The Secret Runners of New York Read online

We returned to Fifth Avenue and, now led by Griff, we headed toward The Monmouth School a couple of blocks north. Alone among the group, Griff still seemed in high spirits, enjoying the grim adventure.

  I turned to Bo as we strode up Fifth. ‘Any ideas about what to expect at the school?’

  He shook his head, his lips tight. The message scrawled on the wall at Verity’s had rattled him. ‘No.’

  We arrived at our old school.

  Monmouth’s once proud front doors were splintered and broken, smashed in, I guessed, by an angry mob.

  ‘Guys,’ I said. ‘We’ve been in this world for about two hours. We should leave enough time to get back to the tunnel before it gets dark. I don’t want to stay too much longer.’

  Griff wasn’t having any of that.

  He practically ran inside.

  He darted into the administration wing on the ground floor and marched straight toward Ms Blackman’s office at the end of a short hall. The door to her office—a brass plaque on it read MS C. BLACKMAN – HEADMISTRESS—swung askew on its hinges.

  Griff hurried toward it. ‘I want to find out what happened to that bitch—’

  He kicked open the door and rushed inside, only to stop dead, much like Verity had in her bedroom.

  Red, Bo and I caught up, and our mouths opened in horror.

  ‘Oh, crap . . .’ Red gasped.

  ‘Whoa,’ I whispered.

  Bo covered his mouth, gagging.

  A heavily decomposed skeleton lay slumped behind the wide mahogany desk, still seated in its high-backed chair. That it was Ms Blackman, there was no doubt: she still wore her severe black skirt-suit with white lace collar.

  The office itself was oddly clean. Being on the ground floor, it had wire-reinforced windows and they were still intact. They had protected the office from the elements and whatever few animals had survived the gamma cloud.

  Ms Blackman’s mouth was open in a soundless scream.

  The top rear quarter of her skull had been blown out. A star-shaped blood splatter covered the wall directly behind her, desecrating her diplomas from Amherst and Dartmouth.

  A note sat on her desk, held in place by a paperweight from the New York Opera. I recognised her perfect handwriting immediately.

  I read it without touching it:

  Oh, cruel world.

  For some reason that I cannot discern, I was one of the few to survive our planet’s passage through the cloud.

  I wish I hadn’t.

  There is no God. No loving God could unleash such violent wickedness on His followers.

  It is better that I end my life now, on my terms, rather than face the monstrous souls now roaming this city of the dead.

  And then she’d blown her brains out.

  I shook my head. Even in her final moments, Ms Blackman had retained her effortless snobbishness: Oh, cruel world.

  I gazed at her skeleton, lying limply in the chair.

  Red said, ‘She survived the gamma cloud only to kill herself. And who are the “monstrous souls” now roaming the city?’

  ‘This is like a bad dream,’ I said softly.

  Griff snorted. ‘Screw that. She got what she deserved, the stuck-up bitch. I hated her.’ He stomped out.

  I turned to Bo and Red. ‘I’d really like to go now.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Bo said.

  ‘I agree,’ Red said.

  We left the office.

  Walking back down the hallway, we found Hattie and Misty in the office of Ms Vandermeer, the school counsellor. They were, bizarrely, laughing.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  They were sitting at Ms Vandermeer’s desk, under her COOL KIDS DON’T SMOKE poster, reading something.

  It was then that I saw what they were reading: a student’s confidential file.

  A bolt of fear shot through me at the thought of my own file—the one Ms Vandermeer herself had shown me—containing evidence regarding the scar on my left wrist and my ostracism back in Memphis.

  Hattie held up the file. ‘OMG. I didn’t know Jenny Johnson’s parents were divorcing. Look here: just before the gamma cloud came, Jenny’s mom cheated on her darling dad with Chad the tennis pro at the racquet club. It broke her dad’s heart and that tore Jenny apart. She opened up to Ms Vandermeer about the whole thing.’

