Forty Leap (9 page)

She opened her eyes, dazed, and looked up at
me. What I saw in her eyes shocked me.

“Mathew,” she said softly, sounding more like
a woman and less like a child than I had ever heard. “You didn’t
leave.”

Me? Leave? Had she thought…?

“There are people on the street,” I said.

Her pupils widened ever so slightly, just
enough to convey terror.

“No,” I said, taking her hand. “A lot of
them. Women and children, too.”

“Children?” she asked.

“Lots of them.” I smiled.

Together, hand in hand, we hurried down the
stairs, Jennie pulling me along at her quicker pace. We burst into
the street like two children desperate to catch the ice cream
truck. Stopping, I fought to get my bearings. Where had I seen
them? Where would they be now?

“Hello?” I called out. “Are you there?”

Jennie looked at me and I wasn’t sure she
approved. I called out again anyway.

“
Shhh!
” came a hiss from the
shadows.

We stopped dead and looked around. It could
have come from anywhere. On the street is where someone was truly
vulnerable. Between all of the burnt out buildings and wreckage
there were innumerable places to hide. For the patient, and ambush
was as easy to set up as was a place setting at the dinner
table.

“Where are you?” I called out.

“
I said shut up!
”

“Then come out,” I called, feeling bold.
Jennie held my hand so tightly that I felt it begin to prickle from
lack of blood.

From the left there came movement and a man
stepped out of ruined coffee shop. He was a thin man, tall and
wispy, with wild hair and grey stubble on his cheeks. His
fingernails were too long and there was dirt underneath them, but
he looked healthy and strong enough and I did not doubt that he had
companions in the shadows. He looked around, searching for
something.

“We’re alone,” I said to him and Jennie
squeezed my hand very tightly.

“You’re a damned idiot,” he replied. “What
are you thinking, shouting into the middle of the street?”

“I saw you,” I replied. “All of you. And
we’re all alone.”

He seemed troubled and, for a moment, I
wondered if I hadn’t stumbled across a loner by chance. Perhaps
even now the larger group that I had spotted was moving off like
the slow trickle of a curbside river.

Slowly, like a timid cat expecting food, he
moved out of the shop. Looking both left and right, he performed a
halting advance. He stopped when he was close enough so that we
could smell him. Or he could smell us.

“’All of you’?” he quoted. “All of who?”

But a sense of relief washed over me as I
realized for sure that he was lying. I pointed to the building from
which we had just come out. I pointed up to the shelf of concrete,
just visible eighteen storied up in the gloom. “From up there,” I
said.

He looked up. I guess he was trying to figure
out whether or not I was lying. He didn’t know what to make of us
and I couldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t have known what to make of us
either.

“Where are you going?” I asked him. “All of
you.”

He didn’t say anything, still unsure. But
there were just two of us and, I suppose, he decided that there was
little danger. Turning away from us, he beckoned that we follow.
Jennie hesitated, but I tugged her gently, not daring to let
go.

The filthy man led us back into the coffee
shop, treading over broken tables and chairs with ease, moving
behind the counter and into the back room. Although shielded from
the outside blasts, the room was in no better shape than the room
up front. It had been looted for sure. The refrigerators were open
and some toppled. There wasn’t a crumb to be found, but there were
a number of empty packages. Anything of value was gone and the rest
was simply scattered junk. I found it all amazing, but the man had
seen it a thousand times before. Even Jennie seemed uninterested in
what had become familiar surroundings. We moved through quickly and
descended into the basement via a set of emergency stairs.

Once below, darkness became the rule. There
were people hidden in the folds of obscurity. I could hear them
even though I could not see them. They were inept at hiding
themselves or I certainly would have had no idea they were there.
Shortly, a second man stepped forward. He was much bigger than the
first and his beard was tight and black.

“Did you search them?” he asked.

The wispy man didn’t answer, his expression
showing his shame. “They’re definitely American. I didn’t…”

The larger man brushed the smaller aside,
uninterested in his explanation. He came up close to us and I could
smell him. He had a musty smell, like he spent a lot of time
underground. I could see the bits of moisture clinging to his
beard. Only then, with him so close, could I discern his Asian
features and identify him.

