're right." Mello stepped back. "Plus the person acting as a prisoner, just behind him, was Rester. I recognized his face. He would be close to Rester, because the man is huge. The one to his right is a woman. That will be Hal." Mello exhaled. "Not bad, for Near, I suppose."

"Should we be getting out of here too?" Matt asked, keeping the anxiety from his tone.

"No. Even if Kira suspects that I'm in the area, there's no sign that he knows where." Mello glared at the door, as if it was somehow to blame for something. "Our biggest problem right now is that lot down there. If they start looting and burning. As long as our own building is secure, we sit tight. If it isn't, then we get out. If we split up, we meet back up again by that statue of the drowned sailors that you told me about. South Manhattan, by a dock, you said?"

"Yes." Matt lit a cigarette, trying and failing to remember the name of the place. "Lots of eating places around."

"Do not get caught. Near and Linda have both told us that people from The Wammy House have been targetted by the Japanese. You would be quite a catch for them." Mello moved to the window again, watching, assessing the mood of the mob. It was like a single entity, vast and intimidating.

Watching the same scene through his monitors, Matt ran his fingers through his red hair. "Have you ever seen anything like that before? It's fucking ugly, man." People trampled over each other, heedless of life and limb, contorting their bodies in grotesque ways just to grasp at a single dollar. Suddenly it was stark in front of their eyes that humans were vicious, that veneer of civilisation stripped from their beastility. It was impossible to comprehend the scene in it's horrific entirety, so individual portions of it loomed larger. A man with his torso bloody, twitching in agony on the floor; a woman perched screaming on a wall; two children cowering behind a car. What was even more slippery to grasp was the fact that Near had planned this. He'd foreseen the reaction to the fortune falling from his window and had used it as the cover for his escape. "Oh my God!"

Matt whipped up his .45 and ran for the door. Mello called after him, "What? Matt stop!" The redhead paused waiting at the door until Mello stalked after him. "You aren't going out there."

"There's this little kid, can't be more than two or three, and no parents around her. She's just standing there and..." Matt stopped as Mello grabbed his arm and all but marched him back to the window.

"Look out there, Matt!" Mello screamed. "You go out and you get killed. I come after you and I get killed. Who the fuck is going to take down Kira then with us both dead?" He quietened, patting Matt's back, then leaned in for a hug. "I know. Trust me, I know."

Matt glared out of the window, but didn't make another break for the door. He slipped his arm around Mello's shoulder and watched with him as the money finally stopped falling, paving the way for new horrors as the crowds fought for that lying on the ground and in the foliage. "I can't see her anymore."

"That's a good sign." Mello reassured him. "If it wasn't, you'd be looking at a corpse."