The Young World Read online

  This is all established in hissed whispers as we skulk underneath the platform. McGee nods at me, and I give Peter a silent high five, and SeeThrough and I totally mangle another high five, and Jefferson looks into my eyes.

  Jefferson: “We’ll be ready if anything goes wrong.” He’s loading the mag of his AR with ammo we got at the Bazaar.

  Me: “Nothing’s gonna go wrong. Right?”

  Jefferson: “Right. Be careful.”

  Then he looks at Kath and says, “You, too.”

  Humph.

  We all make our way onto the platform and shuffle over to the exit.

  It’s still dark outside, but even so, you can feel a difference in the pressure of the blackness. A breeze is blowing down the stairs, bringing a fresh smell. The green of the park.

  Without warning, she starts up the stairs.

  I hear, “Where have you been, yo?” A dude’s voice.

  McGee: “I went down in the tunnels and got lost.”

  Dude: “Who told you to go down there?”

  McGee: “Evan.”

  Dude: “Oh.” Like, no argument.

  “So…” the dude goes, “are you available later?”

  And I think, That’s a weird thing to say. Not Are you around? but Are you available?

  McGee: “What about now?”

  Dude: “Dude, don’t tempt me.”

  Over the edge of the balustrade I can see a husky guy in camo with an AK slung over his shoulder, his hand on the trigger.

  The other hand, I’m guessing, is on McGee’s ass, because she’s kind of rubbing up against him, and I can see her face over his shoulder.

  I could swear she’s rolling her eyes for me, like I’m in on some sort of joke.

  I raise the carbine to my shoulder and say—just in kind of a regular Hey, there! voice, not a shouty Freeze, scumbag! kind of voice—

  “Get your finger off the trigger.”

  Said dude stops groping McGee and turns around. He’s actually blushing. His hand flutters away from the gun, and he squinches his eyebrows together as he tries to figure out what’s up.

  “Get behind me,” he says to McGee. She giggles; he doesn’t get it.

  Me: “Okay. You’re coming with us. Down the stairs.”

  Dude: “What?” He still doesn’t get that he’s been played.

  This is taking too long. So I decide to get all street, or, as Peter likes to call it, Git all rue.

  Me: “Did I stutter, bitch? Get down the fucking stairs.”

  He’s still processing. But his tone changes to pissed off.

  Dude: “Who do you belong to?”

  I don’t know where it comes from, but McGee has a knife in her hand, and suddenly she’s stabbing him over and over, his camo shirt is getting dark and bloody, and he’s falling to his knees, and still she stabs him again and again. Finally she leaves him.

  McGee: “Let’s go! He’s dead! Let’s go!”

  But he isn’t dead; he’s whining, “Wait! Wait!” But it’s already too late for him, I think. I run up; he’s not thinking of anything now but living and dying, and he actually slips the gun off his shoulder like he’s trying to help me help him—

  And Kath takes it from him and kicks him to the ground and out of my hands. His blood is on me and on the street, shining like rubies.

  The others, confused and blinking, emerge from the station.

  Jefferson: “What happened?”

  McGee: “Let’s go!” She sprints to the dirty gray wall of the park. She throws one leg over and then another, and she’s in.

  People in the building across the way—it’s a hotel called the Pierre, according to the awning—are starting to take notice of what’s going on. I see gloomy faces in the windows; someone opens up the glass and swears.

  Me: “No problem! Sorry! I’ll get him home!” Figuring that they might think that the guy bleeding out on the ground is wasted or something. It seems to work, and Peter, SeeThrough, Brainbox, and I jump the wall into the park—what’s the word?—unmolested.

  Jefferson is standing over the dying boy.

  Me: “Jefferson—now!” He turns away from the boy and runs up to the wall. He throws me his AR and lifts himself over. He looks at me for an explanation.

  Me: “Later.” I hand the gun back to him, and we take off after the others.

