The Secret Runners of New York

by Matthew Reilly

  The altercation with her fellow student, MS KATRINA (TRINA) MILLER, on January 4 is illustrative.

  Ms Miller, it appears, asked a male student at the school, MR BEAUREGARD (BO) BRADFORD, on a date to Tavern on the Green. Misty, it turns out, harbours feelings for Mr Bradford and she confronted Ms Miller, her friend, about asking Mr Bradford out. Insults were exchanged before Misty slapped Ms Miller across the face, an act which resulted in Misty receiving a brief suspension from school and an appointment to see me for this psychological evaluation.

  In our session, Misty showed not the slightest sign of remorse for striking Ms Miller. She declared that they would no longer be friends. She said this matter-of-factly and without emotion.

  RECOMMENDATIONS:

  Medication is not the answer for Misty. Her problems are not of the kind that can be addressed with drugs. She is self-involved, controlling and entitled, but she is not psychotic. It is simply the case that when she doesn’t get what she wants, she reacts aggressively.

  It is my professional opinion that regular and continued cognitive behavioural therapy sessions that challenge her world view would be the best treatment for her.

  Dr Vivienne Freeman, MD PhD PsyD

  A second sheet was paper-clipped to the report:

  PSYCHIATRIST’S REPORT

  Addendum following disappearance of Ms Trina Miller

  I have been asked to report on whether or not Ms Misty Collins might have been involved in the disappearance of her fellow student at Monmouth, Ms Trina Miller, two weeks ago.

  While it is true that Misty and Ms Miller were involved in an altercation shortly before Ms Miller’s disappearance, I find it very difficult to believe that a girl of fifteen, even one with Misty’s psychological profile, could have carried out someone’s total disappearance so comprehensively.

  Hmmm. I couldn’t say I agreed with the good Dr Freeman. But then Dr Freeman didn’t know about Misty’s secret portal through time.

  It was then that I glimpsed another report behind the first one.

  It caught my attention because the label on it did not read, collins, melissa (misty).

  It was marked, collins, oscar (oz).

  I opened it and read it:

  PSYCHIATRIST’S REPORT

  Psychological appraisal of Mr Oscar

  (Oz) Collins [copy for insertion into

  file of Melissa (Misty) Collins]

  Mr Oscar (Oz) Collins was referred to me after his mother discovered several searches on his smartphone relating to pornographic material.

  It is my assessment that Mr Collins is an average teenage boy with the curiosities of an average teenage boy. Having spoken to Oz about the issue, I told his mother not to worry. Such searches—which are easy to do these days—are normal for a teenage boy curious about the opposite sex.

  Interestingly, however, when I pressed him on the matter, Oz vehemently protested his innocence. He maintained, even though he could not prove it, that it was his sister, MELISSA (MISTY) COLLINS, who had stolen his phone and made the pornographic searches on it. She had done this, he said, as an act of vengeance after he had informed their parents that she had gone out when she had been grounded.

  Oz informed me that, as punishment, his parents have decided to send him to a military camp for the summer. At this news, he says that Misty taunted him, ‘Fantastic. Now I get to enjoy the summer without having you around to spoil it.’

  I stared at the file.

  Poor Oz. Misty had set him up so he’d be shipped off to military camp for the summer. And then for good measure she’d told everyone at school about it and trashed his reputation. What a bitch.

  I returned the file to its drawer, lest Misty came here looking for it.

  Now very curious, I sought out another file and found it:

  my little sister program

  barnes, delores

  Delores was the second girl to disappear, the one with Down Syndrome who, while not a student at Monmouth, had been connected to the school via the My Little Sister Program.

  I opened the file and after flipping through some pages, found something relevant to my search:

  STUDENT INCIDENT REPORT

  Incident with Henrietta (Hattie) Brewster

  Delores was involved in an altercation with Henrietta (Hattie) Brewster on the sidewalk outside school this morning.

