City of Savages (13 page)

19    PHEE

“Time’s a-wastin’, desperado,” Sam says from across the alley. “At the fifteen-minute mark, I’m taking that revolver, grabbing my brother and Lerner, and hightailing it off this island.”

I raise the gun to remind Sam who’s got the ammo here. “You’re not leaving without us.”

Even though I fake calm pretty well, I’m starting to freak out. I need to get out of here, to breathe, and think. My sister and Mom are at the Carlyle, maybe in danger, maybe caught, and I’m just supposed to stay here, in this tiny alley, with this jerkoff, and be
patient
?

I think about flying the coop and just taking off for the Carlyle myself, but I know it’s impossible. Even if I wanted to run, we can hear the Carlyle door guards searching Madison Avenue, trying to find the holdout who howled like a psycho in front of the hotel and then dashed into the night. I’ll give him this, Sam’s cover let me sneak up Fifth and across 77th. And I don’t know how Sam pulled it off, but he lost the guards and somehow found me hidden behind this store.

“Why’d you come here, anyway?”

Sam sizes me up again. “Manhattan was the only POW camp we knew of still standing.”

“Who’s
we
?”

“Our army. England.”

I gulp. “You fought in the war?” I study him, long and lean in the alleyway’s shadows.

“Both sides had pretty much destroyed each other before I saw any action off base.” I watch Sam watching my gun. “But I was a Royal Marine.”

I have no idea what that means, only that it doesn’t sound good for me. I swear, I’ll shoot this guy if he tries anything,
Royal Marine
or not—if he pushes me. I’ve shot two people.

I’ve killed one
.

I shake my head. I don’t want to think about Darren right now.

“How many bullets are actually left in that thing?” Sam nods his head towards my small pistol and shuffles a little closer. Then the bastard actually smirks. “Mind if I take a look?”

I position the gun in between my knees, so that it’s ready to go. “That’s close enough.”

Now it has to be at least twelve minutes. Thirteen even.

Sky, Sky, Sky
. I focus, try with all my might to tap into her mind and bug her.
I’m worried. Please hurry your ass up
.

20    SKY

I return to the stairwell breathless, Mom’s book tucked into the back of my leggings—our old torch in one hand, and the dead warlord’s gun in the other—to find a frantic, wild pair of Brits.

“A torch,” Lerner says. “You made a pit stop for a
torch
?”

“Lerner,” Ryder pleads with him. “Come on, that’s not helping, man.”

“We’ll need it,” I say cautiously. There’s no reason anyone needs to know what I have, what we’ve found in this journal, besides Phee and me.

“Well, that torch might have just cost us
our lives
.”

I listen, slowly catching the men’s panic. There are footsteps shuffling, and a stairway door swings open somewhere below us.

“We still have time. We need to get to the third floor,” I say as calmly as I can.

“That’s what I’ve been saying this whole time!”

I don’t answer Lerner—even though he’s only speaking up for the dissidents inside me, the angry Greek chorus that’s been howling during the agonizing minutes I spent finding the right keys to release the door’s chains.
How could you waste so much time? For a book of secrets? You would choose to know the past rather than to save your own mother?

I force myself to tune them out, focus only on moving quickly, quietly in the dark. All that matters now is getting Mom and getting out.

We creep down the stairs as the warlords inch their way up. They talk about inane things—who’s going to be stuck watching the fieldworkers tomorrow, who owes who a pint of vodka from old bets. It’s chatter, nothing about the murders at the zoo, so I know that the news hasn’t reached the castle. If it had, the full guard of warlords would be patrolling for us. My guess is there’s a squad or two, just rotating floors.

We reach the third-floor steps ahead of the warlords and slink out the door. I think we’re unseen, until I hear one of the lords whisper, “Wait, did you see that door open?”

The quicker shuffling of boots.

Then a long bellow, “Stop!” behind us. The warlords’ crawl becomes a stampede. We don’t look back, just race down the hall.

“I said STOP!” a warlord calls.

I stutter-step, eye the approaching lords, then glance down the long hall to our room. It’s clear we’re not going to make it to Mom’s. Lerner grabs the bow from Ryder’s hands.

“Sky, give Ryder your gun. Now!” He backs up slowly, nods his head at me. “Run and get your mother. Don’t look back.”

