Run for Your Life (4 page)

Too bad you lost your cell phone, you could call for help on that! he felt like yelling at her. He knew he should leave, but her pitiful crawling and the freaked–out crowd were too delicious a sight.

Then out of nowhere, a neatly dressed, middle–aged Hispanic man shoved people aside and leaped down onto the tracks. He scooped up the girl in a fireman’s carry, as naturally as if he’d been doing it all his life.

Which meant he just might be a cop.

At the same instant, someone in the crowd yelled, “She not jump — he push! Him, in suit!”

The Teacher’s head jerked toward the voice. A gnarled, stooped old woman wearing a babushka was pointing at him.

People on the platform had dropped to the floor, reaching down to the hero and the girl. The train’s horn blared and the sparking brakes shrieked as it tried to make the impossible stop in time. It wasn’t more than twenty feet away when the helping hands from the crowd hauled the pair back to the safety of the platform.

“You! You push her!” the old lady cried, still pointing at the Teacher. You’ve got to be kidding, the Teacher thought, furious. Not only did the White Knight appear out of nowhere and save her, but some old bag lady had seen him. His fingers itched to grab her and throw her under the still–moving train.

But with the danger past, other heads were turning toward him. He put on his best charming smile and tapped his temple with his forefinger.

“She’s crazy,” he said, edging backward. “Wacko.” Instead of boarding the subway car, he turned and walked away casually. People still watched him, but no one was going to challenge a man who looked like him, on the word of a woman who looked like her.

But when he got to the stairs, he went up them fast and kept a watch for pursuers, just to be sure. Unbelievable, he thought, shaking his head. Whatever happened to good old–fashioned New York apathy? What a pain in my ass!

Still, there was always something to be learned from experiments. He knew now never to veer from the Plan, no matter how tempting.

He blinked as he stepped out into the different world aboveground. The light–and–shadow–striped gully of Seventh Avenue was crammed with people — thousands, tens of thousands of them.

Good morning, class, he said silently, as he pointed himself toward the geyser of lights in Times Square.

Chapter 7

Getting my kids cleaned up, hydrated, medicated, and back into their beds took me over an hour. I wasn’t able to tuck myself in until after four A.M. Outside my bedroom window, the sky was actually beginning to lighten above the East Side.

Hadn’t pulling an all–nighter once been fun? was my last thought before I fell unconscious.

It seemed like just a finger snap later when my eyes shot open again. The sonata of coughing, sneezing, and wailing that had awakened me continued at full pitch through my open bedroom door. Who needed an alarm clock?

Being a single parent was tough in a lot of ways, but as I lay there staring up at the ceiling, I decided on the absolute worst one: there was nobody beside me to nudge with an elbow and to mumble, “Your turn.”

Somehow I managed to get to my feet. Two more of the kids were down: Jane and Fiona in the bathroom, taking turns at the Bennett vomitorium. A dizzy, pleasant fantasy suddenly occurred to me — maybe I was just having a nightmare.

But it lasted only a couple of nanoseconds before I heard my six–year–old, Trent, moan from his bedroom. Then he uttered a chilling premonition, another thing that fell into the worst–possible category for parents.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” his little voice quavered.

My bathrobe wafted out behind me like Batman’s cape as I hightailed it to the kitchen. I ripped the garbage bag out of the pail, sprinted back to Trent’s room with the empty barrel — and threw open his door just in time to watch him lose it from the top bunk.

Trent’s guess had been right, and then some. I stood there helplessly, wondering which was worse. That the thick rope of his projectile vomit had demolished his pajamas, his sheets, and the carpet. Or that I’d been forced to witness another scene straight out of The Exorcist.

I gingerly picked him up under his arms and lifted him out of bed, shaking the excess vomit off him into the mess on the floor. Then I carried him, crying, toward my shower. At that point, I was seriously considering taking up crying myself. It wouldn’t help, but if I wailed along with everybody else, maybe at least I wouldn’t feel so alone.

For the next half hour, while dispensing children’s Tylenol, ginger ale, and puke buckets, I wondered what the procedure was for getting a national disaster declared. I knew it usually applied to geographical areas, but my family’s population was almost up there with Rhode Island’s.

