The Secret Runners of New York Read online

  About The Secret Runners of New York

  The windows on all the skyscrapers are smashed . . .

  No power, no lights, no people . . .

  It’s a parallel New York of some kind.’

  THE COMING END

  When Skye Rogers and her twin brother Red move to Manhattan, rumours of a coming global apocalypse are building. But this does not stop the young elite of New York from partying without a care.

  CAN YOU KEEP A SECRET?

  And then suddenly Skye is invited to join an exclusive gang known as the Secret Runners of New York.

  But this is no ordinary clique – they have access to an underground portal that can transport them into the future.

  And what Skye discovers in the future is horrifying.

  RUN! AS FAST AS YOU CAN!

  As society crumbles, Skye and Red race to figure out how to use their knowledge to survive the impending annihilation, they soon discover that the chaotic end of the world is perfect time for revenge. . .

  Contents

  About The Secret Runners of New York

  Title page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I

  New School, New Life

  Assembly

  The Coming End

  New York, Bitches vs New York Bitches

  Misty

  Boys and Beemers

  The Season

  Red

  Part II

  Red’s Run

  The Tunnel Run

  The Real World

  The Well

  Boys

  An Unexpected Favour

  The Plaza, The Dakota and the Carlyle

  The Party

  Into the Park

  Virgin Run

  After

  The Last Days of February

  Private Run

  Second Run

  Part III

  The ‘New’ New York

  Reading About the Coming End of the World

  Debrief and Decision

  Runners Assemble

  A Run in Broad Daylight

  School

  Part IV

  A Fold in Time

  The Cotillion

  A Late-Night Run

  Misty and Me, On the Inside

  Attackers

  The Fate of my Family

  Part V

  The Days Before the Event

  Another Missing Girl

  Getting Inside

  The Investigation Run

  Trapped

  Bound

  Bait

  Him

  Flee

  The Uncertain Future

  Part VI

  The Bitter Future

  The Man in the Mask

  Away

  To the Ends of the Earth

  The Retreat

  Red’s Trail

  Old Red

  Back into the Dark World

  Home

  Part VII

  Mayhem

  An Interview with Matthew Reilly about The Secret Runners of New York

  About Matthew Reilly

  Also by Matthew Reilly

  Copyright Page

  This book is for everyone

  who went to high school . . .

  . . . and survived.

  If you have enough money and a good name,

  you can do anything.

  Cornelia Guest

  The Debutante’s Guide to Life

  Why do we remember the past but not the future?

  Stephen Hawking

  A Brief History of Time

  Central Park, New York City

  PROLOGUE

  BECKY’S LAST RUN

  NEW YORK CITY

  2:35 A.M. DATE: UNKNOWN

  The girl in the torn bridal gown ran for her life through Central Park.

  Thorny branches slashed her cheeks as she charged headlong through the undergrowth. It was late, well after midnight. The park and the city around it were dark and silent.

  Becky Taylor’s normally pretty seventeen-year-old face was smeared with blood and dirt. Across her forehead written in red lipstick were the words:

  HEAD GIRL

  The crimson letters were streaked with desperate sweat.

  Becky ducked her head as she rushed frantically through the brush, leading with her forearm. Amid all the bloody scratches on that arm were some marks near the wrist.

  Four vertical lines: IIII

  Rising above the trees behind Becky, black shadows against the night-time sky, were the iconic buildings of Central Park West: the colossal Museum of Natural History and some of the most famous and expensive apartment buildings in the world, the San Remo, the Majestic and the Dakota. Not a single light glowed within them.

  Her heart pounding, her lungs burning, Becky kept running as fast as she could.

  She could hear them behind her—running, grunting, hunting.

  And then she pushed through a final thicket and suddenly the ground dropped away in front of her and Becky pulled up with a lurch, narrowly avoiding falling down a seven-foot drop.

  In her ripped bridal gown, Becky Taylor risked a smile.

  She’d reached the 79th Street Transverse.

  She was almost there.

  She quickly lowered herself down the seven-foot wall that flanked the sunken roadway and dashed across it.

  Of course the road that had once allowed vehicular traffic to cross Central Park was now empty. Like the darkened city around it, it was eerily deserted.

  Weeds, grass and ivy had grown up through the bitumen, cracking it, warping it. Abandoned cars lay at all angles: the weeds had simply engulfed them.

  Not a soul could be seen.

  It was just Becky in this dead, empty city . . . and her pursuers.

  Around her left wrist was a ring of torn, bloody skin. Becky had awoken here bound to a streetlight, her hands tied behind her back with rope. After some very painful struggling, she had managed to wrench her left hand free of her bonds and begun this frantic run home.

  Becky sprinted across the roadway and clambered up the stone wall on its opposite side.

  A minute later, she rounded a corner and saw it: the Swedish Cottage.

  The Swedish Cottage is a strange brown wood-walled gingerbread-style house that was actually built in Sweden in the 1870s and shipped to the US soon after as a gift from the government of Sweden. It sits in Central Park beside the Shakespeare Garden, out of time, out of fashion and out of place.

