Dark Days

by James Ponti

  “There’s no time to debate,” he said. “They’re here and you’re going!”

  Sure enough, we could hear them trying to open the door. Reluctantly Natalie ducked behind some of the construction equipment, and the rest of us went out on to the terrace.

  “Just act like we’re enjoying the view,” said Alex.

  We lined up along the railing and looked out over the city. I was terrified for so many reasons, I couldn’t really worry about the height. Although it was awfully high. We heard a voice crackle over Alex’s walkie-talkie.

  “We have visual confirmation. All four of them are on the terrace on the sixty-first floor. Repeat: All four of them are on the terrace on the sixty-first floor. Everyone engage.”

  “Part one worked,” Alex said. “They think we’re all out here. Are you guys ready for part two?”

  “Definitely,” I said.

  “Me too,” said Grayson.

  “I’ll guess we’ll find out,” added Beth.

  Moments later the doors to the terrace opened and we could hear the Dead Squad come outside behind us. We tried to stay cool and kept looking out over the city.

  “Don’t turn around until you have to,” I whispered to Beth. “I will protect you no matter what.”

  “What seems to be the problem, officer?” Alex said, turning and engaging the leader of the group.

  “You know what the problem is,” he said. “Marek was clear that the four of you are not supposed to get together. He told you there’d be war. You have been warned, so what happens next is entirely your fault.”

  Grayson and I both turned, but Beth kept looking out toward downtown. There were eight of them in total. Three, including the one in charge, were dressed in NYPD uniforms. The others were your typical Level 2 lowlifes. They were big, especially the cops, but I thought we could handle them.

  “Actually,” I said interrupting. “Marek said we cannot engage in Omega activity . . . and we’re not. We’re just up here enjoying the view. It really is amazing.”

  The man evaluated the situation for a moment and then turned his attention toward Beth.

  “What about you, Coyote?” he said, using Natalie’s code name. “You just enjoying the view.”

  Beth dragged it out for as long as she could before she turned around. When she did, his face filled with rage.

  “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “I guess I’m Coyote,” she said. Then for fun she made a little howling noise.

  He was not amused. He turned to the others and said, “Coyote’s not here.”

  He grabbed his walkie-talkie and started to make a transmission. “Coyote is—”

  That’s as far as he got. Alex kicked the walkie-talkie out of his hand, and our chance for a peaceful encounter was over.

  They outnumbered us, so it was important to strike quickly. I did a full roundhouse kick that took out the zombie nearest me, instantly bringing their number down to seven. Next I double-punched another in the stomach, dropping him to his knees, but before I could deliver the knockout shot, I was blindsided by one of the cops.

  He was big and smelled disgusting. He slammed me into the railing so that I hit it with my stomach, which bent me over and gave me a dizzying view of the ground more than 650 feet below me. Pain radiated from my gut, and the angle made me a little dizzy as I tried to fight back. Then he added insult to injury when he put his lips right next to my ear and said, “Ready to see if gophers can fly?”

  That did it. I really hate that code name.

  I slammed my head directly back into him and snapped my body upright so that it pushed him away. I spun around and delivered a punch right to his chest.

  “I want a new code name!” I said as I added a flurry of punches, which he deflected.

  He was tough and seemed to relish the challenge as he charged right back at me. He was just about to hit me, when I got help from an unlikely source. Out of nowhere Beth came in and took him out with a devastating flurry of kicks to his shins and forearms before dropping him with a punch right to the middle of his forehead. It was a blistering attack that left me momentarily speechless.

  “You know krav maga?” I asked stunned.

  “I do, but that was actually muay thai,” she said. “It’s easy to confuse the two, because they use a lot of the same elements.”

  I was flabbergasted. Here I thought I had been living with a cheerleader all these years, and it turned out she was a lethal weapon. She enjoyed my sense of astonishment and just smiled and winked at me.

  “What?” she said. “You thought that only you and Mom had secrets?”

  This was a game changer.

  Beth and I had taken out two, and when I looked over at Alex I saw one dead zombie on the floor while he fought another one. The odds were evening out, but there were still five of them, and Grayson was struggling with one. The cop had him wrapped up from behind in a full chest hold and was lifting him up in the air.

  “Kick him, Grayson,” I yelled.

  He tried to kick backward with his heel, but he was at an awkward angle and he couldn’t get any power into it.

  I moved to help, but I was grabbed from behind and slammed down onto the terrace floor. A tall L2 loomed over me and tried to hold me down by shoving his boot into my stomach, which was still sore from getting folded over the railing. I saw that both Alex and Beth were busy, which meant that none of us could help Grayson.

  The zombie had lifted him completely into the air, and despite Grayson’s flailing he had no problem carrying him. In a flash I thought back to Grayson’s frustrations that Alex was always the hero and that he was never any good in these fights. I’m sure that frustration was only making the situation worse for him. Then I realized what the zombie was planning to do. He was carrying him over to the edge and was going to throw him off of the building.

  “Grayson!” I screamed.

