Lucretia and the Kroons (7 page)

If this place did, somehow, have the same layout as Flushing Meadows Park then she knew exactly where she might find Sunny.
If Sunny is still alive
. She had the thought and sent it away just as fast. If this place had the same layout then she might find Sunny at their favorite place. The giant replica of the planet, built for the 1964 World’s Fair. Probably the most famous landmark in Queens: the Unisphere.

Loochie lost her footing ten feet from the ground and fell. The drop seemed to take days but eventually she slammed into the earth. She landed on her side, banging her hip and shoulder. She couldn’t keep her eyes focused but still she scrambled to her feet because she could hear the Kroons rushing through the grass. The brittle blades crackled. It sounded like the meadow was on fire.

Loochie ran from them, through the second row of trees. She didn’t think about her feet, shoulder, or hip. Her only thought was to find the Unisphere. She entered a second meadow of half-dead grass. Without meaning to, she let out a sharp laugh.

In the distance she saw a giant silver globe.

Flushing Meadows Park, the real one, was enormous, one and a half times the size of Manhattan’s Central Park, and the one here—
inside
6D!—seemed even larger. Loochie crossed the second meadow with a quickness that surprised even her. Her socks were soaked from the light dew in the grass. When the Kroons broke through the tree line behind her they looked like specks in the distance. She was that far from them already. But there was more ground to cover before she reached the Unisphere.

After the meadow she reached a concrete path with benches. The concrete was cracked and uneven. The benches were broken apart, splintered pieces of wood jutting out in all directions, as if the Incredible Hulk had come through and smashed each one. Loochie didn’t hesitate. She just kept sprinting.

As she closed the distance between her and the stainless steel Unisphere, she saw the one here wasn’t exactly the same as the globe in Flushing Meadows. In that park the Unisphere sat upright, in the same position as the world, tilted on its real axis. But here in 6D she could see the silver globe hung at a precarious angle. Instead of being perched up on its stand, tilting slightly but secure, this one teetered so far over it looked like one good shove would send it rolling away.

Then the terrible grunting and barking seemed close again. Loochie looked back, her pace slowing so she wouldn’t trip on the uneven ground. The Kroons had reached the concrete. All of them were there. Pit, Lefty, the Twins. They were at the line between the meadow and the concrete path but they’d stopped. All four of them had the same narrow, long builds. She would’ve guessed they were brothers even if Louis hadn’t told her earlier. They looked like four demons. Their decaying jeans and T-shirts sagged on their thin bodies. From a distance this made it look like they were shedding their skins. Again Loochie thought of Sunny. How had she survived them? How had she escaped?
Maybe she didn’t
. Again, Loochie brushed the thought away. The four males stood still and watched her patiently. What were they waiting for? She kept running. She wasn’t going to wait around to find out. Straight ahead to the Unisphere, hoping and praying to find her friend there.

The Kroons barked again, all together now, and Loochie looked over her shoulder. The last of the Kroons, the one without legs, had finally reached his brothers. The Twins reached down to lift him. What happened next, she almost couldn’t believe. The Twins heaved him backward and then chucked him into the air. They
threw
him at her. And as he tumbled through the air—could it be possible?—was the legless Kroon
smiling?
Yes. He was. He was. Hunting her. Hurting her. To them this was just a game. Having fun. Right then they seemed like boys at play.

At least until the legless one, Chuck, landed hard on the concrete. He slammed into the ground and the momentum turned him over twice. As he rolled he made a weird choking noise. It took a second for Loochie to realize he was laughing. And when he stopped Loochie had to stop, too. They’d thrown him so hard, so far, that he’d landed ahead of her on the path. Blocking her straight run to the Unisphere. Chuck was on his belly. He planted his two arms and raised his head and snarled at her like a guard dog. And now the other Kroons came screaming up the path behind her. They had her at both ends.

Luckily, Loochie knew this park. Knew what she would find just west of here, if it was indeed a twisted version of Flushing Meadows. The Playground for All Children. It had swings and slides and little tunnels and bridges for kids to walk across. Plenty of spaces for a girl like her to sneak through, hide under, disappear. Louis used to push her in the swings back when she was small. Loochie broke left, going off the path, headed toward the playground. She hoped it would be there.

