I said, ‘Misty’s mom taught her to hide stuff in a hollowed-out book. But she told Misty it had to be a book you were happy to eviscerate.’
And my eyes landed on it.
Living History by Hillary Clinton.
Hiding down there on the bottom shelf, a gift from a cheeky uncle, covered in twenty years of grime: a book that had no place on any Republican Voter’s Bookshelf and one that Starley Collins would have happily gutted.
I snatched the Clinton book from the shelf and opened it, and my eyes lit up at the sight of the deep square hollow that had been cut into its pages.
My joy was short-lived.
Like Misty’s book, this hollow core had nothing inside it. Its emptiness mocked me.
I slumped into the lounge chair behind me, suddenly overcome by fatigue, my brief rush of hope now completely and comprehensively crushed.
Jenny was still trying to catch up.
‘No luck?’ she asked.
‘No, no luck,’ I said bitterly. ‘You and I are out of options. We are officially stuck here.’
PART VI
THE DEAD WORLD
[The Mayan] kings were preoccupied with their own power struggles. They had to concentrate on fighting one another and keeping up their images through ostentatious displays of wealth. By insulating themselves in the short run from the problems of society, the elite merely bought themselves the privilege of being among the last to starve.
Jared Diamond
New York City and Surrounds
Manhattan Island and Surrounds
THE BITTER FUTURE
Angry, frustrated and forlorn, I didn’t want to stay in Misty’s apartment.
For that, and for one other reason, I took Jenny to my apartment over in the north tower.
‘A word of warning,’ I said as I went inside, ‘this isn’t pretty.’
As Jenny entered the apartment behind me and saw my mother and Todd hanging from the ceiling beams, the full weight of the end of humanity hit her.
‘Good God,’ she breathed. ‘You saw this? Before?’
I nodded. ‘Misty brought me here. To needle me. To get under my skin. She didn’t realise that I don’t care all that much for my mother. My dad, though, is a different story, as is my brother.’
That was the other reason I had returned to my apartment: Red.
I knew what would happen to Mom and Todd but I didn’t know what would happen to Red during the chaos preceding the gamma cloud.
My mom’s note had mentioned they’d sent him ahead to the Retreat. I hoped I might find some evidence at the apartment suggesting this had been the case.
Moving through it, I saw my own room again, my bed, my books on their shelves, and the terrible message scrawled over the wall and my poster frames:
I hadn’t forgotten my fate, at least as it was recorded in Mom and Todd’s note: they didn’t know where I was when they died. I figured I was in here—now, trapped in the future—when they had returned from their trip to the Hamptons and searched for me.
I entered Red’s bedroom, the pop-culture boy cave. It was unchanged from the last time I had seen it—the red Cadillac couch, the R2-D2 fridge, the rope hammock by the window, all of it covered in a thick layer of dust.
I looked in his closet. His large travel suitcase was gone, as well as some clothes.
That was a good sign. Maybe Mom’s note had been right.
I peered around the room.
Red may not have been the world’s finest student, but he was clever, street-smart. He knew about the tunnel and he grasped time travel. If I suddenly went missing, he might suspect I was in this time. But what would he do?
I rummaged through his desk and his drawers, looking for some kind of message, but found nothing.
As I stood in the middle of his bedroom, frowning, my eyes fell on his R2-D2 fridge.
Its silver domed ‘head’ was covered in filthy dust.
On a hunch, I opened its front door.
The fridge was empty . . .
. . . except for a white envelope sealed inside a clear Ziploc sandwich bag on the top shelf.
The envelope was labelled: BLUE.
I tore it open and read it.
Dear Blue,
It’s your big brother here, coming to you from twenty-odd years ago. How weird is that?
I’m not sure where you are but I’m guessing you’re ‘inside’. Assuming no-one finds this note first, it should still be here in twenty years.
It’s March 14 and things have got totally crazy here in NYC, even though the gamma cloud is still three days away. The whole city has become a war zone.
I’m leaving the apartment now. Mom and Todd just called me from across town and told me to go to the helipad on the East River now. I tried to convince them to meet me at the helipad, but they’re insisting on coming back to the apartment. They want to collect some bags and clothing (and some cash that they want to bring).
When you get back to the present, find me at the Retreat.
Stay safe, little sis.
R
I stared at the note, tears of relief trickling down my cheeks.
I was so pleased Red had got away safely.
My feelings for my mom and Todd were more mixed: their final trip back to the apartment—to get their suitcases, clothes and some money (for what, in a destroyed world?)—had been their death sentence. My mother’s vanity and belief in a class system based on wealth had been the end of her.
I noted that Red’s attempt to alter their future hadn’t worked.
Then it struck me and I said aloud, ‘Oh, Red. Thank you.’
Standing behind me, Jenny said, ‘What? Why?’
I spun to face her. ‘My brother just gave me an idea. There’s one more place we can look for the gems, and while we’re at it, maybe we can find out what happened to him.’
We hurried out of Red’s bedroom into the hallway.
‘What place?’ Jenny asked, chasing me.
