The Manhattan Hunt Club

by John Saul

  Spinning around, she looked in the other direction.

  Again the tunnel seemed to stretch away into the fog.

  The green glow was dimmer now, and she wasn’t as certain of her bearings as she’d been only a moment ago. She turned again, searching for some clue as to which was the right direction, then turned once more.

  But which way was she facing?

  As the batteries continued to lose their strength, the green light faded, and Eve tore the goggles from her head in frustration. Losing her grip on them, she heard them clatter away into the darkness as once again the blackness closed around her.

  But the men had always talked about light! Utility lights that gave them enough illumination so they didn’t need the goggles most of the time.

  Most of the time.

  But not all of the time.

  The goggles!

  She had to find the goggles!

  Dropping to her hands and knees, she felt around in the slime that covered the floor, searching. They couldn’t have fallen far away—surely they weren’t more than a few feet from her! She reached out, groping in the darkness, and a piece of broken glass slashed through the palm of her hand. Reflexively jerking her hand back, she automatically put it to her lips.

  The taste of blood filled her mouth.

  With the other hand, she groped at the wound, trying to determine how bad it was. She could feel blood running across her palm and down her wrist, and then her filthy fingers found the cut.

  Two inches long at least, running across her palm. She had to bite back a scream of agony as her fingers traced the open wound, grinding the filth from the floor deep into the open gash.

  Clenching her fist to stanch the flow of blood, she reached out in the darkness once more, this time with her left hand. But then she jerked it back before she could touch anything, terrified of what might happen to her if she slashed her other hand, too.

  Getting unsteadily to her feet, Eve Harris took a tentative step, and bumped into a wall.

  Panic welled in her, but she fought against it, bracing herself against the wall, willing her heart to stop pounding, battling against the panic that seemed to be strangling her and made it almost as impossible for her to breathe as it was for her to see.

  Light, she thought. I have to find light.

  But everywhere she looked, there was only the blackness.

  The blackness, and the creatures that she could suddenly hear creeping through it.

  Creeping toward her.

  Jeff froze.

  “What is it?” Heather asked from behind him. “What’s wrong?”

  He reached back, his fingers finding her wrist and closing on it. “Listen,” he said.

  A silence fell over the four of them, unbroken for a moment by anything except the dripping of water. Then they heard it. A great whumping sound, as if something heavy had been dropped from a great height.

  Less than a minute later they heard it again: whump!

  They were still in the utility tunnel, but they’d come to a cross passage, and it sounded like the noise was coming from straight ahead. But before they heard the sound again, another sound intruded on the quiet; this time, though, it was the familiar sound of a subway train.

  The sound grew steadily louder, and they could feel the draft of the air being pushed ahead of the train coming down the cross passage. A moment later they saw the beam of the headlight cross ahead of them, and then the train itself thundered past the end of the passage, its lighted cars flashing like a strobe, the couplings rattling, the brakes squealing as it began to slow for a station.

  Then the train was gone and silence once again descended. Just as he was about to start into the passage, a glimmer of red caught Jeff’s eye, gone so quickly he wasn’t certain it had been there at all. Yet every nerve in his body now seemed to be sending him a tingle of warning, and he stopped short, putting his hand back to block Heather. They were so close to their goal, but someone, he was sure, still lay between them and the one place where they might be able to escape the tunnels with no resistance from either the hunters, the herders, or the gamekeepers.

  As the other three clustered close behind him, he whispered a warning so softly it was almost inaudible, but to his own ears he might as well have bellowed it into the darkness. “Someone’s there. One of the hunters.”

  “We’ll go,” Keith replied as quietly as Jeff. “Heather and Jinx, stay here.”

  Both the girls opened their mouths as if to argue, but when Jeff shook his head and held a finger to his lips, they said nothing. “Stay here until we signal you,” he told them.

