The Manhattan Hunt Club (34 page)

“Got him,” Jeff heard his father mutter. Turning away from the sight of the man he’d just killed, Keith said to him, “Let’s get going.”

Signaling to Heather and Jinx, Jeff waited only long enough for them to catch up before he plunged into the subway tunnel, turning in the opposite direction from the fallen man.

E
ve Harris heard two blasts of gunfire and instinctively dropped to the floor of the tunnel. Favoring her injured right hand, she fell hard on her left, and felt a sharp pain slash up her arm and into her shoulder. Cursing, she rolled over, shrugged the backpack and rifle off her body, and managed to sit up.

Gingerly, she touched her left wrist. The pain was so bad, she knew it wasn’t just sprained, but broken.

Out,
she thought.
I’ve got to get out.

Lurching to her feet, she started along the tunnel once again, feeling her way along the wall with her cut right hand, her left arm far too painful to use at all. Ahead of her, she saw a glimmer of light.

At first she thought it was an illusion, but a moment later she knew it wasn’t—somewhere ahead, somewhere far in the distance, there was the dim glow of a light. The pain in her left arm forgotten, her right hand once more clenched into a protective fist, she began to run through the darkness toward the beacon of light. Her panic washed away and her heart raced with excitement as her eyes fastened on the guiding light.

Then, so suddenly she had no time to prepare for it, her right foot connected not with the floor of the tunnel, but with nothing at all. As her leg dropped into an open shaft, her face crashed against its far edge, the concrete lip smashing the bridge of her nose. Screaming in agony, she dropped down the shaft, her body bouncing off its walls, her torn right hand spasmodically clutching for anything that might break her fall.

A second later she dropped out of the bottom of the shaft, smashing onto the concrete floor below.

She lay there a moment, stunned.

The pain coursed through every nerve in her body.

But she wasn’t dead. Not dead, or even unconscious, for she could see—see clearly—by the light of a bulb that hung in a metal cage from the ceiling a few yards away.

She was going to be all right!

She lay still for another moment, catching her breath, forcing herself to overcome the agony that possessed her.

Then, at last, she tried to sit up.

And discovered that she couldn’t.

Couldn’t move her arms, or her legs.

It felt as if all her bones were broken.

She tried to scream, to call for help, but even her voice had deserted her.

Then, from somewhere in the distance, she heard something.

Footsteps.

Slow, shuffling footsteps, but definitely footsteps!

Someone was coming! Someone who would help her! Hope surged inside her once again. She wasn’t going to die here—she was going to be all right.

The footsteps came steadily closer, and then she saw a face looming above her.

It was a man, squatting down beside her, peering at her. His grimy face was covered with stubble, his eyes were bloodshot. He leaned closer, and when he opened his mouth, his fetid breath poured over her like so much sewage. In response, her belly contracted with a great spasm of nausea, and vomit spewed from her mouth.

The man recoiled, staggering to his feet, wiping the flecks of vomit from his face with the filthy sleeve of his coat as he swore at her. A moment later he straightened and his foot lashed out, and she felt her ear split as the toe of his boot crashed into it. Then he was gone, shambling off into the darkness, muttering to himself.

As she struggled to clear her windpipe of her own vomit, Eve Harris saw the first of the rats creep out of the darkness, drawn from their lairs by the scent of fresh blood.

Her blood . . .

In vain, she tried to cry out.

But even if she had been able to make a sound, there was no one left to hear her.

T
hey were heading north in the subway tunnel. Jeff was almost certain he knew where they were—under Broadway—and what he was looking for should be just ahead. And then, in the distance, he saw it.

A streak of light, so thin it was barely visible. He moved faster, broke into a trot, then a run. Behind him he could hear Heather and Jinx and his father, their feet pounding on the concrete floor of the subway tunnel. They were between the tracks, the third rail on the left, and as they ran, the streak of light grew brighter.

Far ahead he saw another light. Though it was just a pinpoint, he knew it was another subway train, racing toward them.

“We’ve gotta get off the track!” Jinx yelled.

But there was nowhere to go—no alcoves cut into the walls, not even a catwalk! But the streak of light was only a few dozen yards farther along. “Hurry,” he yelled. “We can make it!” He ran faster, hurling himself along the tracks, racing straight toward the train.

He could hear it now, even feel on his face the rush of the air the train was pushing in front of it.

The rest of them were right behind him, and suddenly he was there.

