He sneered. “Damn right I’m serious. Someone needs to take a stand. Our people are dying. The healthy ones are deserting in droves. If we wait any longer, the colony will be extinct.”
“We owe Ghost. He saved us. All of us.”
“Your loyalty to him is going to get you killed.”
Mary spun on her heel. Lost in thought, she marched through the long thin subway tunnel.
A coup.
The very idea made her nervous. She liked Dask. Liked him a lot. But Ghost was like a father to her.
As she walked, she shifted her gaze from left to right, sweeping it across the cool, dank space. Thanks to twelve years spent living underground, her eyes had grown accustomed to darkness. As such, she could see almost everything around her. Scattered trash. A discarded boot. Smashed boxes.
A shopping cart.
Her eyes lingered on the cart. It was a whole lot bigger than the carts she’d seen while begging outside D’Agostino’s. But its size wasn’t its only unique feature. Through some feat of magic, it stood solely on its hind wheels.
Puzzled, she studied the strange spectacle. It took her only a few seconds to unravel the mystery. A thin metal pole rose out of the ground and sliced through the bars of the cart, impaling it at an awkward angle.
Glancing upward, she noticed that the pole extended all the way through the ceiling. She frowned. How had someone gotten…?
Dask coughed. “Listen Mary, forget I said anything. I’m just blowing off steam, that’s all.”
Mary wanted to believe him. The colony was the closest thing she ever had to a real family. “I know.”
“It’s just that Ghost…he doesn’t…well…”
His voice trailed off. Mary considered probing him to say more. On one hand, the conversation made her uncomfortable. But on the other, she didn’t want to push Dask away by ignoring his feelings. Already, she sensed a wall growing between them. And that terrified her almost as much as losing her family.
Emotionally torn, she pushed on, plunging across the tracks that made up the Lexington Avenue Line. The lockout presented a rare opportunity to enjoy the tunnels that surrounded her home without fear of being run over by subway trains. She did her best to enjoy it. But her heart was no longer in it.
Mary snuck a glimpse at Dask who strode behind her, stress lines etched across his handsome face. He no longer looked like the frightened, bratty, annoying kid she’d met all those years ago. Now, he was a devilish, tough twenty-two-year-old.
He sported rippling muscles. His sullen eyes weakened her knees. She liked everything about him, from his long blonde hair to his permanent stubble to his taste in music. He was the kind of boy…the kind of man…that struck fear in the hearts of parents.
Her thoughts drifted to her own mother. What would she think of Dask?
Mary never knew her mother. She didn’t know the woman’s dress size, her favorite food, or her hobbies. In fact, she didn’t even know the woman’s real name. But years of longing and dreaming had answered those questions.
Sort of.
Mary imagined her mother as Penelope Jarvis, a name that she’d picked out randomly from a discarded newspaper. Penelope was a beautiful woman with long blonde hair and curly eyelashes. She fit snugly into a dress, loved spaghetti and meatballs, and read books for fun.
Somehow, Mary and Penelope had been separated at birth. It wasn’t Penelope’s fault. She would never knowingly abandon her child. In fact, every day she spent hours calling around, searching for her long-lost daughter.
Searching for Mary.
Penelope would love Dask. Penelope loved everyone. The longer Mary thought about Penelope, the better she felt. It was a fantasy to be sure. But in Mary’s experience, fantasies were almost always better than real life.
After another few minutes, the tunnel yawned open, revealing a platform. But this one was shaped like an island and stretched longer than the others. She recognized it immediately. It was the platform that divided the two sets of southbound tracks at Grand Central Terminal.
As she walked through the open area, her chest began to hurt. She didn’t like the silence. She wanted to talk to Dask, to explain her feelings.
She glanced over her shoulder. “I get it. The past two months have been awful. I’ve lost too many friends. I don’t want to lose anymore. Can’t you and Ghost find a way to resolve your differences?”
Dask grabbed her shoulder and spun her around. “People are dying, Mary. And Ghost won’t do anything about it.”
“Can’t you just talk to him?”
“I already tried. He’s far too conceited to listen to me.”
“Maybe if I tried…”
“Don’t waste your time.”
He paused for a moment. “You’re my girl, Mary. I need you. I need your support.”
Mary walked into the next tunnel, furtively wiping her eyes in the process. His words touched her. But they also made her ill at ease. Did he really care about her? Or was he just using her to aid his ambitions?
A single set of tracks ran down the middle of the tunnel, separated by I-beams and walls on either side. The tracks themselves were relatively clean, largely free of trash and debris.
“Mary, take a look at this.”
Sensing urgency in his voice, she turned around. Dask knelt a few yards behind her. Despite the blackness, his face looked ghostly white. “What’s wrong?”
He pointed at the ground. “Look.”
She walked over to the side of the tunnel and saw a couple of half-footprints. “What about them?”
“Not those. Look at the marks.”
Leaning back, she noticed something strange. A thick layer of gravel and dirt covered much of the ground. But near the footprints, a large, oddly shaped area had been wiped clean and filled with a pool of slime and sewage.
Dask looked at her. “We need to get out of here. Now.”
She worked her mouth but nothing came out.
“Mary…” His voice was louder now, more urgent.
She turned around. And that was when she saw it. It flew across the tunnel, sweeping a wide swath in its wake.
The beast slammed into Dask.
He toppled over, hitting his head on the ground.
His eyes rolled to the back of his skull.
Mary tried to scream as the horrible thing shot toward her. She saw its red eyes, the blood dripping from its pointed teeth.
With tremendous force, it crashed into her. She fell backward and the creature slid over her, pushing her down with its weight.
The gigantic jaws opened wide.
Teeth clamped around her face.
She heard a sickening crunch.
And then, it began to eat.
Chapter 14
Beverly yawned. “Well, that was a couple hours of my life I’ll never get back. I hope you’ve got something better planned for tomorrow.”
“Patience is a virtue,” I replied. “One you seem to lack.”
She walked a little farther and then pointed to the right. “I keep seeing those things everywhere we go. Do they have a purpose?”
I glanced over my shoulder, following her finger to a gigantic steel piling. Dotting the entire area, the pilings looked like a metallic garden, sprouting out of the concrete and growing through the ceiling. I touched one as I passed by it, feeling the cool metal course through my fingertips. “It’s definitely not useless,” I replied. “That is, unless you’ve got something against midtown Manhattan.”
“How’s that?”
“A long time ago, railroad tracks and a large train yard sat above our heads. But the land was far too valuable to be used in that manner. So, in 1903, New York Central started to move everything underground. Then it built a new terminal and constructed Park Avenue on top of the whole mess.”