  It seems to have started innocently enough. As she arrived at Monmouth to participate in the My Little Sister Program, Delores tripped on the sidewalk and spilled her hot chocolate onto and into Ms Brewster’s new handbag.

  Ms Brewster, naturally, was not amused. According to several girls who witnessed the incident, Delores was instantly apologetic. Unfortunately, Ms Brewster was not in the mood to forgive and she expressed her anger at Delores with some epithets that are not, shall we say, the Monmouth way. According to those witnesses, she said to Delores, ‘You stupid fucking Mongoloid idiot! I don’t know why we have to babysit you retards anyway. Shouldn’t you be doing some basket-weaving course or something?’

  Ms Brewster was counselled about her language and forced to apologise to Delores. Delores continues to be upset by the incident. She has offered to pay for a new purse for Ms Brewster numerous times and continues to apologise to Ms Brewster whenever she comes to our school for the My Little Sister Program.

  I read the report with increasing dread.

  Poor Delores. By the look of it, she had accidentally bumped into Hattie on the street and spilled her hot chocolate all over Hattie’s new and no doubt expensive handbag.

  Of course, Hattie—mannish, belligerent and gunning for a fight—had let fly with a barrage of insults.

  And, shortly after, Delores Barnes had vanished from the face of the Earth.

  A chill slithered up my spine.

  The pattern was clear, at least to me. Three girls who had offended Misty’s clique of runners—one who had challenged Chastity; one who had crossed Misty; and one who had angered Hattie—all mysteriously disappeared soon after.

  The cops and the school’s FBI investigator had clearly not suspected Misty’s gang in the three disappearances. And why would they? They were too disparate, too disconnected.

  Even if the investigators had put the incidents together, they couldn’t possibly have been expected to figure out that Misty’s crew had a secret location—in another time—to which to dispatch those girls who had displeased them.

  This, I figured, had been Jenny’s fate, too.

  But where could she be? And how could I possibly find her?

  I closed the file, slid it back into its place and slammed the drawer. It was time to leave.

  As I made to go, I stepped on one of the files on the floor, left there by Misty and Hattie.

  I wouldn’t have taken any notice of it had I not recognised the name on the spine.

  o’dea, griffin (griff)

  It lay open. To another psychiatrist’s report.

  PSYCHIATRIST’S REPORT

  Psychological appraisal following incident at

  Barneys on June 12

  This shoplifting incident highlights Griff’s significant and strict medical needs. If Griff does not take his medications, his manias will reveal themselves very quickly.

  First, there will be more cleptomaniacal incidents like this. When he is not medicated, he is a compulsive stealer. He likes what other people have.

  But if Griff is deprived of his medications for a longer period of time, we will see more violent and impulsive incidents like those that occurred in his youth: the torture of pets and small animals, and disproportionate acts of revenge on people he feels have slighted him (I refer to the recent incident where he cut up his mother’s favourite dress with scissors after she refused to buy him some designer sneakers).

  This incident is a timely reminder for a
ll of us involved in Griff’s mental health to keep a close eye on his medication schedule. I would, accordingly, like to increase his dosages of Risperdal and Clozaril. He is lucky that after his parents paid for the items he stole, the store chose not to press charges.

  So Misty had been reading up on Griff. And while it sure made for interesting reading, I had more important things to do right now.

  I threw down the file. I had to figure out where—

  ‘Hey, Skye. Thought we might find you here,’ a voice said from behind me.

  It was Misty’s voice.

  I turned.

  Misty, Hattie, Verity and Chastity stood in the doorway, their eyes deadly, blocking the exit.

  TRAPPED

  I just stood there in the school counsellor’s office, wearing Misty’s necklace, looking like a burglar caught red-handed.

  There was a moment of silence as we all assessed each other.

  Verity and Chastity glared evenly at me. Hattie’s eyes darted excessively: a facial tic she’d developed since she’d seen her own dead body. Her mind was gone.

  ‘What did you do with Jenny?’ I said.

