The Secret Runners, page 22
I guessed this was what the French Revolution had looked like.
I found the first apartment I was looking for. The nameplate on it read Allen.
The door to my family’s chamber was open. It was empty. No bodies. No sign of Red. No sign even of his suitcase.
I knew that my mom and Todd had not made it to the Retreat. But Red’s note had said he was coming here.
I began to despair. I needed a sign that he’d made it.
And then I saw it, sitting all by itself in the back corner of the room:
A bronze-colored Graceland baseball.
I picked up the gaudy ball, turned it over in my hand, and saw the smiling face of Elvis Presley on it…and some handwriting.
Red’s handwriting, in black marker, on the ball:
Gone to Dad’s favorite beach house
I exhaled with relief.
Red had made it to the Retreat and then—I imagine when he saw the incoming attackers—he’d fled, but not before letting me know he’d gotten here.
“Oh, Red,” I said aloud, making Jenny spin.
She came over. “Your dad’s favorite beach house? What does that mean?”
“Race Rock Lighthouse. It’s over by Fishers Island, not far from here.”
Buoyed by the hope that Red might have escaped from the Retreat alive, my thoughts returned to my own predicament and my focus narrowed.
I sought out another apartment and found it a short way down the corridor.
The heavy steel door was slightly ajar, its rubber lining holding it loosely in the doorframe.
The nameplate on the door read Collins.
The Collins family did not die well.
The evidence before me was pretty clear: they hadn’t died of suffocation, huddled together in their airtight apartment.
Five bodies, long decayed, lay on the floor. They still wore the clothes they had been wearing twenty-two years previously. Their bags lay in the corner, not yet unpacked.
The partial closure of the chamber’s door had kept animals out, preserving the corpses somewhat. It was only the ravages of time that had decayed them: all five were shriveled and dry, their leathery skin clinging to the bones beneath. Their fingernails, I noticed, had continued growing for some time after their deaths and looked positively ghoulish.
Mr. Conrad Collins—Misty’s father, successful property developer and descendant of the Mayflower Pilgrims—lay crumpled against the far wall, his face all but unrecognizable. His gray suit was riddled with bloody bullet holes. Whoever had shot him had shot him a lot, with an automatic weapon.
Lying beside him, still dressed in a pair of diamanté-studded hipster jeans and a tight top, was the dried husk of the girl who had once been Chastity Collins. She’d been shot twice in the head.
Starley Collins still wore a white-and-gold Gucci pantsuit. It too had been shredded by bullet holes.
I stepped closer and moved aside the collar of her jacket, checking her neck.
“Damn it,” I said.
“What?” Jenny said from behind me.
“She’s not wearing her necklace,” I said. “The figure-eight one with her gem in it. I was hoping she’d worn it when she came here.”
I went over to the last two bodies. Misty and Oz.
They lay facedown, one on top of the other. I shoved the top body with my shoe.
The dead-eyed faces of two strangers stared up at me. Two poor folk who had been shot during the confrontation.
They weren’t Misty or Oz.
I spun on the spot, suddenly fearful.
Misty hadn’t come here. Hadn’t fled to the Retreat when her family had escaped the city on March 14.
The revelation rattled me. For some reason, I didn’t want to stay here anymore.
I recalled Misty’s taunt from before:
“You don’t think you and Bo were the first people to leave the tunnel and explore this world, do you?”
Had Misty come all the way out here? Had she discovered what would happen at the Retreat and so had not gone there with her family back in the present?
I definitely didn’t want to stay here anymore.
A quick search of the Collinses’ luggage revealed that there were no gems here, not Misty’s or her mom’s. I had the distinct feeling that Misty had gotten the better of me somehow, that even now she was one step ahead of me.
“Let’s go,” I said to Jenny.
“Where?”
I looked at her. “Since we don’t have any other options, let’s follow the trail my brother left behind.”
RED’S TRAIL
Race Rock Lighthouse—my father’s favorite beach house—is not that far from Plum Island, less than twenty miles away. But getting there can be a little hairy, as you have to sail across a channel that is exposed to the Atlantic Ocean.
After loading up our little dinghy with gas cans filled with fuel, we left Plum Island and arrived at Race Rock several hours later.
Thankfully, the sea was relatively calm, and we tied our boat to the small dock that serviced the fairytale-like cottage built on its tiny mount a short way off Fishers Island.
Before they had abandoned it, the last people to come to the cottage had shuttered all the windows and doors, which was why when I opened the main door, I found the interior of the lighthouse dry and oddly neat and tidy.
It was empty, except for one thing.
A lone envelope on the kitchen table, weighted down under a rock and labeled: BLUE.
I tore it open.
A single line in Red’s handwriting was on the note inside it:
I have gone to the place where Liberty lost.
Reading it over my shoulder, Jenny frowned. “Where Liberty lost?”
I stared at the line.
“He’s being cryptic, in case someone else found this note,” I said. “Red, my dad, and I used to vacation up here in the summertime. We’d sail all over the place: to this lighthouse, over to Martha’s Vineyard, and up around Rhode Island.”
