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.In front of the door, out on the sidewalk, Agamemnon tried not to listen, tried to let the noise of the city and the low music from the club drown it out.But the city was too fucking quiet.New York City had fallen into a hush, as if the five boroughs were holding their collective breath.“Hey.”Panic shot through him and Agamemnon clapped a hand to his chest, making a fist with the other one as he whirled around to find his boss, Cole Bradenton, standing behind him.Bradenton raised both hands in surrender.“Whoa, relax, man.”“What’s wrong with you, Cole, sneaking up on me like that?” Agamemnon snapped.He sniffed, glancing at the sidewalk, embarrassed that he had been so easily spooked.“Made me jump out of my skin.”“I’m sorry.Really.”The sincerity in Bradenton’s voice was unsettling.Agamemnon glanced up at his friend and employer and saw that Bradenton’s face seemed even thinner than usual, and the Chinese dragon tattooed on the man’s throat undulated as Bradenton swallowed several times in quick succession.“What is it?” Agamemnon asked.“Maybe you oughta come in now.We’ve got all the customers we’re going to get tonight,” Bradenton told him.For a long moment Agamemnon glanced along the quiet street and the neon skyline above.Truth was, he would rather have stayed out here.As unnerving as the desolation was, it was better than having to look into the anxious faces of the club’s patrons.But when Bradenton reached up to put a hand on his arm, the massive bouncer reached up to touch the scar on his face—for some reason it ached today—and turned to follow him back inside.The regulars gathered within all had drinks in their hands or on the bar in front of them.Some of them—screw the ordinance—were smoking cigarettes as they pressed into the crowd clustered together so that they could see the television.Someone probably should have shut off the music—nobody was paying attention to it and they were all straining to hear the TV—but apparently they were so wrapped up in it, none of them had thought of it yet.The television mounted above the bar showed a series of images that Agamemnon had trouble making sense of.Paris.The Eiffel Tower.File footage of people walking along the Seine on a warm, sunny day.And then images of armed soldiers and military vehicles lined in front of one of those huge walls that had blocked off the outside world from the cities and towns that had gone missing.Slushwalls, Agamemnon had named them, though he kept the word mainly to himself.They looked like the gray, filthy slush on the sidewalk after a New York snowstorm.But you could sort of see through them, like they were a veil or something, except it never seemed real, what you saw on the other side, because it looked like there was just nothing at all.Nothing at all.Like whatever had been there really was gone, the way the news anchors were all saying.Agamemnon frowned as new images appeared on screen, video clips of other slushwalls and other cities.They showed the Kremlin in Moscow.A minute later, he saw the Eiffel Tower again.The reporters and analysts and U.N.spokespeople were yammering on about various efforts being made to figure out what was going on, but none of them seemed to really be talking about what the latest news was, what these images were.A shiver went through him.Agamemnon hated contacts, hated glasses, and wasn’t about to have some fucking doctor take lasers to his eyes.The net result of this was that he had to squint to read the words scrolling across the bottom of the screen on the news ticker.That’s where he saw it.Paris and Moscow latest cities to go missing.Agamemnon took a step backward and ran his huge hand over the smoothness of his bald head.He felt warm, clammy, though it was cool outside.How can that be? Paris and Moscow? His mind was reeling.Most of the other places that had been taken so far were pretty small potatoes.Salzburg, Austria, had been the biggest city to disappear, the others mainly out-of-the-way cities or small villages.“Jesus,” Agamemnon whispered
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