I’d been checking on our baby, Chrissy, every few minutes. She was still giving off more heat than the radiator. That was good, wasn’t it? The body was fighting the virus or something? Or was it the other way around — the higher the fever got, the more you had to worry?

Where was Maeve, to tell me in her sweet but no–nonsense way exactly how much of an idiot I was?

Chrissy’s hacking, crushed–glass cough sounded as loud as thunder to my ears, but when she tried to talk, her voice was just a weak whisper.

“I want my mommy,” she cried.

So do I, honey, I thought, as I did the only thing I could think of, cradle her in my arms. I want your mommy, too.

Chapter 8

“Daddy?”

The speaker was my five–year–old, Shawna, watching me from the kitchen doorway. She’d been following me around all morning, a faithful lieutenant delivering frontline dispatches to a doomed general. ‘Daddy, we’re out of orange juice.’ ‘Daddy, Eddie doesn’t like peanut butter.’

I raised my hand in a wait gesture as I squinted at the microscopic Sanskrit on a bottle of children’s cough syrup. Which patient was this for? I tried to remember. Ah, yes, Chrissy. One teaspoon for somebody two to five years and under forty–seven pounds, I managed to decipher. I didn’t have any clear idea of how much she weighed, but she was four and normal size, so I decided to go with it.

“Daddy?” Shawna inquired again, as the microwave timer behind me started beeping like a nuclear reactor approaching meltdown. Between tending to the sick kids and getting the well ones ready for school, our household had now apparently entered DEFCON 3.

“Yes, baby?” I yelled above the din, now looking around for the medicine bottle’s plastic measuring cup, which had gone AWOL.

“Eddie’s wearing two different–colored socks,” she said solemnly.

I almost dropped the cough syrup and collapsed in laughter. But she looked so concerned that I managed to keep a straight face.

“What two colors?” I said.

“Black and blue.”

Finally, a no–brainer. “That’s okay,” I said. “Cool, in fact. He’s a trendsetter.”

I gave up on trying to find the measuring cup — it could be anywhere on the planet by now — and started looking for an alternative. My roving gaze landed on my oldest son, Brian, eating Cap’n Crunch at the kitchen table just three feet away.

“Hey!” he said as I snatched his spoon out of his hand.

“All’s fair in love and especially war,” I said, drying the spoon off on my bathrobe.

“War? Jeez, Dad, I’m just trying to eat breakfast.”

“Slurping works pretty good with cereal,” I said. “Try it.”

I was tilting out the dose of cough syrup when I noticed that a pregnant silence had taken over the kitchen.

Uh–oh.

“Well, good morning, Mike,” Mary Catherine said behind me. “What do you think you’re doing with that spoon?”

I tried giving her my warmest smile while I groped for an answer.

“Uhh — a teaspoon’s a teaspoon, right?” I said.

“Not with medicine, it’s not.” Mary Catherine set a shopping bag on the counter and took out a fresh new package of Vicks children’s cough syrup. “This is what civilized humans use,” she said, producing the bottle’s plastic measuring cup and holding it up.

“Daddy?” It was Shawna again.

“Yes, Shawna?” I said, for the thousandth time that morning.

“You’re totally busted!” She ran away down the hall, giggling.

Busted or not, I didn’t think I’d ever been so glad to see anybody in my life as I was to see Mary Catherine just then.

“You take over the brain work,” I said, and picked up a vomit pail. “I’ll go back to swamping.”

“Right,” she said, pouring the dose of cough syrup carefully into the cup. Then, impishly, she offered it to me. “Care for a shot of this to brace you up?”

“You bet. Neat, with a beer back.”

“Sorry, too early for beer. But I’ll make some coffee.”

“You’re a miracle, Mary,” I said.

As I squeezed past her in the tight kitchen aisle, it suddenly struck me that she was a very warm and lovely miracle. Maybe she read my mind, because I thought I saw her start to blush before she turned hastily away.

She’d brought a bunch of other supplies, too, including a packet of Flents ear–loop surgical masks. We armored ourselves with them and spent the rest of the hour treating the sick. And by we, I really mean her. While I stayed on relatively undemanding bucket–emptying and sheet–changing patrol, she took care of dispensing medicine and getting the survivors ready for school.

