The Secret Runners, page 21
“I’ve had twenty-two years to think about how you left me for dead, Skye. Left me to live in this shithole of a world. Twenty-two years to think about how I was going to kill you. I’ll tell you now: slow. I’m going to shoot you with this crossbow, and while you’re alive, I’m going cut off each of your limbs and eat them in front of your dying eyes.”
Then, right there in the hallway outside my brother’s bedroom, he raised the crossbow and fired it at me.
AWAY
The arrow shot through the air, but by the time Griff fired it, I’d yanked Red’s wooden headhunter’s shield off his door and held it up in front of my face.
The arrow struck the shield…and penetrated it…but not all the way through. Its razor-sharp tip stopped an inch from my nose.
Griff’s eyes blazed with fury.
I shoved Jenny back into Red’s bedroom, and we fell through the doorway together. I slammed the door shut and toppled my brother’s bookcase in front of it. A second later—bam!—the door shook violently, hit by Griff from the other side.
I turned to face the room.
“There’s no way out of here,” Jenny said.
She was right. My don’t-die plan had only gone as far as using Red’s shield to fend off that first arrow. It hadn’t extended to getting out of the apartment.
Bam! The door shook again.
“I’m coming for you, Skye!” Griff yelled. “I’ve waited a long time for this, and I won’t be denied!”
My eyes scanned the room and found the window…and Red’s Balinese rope hammock suspended in front of it.
There was no time to be subtle.
I grabbed his R2-D2 fridge and threw it through the window.
Glass exploded everywhere, and the little droid fridge fell two floors straight down the face of the north tower before it struck the eighteenth-floor crossover terrace, bounced off it, and fell another eighteen stories and smashed into a thousand pieces on the sidewalk of Central Park West.
The window gaped before us.
I didn’t stop moving. I still had Jenny’s anti-kidnapping blade and, my hands shaking, I used it to saw into Red’s rope hammock, cutting it in such a way that its back-and-forth lengths of rope were released to form one long stretch.
The hammock was about six feet long, but when unwound in this way, six feet became twelve, then eighteen, then twenty-four, then thirty.
I left one end of the hammock anchored to the ceiling and tossed the other end—the thirty-foot length of rope—out the window.
“Are you kidding me?” Jenny said.
“We don’t have to go all the way down the building, just to the crossover, and then we run. Go! Go!”
Jenny didn’t need to be told twice.
Out the window she went, gripping the rope like a mountain climber, and in a moment she was out of sight.
Bam! The door behind me shook again, and this time the bookcase shifted and I saw Griff squeeze his face through the gap—then replace his face with the crossbow.
He fired it.
I ducked.
The arrow whizzed out the window behind me.
Then I grabbed the length of rope that had been my brother’s hammock and leapt out the window.
With my feet pressed against the outer wall of the San Remo building, I lowered myself down the face of the tower, the giant blood-colored letters blaring “WE ROSE UP!” surrounding me.
Two floors below me, Jenny stood on the eighteenth-floor crossover, looking up.
“Jump!” she yelled.
I let go, falling the last ten feet.
Jenny caught me, and we sprinted away to the south tower, charged inside it, and descended its fire stairs as fast as we could—knowing that Griff was at that very moment racing down the identical stairs in the north tower.
As we hit the bottom of the stairwell, Jenny said, “Skye, where do we go now?”
My face set itself into a resolved grimace. “Same place I was going to say earlier: we go to the Retreat at Plum Island.”
“Plum Island is a hundred miles away, at the far end of Long Island. How are we gonna get there?” Jenny asked.
“I have an idea for that,” I said. “Follow me and don’t stop till I say so.”
* * *
—
And so we ran.
Out of the San Remo, and then westward through the deserted weed-covered streets of the Upper West Side.
Leading the way, I made sure we zigged and zagged, trying to lose Griff, but I always made sure we were tracking westward.
As we raced down West 79th Street, I heard a cry and I turned to see Griff bounding down the decrepit street a hundred yards behind us, crossbow raised.
“Don’t stop!” I yelled. “Keep running!”
A minute later, we burst out of the building-lined street into a wildly overgrown park flanking the Henry Hudson Parkway: Riverside Park. Beyond it lay the broad expanse of the Hudson River.
“The river?” Jenny said, perplexed.
“Not the river,” I panted. “This way.”
We cut across the abandoned parkway, hurdling its guardrails, and beheld the near shore of the river. On it was our destination, the only boat marina on the entire island of Manhattan: the 79th Street Boat Basin.
Still parked in their slots on the basin’s docks, abandoned by man and time, were several dozen recreational boats.
* * *
—
I instructed Jenny to grab as many gas cans as she could, while I jumped into the most basic motorboat I could find.
I wanted something simple and gasoline-powered, a vessel with no electrical circuit boards that could have been fried by the gamma cloud twenty-two years ago.
I found one: a little utility dinghy with an outboard motor, the kind of runabout rich people used to ferry themselves out to their bigger boats.
