City of Savages (15 page)

Another spark. The light blinds my captors for a second. In that second, Ryder slices a pair of arrows through the two monsters on my left.

Without thinking, I grab my gun from my pocket, shove off the safety, and fire it right into the temple of the third feeder attached to my other side. Warm blood soaks my sleeve and splatters the car.

“RUUUN!” Sam bellows.

“Girls, Trevor, the windows—jump!”

As we move, one, two, five feeders pour into the subway car from the platform side of the car. We fling ourselves through the opposite windows and fall onto a set of tracks below.

“Mom.” I can’t see anything. “Sky!” I reach out, arms thrashing, like I’m possessed.

“It’s okay.” Ryder’s gravelly voice is in my ear, his arms around me, and for a second, I feel safe. “It’s all right, I’ve got you.”

“Where’s my mom?”

“Phoenix, I’m here. Sky—Trevor?!”

“I’ve got Trevor, we’re here,” Sky answers.

“Where’s Lerner?” The darkness takes on the voice of Sam. “Lerner!”

No answer.

“Ryder, quick, the matches,” Sam whispers.

Another spark.

There’s all of us—all of us except Lerner.

We look back to the subway car, now full of hungry cannibals. And they’re crawling through the bashed-open windows on our side, worming through the cracks. Coming for us.

“We can’t leave without him!” Sam says.

“They have him, Sam.” Ryder’s shaking his head as Sam’s match burns out. “I’m sorry.”

Sam takes a second to recover. “Sarah, give me those crutches. Get in the middle. Everyone support her. We’ll move faster.” He lights a torch and passes it to Mom with shaky hands. “Link up,” he says. “Let’s go.”

We fling ourselves away from the subway car, a messy chain of hands, stumbling, breaking, attaching and reattaching in the dark.

We run and run until my side is burning.

Until my feet are numb from the pounding against the tracks.

And just when I think we’re done for, when I think we’re going to die here, in this pit of crazies, in this hellhole of darkness—

A puddle of dawn appears like a mirage on the platform.

24    SKY

We scramble towards the light, propelling Mom forward. We climb onto the platform and over the subway gates, trip up the steps slick with fresh drizzle. The open air greets us, a fierce breeze pummels us with rain, but I don’t think I’ve ever been so grateful to see daylight. We hear groans and rumblings somewhere beneath us—the bright white of morning should stop the feeders, blind them for a moment—and we cross a wide, abandoned Avenue of the Americas, hopscotch around taxis frozen in time to reach the other side.

“Where are we?” Sam calls behind him as he shields his head from the piercing rain.

Mom cranes her neck around. “Fourteenth and Sixth Avenue. We must have crossed tracks to the L line. Phee, are you all right?”

Mom stops to inspect my sister, pulls up her sweatshirt, and takes a look at her new wound. There’s a superficial cut that runs about three inches down her left side. Even though it doesn’t look too deep, she’ll have to be bandaged.

“We need to get you patched up,” Mom says, reading my mind. “You okay?”

Phee just whispers, “I think so.”

Mom kisses the top of her head. “Come on, we have to get out of sight.”

Mom hobbles with us down half a block, then scrambles up a set of cracked cement stairs. She shakes a set of glass double doors, begging them to open, but they don’t budge.

“A gym? You want to hole up in a gym?” Sam pushes. “There’re a thousand flats to choose from. Pick one, any one—”

“There’ll be medical kits in here, splints, bandages. And there’s a lot of us.” Mom scans the building, then peers down the narrow alley that hugs its far side. “This means more room, a better vantage point. Plus, apartments are hit or miss. Trust me, I know.”

Mom puts one hand on the rusted railing, and her other on my shoulder. She limps back down the stairs, grabs her crutches from Sam and lurches over to a pile of debris littering the abandoned back lot. She carefully leans down, picks up an old rusted pipe, and points it at Sam. “You’ve got to break a window.”

“Are you crazy?” Sam says. “Those monsters could already be out of the tunnels and hear us. No, we move on.”

Phee shakes her head and starts walking towards Sam. I know that look in her eye.

“Phee, wait—”

“No, Sky, I’m sick of this,” she says. “Last time we did it your way,
Sam
, it cost your buddy his life and I nearly got a bite taken out of my stomach. So I say we go with my mom on this one.”

Phee’s pulled her gun out and points it right at Sam, of course taking it too far. The weapon might have one bullet left in it, but my sister was never one for details.

I barely can follow what happens next, it’s so fast. In a flash, Sam has Phee’s arms pinned behind her back with one hand and holds her gun in his other.

Mom and I both lurch forward. “Phee!”

“Sam,” Ryder says. “Come on, man. Easy!”

Sam grips my sister against his chest, hard, and my heart kicks up once again. I can’t believe it has any fight left in it.

