Hefting the hammer, Rebar half-turned back to the wall. Joe followed his gaze. Soot had settled on the mortar between the broken bricks, and black lines streaked down the side. That wall had been put up a long time ago, probably before Rebar was born. Why was he knocking it down?
“What are you after?” Joe drew himself to his full height, deliberately echoing Rebar’s military posture.
“Completing my mission, sir.” Rebar rasped his hand across dirty brown stubble on his receding chin. “The month is almost up.”
“Mission?” Joe stood straight, legs apart, hands loose by his sides, ready to run if he had to. Edison kept his distance from the man, too.
Rebar gestured with the hammer’s wooden handle. “Been looking for what’s back there for a long time.”
“Mind if I stick around to see?”
“No, sir. I do not mind,” Rebar said, but the scowl on his face indicated otherwise.
Joe leaned against the cold steel pillar and waited. Rebar picked up the hammer again and smacked it into the bricks, the noise echoing down the tunnel. Brick chips caromed off the wall, one slicing a thin line into Rebar’s stubbled cheek. He didn’t seem to notice.
Brick dust, soot, and crushed cement swirled around the hammering man. He looked like a genie emerging from the glowing lantern in a cloud of red and gray dust. Rebar coughed, spit next to the rusty tracks, and went back to hammering, counting each blow.
Should Joe offer to take a turn? What was the etiquette on performing public acts of vandalism with an accomplice? Lookout or criminal, those were the roles. That made him the lookout. He should sneak off. But he stayed.
A section of wall at Rebar’s shoulder height gave, toppling forward to create a dark hole. Joe blinked in surprise. He pushed off the pillar and stood straight.
Joe fidgeted from side to side while Rebar pounded the broken section until it was big enough to climb through. Joe wanted him to stop so that he could peek at the secret behind the wall, but he kept his peace. After all, the mission was Rebar’s, not his.
Rebar picked up the lantern and held it above his head like an old-time lighthouse keeper, warning ships away from the rocks. The man’s grotesque shadow leaped across the pillar and fell on Joe’s hand.
Without turning around, the man thrust the lantern through the hole. The tunnel around Joe went dark. The silhouette of Rebar’s head against the yellow light blocked Joe’s view inside.
Joe moved next to him, leaning forward eagerly. He couldn’t wait to see it.
“Permission to see inside?” he asked.
The horse-like smell of Rebar’s sweat blanketed the air, reminding him how much bigger, stronger, and crazier Rebar was than he. Rebar leaned away with a grunt, leaving the arm holding the lantern in the bricked-up room.
Joe peered through the hole. In the center of the room stood a single blue train car. Rust bloomed along its steel side like dark lichen. The window glass looked more than twice as thick as normal train windows, watery green behind a patina of dust. Bulletproof. A familiar circular seal adorned the car’s side — an eagle bearing a laurel branch in one clawed foot and arrows in the other. He didn’t need to read the words above it to know what they said: Seal of the President of the United States.
A legend in the tunnels. He had heard of a special train car that had carried Franklin Delano Roosevelt to New York during the Second World War, stopping two hundred feet underneath the Waldorf Astoria, a short walk from a freight elevator used to carry FDR and his automobile up to the hotel parking lot during the war. After the war, the car had vanished.
Until now.
Rebar had found it. But why?
A flash of ivory drew Joe’s eye to the top of the car. Thick dust blanketed old bones. A tiny skull, long arm bones, fragile-looking ribs. A child’s skeleton.
A train passed a hundred feet behind them. The ground shook. A piece of broken brick clattered into the room, and the skeleton on top of the car shivered. Rebar’s arm twitched. Moving light scattered shadows around the room as if a thousand ghosts danced there, finally set free.
Joe shifted his gaze from the dancing shadows to the left wall. Olive-green fabric covered with dust leaned against the stone. On the train ties next to the green pile rested a pale orb with a hole in the back.
A skull.
The green rags? An Army uniform covering a skeleton. At the end of one green arm a dusty gun lay atop the rusty train track. The man had shot himself in the head.
On the ground between the skull and the uniform-clad skeleton lay a set of round wire-framed eyeglasses, one lens a spider’s web of cracks. A man died there, long ago. Not just one (cyan). Two (blue). Close to the wall, a second skeleton wore a long coat that looked as if it had once been white.
He realized it from their postures — the men had been walled in alive.
As much as he was repulsed by their terrible deaths, the mystery intrigued him. Who had walled them in here? And why had Rebar searched for them and brought them to light?
Rebar’s arm trembled. Shadows formed and broke. Joe withdrew his head.
“I found it,” Rebar whispered. “It will save me, the treasure in there.”
“Treasure?”
Rebar lowered the lantern to the dirt. He fingered the greasy handle of his hammer. “It’s mine, sir.”
Joe’s heart raced. They were alone down here. No one to stop Rebar from doing whatever he wanted. Possibilities clicked through his head, but it came down to fight-or-flight. Rebar was bigger than he was, armed with a hammer, and insane.
He took a careful backward step. “I understand that. It’s yours.”
Rebar cocked his head as if listening.
The tunnel was silent. Joe backed up, eyes on the hammer. He came up hard against the pillar.
“We need to tell them, sir,” Rebar said. “Before the end of the month.”
“Tell them what?” Joe asked. His heart thudded against his ribs. He wasn’t an action hero, he was a nerd. He couldn’t disarm a man with a hammer. Next to him, Edison growled.
“You don’t know?” Rebar asked. “What’s your name? What are you doing here?”
Rebar’s muscles corded in his neck. He lifted the hammer and advanced on Joe.
Joe ran. He focused on the tracks in front of him, the tracks that had carried FDR’s train here all those years ago. If the silver rails tripped him up, he was dead. Rebar was crazy, and he’d use that hammer if he could.
Think, he told himself. Find a safe place. He headed back for the open room. Trains pulled in and out of there, sometimes, at this time of night. A driver might see him, help him.
He wasn’t a brave man. Cowardice was to be ashamed of, he knew. He’d always tried to think his way out of fights, and run if he had to. Standing and fighting was never his favorite option. And Rebar had a hammer.
Joe veered off into an unlit tunnel. He had to make sure that he wasn’t being followed. Edison loped silently next to him, calm as always.
No sound of running footsteps on the tracks. Not even the grumble of a train.
Farther down the tunnel, he and the dog slowed. Joe kept glancing over his shoulder to see if Rebar followed them. No one did.
He took a shuddering breath before continuing. This tunnel connected with another not too far ahead, and he could follow that one back to the door that opened onto his own tunnel and his house. He’d be safe there.
What had Rebar uncovered? How had he known to look there? Joe might not be a brave man, but he was a persistent one. Once something piqued his interest, he wouldn’t give up on it.
He would return to the brick room later to pry out the secrets that Rebar had kept from him. He would go back. He wouldn’t be driven away from the truth.