I thought for a moment. “The place where Liberty lost…”
I smiled. “I got it. Liberty was the name of a famous racing yacht. The yacht that lost the America’s Cup in 1983 in Newport, Rhode Island.”
* * *
—
It was nearing sunset when, a few hours later, Jenny and I arrived in our little motorized dinghy at Newport, Rhode Island.
I was shocked when I saw men armed with assault rifles standing on all the major headlands, but as I looked more closely at them, I saw that they wore jeans, boots, and denim jackets: the clothes of ordinary men, not crazies or inmates or soldiers. As we sailed into the port, I noticed a heavily fortified guardhouse on the Newport Bridge.
A small police patrol boat came out to meet us, and at the sight of me, the young deputy at its controls went bug-eyed and quickly allowed us to pass.
I was very confused by all this and wanted to know more, but as we came to the city piers of Newport, all those thoughts flew from my mind as I saw him standing there, smiling knowingly, waiting for me.
It was my brother, Red.
Only now he was nearly forty years old.
OLD RED
His facial features hadn’t changed—the sparkling eyes, the elfin face—but the body around them had.
No longer was Red a lean sixteen-year-old boy. He was stockier, visibly stronger. His forearms were all muscle.
His face had aged considerably: the skin around his eyes was wrinkled from squinting and browned from working long hours outdoors.
In the three days since I had last seen him, my brother had aged twenty-two years and become a man.
There was one other thing about him that I should mention: he was wearing a sheriff’s uniform, complete with a shiny bronze star.
* * *
—
I leapt out of the dinghy and embraced my brother, tears streaming down my face.
I can’t imagine how it looked to the two dozen people who had gathered at the pier to watch our little boat pull in. Who was this teenage girl throwing her arms around their sheriff?
“Blue,” he said. “I’m so glad you made it here. You found my notes? And the baseball?”
I handed him the Graceland baseball as if it were made of gold. “I did. Boy, am I thrilled to see you.”
Red said hello to Jenny, but then he noticed the crowd watching us. He also glanced awkwardly at the buildings behind him, as if checking who was behind their windows. “Let’s go to my place and get you cleaned up. Then we can talk.”
* * *
—
We went to Red’s home, a few blocks from the piers. There Jenny and I showered—in an actual shower, although the water was cold—and got dressed.
By now the sun had set, and when I came downstairs, I found Red standing at the kitchen table (it was lit by candles), holding the hand of a very pretty woman and with two outrageously cute little girls in front of him.
“Blue,” he said, “this is my wife, Tabitha, and our daughters, Katie and Skye.”
I looked down at the smaller one. I guessed she was about six years old. “Skye, huh? What a lovely name.”
In response, the girl hid behind Red’s leg.
His wife seemed perplexed by all of this. Her expression was half-jealous, half-confused—my likeness to Red must have thrown her, but she was clearly thinking, Who the hell is this girl?
Dinner followed.
Red told Tabitha that I was the daughter of a cousin who had been thought lost in the chaos of the gamma cloud’s arrival. He’d left a message for my family in New York and instructed his deputies to keep an eye out for me if I ever arrived. It wasn’t the best cover story ever, but it was better than saying your sister was a time traveler.
After dinner, Red, Jenny, and I went into his study. Red closed the door.
He smiled wryly. “You had to arrive just before dinnertime, didn’t you?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Talk to me, please. Tell me about all this.”
Red sat in the chair behind his desk. “It’s been twenty-two years, but I remember the day you disappeared like it was yesterday. I figured you’d gone inside—with Bo and Verity, who also never came back—but I had to go to the Retreat. For some reason, Misty didn’t go, and wherever she was, she must have taken her gem with her and I couldn’t do anything to come get you. Then the city went crazy and—oh, Blue, I’m so sorry I left—”
“Red,” I said. “Forget it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s been three days. And I haven’t spent a moment of it hating you for not coming to save me.”
He bowed his head. The timelines of our lives had literally gone down separate paths. What had been three days for me was a lifetime for him, and this had clearly weighed on his mind the whole time.
“Tell me about the world in 2042,” I said. “And that.” I jerked my chin at his sheriff’s star. “Can’t say I expected to see you as the sheriff.”
Red gave a small smile. “The gamma cloud wiped out humanity, all right. By our reckoning, less than half of one percent of the population survived. And most of those survivors are people with what our doctors call ‘atypical hypersynaptic brain function.’ Which is another way of saying that most of them are not exactly friendly individuals: criminals, murderers, rapists, antisocial aggressive types, plus the clinically insane.
“A much smaller percentage of the survivors are folks like me: people who happened to be on the right medication at the time or who took the right vitamins or ate the right foods. Many, strangely enough, were on anxiety medication, which means they’re the exact opposite of aggressive. They’re modest, humble people who somehow survived with all the assholes. It’s like the cloud wiped out the middle and kept only the extremes of people. We’ve tried to gather all the decent ones on this island.”
