by Alyssa Cole
“This reminds me of . . . one time, one of my mom’s boyfriends took me on a night hunt,” he says. “He got a kick out of chasing panicked creatures through the dark. This feels like that. Except I’m not one of the hunters this time.”
“Let’s walk Candace back to her place,” I say as, one by one, cell phones glow into the darkness around us, like giant blue lightning bugs floating up and down the street.
“Damn, I wanted to watch the game tonight but the network is down, too,” a man I don’t know by voice says, sighing dramatically as he waves his phone around. “Can’t even use my phone as a hotspot. Fuck outta here with this shit, man. Look. Look. Medical center been closed down for years, and they got electric?”
He waves his phone down the street.
His friend, standing beside him, laughs. “You think they got a TV that play ESPN in there?”
Their joking only adds to the sense of unreality, because when I look down the street, there are lights on in the old hospital.
“They’re having a meeting,” Theo says quietly. “And the lights are on in the hospital VerenTech just bought. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I swore I saw something in there the other night.”
“What was that noise that came from your house, Sydney?” Candace asks again, nudging at my other arm.
“Firecrackers. I think you need to go be with Paulette, Ms. Candace. She’s probably scared since she doesn’t like . . . Oh fuck.” Paulette’s ramblings about the ’77 blackout come back to me.
Earlier I was telling Theo how these things happen in cycles, white people clambering into a hood, be it the original Algonquin hood or closer in history, like Weeksville. If I’m right, what Paulette said makes this darkness even more frightening.
Break and build.
This is the breaking point.
I look down the street in the direction opposite the hospital in time to see more cell phone lights blink on in the distance—no, not cell phone lights. It’s the faraway mirror images of the cell phones near us on reflective surfaces.
“It’s the cops,” I say aloud, grasping toward where I last heard Ms. Candace. After snatching humid air a few times, I catch hold of her wrist.
On the other end of the block is a phalanx of cops—I assume. I can’t really make out much except for the reflection of light sources in their plastic riot shields and dark, bulky silhouettes.
I very briefly assume they’re here for me and Theo or the man bleeding out in my hallway, but no. They wouldn’t need this many cops, or shields, for that.
Break and build.
Night hunt.
Rejuvenation.
“Disperse!” a voice shouts through a bullhorn as the march of footsteps sounds through the street. “Disperse! Anyone continuing to riot will be arrested and puts themselves at the risk of lethal force.”
“Continuing to riot,” the man who had joked about the hospital repeats. “The fuck? Ain’t nobody rioting.”
“Everybody get inside,” Theo shouts, jogging and pulling me along toward Candace’s house. “Get inside your houses and don’t let anyone in.”
“I’m not going inside shit,” another man says. “We didn’t do nothing and—”
There’s a flash of light and a whistle where the cops stand, and then a canister is tumbling toward us, end over end, shooting smoke. It lands by the man who was talking and he reflexively kicks it, sending it back toward the growing cluster of police.
“Assault against a police officer is a felony offense,” the cop with the bullhorn says, and there’s laughter in his voice.
They charge.
It’s a short run to Candace’s, but she’s old. We start to fall behind as she limps, but one of the guys next to us scoops her up without a word and sprints to her stoop, then keeps going without waiting for a thank-you.
A knot forms in my throat as he melts into the darkness. This is what Gifford Place has always been to me—someone helping you without a second thought and keeping it moving.
This is what the people behind this rejuvenation are trying to destroy.
Jenn and Jen’s door opens and they pop their heads out.
“What’s happening?” Jen asks, her eyes wide.
“Go back in and don’t come out,” Theo says harshly.
Jen looks hurt. “I just want to help. Should we call the police?”
“Baby, go inside,” Ms. Candace says in her firm but friendly tone as she opens her own door. “Shit is about to get real, and I don’t wanna see you hurt, okay?”
Jenn comes up behind Jen, pulls her in, and slams the door shut.
Candace looks down at me and Theo. “And you two. Get in here, now. You need to tell me what’s going on.”
Her voice is a little less gentle with us.
“We have to go to the medical center,” I say, thinking about those lights that shouldn’t be on. “We’ll come check on you after. Get inside, hide, don’t let them find you.”
Candace puts her hand on her hip, her patience gone. “Girl, if you don’t stop playing and get your ass inside this house!”
That tone would have worked on me any other time, but Candace doesn’t understand. Doesn’t know that some of our friends are dead or in danger.
I think of Drea’s face, when I’d finally looked at it. She didn’t look peaceful like Mommy had. Foam had dried at the edges of her mouth and her eyes had stared toward the door, as if she’d been expecting me to open it and find her.
I hadn’t.
I’d walked past her, how many times?
I’d heard scratching in the walls. Maybe it had been her. Maybe—
“Sydney!”
Theo yells right in my face and I realize that I was starting to give in to the panic.
“Let’s go.”
Theo holds my arm as we run, and he guides me across the street as another smoke bomb streaks by us. The hospital looms ahead of us, the brighter lights of the lower floor illuminating the base of it and making it look even more imposing.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“When I saw Kavaughn, he appeared out of nowhere but it was here. If he got out, then there’s an entrance or exit we can use to get inside.”