A plywood panel, covering a hole in the subway tunnel’s wall, fixed to the outside of the tunnel so insecurely that the streak of daylight was obvious now.

“No!” he heard Heather yell as she realized what he was going to do. But it was too late.

Jeff hurled himself at the sheet of plywood, launching his body over the electrified rail, his arms raised, his body twisting so he’d hit the wood with his shoulder. If it held, and he dropped back—

His body smashed against the plywood. The nails holding it to the concrete squealed . . . but held, and Jeff dropped to the subway bed, missing the deadly third rail by a fraction of an inch.

There was a blare from a horn, and then the scream of brakes. Jeff looked up to see the train still hurtling toward him, and for a moment he froze, caught in the juggernaut’s headlight like a jackrabbit. Then another voice crashed through the cacophony.

“Down! Now!”

Instinctively obeying his father’s voice, Jeff dropped facedown into the gravel, then heard his father’s voice bellow out again.

“Fire!”

Over the roar of the onrushing train there was a blast of gunfire. Jeff shrank away from it, but it was over almost as soon as it began, and when the blasting guns fell silent, everything had changed.

Light, daylight, was pouring through the hole in the concrete that only a moment before had been covered by the now-shattered sheet of plywood. Jeff scrambled to his feet and, with his father on one side, Heather on the other, and Jinx shoving him from behind, hurtled through the opening in the subway tunnel’s wall. Then they were all blinking in the brilliant sunlight and breathing in the fresh breeze that was flowing off the river a few blocks to the west. Behind them, the subway train shot past, gone as quickly as it had come. As its roar faded away, Jeff looked out at the great excavation that lay before him.

It had changed since the last time he’d seen it, months ago, when his class in urban construction had taken another tour of the huge site where half a dozen buildings had stood. It had been a vast pit filled with heavy equipment meant for burrowing deep into the earth beneath the city. By now the pit had bottomed out, and the pile drivers were at work—the pile drivers he’d heard from deep within the tunnels—driving huge pilings into the bedrock to anchor the foundation of the skyscraper that wouldn’t be completed for another two years.

All around them there were wooden forms for the concrete that would soon begin to fill the pit, and as Jeff gazed at them, he realized that just a couple of weeks later—maybe even less—the opening he’d just come through would have been blocked off forever.

But it didn’t matter. None of it mattered, for he was free—free of the Tombs and free of the tunnels and free of the certain death that was all that had awaited him a few hours ago.

Reaching out and pulling Heather close, Jeff drew the cool afternoon air deep into his lungs, then leaned down and put his lips close to Heather’s ear. “What do you say we walk home?” he murmured. “I think I’d just as soon skip the subway.”

FIVE YEARS LATER

R
andall Converse’s grip on his father’s hand tightened as he gazed down the stairs. “Don’t want to,” he said, hanging back and tugging his father’s arm.

Stepping away from the stream of people emerging from the subway onto Broadway, Jeff squatted down so his eyes were almost level with his son’s. The four-year-old’s features had taken on the stubborn, frowning expression that was a perfect replica of his grandfather’s face when Keith had made up his mind and wasn’t about to have it changed. “It’s okay, Randy,” Jeff said, doing his best to keep his voice from giving away his own nervousness about going into the subway. Years later he still felt a twinge of anxiety whenever he went beneath the streets of the city. On the trains and platforms, he constantly found himself glancing over his shoulder, scanning the faces of the homeless who rode the trains and panhandled in the stations when the transit cops weren’t around. A suffocating feeling descended upon him when the trains took him into the tunnels, and sometimes he imagined he saw the faces of the herders peering out of the darkness. The claustrophobia lessened when he reached the brilliant light of the stations, but his anxiety only disappeared for good when he was back on the surface. He and Heather were both determined that their son would not fall prey to their own fears, even in the face of Jeff’s parents’ arguments. “Millions of people ride the trains every day,” Jeff had insisted when his parents—for once united, if only on this one issue—had expressed their shock that he would consider taking Randy into the subways. “I’m not going to have him grow up being afraid to use them.”

He could now see the same fear in Randy’s eyes that he’d seen in his mother’s when she’d begged him not to take her grandson into the tunnels. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said, brushing a stray lock of curly brown hair off the boy’s forehead. “This is just another train. You like the train that brings us into the city, don’t you?”