  Misty held up another sheet from the file. ‘You should see Jenny’s In-Case-of-Emergency medical file. One suicide attempt and she’s been on Xanax for the last six months. Poor little Jenny-wenny is depressed.’

  I stared at them in open-mouthed disbelief. ‘You’re reading the confidential files of the other girls?’

  Hattie shrugged carelessly.

  ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Jenny’s world is going to end in three weeks anyway. What’s a little more needling from us gonna hurt?’

  She offered Misty a high-five and they smacked hands gleefully.

  ‘We’re going back to the tunnel.’ I turned on my heel and left.

  We made good time heading back through the park to the well.

  I stared forward as I walked, trying to make sense of what I’d seen: from the destroyed city to Verity’s room, to Ms Blackman’s fate and to Hattie and Misty’s casual callousness.

  I thought about people who wished they knew the future and what it had in store for them.

  Maybe knowing the future wasn’t such a good thing.

  PART IV

  THE LAST DAYS OF NEW YORK

  It is your thoughts and acts of the moment that create your future. The outline of your future path already exists, for you created its pattern by your past.

  Sai Baba

  Indian spiritual master

  A FOLD IN TIME

  The next week went by quickly.

  I saw Ms Blackman roaming the corridors at school—ever prim, ever proper, in her black dress-suit and lace collar—and when she nodded politely at me, all I could see were flashes of her skeleton with the skull blasted open at the back.

  I studied with Jenny in a free period. A few times I caught her staring off into the space, her mind far away, her eyes filling with tears.

  ‘You okay?’ I asked.

  She blinked back the tears and smiled tightly at me. ‘Sure, I’m fine. Sorry, where were we again?’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Oh, it’s . . . my dad,’ she said. ‘He’s going through a . . . a tough time with my mom.’

  But the next day Hattie and Misty stopped her as she walked into the common room.

  ‘Hey, Jenny,’ Hattie said. ‘I want to work on my tennis game. I hear Chad, that cute young pro at the racquet club, is excellent. I’m told he gives, like, really personal attention. Like he gave it to your mom.’

  Jenny’s face fell at the realisation: somehow they knew about her mother’s affair.

  I was standing a short distance away over by the coffee machine. This was so wrong. Should I say something? Should I step in?

  But then memories of my time in Memphis flashed through my mind—the disastrous result of standing up for someone—and I felt the pain of those horrible months anew. I also wondered what I could say. Worse, if I did intervene, what if they implicated me in their ill-gotten knowledge?

  In the end, it didn’t matter, for as I stood there paralysed, dumbly silent, Jenny hurried out of the common room.

  I also saw Verity’s parents: the ones who would abandon her and flee to Plum Island during the mayhem. They picked her up after school one afternoon, all kisses, smiles and hugs.

  It was like I was walking through a ghost world: I knew what was coming, what was going to happen in a few short weeks. Homework, a neat school uniform, Facebook, Snapchat, the East Side Cotillion: they all suddenly seemed completely meaningless.

  I thought of calling my dad down in the asylum in Mem
phis, but Misty’s words echoed in my mind: what could I say? That I had seen the future? Not even my father would believe that.

  The curse of knowing the future.

  Red saw it one evening in the look on my face and he placed a calming hand on my shoulder.

  ‘I know how you’re feeling, sis. But, hey, it could be worse. You could be Verity.’

  This was true. Her future contained a frightening unknown: her own disappearance. Now that was a mindfuck.

  Red was right. It could indeed be worse.

  Red and I also discussed the tunnel and the other New York.

  As was my way, during that week, I had gone to the Public Library to read up on the concept of time.

  I searched Google and read a bunch of books on the subject, including a few chapters of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. One quote from that book lingered in my mind: Why do we remember the past but not the future?

  Guess what, Professor Hawking? I can remember the future.

  Anyway, late one night, as we sat together in Red’s room, I held up a book I’d borrowed from the library.

