The Secret Runners Page 7

  Beyond the doorway was another dirt-walled miner’s cave, empty and covered in years of dust, with a ladder leading up out of it.

  Misty placed her gem on this little pyramid, and once again, by some mysterious mechanism, it moved down the opposite flank and a luminous curtain of purple light sprang up from the pyramid’s apex, stretching across the doorway.

  The others wasted no time and stepped straight through it. Following close behind them, Red lunged through the curtain of light—

  —and emerged inside the miner’s cave he had seen seconds ago…only now it was clean and normal, unravaged by dust and time.

  Misty immediately reached down and removed the amber gemstone from the pyramid, and the rippling curtain of light filling the doorway (seen from this side, it was yellow) instantly vanished and suddenly the ancient doorway was just a dark yawning aperture again.

  “Are you, like, totally freaked out right now?” Verity said, grinning.

  Red caught his breath as he stared back at the tunnel, trying to wrap his head around it all.

  Bo smiled at him. “Is that not a total mindbender or what?”

  Red blinked rapidly. “Sure is.”

  In his mind, all he could think of was the creepy hooded figure who had peered down the well shaft at him and shrieked like an animal.

  “Who was that guy who screamed at me?”

  Bo shrugged. “We don’t know. I’ve only been outside the tunnel once: I shimmied up the well, pushing my hands and feet against its walls. I emerged just behind that weird Swedish Cottage not far from the 79th Street Transverse. But the area around me was all freaky, so I didn’t stray from the well.”

  “What do you mean, freaky?” Red asked.

  Bo said, “What I mean is, it’s still New York up there: the same Central Park, all the same buildings, but it’s all been trashed and abandoned. The windows on all the skyscrapers are smashed; that Swedish Cottage has fallen apart. No power, no lights, and no people—or at least, no one besides our friend in the hoodie. It’s like…another New York…not ours. A parallel New York of some kind.”

  Red blinked. “A kind of parallel New York?”

  At that moment, Misty stepped up to him, grabbed his left arm and with one quick movement, drew a single vertical mark on his inner wrist with a black permanent marker.

  “Welcome to the club, Red. You just became a member of the Secret Runners of New York.”

  THE REAL WORLD

  “A parallel New York?” I said flatly. “You’re telling me that after a big night of partying, you went to a parallel dimension in which New York has apparently been trashed and weird dudes in hoodies scream at you in rage. I think you’re right, Red—we shouldn’t mention this to anyone, and you should seriously think about finding a new weed dealer.”

  “I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true!” Red said. “You gotta believe me, Blue. That exit chamber, by the way, was hidden underneath another private conservancy garden behind the natural history museum, not far from here. We had basically run right across Central Park, underneath it, from the east side to the west. It was seriously weird, but man, it was a rush. Maybe I can get them to bring you along if they do it again.”

  “Sure,” I said, rolling over on my bed and grabbing my pillow. “Whatever. I think you should get some sleep.”

  * * *

  —

  The following Monday morning, Red went off to join the cool kids for coffee at a trendy café on the East Side, so I walked to school across Central Park on my own.

  As I came to the 79th Street Transverse, I saw a sign:

  HISTORIC SWEDISH COTTAGE

  I must have walked past that sign dozens of times before, but only now did it actually register on my consciousness.

  I found myself recalling Red’s tale.

  In it, Bo had said that when he climbed up the well shaft, he’d come out of the well behind the Swedish Cottage, not far from the Transverse.

  I bit my lip in thought.

  Why not?

  And so despite my reservations about my brother’s sanity and possibly reckless drug use, I took a little detour: I crossed over the Transverse and headed toward the Swedish Cottage.

  It is a truly wacky building: an eerie dark-brown storybook house, the kind usually inhabited by wicked witches. It was also located in a somewhat secluded spot, set back from the regular thoroughfares of the park, which meant that, at this hour, there was nobody around: no cyclists or joggers or walkers.

  Stepping around the wooden cottage, I found a dense tangle of bushes, vines, and shrubs behind it, separated from the structure by a sturdy wooden fence.

  Taking a quick look around me to make sure no one was watching, I swung myself over the fence and ventured into the undergrowth.

  It was no easy task.

  Thorns nicked me. Branches smacked my face. Vines tripped me up more than once.

  It looked like no one had come through here since the park had been built back in the mid-1800s. Certainly no gardeners or groundskeepers had. The dense tangle was unkempt and ugly and had clearly kept out any would-be explorers for at least a century.

  Fifteen yards into the thicket, I swore aloud. “Damn you, Red, making me think I might—”

  I cut myself off.

  There on the ground in front of me, overgrown with weeds, hidden deep within the thicket, its faded gray brickwork encased in creeping vines, was an old low well.

  THE WELL

  I examined the well for a good ten minutes. This was worth being late for school.

  The many vines that covered the well’s circular mouth were so thick I could probably have stood on them and not fallen through.

  Peering through a small gap in this layer of vines, I looked down into the well and saw only darkness.

