Dead City

by James Ponti

  “What are those for?” Alex asked.

  “Didn’t you know?” Michael responded. “Mr. Driggs keeps his office underground, close to the construction site. He always wants to be near the workers, so that he can best address their needs and concerns.”

  The four of us shared a desperate look, and I was ready to call off the whole thing when Natalie stepped to the front.

  “Sounds cool,” she said, totally selling it. “How do we get underground?”

  Without realizing it, I had put my friends into the impossible situation I most wanted to avoid. In order to help me, they were going to have to break rules they did not want to break. They were about to head into Dead City, and there was no way to alert the Prime-O.

  Michael led us out of the building and down the street for a couple of blocks until we reached a construction site. He went to talk to a security guard, which left us alone for a moment.

  “I am so sorry,” I told them. “I didn’t want to drag you into this.”

  “Well, we’re dragged,” Natalie said. “So we might as well do this right.” She paused for a moment. “We’ll deal with how angry we are later.”

  “What can you tell us about Driggs?” Alex asked.

  “He’s very secretive and very bad,” I told them. “He’s one of the original thirteen zombies dating back to the subway explosion in 1896. And he’s the guy who chased my mom and me when I was a kid. The time when we got stuck out on the roof.”

  “Really?” Grayson was concerned. He knew how much that moment haunted me. “You’re certain it’s him?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, that explains why you went crazy,” Alex said with a laugh that actually made me feel better. “But I’ll tell you, there’s one thing I’ll never be able to forgive you for.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Making us from Bronx Science. They’re our biggest rivals. You know how much I hate those guys.”

  He smiled and winked, and I realized how lucky I was to have the three of them as friends.

  Michael came back from the guard shack. “We’re all set,” he said. “Just make sure you keep on your hard hats the entire time.”

  He led us to a large freight elevator. Instead of a door, it had a gate that Michael had to pull down until it snapped closed. As the elevator descended, we could look through the links of the gate and see the different layers of rock as we passed them.

  “We’re going down about thirty floors,” Michael said, his voice rising so he could be heard over the elevator’s motor. “But there’s only one stop, so it doesn’t take long.”

  When the elevator reached the bottom, we stepped out into a world unlike anything I’d ever seen. We were in a massive cavern at least a hundred feet high. I couldn’t even see the ceiling because all the dust from the digging formed a haze above our heads. We practically had to yell to be heard over the rock pulverizers.

  “It looks like something out of a science-fiction movie,” Grayson said.

  I nodded. “Exactly what I was thinking.”

  “Let’s hope it’s not one of the science-fiction movies where the aliens eat the arriving astronauts,” Alex joked, leaning in.

  I looked up and saw a line of giant dump trucks belching exhaust as they climbed through tunnels that spider-webbed in every direction. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out how they got all the equipment down here. Michael must have read my mind because he explained it to us.

  “A lot of the time, they have to take the equipment apart on the surface, send it down in the elevator in pieces, and rebuild it here. It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is,” Natalie said, truly impressed.

  “Marek’s office is right over here,” he said as he led us to a trailer on the edge of the construction site.

  Seeing a photo of Marek Driggs was one thing. I didn’t realize how hard it would be to see him face-to-face. I almost screamed when he met us at the door.

  When we locked eyes, I had no doubt he was the man who had chased my mother and me. But I couldn’t believe how much he had cleaned himself up. Even down here in an underground construction trailer, he was dressed in a suit like a Wall Street lawyer.

  It didn’t help that he was incredibly charming and friendly. He greeted each one of us with a big smile and a hearty handshake. He even offered us sodas from his mini-fridge.

  “How was the ride down?” he asked us. “Something, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir,” Natalie said, taking charge when it was apparent I was too tongue-tied.

  “Well, I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you all have shown an interest in what we do down here.” He turned to his assistant. “Michael, give us thirty minutes. Then they’ll need an escort back.”

  I was frightened simply seeing him, but the really terrifying thing was how nice he was. If I didn’t know what I knew, I would have been totally fooled. He told us about the history of the Sandhogs and some of the important projects they had completed. He pulled out diagrams and blueprints and explained how the tunneling worked and what they did with all the rock they dug out.

  He gave us everything we’d need to write a thorough term paper and absolutely nothing that helped me understand why he tormented my mother or why Liberty said he was so dangerous.

  I hated to say it, but he seemed awesome.

  Then, when there were about five minutes left, he looked right at me.

  “You know,” he said, “even in the bad light we have down here, you have absolutely beautiful eyes.”

  It was awkward, and I didn’t know how to respond.

  “Thank you.”

  Then he dropped the bomb.

  “You look so much like your mother.”

  The Mayor of Dead City

  All the color drained from my face.

  Marek laughed and flashed a wicked smile before saying, “Well, now who looks like a zombie?”

  I couldn’t believe he had recognized me. I couldn’t believe I had put myself and my friends into this much danger. We were three hundred feet deep in Dead City, alone with the most evil Level 2 zombie of all.