The Playground for All Children was straight ahead. She even felt grateful to see the black fencing that surrounded the grounds. The tops of the fence were sharp, pointed. She made it to the front gates. They were open but when she tried to pull them shut behind her she couldn’t manage it. Each gate hung at awkward angles and she saw that they were broken, their hinges warped. Shutting the gates wasn’t going to happen. She just had to keep going. Disappear among the tunnels and slides. As she entered the playground she passed the green plaque that
hung on the side of every New York City park. A familiar site, the name of each park engraved in clear lettering. She barely looked at the words, ran three steps past it before she caught herself. Something was wrong. Something was off about the sign. Despite the fear she felt, the knowledge that the Kroons were closing in, she still turned back to read it. She read the four words, out loud.

“Playground of
Lost
Children,” she whispered.

She didn’t want to go in, but what choice did she have?

After five steps it was as if the rest of the park, the rest of the world, had been shut out. No sounds carried over. She looked around. Even the Kroons, their barking, was gone. She couldn’t see them, either. They hadn’t been that far behind her. So where were they? Nowhere. The faint breeze she’d seen brushing the tops of the grass, had felt against her skin, had disappeared. The air here was completely still. Even the sky seemed to be shut off from her now. She could still see the overcast grayness, saw a spark of lightning over the meadow, but she never heard the crack of thunder that should’ve followed. A moment after that she saw rain, faint droplets, falling in the distance, a rain shower throughout the park. But not here. Everywhere but here. Not a drop fell on the playground.

It was so quiet, in fact, that she heard her own footsteps on the concrete. And when she reached the padded play area she could hear the plastic wheeze beneath her. There wasn’t anything but some fencing separating this area from the rest of the park, but it was as if the playground’s fences were locking the world out, but maybe also locking Loochie in.

Loochie walked through the padded playground and just before she reached a row of swings she came across a child’s bike. It was upright. Made for a kid younger than her. Red, with rainbow tassels coming out of each end of the handlebars. It had one training wheel attached, on the left side. The right one was missing.

She stepped around the bike and toward the baby swings. There were four of them, in a row—black plastic. They were closed off inside a low set of black gates. From here she could see there was something sitting inside one of the swings. She opened the gate and the metal whined, making Loochie stiffen with fear that the Kroons would hear the noise. She stood there, the top of the gate in her right hand, and it took almost a minute before she could breathe normally again. Before she could walk.

She walked to the third swing in the row. There, tilted at an angle in the swing seat, was a toy school bus. She picked it up and when she did the bus’s little lights flashed and the toy rumbled out the sounds of an engine chugging. She balanced it on her open palm.

Loochie walked away from the swings still carrying the bus. As she moved to the next part of the playground, a big blue jungle gym with two yellow slides, she found more children’s toys, lying here and there. She stepped over two baseball bats and three small gloves. She found a length of jump rope in a heap. There were Frisbees and bright rubber balls, soccer balls and even tennis rackets. But no kids.

She passed under a silver awning, like a metallic tent top, that threw shade down on a portion of the playground. She found a Razor scooter there, still standing. She didn’t want to even touch it. Where had all these kids gone? As she passed the scooter she dropped the yellow bus. She hadn’t even realized she was still holding it. It fell on its side and its headlights flashed. The engine chugged, but Loochie wasn’t listening.

She stepped out from the awning. She just wanted to sit down. Where were all these kids? Were they dead? All of them? She felt—what?—weighed down by the thought, by the reality.
Maybe children just die
. They do. Sometimes. Loochie sat cross-legged and felt like she was going to melt. She covered her face with two hands. Her eyes burned as she began to cry.

She imagined Sunny, but not just Sunny, maybe all the kids who’d owned these toys, burned alive by the Kroons of apartment 6D. A place that was no apartment at all, but something else. Was it hell? Nobody had ever explained to her where hell was. People said it was underground, but how far down? She’d been riding the subways her whole life and she’d never seen a pit of fire filled with burning souls anywhere on the 7 line. So why couldn’t hell be located in a sixth-floor apartment in Flushing, Queens? What if she’d gone looking to rescue her best friend and got herself trapped in hell instead? And what if she never escaped? Who would take care of her mother? Would Loochie just die here? Starve to death? She didn’t even have a toy to leave behind. Eventually her body would wither away and there’d only be her bones.

