The Secret Runners of New York

by Matthew Reilly

  We approached the front door cautiously.

  It was ajar.

  It wobbled slightly, buffeted by the wind entering the apartment through its shattered windows.

  Gripping my pistol tightly, I pushed open the door with its barrel.

  The hinges squealed loudly. I swore inwardly: if anyone was here, they would have heard—

  A hand shot out from the darkness and grabbed my wrist, dislodging the gun from my hand. It clattered to the floor.

  I spun to see Griff standing right beside me—no longer wearing his Stars-and-Stripes hockey mask and gripping his crossbow in his spare hand!

  ‘Hi, Skye,’ he said before he punched me in the face and I fell to the floor, my nose gushing blood.

  ‘I thought you might come back here,’ he said. ‘Trying to find a way out, I imagine. But if I couldn’t get out, neither can you.’

  He stood astride me, aiming his crossbow down at my face just as Jenny came bursting through the doorway and crash-tackled him, bumping his crossbow just as he fired it and the arrow—a twelve-inch-long ultra-stiff carbon-fibre bolt—slammed into the floor with a powerful whump! one inch from my right ear.

  It quivered, sticking up vertically from the hardwood floor.

  Griff grunted as he hit the ground with Jenny on top of him. They separated and began to stand but Griff was faster, and as he rose to his knees, he backhanded Jenny with one big fist, knocking her out with a single blow. Jenny crumpled to the floor.

  I took the opportunity to leap onto Griff’s back and wrapped my arms around his neck, trying to break it. Fat chance. He just dropped us both backwards, slamming me back-first onto the floor underneath his bulky frame, knocking the wind out of me.

  Then he knelt on top of me and in that moment I knew that unless I did something right then, something lethal, I was dead. Kill or be killed. Nothing more, nothing less. And so I did the only thing I could think to do.

  I kicked Griff in the balls, grabbed him by the back of the neck, rolled sideways and, with all my strength, slammed his face into the floor.

  Did I aim for the arrow sticking up from the floor? It’s hard to say. I definitely saw it out of the corner of my eye in the split second before I did it.

  As Griff’s forehead hit the floor, the blunt end of the arrow was thrust up into his left eye and he screamed in a way I had never heard a human being scream before.

  The arrow penetrated Griff’s eye socket, shot up through his brain and then came bursting out the back of his skull, spraying blood and brains as it did so.

  Face-down on the floor, both arms limp, Griff’s body shuddered gruesomely, spasming involuntarily before it finally went still. A pool of blood oozed out from under his face. It looked like his head had been nailed to the floor by the arrow.

  I rolled away from his body to check on Jenny. I shook her gently and her eyes fluttered open.

  ‘Did we . . . did we get him?’ she asked.

  I nodded at Griff, face-down in the pool of his own blood, the arrow—with flecks of blood and brains on it—sticking out the back of his head.

  ‘Oh, we got him all right,’ I said.

  When I was sure Jenny was okay, I hurried into my bedroom.

  I saw the books on the shelves, my eyes zeroing in on my prized Stephen King collection—arranged in order of publication, the one truly personal thing that Oz Collins knew about me, the one thing that he knew I would notice.

  And there it was.

  Misery.

  As Oz knew, it was my favourite Stephen King novel, and it was wedged between Rose Madder and The Green Mile.

  Only that was the wrong spot.

  Its usual place, earned by order of publication, was between The Dark Tower II and The Tommyknockers.

  Something only I would notice and know.

  I grabbed Misery and opened it . . .

  . . . to find the pages of my favourite novel hollowed out and inside the void that had been created . . .

  . . . was a single amber gem.

  Starley Collins’s gem.

  ‘Oh, Oz,’ I said aloud, ‘thank you.’

  Jenny and I dashed out of the San Remo and headed directly for the private conservancy garden behind the Museum of Natural History.

  I figured we could go to the exit cave there, stand in the short section of tunnel behind the portal, place the gem in the pyramid and then simply step back through the portal to the present.

