The Secret Runners of New York Page 12

  I saw abandoned cars parked at odd angles on the sunken roadway, all but consumed by the high weeds.

  And in them I saw . . .

  . . . rotten skeletons.

  I swallowed in horror. ‘Oh, God.’

  Many of the rotting figures, kind of hermetically sealed in their cars, still had some flesh and clothes on them. Their heads either lolled backwards with their mouths open or rested on their steering wheels as if they were taking a quick nap.

  Bo saw them, too. ‘Shit . . .’

  I took in all the rampaging vegetation. I’d seen a documentary about this once: if mankind were to abruptly die out or disappear from the face of the Earth, it wouldn’t take long for nature to reclaim our cities.

  ‘This definitely looks like the future to me,’ Bo said. ‘New York in the future.’

  So this was why he’d come. To settle the argument: was this the future, the past or some other dimension?

  ‘Doesn’t look like a very pleasant future,’ I said, nodding up at the cruel graffiti on the towers of Central Park West.

  The blood-red words practically spat their venom out at the world and for a second it occurred to me that maybe all those giant letters were written in actual blood.

  ‘I don’t think we should stray too far,’ I said.

  ‘It’s okay. I just want to find . . .’ Bo’s voice trailed off as he eyed the landscape ahead of us. He was on a mission and I, it seemed, was merely tagging along.

  We emerged from the park onto Central Park West.

  Or what had once been Central Park West. The foliage of the park had grown fully across the wide boulevard and even up several floors of the buildings on the other side. Central Park West was now a cloverfield, a waist-high plain of grass dotted with ferns, spiky bushes and fescue grass.

  And it was deserted.

  Empty and eerie.

  No movement, no sound.

  In the soft glow of twilight, the once bustling main thoroughfare of the Upper West Side was silent. Abandoned cars lay strewn along its length, half-concealed by the unstoppable plant growth. Some of the vines and weeds had grown right through a few of the cars—and through the human skeletons in them.

  But there was no movement.

  Not a single sign of life.

  What had happened here? I thought.

  Directly across the street from us stood the Museum of Natural History.

  Its imposing granite façade—with its four colossal columns and triumphal centre arch—lorded over the weed-strewn street. But it was not immune from the ravages of nature: moss and mould covered the lower half of its front face.

  The giant statue of the museum’s great patron, Theodore Roosevelt—sitting heroically astride his horse, flanked by a native American and an African American—still stood in front of the building, tall weeds climbing up its sides, but with one major difference.

  Roosevelt’s head had been cut off.

  The cut was clean—the work of a blowtorch I guessed—and across the chest of his horse had been spray-painted the words:

  And then Bo saw what he was searching for and he suddenly dashed northward up the street and, to my horror, descended into the subway station out in front of the Museum of Natural History, at the corner of 81st Street.

  I raced after him and rushed down the stairs of the subway station.

  I found Bo standing in near darkness a short distance from the base of the entry stairs in front of a shuttered newsstand, hammering away at its padlock with a length of pipe.

  BANG!

  BANG!

  The newsstand, like the subway station around it, was covered in moss, mould and vines, as if this whole place had once been enveloped in tropical humidity. It looked like a rainforest.

  Looking beyond the turnstiles and down some iron stairways, I saw the train platforms.

  The concrete trenches containing the tracks were filled with water, right to the edge of the platform. Instead of train tracks, they were now underground rivers.

  I’d also heard about this: every day, the city of New York pumped groundwater out of the subway system, about thirteen million gallons per day. If the power went out, no pumps. And no pumps meant the New York subway system became an underground river network.

  BANG!

  BANG!

  The noise Bo was making worried me. It was shockingly loud in the silence of the empty city, and I was about to tell him to stop when he broke the padlock and yanked open the shutters.

  He found what he was looking for instantly.

  Two small stacks of newspapers, bundled tightly in shrink wrap: the Post and the Times.

  ‘Newspapers,’ I said, realising. ‘Oh, that’s smart, Bo.’

  The shutters had kept most of the moisture out of the newsstand but it was the shrink wrap that had kept the newspapers intact.

  Bo tore open the plastic and snatched up a copy of The New York Post. Our eyes zeroed in on the date of the newspaper:

  MARCH 17, 2018

  The date of the coming end of the world.

  But in this New York . . .

  . . . it had already come.

  READING ABOUT THE COMING END OF THE WORLD

  The front page of The New York Post blared:

  THE END OF MANKIND!

  •GLOBAL CHAOS

  •TOTAL POWER OUTAGES

  •AS WORLD ENTERS GAMMA CLOUD, DEATH SPREADS

  •AMERICA’S TURN NEXT . . .

  SPECIAL FINAL EDITION

  MARCH 17, 2018

  As our planet entered the gamma cloud late last night (U.S. time) the first reports came in from around the world.

  The loss of life worldwide has been catastrophic.

  The major cities of Australia and Japan were hit first: Sydney, Melbourne, Tokyo and Osaka.

