The Young World Read online

  Jefferson: “They run this bar?”

  I reach down and take the safety off my carbine.

  Ratso: “This bar and the whole building. Grand Central. They own the bank. They provide security. They’re pretty much in charge.”

  I sober up quick.

  Ratso: “What? What’s the problem?”

  Jeff looks wide awake himself.

  Jefferson: “We’ve gotta go.”

  Ratso: “But—”

  Jefferson: “Get out of my way, Ratso.”

  Somebody has his hand on Jeff’s shoulder.

  He sits down opposite us. A blond kid with high cheekbones.

  Cheekbones: “Take it easy. What’s the hurry?”

  CHAPTER 25

  CHEEKBONES SMILES and takes the olive out of my martini.

  “Having fun?” he says. He pops the olive into his mouth.

  I look around for the others. The only one of ours I can see is Peter, who meets my eyes and then notices who’s sitting with me.

  “Look at me when I’m talking,” Cheekbones says, his voice rising just a little. Then he sits back. “You know, when you were about to shoot me, I told myself that if I made it through, I’d track you down sooner or later. I never expected you’d just show up like this. How lucky can a guy get?”

  “I don’t suppose you’ll accept an apology,” I say.

  He grins. “Nah.” He reaches out and takes a chocolate-chip cookie from the center of the table. “How’s whatshisface? The kid who shot my pig?” he asks as he cracks the cookie with his teeth.

  “We were just going, dude,” says Donna.

  “You let bitches talk for you?” says Cheekbones, ignoring her.

  “Don’t call her that,” I say.

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll have to wash your mouth out with soap.”

  Cheekbones acts like he didn’t hear that. “So what brings you to our neck of the woods?”

  “They’re going to save mankind,” Ratso volunteers.

  “Shut up.” Now he takes my drink and downs it.

  “What do you want?” I say.

  He smooths his hair back, exaggerating his ease. “Restitution,” he says.

  “Tell you what,” he continues. “I’ll wipe the slate clean if you leave me the bitches. This one and the skinny little Asian one.”

  “Not gonna happen,” I say.

  “What the fuck is your deal, dude?” says Donna.

  “Oh, did I offend you? Guess what—I don’t care. Up here we’re done pretending everybody’s equal. If God wanted bitches to call the shots, he would have made them strong enough to defend themselves.”

  “Why don’t you try me?” she says.

  “Get your finger off that trigger, bitch.” Now he looks at Donna. “This is my house. One shot, and the rest of my tribe comes up here loaded for bear. We will torture you to death.”

  “Donna—take it easy,” I say.

  “You take it easy,” she says.

  “Come on,” says Cheekbones. “It’s no big deal. Just lie there. You’ll pay off your indenture in, like, a year. After that, you’ll be all nice and broken in. Find a sponsor, and you’re cool.”

  So that explains the girls with the armed guards. And the ones selling themselves on the way in.

  “You know what?” says Cheekbones, smiling. “I’ll even jump you in myself.”

  “Watch your language, cowboy. Do you go down on your mother with that mouth?” It’s Peter. He’s standing behind Cheekbones’s seat. Dominic is at his shoulder, looking scared.

  Cheekbones slowly lowers his smile and the drink.

  The point of Peter’s knife rests lightly on the pulse of Cheekbones’s neck.

  “Put the knife down,” says Cheekbones.

  “What’s the magic word?”

  “Put the knife down, please.”

  “No. But thanks for asking nicely.”

  “Is there an exit to the street?” I ask Ratso.

  “There’s some back stairs, but the exit’s blocked off,” he says.

  “Let’s go.”

  Peter puts his hand on Cheekbones’s shoulder and guides him up to his feet. He lowers the knife to the middle of his back.

  “You’re not getting out of here,” he says. “I’ve already alerted everybody.”

  I take the walkie from his belt. It’s switched off. “I don’t think so,” I say. “I think you were already here when you lucked onto us.”

  We walk to the back of the bar. The crowd and the music work in our favor. Nobody sees the blade at Cheekbones’s back.

  Dominic the waiter unlocks a door leading to a staircase heading down, and we all slip in. The landing is pitch-dark, and we take out our flashlights.