  It wasn’t the cottage that Becky was after, but what lay behind it.

  She dashed around the brown building and came to a dirt clearing on the other side.

  There she saw the low stone well.

  Becky hurried over to the well and leapt straight into it, pressing her hands and feet against its close walls and lowering herself down the tight vertical shaft.

  Twenty feet later, she emerged inside the mysterious tunnel at the bottom of the well. She dropped the last few feet and hurried down the tunnel until she saw the ancient stone doorway . . .

  . . . and stopped dead.

  The exit wasn’t open.

  She couldn’t get out.

  ‘Misty, Chastity, you bitches,’ Becky said to no-one.

  A bloodcurdling male scream from outside made her spin.

  And there in that cold u
nderground tunnel in that wretched version of New York City, Becky Taylor realised that she was going to die.

  This day wasn’t supposed to end like this.

  Only hours earlier, she had literally been the belle of the ball, stunning in her Vera Wang gown, outstanding at school, with a handsome date and the world at her feet.

  And now she was here.

  In this horrible place.

  Trapped and alone.

  Soon its cruel inhabitants would find her, and when they did, they would kill her in the slowest and ugliest of ways.

  And with those grim thoughts, Becky Taylor—in her torn bridal gown and lipstick-branded face—dropped to the floor, closed her eyes and quietly began to sob.

  At that exact same moment, in Becky’s room in her family’s apartment in the Majestic building—a regular seventeen-year-old girl’s room in the regular New York City of today—her parents found her phone and, on it, a final text message written but unsent.

  It read:

  dear mom and dad,

  i just can’t take it anymore: the pressure, the expectations, the burden of those expectations.

  please don’t come looking for me, because you won’t find me. i will be at the bottom of the river, at peace.

  i love you.

  becky

  PART I

  THE SCHOOL WHERE NEW GIRLS GO MISSING

  They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back to their money . . .

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  The Great Gatsby

  NEW SCHOOL, NEW LIFE

  It was my first day at school in a new city but I don’t think you’d find many people feeling sorry for me.

  On paper, my life was the ultimate fantasy of the average American sixteen-year-old girl.

  I was living in New York City on the Upper West Side, in the historic San Remo building, in an enormous apartment that overlooked Central Park. The San Remo is one of those imperious twin-towered art deco co-ops that were built in the 1930s which are now occupied by movie stars, Wall Street Masters of the Universe, Saudi princes, and anybody else who can afford to pay $20 million in cash for an apartment.

  But as far as I saw it, my life sucked.

  Wrenched from my childhood home in Memphis, I had been transplanted at the age of sixteen into the most fearsome milieu of teenage bitchiness imaginable: that of ultra-wealthy New York.

  Enrolled at a new school in a new city, away from the father I loved, living with a mother I despised and a stepfather who tolerated me, I hated it. The only plus was that my twin brother, Red—ever calm and easygoing—was in it with me.

  The first day of school didn’t start well.

  I dressed in my uniform: an utterly sexless white button-down blouse under a navy-and-green tartan dress. The white shirt was long-sleeved with stiff buttoned cuffs. A racing-green ribbon was the only hair accessory allowed. In a school as well-to-do as Monmouth, jewellery can be a serious issue—girls can get competitive about this sort of thing and it was entirely possible for a female student to wear earrings worth a few hundred thousand dollars. So all jewellery was forbidden. The only other accessory permitted was a watch.

  I didn’t mind the plainness of it all, or the sexlessness for that matter. At my old school in Memphis—an all-girls school—there had been no dress code, so the student body had worn whatever they liked, and as the girls got older, every day became a fashion contest. And as hips became curvier and breasts became larger, the waistlines of jeans got lower and the necklines of tops plunged further. In the stifling heat of the Tennessee summer, the amount of skin on display was outrageous.

  One hot summer’s day, as I saw two male gym teachers ogling the asses of three seventeen-year-old girls in short shorts, I overheard a female teacher say, ‘Are you kidding me?’

  But this was not the case at The Monmouth School (never forget to include the ‘The’; they will correct you). It was a learning institution and uniforms—for both boys and girls—were one of the ways it kept its students’ eyes on their books and not on the opposite sex.

  As I said, I didn’t mind this. For my own reasons, I especially liked the long-sleeved shirt. And I always wore a watch on my left wrist: a chunky yet very practical white Casio G-Shock.

  My mother, on the other hand, had all sorts of issues with the school’s uniform policy.

  She positioned me in front of the mirror in our entry hall and began redoing my hair from behind me. She twirled a couple of mousy brown strands down around my temples.

  ‘Don’t yank your hair back off your face like that, Skye, darling,’ she said. ‘You could be pretty, you know, if you tried a little.’

  I bristled inwardly, but I didn’t let it show. I’d heard a thousand comments like this before.

  Why don’t you wear something a little more flattering?

  Stop slouching, pull your shoulders back, push your little titties forward.

