Forty Leap

by Turner, Ivan

  “Where are you?” I called out.

  “I said shut up!”

  “Then come out,” I called, feeling bold. Jennie held my hand so tightly that I felt it begin to prickle from lack of blood.

  From the left there came movement and a man stepped out of ruined coffee shop. He was a thin man, tall and wispy, with wild hair and grey stubble on his cheeks. His fingernails were too long and there was dirt underneath them, but he looked healthy and strong enough and I did not doubt that he had companions in the shadows. He looked around, searching for something.

  “We’re alone,” I said to him and Jennie squeezed my hand very tightly.

  “You’re a damned idiot,” he replied. “What are you thinking, shouting into the middle of the street?”

  “I saw you,” I replied. “All of you. And we’re all alone.”

  He seemed troubled and, for a moment, I wondered if I hadn’t stumbled across a loner by chance. Perhaps even now the larger group that I had spotted was moving off like the slow trickle of a curbside river.

  Slowly, like a timid cat expecting food, he moved out of the shop. Looking both left and right, he performed a halting advance. He stopped when he was close enough so that we could smell him. Or he could smell us.

  “’All of you’?” he quoted. “All of who?”

  But a sense of relief washed over me as I realized for sure that he was lying. I pointed to the building from which we had just come out. I pointed up to the shelf of concrete, just visible eighteen storied up in the gloom. “From up there,” I said.

  He looked up. I guess he was trying to figure out whether or not I was lying. He didn’t know what to make of us and I couldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t have known what to make of us either.

  “Where are you going?” I asked him. “All of you.”

  He didn’t say anything, still unsure. But there were just two of us and, I suppose, he decided that there was little danger. Turning away from us, he beckoned that we follow. Jennie hesitated, but I tugged her gently, not daring to let go.

  The filthy man led us back into the coffee shop, treading over broken tables and chairs with ease, moving behind the counter and into the back room. Although shielded from the outside blasts, the room was in no better shape than the room up front. It had been looted for sure. The refrigerators were open and some toppled. There wasn’t a crumb to be found, but there were a number of empty packages. Anything of value was gone and the rest was simply scattered junk. I found it all amazing, but the man had seen it a thousand times before. Even Jennie seemed uninterested in what had become familiar surroundings. We moved through quickly and descended into the basement via a set of emergency stairs.

  Once below, darkness became the rule. There were people hidden in the folds of obscurity. I could hear them even though I could not see them. They were inept at hiding themselves or I certainly would have had no idea they were there. Shortly, a second man stepped forward. He was much bigger than the first and his beard was tight and black.

  “Did you search them?” he asked.

  The wispy man didn’t answer, his expression showing his shame. “They’re definitely American. I didn’t…”

  The larger man brushed the smaller aside, uninterested in his explanation. He came up close to us and I could smell him. He had a musty smell, like he spent a lot of time underground. I could see the bits of moisture clinging to his beard. Only then, with him so close, could I discern his Asian features and identify him.

  “Detective Li?” I asked.

  He seemed taken aback, which was the first time I had seen him thus. During our one meeting, he had been callous and imperturbable. Now, though, as not to be shown up, he was staring hard into my eyes. I could picture his mind’s eye cleaning me up, stripping my beard, changing my clothing, the style… He was trying to place me and I was sure he would be successful.

  “Cristian,” he said. “The time traveler.”

  Now I was taken aback. When told, my time travelling or, more to the point, skipping was something to be dismissed as lunacy. I suppose in the law enforcement profession lunacy is recorded and filed away for later use.

  “Mathew Cristian,” I told him. “This is Jennie.”

  “With an ie,” she added.

  He gave her barely a glance. Turning back to the wispy man, he said, “They’re okay.” And he walked away.

  Looking over his shoulder, the wispy man reemerged. “It’ll be about forty five minutes before we can get moving again. We got to hole up in case someone out there heard you yelling. If you follow this passage to the back of the group, someone will give you something to eat.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Out, of course.”

  “Out?”

  “Out of the city.”

  Jennie knitted her brow. “How’s that?”

  The wispy man seemed to consider his answer for a moment, then shrugged. “Warren knows how to go. That way if any of us is caught by the Arabs, they can’t tell no one where we went.”

  Now that my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I could see that it was not absolute. There were glowing spots all down the passage indicated by the wispy man. Since he deemed it unnecessary to pay us any more attention, we turned away from him and started to follow the lights. As we moved down the passage, we studied the faces floating in the glow of the small lights. They all looked the same, all like Jennie. Some held a spark of hope, as if Warren Li, former NYPD Detective really knew what he was doing when he said he was taking them out of the city. Others were just as hopeless as ever. The lights they carried came from candles and reading lights with fading batteries. There were one or two flashlights that showed up brightly when we turned a corner. Other than that, though, it was a pretty dreary world.

  As we reached the last of the people, and there must have been close to a hundred people, they thinned out. Here at the end, people sat apart, each munching on something or other. There was a man sitting with a woman and each seemed responsible for two large rucksacks. They were going through the packs carefully, counting on their fingers as they went. Apparently, these were the grocers.