  “Are you going to kill me?” asks Cheekbones. I taste a drop of fear.

  “That would be the easiest thing to do,” I say. “Donna, you got any duct tape left?”

  We tie Cheekbones’s hands behind his back and bind his ankles together. I rip off a piece of my shirt and stuff it into his mouth, sealing it off with tape. He doesn’t do the old-fashioned moaning and whimpering thing. He doesn’t struggle or make noise. Instead, he looks an unambiguous message into my eyes. The message is, I will be the death of you.

  Well, maybe.

  I sit him down at the edge of the stairs that lead into blackness and debris.

  Donna looks him right in the eye and kicks him down the stairs. We hear muffled barks of pain as he tries to stop rolling and right himself.

  “All right,” I say. “We’re walking out of here. Everybody just stay cool. I’m betting that loser didn’t tell his people he’d found us before he sat down to gloat. Any objections?”

  “Just a question,” says Ratso, raising his hand. “So—you know that guy?”

  “Yeah. Long story. I’m sorry we got you involved. You want to come with us? I don’t think things are safe here.”

  He nods. “Oh, I agree.” He thinks. “Well, like I said. Destiny.”

  “Sure,” I say, and head back into the bar.

  People are none the wiser, and we make our way out easily. Peter blows a kiss to Dominic as we go.

  We don’t say a word as we head past the bouncers fingering their guns. “You guys have a good night,” they say.

  When we emerge from the stairs to the corner of the Grand Concourse, the buying and selling is still going on. But it’s hard to look at it the same way. It’s as though a spirit hovers over the place—all its actions and transactions in service of the Uptowners. All of it seems like whoring now.

  There’s some sort of ceremony or ritual happening on the balcony at the other end of the hall. Some camouflaged guards stand around a boy, his head hanging. Another kid is reading off some sort of proclamation. Everyone in the Concourse has turned to watch. The high arched windows are blocks of blackness above them.

  “What’s that?” I ask Ratso.

  “Looks like a counterfeiter.”

  “What are they doing with him?” asks Peter.

  But Ratso doesn’t have to answer, because the guards put a stained hood made from a sewn-up Angry Birds T-shirt over his head and start strangling him with a rope. He struggles, kicking wildly, and the guards hold his limbs.

  We’re frozen in place as the life shudders out of him.

  “Shit,” says Donna.

  “Let’s go,” I say. “Take it slow. Nobody runs.”

  We head for the big marble stairs, but just as we do, the walkie I stole from Cheekbones crackles to life. “Lock the doors down,” I hear Cheekbones say.

  Above us, the guards at the exit doors pull them shut and prevent anyone from leaving, leveling their guns at anyone who gets near.

  “We’ve got intruders,” Cheekbones says. “Four male, two female. Mongrels. There’s a tall black kid and a couple of Asian kids. And that Mole Person who always hangs around the Bazaar.”

  “There’s no such thing as Mole People,” Ratso says, to nobody in particular.

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sp; As the guards scan the crowd, we try to look casual rounding the stairs. We walk toward the center of the Concourse. I can see guards all over the place getting the message:

  “Kill the fuckers.”

  There’s no order to stop, no warning shots. I hear the TACK-TACK report of an assault rifle, and a stranger to the right of me falls to the ground.

  The crowd scatters like ants from a hill getting hosed down as the guards take potshots from above.

  “This way!” shouts Ratso, running toward the passage to the old subway station.

  As we reach the garbage-strewn, sepulchral mouth of the subway, a lone guard raises his gun. Peter shoots him in the leg, and he goes down.

  “Sorry!” shouts Peter as we head farther into the darkness.

  I don my headlight and turn it on, the light playing over a heap of debris and rows of wire fencing that block our way out.

  “They’re at the subway entrance!” I hear an unfamiliar voice say. Then, the stomp of boots heading our way.

  We search the fence. There’s no way through, and Ratso is nowhere to be seen. Then I hear him call from a corner.

  “Over here! Quick!” he says. We rush over to find a corner in the chain-link fence that’s been torn from its mooring and bent backward.