  And nobody knew we were here.

  “You know, you really do look like your mother,” he continued. “And I’ll tell you, she would have been proud of you for figuring out who I was and finding me so quickly. The apple doesn’t fall far.

  “But she would have been disappointed in this: you coming here so unprepared, putting your friends and yourself in danger. She would have been very disappointed.”

  I started to tremble as I thought about the words that Liberty had used: “He’s determined to get rid of all the Omegas, past and present.”

  “Don’t listen to him, Molly,” Alex said, jumping in. “He’s not going to do anything to any of us.”

  Marek turned to him. “Is that so? What makes you think that?”

  “Too many people know we’re down here,” he said, bluffing. “Our teacher, the Prime-O, the receptionist, your assistant. Besides, we had an appointment. It’s marked in your official calendar. Even if you tried to erase it, a computer tech from the police department would find it in less than two minutes. You can’t risk those types of loose ends.”

  Marek nodded, savoring the moment. “First of all, there’s no way you told your teacher or the Prime-O; they wouldn’t have let you come. As to the receptionist and the assistant, they’re both undead, so I’m pretty sure my secrets are safe with them. You are right about the appointment. That would be a problem, except that the appointment was for Jennifer Steinbach of Bronx Science. Lovely girl and very much alive. In fact, we had her over earlier today, so the Sandhogs could present her with a plaque in honor of her win at last year’s science fair. I even posed for a picture with her, you know, to tie up any loose ends.”

  Alex slumped. His bluff had been called.

  “As far as the rest of the world is concerned, you four might as well be on Mars,” Marek said as he turned to me. “You know, it’s funny—if only y
ou’d been honest when you made the appointment. You would have saved everyone.”

  What happened next was unexpected. Grayson stood up and looked at Marek defiantly. “And if you had been honest, it might have saved you.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “Just some other loose ends that you’ve overlooked.”

  “Really?” Marek said. “We’re going to go through this with each one of you? Okay, I’ll play along. How many loose ends did I forget this time?”

  “One thousand seven hundred and eighteen.”

  Marek laughed. “That’s a specific number. Tell me, what is it?”

  “It’s the number of Sandhogs Local 147 members who will get e-mails from me tonight if I don’t cancel the send command by seven o’clock.”

  For the first time since we’d arrived, Marek was momentarily speechless as he tried to read Grayson, to see whether he was bluffing too.

  “And what do these alleged e-mails say?”

  “They detail the tens of thousands of dollars you have stolen from the hardworking members of this union over the years. Money that you’ve deposited into private accounts to spend on whatever it is that freak-show zombies like you do for fun.”

  It was the first time I’d ever heard Grayson use the z-word. And I have to say it was well-timed, because Marek froze in his tracks.

  “What can I say?” Grayson added, with total badass confidence. “I was bored this weekend, and I have a really good computer.”

  Natalie jumped into the fun. “After they arrest you, what do you think the odds are that they’ll send you to a prison constructed out of Manhattan schist?” She made a choking sound, imitating what Marek’s final breaths would be like.

  He considered this for a moment, looked at Grayson, and cocked his head. “Perhaps I underestimated you,” he said. “Although I suppose I wouldn’t be the first to do that.”

  “And you won’t be the last,” Grayson responded, not backing down one bit. “Because my friends and I are going to walk out of here completely unharmed.”

  Marek nodded and actually looked impressed by what Grayson had done. “That leaves us at something of an impasse. Maybe we should try that memory device you Omegas use in these confrontations? What is it called, CLAP?”

  He knew a lot more about the Omegas than I would have liked.

  “C is for ‘calm,’ right?”

  No one responded.

  “I’ll take your silence as a yes. Well, we’re being calm, so that’s a good start. L is for ‘listen.’ So listen to this: Even if you did send those e-mails, I can disappear underground for longer than you can imagine. It may delay my plans a little, but I will come back and I will win. So all you’ve done is buy yourself time. Don’t push your luck.

  “As to A and ‘avoidance,’ trust me when I say you want to avoid me from now on. We’ve had our fun, but it’s over and I’ve got work to do. Which leaves us with P, the reason you want to avoid me. Because if you don’t, I will punish you in far worse ways than any you’ve thought of. I won’t just hurt you. I will take from you the things you hold dear. Just as they were taken from me.”

  He leaned close to Alex and whispered in his ear.

  “For example, those little sisters you love so much. It would be awful if something happened to them.”

  Alex shoved him and looked ready to fight on the spot. But Natalie put a calming hand on his shoulder, and he managed to control himself.

  “I’m not saying that I’m going to hurt them,” Marek continued. “I just want you to understand that the best thing about being a Level 2 is the fact that having no soul means having no conscience. I can do something you find completely reprehensible and not lose a second of sleep over it.”

  He turned to me and gave me his most evil look yet. “You know, I slept like a baby the night I killed your mother.”

  I went to instant boil, which is exactly what he wanted. “Don’t even try that with me,” I snapped. “You had nothing to do with her death. My mother died of cancer.”