  I tried to get up, but the zombie still held me down, his boot digging deep into my stomach. I reached up and twisted his knee until it dislocated, green slime shooting out where the bone punctured the skin. Then I punched the other knee from the side so that he fell. Unfortunately, he landed directly on top of me, which kept me from jumping right up to help.

  I could see the panic in Grayson’s face as the zombie neared the edge.

  “Use the railing!” I yelled to him. “Push back off of the railing.”

  Grayson did exactly what I said. He pushed back off of the railing and drove his body into the zombie, knocking him back. It was a good move, but the zombie was big and bad and it only slowed him down for a second. I scrambled to get back on my feet, but I was too far away to help. So were Beth and Alex.

  “No!” I screamed as they neared the edge.

  They say that time slows down in your head at moments of great stress, and I’ve had that feeling. But this was the opposite, it seemed like everything was moving too fast for me to do anything about it. That’s why it was such a surprise when a punch came out of nowhere and connected to the back of the zombie’s head.

  Natalie.

  She had come back to help. She delivered a quick series of blows to his lower back, and the zombie loosened his grip, allowing Grayson to break free. She continued her vicious attack, as did we all. Within less than a minute, all of the zombies lay dead on the floor.

  “What are you doing here?” Alex demanded. “I thought I told you to go downstairs and be safe.”

  “Really? Because I thought you told me that we were always a team no matter what,” she replied. “Something like ‘Omega today, Omega forever’.”

  She looked around at all of the dead bodies and smiled.

  “Besides, I’m still the captain of this team,” she added. “You don’t tell me what to do. I tell you what to do.”

  She laughed, and it was by far the happiest I’d seen her since New Year’s. For the first time since that day, we were truly a team again.

  “We better get you out quickly,” Alex said. “They’ll send
another team right away.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. At least not for a while.”

  She grabbed the walkie-talkie and turned up the volume so we could all hear.

  “All units, trackers report that all four Omegas have left the building and are now walking north on Lexington.”

  We all gave Natalie a confused look. “Why do they think we’re walking down Lex?”

  “While you guys were fighting, I collected all the trackers and slipped them into the pocket of a pizza delivery guy on the elevator.”

  Alex laughed. “Seriously?”

  “Totally,” she said. “It should buy us some time.”

  “Advise all units, I’m on Lexington and do not see them. This must be a mistake. Does anyone have a visual on the Omegas?”

  Beth reached down and picked up the walkie-talkie. We had no idea what she was doing, but she pressed the talk button and responded. Only, she didn’t sound like Beth Bigelow, she used one of the accents she’d demonstrated for the boys at my birthday party.

  “That’s affirmative,” she said, sounding just like a cop from Brooklyn. “I have eyes on Coyote right now. She is entering a pizzeria.”

  “His shirt said Leonardo’s,” whispered Natalie.

  “Roger that,” Beth added, now switching over to a Bronx accent. “I see her too. She’s entering Leonardo’s Pizzeria. Repeat, Leonardo’s Pizza.”

  We all marveled at what she was doing. Alex got her attention and pointed at each one of us as he told her our code names.

  “Wolverine, Jayhawk, and Gopher.”

  She gave me a raised eyebrow look and whispered, “Gopher?”

  “It’s not like I picked it.”

  “Coyote is with Wolverine, Jayhawk, and Gopher,” she said with yet another accent. “All four of them have entered the pizzeria.”

  “Roger that. All units advance to Leonardo’s Pizzeria at Forty-third and Lexington.”

  She looked up at us and smiled.

  “That should give you a few minutes to get out of the building before they figure out you’re not in the pizzeria.”

  We took the elevator down to the third floor. Then we went down the rest of the way by the stairs on the opposite side of the building. By the time we reached the subway station we were equal parts exhausted, ecstatic, and relieved. Grayson took the flash drive, and Alex insisted on escorting Natalie home.

  We all exchanged hugs on the platform, even Beth.

  Once everyone had gone, Beth and I just stood there looking at each other. So much of the afternoon had been about surviving the attack and the boys learning about Natalie. I hadn’t gotten the chance to check on how Beth was handling all of this.

  “Let’s head home,” she said. “You have some explaining to do.”

  I thought about it for a second. “I’ll explain, but first I need to show you something.”

  We took the subway north to City College and were quiet for most of the ride.

  “When did you learn krav maga and . . . what was it?”

  “Muay thai,” she said.

  “That,” I said. “When did you learn martial arts?”

  “Mom insisted that I do it when I was a kid, and I always kept with it,” she replied. “I kind of kept it hidden because I didn’t want to catch any flack from the girls in the building or at school.”

  That’s when it dawned on me that Mom might have trained Beth for Omega just like she trained me.

  “Did she make you learn the periodic table, too?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “How’d you know that?”

  I shook my head, disbelieving.

  “She was preparing you in case you became an Omega,” I said. “She did the same thing with me. The periodic table is the key to our code.”

  We got off the subway and started walking to the college.

  “If I was trained like you, then why didn’t I become an Omega?” she asked. “Am I not good enough?”

  “Hardly. You’d be awesome at it,” I said. “What you did up there was amazing.”

  “Then why?” she asked.