  I called, “Hellooo!” and my voice bounced back to me as if from a great distance. This was no simple well. Maybe there was a tunnel down there.

  What exactly had Red done on Saturday night?

  I covered the well with a few extra branches, and then retraced my steps through the surrounding scrub, making sure no one saw me emerge from it near the Swedish Cottage.

  (When I showed the well to Red the next day, he smiled with vindication and exclaimed, “I told you!”)

  As I made my way to school, I thought more about his story, about his “run.” It sounded intriguing, but unless I penetrated the inner sanctum of the cool crowd like Red had managed to do and got invited to go on one of their runs, I wouldn’t be able to investigate it any further.

  THE NEW YEAR IN NEW YORK

  Red’s popularity with the in-crowd continued through December.

  He actually asked me once if I was okay with it, and I was. Over the years, we had always had mutual friends and separate friends; these kids were definitely his friends.

  Mind you, I did start to seriously contemplate the state of my social life when, that New Year’s Eve, Red was invited to an inner-circle-only party at Dane’s apartment on the Upper East Side, and my mom and Todd were invited to a soiree at the Majestic, and I was faced with the prospect of spending New Year’s Eve alone in our apartment. I came to the sad conclusion that I needed to work harder on social matters. Even my mom had a better nightlife than I did.

  And then, two days before New Year’s Eve, Jenny called.

  “Hiya, Skye. Last Minute needs one more waitress for a gig on New Year’s. Want to do it? They’re offering seventy bucks an hour for maybe four hours’ work.”

  Last Minute Staff and Events was the name of the company she worked for, the one that provided extra waitstaff at the eleventh hour.

  Lacking anything else to do—and happy to bolster my bank balance with some quick cash—I said sure, why not.

  Dressed in black pants and a waistcoat, I actually had fun working with Jen
ny. At a vast suite in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in the Time Warner Center filled with cheerful Canadian businesspeople and their partners, I carried a tray loaded up with champagne for almost four hours and walked out of there at one a.m. with 280 bucks in cash.

  Jenny’s manager said I’d done well and asked if I wanted to go on their roster for future functions. I shrugged and said sure.

  I walked home with Jenny, and as we parted at her building, the famous Dakota, I thanked her for the opportunity.

  “Hey, anytime,” she said. “It’s nice to hang with someone who’s not too proud to work.”

  I arrived home long before anyone else in my family and fell into bed.

  I heard Red return shortly after dawn, and when he finally came down to breakfast the next morning, I noticed a newly added black line on his wrist.

  Oddly, he didn’t talk to me at all about this run. I wondered if Misty and the others had reminded him that runs were not to be discussed outside their circle, and thus Red was not going to elaborate on what he had already told me.

  I let it go. Good for him, I thought. And good for me. The New Year in New York had been okay.

  * * *

  —

  The coming of the New Year brought with it something else: renewed interest in the end of the world.

  March 17 was suddenly only two and a half months away, and the media was back on the case. The papers and TV news were filled with animated graphics of the Earth moving around the sun, its elliptical orbit carrying it inexorably toward a billowing cloud of gamma-radiation particles. In most of the animations, the Earth smashed through the cloud, causing many of its particles to cling to our planet like a zillion magnetic insects while others were scattered into space.

  But now that the Earth was so close to the cloud, a new feature of humanity’s final day was presented to us.

  As the world penetrated the gamma cloud, it would, of course, be spinning.

  This meant that one hemisphere of the Earth would plunge into the gamma cloud first and experience its effects. This would give the other side of the planet a six- to twelve-hour glimpse of what was to come.

  New computer models showed that Australia, Asia, India, and the Middle East would hit the cloud first. Then as the Earth rotated, Africa, Europe, and North and South America would be affected.

  Jimmy Kimmel said, “Expect last-minute ticket sales on Virgin Galactic to go through the roof during those six to twelve hours.”

  It was interesting to see people’s opinions on the gamma cloud. Politicians, for example, sat resolutely on the fence since if the world didn’t end, none of them wanted to be mocked forever after as Chicken Little. They called for calm and for people to go about their lives.

  Scientists from MIT, Princeton, Caltech, and Oxford weighed in, but when all was said and done, the prevailing wisdom was still split fifty-fifty.

  Or as one of the experts put it: “In evolutionary terms, the human brain is not wired to deal with threats like this, existential threats that it has not encountered before. We know to run from lions and tigers because we know from experience that they could kill us. We have no experience with a cloud of gamma radiation, so we just shrug and say, ‘Oh, well, let’s see what happens. Till then, I’ll just go about my life.’ ”

  This was the view of our fellow San Remo resident, Manny Wannemaker, the right-wing radio host.

  He said to his millions of listeners, “This gamma cloud stuff is all nonsense. It’s just more scare tactics from the Left. Climate change didn’t work, so this is another grand attempt by the socialist-progressive-liberal elite to redistribute the wealth. Trust me, folks, it’ll all turn out to be a whole lot of nothing.”

  (Manny famously spoke into a solid-gold microphone. With the mike, his expensive overcoat with the purple sleeves, and his apartment in the San Remo, he was not a fan of redistributing anything.)

