Dark Days

by James Ponti

  He motioned toward the Alice sculpture and smiled.

  “If you try to plan anything to get in our way, I’ll know about that, too,” he added. “And then it will be just like the Queen of Hearts . . . Off with your heads.”

  Rather than wait for a response, he turned and walked away. I noticed his limp didn’t seem as bad as before, and I wondered how much of it had been an act. The policemen joined him and escorted him down the path away from us.

  My mother watched silently until they were out of sight, and then she turned to me. I could tell she was thinking through everything.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked.

  “Exactly what he told us to do,” she said. “They know too much about us and we have no idea what they’re up to. We have no choice but to remain on lockdown.”

  “Undead army,” I said, repeating the two words that had most caught my attention.

  “How terrifying is that?” she said.

  I looked up at my mom and studied her face for a moment. “Do you think he meant it?”

  “Meant what?”

  “That we could go back to normal? That our family could be together? Because . . . that would be incredible.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment before answering. “That would be incredible. But he’ll never let it happen. He’s planning something. Something huge. I don’t know what it is. But I know he’s not planning on us being happy. And I guarantee you that he won’t be satisfied until I’m dead.”

  “If he wants you dead, then why didn’t he just attack you here and now? They had us outnumbered.”

  “That’s a good question,” she said. “I think it’s because there’s someone he hates even more than me.”

  It took me a second to figure out whom she was talking about. “His brother! He hates Milton. So you don’t think he meant it when he said they could go back to being brothers?”

  “No, I don’t. I think this meeting had two purposes. He wanted to deliver his threat, but more importantly he wanted to have someone follow me to see if I’ll lead him to Milton’s hiding place.”

  “You think there’s someone here in the park watching us?” I asked.

  “I don’t think it,” she said. “I know it.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Don’t tell me yet. Let me see if I can figure it out.”

  I tried to be inconspicuous as I scanned the people in the park, looking for anyone who might be spying on us. It took me about a minute.

  “I see him,” I said. “Red jacket on the bench, reading a book.”

  “Very good,” she replied. “How do you know?”

  “I recognize him from earlier,” I explained. “He was sitting on a bench by the clock when I found the message.”

  “I don’t think he’s alone, though,” she said. “Check out the woman pushing the baby stroller. She’s already walked by twice. She never checks on her baby, but she makes eye contact with the man on the bench every minute or two.”

  “So what’s our plan?”

  “They want to find a secret underground passageway,” she said. “Let’s make them think that’s where we’re going.”

  My mother started walking and I followed right behind her. We walked right past the man on the bench, and I’ll tell you this, he was cool. He didn’t look up or move. He just read his book like he was totally engrossed.

  I was careful not to make eye contact, so I looked down at his feet as we passed him. He was wearing dark blue running shoes with mud stains at the toes.

  “You can’t tell anyone what I’m about to show you,” Mom said to me in a whisper that was just loud enough for him to overhear. “It’s a new entrance to the underground.” That’s when I noticed the man flinch ever so slightly. She’d baited the hook perfectly.

  “How do you get there?” I asked.

  She waited until we were out of his earshot, and she answered quietly, “I’m still working on that. We need someplace secluded where we can turn the tables on them.”

  Here’s a fun fact. It turns out that I have a habit of humming whenever I get nervous. (Of course, I never noticed this until one day when Alex pointed it out, and now I can never not notice it!) So I started humming the last song I’d heard: “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

  Mom stopped for a second and looked right at me. “Molly, that’s a great idea.”

  I was glad I helped; I just wished I knew what I’d done. “What’s a great idea?”

  “Row Your Boat,” she said. “We’ll lead them to the boathouse.”

  There’s a lake in the middle of Central Park called The Lake. (Really clever name, huh?) And a popular activity is for people to go out on it in rowboats they rent at Loeb Boathouse, which sits at the end of a long dock next to a restaurant. But it was winter and the lake was frozen.

  “I don’t think the boathouse is open,” I said.

  Mom picked up the pace ever so slightly. “That’s what makes it perfect.”

  The boathouse is a square wooden building that looks like a garage with a weather vane on the top. It extends out over the water so that you can literally row in and park your boat. Now that the lake was frozen, there was a gap about three feet high that separated the bottom of the boathouse from the ice.

  This gap was how Mom planned to get inside.

  “Wait until I’m all the way in before you follow me,” she said. “We’re still pretty early in the winter, and I want to make sure the ice is strong enough to hold us.”

  The mere thought of crashing through the ice was enough to slow me down. Mom walked to the edge and put one foot out onto the slippery surface, whispering a near silent prayer, “Please don’t break.”

  It didn’t.

  Once she knew it was strong enough, she quickly slid under the bottom and climbed up into the building. She made it look easy and I followed her.

  “Good job,” she said when I popped up inside next to her.

