Authors: Scott Cramer
Abby finally reached the next station. Were it not for her race against dawn, she would have crumpled into a fetal position and slept. With daylight approaching, she returned the hammer to her pack and put the flashlight into one of the watertight containers.
She battled her way up the escalator, upstream the whole way. The smell of fresh air and bellow of howling wind informed her that the storm had not abated and she was getting nearer to the street level. Through a revolving door of metal bars, she spotted what she thought was the East River. If the Brooklyn Bridge was to her left, she had further to go, if it was to her right, she’d overshot the pier.
Incredibly, the bridge was to her left, but she might as well have been a thousand miles away from Pier 15. The revolving door wouldn’t budge. It was locked or rusted.
She faced two choices. She could battle the rats and return to the first station or she could battle them and try the next station, hoping it offered a way outside. This close, she decided to go for a new station.
She retraced her steps and groaned in disbelief. The walkway to the next station was on the opposite side of the tracks. The flashlight showed a ladder rising up to the platform. Between her and the ladder was a moat filled with the most disgusting water imaginable. Unidentifiable disgusting blobs floated down the rat river.
Something snapped inside of her. She was going to reach the ladder on the other side if it was the last thing she did. Abby removed the life vest from the pack, put it over her head, and yanked the string. The air bladders puffed out. She returned the flashlight to the plastic tub and cinched the pack tight on her shoulders.
Backing up to get a good start, she put her head down and charged forward. She misjudged the number of steps and tumbled into the tunnel river, choking on a mouthful of greasy, salty, putrid water.
She clawed, dog paddled and scratched her way forward, but her fingers slipped off the ladder, and the current swept her into the tunnel.
Abby tried to see the the bright side. Being carried downstream was a lot faster than inching her way along the platform.
~ ~ ~
Lieutenant Dawson sprinted down Broadway, one block east and parallel to Lexington Avenue. If Cadet Leigh was going to Pier 15, Broadway was the most direct route. He glanced left and right, thinking she might huddle in an alley to hide.
With the wind at his back, he felt like he had wings. Rain saturated the air, and he found it useful to breathe through his mouth with his lips puckered. It broke up the larger drops.
The Prospect Street intersection was two blocks ahead. Prospect led straight to the pier. As he crossed Avenue U, he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. The vehicle was on top of him in a flash, and he dived for safety. Fully outstretched, he hit the ground and slid, grunting as the friction of the pavement punished his stomach and face. The speeding armored personnel carrier missed him by inches.
He tasted blood. Dawson wiggled his jaw, figuring it was bruised but not broken. He ran his finger along his upper and lower teeth. No chips. He was most certainly bleeding somewhere other than his mouth, but it was impossible to know how badly with the rain hosing his wounds. He hopped to his feet and continued, exercising greater caution at intersections.
The sight at the corner of Landry Avenue and Prospect Street stopped him figuratively and literally. The force of the hurricane had blown apart a tall building.
He scrambled up and down the pyramid of bricks and steel girders in the road and raced toward the East River, hearing the roar before he saw it. He moved as close to the raging water as he dared go. The Brooklyn shore was dark, as was all of Colony East.
He thought Abigail was too smart to attempt to cross the river. Then he considered her state of mind. Doctor Droznin had infected her with AHA-B. The cadet was desperate. She had fired a weapon, and there was no telling if she had shot anyone. Dawson decided to comb the bank between here and the bridge, expecting to find her quivering like a frightened rabbit in the weeds.
~ ~ ~
With the life vest keeping her head above the water, Abby drifted in the underground river. She knew she was moving because the
ploink ploink ploink
of drips grew louder and then faded as she floated by leaks from above.
Where would she end up? The subway tunnels stretched for miles. Was there some end? Or many ends? Or did the tunnels form an infinite maze, looping around and crisscrossing? She feared becoming a soggy rat meal.
Without the ability to see, Abby had to rely on other senses to guess at her location. She sniffed and was reminded of low tide, the rot of dead clams and tang of salty kelp. She inhaled slowly, drawing in fetid airy tendrils of oil and gasoline. She opened her mouth and wagged her tongue. Her taste buds helped paint a fuller picture of the odors. She remained alert for fresh air, which would signal she had entered a station. But how would she know which way to paddle to reach the platform?