Thankfully, I’d driven little boats like these back in my sailing days with my dad. I primed the outboard motor, working the choke, and then I yanked hard on the starter cord.
It didn’t start.
“I see you, Skye!” Griff’s voice cut across my consciousness like fingernails on a chalkboard.
He was standing up on the parkway, looking down at me from a hundred yards away. He fired the crossbow, but the distance was too great and the arrow sliced into the water three feet from me.
Griff leapt over the guardrail.
I kept yanking on the starter cord.
Jenny joined me in the dinghy, dropping a few cans of gasoline onto the floor and untying the ropes. Suddenly the little boat’s outboard motor caught, and with a smoky bang, it sputtered to life.
I almost screamed with relief. After a few seconds, it was chugging with a regular rhythm, and that was good enough for me.
“Let’s go, Skye,” Jenny urged.
“Wait!” I said, jumping out of the boat and onto the dock, where I yanked a laminated map off a noticeboard. It showed Manhattan, Connecticut, and Long Island.
Then I leapt back into the dinghy and gunned the engine, and we peeled out of the 79th Street Boat Basin, racing into the vastness of the Hudson River.
I turned to see Griff arrive at the shore, swearing and gesticulating with rage.
At first, I took us north—my plan was to go up and around Manhattan Island via the Harlem River and then cut through to Long Island Sound—but as I peered northward into the moonlit gloom, I saw that the George Washington Bridge had collapsed, blocking our way.
And so I banked the boat around and took us south down the Hudson. It would take a little longer going around Manhattan this way, but we could still make it.
It was only when we were a full mile downriver that I dared to breathe a deep sigh of relief.
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
Cruising around New York in our little dinghy was a totally surreal experience.
It was a still night, and the river was like glass. As we glided past the empty city, gazing at it by the light of the moon, the scale of the catastrophe that had befallen the world truly hit home.
Not a single window glowed with electric light. Every one of the many towers of the city was dark. Some buildings had toppled over, while others—like the Empire State Building—teetered at extreme angles.
Creeping vegetation covered everything, a deeper black in the darkness, a visible cancer slowly consuming the cityscape.
And then there were the truly bizarre sights.
A dozen container ships—left to drift when their crews had abruptly dropped dead—had washed ashore and now rested against the buildings of downtown. One big oil tanker had managed to wedge itself fully into 13th Street up against the Standard Hotel. Moss and shrubs had half swallowed both the ship and the hotel, so that it was hard to tell where the building ended and the boat began.
A crashed 737 airplane lay on the highway in Battery Park. The impact had caused the parkway to collapse. On another section of the road, two enormous Staten Island ferries lay on their sides like a pair of beached whales.
We rounded the bottom of the island and saw the Statue of Liberty.
Lady Liberty’s head and upraised arm were gone, evidently by explosive force, judging by the outwardly bent metal at her neck and shoulder. They now lay at the base of her podium, turning the once-great statue into a modern-day Ozymandias.
Scrawled in red paint on the front of her iconic robes was the chilling message:
SEE YOU ALL IN HELL!
Time hadn’t destroyed the Statue of Liberty. Furious people had, with grenades or some other kinds of explosive devices.
Jenny’s eyes filled with tears. “It’s all gone. All of it.”
“And it ended so terribly,” I said, “in anger and violence. What’s wrong with people?”
Then, as we turned northward up the East River, we saw the bridges.
The Brooklyn Bridge was still standing, but it was entirely covered in vines. The Manhattan Bridge was half broken: the suspension cables on the Manhattan side had buckled, so the roadway at that end had dropped into the river. As for the Williamsburg Bridge, both of its once mighty towers, eaten away by vegetation, had collapsed, causing the whole thing to fall into the river.
Importantly for us, the fallen wreckage had not entirely blocked the way.
We wound our way past the colossal pieces of fallen concrete and steel, our dinghy tiny alongside them.
As we passed Brooklyn, I saw a fire atop a warehouse and beside it…three skulls mounted on stakes.
Jenny stared at them, openmouthed in horror. “What are they?”
Guided by the simple map I had taken from the boat basin, we cruised up the East River before we turned right at Lawrence Point, heading east toward Rikers Island, LaGuardia Airport, and Long Island Sound.
As we came to the point, I saw a pulsing orange glow beyond it, and my heart began to beat a little faster. Then we rounded the point, and the prison island came into view.
I gasped. “Mother of God…”
“The world didn’t end for everybody,” Jenny said flatly.
In this otherwise dead city, the prison was alive with light and movement.
Fires burned in every guard tower. Drums boomed. Shadowy figures danced and drank. I saw more skulls on the walls, backlit by the firelight. Masked men with guns patrolled the lone bridge that connected Rikers Island to the shore near LaGuardia.
This was what Griff had said.
To survive the gamma cloud’s effects on the human brain, one needed to possess either a medically created immunity or a natural one.
