by James Ponti
We reached the bottom of the stairs, and he stopped for a moment. He looked at me and shook his head, frustrated by my lack of understanding.
“They’re not Level 3s back there,” he reminded me. “And 1s and 2s don’t just attack. They discuss and they coordinate.”
“And then?”
“And then . . . if you’re lucky, the Level 1s win the argument and you make it back to the surface with only minor damage. But the 2s . . . they hate to lose.”
As I was mulling over this little tidbit, I could hear the roar of water rushing nearby.
“Where are we going?”
“The aqueduct,” he informed me as he headed in the next direction. “It’s the quickest way out. We can ride the current down to Morningside Park and then go up to the surface there.”
“Ride the current?” I asked with disbelief. “You have a boat?”
“No,” he laughed. Then he stopped for a moment and looked back at me. “You can swim, can’t you?”
That’s when I realized that we were going into the water.
“Yeah, but laps at the Astoria Park pool are one thing. A raging current in a dark underground tunnel sounds a little dangerous.”
“Oh, it’s not a little dangerous,” he said. “It’s a lot dangerous. But nothing compared to what happens when an undead mob turns on a breather at a flatline party.”
Just the thought of that made me shudder. Then we heard some people following us down the stairs.
“Speaking of which,” he said, nodding at the noise. He pointed toward the darkness. “The aqueduct’s this way.”
We hurried to a narrow crawl space. He squeezed in and I followed. I was smaller than him, so it was easier for me, but I still began to feel a little claustrophobic.
The sound of the water got louder and louder, until we reached the end of the passageway. Once we came out on the other side we had enough room to stand up, but that was about all. We were on a small ledge directly above the water.
The roar echoed through the tight quarters of the tunnel, and he had to speak up as he gave me instructions. “After you dive in and come back to the surface, try to float on your back, feet first, and keep to the middle. You want to stay as close as possible to the air pocket.”
Dive. Surface. Air pocket. Argghhh.
It was all too much. But before I had a chance to think it over, he jumped in and started going down the tunnel. Then I heard voices on the other side of the crawl space getting closer, and I decided I had no choice.
I closed my eyes and then stepped off the ledge.
The water was way colder than I expected, and the pace of the current was really strong. I tried to follow his instructions and float on my back, but I kept slamming into the bricks that formed the ceiling of the aqueduct.
I felt like I was riding one of the slides at the water park we went to last summer at the Jersey shore. Only that was fun and exciting, and there were lifeguards everywhere.
This, on the other hand, was dark and terrifying. And the closest thing I had to a lifeguard was an undead crackpot who was already mad at me for crashing his flatline party.
Before I knew it, I’d lost all track of time and direction. There was a long stretch where the air pocket was only a couple of inches high, making me gag water whenever I tried to breathe.
Then the pace picked up, and I really started zipping along until I shot out of the tube and plunged ten feet through the air before splashing into an underground reservoir. When I bobbed up to the surface, I could hear him calling to me.
“Over here!” he yelled out. “Swim hard!”
It was dark, but I was still able to make him out. He was above the waterline, sitting on some rocks, waving for me to come to him. My instinct was to rest for a moment, but that’s when I felt the current trying to pull me down into the reservoir.
“Don’t let it pull you under!” he warned. “Just swim to me.”
I swam with all the strength I could muster, and finally broke through the current and struggled to the side.
He reached down to help me up, but I was so frantic that I almost ripped his arm out of its socket. (A real possibility with the undead.) Finally, I made it up next to him, collapsing on a rock.
“Are you okay?” he asked me.
I hacked some water and tried to catch my breath. I was finally able to sit up partway by resting back on my elbows. “You know how sometimes you’re scared of something, but then you do it and it’s so exciting that you end up enjoying it?”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling.
I shook my head. “This was nothing like that.” I hacked a few more coughs. “That was the single worst experience of my life.”
Then I looked at him.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
That’s when I noticed his left hand. His fingers were broken and bent in different directions, and his wrist had been snapped back at an impossible angle.
“Ooooh. Did I do that when you were helping me out?”
“No,” he said with a shrug. “I caught it against the wall right before the plunge.”
“Oh yeah . . . the plunge!” I shook my head. “There’s no warning for that one.”
He laughed. I just sat there and tried to pull myself together. For about a minute or so we were silent, except for the sound of my heavy breathing and the cracking noise his fingers and wrist made as he snapped them back into place.
Finally I asked, “Where are we?”
“Morningside Park,” he answered. “You know it?”
I nodded. “Best place in the city to see great blue herons, red-winged blackbirds, and rock doves,” I answered, recalling my days with the Junior Birders. “Especially in the pond by the waterfall.”
Morningside Park has an actual waterfall. It’s not some phony man-made fountain, but a natural fall that drops about twenty feet into a big pond. It’s hard to believe it’s in the middle of the city.
“I’ll give you this,” he said, laughing. “You’re not like any breather I’ve ever met.”
“And you’re not like any . . . undead person”—I caught myself before using the z-word—“I’ve ever met.”