“Yo!” After shouting, she listened for the faint echo. Bats, she had read, operated by echolocation. They chirped and relied on the sounds bouncing back to navigate. As soon as she detected a change in the ceiling’s height, she’d dog paddle in that direction.
“Yo. Yo. Yo.” She counted to three between shouts, straining to hear subtle differences in the echoes.
Floating in the darkness warped her sense of time. Sometimes she felt like her entire existence in the subway river had yet to reach a single second. Other times, it felt as if she had been in it forever.
Her brain lit up like a neon sign when she caught a whiff of fresh air. Real or imagined, Abby could almost taste the hurricane. She plucked out scents carried in the winds: exotic African spices, sweet coconut, the perfume of flowers stripped from stems.
She called out more frequently. “Yo… Yo… Yo…”
All of a sudden, she experienced a cathedral of emptiness soaring above her. The void swallowed her shouts. She kicked and paddled to the right and soon bumped into something hard. She beached her torso on the platform ledge, hooked her left knee on the landing, and then levered up the rest of her body. Stretched out on the smooth cement, she congratulated herself for pulling into the station.
~ ~ ~
Lieutenant Dawson leaned into the wind, fighting his way toward the Brooklyn Bridge. His radio crackled with reports of the hunt for Cadet Leigh.
“Charlie Tango, sweep of Central Park Farm complete, over.”
“Roger Charlie Tango. Head north. Movement reported.”
“Zulu Foxtrot, Times Square clear, over.”
“Roger Zulu Foxtrot.”
“CDC all-points bulletin.” It was Doctor Perkins. “Code Purple. If the suspect is injured or killed, bring the body to Medical Clinic 17. Repeat, if the suspect is injured or killed, bring the body to Medical Clinic 17. Perkins out.”
Dawson angled his posture lower and drove his legs harder into the teeth of the wind. Flecks of debris plastered the flashlight, dousing the beam. He wiped them away until he realized the flashlight was useless. He pocketed it.
He reached the bridge without spotting anything that resembled a person. Unfortunately, he realized he might have stepped over Cadet Leigh and not seen her.
He spun around to identify the source of a sudden deafening groan. Above the roar of the rushing water, it sounded like the grind of metal on metal, something twisting to the point of breaking. The eerie screeching sent chills inward to his core, as if the cold raindrops were soaking through his skin and into his blood.
A crack, loud as thunder, brought his attention to the middle of the river. He blinked and held his arm up to shield his eyes from the buckshot of debris blasting through the air. Fifty yards away, the freighter, which had wedged itself against the bridge abutment before the colony had opened, rolled over. There was just enough light to show the enormous hull shifting. All of a sudden, the raging current swept it away like it was a toy boat.
Dawson paused in awe. Then he started back toward Pier 15.
~ ~ ~
Confident in her ability to navigate in total darkness, Abby skipped digging the flashlight from her pack and waded through the knee-deep water. She traversed the subway platform, zeroing in on the sound of rushing water.
She reached the base of the escalator. Trying to climb up, she strained to push her legs forward against the waterfall cascading between the handrails. The force drove her back.
Abby stepped aside and took a moment to rest. With new resolve, she placed her hands on the two rails and started upstream, pulling with her arms while pushing off with her feet. Pummeled by a torrent that threatened to take her legs out from under her, she inched higher, little by little. The higher she climbed, the weaker the force of the water became. Her progress boosted her morale and that, in turn, gave her added strength. She reached the top.
Stopping to catch her breath, Abby saw steps ahead of her leading up to a dark gray sky. Water cascaded down them, but it was dispersed, and she climbed up with relative ease. Nothing blocked the entrance. Nothing stood in her way to the outside. At last, she exited her free ride through the New York City transit system.
From the color of the sky, she guessed the sun had risen. Even though the storm raged on, the wind and rain seemed to have lessened. Something suddenly smacked the back of her arm hard, twisting her. A sheet of plywood blew by, skittering along the ground and then lifting into the air like a candy wrapper. Abby’s elbow throbbed from the impact, but she was thankful a sharp corner of the wood hadn’t struck her head. Wary that Hurricane David had more punches to throw, she continued cautiously.
