by Mark Alpert
But at least the wind wasn’t as strong here. They headed west under the tracks, wading through the avenue’s floodwaters, stepping around the abandoned cars and floating garbage. Jenna stared straight ahead and tried not to think about where they were going. In despair, she thought of her father and brother, wondering if they were still with the FSU officers on Sixth Street. She didn’t hear any more distant gunshots, so maybe the firefight was over. But that meant the cops would go back to their headquarters now and take Abbu and Raza to the detention facility. It was a horrible ending to her family’s story, all their years of struggle and sacrifice. They’d lost their jobs, their dignity, and now their freedom.
Jenna shook her head and cursed herself. She’d screwed up everything.
After ten minutes of slogging through the muck, she spotted the Ocean Parkway train station. On both sides of the street, stairways rose from the sidewalk to the elevated line, but after the riots the FSU had closed the station’s entrances. Thick plywood boards and coils of razor wire blocked the stairways. As Jenna waded closer, she noticed a yellow sign nailed to one of the boards: TRESPASSING ON THE TRACKS IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN. AS OF 6/15/23, THE FEDERAL SERVICE UNIT IS AUTHORIZED TO USE DEADLY FORCE AGAINST VIOLATORS.
Jenna was familiar with this station. She used to get on the Q train there and take it to her job in Manhattan, at Rockefeller University’s Molecular Genetics Lab. The commute was a long one, an hour and a half each way, but it had never bothered her. She’d loved her job. She’d joined the lab as a postdoctoral fellow—the lowest position on the research staff—but the lab director had let her participate in the most interesting projects. She’d contributed her ideas and helped design the experiments. After just two years she was promoted to assistant professor, the youngest in the history of the university.
In retrospect, though, she would’ve been better off if she’d never stepped foot inside that lab. She should’ve studied something else besides genetics. Maybe avoided science altogether.
Grimacing, she turned away from the boarded-up stairs. At the same time, she felt a sharp tug on her left arm. Derek stopped at the foot of the stairway and pulled her close. While keeping his grip on Jenna, he clamped his other hand around the edge of one of the plywood boards. With a tremendous heave, he tore the board off the station entrance, then used it to shove the coils of razor wire out of the way.
He nudged Jenna toward the gap he’d made. “Duck your head.”
She hesitated, glancing at the yellow sign on the board he’d just removed. “This is stupid. If someone sees us on—”
“Just go!”
She stooped down and slipped through the gap. Derek followed a moment later, pivoting his massive torso so it would fit between the splintered boards. Then he splayed his hand on Jenna’s back and pushed her up the steps, which were caked with pigeon shit. She winced as the wet droppings squished under her toes.
They went up to the deserted station, clambered over the turnstiles, and climbed another stairway to reach the empty platform. Jenna looked up and down the elevated tracks, nervous as hell, half-expecting to see police sharpshooters on the rooftops of the nearby buildings. But no one was in sight, not a living soul.
She turned around, gazing in every direction. The neighborhood was cloaked in darkness and squalls. Gale-force winds whipped between the apartment buildings and deluged the streets. Although plenty of superstorms had hit New York in the past decade, and especially since the Great Arctic Melt three years ago, tonight’s tempest was the worst yet. The Atlantic Ocean was taking its revenge on the city. Even the rich folks in Manhattan were going to suffer this time.
Jenna backed away from the tracks. She found some shelter under the platform’s steel awning, which deflected the wind and rain. Then Derek came up behind her with a switchblade in his hand.
He grasped her shoulder. “Don’t move.”
The fear in her chest was so sudden and sharp that for a second Jenna thought he’d plunged the knife into her. But instead Derek cut the plastic cuffs around her wrists, slicing the ties in one swift stroke. It took a little longer for Jenna’s terror to fade.
“My … God.” Her heart knocked against her breastbone. She shook her hands to get the feeling back into them. “Give me a little warning next time, okay?”
Derek closed the knife and put it back in his pants pocket. His face was blank. It was as if he hadn’t heard her. “We can’t stay here. We have to keep going.”