  People just dropped dead where they stood—in the streets, in their homes, everywhere. Planes (of those airlines that chose to keep flying) simply fell out of the sky, some crashing into city centres and taking out buildings. At the same time, all electrical power began to fail.

  In some cities, social media networks and closed-circuit cameras managed to operate for a brief period of time after the cloud hit, giving the rest of us a few minutes of footage of what occurred before those phones and cameras winked out.

  We may have been better off not seeing it.

  Survival rates are low, possibly as low as half of 1%.

  Social upheaval has intensified. Fires have broken out. Gangs of survivors roam the streets, overwhelming supermarkets and looting homes.

  With only twelve hours till our spinning planet exposes the United States to the gamma cloud, this will be the last ever edition of this newspaper and the editors sincerely wish you all Godspeed and good luck.

  May God have mercy on us all.

  ‘This is the future . . .’ I breathed. ‘We’re in the future, but sometime after the world ended on March 17.’

  ‘Yeah, but how long after?’ Bo gazed at the rainforest-like ecosystem that had consumed the subway station. ‘It would have taken years for all this to form.’

  I tore open the other bundle and grabbed a copy of The New York Times. It was very thin, barely a dozen pages, and was also dated March 17, 2018. It too proclaimed itself to be a special edition.

  America Collapses: Total breakdown of law and order across country

  It didn’t take long.

  Once word began to spread on news sites and social media of what was happening in other parts of the world, society as we know it broke down completely in America.

  The smattering of hate crimes and other incidents of social unrest that have marred the city for the last week—all of which began with the bloody siege at the University Club on March 9 and which escalated around March 14—turned into an outright society-wide breakdown
yesterday.

  The police disappeared from the streets and as they did, lawlessness took over.

  The last civilised place on Earth

  Being the last major country to plunge into the gamma cloud was always going to give America a front-row seat to the end of the world. What a terrifying sight it has been.

  This quirk of fate has also, sadly, given us the better part of a day to prepare for our own demise.

  Most Americans have spent time with their families, some have left their families, many have gathered in churches and synagogues to make peace with their gods, while, more disturbingly, many more have gone on rampages to settle old scores (we include the recent deliberate crashing of a passenger-filled airliner into the runway at Denver International Airport in this category).

  Here in New York, the storming and vandalising of wealthy homes on the Upper East and West Sides of Manhattan—plus suburbs like Scarsdale, Rye and the Golden Triangle—that has appalled so many over the last three days continued. That much of the looting was done not just by the obviously poor, but by middle-class adults and teens, has laid bare the rage that was simmering beneath the surface of our society.

  The lottery: Who lives and who dies?

  As the effects of the gamma cloud washed like an unstoppable wave across Asia, word spread quickly on social media about who was surviving the invisible cloud of radiation and who wasn’t, moments before the writers’ accounts went eerily silent.

  Short snippets of footage from closed-circuit security cameras—their hacked feeds watched anxiously from overseas—recorded bizarre scenes in streets, parks, prisons and hospitals.

  A CCTV camera on a street in Melbourne, Australia, filmed a thousand-strong crowd of people gathered outside a church. One moment, they were all standing, the next all but one had collapsed to the ground. Ten seconds later, the camera itself went off.

  And as the power went out in a westward wavelike progression, there came fewer images, posts or tweets.

  Just silence.

  The accounts and rumours of who has survived are varied.

  In Nagasaki, Japan, an entire elementary school survived when practically no-one else in the rest of the city did. In the desperate rush to find out why, it was noted that the school provided meals to its students, meals comprised of locally-caught fresh raw fish.

  In a hospital for the mentally ill in Mumbai, India, as their doctors collapsed around them, three-quarters of the patients survived.

  The inmates of an entire wing of a maximum-security prison in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou were said to have been unaffected by the gamma radiation. When their guards dropped dead, they escaped. This has also been reported as occurring in high-security prisons in Japan, Turkey and parts of Russia.

  What is the common denominator?

  Who are these lucky few to survive?

  (Or are they really lucky? To find themselves living, essentially alone, in an empty shell of a world, its population slashed from seven billion to a bare couple of million?)

  And does it matter? If eating raw fish will save you—or taking anti-psychotic medication—where will you get it now? And could you eat or swallow enough of it in time to develop a resistance to the gamma radiation?

  Thank you and the end

  Today, this usually bustling newsroom is quiet.

  Those of us who came to work—mainly the single ones who see this office as our home and our colleagues as our extended family, plus many printers and delivery workers—did so with the sole intention of producing one final edition of this grand old newspaper.

  Some newsstands will receive this edition, others will not. It depends on whether your delivery person came in today. The company left it up to each of us to decide.

  As the invisible wave of death and electromagnetic annihilation comes across Europe and the Atlantic Ocean toward the United States, we wish you well.

  This is The New York Times editorial board, signing off.

  May God have mercy on our souls.

  Bo and I looked at each other.

  ‘People went berserk in the final days,’ I said. ‘Riots, murders, the poor against the rich.’