  They looked up at us as we approached, the man smiling, the woman clearly involved in doing some internal calculations.

  “Newcomers!” the man announced, as if we were the first he’d ever seen and it delighted him. “I guess you’re the reason we’ve stopped.”

  I nodded, bemused.

  He extended a dirty hand. “Daniel Tiri. This is my wife, Lydia.”

  I introduced myself and Jennie.

  “Have a bottle,” he said, pulling out a twenty ounce bottle of spring water from the pack. “You’ll have to share.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Thank you.”

  He waved me off. “It’s all Warren’s anyway. He just put us in charge.”

  I looked at the handful of visible people. “How long have you been wandering the city?”

  He laughed. “We don’t wander. Warren lays out a trip on the map and we follow the course.”

  “How long does that take?” asked Jennie.

  Tiri shrugged. “Two or three weeks, usually.”

  “Usually?”

  He nodded again. “We make a circuit, picking up as many stragglers as we can along the way. Once we get back to where we started, we push everyone out the door. Then we start planning the next circuit.”

  I was impressed. I asked how many times they had succeeded.

  He thought about that a moment, muttering about which circuit had included Felix. He couldn’t seem to remember whether it had been the last one or the one before that. Ultimately, he began to sound like a broken record and his wife chimed in with the answer. It was four circuits.

  Tiri was a talker and we sat and munched on some crackers and dried meat as he told us about Warren Li. After the invasion, the detective had found a way out of the city and started setting up a network to ferry refugees to safety. The stories surrounding Li’s initial escape were
many and varied. As with all heroes, they ranged from the likely to the ridiculous. There was one in which Li was standing on a pillar of the docks at the Staten Island Ferry with nothing but a broken baseball bat and a whipcord of leather. Hordes of soldiers were shooting at him (and missing) while he fended off the rush. Ultimately, he dove into the river and escaped. In another version of the story he had only the whipcord. After all, he could hardly hold the baseball bat with a baby in his arms.

  “I’ve seen Warren do some amazing things, though,” Tiri told us. “He started the first circuit all by himself and picked up me and Lydia early on. It’s tough to get people to trust you when you’re a small group. That’s how the street gangs travel. We ran into a couple of those, but Warren took care of it.” He didn’t elaborate. As people latched on, Li had taken care to evaluate who would be useful circuit to circuit. There were seven in the group now and Tiri was pretty sure that that would be it. Too many people would be too hard to control. As Tiri put it, Warren wanted a small crew and a large herd.

  Tiri spoke to us for most of forty minutes before a lanky woman came forward and whispered something to him.

  “Time to go,” Tiri announced.

  We backed away. For most of the time, Jennie and I had remained silent. We hadn’t needed to question Tiri in order to get the information we got and Jennie was mostly disinterested. Now we watched as the people around us began to stow their meager possessions in small bags. Children found their ways to adults. Adults found their children. Tiri and the lanky woman kept to the rear in order to make sure that no one stayed behind.

  We marched back along the same passage and, eventually, emerged into the coffee shop. I could see Li out front, blazing the trail through the debris. He stuck close to the buildings and moved quickly and with purpose. His eyes were everywhere and I imagine his ears were pricked up to the slightest sound. How long, I wondered, did it take to get one hundred people off of the street and into the basement of a coffee shop?

  Only as long as it took two people to run down eighteen flights of stairs.

  Once out into the light, Jennie grabbed my arm with a hiss.

  I stopped and looked at her, suddenly panicked. She was pointing further up the line and her face was a portrait of rage and hate. The man she was pointing to, and her finger continued to move as he did, was very average. Stooped as he was trying to get over the mounds of rubble, it was difficult to tell his height, but he was no taller than I am. He seemed young and old at the same time, so I presumed young with life in the besieged city having taken its toll on him. When people are dirty and mangy it’s difficult to tell their ages. Like all of the other men, he wore a beard. But it had grown in patches, betraying youth. He had shifty eyes.

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  “Shhh,” Tiri warned from behind us. “On the street, we keep quiet.”

  But Jennie would not be silenced. “He was one of the guys that beat down on Devon and took Reesha.”

  I stopped in my tracks. “Are you sure.”

  “I saw all of them,” she said. “I’ll never forget their ugly faces.”

  “Keep moving,” Tiri whispered.

  Jennie had stopped, too, and was looking around. It only took a moment before she found a piece of pipe and had it in her hands.

  “Jennie,” I hissed.

  She broke ranks and started moving forward. She did nothing to conceal her actions and she made a lot of noise. There was this barely audible sound issuing from her throat that sounded both animalistic and terrifying. Noticing the oddity, Li stopped and turned. He held up his hands to halt the line and began to make his way back, throwing a glance at Tiri. There was no doubt about Jennie’s intentions although I’m not sure Li had picked out her target. As I watched him approach her, I thought I could interpret his intentions and I did not like them. Quickly, I moved to intercept. But Jennie hardly needed my help.

  “You stay back, cop,” she called across the street and now everyone was aware of the event.