Randy said nothing, but Jeff saw the fear in the boy’s expression start to fade as curiosity replaced it. “And you want to see where I used to live before you were born, don’t you?”

Randy nodded, but there was enough uncertainty in his eyes that Jeff lifted him up into his arms. “How about if I carry you?”

“No!” Randy instantly objected. “I’m not a baby!”

Setting the boy back on his feet, Jeff took his son’s hand and together they started walking down into the subway station.

A familiar knot of anxiety began to form deep in Jeff’s belly.

“Now, this isn’t so bad, is it?” he asked as they settled onto a bench in a well-lit car a few minutes later.

Randy shook his head, but said nothing until the train moved from the station into the darkness of the tunnels. “What if it gets stuck?” Randy asked. “How do we get out? Do we have to walk?”

The thought of actually walking through the tunnels chilled Jeff to his core, but when he spoke, his voice was steady. “It won’t get stuck,” he reassured the boy. “And even if it does, someone will come and fix it.”

As the train moved north, Jeff sensed that Randy was starting to relax. As the stations flashed by one after another, so did his memories of the days he’d spent trapped in the tunnels beneath the city.

But in the end, the nightmare he’d lived since he’d saved Cynthia Allen’s life in the station at 110th Street had finally ended. He and Heather had been married a month after his escape, and nine months to the day after the wedding, Randy had been born.

With that, everything in their lives had changed once more.

He finished architecture school and moved back to Bridgehampton, since neither he nor Heather wanted to raise Randy in the city.

In the days following Jeff’s escape from the tunnels, there had been remarkably little publicity about the unusual number of prominent people who had died in such a short period of time. Not a word of the real story appeared in the press, and Jeff and Heather knew exactly why: The Hundred had closed ranks, and the members’ version had replaced the truth.

It seemed Perry Randall had been the victim of a mugger.

Carey Atkinson had committed suicide in the face of a failing marriage, mounting debts, and a looming scandal in the Police Department.

Monsignor Terrence McGuire had retreated to an isolated monastery in Tuscany.

Judge Otto Vandenberg had died of a stroke and Arch Cranston had succumbed to a heart attack a day later.

Eve Harris, however, had apparently simply vanished, and though for months afterward the media had indulged in endless—and ever more sensational—speculation as to what might have happened to her, even that story had eventually faded away.

The One Hundred, as anonymous as ever, silently filled the vacancies within their ranks.

The life of the city went on.

When the train reached 110th Street Jeff stood up and led his son to the platform. As they headed for the stairs to the surface, he glanced at the spot where Cindy Allen had been attacked.

The spot where the near destruction of his life had begun.

Nothing about that far corner of the station hinted at what had happened there almost six years earlier. Perhaps it was that very anonymity that gave him pause. He was still gazing at the blank white tile of the far wall when his son tugged at his arm.

“What’s wrong, Daddy?” the little boy piped.

His son’s voice pulled Jeff back from the past and he smiled down at Randy. “Nothing,” he assured him, swinging the boy up into his arms and starting quickly up the stairs. “Nothing at all.”

The anxiety of being in the subway evaporating in the daylight, Jeff lowered his son to the sidewalk, but didn’t let go of his hand as they waited for a break in traffic.

“You said you lived right by the subway,” Randy said, looking around at the restaurants and shops that lined the street.

“Up there,” Jeff replied, pointing to the back of the building where he could see the familiar window of his old apartment. “See? The brick building. I lived on the third floor.”

Randy gazed solemnly up at the grimy structure. “I like our house better,” he pronounced.

“So do I,” Jeff agreed as the light changed and the sea of traffic finally parted, allowing them to cross. “I like it a lot better.”

A couple of minutes later they came to the landing on the third floor, and Randy, recognizing the woman who stood in the apartment’s open door, pulled loose from his father and ran toward her.

“Jinx!” he cried out, wrapping his arms around Jinx’s neck as she lifted him up and planted a kiss on his forehead.

“Look at you! Almost grown up. Too big for a lollipop, right?”

“No!” Randy squealed. Wriggling back to the floor, he looked at his father. “Can I have one?” he pleaded.

“Just don’t tell your mom,” Jeff said, winking at the little boy. As Randy peeled the wrapping off the lollipop Jinx had produced from the pocket of her sweatshirt, Jeff glanced around the apartment. Even with his drafting table gone, it had the unmistakable look of students’ quarters. The posters on the walls had changed, and the brick-and-board shelves he’d built were now filled with Jinx’s textbooks instead of his own, but the paint was still peeling, the curtains hadn’t been changed, and the carpet was even more worn than he remembered.

