The Secret Runners of New York Read online

  Before I’d met her above the entrance cavern, she’d already sent Griff and the girls ahead, into the other New York, using her mother’s gem.

  Bo and Chastity joined us in the apartment a minute later. They had come in with the others earlier and had been waiting upstairs while the prank had been executed. Bo had considered it too mean and had said he wouldn’t be a part of it. Chastity, on the other hand, had thought it was inspired. As the butt of the joke, I agreed with Bo, but then I had to admit it had been kind of clever.

  And so now this was Misty’s exclusive Cotillion afterparty, held in her own private alternate New York.

  We hung out for a while in Misty’s abandoned apartment, drinking and smoking—both cigarettes and pot; I didn’t partake in either—before everyone decided to head back.

  ‘You wanna check out your apartment?’ Misty asked as we walked out her front door.

  ‘I don’t know—’ I began.

  It was the truth. Having seen Verity’s experience, I felt I was better off not knowing what my family’s future held.

  ‘Let’s go see my place!’ Hattie burst between us, her piggish nose red from drinking. ‘We’re so close. It’s only a few floors down.’

  The group voted with their feet and within minutes we had descended the darkened stairwell and gathered outside Hattie’s apartment on the 16th floor.

  The door was locked. Hattie was reaching for her key when Griff just kicked the door in.

  ‘Don’t need keys in this New York,’ he snorted.

  Then he stepped aside allowing Hattie to stumble past him through the doorway, still gleefully drunk.

  She stopped instantly.

  Her mouth fell open in horror, her drunkenness abruptly vanishing.

  I saw the blood immediately.

  On the walls, on the furniture, on the curtains.

  Then I saw the bodies: Hattie’s parents lay face-down on the floor of the living room. Like Hattie, they were both overweight, and it looked like they had died in the act of crawling: Mr and Mrs Brewster each had a large kitchen knife embedded in their backs and each knife was surrounded by many more bloody stab wounds.

  ‘Jesus God in Heaven,’ Verity whispered.

  ‘Damn . . .’ Misty said.

  ‘What happened here?’ Griff said.

  Hattie just stood there motionless and speechless.

  I swallowed. It looked like something out of a slasher film . . . or a slaughterhouse.

  The knives in Hattie’s parents’ backs also served another purpose. The killers had used them to pin identical notes to the corpses, written in Spanish:

  NO HAY GENTE RICA

  EN EL CIELO

  Hattie stammered, ‘Wh—what does it mean?’

  Griff translated. ‘It says, “There are no rich people in heaven.”’

  Hattie’s breath began to come in faster and shallower gasps.

  And then we saw the third figure, half-hidden beyond the kitchen doorway, seated, it appeared, at the table in there.

  Hattie hurried into the kitchen.

  I reached out to hold her back. ‘Hattie, wait—’

  But it was too late.

  She froze in the doorway.

  I joined her.

  The figure appeared to be seated calmly at the kitchen table, hands in her lap, head bent as if in prayer.

  Then I saw the ropes. She was tied to the chair. Before I saw the figure’s face, I knew who it was. I could tell by her chunky dark-haired frame and the (now slightly burned) black and gold Lululemon tracksuit she wore.

  Hattie knew it, too.

  It was her own dead body.

  As I stood there watching this impossible moment—Jesus Christ, they were both wearing the same outfit—my mind raced.

  I mean, did this amount to some kind of time paradox? I’d seen time-travel movies. Was it permissible for someone to see their own corpse in the future?

  Or what if you met yourself in the future? Would that cause the universe to end? Back to the Future would say yes. Star Trek (at least the Abrams version) would say no.

  I decided that since none of us was killing our own grandfather in the past, it was probably okay.

  I was ripped from these thoughts when Hattie began hyperventilating.

  Coming around the table, I saw that the dead Hattie’s face was blackened and charred, horrifically burned. The skin had either melted or sloughed off, revealing her hideous screaming skull.

  A thick rag (presumably doused in some kind of flammable liquid) had been jammed into her mouth—it was still there—and been set alight.

  Hattie had been burned alive.

  Or rather, would be burned alive.

  For good measure, a meat cleaver had been jammed into her heart.

  Misty gasped.

  Verity said, ‘What . . . the . . . hell . . .?’

  Bo just blinked repeatedly.

  I glanced at Hattie. I couldn’t imagine what she was thinking right now. To see your dead future self was one thing, but to see that you had been murdered, and so horrifically, well, that was beyond comprehension.

  The blade in her chest also held a note in place. It read:

  LIMPIAR SU PROPIO

  BANO, PERRA

  Griff translated it in a low voice: ‘“Clean your own toilet, bitch.”’

  And suddenly it all made sense.

  I recalled Hattie’s awful comments about her household staff, the ones she called ‘lazy Mexicans’, the ones she and her mother bullied mercilessly.

  In the free-for-all before the gamma cloud, it seemed, when the lines between employer and employee—between lower class and upper class—had vanished, her staff had taken their revenge.

  I watched Hattie watching herself.

  It was like seeing someone go insane right before your eyes. At first she just stared blankly at her own corpse. Then she began coughing, gagging, choking . . .