I turned as I ran. ‘We have to get to the—’
‘You’re not going anywhere,’ a deep voice said from the other end of the hallway and I looked up to see America Face standing there, crossbow in hand, blocking the way.
‘Hello, Skye,’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting a very long time for you.’
THE MAN IN THE MASK
‘Who are you!?’ I demanded.
Slowly, the tall figure reached up with his free hand and unclipped the strap of his red, white and blue goalie’s mask.
The facemask fell to the floor and I saw him.
He looked totally different with his wild frizzy hair shaved off. He was also twenty years older than the seventeen-year-old I knew, but his freckled features were unmistakable.
It was Griff.
Age had given his face creases and he had filled out. This 38-year-old Griff was a man, full-grown and powerfully built.
And angry.
‘Misty told me you’d meet me, Skye,’ he said flatly. ‘She said you’d bring her gem to The Plaza so I could ride out the gamma cloud. I waited and waited but you never came.’
I began to see what had happened. ‘Griff. Please. Let me explai—’
‘I waited for you!’ he shrieked. ‘I waited while the world burned and you never came!’
Jenny and I both took an involuntary step back.
It was then that the full impact of Griff’s fate hit me: Misty had lied to him—she had never told me anything about getting the gem to him and probably had no intention of ever getting it to him.
And so he had not been able to avoid the coming of the gamma cloud and the collapse of society that had accompanied its arrival.
When it had come on March 17, he had been one of the few to survive it, probably, I realised now, because of the many medications he�
�d been on.
And then he had waited—in this empty ruined world, for twenty-some years—for the secret runners to emerge from the well.
‘You’ve been waiting all this time?’ I asked.
The older version of Griff nodded.
‘For me?’
He nodded again. I saw his hand regripping the crossbow . . . and suddenly I recognised that, too: it was Verity’s dad’s $4,000 crossbow.
Lines from Griff’s medical file came to me: how he had to keep taking his meds; cleptomania; disproportionate acts of revenge against those who slighted him. He’d clearly helped himself to Oz’s hockey mask and Mr Keeley’s crossbow . . . and he’d been stewing for twenty years to unleash his vengeance on me.
Griff said, ‘When we did our runs, I knew that the tunnel transported us roughly twenty years into the future. So I kept track of the years and the seasons. For the record, your brother was right: the tunnel took us twenty-two years into the future.
‘I wanted to be here when you emerged, so, not long after the coming of the gamma cloud, I parked that yellow cab over the hatch leading to the entry cave. I also drove a garbage truck over the exit hatch behind the Museum of Natural History and deflated its tyres, too, so the only way you could get out was through the well.
‘Since then I’ve been coming back to the well every year at this time to watch and wait for you and the others. I was the one who cleared the area around the well and set up camp there.
‘A few months ago, I saw the others inside the tunnel, saw the lights on their phones. After that, it was only a matter of time till you emerged, Skye.’
‘Griff,’ I said, ‘Misty did this. She manipulated you. She lied—’
‘SHUT UP!’ Old Griff yelled. ‘SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH! You did this! You left me! You have no idea what I’ve seen in the last twenty-two years! What I’ve had to do to live!’
I fell silent.
‘Do you know who survived the cloud?’ he said softly. ‘I’ll tell you, because I saw it all happen in real time. I saw every normal person drop dead where they stood. Who kept standing? Every crazy-assed psycho with a warped brain, that’s who. Seems the mistimed electricity in every psychopath’s and schizophrenic’s brain made them immune to the gamma radiation.
‘Whack-jobs in mental hospitals; bipolar and borderline personality disorder sufferers; the mentally ill on the streets. They survived. So did most of the psychos in prisons and county jails. In other words, everyone who howls at the moon.
‘Somewhere in the chaos before the gamma cloud, someone decided to blow open the gates to the jail on Rikers Island so now there are all sorts of bad motherfuckers running around. The Bible was wrong. The meek didn’t inherit the Earth. The insane did.’
He shook his head, looking down at the crossbow in his hand.
When he looked up again, I saw madness in his eyes.
‘I’ve had twenty-two years to think about how you left me for dead, Skye. Left me to live in this shithole of a world. Twenty-two years to think about how I was going to kill you. I’ll tell you now: slow. I’m going to shoot you with this crossbow and while you’re alive, I’m going cut off each of your limbs and eat them in front of your dying eyes.’
Then, right there in the hallway outside my brother’s bedroom, he raised the crossbow and fired it at me.
AWAY
The arrow shot through the air but by the time Griff fired it, I’d yanked Red’s wooden headhunter’s shield off his door and held it up in front of my face.
The arrow struck the shield . . . penetrated it . . . but not all the way through. Its razor-sharp tip stopped an inch in front of my nose.
Griff’s eyes blazed with fury.
I shoved Jenny back into Red’s bedroom and we fell through the doorway together. I quickly slammed the door shut and toppled my brother’s bookcase in front of it. A second later—bam!—the door shook violently, hit by Griff from the other side.
I turned to face the room.
‘There’s no way out of here,’ Jenny said.
She was right. My don’t-die plan had only gone as far as using Red’s shield to fend off that first arrow. It hadn’t extended to getting out of the apartment.