  He stopped in place, a rabbit’s look on his face, and scanned the sky and the street. Then the rabbit turned to a jackal and he made several short signals. Instantly, the Tiris, the wispy man, the lanky woman, a large black man with a badly burned face, and a boy who couldn’t have been any older than fourteen got out of the line and began to usher everyone into the nearest building. Apparently, he took no chances with being caught out in the open. Even though a hundred people were easily visible on the street, loud voices most likely rang out for blocks and blocks in the dead and silent metropolis.

  “Hey!” Jennie shouted, her voice reverberating off of the empty buildings. The man she had identified as her target was moving with the crowd. I was amazed at the efficiency with which Li’s agents were able to traffic all of those people off of the street. It was a testament to their skill because the people themselves were obviously untrained. Tiri’s use of the word herd had been extremely accurate.

  No one acknowledged her outburst, but she had cleared the worst of the street rubbish now, climbed atop a pile of wreckage, and got right in his way. He tried to move past her very casually, as if he believed she had put herself in his way by mistake. But she cut him off again.

  “I’m talking to you, raper!”

  What I saw in his eyes was a quick switch from passiveness to instinctive wrath and then back to forced confusion. Li was four steps away and I was five.

  Jennie brandished the pipe and, to me, looked as if beating the pulp out of someone with it was not something she hadn’t done before.

  “Before I beat on you, you tell me what happened to Reesha.”

  In his defense, the poor man looked genuinely confused at the mention of Jennie’s friend’s name. By now, the street was almost empty. It was Jennie and the man and me and Li. The wispy man clung to the entrance of an office building, not only waiting for his own exit, but making it clear to onlookers where he had taken the group.

  “Reesha!” Jennie screamed at the boy. “You beat on Devon and you took Reesha!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, but for a flicker of an instant the truth shone in his eyes. He remembered. Maybe he had learned her name before…

  “Where is she, you pig?”

  “I don’t…”

  “Where?!” When Jennie swung the pipe it was with expert precision. It collided with the tip of his left shoulder bone making a cross between a clank and a crack. Tears practically leaped from his eyes and he went to his knees screaming obscenities.

  Li rushed forward and grabbed Jennie around the waist with one great arm, taking the pipe from her with the other hand. Though she struggled, her ninety plus pounds were no match for his strength. He tossed her aside like a piece of litter and she half fell, half scrabbled down a hill of rubble. At the sight, I rushed forward. I was going for Li, but the gang man was already on his feet, his injured arm dangling at his side, but his other hand curled into a fist. He had come down the hill on the other side and was moving toward her. The look in his eyes was venom and I grew very afraid. Clumsily, I changed direction and almost toppled as I came down the side of the hill. He didn’t even notice me until I crashed into him and the two of us tumbled into the street getting scraped and bruised by broken stones and glass. As I tried to regain my footing, I noticed that no one had gone into any basement. Through the gaping holes and windows, all of the people in the group had stayed to watch.

  “Killer!” Jennie’s fury had not lessened. She had found a second length of pipe, this one shorter than the first and jagged on one end. It would probably have not been as effective a swinging weapon, but it would have been an effective weapon just the same. Her advance, though, was halted by Li who stepped into her way.

  “Get out of my way, cop,” she ordered, holding the pipe up.

  “We don’t do this here,” Li said. “Take it up with the police when we get out.”

  I could almost feel her skepticism. She was fifteen years old and she had no eviden
ce against him. No one was going to listen to her word. He would walk away. I wonder if Li thought she was going to give in because her muscles did relax. But if he did, he misread her intentions. Loosening up her body, she quickly sidestepped him and threw the pipe straight at the gang man. Again, I was amazed at her precision because the pipe flew end over end and smacked him right in the temple with a potato chip crunch.

  His eyes rolled into his head and he dropped to the street.

  This was the only time in my life that I ever experienced what I would describe as the collective gasp. I had read about it in books and seen it in movies, but I never thought it was possible in reality. Everyone watching had exactly the same reaction and the breath that left their mouths was identical.

  Sparing just one insolent look for Li, Jennie marched over to the fallen man and looked down on him. She toed him with her worn shoe just to make sure and then she spat on his dead face.

  “Who’s the murderer now?” Li asked. He signaled once again to his crew and they began bringing everyone out of hiding. “Don’t follow us,” he said to Jennie.

  I stood there as it happened, watching the crowd pass by the scene, every person trying to get a look. As if they hadn’t seen enough death in the previous months. When the last person had gone by, Jennie turned and began to march off in the other direction. I stood and watched. I watched Li go one way and Jennie go the other way.

  And I stood.

  “Cristian,” Li called back. I looked up at him. “Are you coming?”

  I shook my head.

  He seemed perturbed, but turned away just the same. He certainly wasn’t going to beg.

  I turned to look back at Jennie and saw that she had stopped in the street. She was still turned away from me, away from everything. Her head was down and she looked as if she needed to fall down. With one last glimpse at the group of people disappearing behind wreckage and around a corner, I went to Jennie and put a hand on her shoulder. When she turned there were tears in her eyes and a defiant twitch at the corner of her mouth.