“Lerner wasn’t my fault,” Sam says to Phee. “I did what I should have. I got him bandaged. I made him rest. . . . I . . . I followed protocol.” He takes a long, deep breath. “A man’s injured, that’s what you do.”

Phee shakes her head, and her long, tangled hair splashes Sam in the face. “Whatever to protocol,” she says. “You need to start listening to my mom, or we’re all going to die.”

Sam releases her, pushes her forward, and Phee clutches her side. Sam pauses, clearly thinking twice, before he carefully hands her gun back to her.

“Why not move on?” he repeats.

“Because Phee and I need a med kit.” Mom walks back through the rain-slick alley, where a row of closed windows just beg to be broken. “And from the looks of it, this place hasn’t been touched in fifteen years. It’s the perfect place to wait out the weather.”

*   *   *

Sam punctures a window with three quick jabs of the steel rod, and we hoist one another up and take turns crawling through the opening and inside to a dark, musty lobby. Then Sam and Ryder pick up a large bureau and move it in front of the broken window, a makeshift door to a makeshift home. Dripping wet, we cross the checkerboard-tile expanse of the lobby, past a wide desk with empty chairs, and then under a red-letter sign that reads
YMCA
. We climb two flights of stairs and emerge on the third floor.

“The yoga studios should have candles.” Mom slowly combs the wide layout, checking the signage of each glass door that borders the open floor, as Phee and I flank her on both sides.

The main space looks like a graveyard of headless, strange dinosaur skeletons, arranged in row after row. Some tall and hunched, like pictures I’ve seen of T. rexes in books; some small and tight, as if they once ran fast and close to the ground. “What are all these things?”

“Workout equipment. StairMasters, ellipticals, bikes.” Mom points to a glass door. “Bingo.”

We lead her into the small room, with a wood-paneled floor and lush red velvet curtains painted in dust. Sam lights a long row of white candles in the center of the room, while Trevor starts digging through the open cupboards on the far wall. He pulls out some black foam mats and tattered blankets. “I think I could sleep for a year,” he says, before splaying out on the ground.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” Sam mutters, as he curls into a ball on the floor next to Trevor. “Those Park twats are on the hunt for us. We move at nightfall.”

“Says the guy in the fetal position.” Phee moves to plunk down as well, but Mom and I grab hold of her arms.

“Not yet,” Mom tells her. “We need to get you bandaged up.”

“You ladies need any help with anything?” Ryder’s voice echoes against the wood. And I feel an unexpected, jealous surge—does he want to help because of Phee?

“Actually, Ryder,” Mom says, “we should take advantage of this rain. I’m sure there’re buckets and old water jugs in the storage closets we passed. Can you guys take care of it? Sky, come with me.”

Ryder nods. “Sam and I are on it.”

Sam starts muttering obscenities in the corner, but he gets up.

“Aren’t you forgetting someone?” Trevor moves from corpse state to standing in about two seconds. “I’ve gotta do my part too.”

I watch Ryder stifle a smile. “Of course, man. We were counting on it.”

*   *   *

My sister’s practically falling asleep as we clean her wound with the treated gauze Mom dug out of an old first aid kit. But after our collective nightmare, I don’t know how Phee could even think about sleeping. Every time I close my eyes, I see split-open faces, an army of warlords on our heels, or worse, hungry tunnel feeders.

I watch Mom rummage through the kit attached to the wall. She pulls out a cardboard box with a sorry-looking man clutching his head on the front of it.

“Mom,” I say.

“Mmm.” She opens the box and unravels a long flesh-colored dressing.

“In the subways,” I say softly, “you said you saw the feeders in the tunnels before, personally. I don’t understand.”

She doesn’t look at me as she pulls apart the bandage, but I take it as good a sign as any to continue.

“I always thought the feeders were lost people, traitors who stayed underground after the city’s official surrender—holdouts who never came up to the surface again.”

“That’s right.” But she doesn’t give me anything more.

“So . . .” I struggle with how to phrase my next question. “So, what were you doing down in the tunnels after Manhattan surrendered?”

She keeps her mouth in a tight, thin line as she wraps the gauze around Phee’s middle, then gives me the same to wrap around her other side.

“Not too tight,” Phee grunts, eyes closed.

I let my hands wind round and round, helping Mom, playing nurse, but I don’t take my eyes off my mother. She must feel it, my desperation for her to just let me in, to tell me what she keeps hidden. Secrets are spilling out of this city, emerging from the shadows, rising from the ground—and I’m tempting hers, begging hers to join them.

“I was lying to the Englishmen.” She doesn’t look at me.

“Mom—”

“Not lying, really. Just bluffing. I knew the stories. I knew some people who had tried to escape the Park years ago, who’d gone into the tunnels and came back with the fear of God in them. I knew the feeders were real. And I didn’t want to risk our safety for a shortcut.” She pats Phee’s side gently and then pulls down her sweatshirt to cover the dressing. “There.”