I watch him as he looks back and forth, his jaw rigid and his shirt splattered with the blood of a man he killed for me.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask. “This isn’t your neighborhood.”
And I’m not anything to you.
“Maybe not,” he huffs. “But you know us strange white dudes have a hero complex. Of course I’m gonna swoop in and save the day.”
“If you don’t get killed,” I remind him.
“I’m hoping to avoid that outcome.”
I don’t want anyone else to die, but I really hope Theo in particular avoids that outcome, too. I don’t know if either of us will, given the war zone sounds coming from my neighborhood.
We skirt around the chain-link fence and he moves to touch it but then pulls back. “Either running in these jeans built up some static electricity or this is now electrified. It wasn’t the other day.”
Shit.
The cops are starting to reach our end of the block. There are knots of people tussling in the streets.
Think, Sydney.
“Remember I told you those urban legends about people getting pulled underground?” I ask. “Now that we’re in the middle of this, years and years of rumors that people have been kidnapped and dragged into this hospital start to make more sense.”
“When I did the research, I did see a brief entry about supposed underground tunnels to the hospital,” Theo says. “It was debunked, but the rumor said they were built during the war when the hospital was a factory. If those are still in use . . .”
“We were always told the mole people would get you if walked on subway grates or metal cellar doors . . .” I look over at the bodega. “Come with me.”
I grab Theo’s hand and dash across the street to the bodega, to the metal cellar door outside it. And
people kept mentioning feeling rumbling underground, and I’ve felt the shaking in the middle of the night myself. “I heard something in here the day before Tony arrived. Maybe there’s a way in through here.”
I try to lift the door, but it doesn’t budge.
“Hold on,” Theo says, then pulls what seems to be a baby crowbar out of his back pocket.
I raise my brows at him. “You just carry that around with you?”
He slides it between the two metal doors and starts working it back and forth like a berserker until finally whatever locking mechanism is holding the door closed from inside pops. He makes a big show of lifting first one cellar door open, and then the other.
I stand in front of the stairs that lead down into the darkness, and he stands beside me.
“You were saying?”
A riot gear–clad cop suddenly appears from around the corner, running at us full-tilt—I only register his presence as he’s on top of us. Without thinking, I push Theo out of the way and take a few quick steps after him. The cop barrels through where we’d been standing and steps right into the space where the metal doors should be.
His arms swing wildly as he tries to steady himself, so close to me that I feel the breeze created by their windmilling, smell the scent of cheap Rite Aid cologne and sweat.
As fast as this is happening, my reflexes register that I can reach out to him. Steady him.
I don’t.
He tumbles forward and his chin catches the edge of the metal-lined inset cellar door before his hand does; his neck snaps with a quick, sickening crack.
I stand there in shock for a second, and then press my lips together. Years of watching over-the-top comedies have trained me to laugh at the sheer slapstick of the situation—the arms waving, the shock on his face because of his miscalculation. One hysterical yelp escapes from between my lips before I cover my mouth with both hands; hot tears run from my eyes and form rivulets where my palms meet my cheeks.
This shit is real. Really real. I don’t feel bad for the motherfucker, and I know he’d’ve been laughing if it were me, but this is real, and there’s nothing funny about it.
Drea’s face frozen in agony flashes into my head and I force the image away.
A light shines down the steps into the darkness of the cellar—Theo’s reached past me with his phone. We need to make sure the cop is dead and not down there waiting with gun drawn. The light reveals that the dude’s head is twisted all the way to the side at the bottom of the cement steps.
Something moves near his waist, and for a second I think he’s still reaching for his gun, but it’s Frito, who’s apparently escaped Tony’s remodeling. She sits on the cop’s ass and meows up at us.
I check for the revolver—it’s still tucked snugly between the elastic waistband of my sweats and the cushion of my belly. I pull it out, the heat of the metal comforting; Mommy had held this gun in her hand, maintained it. It’s part of her, like the house and the garden. Like Gifford Place. Like me.
Theo still has the gun he took from Con Dead back in my hallway.
My neighborhood is under siege. There’s a very good chance neither of us will make it out of this situation alive, given how much money and power are at stake.
I force myself to start walking down the steps into the darkness of the cellar, because there’s no turning back.
“Let’s go.”
Chapter 22
Theo
I WATCH SYDNEY DISAPPEAR INTO THE CELLAR BUT DON’T MOVE.
What am I doing?
My eyes sting as a cloud of tear gas is carried past me on the breeze. Flashlights shine wildly in the night, highlighting raised batons coming down on innocent people. I’ve been tangled up in some shady stuff, but I am in way over my head.
Going down into that cellar, where a cop is lying dead, is a very different decision from running across the street to Sydney’s house when I’d seen a man hunting her.
This conspiracy may very well be real, but like Sydney just said, this isn’t my neighborhood. I already put money down on a shitty room. I could put this gun down and leave. I’d be safe; any of the cops surging down the street who saw me would assume I was with them.
And if I walk away from this and pretend it never happened, I might as well be.
I follow Sydney into the cellar.
