Signaling to Heather and Jinx, Jeff waited only long enough for them to catch up before he plunged into the subway tunnel, turning in the opposite direction from the fallen man.
Eve Harris heard two blasts of gunfire and instinctively dropped to the floor of the tunnel. Favoring her injured right hand, she fell hard on her left, and felt a sharp pain slash up her arm and into her shoulder. Cursing, she rolled over, shrugged the backpack and rifle off her body, and managed to sit up.
Gingerly, she touched her left wrist. The pain was so bad, she knew it wasn't just sprained, but broken.
Out, she thought. I've got to get out.
Lurching to her feet, she started along the tunnel once again, feeling her way along the wall with her cut right hand, her left arm far too painful to use at all. Ahead of her, she saw a glimmer of light.
At first she thought it was an illusion, but a moment later she knew it wasn't-somewhere ahead, somewhere far in the distance, there was the dim glow of a light. The pain in her left arm forgotten, her right hand once more clenched into a protective fist, she began to run through the darkness toward the beacon of light. Her panic washed away and her heart raced with excitement as her eyes fastened on the guiding light.
Then, so suddenly she had no time to prepare for it, her right foot connected not with the floor of the tunnel, but with nothing at all. As her leg dropped into an open shaft, her face crashed against its far edge, the concrete lip smashing the bridge of her nose. Screaming in agony, she dropped down the shaft, her body bouncing off its walls, her torn right hand spasmodically clutching for anything that might break her fall.
A second later she dropped out of the bottom of the shaft, smashing onto the concrete floor below.
She lay there a moment, stunned.
The pain coursed through every nerve in her body.
But she wasn't dead. Not dead, or even unconscious, for she could see-see clearly-by the light of a bulb that hung in a metal cage from the ceiling a few yards away.
She was going to be all right!
She lay still for another moment, catching her breath, forcing herself to overcome the agony that possessed her.
Then, at last, she tried to sit up.
And discovered that she couldn't.
Couldn't move her arms, or her legs.
It felt as if all her bones were broken.
She tried to scream, to call for help, but even her voice had deserted her.
Then, from somewhere in the distance, she heard something.
Footsteps.
Slow, shuffling footsteps, but definitely footsteps!
Someone was coming! Someone who would help her! Hope surged inside her once again. She wasn't going to die here-she was going to be all right.
The footsteps came steadily closer, and then she saw a face looming above her.
It was a man, squatting down beside her, peering at her. His grimy face was covered with stubble, his eyes were bloodshot. He leaned closer, and when he opened his mouth, his fetid breath poured over her like so much sewage. In response, her belly contracted with a great spasm of nausea, and vomit spewed from her mouth.
The man recoiled, staggering to his feet, wiping the flecks of vomit from his face with the filthy sleeve of his coat as he swore at her. A moment later he straightened and his foot lashed out, and she felt her ear split as the toe of his boot crashed into it. Then he was gone, shambling off into the darkness, muttering to himself.
As she struggled to clear her windpipe of her own vomit, Eve Harris saw the first of the rats creep out of the darkness, drawn from their lairs by the scent of fresh blood.
Her blood…
In vain, she tried to cry out.
But even if she had been able to make a sound, there was no one left to hear her.
They were heading north in the subway tunnel. Jeff was almost certain he knew where they were-under Broadway- and what he was looking for should be just ahead. And then, in the distance, he saw it.
A streak of light, so thin it was barely visible. He moved faster, broke into a trot, then a run. Behind him he could hear Heather and Jinx and his father, their feet pounding on the concrete floor of the subway tunnel. They were between the tracks, the third rail on the left, and as they ran, the streak of light grew brighter.
Far ahead he saw another light. Though it was just a pinpoint, he knew it was another subway train, racing toward them.
"We've gotta get off the track!" Jinx yelled.
But there was nowhere to go-no alcoves cut into the walls, not even a catwalk! But the streak of light was only a few dozen yards farther along. "Hurry," he yelled. "We can make it!" He ran faster, hurling himself along the tracks, racing straight toward the train.
He could hear it now, even feel on his face the rush of the air the train was pushing in front of it.
The rest of them were right behind him, and suddenly he was there.
A plywood panel, covering a hole in the subway tunnel's wall, fixed to the outside of the tunnel so insecurely that the streak of daylight was obvious now.
"No!" he heard Heather yell as she realized what he was going to do. But it was too late.
Jeff hurled himself at the sheet of plywood, launching his body over the electrified rail, his arms raised, his body twisting so he'd hit the wood with his shoulder. If it held, and he dropped back-
His body smashed against the plywood. The nails holding it to the concrete squealed… but held, and Jeff dropped to the subway bed, missing the deadly third rail by a fraction of an inch.
There was a blare from a horn, and then the scream of brakes. Jeff looked up to see the train still hurtling toward him, and for a moment he froze, caught in the juggernaut's headlight like a jackrabbit. Then another voice crashed through the cacophony.
"Down! Now!"
Instinctively obeying his father's voice, Jeff dropped facedown into the gravel, then heard his father's voice bellow out again.
"Fire!"
Over the roar of the onrushing train there was a blast of gunfire. Jeff shrank away from it, but it was over almost as soon as it began, and when the blasting guns fell silent, everything had changed.
Light, daylight, was pouring through the hole in the concrete that only a moment before had been covered by the now-shattered sheet of plywood. Jeff scrambled to his feet and, with his father on one side, Heather on the other, and Jinx shoving him from behind, hurtled through the opening in the subway tunnel's wall. Then they were all blinking in the brilliant sunlight and breathing in the fresh breeze that was flowing off the river a few blocks to the west. Behind them, the subway train shot past, gone as quickly as it had come. As its roar faded away, Jeff looked out at the great excavation that lay before him.
It had changed since the last time he'd seen it, months ago, when his class in urban construction had taken another tour of the huge site where half a dozen buildings had stood. It had been a vast pit filled with heavy equipment meant for burrowing deep into the earth beneath the city. By now the pit had bottomed out, and the pile drivers were at work-the pile drivers he'd heard from deep within the tunnels-driving huge pilings into the bedrock to anchor the foundation of the skyscraper that wouldn't be completed for another two years.
All around them there were wooden forms for the concrete that would soon begin to fill the pit, and as Jeff gazed at them, he realized that just a couple of weeks later-maybe even less-the opening he'd just come through would have been blocked off forever.
But it didn't matter. None of it mattered, for he was free- free of the Tombs and free of the tunnels and free of the certain death that was all that had awaited him a few hours ago.
Reaching out and pulling Heather close, Jeff drew the cool afternoon air deep into his lungs, then leaned down and put his lips close to Heather's ear. "What do you say we walk home?" he murmured. "I think I'd just as soon skip the subway."