  But when we arrived at the conservancy garden, I stopped short.

  I’d forgotten that Griff had been here.

  The fence surrounding the garden had been flattened and the thing that had toppled it—a garbage truck, driven here long ago by the vengeful Griff—lay directly on top of the hatch in the garden.

  Its tyres had indeed been deflated, causing the huge rust-covered vehicle to lie flat on the hatch. There was no way on God’s Earth we could move it.

  Twenty-two years of unchecked shrub growth had climbed up and around the garbage truck, making it part of the garden and actually hiding the hatch even more comprehensively than it had been hidden before.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘The well,’ I said. ‘We go back to the well and get into the tunnel. We’ll be able to get to the exit portal and our time that way.’

  We raced back into the park, across the Transverse and around the Swedish Cottage.

  We pushed through the bushes surrounding the clearing and beheld the low brick well.

  Verity’s body still lay slumped against it, her lifeless eyes open in a stupid stare, one leg still gripped by the bear trap and the arrow still lodged in her heart.

  On the ground around her and the well, still partially concealed by a carpet of brown leaves and twigs, were the other five bear traps from the Met exhibit.

  ‘Stay back,’ I warned. ‘Let me find a safe path between the traps.’

  Jenny hung back as I edged carefully forward, cautiously pushing the carpet of leaves aside with my toes until I arrived at the well . . . just as a figure rose up from behind it and aimed a pearl-handled pistol directly at my heart.

  Misty.

  Misty’s eyes were deadly. She held her mother’s gun with a firm assured grip.

  ‘I’ve been coming here the last few days,’ she said. ‘Just for a couple hours a day. I saw you in the tunnel, Skye. I don’t know how you got away from that roof but you did. So I’ve been coming here to check up on you.’

  ‘Have you told Griff yet that I’m going to bring him your gem?’ I said. ‘Have you lied to him yet?’

  ‘I have,’ Misty said. ‘And he gets so angry, Griff. So angry. And in case you’re getting any ideas, my gem is hidden in a crevice in the tunnel—one of the thousands of tiny crevices in there—so you won’t find it and get out using it.’

  I’d had enough. ‘Listen, bitch, I’ve travelled way too far for way too long to play stupid games with you now. If you’re gonna kill me, just kill me, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ she said lightly, re-aimed the pistol and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened. The gun didn’t fire. It just clicked.

  Misty frowned but I knew what had happened.

  She didn’t have a round in the chamber.

  Classic city-girl error. Any girl who’d grown up in the South or in a hunting family would never make that mistake, but a spoilt rich kid from the Upper East Side—especially one like Misty who had probably learned everything she knew about guns from the movies—clearly would.

  I wasn’t going to let her rectify the situation. As Misty frowned quizzically at her pistol and reached for the slide, I bounded forward, leapt over the well and threw myself at her.

  We went tumbling to the leaf-covered ground, and as we did, a cluster of brown leaves exploded upward as I inadvertently clipped one of the bear t
raps hidden underneath them and—snap!—the trap’s metal jaws sprang shut with terrifying force inches from my hip.

  But Misty still had the gun, and as we landed in the carpet of leaves, she yanked on its slide, chambering a round, and suddenly that gun was live.

  I grabbed her gun hand with both of my hands, holding it at bay. I glimpsed Jenny over on the other side of the clearing, too far away to be of any help.

  Her arms shaking, fighting against mine, Misty began to bring the gun around toward my face.

  I tried to resist but whether it was exhaustion on my part or just sheer strength on hers, Misty was too strong, and the gun’s barrel came closer and closer.

  I clenched my teeth as I struggled against her, but it was no use. In a few seconds, Misty was going to shoot me in the face.

  Fuck it, I thought, and I shifted my weight suddenly, rolling the two of us across the leaf-covered ground—rolling and rolling—until Misty’s head came down in the middle of a pile of brown leaves and clang! the leaves erupted, fluttering upwards, and a pair of steel jaws came blasting out from under them, wrapping around her head, clamping down on her neck in a single brutal instant.