  Misty’s lips curled into a thin smile. ‘Like with the others, we took her someplace that’ll have special meaning just for her.’

  ‘The others? You mean Becky, Trina and Delores?’

  ‘It started with Trina,’ Misty said, ‘because Trina betrayed me. It was the best way to get rid of Becky. As for the retard, well, we just did that for fun because she ruined Hattie’s new Birkin bag.’

  ‘I loved that bag . . .’ Hattie drawled, still blinking weirdly.

  I said nothing but I was thinking: Holy shit.

  Misty spat. ‘Fucking Trina. You know, I thought she was my friend. And then she went and asked Bo out on a date. My Bo! On a date! At fucking Tavern on the Green. Jesus Christ, what a cliché.’

  Misty’s heavy-lidded stare became harsher. She threw something at me and I caught it.

  Her phone.

  On the screen was an mpeg video. I pressed the triangular ‘Play’ icon . . .

  . . . and saw the high heap of trash in the tunnel underneath the well. Faint light came down the well, illuminating the space. It was the signature fish-eye view of a GoPro camera.

  Then two figures entered from the right, both holding phones as flashlights.

  Bo and me.

  On our first private run, when we had gone up and out of the well to explore the world of the future for the first time. I watched as, on the screen, Bo tried several times to hurl his grappling hook up into the well until at last it caught.

  And then—to my horror—I saw Bo hold me in his arms and kiss me tenderly.

  I remembered the moment vividly, only now I looked at it through Misty’s eyes.

  Oh, shit . . .

  It was then that I recalled my very first run with the larger group, when Misty had fiddled around among some crevices in the left-hand wall of the tunnel near the trash heap.

  She had been planting the GoPro.

  Misty snatched the phone from me. ‘You can’t imagine how furious I was with Trina when she went behind my back and tried to steal Bo from me. She was my friend. And now you, Skye. Kissing him! I thought you were my friend and now I see you trying to take him from me.’

  I spoke slowly, calmingly: ‘Listen, Misty. There’s nothing going on between me and Bo—’

  ‘Bullshit! I saw you at the Met together! One afternoon after school, Hattie saw you both go in there! She followed you and called me.’

  I glanced at Hattie. She looked like a prison guard.

  Verity just shook her head disapprovingly.

  Chastity was inspecting her fingernails, bored.

  I tried a different tack. ‘Misty, I didn’t know there was anything between Bo and you—’

  ‘Bo and I love each other!’ she screamed at my face, spittle flying, and in that moment I knew for certain that Misty was a psychopath.

  She caught herself, took a deep breath. ‘Bo and I have a connection. Through our bloodlines, through our souls. We are meant to be together. After I saw this’—she nodded at her phone—‘I wanted to fucking tase you right away, drag you in here, tie you to a streetlight like we did to Becky and leave you to the crazy scavengers of this time. But the girls here talked me out of it, said it was too close to Becky’s disappearance. They convinced me to wait till it got closer to the end of the world, till things got bad, till now, when another disappearance or two wouldn’t be followed up.’

  Verity smirked. ‘Don’t thank us all at once.’

  Misty said, ‘In the meantime, I had to content myself with messing with your head: taking you to your apartment and showing you how your parents killed themselves.’

  I frowned. ‘You knew how they died?’

  ‘Of course I knew. I’d already been through your apartment. I got in via the balcony to your parents’ bedroom. Honestly, you don’t think you and Bo were the first people to leave the tunnel and explore this world, do you? Granted, I didn’t think to burn a hole in an oak tree to figure out just how far into the future this place was, like your brother did.’

  At the mention of Red, I turned to Verity.

  Verity cocked her head. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll tell him that you came here alone with Bo and the crazies got you. Have no fear, I’ll take good care of your brother after you’re gone.’

  Misty said, ‘When we dumped Becky in here, we went to the trouble of writing a text on her phone to cover our tracks. We won’t even bother doing that for you.’

