Hardaway yanked Bill’s arms behind his back. The cold pinch of metal as the handcuffs snapped over his wrists. “Just try us,” she muttered in his ear.

  ELEVEN

  The ruined gate tore from its rusty hinges. Fiona pushed it aside before tossing the crowbar to Fireball and wrapping an arm beneath Jen’s armpits, the girl shivering against her. They scurried down the hallway leading to the platform, Fiona trying to listen above the storm for footfalls on concrete, yelling, anything to indicate pursuit from above.

  The stationmaster’s kiosk was empty. Fiona peeked through the scratched windows. Nothing of interest on the desk, just papers and a crushed jumbo can of energy drink. She tried the door. Locked. Besides, even if it wasn’t, would a stationmaster have anything useful? It wasn’t as if the MTA equipped its station employees with a machine gun, which was the one thing she needed at this juncture.

  “Take her,” she said as she passed Jen to Fireball. Jen coughed, a brutally loud sound that echoed off the station tiles.

  “I hope to all that’s holy you got a plan,” Fireball said, struggling to hoist Jen. “Because if you don’t—”

  “Wait here.” Fiona leapt the turnstiles.

  “Wait,” Fireball said, his panic rising. “You’re not leaving us here, you hear me? You’re not—”

  Fiona walked over to the emergency exit door and opened it. “As tempting as that might be,” she said, waving for Fireball to drag Jen through. From this angle, she had a view down the station hallway almost to the base of the stairs. Why hadn’t anyone come down? Maybe they thought she had another explosive or two.

  Well, let them think so. She did a mental shell count: full clip, plus the crowbar. Not great, but not terrible, either. Despite her soaked clothes, she didn’t feel cold. Thanks, adrenaline!

  “We could cross the tracks,” Fireball said, pointing to the opposite platform. “Go out the other exit.”

  “Probably got a gate,” Fiona said.

  Jen coughed again, loud, explosive. A string of snot swung from her nose. “This day sucks,” she wheezed, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

  “I’ve had worse,” Fiona said.

  “I haven’t.” Fireball pointed to the tracks. “We go down there, I guess? Better hope they’re not lying about the trains not running.” His teeth chattering softly. The poor guy had played thousands of hours of first-person shooters throughout his wayward life, gunning down millions of baddies with an impressive array of oversized guns. Well, reality never offered the kindnesses of a respawn point and the ability to save your game.

  “Yeah,” Fiona said, not enthused about the idea, but what choice did they have? “We’ll head uptown. Get back to the house, we can regroup, think this through.”

  “And a drink,” Jen said. “I could use a drink.”

  “What are you, twelve?” Fireball asked.

  Jen sneered at him. “I’m joking, dumbass.”

  “At least you’re feeling good enough to screw with him,” Fiona said. The girl wasn’t strong enough to move on her own, but she wouldn’t drop dead on them. And right now, such things counted as a big win.

  Fiona waved for them to follow her to the north side of the platform, where a waist-high gate blocked off the maintenance walkway running along the side of the tunnel. She paused there, one hand on the gate, listening and smelling. No distant squeal of subway wheels on tracks, no rumble of floodwaters. The tracks clear aside from a stream of pungent sludge on the bottom. Not even any rats—did they know something she didn’t?

  She pulled out her phone and flicked on the flashlight app, praying she had enough battery life to last however long they needed to spend in this tunnel. She pushed through the gate, flicking the light over the narrow walkway, Fireball and Jen close behind her.

  The walkway ran for another thirty feet before ending in a short ladder to the tracks. To their right, a small alcove and a metal door without markings on it. She tried the handle. Locked. Likely led to a maintenance shaft.

  A prickling unease—a signal from deep in her lizard brain, warning her to watch out.

  “Hold on,” she whispered, clicking off her phone’s light.

  “What’s wrong?” Jen asked, her voice echoing off the tunnel’s concrete curve.

  “Hush,” Fiona said, pressing her body against the walkway railing so she could see beyond them, back into the station. The tunnel’s entrance framed the platform and the edge of the turnstiles. Nothing seemed different from a minute or two ago, except for a trickle of water from the ceiling above the turnstiles, pattering off the concrete. Had that perked her attention?