“Go where?”
“That way.” He pointed at the elevated tracks to the west, which curved toward the Stillwell Avenue station. “We’ll walk on the tracks.”
She shook her head. “No, that’s a bad idea. We can’t—”
“We won’t get electrocuted. They turned off the power.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about. You see how bad the storm is? The wind will blow us right off the tracks.”
“I told you, we can’t stay here.” His voice rose. He stepped closer and narrowed his eyes. “We have to go.”
Jenna stared at him. Maybe Derek wasn’t a killer, but he was abnormally intense, and now that she saw him up close she realized his appearance was odd too. His dark face was mottled with round patches of lighter skin, each about the size of a dime. There was an ugly red ulcer on the side of his neck, a wound that hadn’t healed right and was ringed with dead skin. His eyes were bloodshot and his lips were blistered, and every time he breathed he let out a low rasp from deep in his chest. Jenna was a researcher, not a doctor, but she could tell that something was wrong with him. And it seemed to be affecting his behavior, making him feverish and irate.
She needed to calm him. She held out her hands, palms up, in what she hoped was a soothing gesture. “Just listen for a second, okay? I’m grateful that you saved me from those FSU assholes, really grateful. But those same cops arrested my father and brother, and I need to help them. My brother, he’s disabled, he can’t walk or talk. That’s why I still live with my dad, so I can help him take care of Raza. And both of them are probably scared out of their minds right now.”
Derek shook his head. “There’s nothing you can do about it. The Feds have them. They’re going to jail.”
“No, listen, I can do something. I can find out what charges the Feds are bringing against them. And maybe I can find a lawyer who’ll fight their detention. So it would be best if we split up, you know? You go your way and I’ll go mine. And if you need my help with anything—and I mean anything at all—we can meet somewhere in a couple of days. I really think that’s the best way to handle it.”
He said nothing at first. His face went blank again, and for a moment Jenna thought he was seriously considering her proposal. Then he leaned over her, lowering his head until it was a couple of inches from hers. “Don’t even think about it. If you try to run off, I’ll bash your brains out.”
He was so close, Jenna could see the broken blood vessels in his eyes. It took all her courage just to stand her ground. “What do you want from me? Are you sick? Is that it?”
Derek nodded. “Yeah, sick as hell. But you’re gonna cure me.” Sweat dripped from his eyebrows. He stank like a locker room. “You’re gonna get me back to normal.”
“Look, I’m sorry, but I’m not a doctor. I can’t—”
Jenna stopped herself. She heard a distant roar, a rumbling, grinding mechanical noise coming from the north.
A quarter mile from the elevated tracks, a convoy of three black vehicles raced down Ocean Parkway. They were as big as tanks but much faster, plowing through the floodwaters on huge, monster-truck wheels. Jenna recognized them from news reports she’d seen on TV—they were armored personnel carriers, the favorite ride of soldiers and SWAT teams. Each vehicle had a fierce-looking machine gun on top and a pair of powerful searchlights. As the convoy sped closer, the searchlights turned back and forth, sweeping their beams across the abandoned buildings on both sides of the parkway.
Derek grabbed her arm. “Get down!”
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He pulled Jenna down to the platform, wrestling her to the wet concrete. Breathless, she sprawled on her stomach next to Derek and peered at the convoy, which slowed to a crawl as it approached Brighton Beach Avenue. One of the armored vehicles pointed its searchlights skyward, and the beams played over the elevated tracks, flashing horribly bright against the steel rails. Derek flattened himself, pressing his forehead to the platform, and clamped his hand over Jenna’s back to keep her down.
After a long moment, the personnel carriers turned left and moved on. They sloshed down the avenue below the tracks, going east. The rumbling gradually faded below the noise of the storm.
Scowling, Derek rose to his feet. “Those were Strykers. I rode in them in the army. In Afghanistan.”
“But the ones we just saw belonged to the FSU, right?” Jenna sat up and shivered. She was cold and exhausted. “And they’re going to Sixth Street?”