  Marek nodded. “Yes, she did. She died of a very specific type of cancer that occurs when dead human tissue penetrates an open wound and passes along its own sickness and disease to the living. Most people, like your father, think that happened by accident while she was performing an autopsy. But would you like to know where the flesh really came from?”

  He slipped off his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt cuff at his left wrist. He slowly rolled up his sleeve to reveal that his arm was covered with hideous scars and gashes. Chunks of rotted flesh clung to exposed bone.

  I almost threw up looking at it.

  “This is why you came here, isn’t it, Molly?” he asked, holding the arm up for me to see. “You wanted to find out something about me. Well, you’ve succeeded. I am a grotesque monster.”

  He rolled the sleeve back down and then buttoned it just as his assistant returned to escort us back.

  “Perfect timing, Michael,” Marek said happily. “We just finished. I think we’ve all learned some valuable lessons. Don’t you?”

  None of us felt the need to continue the charade by answering.

  “I’ll take your silence as a yes,” he said, undeterred. “Good luck on your term paper. You should have a lot to write about.”

  The five of us remained quiet during the entire elevator ride to the surface. I was in a daze, wondering if it was at all possible that Marek had actually caused my mother’s death. Even more important, I was worried I had endangered my friends and their families.

  Natalie was to my right. She put a comforting arm across my shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she whispered. “He was just trying to scare us.”

  “It worked.”

  I looked over at Michael and realized that the rosy complexion I had noticed on his cheeks was, in fact, makeup. Marek had told the truth about him. He was undead.

  Once we turned in our hard hats and left the work site, Natalie moved to the curb and signaled for a cab.

  “Let’s give it up for Grayson,” Alex said, offering him a high five. “Hero of the day.”

  “Absolutely,” I added with a grin. “I can’t believe you were able to break into his banking records.”

  “About that . . . ,” Grayson said. I noticed his hand was trembling.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “That was all a bluff,” he said with a gulp.

  “No way,” Alex said, even more impressed. “You are the man.”

  “How did you know he’d stolen money from the Sandhogs?” I asked.

  Grayson was still a little shaken. “He’s a bad guy with no conscience. I figured he had to have stolen something. Money seemed like the most logical guess.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “You guys are something else.”

  A cab pulled over and we all got in. It was a minivan. Alex and Grayson took the rear seat while Natalie and I got in the middle row.

  “Where to?” the driver asked.

  “To 520 First Avenue,” Natalie said. “The Office of Chief Medical Examiner.”

  “We’re going to the morgue?” I asked.

  Natalie shook her head. “No. We’re going to see the Prime-O.”

  Consequences

  Like me, Natalie was convinced that, in addition to being New York’s best medical examiner, Dr. H was also the Prime Omega. And after what we’d just been through, she knew we needed to go straight to the top. She called him from the cab and said we were coming in.

  The final proof he was who we suspected: He didn’t try to stop us.

  We walked into the building, and if ever I could have used one of Jamaican Bob’s corny jokes to break the tension, this was the time. But he must have sensed something serious was going on. Instead of a joke, all we got was a faint smile as he told us, “Dr. Hidalgo is expecting you.”

  The closest I got to a laugh was right before we walked into the lab. Natalie and I each swiped
some vanilla under our noses and offered it to the boys. They looked at us like we were aliens.

  “I think we’ll be fine,” Alex assured us.

  “Yeah,” Grayson added smugly. “It’s not the first time we’ve ever been in a lab.”

  It was, however, the first time they’d ever been in the morgue. Within thirty seconds, they were begging for some extract. Natalie and I shared a smile.

  It was the last time she smiled at me for quite a while.

  More than anywhere else, the key moments of my life occurred within the walls of the lab at the New York City morgue. This is where my mother and I created a bond that made the rest of my family call me Mini-Mom. And when her death turned my world upside down, this was where I started to rebuild my soul. More recently, it was where Natalie and I formed the first true friendship of my life. And even more recently than that, it was where I came into my own as an Omega in a battle with three killer zombies.

  Amazingly, in a room everyone else associates with death, my memories of the morgue were everything but. They were all vibrant and very much alive.

  Until now.

  That’s because “dead” is the only word to describe the expression on Dr. Hidalgo’s face as Natalie detailed what had happened between us and Marek Driggs. She recounted the entire chain of events, and the revelation about my mother’s death and the threats he made against us and our families.

  When she was done, I told him the story of my solo visit to Dead City. About how I crashed the flatline party and escaped with Liberty in the aqueduct. I even admitted that I had visited the Alpha Bakery without any imminent need.

  I didn’t want any more secrets. By the time I was done, I couldn’t look any of them in the eye.

  “Well,” Dr. H said, digesting the weight of what we’d just shared. “I am so relieved you all are safe. And I appreciate the honesty in what you’ve told me.”

  He hesitated for a moment.

  “You have told me everything, haven’t you?”

  All eyes turned to me.

  “Yes, sir,” I said, barely able to get it out.