  She added, ‘You really did me a favour, coming in here now with Bo. Meant I didn’t have to go to the trouble of luring you to the conservancy garden outside, tasing you and then hauling your ass in here.’

  ‘What are you going to do to me?’ I said warily.

  Misty smiled tightly. ‘I’m guessing you came here to find Jenny, so we’re going to give you what you want. We’re going to take you to her.’

  Then Misty’s hand whipped out from underneath her track top and I briefly saw a Taser C2 stun gun in it. She pulled the trigger and I glimpsed the plastic gun’s twin electric-shock probes rushing at me before everything went black.

  BOUND

  ‘Wake up, sleepyhead! Wake up!’ a distant voice cooed at the edge of my consciousness.

  Then, whack! Somebody slapped me, hard.

  I opened my eyes to see Hattie’s broad heavy-set face right up close to mine.

  ‘She’s awake,’ she snorted and stepped away to join Misty, Chastity and Verity. Misty, I saw, must have taken back her gem while I’d been unconscious. She now wore it around her neck.

  I was outdoors, sitting with my back up against the base of a post of some kind, my hands wrapped around and behind it, tied together at the wrists with a plastic garbage-bag tie.

  Only this was no ordinary post.

  It was painted hot pink.

  It was the tall pink crucifix on the roof of the Met that I had seen unveiled by Jenny’s father, Ken, at the announcement event in January; the sculpture by the British artist Clivey named The Price of Feminism.

  The buildings of the Upper East Side loomed over me, stretching away to the north and south. It was early evening, the sky almost fully dark. While I had been knocked out, the sun had gone down.

  I guessed I had been out for about thirty minutes. Just above the roof’s waist-high rail, I could see the tops of the trees of Central Park—

  A groan from above me made me look up.

  ‘Oh, God . . .’ I breathed.

  Jenny hung on the back side of the crucifix, Christ-like, a mirror image of the sculpted woman on the front face of the cross.

  Jenny looked asleep or semi-conscious. Her head was bowed, her eyes closed. Her arms were stretched wide, tied with rope to the crossbeams while her legs were bound t
o the stem beside my head.

  Across her forehead, written in red lipstick, was one word:

  BITCH

  Jenny was drifting in and out of a tormented sleep, groaning and shouting in her nightmares.

  Her clothes were dirty, her hair was pressed down against the sides of her head, sodden from exposure to rain and wind. I guessed she’d been out here for at least two days and nights.

  Directly across from her was a simple chair with a white placard resting on it. On the placard, written in black marker, were the words:

  YES, JENNY, I CAN HURT YOU.

  Misty had made her point.

  Not only had she left Jenny for dead, she’d left her for dead hanging from the arty fibreglass crucifix her own father had caused to be installed on the roof of the Met.

  Misty smiled at me. ‘Time for us to go. But we’re not going to leave you all alone. We’re going to do for you what we did for Trina and Delores and Becky. Send out a call for the crazies.’

  She placed a pink Jambox portable speaker on the rail and hooked it up to my phone. She swiped through my playlist.

  ‘Fuck, what a totally lame list. Oh, here we go, Most Frequently Played . . . look at that, The Animals.’

  She selected ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ by Eric Burdon and The Animals, hit play, turned the volume way up, and with a curt nod to the other girls, turned and left, leaving me on the roof of the Met with the unconscious Jenny, bound to the bright pink crucifix.

  BAIT

  ‘There is a house in New Orleans . . .

  ‘. . . they call the Rising Sun . . .’

  The first haunting lines of the famous ballad blared out from the speaker at full volume, echoing across the deserted park.

  The song’s melancholy organ line, combined with Burdon’s deep foreboding voice, was unnerving at the best of times, but when played so unnaturally loudly, the effect was multiplied. If I was going to die to any song, this was not the one I’d choose.

  And if there was anybody out in the park, they would hear it for sure.

  ‘. . . It’s been the ruin of many a poor . . .’