“Yeah. They’re looking for you.” He grabbed her arm again and pulled her toward the tracks, forcing her to sit down on the edge of the platform, with her legs dangling over it. “After they search all the buildings on the street and see you’re not there, they’ll come back this way.” He sat on the edge beside her, then jumped down to the tracks. Then he turned around and grasped her waist with both hands. “That’s why we have to go.”
Jenna was in even more trouble than she’d thought. Too stunned to resist, she let Derek lower her to the tracks. Then they turned west and started walking.
* * *
It was the hardest thing Jenna had ever done.
Even in daylight and good weather, walking on the elevated tracks would’ve been difficult. The steel rails were supported by wooden railroad ties that had been installed decades ago. The ties were splintery and waterlogged and littered with all kinds of wet trash—plastic bags, soggy newspapers, McDonald’s wrappers. And on this section of the elevated line, there were yawning, foot-wide gaps between the ties, which meant that a misstep could easily break your leg.
But the storm made everything a hundred times worse. Jenna could barely see where she was going, and the gales from the Atlantic battered her. Derek marched down the middle of the westbound track, exactly midway between the rails, stepping quickly and efficiently from one railroad tie to the next, but Jenna couldn’t keep up. Halfway to the next station, a powerful gust threw her off balance and she fell to the track. Her hands smacked into the edge of one of the ties and her knees smashed into another.
“Fuck!” She lay facedown across the track, dizzy and hurting all over. Her head hung between two of the railroad ties, and through the gap she could see the flooded street below. She waited a moment for the dizziness to pass, then raised her head and looked for Derek, who was twenty feet farther down the track. “Hey! HEY!”
He stopped and turned around, but he didn’t come back to help her. He just raised his right arm and pointed to the east. Jenna slowly and painfully stood up, planting her feet on the ties and bracing herself against the wind. Then she looked east, back to Brighton Beach, about a mile behind them. The armored personnel carriers were hidden behind the rows of buildings, but she saw the beams of their searchlights. They illuminated the sheets of rain falling on the neighborhood.
Jenna got the message. The FSU was hard at work. She and Derek had to get farther away. She took a deep breath and continued trudging down the track.
After a few minutes the storm’s fury subsided. The clouds thinned, glowing with the light of the full moon above them, and the winds died down, allowing Jenna to walk a little faster. The elevated line curved toward the ocean and passed a complex of high-rise apartment buildings, all in disastrous shape. Their windows were long gone, shattered in previous storms, and their balconies were badly damaged. But the buildings hadn’t been completely abandoned. Some of the windows were boarded up with plywood or cardboard, and some of the apartments glowed with flickering light, most likely from the candles and Coleman lamps of squatters.
Soon they reached the next station, just north of Surf Avenue. This used to be the stop for the New York Aquarium, but that place was demolished in one of last year’s storms. Farther west were the remains of the amusement-park rides that used to crowd the area between Surf Avenue and the Coney Island boardwalk. The same storm that wrecked the aquarium also knocked down the Cyclone roller coaster, which now lay in a tangled heap of wood and steel, surrounded by the floodwaters like an island. There were smaller islands of debris where the other rides once stood: the Thunderbolt, the Sling Shot, the Seaside Swing, the Brooklyn Flyer.
Jenna stared at the piles of rubble. She’d loved the rides at Coney Island. Because her family lived so close to the amusement park, they used to go there every weekend when she was a kid. Those were the good years, before Jenna went to college and everything fell apart. Her mother was alive back then, and Raza could still walk. Her father was a happier man then, always teasing her and making stupid jokes, and Jenna was happy too, a cheerful Muslim girl who still said her prayers and wore her hijab. Their favorite ride was the Wonder Wheel, the hundred-year-old Ferris wheel that towered over the boardwalk. All four of them would sit in one of the Wonder Wheel’s cars and watch the whole city come into view as the wheel spun them upward.