  No, the dripping had nothing to do with it.

  She was holding her breath. She exhaled slowly, sucked down more oxygen and held it. Leaned further over the railing, hoping for a better angle of the station—

  Yes, there. Poking from just above the turnstiles, a tiny black… dot. Like the tip of a gun barrel, pointing across the tracks toward the opposite platform. Like someone was standing on the far side of the turnstiles, scanning for danger before making a move.

  No, you’re paranoid.

  I’m not, she told the demon in her head. I’m most definitely not.

  She raised the pistol. If their pursuer showed a little more of themselves, she could risk a shot, but she had no idea how many hunters were down here. The tunnel offered no cover, nowhere to hide if they came in this direction.

  The black dot edged forward, becoming the stubby barrel of a submachine gun held by thin, pale hands. The arms holding the gun appeared beyond the edge of the turnstiles, clad in shiny raingear. Then the body, the head hooded, the legs encased in soaking-wet jeans. Smaller than Fiona expected. A woman, maybe?

  The hooded figure climbed over the turnstiles and onto the platform, sweeping the gun along the tracks. “Clear,” it said in a high-pitched voice—a woman, yeah—before turning back and opening the emergency exit.

  Three more figures stepped onto the platform, clad like the first in soaking-wet raingear and jeans, all armed with submachine guns with extended clips. Fiona bet those weapons were converted to automatic fire. The way they spread out across the platform, covering every angle, suggested they were professionals—certainly more skilled than the chumps in the penthouse or the two bodyguards she’d gunned down beside the truck.

  Great.

  She tapped Fireball’s shoulder and, when he looked at her, placed a finger to her lips. Gestured for him to climb down the ladder to the tracks—but quietly.

  Fireball nodded. Moving as slowly as he could, he lifted Jen off his shoulder and passed her to Fiona, who pivoted, placing the girl against the concrete wall. Jen’s breath loud in her ear.

  Fireball set the crowbar on the concrete and placed his hands on the railing and his left foot on the first rung. His backpack straps creaked.

  His foot scraped the rough metal, frighteningly loud.

  Fiona tensed. Two of the armed men stood at the downtown side of the platform, sweeping their guns along the tracks. The others clustered at the turnstiles, their heads tilted together. The murmur of conversation.

  Fireball descended another rung.

  One of the men sat on the edge of the platform, his legs dangling over the tracks.

  Fiona waved for Fireball to move faster. Jen’s hand on her shoulder, Jen moving past her, placing a shaky hand on the railing, looking at Fiona like: Should I do this?

  Fiona nodded.

  Jen placed her first foot on the rung. Her leg shaking. Fireball, already at the bottom, placed a light hand on her hip, trying to steady her.

  Jen stepped to the second rung. The ladder tapped against the concrete—ping!

  The sitting man pushed off, landing on the tracks, and the man above him passed down a rifle. The others near the turnstiles wandered to the platform’s edge, slinging their weapons across their backs.

  What would happen now? If Fiona was lucky, they would sweep the downtown tunnel as a squad, leaving her to retreat uptown with the kids. But she wasn’t so lucky. If these hunters had half a brain between them, they would split into two groups and hit both the uptown and downtown tunnels.

  Which left the question: How far would they explore before turning back?

  Jen settled on the last rung, Fireball’s hands around her waist. Their breath loud, rapid, panicked. Too damn loud.

  Fiona kept her gun aimed at the man who stood on the tracks. The others descended from the platform one at a time, the rest providing cover. Did they have flashlights? Probably. They were prepared.

  The station lights dimmed and flared.

  Imagine being down here if the city lost power. If a retaining wall gave way and the system flooded. Lost in the blackness, cold water pushing against your feet, then your legs, then your waist. Filling your lungs. Sucking you down. Fiona didn’t want to think about it. She started to climb down the ladder—a tricky business with the pistol in one hand. She tried lowering her feet as slowly and quietly as possible onto the tracks, but she missed and her left foot slid into the toxic mud with a squish broadcast in stereo, drowned out by the clink and rustle of hunters shifting because they heard, they knew, they were ready to—

  She raised the pistol.