  There came a sickening crack and Misty’s body slumped immediately.

  That she was dead, there was no doubt.

  The powerful clamping mechanism of the bear trap had almost torn her head from her body, its steel teeth almost biting all the way through her neck. Mercifully, the leaves that Griff had used to conceal the trap shielded most of the grisly sight from my view.

  Blood dripped onto the gruesome necklace of leaves that were now pinned to Misty’s throat. Her eyes stared up at the sky, unblinking, lifeless.

  Jenny picked her way carefully over to my side.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ she gasped, looking at Misty’s body. ‘Now, that is what she deserved.’

  I just shook my head. ‘You got that right.’

  A few minutes later, Jenny and I sat on the rim of the well.

  We had pulled as many branches and stalks as we could over to it and laid them across it, trying to conceal the well from this future world. I had also taken Misty’s keys from her: the ones that opened the hatches at each end of the tunnel.

  Jenny went down the well first. I lingered for a moment on the rim, giving that strange world around me one last look. I thought of Red and of Bo and of the journey I had survived.

  And then into the well I went, pulling the last branches across it behind me.

  Down the well and into the tunnel.

  My heart leapt when I saw the exit doorway at the far end.

  Jenny and I came to the ancient portal and I inserted Starley Collins’s gem into the pyramid. The curtain of light sprang to life and as we stepped through it together, I closed my eyes with relief—

  —and when I opened them we were on the other side, back in the present day, in the exit cave beneath the Museum of Natural History.

  I led Jenny up the ladders to the surface and a few minutes later we emerged from the gardener’s hatch in the conservancy garden and I heard the glorious sounds of car horns and police sirens in the night.

  We were back.

  Just in time to witness the end of the world.

  PART VII

  THE END OF CIVILISATION

  What the caterpillar calls the end of the world

  The Master calls a butterfly.

  Richard Bach

  MAYHEM

  New York City was in meltdown.

  It was indeed March 14—the night of March 14, to be precise—and the city had descended into chaos, chaos that would only get worse over the next three days.

  Police cars and ambulances sped every which way, lights flashing, sirens wailing. Looters laid siege to buildings; hooligans threw Molotov cocktails into shop windows. Fires blazed everywhere.

  Jenny and I split up to find our respective fathers, arranging to meet later.

  I passed the San Remo building: a giant crowd of rioters was massed in front of it, held back by police. They chanted, ‘We want Manny! We want Manny!’

  I couldn’t have got in if I’d tried.

  Red would—thankfully—have already left for the Retreat. But somewhere in there, huddled and afraid, were my mom and Todd, as well as the radio host, Manny Wannemaker, who had inflamed this very crowd. And that wasn’t even mentioning the shocking murders that would happen—or may have already happened—in Hattie’s apartment.

  I didn’t linger.

  I raced downtown to Penn Station where, amid the heaving throng of people trying to escape the city on trains, I finally found my father sitting quietly and patiently on a suitcase at our usual meeting place by the escalators.

  He had waited eight hours for me. We embraced and hustled out of there.

  The next three days went by in a blur.

  There was no point returning to my apartment. I couldn’t get in anyway. Mom and Todd would die by their own hand and Red, as I knew, was already gone.

  I desperately wanted to tell my dad about the portals and my travels through time. Open-minded as he was, I knew there was really only one way to do it, and that was to take him to the entry cave and show him.

  That cave turned out to be one of the safest places in the city and a good spot to lay low during the uproar.

  I showed my dad how the portal operated: placing the gem in the pyramid, initiating the curtain of purple light and stepping through it.

  Because of the age restriction on travelling through the time-tunnel, I had him dash overland through the park to the exit portal on the west side and sure enough, I popped out of that portal soon after to meet him. After that, I showed him the well behind the Swedish Cottage.