  . . . and then she vomited explosively.

  And then, worst of all, her mouth flecked with her own vomit, she began to laugh, a hideous, insane, tear-filled laugh.

  ‘Fuck me,’ Misty said. She turned to Bo and Griff. ‘Get her out of here. Take her home.’ The foul discovery had evidently sucked the fun out of her run and she wasn’t happy about it.

  Bo and Griff hustled Hattie out of the apartment and down the stairwell. Misty, Chastity, Verity and I stepped out into the corridor in grim silence.

  ‘Let’s go back,’ Verity said.

  ‘Yeah, night’s over,’ Chastity said. She and Verity started to head off.

  But Misty wasn’t done. She turned to me. ‘Wanna go check out your place?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so—’

  ‘Come on,’ Misty said. ‘We all did it. And we’re so close.’

  She was right about that. My apartment was on the 20th floor of the north tower, only a few minutes away.

  Verity saw us pause. ‘What’s the problem, kids?’

  Misty said, ‘Skye doesn’t want to check out her apartment but I think she should.’

  Verity frowned. ‘After that?’

  ‘Somehow, I don’t think Skye’s been tormenting her household staff. Or have you, Skye?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come on, the rest of us have done it. You and I can do it together, just the two of us. We can catch up with the others at the exit. I got your back.’

  I really didn’t want to go, but I felt socially cornered. If Red had been there, I might have had a better chance of deflecting Misty’s entreaties, but alone, wanting to be part of the group, a group that had seen their fates, I just couldn’t hold her off.

  ‘Oh, okay,’ I relented.

  Misty and I arrived at my apartment a short time later. Verity and Chastity had gone off after Bo, Griff and Hattie. />
  The front door was closed.

  Locked. Bolted. And covered in splintered hack-marks, the kind made by axes.

  Todd would have been pleased. He’d told me once that our front door, while looking like it was crafted from wood, was actually made of plate steel underneath. And the deadbolt required a laser-cut key that could not be copied.

  I had my key from the ‘real’ New York in my pocket and since there was no reason it wouldn’t still work, I lifted it toward the lock.

  I hesitated for a moment, unsure whether I should do this, but then I took a deep breath and slid the key into the lock.

  It turned easily.

  The damaged door unlocked and I pushed it open and the instant I did, I forever wished I hadn’t.

  THE FATE OF MY FAMILY

  They were hanging from the ceiling, side by side, their heads bent forward, their necks broken.

  My mom and Todd, or what was left of them.

  The nooses Todd had fashioned were good ones. The knots had stood the test of time. Birds might have pecked out my mother and my stepfather’s eyes, and the skin on their faces might have sloughed off due to exposure, but their skeletons still hung there, twenty-plus years after the event.

  Misty saw my face go pale. ‘Oh, Skye . . .’

  Then another thought hit me.

  Red.

  He wasn’t in the living room. I wondered if his body was somewhere else in the apartment.

  It was then that a second thought came to me.

  What if my dead body was somewhere here, like Hattie’s? I tried not to think about that.

  I cautiously stepped inside.

  Even though my relationship with my mother was complicated, as I gazed up at her hanging body, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her.

  There was a note on the coffee table below the two bodies. It was written in my mother’s compulsively neat handwriting and it read:

  Dear Skye,

  We are trapped in here.

  It is now March 17. The city has been in uproar for three full days now.

  After that horrid siege at the University Club, riots began downtown, but they seemed to be isolated there.

  But then Manny Wannemaker criticised the rioters on his radio show (he called them ‘free-loading welfare losers’). Word went out on social media to get him. They found out he lived in the San Remo and they surrounded our building.

  The siege began on the 14th, I think, then the mob forced their way past the police and inside. They have been working their way upward ever since, ransacking apartments as they go and killing the occupants.

  They broke into Manny’s last night and hanged him from the window of his apartment. The crowds massing outside cheered.

  We sent Red ahead to the Retreat earlier on that first day but we got trapped here and so we missed the last chopper.

  Now we cannot get out.

  The gamma cloud is going to arrive in a few hours and we have decided to kill ourselves rather than die at the hands of the cloud or the murderers banging on our door right now.

  We don’t know where you are or where you have gone, and are hurt that you left without saying anything. We will see you on the other side.

  Mom and Todd

  She hadn’t even signed off ‘Love Mom’. And she couldn’t resist the final emotional barb that she felt hurt that I’d left without telling her where I’d gone.

  My mother. She had forged her way in the world the only way she knew how: with her looks. It had got her the life and lifestyle she wanted. And I imagined that, in her mind, in doing it all, she felt she had been heroically providing for Red and me when our father had gone nuts.

  As for Todd, he hadn’t been a bad guy or a good guy. He’d loved my mother, which was a good thing, I supposed, even if he’d been largely indifferent toward Red and me, but maybe that had just been his way.

  I gazed up at the two hanging bodies and shook my head. They had died here having not been able to make it to their rich people’s hideaway at Plum Island. Their money hadn’t been able to save them.

  ‘Sorry, Mom,’ I said to her corpse.

  I dropped the note and checked the other rooms to be sure Red wasn’t there.