  ‘So, I found this,’ I said. ‘It’s called The Time Mechanic: A Physicist’s Guide to Time Travel. It’s by some multiple-PhD genius from Caltech named Dr Kevin Maguire and it’s all about concepts of time.’

  ‘Okay . . .’ Red said.

  ‘What this guy says is that time is unique in all of physics. It only ever moves forward, never back, and it’s always happening. The Earth could stop spinning, the sun could explode, but time will always go on.’

  ‘That’s deep, sis, even for you,’ Red said.

  I smiled. ‘Smart-ass. But he also mentions weird phenomena, like déjà vu in dreams. Have you ever had a dream and then, a few weeks or months in the future, what happened in the dream happened in real life?’

  ‘Sure, I have. Everyone experiences that. It’s weird. It’s also entirely unprovable. You never quite know if you really dreamt it or not.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘But this guy suggests that it can be explained, if you think about time in a weird way.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘All right, so time is always moving forward, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Only we tend to think of time as moving forward in a straight line.’

  ‘We do,’ Red said.

  ‘Well, don’t. Don’t think that,’ I said. ‘Instead, think of it as moving in a spiral, an upward spiral.’

  I flipped open the book and found a page depicting a flat spiral: it looked like the up ramp in a parking lot.

  ‘This is time,’ I explained. ‘The lower layers are the past, the upper ones are the future. And time is always moving, up and up, round and round, ascending the spiral in these parallel layers. But’—I held up a finger—‘occasionally, randomly, the layers sag or fold.’

  I turned the page to reveal a second drawing, this one with an upper layer that sagged down into the one below it.

  ‘This dip,’ I said, ‘is a fold in time. Now, a fold like this can be super tiny, like on the quantum level: this is what the author thinks happens when we experience déjà vu. As we sleep, we pass through a tiny fold in time and glimpse the future.

  ‘Larger folds in time, however, allow for much more.

  ‘This, I think, is what our tunnel is,’ I said proudly. ‘Its two doors, when each is opened by a gem, give access to and from a section of the future that folds down into our present, allowing us to move between the two times.’

  ‘You’re saying the future—a time roughly twenty years from now—has folded down into our present?’ Red said. ‘And the portals allow us to access it?’

  ‘Exactly!’ I said. ‘On top of that, it seems that the fold itself is moving along with the passage of time.’

  ‘Whoa, wait, what?’

  ‘Let me put it another way: the fold itself is moving up the spiral of time,’ I said. ‘It’s like what we were talking about the other day when we discussed how our New York and the future New York appear to be overlaid temporally: if we’re in there for an hour, an hour passes here. Likewise, if we stay here for a day, a day passes there.’

  ‘Okay,’ Red said. ‘How about this: can we change the future? You know, like they do in the movies?’

  I nodded at the book by the Caltech guy. ‘Dr Maguire says no. If we could change the future, he says, that would mean that there are multiple futures and Maguire thinks that’s not the case.

  ‘He maintains that there is only one timeline of history. If, by virtue of a fold in time, you got to glimpse the future, he says you would be glimpsing the one and only future, the future that is going to happen no matter what. Maguire doesn’t believe in changeable futures and he thinks multiverses are horseshit. So, no, we can’t change the future. It’s set, at least according to him.’

  ‘All right, last question,’ Red said. ‘The portals only allow people of a certain age to pass through them. How do you and your genius buddy explain that?’

  I held out my hands. ‘Come on, give a girl a break. Have I not opened your mind here? I don’t know why the tunnel has an age–limit. Or why it only works in the winter months. You’re gonna have to find a Time Lord like Dr Who to answer that, if, of course, the world doesn’t end first.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Red said gloomily.

  As it turned out, the rest of New York City was less perturbed by the impending end of the world than we were. Despite the scientists now appearing almost daily on TV, the late-night hosts were openly mocking the coming cataclysm and most regular folk just carried on with their lives.