My heart is pounding, my vision is blurred, but my body jumps at his command, thrusts the old revolver into Ryder’s hand, and starts sprinting towards our room down the hall.

I hear shouts, barking orders. “Attack, do you hear me? Take them down!”

I burst into our room, shake Mom out of sleep, start throwing clothes and the remains of our half-eaten dinner into my book bag. She’s lying there, looking fragile, the sleep still on her, and I want to embrace her, just curl into her arms and forget the world.

“Grab a torch, get your crutches,” I say as I add the journal and the knife wedged underneath the mattress to my pack. “We need to leave. We need to leave now!”

Mom attempts to argue, but sleep’s tentacles still hold her captive. I throw her arm around my shoulders and try to propel her forward.

“Sky, wait—stop! What is this? What’s going on?”

“Mom, not now. Later, trust me. Where’s your coat? Where’s your shoes?”

We hear a gunshot, and then another, and Mom’s eyes fly open in fear. She thrusts her coat over her pajamas, stuffs her feet into her shoes, and lurches towards her crutches resting in the corner. “Where’s Phee?”

“She’s okay. She’s outside.”

There’s a heavy, panicked knock on the door.

“Lerner’s hit!” Ryder calls from the other side. “We need to get out of here!”

I help Mom to the door, then crack it open. “Watch her ankle, it’s sprained.”

Ryder nods and huddles Mom and me into his chest. Lerner’s behind us. He’s been shot by an arrow—his leg is red and raw—but he’s still managing to load our bow and get in one or two shots at the warlord team trailing us with knives and makeshift weapons. We move like a snake together, down the hall, down the stairs—

We round the marble staircase to the lobby, breathless, devils on our heels.

“Out the door!” Lerner calls ahead to Ryder.

Ryder pulls us out of the lobby, into the night. We’re greeted by two door guards coming from the east. They stop, shocked at finding us, raise their knives—

But Ryder takes the gun and shoots one of the guards in the chest.

“Drop your weapon,” Ryder barks to the other. It’s a younger lord—a man, maybe a decade older than me. He’s carrying nothing but a small spear.

The man slowly places his spear on the ground as we push past him, out into the night air. We race to Madison Avenue, with a team of warlords on our heels.

21    PHEE

“PHEE!” I hear Sky bellow, a shaky war cry across a dead highway, and Sam and I scramble to our feet and run out to the sidewalk.

Sky, Mom in pajamas, Ryder, and Lerner are being chased by a mob of whorelords up Madison. It looks like a parade out of somebody’s nightmare.

I wave my hand, start running towards them without thinking, on instinct. My gun out and dancing in the air, ready to rumble—

But Sam grabs my hoodie before I can get very far.

“Forget it, there’s too many of them,” he says. “We need to run.”

“Run? Where?”

Sam looks uptown. “The tube. We can lose them in the dark.”

He’s speaking gibberish. “What are you talking about? What
tube
?”

“Whatever, the subways. Underground.”

The tunnels.

No.

No. No. No.

But he doesn’t wait for a reply, just inserts himself front and center of this cat-and-mouse chase, and there’s not a second to waste, to think. Soon me, Sky, Mom, Ryder, and Lerner, we’re all following him, up Madison.

“Lerner, Ryder, the tube, on the left!” Sam shouts, and I swear Mom almost screeches to a halt.

“Girls, we can’t.” She starts trembling.

I put my hand on her and look behind to the army of guards. They’re literally on Ryder’s and Lerner’s heels.

“Mom, it’s our only option.”

We approach a set of stairs, with a green rusty gate that reads
77TH STREET ENTRANCE
and has a big green circle around the number 6. The stairwell cuts back and forth below us until it disappears into darkness. Sam’s already stumbled into the pit. But he doesn’t know what’s down there.

“Come on!” he calls up to me.

I stop at the railing for a second. The whorelords are still firing arrows behind Ryder and Lerner, who both push us into the tunnel.

“It’s the only way,” Ryder tells us. “GO!”

Mom gives a low, long wail, like an animal that knows it’s seen its last day, but I can’t listen to her. I turn my back on the whorelord army and tuck her walking sticks under my arm. Then I grab her hand, and Sky grabs the other. We stumble down and into the dark.

PART TWO

Save yourself. Whatever it takes. Save yourself.