But there weren’t any other bones here.

Plenty of toys, but no bones.

It was this realization that reenergized Loochie. If these kids had just died here there’d be bodies all over the place. There’d be something. She’d seen ashes fall from the tip of that
first Chinese cigarette she smoked. Wouldn’t bodies at least leave ashes, too? But there were none. Now Loochie imagined that all these kids, one for each toy, dozens of them, were huddled away somewhere. Together. And that sounded a lot better than being alone.

Loochie stood again. She located the Unisphere on the landscape. It loomed larger than it had before. Maybe a hundred yards away now. She walked to the edge of the playground and strolled along the fence line. She didn’t want to go back out the gates she’d walked through. Maybe the Kroons couldn’t come into the playground any more than the wind or the rain, but they could be waiting right on the other side of those gates. In the real world this playground had two entrances. Maybe this one did, too. She’d walk along the fence line until she found the other one and hope none of the Kroons was waiting there. She put out one hand and ran it along the fence as she walked. The tips of her fingers felt slightly numb, in a good way, as she made sure to brush every pole she walked past for good luck.

Because she was concentrating so hard on finding the other exit she didn’t immediately notice the sound of thunder rolling toward the playground. But as the sound got louder, Loochie looked up. The rain had already stopped throughout the rest of the park though the skies remained as gray as before. Loochie tried to track the clouds. She missed one fence post then another as she moved. Loochie saw only one cloud in the distance. It was enormous. That deep gray that signals a serious downpour is coming. The cloud glided across the closer meadow but it looked like the wind would carry it elsewhere.

But then the cloud shifted. She watched it happen and couldn’t quite understand what she was seeing. It wasn’t like when wind directions change and a cloud moving east begins to slowly move northeast. No. As Loochie watched the great dark cloud seemed to
bend
. There was no way of mistaking the movement. The cloud turned.

It steered toward the playground.

Toward her.

And once it changed direction it seemed to increase speed. Moving so quickly that Loochie barely stumbled back five or six steps before she could understand what that noise in the
sky really was. Not a thunderclap but the beating of wings. Like she’d heard when she passed that lopsided door in the hallway of 6D. Hundreds of wings. Maybe thousands. She’d passed the room and felt lucky she didn’t have to know what was causing the sound. But now she could see.

A cloud of rats. No, that’s not quite right. A flock of rats. The worst of the New York City varieties. The kind that plague subway tunnels and platforms. The kind that live in building basements, in the deepest cracks, and come out late at night to gnash through heavy-duty plastic bags of trash left on the streets for pickup. These were the big, bulky rats. Their fur was as gray as ashes, and their long thin tails as pink as torn flesh. She could already see their small, black, expressionless eyes. How many pairs? Too many to count. In every way they were familiar to her, every way except one: These things had wings.

Pigeon’s wings. Loochie had always found New York City pigeons’ wings to be quite pretty. The blend of dark gray feathers with nearly white ones, the iridescent rainbow flashes, made patterns that she marveled at. So it only horrified her more to see the rats bobbing on such beautiful wings. Each time the wings flapped the rat’s claws scrambled in the air, as if they were galloping through the air.

Loochie hurried along the fence line again but she couldn’t find the second set of gates. Instead she found herself slowing down. She kept looking over her shoulder as the cloud of rats drew nearer. As she ran she ducked down and threw her hands up over her head.

The rats were almost directly overhead now. Under the flapping of their impossible wings, she heard them squeaking, high-pitched shrieks volleying back and forth. A sound that burrowed under Loochie’s skin and made the sides of her face itch. New York City rats could chew through sewer pipes and industrial wiring in record time, so how hard would it be for a flock of them to tear through a twelve-year-old girl? To chomp through her clothes and even her skin until they were left to gnaw on her bones.