  The usual wackos built hermetically sealed bunkers in their backyards. Others stocked up on canned tuna and bottled water.

  And, of course, the crazies with their placards still gathered outside tourist sites like the Met and the natural history museum. I couldn’t say there were more of them, but passersby seemed to take more notice of them now.

  Disturbingly, there had been a spike in hate crimes around the world. At first, it was members of one religion killing members of another, blaming them for the coming end of all things.

  And then, somewhere around mid-January, came the first hate crime against the rich.

  A gang of thugs raided the Westchester mansion of a well-known billionaire whose wine cellar had been featured in an article in Forbes. They killed the billionaire and his family…and then put their feet up and drank his wine while streaming the whole thing live on Periscope.

  When a SWAT team eventually raided the house, TV cameras and news helicopters caught it all, in particular the bandanna-clad youth who called from the upstairs window, “We’re all gonna die anyway, so we might as well live large!”

  And then, live on TV, he drew a gun and shot himself in the head.

  Naturally, this incident captured the attention of those souls who till then had not shown the slightest interest at all in gamma clouds, electrical currents in the human brain, science, and the end of humanity. In short, people like my mother.

  Now she was all ears.

  Late one night, I heard her whispering to my stepfather. “Todd, is there anything we can do? Surely we’re not going to die with everybody else.”

  My stepfather answered in his detached, measured way. “It’ll be okay, Deidre. I think the whole thing is just a big scare.”

  “But what if it isn’t? What if—”

  “I got it covered, honey,” he said, assured as always. “I’ll make sure we’re safe.”

  I wondered what he meant by that. How could anybody make sure they survived the Earth’s passage through the gamma cloud?

  The answer came in scattered whispers and hushed comments I heard in the schoolyard, in the common room, and from my mother on the telephone to her girlfriends.

  Four whispered words: The Plum Island Retreat.

  * * *

  —

  “Have you heard about Plum Island?”

  “They’re just calling it the Retreat. It’s an old high-security animal disease facility, with airlock doors and biohazard-level air seals. They think it can withstand the gamma cloud. It’s also an island, which makes it secure—”

  “It was set up by a few Goldman Sachs guys who knew all about this gamma shit ages ago. They found out about it when they were investing in some biotech thing. They bought the whole island from the government five years back and have been fixing it up for habitation ever since. The plan is to stay there till the gamma radiation passes—”

  “My dad’s paid for our family to go to the Retreat, just in case—”

  “Starley Collins was telling me it can only hold sixty people, that’s it. Once they hit that number, the doors will be closed.”

  “What’s the buy-in?”

  “Seventeen mil. Per person. In cash. And you gotta know the right people. It’s all very hush-hush. They haven’t even told those who are in when they’ll move there.”

  “That’s a lot of cash to gamble on a never-before-seen cosmic event. What if it all blows over and nothing happens? Everyone who goes there will look like a fool.”

  “And if everybody dies and they survive, what do they do then anyway? Live in an empty world?”

  Naturally, my mother heard these things, too, and when she discovered that Todd’s cool and measured solution had been to buy four places for us at the Plum Island Retreat—at $17 million each—my mom rewarded him just like she had on their first date.

  When he informed her that he had offset the cost of the Retreat by shorting a selection of specific stocks—meaning that
if the world did not end as predicted, he stood to make about $200 million—she rewarded him again. Go, Todd.

  Red’s view of it all was typical Red. “If it really is the end of everything”—he shrugged—“there’s nothing I can do about it, so I might as well have fun in the meantime. And that way, if the end comes, I can say I enjoyed the last few months.” My brother was never going to win any philosophy prizes, but in its own way, his logic was hard to fault.

  And so, while Red partied, at the end of January I flew down to Memphis to see our dad.

  “Have you been eating your sardines?” he asked me as soon as I walked into the ward. “Taking your phosphorus supplements?”

  “Yes, Dad.” I had been, actually. Truth be told, my mind had actually felt sharper for doing so.

  “And no sodas?”

  “Not a drop.” I didn’t add that my stomach looked the best it ever had: no bloating from the carbonated fizz. My dad’s end-of-the-world diet was awesome.

  “How’s your mother?” he asked.

  “She’s still Mom.”

  He smiled sadly. Their marriage had always been doomed. He’d been the brilliant but bookish doctor from a high-standing Memphis family; she had been the local beauty queen determined to marry into wealth and society.

  But when the wealth-management company handling my father’s family trust ran off with the money and it was suddenly revealed that my father no longer had any fortune, my mother was out of there.

  My father—sweet, smart, yet totally naive—had been devastated.

  The nervous breakdown had come soon after.

  I liked to remember him as the man I knew as a ten-year-old kid: the one who would take us on sailing vacations to Martha’s Vineyard and Rhode Island and, most of all, to the lighthouses near them that he admired so much.

  “Those damn lighthouses,” my mother would say. She didn’t like those trips at all because they messed up her hair. But my father came alive on them. His eyes lit up as he gazed at his beloved lighthouses.