A natural resistance included having dysfunctional or overactive synapses in your brain. That group included people like Griff, but also others taking medication for anxiety or depression or post-traumatic stress. But, by definition, that group also included most of the psychopaths and sociopaths at Rikers Island.
Welcome to the new world…
I cut the engine.
“What are you doing?” Jenny whispered.
“I don’t want them to hear us or see our wake,” I said. I leaned over the side and started paddling gently.
And so it took us much longer to pass Rikers Island than I’d hoped. We clung to the Bronx shoreline to the north of the firelit prison island, eventually using the seat pads of our little boat as improvised paddles. It wasn’t until we had passed the Whitestone Bridge that I dared to restart the engine.
As dawn broke on this eerie new world, we motored away from New York City, heading toward the rising sun, cruising up Long Island Sound in our dinghy, forging our way toward Plum Island.
THE RETREAT
It took us two full days to reach Plum Island.
For one thing, our little dinghy wasn’t exactly the fastest motorboat in the universe; for another, well, both Jenny and I simply needed sleep.
Once we were well clear of the city and Rikers Island, we came to a remote inlet near Caumsett State Park, and there we found an offshore channel marker—it was basically a hut on stilts about a hundred yards from the shore.
It was perfect. Strung out from lack of sleep and the stress of running for so long on pure adrenaline, we both slept for nearly sixteen hours, right through the whole next day. I can’t speak for Jenny, but I’ve never slept so soundly.
After our big sleeps, we spent the following night and most of the next day cruising along the northern shore of Long Island.
It was going on four in the afternoon when it came into view.
Plum Island.
Low and flat, with a weird cluster of white box-like buildings that were both very old and very new, the island rose up out of the horizon before us.
It was a cloudy day and already getting dark. This was the final factor in why it took us so long to reach Plum Island: I didn’t want to go ashore at night. I wanted to see its secrets in the full light of day.
The Retreat had waited for me for twenty-two years. It could wait another night.
And so we slept on another channel marker till morning came. Then, as soon as the sun rose, we brought our little dinghy ashore on Plum Island.
* * *
—
We landed at the island’s main arrival area, a semicircular ring of docks sheltered by a pair of breakwaters.
Broken boats littered the shore; a few helicopters lay upside down beside them. Tossed around by twenty years of storms and hurricanes, the boats and choppers had smashed all the jetties and storage shacks to splinters.
I ran our little dinghy aground near a large white sign that had almost been completely consumed by weeds:
US GOVERNMENT PROPERTY
LANDING PROHIBITED
“I guess the creators of the Retreat decided to keep the government’s old keep-out signs,” I said.
Jenny said, “You don’t advertise your secret hideaway for the rich and powerful.”
We walked a short way across the island until we came to its largest set of structures, a cluster of white-painted warehouse-sized buildings that had once been the Animal Disease Center.
Facing the waters of the Sound to the north, the compound was, quite simply, enormous. And the features that had once enabled it to keep animal diseases contained had been cleverly converted to allow humans to survive for a long time: water tanks, diesel generators, living quarters, and airtight spaces for food storage.
It was the perfect sanctuary for the exclusive few to ride out the gamma cloud.
And then I saw the damage.
“This hideaway,” I said, “didn’t stay secret.”
* * *
—
The damage to the white-painted buildings had not been done by any storm or hurricane.
Hundreds of bullet holes pockmarked the walls. Charred, blasted-open sections of the walls indicated the use of grenades or explosives of some kind.
A battle had been fought here. A big battle.
A lawn of waist-high grass separated the buildings of the compound from the Sound, and after a moment my scanning eyes noticed objects in the grass: dozens of small boats not unlike my little dinghy. Rowboats, motorboats, all kinds of boats lay in the deep grass. They, too, had been tossed by years of storms, but their legacy was clear.
“The public found out about the Retreat,” Jenny said. “They wanted to get in as well, so they stormed it.”
I nodded. I could picture the scene:
A dozen wealthy families—still wearing their Armani suits and glittering jewels—staring out at an armada of poor people storming the shore in their little boats like an invading seaborne force.
With a final look back at the lawn, I stepped inside the nearest building.
* * *
—
Bullet holes in the walls—shattered windows—dangling fluorescent light tubes—bloody smears on the floor.
Jenny and I strode silently through the wreckage until we came to the area containing the living quarters. The doors were made of thick steel and had rubber seals. Each door also had a vacuum-sealed porthole window of double-glazed tempered glass sunk into it.
Nameplates on the doors identified the families who were to live in them.
As I peered in through the portholes, I saw how the wealthy had died.
Unable to penetrate the fortified airtight apartments, the attackers had cut off the air, suffocating the wealthy occupants. How did I know this? The messages scrawled on the porthole windows in blood or lipstick told me:
YOUR MONEY CAN’T BUY YOU AIR!
DIE WITH THE REST OF US, RICH PRICKS!
I wasn’t sure what was more repugnant: the image of wealthy families trapped in the airtight chambers they had paid a fortune to occupy, slowly suffocating, or the pure hatred of the poor who had caught up with them.