  CHAPTER 29

  WE TRAMPLE THROUGH rows of dead plantings under the trees and come upon a chain-link fence. We seem to be in a disused farming plot. Everybody is strung along the fence looking for a way out, and eventually Brainbox finds a meshed-in door of tubular steel unlocked.

  There are tall trees all around us, their branches interweaving overhead and obscuring the towers that loom over our backs. Expensive real estate, and good vantage points for firing on us.

  When I was a kid, I used to relish the moment when the natural eclipsed the man-made; just a little ways in, and you could tell yourself there wasn’t a city around you at all. And if you angled your head just so, squinted so that the buildings might be mountains, it worked. In the predawn, with the cars all dead, the effect is complete; nothing but birdsong and the thudding of our feet as we race among the trunks. Wash and I used to burst into the park; the linear constraints of the trafficked streets broken, the peril of crossing the road slipped, we loosed ourselves from Mom’s and Dad’s hands and ran jubilant and shouting into the fake wild.

  We burst into a footpath and, beyond that, a road through the park running north. There we pause at the verge and look for any sign of the Uptowners. But Kath walks out of cover and stands there totally exposed.

  “Nobody’s here, I’m telling you,” she says, and walks into cover across the street. There’s a bounce in her stride, like she owns the place.

  So we start across the road. It winds away lazily to the north and south. A mourning dove coos. All seems well.

  My foot sends something skittering. I look down and see, in the purple light, a little bone with some ragged flesh still on it.

  We come to a pond with a blocky stone bridge across it. I’m trying to piece together a map in my head, but this part of the park doesn’t register. Somewhere near here was a skating rink, I know that much, and east of that, close to the park walls on Fifth Avenue, the zoo and the planetarium.

  A splash on the opposite bank makes us raise our guns. Something has slipped into the water; ripples roll lazily toward us.

  There’s another splash, then another, and we see a row of dapper little birds conferring and diving.

  The penguins seem untroubled by our presence, and utterly at home.

  In the zoo there was a miniature rain forest, kept artificially humid, circled by a spiraling helix-shaped walkway. You could see parrots, snakes, and caimans, with cartoonish teeth and narrow snouts, as your skin wept, shocked by the change in temperature. Then you’d reemerge into the cool of the real world.

  Nearby there were polar bears making endless cycles of their enclosure, banging up against the chunky glass with their massive paws, which is why we’re alert as we follow the curve of the pond northward. It’s hard to figure how they would have survived, but the post-apocalyptic urban myth holds that they’re thriving, poaching the occasional human from beyond the walls. A softhearted keeper released them during What Happened, people say. Maybe he was worried that they would starve to death, or maybe it was just a symbolic gesture in tune with the catastrophe—let nature out to do what she will.

  People say they killed the keeper and ate his soft heart.

  We can make out to our right the low shapes of the zoo under the burly, boxy apartment buildings in the distance. I have a sudden desire to walk under the Delacorte Clock and watch the bronze animal statues as they circle. An elephant with a concertina, a hippo with a violin, a kangaroo and joey playing curving horns. Chimes clanging a jaunty tune in cold, skeletal rhythm.

  Animals on their hind legs playing instruments. Where did the desire to make them act like us come from? We weren’t satisfied
with having shoved them aside, enslaved them, exterminated them, so we had to make them, in our minds, imitate us, like an empire forcing its ways on conquered nations?

  Past the zoo, the tension eases a little. I catch up with Donna.

  “She killed the dude,” she says, her voice low. “Straight up shanked him to death.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Why? Ask her. You guys are, like, tight, right?”

  I can feel my face flushing, and I hope she can’t see it in the dim light. A waning moon is finishing its circuit, about to make way for the sun.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Whatever, dude,” she says. And she looks away, composing her face. “I—whatever.”

  Is she jealous? Why should she be jealous? She doesn’t want me anyway.

  “Just watch yourself, Jeff,” she says. “She’s a live one.”