He looked at me for a moment before asking, “What do you want with Marek?”
“Is that his name? The man in the picture?”
He nodded.
“When I was a little girl, he tried to hurt my mother and me,” I answered. “I want to know why.”
“With Marek, there doesn’t have to be a reason why. The only thing you need to know about him is that he’s a bad guy and someone you want to avoid.”
“Let me guess,” I joked, in the way you joke about something that terrifies you. “He’s one of those Level 2s who hates to lose.”
He shook his head and with all seriousness answered, “No, he’s the Level 2 who never loses.”
“How come?”
“First of all,” he said, “he’s one of the Unlucky 13.”
It was the same thing my mother had written on the envelope with the pictures. “Who are the Unlucky 13?” I asked.
“The very first undead,” he replied. “They were miners who were killed in the explosion in 1896 that opened the seam of Manhattan schist.”
“Those guys are still around?” I said in disbelief.
He nodded. “And you can build a lot of power in more than a hundred and thirty years of living. They’re treated like gods down here. Each one is in charge of a different part of the underground.”
“And what’s Marek in charge of?” I asked.
He smiled. “He’s in charge of the other twelve. He was the foreman on the mining crew, and he’s still the boss. They call him the mayor of Dead City.”
“I imagine he wouldn’t be happy if he found out you helped me.”
Liberty shook his head. “No, he would not.”
“Then why did you do it?”
He thought about this for a moment before answering. “Omega today. Omega
forever.”
I couldn’t believe it. “You’re an Omega?”
He nodded. “And Marek is the one who did this to me,” he said as he pointed to the scar that ran along his scalp. “He’s determined to get rid of all the Omegas, past and present.”
“I don’t know how I can thank you,” I said.
“First of all, you can get out of here in case any of the others followed us.” He pointed toward a walkway. “That takes you right out behind the waterfall.”
I stood up and started toward the walkway. Then I stopped and turned back to him. “I know you go by Liberty, but can I ask your real name?”
“Liberty is my real name,” he said. “My parents were both American history teachers. What about you?”
“I’m Molly.”
“Nice to meet you, Molly,” he said, smiling. “Now do me a favor. Stay safe and stay away from Marek . . . no matter what.”
I thanked him again and then followed the path until it came out by the waterfall. The passageway was wet, and water poured all over me, but I was too soaked to care.
By the time I made it home, I’d decided to give up my search. Part of this was because Liberty had done such a good job convincing me that it was too dangerous, and part was due to the fact that I had run out of ways to look. Even I wasn’t stupid enough to go back into Dead City by myself, and you can’t exactly look up “Marek” under “zombies” in the phone book.
But a couple of days later, I was over at Grayson’s house using his computer to research a biology paper. Zeus really is an amazing computer. It has access to every database you can imagine, and I like the way it recognizes my voice and calls me by name.
As usual Grayson’s brothers, Wyatt and Van, stumbled into the room, arguing about something. I think it had to do with whether or not Pluto should still be considered a planet. He moved the debate out into the family room, and in the process left me alone.
That’s when it dawned on me that while I couldn’t look up Marek in the phone book, I could check for him in the Book of the Dead.
Unlike the Book of Secrets, Omegas did have limited access to the Book of the Dead because we’re responsible for taking the census every five years. In fact, the five years were almost up, and Grayson had been working on a new program for the next one.
His theory was that the census usually misses a large portion of the zombie population, and he was trying to come up with a better way of counting them. To test the program, he’d been running data from all the past censuses through Zeus.
I accessed the program and then ran a search for the name Marek. Zeus instantly spit out four different entries. Each was from a different year and each Marek had a different last name. The most recent was Marek Fulton in 1975. It seemed like a dead end, but then something about the last names caught my attention. They were Bedford, Linden, Nostrand, and Fulton.
They sounded familiar and I realized why. Each one was also the name of a major road in Brooklyn. They had to be fake surnames used by one person named Marek, trying to hide his identity.
I could hear Grayson and his brothers still arguing and figured I had a few minutes. I ran a search for all the names of streets in Brooklyn, and then cross-referenced them with the name Marek.
I’ve got to say, Zeus is some kind of powerful, because in about ten seconds a single name was flashing on the screen:
MAREK DRIGGS, CONSULTANT,
NYC SANDHOGS LOCAL 147
There was also a phone number listed.
Normally, I would never have thought of calling because of caller ID. But I had Zeus at my fingertips, and Grayson had set him up with a program that blocked it.
I knew Grayson was going to be back any second, so it was now or never.
I had Zeus dial the number.
Just when I was about to hang up, I heard a click on the other end, then a man’s voice.
“Hello?”
I Create a Fake Identity
Until now, he had simply been an anonymous face in a recurring nightmare. The face of the man who had chased my mother and me. The man who had terrified me and created my paralyzing fear of heights. But now that face had a name . . . and a voice.
“Hello?” he repeated.
The voice wasn’t ominous like I’d expected, but was actually kind of friendly instead. Still, I gulped before answering.