“Detective Li?” I asked.

He seemed taken aback, which was the first
time I had seen him thus. During our one meeting, he had been
callous and imperturbable. Now, though, as not to be shown up, he
was staring hard into my eyes. I could picture his mind’s eye
cleaning me up, stripping my beard, changing my clothing, the
style… He was trying to place me and I was sure he would be
successful.

“Cristian,” he said. “The time traveler.”

Now I was taken aback. When told, my time
travelling or, more to the point, skipping was something to be
dismissed as lunacy. I suppose in the law enforcement profession
lunacy is recorded and filed away for later use.

“Mathew Cristian,” I told him. “This is
Jennie.”

“With an
ie
,” she added.

He gave her barely a glance. Turning back to
the wispy man, he said, “They’re okay.” And he walked away.

Looking over his shoulder, the wispy man
reemerged. “It’ll be about forty five minutes before we can get
moving again. We got to hole up in case someone out there heard you
yelling. If you follow this passage to the back of the group,
someone will give you something to eat.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Out, of course.”

“Out?”

“Out of the city.”

Jennie knitted her brow. “How’s that?”

The wispy man seemed to consider his answer
for a moment, then shrugged. “Warren knows how to go. That way if
any of us is caught by the Arabs, they can’t tell no one where we
went.”

Now that my eyes had adjusted to the
darkness, I could see that it was not absolute. There were glowing
spots all down the passage indicated by the wispy man. Since he
deemed it unnecessary to pay us any more attention, we turned away
from him and started to follow the lights. As we moved down the
passage, we studied the faces floating in the glow of the small
lights. They all looked the same, all like Jennie. Some held a
spark of hope, as if Warren Li, former NYPD Detective really knew
what he was doing when he said he was taking them out of the city.
Others were just as hopeless as ever. The lights they carried came
from candles and reading lights with fading batteries. There were
one or two flashlights that showed up brightly when we turned a
corner. Other than that, though, it was a pretty dreary world.

As we reached the last of the people, and
there must have been close to a hundred people, they thinned out.
Here at the end, people sat apart, each munching on something or
other. There was a man sitting with a woman and each seemed
responsible for two large rucksacks. They were going through the
packs carefully, counting on their fingers as they went.
Apparently, these were the grocers.

They looked up at us as we approached, the
man smiling, the woman clearly involved in doing some internal
calculations.

“Newcomers!” the man announced, as if we were
the first he’d ever seen and it delighted him. “I guess you’re the
reason we’ve stopped.”

I nodded, bemused.

He extended a dirty hand. “Daniel Tiri. This
is my wife, Lydia.”

I introduced myself and Jennie.

“Have a bottle,” he said, pulling out a
twenty ounce bottle of spring water from the pack. “You’ll have to
share.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “Thank you.”

He waved me off. “It’s all Warren’s anyway.
He just put us in charge.”

I looked at the handful of visible people.
“How long have you been wandering the city?”

He laughed. “We don’t wander. Warren lays out
a trip on the map and we follow the course.”

“How long does that take?” asked Jennie.

Tiri shrugged. “Two or three weeks,
usually.”

“Usually?”

He nodded again. “We make a circuit, picking
up as many stragglers as we can along the way. Once we get back to
where we started, we push everyone out the door. Then we start
planning the next circuit.”

I was impressed. I asked how many times they
had succeeded.

He thought about that a moment, muttering
about which circuit had included Felix. He couldn’t seem to
remember whether it had been the last one or the one before that.
Ultimately, he began to sound like a broken record and his wife
chimed in with the answer. It was four circuits.