  We pass by the skating rink, a square about the length of a football field on each side. We used to come here. The rink was wider than the one in Rockefeller Center, and Dad, who was kind of Japanese about these things, preferred the setting of the trees to art deco architecture and golden statues. Wash would glide—first gracefully, when he was picking up skating with his customary ease, then fast as lightning during his brief and expensive hockey phase. I would stutter around like a badly worked puppet as people steered clear of me.

  Now the melted ice is a black, stinking pool crusted with green algae.

  There’s something malevolent about a lake with squared-off banks. The water pointed and resentful. We hear the splash of more penguins, but I can’t see them.

  “This was a fish farm?” says SeeThrough, who has fallen in step with me.

  She isn’t joking.

  “Of course not,” I say. “You never came here? Your parents didn’t bring you?”

  She laughs, like it’s ridiculous. “No! My parents were too busy.”

  “Too busy? Like, they worked every day?”

  “Yes, every day,” she says, as if I’m stupid. “They had to pay for food, school, everything.”

  “I thought school was free for you. Because of your dad.”

  She laughs again. “Nothing is free!” she says, smiling. “You rich kids never understand that.”

  I never thought of myself as rich. I guess everything’s relative. I have a flash of SeeThrough, learning to live in a new language, working hard every day, ignored.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Sorry about what?”

  “Sorry I haven’t gotten to know you better.”

  “No worries,” she says. She holds out her uninjured arm. I shake her hand.

  Past the water, the land gently rises. I feel an ache in my calves as we climb toward an octagonal building at the top of the slope.

  It turns out to be the old Catcher in the Rye carousel, obscured under a housing of red-and-white-striped brick and a green cast-iron roof. The barred iron gates are shut and secured with chunky padlocks. We fan around the building, looking at the horses frozen in tense, lacquered agony.

  Across the way, through a tangle of wood, past smutted silver mirrors, I see Kath staring through the bars. She winks at me, her mouth twisting into an odd smile.

  I turn away and look to see if anyone’s following us. In the distance, I can make out a cloudy form hazing the undergrowth. Time to go.

  Past Sheep Meadow, a grassy green hangout now rioting with long weeds, we come to Bethesda Terrace, grand stone steps leading to a swampy fountain with a stone angel in the middle. We hurry down a path to the east side and slip between the boat house and lake on the left and a pond on our right.

  I flash to a day in preschool: I am climbing the Alice in Wonderland statue, my palms practically sizzling on the summertime bronze giant mushroom. Miraculously, someone starts giving away ice-cream sandwich samples. This windfall blows right through Mom’s treat embargo. Wash and I even get seconds. After working the soily chocolate from our fingers with our teeth, we hop down to the pond. There’s an informal regatta of model sailboats. Some are blocky and inert, some elegant and complex. A big man with a beard lets us steer one with his radio control box, and we wildly gyrate the toggles, sending the magnificent craft crashing into the side. He laughs and says no harm done. When we get home, Mom finds a book called Stuart Little and reads out loud about a clever little mouse who sails on that very pond and cuts his way out of a paper bag with his pocketknife.

  I ask for a pocketknife for my birthday, and Mom says no. I start wailing, and Washington says I’m too small for a pocketknife, and I say if Stuart Little isn’t too small and he’s a mouse, then I’m not too small.

  Past the pond, the ground shifts up again. We are heading into a narrow channel of rock when I see something crouching at the edge, a sleek assembly of tensed muscle.

  “Stop!” I hiss.

  “What is it?” says Peter.

  “It’s a fricking panther or something! On the rock right there!”

  Donna squints and then sees it. “Jesus,” she says, and looks angrily at Kath, like this is all her fault.

  Dawn is seeping into the sky. “We’ve got to move,” I say.

  Donna raises her carbine to her shoulder, stills her breathing, and fires at the big cat.

  There’s a resounding clang. The cat doesn’t so much as move.

  I laugh and start walking toward it.

  “Wait!” says Donna, but I’m not afraid.

  I walk into the channel in the rock and, reaching up, tap the bronze panther sculpture with the butt of my gun. It rings a low note.

  “Let’s go,” I call to the others.

