The Secret Runners, page 14
Halfway along it, however, I saw a very strange thing.
The Empire State Building stood at an extreme angle, slanting dramatically out over Fifth Avenue like a supersized version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
“The water in the subway system must be causing rust and subsidence,” Bo said. “The ground around the Empire State is weakening. It’ll fall eventually.”
I stared at the tilted skyscraper. It was a fitting metaphor. Here was the ultimate symbol of New York City, a steel-and-stone behemoth that testified to the city’s force of will, its in-your-face bravado, its corporate might, and now it was a half-fallen shell, empty and broken.
* * *
—
We arrived at the Carlyle.
Since the power was out, the elevators didn’t work, so we schlepped up the fire stairs, all thirty-five floors of them.
At length, we came to the roof, the scene of Verity’s birthday party nine days earlier (or twenty-two years and nine days earlier).
The rooftop terrace looked awful. It was covered in a slippery carpet of greenish-black mold. The smell was revolting. Sprouts had grown from nearly every seam in the floor.
But it was the view from up here that seized our collective attention.
We all stared dazedly out at the panorama of New York City.
Almost every building was damaged. They either had their windows smashed or showed evidence of fire damage. Black charring scarred many of them.
Some, like the Empire State, teetered at precarious angles. Others had completely fallen. Quite a few had mossy growth high up on their summits, like here at the Carlyle.
Against the grim gray sky, it all looked haunting, eerie.
In perhaps a dozen places—on a few rooftops and on the ground at the northern end of the park—small fires burned, sending up wispy columns of smoke. It was the only movement in the otherwise empty city.
“Fires?” I said to Red apprehensively. “Who’s lighting them?”
Red grimaced. “Survivors? Or maybe lightning strikes?”
Misty pointed southward at the Plaza, with its distinctive Parisian roof. All the windows on its upper floors were shattered. A fire burned in one smashed-open room up there.
There was graffiti on the front face of it, like on the San Remo:
GOD
CAME
HERE
“Hey, Griff,” Misty said wryly, “I don’t think they’re serving high tea at the Plaza anymore.”
I looked at the once-grand hotel, remembering the afternoon tea I’d had there with Misty and Griff.
Red shook his head. “You don’t get runaway plant growth so high up without a lot of rain. After the gamma cloud killed everyone, the city must’ve been hit by some hurricanes or superstorms like Sandy. I mean, look at the park—it’s gone wild.”
That was an understatement.
Below us, Central Park looked like a veritable jungle. Its various twisting drives and transverses had been completely reclaimed by nature. The forest in the park had started to consume the Met—like a snake slowly trying to eat a large animal, it had crept up the entire western side of the enormous museum. Within a few years, it would encase the whole thing.
“I don’t believe it,” Hattie said. “The entire city. I just don’t believe it.”
* * *
—
We descended as a group to Verity’s apartment.
I lingered at the back, hesitant.
“You okay?” Bo asked, dropping back to join me.
“We don’t know what we’re going to find in there,” I said.
“If you’re thinking about dead bodies, I wouldn’t worry,” he said. “I think everyone here has a spot reserved for them at the Retreat. Knowing what we know, there’s no way any of us would’ve stayed.”
The front door to Verity’s apartment had been forced open. Wind whistled in through a bank of smashed windows.
The place had been ransacked. The couches had been slashed, spraying goose feathers everywhere. The TV had been tossed, its screen cracked. Potted plants were shriveled, dead.
Cautious yet curious, Verity went into her old bedroom…
…and froze. She stopped so suddenly, Hattie almost bumped into her.
“What—?” Verity breathed.
I looked past them and saw Verity’s bedroom.
It had been ransacked as well—all the drawers hurled open, the mattress thrown off the bed, the posters ripped off the walls.
But it was the writing scrawled on the wall that seized our attention. It was written in thick black marker:
Verity,
We don’t know where you are.
We had to go.
The poor started attacking the building.
We have gone to the Retreat. Find us there.
We’re so sorry.
Love,
Mom & Dad
I looked from the desperate scrawl on the wall to Verity’s shocked face, and I saw the confusion in her eyes.
Was this her future?
One in which she was separated from her parents during the coming anarchy back in our time? One in which her parents fled from the city to the Plum Island Retreat without her?
Verity blinked, trying, it seemed to me, to absorb the enormity of what she was seeing. And she was seriously struggling. This didn’t fit into any of her usual categories of cool, lame, or embarrassing. This existed in a category all its own, and it looked like her simple mind had seized up trying to process it.
I had feared finding dead bodies, but as I watched Verity practically shut down before my eyes, I thought that maybe this was worse.
“You shouldn’t know this,” I said. “We shouldn’t have come here.”
SCHOOL
After they saw the scrawl in Verity’s bedroom, a grim silence descended on the group.
Red put his hand gently on Verity’s shoulder. Dane whispered, “That is not cool.” Bo shook his head. Misty and Chastity said nothing. And Griff just shrugged. Nobody wanted to linger in the apartment.
We returned to Fifth Avenue and, now led by Griff, we headed toward The Monmouth School a couple of blocks north. Only Griff still seemed to be in high spirits, enjoying the grim adventure.
I turned to Bo as we strode up Fifth. “Any ideas about what to expect at 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. Briggman’s office at the end of a short hall. The door to her office—a brass plaque on it read MS. C. BRIGGMAN: HEADMISTRESS—was closed.
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. Briggman, there was no doubt: she still wore her severe black skirt suit with white lace collar.
The office was oddly clean. The wire-reinforced windows were still intact and had protected the office from the elements and whatever few animals had survived the gamma cloud.
Ms. Briggman’s mouth was open in a soundless scream.
The top rear quarter of her skull was gone. Blood 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 Metropolitan Opera. I recognized 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. Briggman 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 counselor. 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.
Then 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 openmouthed disbelief. “You’re reading the confidential files of the other girls?”
Hattie shrugged carelessly. “Why not? Jenny’s world is going to end in three weeks anyway. How’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. Briggman’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.
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
A FOLD IN TIME
The next week went by quickly.
I saw Ms. Briggman roaming the corridors at school—ever prim, ever proper, in her black skirt suit and lace collar—and when she nodded politely at me, all I could see were flashes of her skeleton, with her skull blasted open at the back.
I studied with Jenny in a free period. A few times I caught her staring off into 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 to your mom.”
Jenny’s face fell at the realization: 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 paralyzed, 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 Memphis, 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 Red and I sat together in his 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. 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 a ramp in a parking garage.
“This is time,” I explained. “The X is now. 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.”