Within twenty minutes, the moans of the dying had stopped, and the living were in the front hall, lined up, scrubbed, combed, and even wearing correct socks. My private Florence Nightingale had done the impossible. The insanity was almost under control.

Almost. On the way out the door, Brian, my oldest boy, suddenly bent double, clutching his belly.

“Ohhhh, I don’t feel so hot,” he groaned.

Mary Catherine didn’t hesitate a second. She pressed the back of her hand against his forehead to feel his temperature, then lightly swatted her fingers against the side of his ear.

“The ‘didn’t–study’ flu is what you’ve got, as if I didn’t know about your math test,” she said. “Get moving, you malingerer. I’ve well enough to do around this house than to deal with your messin’.”

As they left, I did something I’d written off for this morning. I smiled with genuine good humor.

Cancel the National Guard, I thought. All this situation required was one petite young Irish lass.

Chapter 9

The Teacher walked into Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library, at eleven A.M. — still ahead of schedule. He’d stopped by his headquarters, a rented apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, and changed his appearance from head to toe. The Rolex was gone, replaced by a Casio sports watch. So was the Givenchy suit. Now he was wearing wraparound shades, a Jets cap, a traffic–cone–orange Mets spring training jersey, and baggy yellow basketball shorts.

No one could possibly have recognized him as the elegant businessman who’d pushed that worthless bitch in front of the train — which was precisely the point. To make the mission succeed, speed and surprise were key. He needed to strike like a cobra, get in and back out again before anyone even knew he’d been there. Melt into the crowds and use them as human shields. Exploit the multilevel, mazelike streetscape of Manhattan. Totally change his appearance — then strike again.

He found an empty folding chair in the park, removed his Palm Treo from his fanny pack, and brought up the other vital document it contained. To accompany his mission statement, the Plan was a fourteen–page blueprint for what he needed to accomplish. He scrolled to its last and most important page, a long bullet–pointed list. Almost in a trance, he read it over slowly, mentally rehearsing each and every possibility as he went along, visualizing how he would perform every act with calm, serious perfection.

He’d first learned about the power of visualization when he was a pitcher on the baseball team at Princeton. He wasn’t especially gifted — just a basic power righty, with a fastball in the low nineties. But his coach had taught him to go over the lineup of the opposing team before every game, imagining each strikeout in detail.

That coach had taught him a couple of more down–to–earth techniques, too. One was a velvety smooth delivery that made him seem faster. Another was to throw inside, which led to his well–deserved reputation as a headhunter.

And that was what had gotten him kicked off the team in his junior year. He’d plunked some blond pansy from Dartmouth so hard that the baseball cracked his helmet and gave him a concussion. The Dartmouth team assumed that he’d done it on purpose, because the asshole had gone three for three against him. The field had erupted in a bench–clearing brawl.

They were right that the Teacher had thrown the beaner deliberately, but wrong about the reason. What had pissed him off was the other guy’s hot girlfriend, sitting in the front row of the stands, who jumped up and cheered every time he was at bat. No way did that faggot deserve a girl like her. So the Teacher had decided to show her what a real man was all about.

He smiled at the memory. It had been his last game, but far and away the best of his life. He’d broken the Dartmouth third–base coach’s nose and all but spiked the ear off their catcher. If you had to go out, that was the way to do it. Too bad he’d never seen the girl again. But she’d remember him for the rest of her life.

The Teacher shook away the reverie and tucked the Treo safely back into his fanny pack. He stood, spent a moment stretching, then lowered himself to a runner’s on–your–mark stance, fingers digging into the gravel path.

He had his game face on now. It was time to get to work.

Bang! went an imaginary starting pistol in his head.

With his strong legs churning and gravel flying behind him, he bolted into a sprint.

Chapter 10

Step one of the plan was to create a smoke screen. The Teacher was racing along the pavement between 41st and 40th when he spotted a perfect opportunity — a middle–aged businessman jaywalking across Sixth Avenue.

Strike like a cobra, he thought, instantly changing the course of his pounding footsteps.

He crashed into the suit like a linebacker, catching him in a headlock and dragging him to the curb.