Abby gulped in terror at the sight of the East River, a churning, angry torrent of rapids that seemed to defy gravity. The waves crested higher than her head. She spotted the tops of the windmills, their spinning blades a blur. She blinked in disbelief as a patrol boat tumbled downriver.
In the half-light, the surroundings looked vaguely familiar, but Abby didn’t know exactly where she was until she spotted the Brooklyn Bridge. With a lot of resolve and some luck, she had managed to land in the perfect location. All that remained for her to do was grab the rafts from the dumpster and launch herself from Pier 15. Then she realized that was a very bad idea. The river was out of control. Her inflatable vest and raft notwithstanding, the East River would silence the only voice that could announce what the adults were doing. She would drown. Instead, she’d hide in the dumpster throughout the day and make her escape that night.
She was startled by a flashlight beam. Forty yards away, the ghostly eye danced back and forth as the adult carrying the light ran toward her.
Abby bolted for the dumpster. Running with the wind, she flew five feet or more with every stride. She concentrated on where she planted each foot, trying to avoid paint cans, bricks and other obstacles.
“Abigail.” Her name whizzed by like a bullet. She turned and saw Lieutenant Dawson chasing after her. “Abigail, stop!”
She leaped onto the dumpster, and her forward momentum folded her over the horizontal metal lip, the force puncturing her life jacket’s air bladders. She scrambled for a toehold and got one. Gasping, she reached down and flipped up a corner of a tarp. The wind did the rest and the blue tarp sailed away. The rafts, each made of eight bottles, lashed together, were right where Jonzy had told her they would be. She grabbed a raft in each hand and jumped down. Landing in a crouch, she whipped her head back and forth, looking for the lieutenant.
She gasped. Only thirty yards separated them, a distance shrinking by the second. The river was also thirty yards away, and Abby picked an angle she hoped would keep her just out of the lieutenant’s grasp.
“Abigail. Stop. Please. Stop.”
Gulping air to feed her lungs, she choked on raindrops and choked harder when she realized Pier 15 was gone. It had washed away. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the blur of the lieutenant, and before her rose the blur of the river and an uprooted tree that it had tossed ashore. Struggling to carry the two rafts, she feared they were slowing her down and let go of one. The roar of the river made her take a firmer grip on the other.
She cleared her mind of all thoughts because she would have tripped over a single doubt. Abby had to put her fate in the arms of the hurricane.
The lieutenant was closing in fast, less than twenty feet away, on a course to intercept her at the water’s edge. She angled slightly to the right. Digging deeper into her last reserve of strength, she flung herself forward with abandon.
The lieutenant leaped at the same moment. Abby saw his expression of desperation, arm extended, fingers straight, back arched, ready to grab her. She felt the bump of him striking the bottles in her left hand. She let go and fell sideways into the river. The world flipped upside down and turned dark green and then brown.
~ ~ ~
Dawson scrambled to his feet. He kicked off his shoes, ready to jump in. He scanned downriver, watching for her head to pop up. “Abby,” he shouted. “Abby.” The wind pulled her name apart and scattered the letters.
Frustration shredded his insides as he calculated her likely position, his eyes darting back and forth over the writhing rapids. He saw hundreds of objects that looked like arms and legs and heads, but it was only debris swept into the raging water. Tree branches, chunks of wood, beards of white foam.
Gripping the crude flotation device, he raced along the bank and waded up to his knees, struggling to keep himself rooted. Pebbles and grit blasted his legs. He knew that too much time had passed. The volume of water was too great, the surge and suction too fierce. By now, her body would have carried to the bridge, if not beyond.
Spears of anger shot through him as he questioned his actions. He should have run faster, taken a different angle, jumped sooner. A sudden thought exploded into a thousand icy splinters. What if he had stopped? Abby might have stayed out of the river.
Dawson took off running again, lifting his knees high, pumping his arms. The plastic bottles tumbled apart and whipped together again with every stride. Running served no purpose other than to prevent him from plunging into a well of grief.