  I lead them under a bridge and around the side of a hill to where a massive sandstone building juts into the park. A sloping wall of sectioned dark blue glass faces us.

  “This way,” I say.

  CHAPTER 30

  WE’RE AT THE PARK SIDE of Jefferson’s happy place, the Metropolitan Museum.

  We kick our way through the window. It would be much cooler to shoot it out, but it just doesn’t work that way with fancy glass. I’ve tried. You end up wasting a bullet, putting a tiny hole in it.

  So Jefferson and I kick and club the window, and it shatters into little fragments like crystals clinging onto a sheer film, like a curving skin of scales, and we peel it away.

  The room is cavernous under the slanted windows. Thin wooden totem-pole things tower into the air. There are masks and figures, roughly carved and forbidding, in glass cases dotting the floor. In the middle of the room, under a sort of roof of wooden panels strung from the ceiling, there’s a long, narrow dugout canoe. Hanging from the walls are these massive wooden sculptures—distorted, angry bodies, twisted animal forms.

  Jefferson: “Come on. We can rest here until night comes again. I know a place.”

  Jefferson leads us through the galleries without pausing. These are his stomping grounds, all right. It looks like he knows exactly where he’s going. It’s weird to see him so sure of himself when usually he’s, like, convulsed with self-doubt. Like, Would the doorway to the right be insulted if I took the doorway to the left?

  We pass through a big-ass room full of Roman stuff, busts of chicks with totally random hairdos and dudes with no noses. Another room of ancient-y things. Creamy marbles, big black clay soup tureens decorated with people running in circles. Some of the smaller cases have been smashed open and looted. We slip through a darkened gallery and into the entrance hall of the museum, which is, like, two stories tall, with balconies running around it.

  We hear a bellowing sound, like the groaning of a tree before it snaps. We freeze in place. Standing there, my body slips back a hundred thousand years—squirts of fear tell me that I’m being hunted.

  The roaring gets louder. At the end of the gallery, I see a mass of filthy cream yellow, smeared with dirt and blood.

  I stumble backward, terrified, and lift my carbine. As I fire, there’s a clatter of reports from the guns of the others.

  It l
umbers toward us, nudging aside big statues like they’re store mannequins. They smash and scatter on the floor. Bullets ping off the marble, chips flying into the air. Somehow, whether it’s the wildness of our shots or the animal courage of the bear, we’re not stopping him. As he crowds forward, we turn and run.

  Jefferson takes the lead again, and we cut to the side of the stairs and find ourselves in a dark room full of medieval stuff. There’s a big stone gazebo sort of thing in the center, jeweled chests, a statue of a lady holding a baby (Jesus, I guess—who else is it gonna be?). There are stained-glass windows set into the wall, but no light is coming through, so they’re muddy and dark.

  The next room is even bigger, with windows high up letting in sunlight. There are statues and plaques all over the place, but most importantly, a tall ornamental metal fence running across the back of the room with a hinged gate. We go through and shut the gate, and then we shift a stone statue off its stand and slide it in front to keep it shut.

  The polar bear lopes into sight at the far end of the gallery. Jefferson and Kath open fire, and the echoes batter my ears. I pull the trigger on my carbine until the flat click of the receiver tells me it’s empty.

  The bear disappears under some arches to the side of the gallery, and we can’t see it anymore. My head is buzzing, but I can still hear hoarse breathing, like something huge is dying. The shell casings dance along the ground, tinkling, and then nothing.

  “I’m out,” says Jefferson, pulling the mag from his gun.

  “Same,” says McGee.

  Then—faster than I thought possible—the bear gallops into view and slams into the fence, twisting and snapping the metal bars. Its face leers down at us, yellow teeth as long as fingers running with spit and blood.

  Peter fires his Glock, and the bullets ping and crack the bars and take the creature’s ear off. It howls and reaches through the bars. Jefferson has his sword out and slashes at it, but the bear actually yanks it away, and it clatters to the ground on the other side of the fence.