So Griff wasn’t entirely correct, I thought. Some of the meek had inherited the Earth.
“What happened after the cloud?” Jenny asked.
Red said, “In the years after the gamma cloud, the whole Eastern Seaboard was a mess. Empty cities. Roaming gangs of prisoners. As I said, I initially went to the Retreat—Mom and Todd never made it—but I saw the writing on the wall when it was attacked the first time on March 16 by about fifty of the ‘Angry Poor,’ as the wealthy were calling them. I figured a lot more angry people would come later, and they did.
“So late on March 16, I left my baseball there with the message for you, stole a little motorboat, and hightailed it away from there. I rode out the gamma cloud alone at Race Rock Lighthouse and somehow survived. I guess Dad’s diet and vitamin regimen worked.”
He stared off into space, remembering. It was so strange to see my brother, my twin brother, looking and acting so grown up. His weary eyes now held half a lifetime of hard experience behind them.
He shrugged. “I couldn’t stay at the lighthouse. So I ventured out, looking for people like me, people who would want to rebuild. How do you rebuild society? One brick at a time, I guess. I met some good people—a few bad people. I’ve also killed quite a few people. But the good folks and I rounded up more good folks, and we settled here in Rhode Island.
“It’s a great spot to start rebuilding society because it’s big enough to have a couple of power stations and its own water supply, yet it’s only accessible by three road bridges. It’s defendable. We guard all those bridges around the clock, plus all the sea approaches.
“After that, well, we identified the people a new society needs most: doctors, electricians, plumbers. Funny, a new community doesn’t need hedge-fund managers and investment bankers. We’ve managed to restart one of the power stations and get some electricity online again—at least for a couple of hours a day—plus the water mains, which allows for flushing toilets. Trust me, the world’s better with flushing toilets.”
“A new town also needs a good lawman,” I said. “An honest man, someone who won’t favor one person over another, someone who can be trusted to enforce the law.”
Red bowed his head modestly.
I smiled warmly. “You always had it in you, Red. I knew that.”
“I do my best,” he said softly. He snuffed a rueful laugh. “I always teased you that I was older than you. By two minutes. Now I really am older. What about you? What happened?”
I told him everything: how Misty and her clique had been responsible for the missing girls; how they had brought Jenny into the future and left her for dead; how we had battled the furious Griff and fled New York with him on our tail; and how we had gone to the Retreat not only to find out Red’s fate, but also to acquire Starley Collins’s gem. Without a gem to place in the exit portal, we were stuck in this time.
“But her gem wasn’t there,” I concluded.
As I finished speaking, I looked at my brother—now thirty-eight years old, a father and a sheriff—and a great sadness came over me. My trials over the last few days paled in comparison to the years of danger, fear, and terror he had endured since the cloud.
And I realized: This world was now his world. It was not mine. He had lived in it, fought in it, earned his place in it over twenty-two years. I hadn’t.
Red’s older eyes met mine with the same concern.
“There’s another problem,” I said. “Dad. He sent me a text just before I made this run. He’s going to arrive in New York City—alone and unprepared—right in the middle of all the chaos. I have to find a way back to help him.”
A peculiar look crossed Red’s face.
“I’ve got something for you,” he said as he reached down and slid open his desk drawer. “Something I’ve been holding on to for a long time.”
He pulled an envelope from the drawer and handed it across the desk to me.
Written on it in a teenager’s hand were the words:
For Skye
Do Not Open Till 2042
My eyes snapped up. “Who—what is this?”
Red said, “When I was leaving Plum Island just before the gamma cloud hit, someone ran into the water after me, chasing my boat, begging to come with me. It was Oz Collins.”
“Oz?” I said.
“Yeah. I’d chatted with him on the first day I arrived at the Retreat. He wasn’t as bad as the other kids said. I’d heard he was a weirdo, but he wasn’t like that at all.”
“Misty made up all that stuff,” I said. “Set him up.”
“Did she? Makes sense,” Red said thoughtfully. “Oz asked about you, and I said you were missing, but in those times a lot of people were missing. He gave me a kind, almost distant smile and wandered off. The next time I saw him was when he chased me into the water as I was fleeing Plum Island on March 16. He also knew it wasn’t a safe place to stay.”
“I thought you said you rode out the gamma cloud at Race Rock alone?” I said.
“I did,” Red said. “Oz asked me to drop him back on Long Island. He didn’t say why. He said he was going back to the city. So I dropped him off, but when I did, he gave me this envelope.”
I took the envelope and stepped into the corner of the office to read its contents privately by the light of a flickering candle.
The note inside read:
Dear Skye,
I know you don’t know me very well, but I feel I know you. You were kind to me on two occasions that I have always remembered: that time you defended me after my magic act at the talent show, and when we talked about our costumes at Verity’s birthday party.
Some people think I’m weird, but I’m not. I’m just shy. I find it hard to talk to people, which is why it was so nice when you chatted with me.