Mom’s smiling, but it’s hollow. And I don’t know how I know, but I do. She’s lying, or
bluffing
, to me. She’s keeping something, something dark and terrible, from me.

“Mom, please—”

“Stay with your sister a minute, okay?” she says as she walks to the windows.

And that’s it. My own window to the past is closed before I find a way to prop it open. “Sometimes you have to lie to survive, Sky,” Mom adds behind her. “I hope you’ll understand why I did what I did. One day.”

And then she joins Sam, Ryder, and Trevor as they arrange buckets on the fire escape to capture the rain.

*   *   *

I toss and turn for hours, even though I know I need to rest. Even though my muscles are aching, quaking,
pleading
with my mind to just stop working for a moment so they can truly relax. But I can’t. My conversation with Mom has me so anxious to figure out the missing pieces of her story that I’m tempted to pull out her journal and start reading it right here in the yoga room.

A collective wheeze whispers through the room. The candles have been blown out, and the only light that remains is a small sliver that sneaks through the velvet curtains. Phee’s snoring softly next to me, and I wonder if I should wake her up again, or if that’s too cruel, especially considering all that we’ve been through. Any normal person would be sleeping. So I grab my backpack, tiptoe over the field of bodies, and slip out the glass door.

Filled water buckets now line the entryway to the yoga room. I pull a small canteen out of my backpack and tip over one of the buckets to fill it. I take long, luxurious gulps as I navigate through the dinosaur field, or “workout” room, then settle against a far window and pull out the journal.

I look at the
Charlotte’s Web
cover for a long time. I feel guilty moving forward without Phee, even though I can’t wait to jump in.

I settle on reading until there’s something I know we should share together. I crack open the pages, and the morning light pours across Mom’s words.

I hear creaks, noises underground, and
I think he and Robert are around the corner,
coming for us. Sometimes I even trick myself into thinking Tom’s cologne is wafting through the subways.

Other days I know Tom must be dead.

But I won’t let myself feel it. Otherwise I know it would be the final straw, and I’ll crumble. And Sky needs me.

April 25—The pains returned again, but this time with a vengeance. Dry heaves and aches and pains and a headache that knocked me sideways. And I knew it, I knew it so deeply and tragically that I started wailing.

“I’m pregnant,” I told Mary.

Pregnant.
Phee
.

Phee and I always knew she was born during the war, but not . . . in the tunnels. Not when bombs were being dropped above and people were living in the dark, cold shadows of the city, on rats and borrowed time. I close my eyes and picture Mom, without Dad, with Mary, with one baby and another on the way. And even though I know the ending to this story—that Mom survived, is sleeping and snoring in the next room—I’m still terrified of what happened in between.

I know I should stop reading, should tuck the journal back into my bag and wait for my sister. Phee should read this. This is her story too.

But the past has me under its spell, keeps my eyes transfixed and my hands wrapped protectively around the journal. And I don’t resist.

I
can’t
resist.

I didn’t want to tell her, but in the dark Mary and I have come to share everything, and it’s scary how much I need her.

I couldn’t breathe after I said it. Me, with two. Her, with none. Mary. Strong, wonderful, beautiful Mary. For a moment, I wondered if her husband ever knew her like I’d come to know her. If Jim ever saw what I have seen.

“What do we do?” I whispered. “I need him, Mary. I need to find Tom.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time, just stroked my hair, hugged me and Sky towards her, and rubbed my belly tenderly.

Finally she answered me, her voice as faint as rain on the surface, “We’ll figure out a way.”

May 5—I’m lying down after a night of celebration, if you want to call it that. The tunnels for the first time feel festive, hopeful, though the day started out in a panic.

Early in the morning, somewhere between First Avenue and the crossover to Brooklyn on the L line, we woke to the pitter-patter of their footsteps on the tracks. Three people, maybe four. Was it other survivors? We listened.

Then we heard the harsh, strident sounds of foreign tongues. The smacking of boots.

Soldiers.

Mrs. Warbler, one of the cursed vacationers from Kansas, just started rocking and mumbling, “This is our end.”

“We’re never going to make it,” Bronwyn sobbed into her hands.

I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and pulled her in, as Sky swatted Bronwyn’s matted blond hair from my lap. Bronwyn’s somehow
become my charge in this dark underworld, where the lines between stranger and family,
right and wrong, have been erased. She doesn’t have anyone else.

But Mary has no time for the girl. She snapped at Bronwyn to keep quiet. There were still a lot of us, she said. And we knew these tunnels. “We might not all make it out of this alive,” Mary added, “but we sacrifice for the greater good.”

We quickly dispersed and perched ourselves like long rows of gargoyles on the platform above the tracks. The front row of our crew was armed with knives, flashlights, Sky’s stroller, and a few other Bugaboos and UPPAbaby Vistas from other moms who’ve joined our doomed crew. Mary wouldn’t let me anywhere near the front line.