“Close the doors after you,” she says when I’m halfway down. “We don’t want one of us to fall down here like this asshole did.”
I pause at her words, then nod and pull the metal doors shut. The lock is busted but hopefully no one follows us in.
Sydney’s phone flashlight is still on, and the dim glow illuminates her searching the body.
When I get to the bottom step, she looks up with a ferocious smile, teeth clenched and eyes wide. I’m sure if I placed my hand at her throat, her pulse would be pounding like mad. I’ve seen the same look before, and have probably given it, after pulling off a job that could have ended with me in a body bag.
She hands me a Taser, taking the cop’s gun for herself, and I snort as I see the compact Glock.
I hold up the one I took from her assailant for comparison. “Matching set. Standard police issue.”
“Of course that guy was a cop. Of course. This is all just—” She inhales deeply, then tugs the cop’s Maglite from his belt and stands from her crouch. Bright, crisp light suddenly fills the rest of the cellar and thank god, there’s nothing here but stacks of flattened cardboard boxes and some cat food.
“Shouldn’t there be inventory?” Sydney asks. She stalks around the space, shining lights into every corner. Her efficient stride knocks over a box of Meow Mix and the contents spill on the floor, to Frito’s content. Sydney passes the light over the bare cement walls and we both search for a few minutes, neither of us commenting on the muted noise of screams outside and, eventually, a gunshot that makes us both jump.
“Maybe I was wrong,” she says, leaning down to stroke Frito, who’s winding around her feet. She stays bent, flashlight tucked beneath her arm and pointed behind her, and that’s when I see it—the thin strip of shadow in the cement wall.
I step around her with the crowbar. The flat edge of it just fits into the slit, but I don’t have to do much more than one lever. This door swings back into the cellar smoothly. Quietly.
“I can’t believe I made fun of you for having that,” she whispers as it opens, and then we both tense.
A breeze blows my hair back as I step in front of her with my gun raised. A hallway is revealed as the door touches back against the cellar wall, completely open. No, not a hallway.
“I guess the rumors about the tunnels were right,” Sydney says in a barely audible voice. “It’s creepy knowing this was underneath us all this time.”
It’s not the unfinished tunnel that had come to mind when the teens at the planning meeting had talked about mole people. It’s professionally done cinder block painted beige with a garish yellow strip running along the top. Halogen tubes are spaced evenly along the walls, and it’s surprisingly wide, the ceilings high enough for a truck to pass through.
It looks like—
“It’s part of the hospital,” Sydney says as she cautiously peeks out, and turns her head from right to left. “This has to be it.”
When I peek out after her, I get the full effect of what she means. It has the same old, sterile, and unwelcoming atmosphere of most public hospitals.
The tunnel stretches down to the left but on the right there’s a set of beige double doors, with aluminum plates along the bottoms, about ten feet away.
She grips her gun and starts walking right.
“Should we come up with a plan?” I ask.
“Like what? Shoot all the white people except you?” She glances at me, then back toward the approaching double door. “That’s the only information we really have.”
“True. Awkward. I guess we’ll play it by ear.”
Our footsteps echo in the hallway and I keep turning around
to make sure the sound isn’t someone sneaking up on us, but the hall is empty. There’s no motion except for the flicker of one of the halogen bulbs that needs to be changed.
When we get to the door, Sydney asks, “Ready?” in a voice that shakes with fear. Her hands are trembling, too, and she quickly tucks the Glock into the back of her waistband and pulls the .22 revolver out from the front, flipping the safety.
Her hands steady, but she shifts her weight from foot to foot, probably feeling the same anxiety that’s crawling over my own skin.
“Ready,” I say.
My breath is coming fast as I push the door open and she stalks through ahead of me. We’re greeted anticlimactically with another set of double doors, and our breathing fills the small space as we psych ourselves up to walk into danger again.
Just as Sydney takes a step forward toward the door, someone pulls it open slowly from the other side, and the sound of benign chatter precedes whoever it is.
“Shit, they need to fix these doors already; the other one is jammed. Anyway, yeah, they said I could have the Perkins place, then they went and gave it to that shithead Charlie,” a familiar voice says. William Bilford’s voice. “Like fuck that, I’ve been doing all the legwork for months and I told them I wanted those fireplaces. At the Jones place, I’ll have to get the fireplaces rebricked and get rid of all the cement over the backyard.”
The front end of a rolling gurney pushes through the doors into the vestibule, followed by an unfamiliar woman’s voice. “At least you got to call dibs, I just have to wait, even though I’ve put up with—”
A brunette with her dark curls pulled back, wearing a blouse and slacks, stares at me, leaving her sentence unfinished.
“Who’s this? Is he one of the researchers?” She squints, trying to place my face.
“Did you change your mind?” William asks me, clearly amused. “Once shit started going down? I told you to get in early.”
“Ms. Gianetti?”
It’s only when Sydney speaks that they even seem to notice her presence. The woman startles.
“Ms. Green.” The woman looks dismayed. “What are you—?”
“I guess this is why you couldn’t help my mother get her house back?” Sydney’s voice is low and vicious, angrier than I’ve ever heard her.