  The hunters paused.

  These guys weren’t the bodyguards from the penthouse. They were dressed differently, moved differently. But they shared one big similarity, she realized.

  They wouldn’t fire wildly into the tunnel. Too much risk of hitting Jen.

  That wouldn’t stop them from getting close enough to shoot Fiona in the head at point-blank range, though.

  Lovely.

  One of the hunters took a step toward the tunnel entrance—only for his nearest companion to hiss a question. The lead hunter turned back, joining heads again in urgent discussion.

  Fiona waved for Fireball to walk deeper into the tunnel. Mimed stepping carefully from wooden crosstie to crosstie. Beside him, Jen wrinkled her nose at the stench.

  Fireball took Jen’s hand (it really was sweet, how he was watching over her) and stepped to the first crosstie, testing the wood with the edge of his toe before settling his full weight on it. Jen followed, her bare feet tapping the crosstie, testing for splinters, before she committed.

  The wood creaked.

  One of the hunters stepped toward the pillars separating uptown from downtown tracks. The hood hid the face except for a pale curve of chin, but the figure moved with a catlike grace, a confidence that suggested they could handle themselves in a fight.

  Two of the others followed the first one, rifles raised. The remaining one knelt on the tracks and faced the downtown tunnel, ready for whatever might come in that direction.

  None of them had flashlights, Fiona realized. One small advantage.

  Jen clapped her hands over her mouth, her eyes widening in panic.

  Fiona jabbed a finger at her: Don’t you dare cough.

  Jen’s throat jerked as she tried to hold it in.

  The hunter trio at the tunnel entrance now, maybe twenty yards away, maybe ten seconds from running into them if they kept their pace.

  And now Fiona heard a most peculiar sound from deeper in the tunnel, a low whistling that rose and rose, and her guts clenched as she thought train but this was something different, not the screech of metal on metal but air fluttering fleshy vocal cords, warping into notes so familiar and yet ever-so-slightly off-key, a radio hit from long before Fiona was born—

  To Fiona’s left, against the tunnel wall, emerged a figure almost impossible to see, black on black except for the ghostly splotch of the face. The smudge of what might have been arm rising, as the whistle sharpened into a snapped command:

  “Get down.”

  Grabbing Fireball and Jen by the collar, Fiona dove between the crossties. Her knees splashing in mud, the stink of the subway filling her nostrils. In front of her stepped a man in dark combat gear, his hair upswept in a gravity-defying pompadour, in his grip an ancient submachine gun that probably last saw action in France during World War II.

  “Hunka hunka,” the man said, and pulled the trigger. In the enclosed tunnel, the roar of ammunition was ear-bursting, apocalyptic, and Jen screamed against Fiona’s armpit as bullets snapped over their heads.

  Fiona knew this guy.

  Except it was impossible. The man was dead. By her hand, no less.

  Dead or not, the guy paused long enough to eject the gun’s newly empty magazine before slapping in a fresh one. At the tunnel entrance, the hunters had taken cover behind the pillars.

  “Better get a move on, little ones,” the man snapped, jerking his head behind him, and pulled the trigger again. Grabbing Fireball and Jen by the arms, Fiona peeled them from the mud and pushed them deeper into the tunnel lit by gunfire.

  REWIND: BEFORE THE STORM

  I was loading a week’s worth of water, energy bars, and fatty snacks into the trunk of my car when Battlin’ Bob Blazinsky, a small-time thug with a plus-sized appetite for booze and beating people down, phoned me with a last-minute assignment to break someone’s legs. I still wasn’t used to taking requests from a tiny fish like Bob, whose criminal “empire” extended for two whole blocks of St. Mark’s Place. Every time he sent me to snap a bone or break a nose, I wanted to inform him in my snootiest possible tone that I had once been more—so much more.