—From September entry,

Property of Sarah Walker Miller

22    SKY

The warlords march over the steel grates above us, shouting, cursing, firing hopeless arrows into our abyss, literal shots in the dark. But they won’t come down here, not unless Rolladin puts a rifle to their heads.

No one comes down here.

I squeeze Mom’s hand tighter as we burrow into the deep, the torch that Phee now holds our only guiding light in this twisted labyrinth. We run past an abandoned box of a room labeled
INFORMATION
, then hop over a series of steel gates.

“Sky, where’s that other torch?” Lerner asks. He takes Mom’s hand to help her over the steel bar. “We need all the light we can get down here. And those guards will be down soon enough.”

“The guards won’t come down here,” Mom says, quivering, as she makes her way over the gate, wincing as she lands on her ankle. We hobble with her after Lerner, Ryder, and Sam, down another set of stairs. “Listen, we’ve already attracted too much attention ourselves. We should stay quiet and get back to the street at the next stop.”

We climb down onto the tracks. Sam stops to patch up Lerner’s leg, ripping shreds from his own shirt to wrap it like a mummified limb.

“What do you mean, no one will follow us down here?” Lerner asks Mom as Sam works. “You mean we lost the guards?”

“Yes, but now we’ve got a bigger problem.” Mom settles herself onto her crutches. Her hands are shaking so badly, she’s making the walking sticks tremble. “We shouldn’t be down in these tunnels—they’re not safe. We need to get back to the surface—”

“Lemme get this straight.” Sam looks up at her. “We’ve got a mob of ruthless guards prowling New York for us. We’ve got a clear-cut path downtown, underground. You’re positive no one’s going to follow us down here. And you want us to go back to the
streets
?”

Mom grips her crutches tighter and straightens her spine. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Sam.”

I haven’t really looked at Sam—my eyes have been on my woodsman, Ryder—but he’s younger than I originally thought, probably in his twenties. He’s wartime thin, with big, deep-set eyes, and his own shock of black hair.

“My brother, Ryder.” Sam points to my woodsman, then nods up to his older friend. “And you know Lerner, since he just saved your hide.”

“Well, all due respect, Sam,” Mom keeps her icy tone, “but you don’t know anything about Manhattan. This city is haunted. There are monsters down here. Not humans, monsters—”

“
Monsters
,” Sam repeats. He gives a frustrated laugh. “Funny, I don’t remember seeing any of these monsters when we walked through the tube from Brooklyn.”

“Well, you must’ve gotten lucky.”

Sam shakes his head. “Boys, any of you get the feeling this whole city’s gone mad?”

He stands and starts tugging my backpack open for the extra torch. I try to pull away from him, but he pins me against his chest. I give a little yelp.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Mom hobbles forward as Phee starts clamoring, “Hey, asshole, lay off her!”

“Sam, please,” Ryder pleads. “Easy.”

“Everyone, just . . .
stop
.” Sam tightens his grip around my shoulders. Then he whispers calmly in my ear, “Give me your torch, then you and your family can crawl back to the surface alone.” He looks at Ryder. “These chicks aren’t worth it, trust me. They’re just extra baggage.”

“Extra baggage,” Ryder repeats. He takes a slow step towards his brother. “You act like there are other places we have to run. But you said it yourself, Sam—Manhattan was the endgame. So where the hell are we going?” I hear Ryder swallow in the dark quiet of the subways. “I’m tired of doing things your way, all the time. These women saved our lives, so we save theirs. Baggage or not, we figure the rest out together.”

My cheeks begin to feel warm in the frigid tunnels.

“You’ve always been too quick to trust.” Sam shakes his head. “Too quick to play savior, Rye. Even still.”

That “still” holds the weight of worlds, and I want to know more. As I watch my woodsman, I realize I want to know everything about him, who he is, where he’s from, and where he wants to go.

“We do owe them, Sam,” Lerner says softly. “Ryder’s right about that.”

Finally, slowly, Sam eases his grip on me.

Under the dim light of the torch, Mom studies Sam, then Ryder and Lerner. I can tell she has a million questions for these men, not least of which is why they feel indebted to us. But something more powerful has precedence, has taken hold of her face.

A raw, primal fear.