  He was, of course, amazed.

  But once the initial shock wore off and I told him about the theory of time I had found, his analytical mind took over and he started talking animatedly about time spirals, Einstein Bridges and folds in time.

  I told him everything. About Misty and the runners and the missing girls, about Misty’s feelings for Bo, about Bo and me, about being tied up on the roof of the Met with Jenny and about Bo’s horrific death there. And I told him about Red’s future: how I’d found Red twenty-two years from now as the sheriff of a fledgling community on Rhode Island.

  ‘Red’s always been a big kid,’ Dad said, ‘but I’ve long believed that he’d mature well. I’m pleased to hear that.’

  When I showed my dad the photos Bo had taken of the cave paintings in the tunnel of priest-like figures holding coloured gems, my dad said something odd: ‘What are those other gems they’re holding? The red and green ones?’

  I hadn’t noticed them before but there they were: the priests held not only two yellow gems, but two red gems and two green ones as well. I told my dad I’d never seen any red or green gems in the flesh, just the yellow ones.

  My dad shrugged. ‘If the yellow ones create a twenty-two-year fold in time, what do the red and green ones do? If you find them, maybe they also initiate these portals, but in different ways. They might create different kinds of folds. Longer or shorter ones or ones that go back in time.’

  ‘That’s enough, you!’ I said, smiling. ‘I’ve already done more time-travel thinking this past month than I ever thought I’d do. I’m just glad I could share it with you.’

  As March 17 drew near, my dad and I met up with Jenny, who by then had found her father, Ken.

  We decided we would all find a nice quiet place to face the gamma cloud together, somewhere away from the disintegrating city.

  Ken, it turned out, owned a small waterfront cottage on a remote inlet on Long Island called Bullhead Bay, out near the famous golf courses, Shinnecock Hills and the National Golf Links of America. Typical of Ken, it was not ostentatious or obviously opulent. From the outside, he said, it looked like a shack.

  And i
t was accessible only by boat or seaplane. Sounded good to me.

  Since we couldn’t hope to reach Ken’s seaplane, parked at its marina in Jersey, we just found a car—there were plenty of abandoned ones—packed it with supplies, and drove eastward, out of the city, out past JFK and along the Long Island Expressway till we came to the turnoff for Bullhead Bay.

  A rowboat took us the rest of the way. I loved the cottage: you could hardly have found a more remote—or beautiful—place, except perhaps Race Rock Lighthouse.

  On March 17, as Dr Harold Finkelstein had predicted, the world swept through the gamma cloud.

  When the hour drew near, the four of us gathered in the living room of the cottage and sat on the floor in a circle, holding hands.

  The first thing to go off was the radio, then the refrigerator, then the lights. The gamma cloud was knocking out the electricity.

  And then, as he held his daughter’s hands in his, Ken Johnson’s eyes rolled up into his head and he slumped to the ground, dead. The last thing he saw was Jenny’s kind, loving face.

  As for Jenny, thanks to the regimen of anti-depressant drugs she’d been taking over the last few years, she survived the passage through the cloud.

  I did, too. The peculiar diet of vitamins and sardines my father had suggested got me through, as it had with Red.

  My dad also survived, in all likelihood because of the various medications he had been on while he’d been institutionalised in Memphis.

  We buried Ken in the garden down by the shore. I held Jenny as she sobbed into my shoulder.

  Over the next few days, the world went still. Still and quiet.

  We saw no planes in the sky overhead. No cars or trucks on the roads. We heard none of the familiar sounds of suburbia, no lawnmowers or leaf blowers.

  On the third afternoon, my dad took me aside.

  ‘Blue, thanks for finding me at Penn Station. It’s been so wonderful to spend this time with you. But listen to me. Over the next few years, this world is going to be a hard place, a dangerous place. It won’t be safe for a sixteen-year-old girl and it certainly won’t help if you have to watch out for your silly old dad during that time.’