  ‘When you’ve got nothing to lose and no police to arrest you,’ Bo said, ‘all bets are off.’

  My mind spun with myriad thoughts: the end of civilisation, social anarchy, and what would happen to my family during that chaos; a shortened future with Bo; and the simple mind-bending fact that this hadn’t happened yet.

  ‘Bo,’ I said seriously. ‘What do we do? Back in our New York, the real New York, it’s February 23. It’s three weeks before all this happens. What should we do?’

  Bo shook his head. ‘I don’t kn—’

  A strange sound cut through the air.

  A call, like that of a hunter in the wild.

  ‘Eeeeee-oh!’

  It had come from outside.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ I said quickly.

  Bo’s eyes were wide. He sure had.

  Then a return call came from inside the train tunnels: ‘Ooooh-ee!’

  ‘Someone’s here . . .’ I said.

  ‘Go!’ Bo hissed. ‘Run! Back to the well! Now!’

  We flew out of the subway station.

  The Natural History Museum loomed behind us in the half-light of the early evening as we sprinted away from it, across the cloverfield that was now Central Park West.

  We hurdled the low boundary wall of the park and landed on muddy ground amid some bushes. Bo gripped in his hands copies of the Post and the Times.

  I risked a glance behind me.

  I saw no movement, no pursuers—

  And then I saw him.

  A figure, a man, standing on the roof of the Natural History Museum, a silhouette against the darkening sky, staring straight down at us.

  He stood dead still.

  The hoodie he was wearing veiled his face in shadow, so I couldn’t see his features. Was it the same man who had screamed at Red and who had cackled down the well at me?

  I raced into the park with Bo.

  We bounded over the bridge spanning the dandelion-covered 79th Street Transverse, raced past the Shakespeare Garden, and swept around the Swedish Cottage until finally we came to our well with Bo’s grappling hook still clutching its rim and his rope dropping into it.

  We weren’t going to wait around to see if we had been followed.

  I went first, sliding quickly down the knotted rope.

  When I hit the bottom, Bo unhooked the grappling hook from the edge of the well, jammed it into his belt, and shimmied down the narrow shaft, hands and feet spread wide, pressed against the walls, until he dropped down onto the trash heap beside me.

  ‘Don’t stop!’ he said. ‘Keep running!’

  We bolted down the second half of the tunnel, all four hundred yards of it, as fast as our legs could carry us, and my heart leapt with relief when I saw the exit portal up ahead.

  I looked behind me as I ran, but I saw no pursuers.

  We arrived at the exit portal, panting and breathless. Bo placed the gem in the small pyramid.

  The curtain of light sprang to life across the ancient doorway and, together, Bo and I stepped through it—

  —and emerged inside the exit chamber in our time.

  Bo immediately reached down and yanked the yellow gem from the pyramid in the floor of the doorway and the rippling curtain of light vanished.

  All that remained in its place was the empty doorway and the tunnel beyond.

  I heaved for breath. Despite the cold, my Monmouth school uniform was damp with sweat.

  Bo sucked in air as well, still gripping the newspapers in his hand. He grinned at the adrenaline of it all.

  ‘That,’ he gasped, ‘was intense.’

  I could only nod in agreement. ‘Intense
doesn’t even begin to describe it.’

  DEBRIEF AND DECISION

  Of course, we couldn’t wait to tell everyone about what we had seen.

  The next night, Bo invited the whole gang to his place on the East Side and together we told them about our run: about the empty city and the overgrown park, the cloverfield that was Central Park West, the vandalised apartment buildings, the flooded subway station and the mysterious hunting calls.

  And then, with a flourish, Bo pulled out the two newspapers describing the coming end of the world. He passed them around the room, their headlines blazing:

  THE END OF MANKIND!

  America Collapses: Total breakdown of law and order across country

  ‘Jesus . . .’ Verity said, reading the future edition of the Times with Red. ‘This is horrible.’

  ‘It’s seriously messed up, is what it is,’ Red agreed. ‘An “outright society-wide breakdown” before the cloud comes.’

  ‘The plebs started attacking the wealthy,’ Hattie said, appalled. ‘Honestly, why would they do that?’

  Misty was reading the newspaper over Red’s and Verity’s shoulders, occasionally glancing across at Bo and me.

  I detected resentment there: resentment that Bo and I might have gone off together and had a bonding experience.

  She’d given Bo her gem but she clearly hadn’t anticipated that he would take me along on his exploratory run.

  Bo showed the others the photos on his phone of the outside world, of the San Remo defaced by the exclamations:

  (His zoomed-in photos definitely showed a clothed figure hanging from a noose from one of the windows.)

  And the other buildings, also vandalised:

  Bo said, ‘Our world is racing towards anarchy. The Times mentions riots and mayhem that start on March 14, riots and mayhem that target people like us. And then, as that professor predicted, the gamma cloud arrives and kills practically everybody on March 17. What should we do?’

  ‘What can we do? Misty asked.

  ‘I don’t know, tell someone. Tell our parents.’