  While Heather and Jinx crouched in the darkness, Jeff and Keith crept noiselessly forward, edging closer and closer to the intersection with the subway tunnel ahead. Each of them carried a rifle, along with one of the backpacks taken from the fallen hunters. As they came to the junction, Jeff pressed against one of the walls, Keith against the opposite.

  They waited, listening.

  Nothing.

  The seconds stretched into a minute, then two.

  Still nothing.

  Jeff was about to edge out into the subway tunnel when his father shook his head. Then, as Jeff watched, Keith shouted into the darkness:

  “I’m coming for you, you bastard!” And as he shouted, he hurled the backpack he was carrying into the subway tunnel, dimly lit by the wide-spaced bulbs mounted high on the walls.

  Arch Cranston—code name “Cobra”—had already snapped at the bait by the time he realized it was a trap. At the sound of the angry words, he raised his rifle to his shoulder, and he’d already locked the sight onto the object hurtling from the side tunnel and squeezed the trigger before he realized it wasn’t the man he’d expected at all.

  But it was too late, he was already committed. As he realized what was happening, the trap closed.

  Before Keith’s words had died away, they heard the chattering of a rifle, and the backpack was torn to shreds by the rain of lead slashing through it. The rifle was still chattering when Keith, holding the Steyr at waist level, stepped into the tunnel, pointing the rifle in the direction from which the other gun was firing and squeezing the trigger, spraying the tunnel with slugs.

  As his bullets ricocheted off the walls and whined away into the distance, the other gun fell silent, followed by a small, gurgling groan.

  “Got him,” Jeff heard his father mutter. Turning away from the sight of the man he’d just killed, Keith said to him, “Let’s get going.”

  Signaling to Heather and Jinx, Jeff waited only long enough for them to catch up before he plunged into the subway tunnel, turning in the opposite direction from the fallen man.

  Eve Harris heard two blasts of gunfire and instinctively dropped to the floor of the tunnel. Favoring her injured right hand, she fell hard on her left, and felt a sharp pain slash up her arm and into her shoulder. Cursing, she rolled over, shrugged the backpack and rifle off her body, and managed to sit up.

  Gingerly, she touched her left wrist. The pain was so bad, she knew it wasn’t just sprained, but broken.

  Out, she thought. I’ve got to get out.

  Lurching to her feet, she started along the tunnel once again, feeling her way along the wall with her cut right hand, her left arm far too painful to use at all. Ahead of her, she saw a glimmer of light.

  At first she thought it was an illusion, but a moment later she knew it wasn’t—somewhere ahead, somewhere far in the distance, there was the dim glow of a light. The pain in her left arm forgotten, her right hand once more clenched into a protective fist, she began to run through the darkness toward the beacon of light. Her panic washed away and her heart raced with excitement as her eyes fastened on the guiding light.

  Then, so suddenly she had no time to prepare for it, her right foot connected not with the floor of the tunnel, but with nothing at all. As her leg dropped into an open shaft, her face crashed against its far edge, the concrete lip smashing the bridge of her nose. Screaming in agony, s
he dropped down the shaft, her body bouncing off its walls, her torn right hand spasmodically clutching for anything that might break her fall.

  A second later she dropped out of the bottom of the shaft, smashing onto the concrete floor below.

  She lay there a moment, stunned.

  The pain coursed through every nerve in her body.

  But she wasn’t dead. Not dead, or even unconscious, for she could see—see clearly—by the light of a bulb that hung in a metal cage from the ceiling a few yards away.

  She was going to be all right!

  She lay still for another moment, catching her breath, forcing herself to overcome the agony that possessed her.

  Then, at last, she tried to sit up.

  And discovered that she couldn’t.

  Couldn’t move her arms, or her legs.

  It felt as if all her bones were broken.

  She tried to scream, to call for help, but even her voice had deserted her.

  Then, from somewhere in the distance, she heard something.

  Footsteps.

  Slow, shuffling footsteps, but definitely footsteps!