Bam! The door shook again.
‘I’m coming for you, Skye!’ Griff yelled. ‘I’ve waited a long time for this and I won’t be denied!’
My eyes scanned the room and found the window . . . and Red’s Balinese rope hammock suspended in front of it.
There was no time to be subtle.
I grabbed his R2-D2 fridge and threw it through the window.
Glass exploded everywhere and the little droid fridge fell three floors straight down the face of the north tower before it struck the 18th floor crossover terrace, bounced off it, and fell another eighteen storeys and smashed into a thousand pieces on the sidewalk of Central Park West.
The window gaped before us.
I didn’t stop moving. I still had Jenny’s anti-kidnapping blade and I used it to saw into Red’s rope hammock, cutting it in such a way that its back-and-forth lengths of rope were released to form one long stretch.
The hammock was about six feet long, but when unwound in this way, six feet became twelve, then eighteen, then twenty-four, then thirty.
I left one end of the hammock anchored to the ceiling and tossed the other end—the thirty-foot length of rope—out the window.
‘Are you kidding me?’ Jenny said.
‘We don’t have to go all the way down the building, just to the crossover, and then we run. Go! Go!’
Jenny didn’t need to be told twice.
Out the window she went, gripping the rope like an abseiler, and in a moment she was out of sight.
Bam! The door behind me shook again and this time the bookcase shifted and I saw Griff squeeze his face through the gap—then replace his face with the crossbow.
He fired it.
I ducked.
The arrow whizzed out the window behind me.
Then I grabbed the length of rope that had been my brother’s hammock and leapt out the window.
With my feet pressed against the outer wall of the San Remo building, I lowered myself down the face of the tower, the giant blood-coloured letters blaring ‘WE ROSE UP!’ surrounding me.
Three floors below me, Jenny stood on the 18th floor crossover, looking up.
‘Jump!’ she yelled.
I let go, falling the last ten feet.
Jenny caught me and we sprinted away to the south tower, charged inside it and descended its fire stairs as fast as we could—knowing that Griff was at that very moment racing down the identical stairs in the north tower.
As we hit the bottom of the stairwell, Jenny said, ‘Skye, where do we go now?’
My face set itself into a resolved grimace. ‘Same place I was going to say earlier: we go to the Retreat at Plum Island.’
‘Plum Island is a hundred miles away, at the far end of Long Island. How are we gonna get there?’ Jenny asked.
‘I have an idea for that,’ I said. ‘Follow me and don’t stop till I say so.’
And so we ran.
Out of the San Remo and then westward through the deserted weed-covered streets of the Upper West Side.
Leading the way, I made sure we zigged and zagged, lest Griff spot us, but I always made sure we were tracking westward.
As we raced down 79th Street, I heard a cry and I turned to see Griff bounding down the decrepit street a hundred yards behind us, crossbow raised.
‘Don’t stop!’ I yelled. ‘Keep running!’
A minute later, we burst out of the building-lined street into a wildly overgrown park flanking the Henry Hudson Parkway: Riverside Park. Beyond it lay the broad expanse of the Hudson River.
‘The river?’ Jenny said, perplexed.
‘Not the
river,’ I panted. ‘This way.’
We cut across the abandoned parkway, hurdling its guardrails, and beheld the near shore of the river. On it was our destination, the only boat marina on the entire island of Manhattan: the 79th Street Boat Basin.
Still parked in their slots on the basin’s docks, abandoned by man and time, were several dozen recreational boats.
I instructed Jenny to grab as many gas cans as she could find while I jumped into the most basic motorboat I could see.
I wanted something simple and gasoline-powered, a vessel with no electrical circuit boards that could have been fried by the gamma cloud twenty-two years ago.
I found one: a little utility dinghy with an outboard motor, the kind of runabout rich people used to ferry themselves out to their bigger boats.
Thankfully, I’d driven little boats like these back in my sailing days with my dad. I primed the outboard motor, working the choke, and then I yanked hard on the starter cord.
It didn’t start.
‘I see you, Skye!’ Griff’s voice cut across my consciousness like fingernails on a chalkboard.
He was standing up on the parkway, looking down at me from a hundred yards away. He fired the crossbow but the distance was too great and it sliced into the water three feet from me.
Griff leapt over the guardrail.
I kept yanking on the starter cord.
Jenny joined me in the dinghy, dumping a few cans of gasoline onto the floor and untying the ropes. Suddenly the little boat’s engine caught and with a smoky bang, the outboard motor sputtered to life.
I almost screamed with relief. After a few seconds, it was chugging with a regular rhythm and that was good enough for me.
‘Let’s go, Skye . . .’ Jenny urged.
‘Wait!’ I said, jumping out of the boat and onto the deck, where I yanked a laminated map of greater New York off a noticeboard. It showed Manhattan Island, Connecticut and Long Island.
Then I leapt back into the dinghy and gunned the engine and we peeled out of the 79th Street Boat Basin at speed, racing out into the vastness of the Hudson River.
The Secret Runners of New York Page 20