  But even had I informed Bob about the time I killed three Sicilian elders with a popsicle stick at an outdoor café in Capri, I doubt he’d have the mental capacity to be impressed. Bob couldn’t find Italy on a map—or the Empire State Building, for that matter. To preserve whatever was left of my sanity, I kept my mouth shut whenever he handed me a greasy wad of twenties like he was a king conferring the grandest of gifts upon a humble subject.

  “Yeah, need those skills of yours,” Bob grunted over the phone. In the background, I heard the buggy buzz of tattoo guns, so he was sitting in his makeshift “office” in the rear of the Tat Cat.

  I slammed my trunk closed and swiveled for a panoramic look at the street. It was, as you might expect in the hours before a major hurricane made landfall, an incredible shitshow. I imagined the citizens of other states, confronted with the prospect of disaster, packed their cars with supplies, water, tents, and whatever else they might need to survive for a few days. Contrast that with the happy folk of New York City, or at least the Village, intent on stuffing their vehicles with liquor, cigarettes, books, small dogs, baggies of weed and pills, and their finest clothes.

  “You take a look outside?” I asked him.

  “Uh, yeah?”

  “Hurricane’s coming, so I’m leaving. Probably take me five hours to get across the bridge.”

  “Oh, come on.” Bob could adopt a whining tone unsuitable for someone who imagined himself as Al Capone’s successor. “The guy’s close, I swear. I’ll throw in a little extra, okay?”

  Metal crunched. At the intersection, two sedans pirouetted in a glittering spray of glass and paint. Bystanders paused to raise their phones, hoping to record a good fight.

  “How much we talking?” I asked.

  “Guy owes me two.”

  “And you’re paying me what?”

  “The usual?”

  “No.” I glanced at the sky thick with scuttling clouds. “Three hundred this time, man. That’s crunch rates.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me.” Anger now. He thought it made him sound intimidating, but I had to resist the urge to snort. Maybe I should’ve told him about the time I took on an entire Oklahoma town with a pair of AK-47s and lived to tell the tale.

  “I kid you not,” I said. “You don’t like it, find someone who’ll do it cheaper. Who you got there in the tattoo parlor? Goth Queen and the Lube King? They’ll do it if you teach them how to use a bat.”

  By the way Bob hissed, I knew he had nobody right now.

  As I waited for him to collect his thoughts, I watched the drivers of those crashed cars circle their wreckage, pointing and cursing. More cars tried to squeeze past the wrecks, but it was a tight fit, and traffic began to clog the street in both directions.

  “Fine,” Bob said. “Three hundred, but you make sure that leg is good and broken, you understand? I want that kid to limp for the rest of his natural life.”

  “I’ll bend it around like a swizzle stick,” I said. “What are his details?”

  “Guy’s name is Alec,” Bob said. “Young guy, blonde, looks like a real frat boy. Can’t bet on football for shit, either. He’s drinking over at The Shrunken Head right now.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The bartender.” Bob sounded almost insulted. “The bartender owes me.”

  “Fine. You better stick around in the tattoo parlor,” I said. “I’ll be around shortly for the money.”

  “Wait. How’d you know I was at—”

  I ended the call. It was time to admit that driving up to my little shack was a bad idea. I could walk the two blocks to The Shrunken Head, teach this kid a lesson he’d never forget, pick up my cash, and lock myself in my apartment before the storm hit. Ride out the hurricane in comfort, provided the wind refrained from sending a van through my bedroom window.

  Or I could skip the beatdown and lock myself in my humble abode, sparing me the whining and screams of yet another poor sap who thought the Buffalo Bills had a chance of winning against anyone this season other than a high school team. But I needed to pay the rent, and hurting people was one of my few marketable skills, along with bad jokes and mixing a halfway decent drink. I didn’t feel terrible about it. It wasn’t like I was killing anybody.

  The Shrunken Head was packed with drunken lunatics in the middle of the day. Never mind an oncoming hurricane or yet another fast-spreading pandemic—they stood shoulder-to-shoulder, sweating in the windowless murk, pounding down shot after shot of sugared engine cleaner. The speakers bolted above the liquor shelves blasted a droning, repetitive beat that technically qualified as music. I thought it sounded more like a factory machine on the verge of blowing a gasket.

 

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