  This included the elite of Manhattan society. They had lunches to host, parties to attend and most of all, that Saturday night, March 3, they had the East Side Cotillion to stage.

  THE COTILLION

  As the morning of Saturday, March the 3rd dawned, I was contemplating a quiet night at home. After our group run the previous weekend, I was still feeling keyed up and needed to decompress a little.

  As it happened, the day before, Red had come down with a nasty virus which had mutated into full-blown Man Flu. An evening on the couch eating popcorn, sipping tea, and watching something on Netflix sounded like just the ticket for both of us.

  But then came the call at eleven in the morning from Last Minute Staff and Events asking if I could work that night at triple-time rates from seven till eleven.

  On any other Saturday, I would have done it just for the money—hey, it was triple-time pay rates—but on this occasion I said yes just so I could see Jenny. I still felt bad about not standing up for her in the common room and, if nothing else, I wanted to make sure she was okay. Besides, what use was triple-time money in a world that would end soon anyway?

  And so I left Red on the couch, coughing and sniffing and feeling sorry for himself, and went to work.

  It wasn’t until I met Jenny—also dressed in black trousers, black vest and white shirt—at the back entrance to The Plaza Hotel that evening that the thought dawned on me: just what event were we working at? What event could require extra servers at such late notice and be prepared to pay such exorbitant rates for them?

  Of course, Jenny knew and she thought it was hilarious.

  She grinned. ‘That’s right, Cinderella. You’re going to the ball, only you’re not going with Prince Charming, in a beautiful gown and glass slippers. You’re going as the hired help!’

  And that was how I ended up attending the East Side Cotillion, the most exclusive debutante ball in America: as a waitress.

  The Plaza’s upper ballroom, already an amazing space with panoramic views of Central Park, had been dressed up to the max: a forest of orchids, state flags and dining tables ringed a broad dance floor.

  The elite of New York society sipped Dom while they chatted—distinguished-looking men in tuxes, handsome women in designer dresses and
diamonds, and, of course, the thirty debutantes in their virginal white gowns, gripping bouquets of pink and red roses, and hanging off the arms of their cavaliers.

  It was, I must admit, every girl’s dream.

  Jenny hadn’t been far off the truth: this was the modern world’s version of Cinderella’s ball. For one night, every one of those girls was a princess and the focus of society’s undivided attention.

  I glimpsed Misty conversing amiably with the mayor, her white-gloved arm linked through Bo’s elbow. Her hair had been professionally curled and her make-up was perfect. She looked great.

  Around her neck, beautifully complementing her dress, was her figure-eight necklace with the amber gem embedded in it.

  Her mother hovered nearby, happily accepting compliments about her daughter. Starley Collins wore a glimmering gold dress that hugged her slim, aerobicised physique perfectly. Her diamond earrings glittered.

  Then I noticed her necklace.

  Mrs Collins was wearing a necklace that was identical to Misty’s: a figure-eight-shaped pendant also with a yellow gem in it.

  The second gem.

  I was pleased to discover that my assigned area of the ballroom did not include Misty’s table. It didn’t feel right to be serving drinks to my schoolmate.

  And so I glided through the pre-dinner crowd with a tray of champagne flutes, quietly taking people’s finished drinks and offering them new ones, happily earning my triple-time rates, until the moment I emerged from the bar area with my tray reloaded and I found the way blocked by Misty and her mother.

  ‘Skye!’ Misty exclaimed, hugging me. I can’t imagine how it looked: me in my plain black-and-white waitress clothing and her in her extravagant white dress, embracing. ‘I thought it was you! How embarrassing for you to see me like this.’

  I wasn’t so sure she felt it was she who should be embarrassed.

  She indicated her mother. ‘I don’t know if you’ve met my mom, Starley Collins. Mom, this is Skye Rogers, Todd Allen’s stepdaughter.’

  ‘Why, of course we’ve met!’ Mrs Collins exclaimed. ‘At the building.’