  Someone was coming! Someone who would help her! Hope surged inside her once again. She wasn’t going to die here—she was going to be all right.

  The footsteps came steadily closer, and then she saw a face looming above her.

  It was a man, squatting down beside her, peering at her. His grimy face was covered with stubble, his eyes were bloodshot. He leaned closer, and when he opened his mouth, his fetid breath poured over her like so much sewage. In response, her belly contracted with a great spasm of nausea, and vomit spewed from her mouth.

  The man recoiled, staggering to his feet, wiping the flecks of vomit from his face with the filthy sleeve of his coat as he swore at her. A moment later he straightened and his foot lashed out, and she felt her ear split as the toe of his boot crashed into it. Then he was gone, shambling off into the darkness, muttering to himself.

  As she struggled to clear her windpipe of her own vomit, Eve Harris saw the first of the rats creep out of the darkness, drawn from their lairs by the scent of fresh blood.

  Her blood . . .

  In vain, she tried to cry out.

  But even if she had been able to make a sound, there was no one left to hear her.

  They were heading north in the subway tunnel. Jeff was almost certain he knew where they were—under Broadway—and what he was looking for should be just ahead. And then, in the distance, he saw it.

  A streak of light, so thin it was barely visible. He moved faster, broke into a trot, then a run. Behind him he could hear Heather and Jinx and his father, their feet pounding on the concrete floor of the subway tunnel. They were between the tracks, the third rail on the left, and as they ran, the streak of light grew brighter.

  Far ahead he saw another light. Though it was just a pinpoint, he knew it was another subway train, racing toward them.

  “We’ve gotta get off the track!” Jinx yelled.

  But there was nowhere to go—no alcoves cut into the walls, not even a catwalk! But the streak of light was only a few dozen yards farther along. “Hurry,” he yelled. “We can make it!” He ran faster, hurling himself along the tracks, racing straight toward the train.

  He could hear it now, even feel on his face the rush of the air the train was pushing in front of it.

  The rest of them were right behind him, and suddenly he was there.

  A plywood panel, covering a hole in the subway tunnel’s wall, fixed to the outside of the tunnel so insecurely that the streak of daylight was obvious now.

  “No!” he heard Heather yell as she realized what he was going to do. But it was too late.

  Jeff hurled himself at the sheet of plywood, launching his body over the electrified rail, his arms raised, his body twisting so he’d hit the wood with his shoulder. If it held, and he dropped back—

  His body smashed against the plywood. The nails holding it to the concrete squealed . . . but held, and Jeff dropped to the subway bed, missing the deadly third rail by a fraction of an inch.

  There was a blare from a horn, and then the scream of brakes. Jeff looked up to see the train still hurtling toward him, and for a moment he froze, caught in the juggernaut’s headlight like a jackrabbit. Then another voice crashed through the cacophony.

  “Down! Now!”

  Instinctively obeying his father’s voice, Jeff dropped facedown into the gravel, then heard his father’s voice bellow out again.

  “Fire!”

  Over the roar of the onrushing train there was a blast of gunfire. Jeff shrank away from it, but it was over almost as soon as it began, and when the blasting guns fell silent, everything had changed.

  Light, daylight, was pouring through the hole in the concrete that only a moment before had been covered by the now-shattered sheet of plywood. Jeff scrambled to his feet and, with his father on one side, Heather on the other, and Jinx shoving him from behind, hurtled through the opening in the subway tunnel’s wall. Then they were all blinking in the brilliant sunlight and breathing in the fresh breeze that was flowing off the river a few blocks to the west. Behind them, the subway train shot past, gone as quickly as it had come. As its roar faded away, Jeff looked out at the great excavation that lay before him.