  We follow Ratso as he shimmies through. My leg catches on the edge of the fence, and I tear it free as the guards finally appear, silhouetted against the lights of the Concourse.

  Brainbox slips up to the hole in the fence and rolls something along the ground toward the guards.

  “Grenade,” he says calmly.

  I hunker down and cover my ears as the stun grenade goes off, and I watch as the silhouettes contort and stumble.

  “Where’d you get that?” asks Ratso, amazed.

  “The library,” says Brainbox.

  Ratso’s face registers confusion. “Come on, they’re gonna follow.”

  “How do you know?” says Donna.

  “Because,” says Ratso, “they hate Mole People.”

  CHAPTER 26

  SO HALF AN HOUR AGO, I was sipping cocktails, hobnobbing with SeeThrough and Peter in an episode of, like, Post-Apocalyptic Gossip Girl. Now, for about the fourth time in two days, I’m being hunted by murderous psychopaths.

  This is a great cardio workout. But, generally speaking, evading capture by cannibals, enraged hippies, and machine-gun-toting jocks? Not my thing.

  Ratso seems to know the terrain, which levels the playing field a little against the numbers and outright bloodlust of the Uptowners. He leads us through the dark as light from our headlamps splashes over bricked MetroCard-dispensing machines, empty ticket booths, redundant turnstiles. We jump from the platform and haul ass down the tracks. Every once in a while, a rifle-mounted lamp from the Uptowners’ guns catches us, and we dance between bullets that ring the steel support beams like giant chimes.

  I blame Jefferson, of course.

  This is what happens when you try to change the world. See, things may have been kind of shitty back in the Square, but they were at least dependably shitty. We had settled into a sort of groove. Then came this whole stupid adventure. When you go around acting all heroic and effing around with the status quo, the status quo responds by kicking you in the nuts.

  So now it’s first-person-shooter time. Sopping concrete with gray snowdrifts of God knows what. Rusting metal rails and crunching gravel. Slimy, spray-painted walls and scattered plastic cones. Any minute now, a mutant is gonna jump out of the shadows.

  Ratso, who seems basically to see in the dark, takes us through a side passage from the Lexington Avenue subway line onto a football-field-sized patchwork of tracks leading farther into the dark. I notice a sign that used to say LOOK OUT FOR TRAINS, which has been modified to say LOOK OUT FOR RATS. Indeed, we encounter a chorus of squeaking and skittering rodents as we run across the metal lines. I glance at a fleeing rat, and our eyes meet for a moment; I could swear she gives me a sympathetic look—like, I been there, honey.

  Ratso leads us on a long, looping sidetrack—dipping back downtown and then up again—hoping to shake the Uptowners. We huddle in a dank black alcove under some graffiti by somebody called Revs, and I listen for the sounds of boots over my roaring pulse and my ragged breaths.

  After a while Ratso says, “C’mon. We’ve gotta go farther down.”

  The flashlights of the Uptowners reappear and grope over the tracks toward us as we follow Ratso to a blank wall. He kicks it, and a camouflaged door opens, revealing a narrow set of stairs covered in grime and soot, like everything else under the station. We clatter down these stairs and emerge into another dirty plateau of rails; then sprint along them, uptown this time, the sounds of the hunters growing more and more dim.

  I keep running, quiet, tired, and scared, the alcohol pounding in my temples and sapping my strength. Ratso guides us through channels of bare rock, down long flights of stairs, along switchbacks, and down graffiti-painted hallways, until I have no idea where we are, what’s up, down, east, west. He never hesitates, navigating by some kind of mental GPS.

  Eventually he stops, and we listen some more. I can only hear the dripping water and the scrape of bits of paper being shushed along by underground breezes. I smell oil and tar and rot.

  Ratso’s listening with everything he’s got. His eyes are raised, sipping the air.

  Finally, he’s satisfied. He disappears through a hole in the wall I never saw. His head pops out moments later.

  “This way,” he says. “No talking until I say.”

  We slog up a narrow track, past a broken-down subway train. From the green 6 in the window, I can tell we’re back on the Lexington Avenue subway line. Then we duck into another tunnel, where the air is filled with dust. A big 61 is painted on the wall.