The Ferris wheel was still there, just two hundred yards from the elevated tracks. It was the only ride that hadn’t been destroyed, probably because it had been built so solidly. It loomed high above the flooded beach and the ruined boardwalk, a huge, skeletal disk with dark, crisscrossing spokes.
As Jenna stared at the thing, the wind from the ocean picked up again. The storm strengthened, lashing her with so much rain that she had to crouch and hold on to the railroad ties. Derek stopped too and looked over his shoulder at her. Then he turned to the south and gazed at the Atlantic. His body went still. He froze in that position, so motionless that his silhouette seemed to become part of the tracks.
Jenna looked in the same direction. Although the ocean and sky were almost equally dark, she could make out the horizon. It was rising. A massive sea swell, stretching for miles from east to west, rushed toward Coney Island. She stared in horror at the long, black wall of water. It was at least sixty feet high and capped with white breakers, furiously charging toward the shore.
Derek snapped out of his trance and raced over to her. He grabbed her arm and yanked her to her feet. “Run, goddamn it! If you want to stay alive, keep up with me!”
They started running side by side, heading west at full speed. Only a minute ago, Jenna had struggled to walk on the tracks, but now she hurtled over the railroad ties. Off to her left, the sea swell rolled closer and climbed higher, but she fixed her eyes straight ahead and focused on her stride. She aimed her bare feet at the ties and sprang off them with all her strength, doing everything she could to run faster. Derek’s grip on her arm kept her steady and gave her momentum. In seconds they left the Aquarium station far behind and dashed toward the Stillwell Avenue stop.
But they weren’t fast enough. The sea surge roared over the beach, carving a new channel through the sand. The wall of water struck the broken boardwalk and tore off a giant piece of it, a thick slab of concrete and wood, almost a hundred yards long. Propelled by the surge, the slab careened through the ruined amusement park, sliding into the piles of debris. Then it slammed into the base of the Wonder Wheel.
The crash echoed over Surf Avenue and the elevated tracks. Without breaking stride, Jenna turned her head to the left and saw the stretch of boardwalk jammed against the Ferris wheel’s spokes. The wheel tilted for a moment, leaning away from the ocean. Then it plunged to the ground and splashed into the floodwaters. The sea surge swept over the wreck and streamed toward the elevated line.
Derek ran even faster, pulling Jenna forward. “Come on, come on!”
Her lungs were bursting. It was no use. The ocean slid over Coney Island like an immense black sheet, carrying tons of bobbing wreckage. Its frothy edge smashed into the two-story buildings on Surf Avenue
and obliterated their brick façades. An instant later, the deluge rammed into the steel columns that supported the train line.
The impact shook the tracks. The railroad ties shuddered and Jenna lost her footing. She started to fall backward, but Derek swung her around and swooped an arm under her knees. He lifted her to his chest and kept running between the rails, leaning forward and breathing like a bellows.
She couldn’t believe it. He was unnaturally strong and phenomenally fast. The elevated line swayed and vibrated, hammered by the sea surge coursing underneath it, but Derek kept his balance and sprinted ahead. Jenna clutched his torso, holding on for dear life, and felt the muscles working under his skin. She peered over his shoulder and saw the tracks buckle a hundred feet behind them, the steel rails twisting and the railroad ties snapping. But Derek outran the collapse. He reached the section of track that curved north, away from the ocean, and then dashed for the shelter of the Stillwell Avenue station.
And then, all at once, they were out of danger. The station was a massive concrete structure with a huge steel canopy arching over the tracks. The terminal had been renovated a decade ago, and Jenna guessed that the reconstruction crew had done a good job, because the place looked remarkably undamaged. Derek slowed to a jog, then stopped on the tracks beneath the arching canopy. They were safe from the storm here.
But Jenna didn’t feel safe. Not at all. Although Derek had saved her life, she was more uneasy than ever. She squirmed in his inhumanly strong arms. “Let go of me! Put me down!”
He stepped toward the station’s platform and gently set her down on its edge. “I have something for you.” He climbed onto the platform beside her, grasped her elbow, and led her across the station.