Tiri was a talker and we sat and munched on
some crackers and dried meat as he told us about Warren Li. After
the invasion, the detective had found a way out of the city and
started setting up a network to ferry refugees to safety. The
stories surrounding Li’s initial escape were many and varied. As
with all heroes, they ranged from the likely to the ridiculous.
There was one in which Li was standing on a pillar of the docks at
the Staten Island Ferry with nothing but a broken baseball bat and
a whipcord of leather. Hordes of soldiers were shooting at him (and
missing) while he fended off the rush. Ultimately, he dove into the
river and escaped. In another version of the story he had only the
whipcord. After all, he could hardly hold the baseball bat with a
baby in his arms.

“I’ve seen Warren do some amazing things,
though,” Tiri told us. “He started the first circuit all by himself
and picked up me and Lydia early on. It’s tough to get people to
trust you when you’re a small group. That’s how the street gangs
travel. We ran into a couple of those, but Warren took care of it.”
He didn’t elaborate. As people latched on, Li had taken care to
evaluate who would be useful circuit to circuit. There were seven
in the group now and Tiri was pretty sure that that would be it.
Too many people would be too hard to control. As Tiri put it,
Warren wanted a small crew and a large herd.

Tiri spoke to us for most of forty minutes
before a lanky woman came forward and whispered something to
him.

“Time to go,” Tiri announced.

We backed away. For most of the time, Jennie
and I had remained silent. We hadn’t needed to question Tiri in
order to get the information we got and Jennie was mostly
disinterested. Now we watched as the people around us began to stow
their meager possessions in small bags. Children found their ways
to adults. Adults found their children. Tiri and the lanky woman
kept to the rear in order to make sure that no one stayed
behind.

We marched back along the same passage and,
eventually, emerged into the coffee shop. I could see Li out front,
blazing the trail through the debris. He stuck close to the
buildings and moved quickly and with purpose. His eyes were
everywhere and I imagine his ears were pricked up to the slightest
sound. How long, I wondered, did it take to get one hundred people
off of the street and into the basement of a coffee shop?

Only as long as it took two people to run
down eighteen flights of stairs.

Once out into the light, Jennie grabbed my
arm with a hiss.

I stopped and looked at her, suddenly
panicked. She was pointing further up the line and her face was a
portrait of rage and hate. The man she was pointing to, and her
finger continued to move as he did, was very average. Stooped as he
was trying to get over the mounds of rubble, it was difficult to
tell his height, but he was no taller than I am. He seemed young
and old at the same time, so I presumed young with life in the
besieged city having taken its toll on him. When people are dirty
and mangy it’s difficult to tell their ages. Like all of the other
men, he wore a beard. But it had grown in patches, betraying youth.
He had shifty eyes.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Shhh,” Tiri warned from behind us. “On the
street, we keep quiet.”

But Jennie would not be silenced. “He was one
of the guys that beat down on Devon and took Reesha.”

I stopped in my tracks. “Are you sure.”

“I saw all of them,” she said. “I’ll never
forget their ugly faces.”

“Keep moving,” Tiri whispered.

Jennie had stopped, too, and was looking
around. It only took a moment before she found a piece of pipe and
had it in her hands.

“
Jennie,
” I hissed.

She broke ranks and started moving forward.
She did nothing to conceal her actions and she made a lot of noise.
There was this barely audible sound issuing from her throat that
sounded both animalistic and terrifying. Noticing the oddity, Li
stopped and turned. He held up his hands to halt the line and began
to make his way back, throwing a glance at Tiri. There was no doubt
about Jennie’s intentions although I’m not sure Li had picked out
her target. As I watched him approach her, I thought I could
interpret his intentions and I did not like them. Quickly, I moved
to intercept. But Jennie hardly needed my help.

“You stay back, cop,” she called across the
street and now everyone was aware of the event.

He stopped in place, a rabbit’s look on his
face, and scanned the sky and the street. Then the rabbit turned to
a jackal and he made several short signals. Instantly, the Tiris,
the wispy man, the lanky woman, a large black man with a badly
burned face, and a boy who couldn’t have been any older than
fourteen got out of the line and began to usher everyone into the
nearest building. Apparently, he took no chances with being caught
out in the open. Even though a hundred people were easily visible
on the street, loud voices most likely rang out for blocks and
blocks in the dead and silent metropolis.