  I see shapes moving in the darkness, but Ratso grabs my carbine and lowers it when I take aim. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. And then I notice more shapes, behind our group, on either side… and the shapes resolve themselves into people.

  Mole People.

  They’re skinny and dirty, wearing ragged clothing and armed with machetes and baseball bats and homemade spears. They’re quiet as shadows. Before I know it, one of them materializes at my side—a wiry girl with matted blond hair and staring blue eyes.

  I half expect her to start fingering my possessions, like we’re in some movie about Amazon tribesmen or something. But instead, she says, “ ’Sup.”

  “ ’Sup, girlfriend,” I say.

  She looks about thirteen—really young for this world, though her size could be due to malnourishment.

  The rest of our pilot fish are youngsters, too—I’d say nobody over fifteen. That’s odd because youngsters don’t make it very far in New York. Not strong enough, not independent enough, not mean enough. You see a few randoms scraping by, and there’s some kids as young as SeeThrough in our group, but generally they don’t live long in the Rough and Tumble.

  Ratso is on a first-name basis with everybody; or maybe I should say a nickname basis. The Moles have names like Gaga, Bieber, and Honey Boo Boo, which I’m guessing their parents didn’t give them. There appear to be at least three Bellas. My little friend is called Taylor.

  Our fixer paves our way with a big fat smile, like in that Peter and the Wolf cartoon where the kid is high-stepping it at the end with a snapping wolf hanging from a pole.

  The tunnel widens into a platform. Past that, illuminated by a bunch of campfires, there’s a work site dotted with abandoned construction equipment. Tents are staked into the dirt all over—everything from cute little kids’ pup tents with grimy cartoon animals all over them to big canvas deals. I see shadow people through the nylon, faces peeping up from plates of food, lit by the flames.

  The cavern has decorations hanging all over the place. There’s a bunch of paintings with dudes in red jackets riding horses after packs of dogs, Asian tapestries, mirrors with fancy curlicued gold frames, shiny golden drapes. Puffy couches and ornate chairs li
ne the walls, and there’s a gigantic grandfather clock with four faces sitting in the middle of the jumbled tents.

  Ratso: “My house. Not bad, huh?”

  Me: “Groovy.”

  Kids are pouring out of the tents to gawk at us. I figure maybe seventy or eighty in all.

  I’d call their look “Insane Tween Posse.” There’s some black-clad emo happening, especially among the outnumbered boys. But most of them are decked out in crappy mall fashion, accessorized like they’re wearing everything they have in case they need to move at a moment’s notice.

  Ratso: “Visitors! Be cool, everybody! Nothing to be afraid of!”

  I wonder who he’s trying to convince—them or us. We’re surrounded, seriously outnumbered, and generally pulverized.

  The Moles kind of circle around us for looky-loos, and nobody knows what to say. Peter tries to break the ice with, “We come in peace,” but nobody laughs.

  Silence.

  Ratso: “Well, come on, make them welcome and stuff.” Still nothing.

  I rack my brain for something to break the ice. Turn to Taylor.

  Me: “Ummm… that skirt’s really cute?”

  Her robin’s-egg-blue thousand-yard stare, set off against the filth of her face, suddenly twinkles away as she smiles. “Really? I got it at Urban Outfitters. Before, you know.”

  Me: “Totally suits you.”

  Taylor: “Your skin’s really beautiful. I would kill to have skin like that.”

  Some more girls step forward.

  Mole Girl: “You’re so pretty. Isn’t she pretty?”

  Another: “And she’s so skinny. Uccch. I wish I was that skinny.” (She is.)

  Another: “Your hair looks awesome.”

  As the International Language of Girl builds cultural bridges, the boys look lost.

  Jefferson (to some kid): “Um, your shirt is cool?”

  There’s a clanging sound, and everybody looks up at an old railway car that looms over the platform.

  Talk stops. Ratso goes tense.

  Two girls appear in the car’s doorway. One looks like a kind of Victorian Morticia Addams; the other one’s a psychedelic cowgirl—Day-Glo colors, pink raccoon eye shadow, glittery hat. They look, stylistic gulfs aside, related. The Harajuku Twins, I think.