  I looked in Red’s bedroom first. It was untouched—the Cadillac couch, the R2-D2 fridge, even the stupid hammock was still there—all covered in twenty years’ worth of damp dust.

  No Red.

  I went to my room next, edged open the door.

  I glimpsed my framed posters—Green Day, The Killers, Eric Burdon and the Animals—but there was something wrong with them. There was something on them, paint or mud or something. I pushed the door open fully.

  Giant letters were spray-painted across the wall and my posters:

  My blood turned to ice.

  What the hell? Waiting for me?

  I recalled my toy kangaroo in the tunnel, with the note in its pouch that read, HE IS WAITING FOR YOU.

  Misty appeared behind me and for a moment I relaxed. It must be another prank.

  ‘This isn’t very funny,’ I said.

  But Misty’s face was flat. ‘We didn’t do this, Skye,’ she said in a low voice.

  Fear came flooding back.

  I blinked hard, trying to regather myself. My original instincts had been right: I should never have come here.

  Thankfully, I did not see my own dead body anywhere. I don’t know how I would’ve taken that.

  But now I was in the same boat as Verity: I knew what the future held for my mom and my stepdad, but my future—and my brother’s—was still unknown.

  It was time to go.

  With a final look at the grisly message on the wall of my bedroom, I slammed the door and left the apartment.

  As Misty arrived at the stairwell, I walked a short distance behind her down the hallway, head bowed in thought.

  ‘Skye . . .’ a male voice said softly.

  At first I thought I’d imagined it. Someone saying my name.

  ‘Skye . . .’

  I turned.

  A figure, a man, stood at the far end of the long hallway. He stood dead still, backlit by the broken window behind him, thirty yards away, staring right at me.

  His face was shrouded in shadow, but from the outline of his head I could tell that he was wearing a helmet of some kind.

  He just stood there watching me.

  For all I knew, he had been watching us from the end of the hallway the whole time and neither Misty nor I had noticed him.

  He took a step away from the window and in the shifting light, I saw his helmet.

  He was wearing Oz’s New York Rangers/American flag goalie mask. It concealed his face.

  And then he revealed a loaded crossbow from behind his back and said, ‘Hello, my pretty,’ and I dashed into the stairwell and ran for my life.

  Verity and Chastity got the message pretty fucking fast when they saw Misty and me burst out of the stairwell, screaming, ‘Run! Get back to the well! There’s someone up there!’

  We bolted out of the San Remo building and across Central Park West and as we hurdled the stone fence and entered the darkness of the park, I risked a glance behind me.

  The figure in the mask emerged from the San Remo, only he wasn’t running. He was strolling casually, twirling his crossbow.

  We ran headlong through the park, crossed the Transverse, dashed around the Swedish Cottage, clambered down the well, retrieved our rope and exited the tunnel in record time.

  We emerged from the portal to find Bo and Griff waiting for us, still holding Hattie between them. Bo saw the fear in my eyes immediately.

  Misty came out last of all, still dressed in her jacket, debutante bodice and jeans.

  She bent down and removed the yellow gem from the pyramid and turned to face us with a wild-ey
ed grin.

  ‘That,’ she said, ‘was the most messed-up run we’ve ever done.’

  PART V

  THE MISSING GIRLS OF MONMOUTH

  Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

  Benjamin Franklin

  THE DAYS BEFORE THE EVENT

  I don’t really remember going home after that run. I only recall staggering into my bedroom, falling into bed, sleeping deeply and waking up around midday the next day.

  Still in my pyjamas, I padded out into the living room—the same living room I had seen in the future with my mom and Todd hanging dead from the rafters, the windows cracked, the apartment a dust-covered cave.

  That morning, however, the apartment shone, lit by brilliant sunshine. The beige carpet was spotless, the curtains were pulled back from the windows and all my mom’s carefully selected pieces of modern art were polished and shining.

  Red was there, eating Cheerios for lunch and looking much better than he had when I’d left him the previous night.

  ‘Where are Mom and Todd?’ I asked.

  ‘Gone to Southampton for a few days,’ Red said with his mouth full. ‘Said they’d be back on Friday. Although I reckon they’ve gone a little further than Southampton: I think they’re going to Plum Island, to check out the Retreat. After all, it’ll be home in a little over a week.’

  Only they would never get to the Retreat. Here was where they would die, in this apartment, trapped like rats with an angry mob banging at the door.

  I hesitated for a moment, wondering if I should tell Red about it. Screw it. I told him.

  I told him everything I’d seen the previous night: Mom and Todd’s hanging bodies, the note, and also what had happened to Hattie.

  ‘Damn . . .’ Red gasped. ‘What should we do? Should we tell Mom and Todd to stay away from New York? To not come back? Can we do that? Can we change the future?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I mean, it depends if the future we’ve been visiting is the only future. According to Dr Maguire from Caltech, it is, and even if we told them to stay away, it wouldn’t make any difference. Fate would conspire to put them in that room at that time. There’s no way to know.’

  Red said, ‘Blue, I know you and Mom don’t always see eye to eye, but we’ve got to at least try. Let’s ask her and Todd if we can all leave the city before March 14. We have to at least do that.’