  Eyes up, child. Honestly, how will you ever get a boy to notice you if you never look up?

  And most cutting of all: You know, Skye, I really think you could stand to lose a little bit of weight.

  Of course, my mom was fully made-up even though it was 7:30 in the morning.

  She had already been up for two hours by then, and in that time she had run six miles on her treadmill, done a hundred sit-ups and a twenty-minute mindfulness meditation. My mother was forty-five with the body of a twenty-five-year-old and today her sleek form had been poured into a perfectly fitted Prada dress. Her long auburn hair, as always, had been professionally done, every curl and wave carefully arranged. (Our live-in maid, Rosa, in addition to being my mother’s personal servant, confidante and informer, had once been a TV make-up artist, which no doubt had secured her the job.)

  Oh, and my mother wore heels, even in our apartment at that hour.

  ‘Skye,’ she said, ‘this is a hard truth that nobody wants to admit, but you have to learn how the world judges women: it’s not what is in our heads that matters. It’s the package. How else do you think I won your stepfather?’

  A quick little disappearing act under the table at the restaurant on your first date? I thought uncharitably. I’d overheard Mom revealing that to her best friend, Estelle, one night on the phone after she’d had one too many cosmopolitans.

  My mother, Deidre Allen (née Rogers, née Billingsley)—one-time Belle of the Memphis Ladies Auxiliary’s Debutante Ball and second runner-up in the Miss Tennessee beauty pageant—had only a high-school education to her name, but that hadn’t stopped her rising to the peak of New York society and adopting a daily ritual of shopping, lunching, yoga and cocktails.

  Thankfully, at that moment, Red came down the stairs, dressed in his Monmouth blazer, tie and trousers, and said, ‘You ready, Blue?’

  I loved my twin brother. His real name was Alfred, but since time immemorial everyone had called him Red. With his carelessly tousled copperish hair and his elfin face—which matched mine—he somehow managed to make his private school uniform look cool.

  I don’t know how he did it.

  Hell, sometimes I didn’t know how he and I had shared the same womb.

  A bare two minutes older than me, Red was everything I was not: chill and all but unflappable. Nothing could rattle him. ‘It’s that extra level of maturity I possess,’ he’d tease me. ‘Since I am a little bit older than you.’

  He made friends easily, effortlessly. You could throw Red into a room full of strangers and within twenty minutes, he’d be chatting and laughing with a bunch of them.

  I wished I could do that.

  I liked to think that I was pretty good at small talk and felt that I could get along with most people.

  The problem was the intro.

  I was painfully shy when I met people for the first time. I just had to get to the c
onversation. Once there, I was actually okay, but it was getting there that was my problem.

  Blue had been my dad’s nickname for me—my real dad’s—as in sky blue. (I actually couldn’t remember him ever using my real name.) Get it? Red and Blue. And since my dad’s name was Dwight, he had loved to say, ‘Look at us three: Red, Dwight and Blue!’

  Dad jokes. You hate them when you hear them every day, but trust me, you sure do miss ’em when he’s gone.

  I said, ‘Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.’

  I yanked myself from my mother’s grip and got out of there as fast as I could.

  Our new school was directly on the other side of Central Park, maybe half a mile away, so Red and I walked there.

  I have to admit, despite all the other things I hated about my life, I liked that walk.

  Our building was on Central Park West, not far from the Museum of Natural History, and Monmouth was over on the East Side, on Fifth Avenue near the Met, so we walked along the lovely tree-lined paths that swooped over and beside the ever-busy 79th Street Transverse.

  At that time of the morning, it was quite delightful.

  Delightful, that is, except for the crazies and the religious weirdos who had become regular sights on the sidewalks near landmarks like the Met and most of the major entrances to Central Park, holding up their signs and bibles.

  The happier nutjobs wore tinfoil hats and danced around like idiots. They carried signs like:

  THIS ST PATRICK’S DAY

  IS GONNA BE THE BEST ONE EVER!

  YOU SHOULD HAVE ASKED HER OUT.

  FORNICATE! SPEND! LOOT!

  AFTER MARCH 17

  IT AIN’T GONNA

  MATTER ANYMORE!

  The religious ones were older and more serious. They held their placards silently and stoically. Their signs were less colourful:

  LUKE 21: 25–26

  1 JOHN 5:19

  THE WHOLE WORLD LIETH IN WICKEDNESS!

  AND HE SHALL DESTROY THE SINNERS! ISAIAH 13:9

  THIS IS GOD’S VENGEANCE

  FOR ALLOWING GAYS TO MARRY.

  GOD HATES FAGS AND JEWS.

  WELCOME TO THE RECKONING.

  I didn’t care much for the St Patrick’s day stuff. It had been all over the news when that old scientist had first made his announcement a year or so ago, but March 17 was still seven months away and after the initial media fervour, people had got bored with it, and soon the whole thing had acquired the standing of just another Y2K, Comet Hale–Bopp, or 2012 apocalypse. It blew over.