“Is this Marek Driggs? With the Sandhogs?”
“Yes, it is. Can I help you?”
I may not always be a quick thinker, but I was sitting in front of a computer that more than made up for it. After just a few mouse clicks, Zeus was spitting out page after page of information about Marek Driggs and the Sandhogs Local 147. As the pages filled the trio of monitors in front of me, I came up with a plan.
“I’m working on a project for school,” I said, trying not to stammer. “About the Sandhogs.”
The Sandhogs are the urban miners who dig the tunnels beneath Manhattan, and Local 147 is the labor union that represents them. The pictures scrolling across Zeus’s monitors told their amazing story. At any given moment hundreds of workers are operating giant earthmoving equipment and tunneling machinery underneath one of the busiest cities in the world. And hardly anybody even knows they exist.
“That’s fantastic,” he said, sounding like he truly meant it. “It’s about time the local schools paid some attention to the Sandhogs. You know, without them this city wouldn’t be possible.”
“They’re the men who make New York work,” I said, reading their slogan from the website in front of me.
“That’s exactly right!”
“That’s what I want to write about,” I told him, gaining confidence. “And for the assignment we’re supposed to do an interview.”
“Well, I’m not with the press office,” he replied. “But I don’t know anybody who understands the underground quite like I do.”
“Well, then,” I said, “maybe I could interview you.”
And that’s how I ended up making an appointment to interview Marek Driggs in his office.
I knew this went against everything Dr. H and Liberty had told me. But for reasons I didn’t fully understand, I needed to see him face-to-face. Both for me and for my mom. And unlike the flatline party, where I was ill prepared and made stupid mistakes, this time I had a good idea of what I was doing and who I was up against. I was going to be careful and smart.
I spent the next few days learning everything I could about the Sandhogs. The more I read, the more I was amazed by what they do. The Sandhogs are constantly at work underneath the city. And their history made them the perfect hiding place for the undead. The original zombies and some of the earliest Sandhogs both came from the crew of miners who dug the city’s first subway tunnel. And what better place is there for a zombie to work than deep beneath the city, surrounded by Manhattan schist?
I wasn’t planning to confront Marek. I just wanted to study him and figure out why he and my mother were enemies.
I had one big advantage. He still looked like he did when I first saw him, but I had aged and looked nothing like my five-year-old self.
That Thursday I was totally confident when I left school and went to the union headquarters. It’s located in Washington Heights, in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge. Before I went in, I put my Omega training to good use. I walked around the building looking for possible escape routes, just in case something did go wrong. And in my head I ran through my phony identity one more time to make sure I had it down. Unlike with Liberty, I was not about to give this guy my real name.
By the time I walked up to the receptionist, I was completely prepared.
“Hello. My name is Jennifer Steinbach, and I’m a student at Bronx Science,” I told her, using the name and school of the girl who’d beaten me at last year’s regional science fair. “I’m supposed to interview Mr. Driggs for a research paper I’m writing.”
So far, so good.
“Yes,” she said with a smile. “You’re a few minut
es early. So why don’t you sit down with the others?”
It took a moment for what she said to register. “Others?”
She motioned to a nearby waiting area, where I saw the very unhappy trio of Natalie, Alex, and Grayson. I didn’t want to let the receptionist see my surprise, so I gave them a smile and a little wave.
“Hey, guys.”
Not one of them smiled back. They just glowered as I walked over to join them.
“What are you doing here?” I asked under my breath as I sat next to Natalie.
“Well, considering you couldn’t come up with anything better than Jennifer Steinbach and a research paper,” she answered, “I’d say we’re saving you.”
“How’d you even know I was going to be here?”
She nodded toward Grayson. “He told us.”
I looked at Grayson. “Who told you?”
He couldn’t help but smirk ever so slightly. “Zeus.”
I couldn’t believe it.
“A computer . . . tattled on me?”
“No, but it did generate a report on your unexpected search into the Book of the Dead. And the voice recognition software recorded your phone call because it detected a high level of distress in your speech patterns.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” I whispered to them. “This has nothing to do with you. Besides, I can handle it by myself.”
“If that’s what you think,” Alex said, looking right into my eyes, “then you haven’t listened to a thing we’ve tried to teach you. Omega today, Omega forever. You can’t turn it off and on. We’re a team. And by the way, you can’t handle it by yourself.”
Before I could respond, a well-dressed man in a suit came out to greet us. He had a boyish face with rosy cheeks, and was definitely not Marek Driggs.
“Are you the students for the interview?” he asked with a friendly smile, no hint of New York in his accent.
I stood up to greet him. “Yes, but I thought we were meeting with Mr. Driggs.”
“You are,” he answered. “I’m his assistant, Michael. I’m just here to take you to his office.”
At first I thought it was kind of strange because the headquarters weren’t particularly big. It didn’t seem like we’d need a guide. But then Michael opened a cabinet and started pulling out red hard hats with the Sandhogs logo on the side.