“We don’t need your help,” Mom says. “We’ll give you a torch. Then you can run off into the night and take your chances. I don’t know what you and Phee have done at the Park, Skyler,” she says to me. “But it’s fixable, it always is. We’re not going to tempt death, walking down here. Rousing the tunnel cannibals.” Her eyes become glazed and gauzy under the torchlight. “We can beg for Rolladin’s mercy. We’ve done it before.”

“Did she say cannibals?” Ryder whispers.

But my gaze is fixed on Mom. I finally realize, after the rush and adrenaline have taken their toll and left me exhausted, that Mom has no idea what we’ve found out. What these men’s arrival even means.

And someone needs to tell her.

I unzip my backpack, careful to keep the other contents in, and dislodge the torch Phee and I used on the roof. Phee hands me our other one so I can light mine. I look at my sister. Who’s going to tell Mom? Who’s going to tell her that whatever demons haunt these tunnels are nothing compared to the one that rules the city?

“Mom.” Phee finally takes the bait. “We’ve found out some things you don’t know, okay? Before we go back to Rolladin, you need to hear this.”

Mom looks a little shaken but doesn’t back down. Not that I’d ever think she would so easily. “Fine,” she tells us. “You can tell me on the walk back.”

“Mom.” I put my hand on her shoulder, as if I can literally transfer my sincerity, along with everything I’ve come to learn over the past few hours. “We can’t go back. Not anymore. We can never go back to the Park again.”

*   *   *

After she finally relents, Phee and I tell Mom everything—well, almost everything—as we continue our cautious trek downtown. We tell her about getting caught on the roof . . . stargazing. We explain about the castle and the trial. How Rolladin and her Council have lied to us, stolen our freedom. Then we tell her about Cass, and about freeing the men.

We leave out the parts about the journal, and pledging allegiance to Rolladin. And about killing the other warlord. It’s not as if Phee and I have rehearsed this, but somehow we both know what boundaries not to cross, where the pressure points are in our story. There are things Mom just shouldn’t know.

She embraces us, thanks God for us, stifles tears. It’s a long time before she collects herself. I know she must be a mess of emotions, as I was when we found out about Rolladin’s lies. And I’m sure that on some level she’s livid with us for sneaking out after hours and getting caught. But when she does speak, there’s no scolding, or pleas to return to the surface.

Instead, she fires off questions to the men, hushed, desperate whispers. I know this feeling all too well—this raging urge to know—I’ve felt it ever since I laid eyes on Mom’s journal. Still, it’s kind of surreal to see my
mother
the one so hungry for information.

“I don’t understand,” she asks Lerner in front of us. “China attacked us in ’16. Manhattan was officially occupied. . . .” She turns in on herself, thinking. “By the end of ’17? ’18, even?”

“That’s right,” Lerner answers. “But by that point China had aligned itself with Russia and Korea, among others. Britain got involved right after they bombed your bridges and Ellis Island. If I recall, the EU splintered soon after that.”

Mom pauses, as if she’s reloading her question pistol, then fires off another round.

“Did you know?” she whispers. “Did the UK know they were keeping us on this island? That there were survivors?”

“Sam knows all of this best.” Lerner tries to defer.

“I’m letting them tag along,” Sam throws behind him. “That doesn’t mean I’ve got to catch them up on the last decade.” He’s a good five feet in front of Mom and Lerner, scouting the tunnels with the torch he managed to steal from me.

Lerner and Mom just look at each other. “He’ll come around. He always does,” Lerner whispers as he and Mom traipse forward together, and Phee and I fall into lockstep with Ryder behind them. “Put it this way, the whole world knew what happened here. It sparked another world war, drove most of the globe to align with one side or the other, escalated combat from land invasions and air raids to weapons of mass destruction.” Lerner pauses. “An escalation that ended us all.” He looks around the tunnels. “How much do
you
know?”

Mom pauses. “Hardly anything.”

“I remember it began that March of ’16,” Lerner says, “after a year of worldwide droughts, with trade concerns driving China to the brink. They attacked New York, DC, L.A., and San Francisco the same morning. Their plan was to take hostages, gain hold of four major American cities—”

“So how’d you learn to fight like that?” Ryder’s gravelly voice interrupts my eavesdropping, and I realize he’s talking to Phee.

“What do you mean, like how’d I figure out how to use a gun?” Phee says. “I guess I taught myself.”

Ryder laughs—a deep, melodic, hearty laugh. A good laugh. “No, though that was impressive. I mean how’d you learn to box?”