  It had changed since the last time he’d seen it, months ago, when his class in urban construction had taken another tour of the huge site where half a dozen buildings had stood. It had been a vast pit filled with heavy equipment meant for burrowing deep into the earth beneath the city. By now the pit had bottomed out, and the pile drivers were at work—the pile drivers he’d heard from deep within the tunnels—driving huge pilings into the bedrock to anchor the foundation of the skyscraper that wouldn’t be completed for another two years.

  All around them there were wooden forms for the concrete that would soon begin to fill the pit, and as Jeff gazed at them, he realized that just a couple of weeks later—maybe even less—the opening he’d just come through would have been blocked off forever.

  But it didn’t matter. None of it mattered, for he was free—free of the Tombs and free of the tunnels and free of the certain death that was all that had awaited him a few hours ago.

  Reaching out and pulling Heather close, Jeff drew the cool afternoon air deep into his lungs, then leaned down and put his lips close to Heather’s ear. “What do you say we walk home?” he murmured. “I think I’d just as soon skip the subway.”

  FIVE YEARS LATER

  Randall Converse’s grip on his father’s hand tightened as he gazed down the stairs. “Don’t want to,” he said, hanging back and tugging his father’s arm.

  Stepping away from the stream of people emerging from the subway onto Broadway, Jeff squatted down so his eyes were almost level with his son’s. The four-year-old’s features had taken on the stubborn, frowning expression that was a perfect replica of his grandfather’s face when Keith had made up his mind and wasn’t about to have it changed. “It’s okay, Randy,” Jeff said, doing his best to keep his voice from giving away his own nervousness about going into the subway. Years later he still felt a twinge of anxiety whenever he went beneath the streets of the city. On the trains and platforms, he constantly found himself glancing over his shoulder, scanning the faces of the homeless who rode the trains and panhandled in the stations when the transit cops weren’t around. A suffocating feeling descended upon him when the trains took him into the tunnels, and sometimes he imagined he saw the faces of the herders peering out of the darkness. The claustrophobia lessened when he reached the brilliant light of the stations, but his anxiety only disappeared for good when he was back on the surface. He and Heather were both determined that their son would not fall prey to their own fears, even in the face of Jeff’s parents’ arguments. “Millions of people ride the trains every day,” Jeff had insisted when his parents—for once united, if only on this one issue—had expressed their shock that he would consider taking Randy into the subways.
“I’m not going to have him grow up being afraid to use them.”

  He could now see the same fear in Randy’s eyes that he’d seen in his mother’s when she’d begged him not to take her grandson into the tunnels. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said, brushing a stray lock of curly brown hair off the boy’s forehead. “This is just another train. You like the train that brings us into the city, don’t you?”

  Randy said nothing, but Jeff saw the fear in the boy’s expression start to fade as curiosity replaced it. “And you want to see where I used to live before you were born, don’t you?”

  Randy nodded, but there was enough uncertainty in his eyes that Jeff lifted him up into his arms. “How about if I carry you?”

  “No!” Randy instantly objected. “I’m not a baby!”

  Setting the boy back on his feet, Jeff took his son’s hand and together they started walking down into the subway station.

  A familiar knot of anxiety began to form deep in Jeff’s belly.

  “Now, this isn’t so bad, is it?” he asked as they settled onto a bench in a well-lit car a few minutes later.

  Randy shook his head, but said nothing until the train moved from the station into the darkness of the tunnels. “What if it gets stuck?” Randy asked. “How do we get out? Do we have to walk?”

  The thought of actually walking through the tunnels chilled Jeff to his core, but when he spoke, his voice was steady. “It won’t get stuck,” he reassured the boy. “And even if it does, someone will come and fix it.”

  As the train moved north, Jeff sensed that Randy was starting to relax. As the stations flashed by one after another, so did his memories of the days he’d spent trapped in the tunnels beneath the city.

  But in the end, the nightmare he’d lived since he’d saved Cynthia Allen’s life in the station at 110th Street had finally ended. He and Heather had been married a month after his escape, and nine months to the day after the wedding, Randy had been born.

  With that, everything in their lives had changed once more.