“Hey, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,” Jinx said, grinning as she read his thoughts. “In two more years, I graduate, and then I’m out of here.” Her grin faded. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. If you hadn’t let me move in here—”

“You’d have found somewhere else to live,” Jeff cut in, not letting her finish. “You could have stayed with Tillie.”

Jinx shook her head. “I love Tillie, but if I’d stayed down there much longer . . .”

Her voice trailed off. They both remembered the rooms under the streets where Tillie still looked after her family. Most of the faces had changed. Robby had moved to the surface two years ago when the parents of one of his schoolmates found out where he was living and invited him to share their son’s bedroom. It wasn’t until they’d invited Tillie and Jinx for dinner and discussed the whole situation that Robby had finally agreed to try the surface again, and that had only been with the understanding that he could go back to Tillie any time he wanted to. He still went to visit Tillie at least once a week, and she emerged from her “co-op” every few months to have dinner with Robby’s new family. But at the end of the evening, she always looked forward to getting back to the tunnels. “Too complicated up here,” she insisted. “Too much to think about, too much to worry about.”

“So?” Jeff asked Randy as the boy began licking his lollipop. “Sure you don’t want to move in here?”

Randy shook his head. “It’s ugly,” he pronounced.

“Hey! Is that any way to talk about Jinx’s house?”

“The boy’s got good taste,” Jinx said. “Let’s go get lunch. I have two classes this afternoon, and then I’ve got to get to work.”

“Still working both jobs?”

Jinx shrugged. “The way I figure it, I didn’t work any jobs for so long that now I’m playing catch-up. By the time I graduate, I figure I’ll be even, and then I can cut back to one job. And that one is going to pay more than waitressing.”

Leaving the apartment, they went to the diner that had always been Jeff’s favorite and found a table by the window so they could watch the activity on Broadway. The mix of people hadn’t changed much since Jeff had lived in the neighborhood: mostly students with a lot of university faculty and staff mixed in. But there were others as well—tourists and shoppers and people just prowling the city.

And always the homeless.

An old woman—nearly indistinguishable from Tillie to a casual observer—pushed an overflowing shopping cart, and down the street three shabbily dressed men sat on the sidewalk, their backs resting against a wall, panhandling for change.

For a long moment both Jinx and Jeff gazed at them in silence, and it was finally Jeff who uttered the thought that was in both their heads.

“Do you suppose it’s still going on?”

Seconds ticked by as Jinx said nothing, but at last she shook her head. “It was Ms. Harris,” she said. “She was the one who passed out the money, and without the money, it never would have worked.”

“Ever wonder what happened to her?”

Jinx’s expression darkened. “I’m just glad she’s gone.”

Half an hour later Jeff and Randy were back in the subway station, waiting for a train to take them back downtown. “Who’s Ms. Harris?” Randy asked, looking up at his father.

Jeff hesitated, then said, “Just someone we used to know, a long time ago.”

“Was she a friend of Auntie Jinx’s?”

A southbound train roared into the station. Jeff clutched tight to Randy’s hand as the crowd of departing passengers swirled past them, then helped him step onto the train. “No,” he said as the doors closed. “Ms. Harris wasn’t a friend of Auntie Jinx’s. She wasn’t a friend of anyone’s.”

The train started to move and Jeff reached up with his free hand to grab the railing above his head. For a fleeting second, he saw someone peering at him through the window from the platform.

A woman, her face nearly lost in the folds of a ragged shawl.

He glimpsed her face for only a few fleeting seconds, and yet it terrified him. It was a face that looked as if it had been attacked. The skin was deeply scarred, the features distorted and twisted. It reminded him of the tunnels and the time he’d spent in them, seeing people who had been attacked by other people, or rats, or insects, or alcohol and drugs, or simply by life itself.

It was a face that was universal in the tunnels.

It was the eyes that he recognized.

They were the same eyes that had looked at him during the one moment when he’d thought a stranger might choose to help him.

And that person had turned away.

Now, as the train began to move, it was Jeff who turned away from Eve Harris. When his son asked him a moment later if he knew who the lady was, he just shook his head.

“No,” he said. “She wasn’t anybody. I don’t think anybody was there at all.”