  “It’s because you have to go to MIST.”

  “Oh,” she said, a look of disappointment on her face. “I guess I screwed that up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s what Mom wanted, and I wouldn’t do it,” she explained. “She asked me to apply, but I told her I didn’t want to go there. That must have really disappointed her.”

  “You can’t think that,” I said. “You never disappointed Mom. She was always proud of you.”

  Beth sighed. “I guess we’ll never really know for sure.”

  And this is where I had her. She followed me as we snuck down into the catacombs below CCNY. I couldn’t remember all of the turns by heart, but I quickly realized that the pipes would help me find my way. The pipes ran along the ceiling but came down the wall by the secret entrance.

  Beth hardly asked any questions, no doubt overwhelmed by everything from the zombie attack to our discussion of Mom. Finally, I found the wall and made sure to remind myself which pipe was the right one.

  I turned the wheel and the hidden door unlocked. Just as I went to pull it open, I turned to Beth and said, “If you don’t believe me when I say you never disappointed her, you can just ask her yourself.”

  I opened the door to reveal the hidden lab. Milton and my mother were working on an experiment and looked up, surprised by the interruption. Then Mom saw my sister and took off her safety glasses.

  “My dear, sweet Elizabeth,” she said, shaking her head.

  I looked at my sister as tears streamed down her face.

  “Mom?”

  George Washington Walked Here

  It had been two weeks since our adventure at the Chrysler Building, and the results had been both emotional (Beth and Mom’s tearful reunion) and educational (all the information Grayson had retrieved from the files of the Empire State Tungsten Company). But so far they hadn’t been dangerous. Marek had yet to deliver on his threat to start an all-out war between the undead and Omega, and that had us worried.

  Not that you could tell from the oh-so-enlightening conversation the boys were having as Grayson, Alex, and I looked across the harbor at the Statue of Liberty.

  “Did you ever notice that the Statue of Liberty’s butt is pointed right at New Jersey?” Grayson asked. “I mean, that’s their view.”

  “Maybe they should put that on the license plates,” replied Alex. “New Jersey—the Butt of Liberty.”

  We were waiting in Battery Park at the southernmost tip of Manhattan. In addition to its view of the harbor, the park is the starting point of the George Washington walking tour of New York City. The tour was laid on the map that my anonymous informant mailed to me. I wanted to walk it as part of my search to see what the father of our country had to do with Marek Blackwell’s plan to reinvent underground New York. But, since we didn’t know when Marek was going to strike back, the others thought it would be safer if they came along.

  “You know, I’ve never even been there,” I said, pointing at the statue. “My whole life in New York and I’ve never been to the Statue of Liberty.”

  “Me neither,” said Alex.

  Grayson shook his head. “Molly I understand, because she’s terrified of heights, but why not you?”

  “No reason,” Alex said. “It’s just something you figure you’ll get around to one day, so there’s no rush. Every time I thought about going, I put it off because I knew I’d get another chance.”

  We were all quiet for a moment, and then Grayson said something that revealed what was on all of our minds.

  “I wonder if Natalie thought the same thing,” he said. “I wonder if she thought she’d do it sometime and never got around to it. ’Cause she sure can’t do it now.”

  The three of us had not really talked about Natalie’s situation yet.

  “I think about stuff like that all the time,” Alex said. “I think about all t
he things she can’t do. All the places she’ll never get to go.”

  “Do her parents know?” asked Grayson.

  “They must,” said Alex. “After all, they moved from the twelfth to the second floor.”

  They both turned to me. “How’d they take it?” asked Grayson.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “Natalie and I weren’t really talking much in the month and a half after I found out, so I never got the chance to ask her about her parents.”

  “Why weren’t you talking?” asked Alex.

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, embarrassed by what I was about to say. “I accused her of being a Level 2.”

  They both laughed.

  “That must have been fun,” said Grayson.

  “Did she try to rearrange your face?” asked Alex.

  I thought about it for a moment, then asked them, “Is it really that impossible to believe? I mean, did either of you two think she might be an L2?”

  “For about a nanosecond,” said Grayson. “But we were about to fight the Dead Squad. It was pretty obvious what side she was on. I might have wondered about it if it had just come up in conversation.”

  “Not me,” said Alex. “But I can understand why you would.”

  “Why not you?” I asked.

  Alex thought about it for a moment. “The best that I can understand is that the person’s state of mind at the moment of death is what determines whether or not they become a Level 2. So it comes down to this: Does she have the type of heart that forgives or the type of heart that blames? And when you think of it that way, it’s not even a question.”

  He was absolutely right. Before I could reply, we were interrupted.

  “I hope you guys don’t mind, but I brought a friend,” Natalie said as she walked up with Liberty.

  “Not at all!” I replied, happy to see him. He gave me a hug and then did the whole fist bump, handshake thing with the boys.

  “We can use the help,” I continued. “I’ve already done this tour twice and come up empty both times.”

  Left unsaid was the full reason he was with her. He’d been protecting her in the one place we couldn’t. Every day when Natalie went underground into Dead City to recharge her energy levels, Liberty went with her.