“Box?”

“Or fight in the street, whatever you New Yorkers are calling it now,” he says. “You had some serious moves.”

I try to ignore their conversation and tune back in to Mom and Lerner’s, but I can’t seem to do it. A thick, familiar wedge lodges itself in the base of my throat. So Ryder saw Phee in action. Of course he did: He must have been the shadowed stranger, darting away from the street-fights and back to the woods. And suddenly he no longer feels like my woodsman, but just another Phee admirer, another person floored by my sister’s bravery. I feel him slipping away.

“Wait—you were there?” Phee asks. “In the Park, last night at the street-fights?” The self-satisfied grin on her face nearly becomes a third torch.

“Yeah, we were in the woods when we heard all the commotion. We snuck down to that underpass and caught some of the performance.” Ryder gulps, then steals a glance at me. “What a show.”

“Yeah, the street-fights happen every year at the Park census celebration,” Phee says. “And they’re awesome to watch for sure. But being in that ring was a whole different story.” Then she promptly clarifies: “Not that I was scared—I stepped up, obviously. So wait, you were in the Park that whole night? How’d no one see you?”

“Oh, someone saw me.” Ryder laughs. “Your sister over there is quite perceptive.”

My cheeks become hot and flushed, but I’m pretty sure the torchlight reveals nothing.

So he
had
seen me, just as I had seen him.

I want to say something, to use the kernel of his comment to pop open a full conversation, but all I come up with is, “I thought it was you.”

“Wait, Sky, you saw these guys? And didn’t tell me?”

“I saw Ryder for a
second
, Phee. When I went to look, I didn’t find anything. I figured . . . I figured it was just my imagination,” I answer. “And you’d been through so much with the street-fights, I didn’t want to bother you.”

“Yeah, I guess you have a lot of false alarms.” Phee shrugs, and then flashes Ryder a smile. “Once Sky
swore
there was a dragon downtown. In the stock exchange building.”

“Phee, I was like eight,” I say, feeling my face growing hot again. “Plus, I had just read
The Hobbit
. It kind of made sense.”

“You read
The Hobbit
? At eight?” Ryder sounds impressed, and my face flushes with something new.

“I’ve read it a bunch of times since then, but yeah, I guess I did.”

“All she does is read,” Phee mutters.

I remind myself to tell her she’s being a brat later.

“Where do you get your books?” Ryder presses. “I’d think that crazy lady, Rolladin, keeps everything under lock and key.”

“There’s a small library at the Carlyle, but most of the good books have been taken,” I say. “We’ve found others during the summer, when we’re on our own. From the libraries when Mom takes us uptown, or from scavenged apartments. Do . . .
you
read a lot?”

“Whenever I get the chance,” he tells me.

Mom, Sam, and Lerner stop moving in front of us, and we catch up to them and grow quiet. Two giant forms have emerged out of the darkness. They’re like the abandoned taxis on the street, but monsters, like the one in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
, car after car stitched together by thin cables and wires. The monster cars take up the entire width of the track.

“What are they?” I whisper.

“Subway cars.” Mom skips over to me on her crutches. “People used to ride in them. This is what the tunnels were for before the war.”

Her answer brings me back to her words of long ago, to the story of her journal. But now the story’s leaping off those old crinkled pages. I look around, breathless.
This
is where Mom was when the Red Allies attacked. This is where she lived with Mary and me, for months. The shadows creep closer, the subway cars loom larger, and I feel my throat tightening like a lid on a jar.

“They’ve never seen a subway?” Lerner whispers.

“Long ago, they did,” she tells him. “I’ve made sure they never have since.”

She turns on her crutches to address our motley crew. “Listen, if we’re going to keep moving, we need to trust one another. I swear there are disturbed people down here,” Mom says. “We need to get out at the next stop.”

“Wouldn’t that be the first place your psycho leader would look for us—the stops along this 6 line?” Sam sighs. “You say there are . . . ‘monsters’ down here. But when’s the last time anyone was actually in these tunnels to see for themselves?”

“Sam’s got a point, Sarah,” Lerner chimes in. “The lies this Rolladin woman was touting, it’s like she has your entire city under a spell. Maybe the reason the subways are off-limits is because they’re the only real way of leaving the island, since all the bridges are gone.”