  I sat there for a moment, my feet dangling over the edge of the slip where the boats pulled in. The inside of the building looked a lot like my grandparents’ attic. There was stuff crammed everywhere, long wooden oars, dingy orange life jackets, and a pair of overturned rowboats.

  “Get under there and hide,” she said, pointing at one of the boats.

  “Why am I hiding?”

  “Because I want them to think that we’ve gone underground. They’ll look through that window before they come in, and if they see us in here, they’ll know we’re on to them.”

  She lifted up the edge of the boat and I reluctantly crawled under it. When she set it back down, I was plunged into darkness. The combination of dark and damp, frozen and slippery made it the least comfortable place I’d ever been.

  “Don’t come out unless I call your name,” she said.

  “Seriously?”

  “I mean it,” she said. “We play by my rules.”

  “All right,” I whined.

  Because the edge of the boat was curved, I could peek out from the bottom. (Although I had to press my cheek against the frozen floorboards to do it.) It took about thirty seconds or so for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but I was able to see a reflection of the room in a row of silver paint cans along the wall. The round shape of the cans distorted everything like one of those mirrors you see at a carnival, but at least I had some idea what was going on. I could see my mom squeeze into a narrow area between a cabinet and the rear wall. The distortion made her look super skinny and about eight feet tall.

  For the next few minutes everything in the boathouse was silent and still, except for the sound of wind racing across the ice and whistling through the slats in the floor. I was cold and shivering like I was in some bad ghost story. First we heard the approaching footsteps, and next there was talking outside. Then someone started to push the door.

  They were coming in.

  Ice Breakers

  I kept perfectly still in my hiding place beneath the rowboat, my pulse quickening as they tried to force their way in. Rathe
r than coming in from underneath the boathouse like we did, they were trying to break through the main door. After about fifteen seconds of grunting and straining, there was a loud pop and the door burst open. A shaft of sunlight cut across the room for as long as it took the two of them to enter and close the door behind them. Once they did, everything returned to darkness and my eyes had to readjust.

  “Check for any access that leads underground,” the man told his partner. “I overheard her say it was a new entrance.”

  I squinted to make out their reflections in the paint cans as they rifled through all the clutter. He was poking around a pile of life jackets and she was pulling back a large canvas cover, when someone new joined the conversation.

  “You’re not going to find what you’re looking for.”

  The voice belonged to my mother, and it had the same startling effect on them that it had had on me when I was eight years old and trying to see if there were any Christmas presents hidden under her bed.

  “If either of you wants to make it out of here,” she said, “I recommend you start talking and tell me what Marek’s planning.”

  I had a good view of Mom as she stepped in front of the doorway and blocked their escape. She had a long metal tool with a hook at the end that she held like a weapon.

  “Do you honestly think you can handle the two of us by yourself?” asked the man, who had apparently forgotten that my mom was not alone when she entered the boathouse. I’ll be honest. I was offended.

  “Oh, I can handle you two,” Mom said confidently. “I’m just trying to figure out if a worse punishment might be to let you both live. That way you can go back and tell Marek that you ruined his one chance of finding Milton. How do you think he’ll react to that?”

  That got him angry and he charged her, slamming her against the wall. She pushed back with the metal tool and spun it around so that the hook cut right into his gut. She jerked it up and down before she pulled it out of him.

  You’d think that would’ve finished him off, but it didn’t. He flashed a wicked grin and was completely unfazed by the purple goo oozing from his stomach. Just seeing it in the reflection was gross enough. I’m pretty sure if I saw it up close it would’ve made me want to hurl.

  They traded a couple punches before the woman called out. “Wait a second. What about the girl she was with?”

  Finally, somebody noticed I wasn’t there.

  I could tell by her voice that she was right next to the boat I was hiding under. Since my element of surprise was about to disappear, I decided to be bold.

  I rolled over onto my back and tucked my knees all the way up to my chest. Then I pushed up with my legs as hard as I could against the boat so that it flipped over and hit her. She staggered back and tried to get her balance, but there was a problem. She was on the edge of the slip, so when she stepped back there was no floor. She fell and slammed right onto the frozen lake.

  “I’m pretty sure I told you to wait until I called your name,” Mom said angrily. “You never listen.”

  Would it have killed her to say, “What a cool move that was, Molly?”

  I was about to say something snarky right back at her, when I saw the look of horror on her face. I ducked just as a long wooden oar swung right by my head and missed me by no more than an inch or two. The man laughed as he took another swing at me, but this time I was able to deflect it with an oar that I had just picked up.

  It looked like we were about to have a swordfight with the oars, but then I felt a tug at my ankle. It was the woman reaching up and grabbing me. She jerked hard and I came crashing down on her and the ice.

  That’s when I heard the terrifying sound of ice cracking. I couldn’t see where it was and I had no idea how long it would be before it broke. I wasn’t planning on waiting around to learn the answer.

  I scrambled up onto my feet, and after slipping a couple times, managed to reach up to the edge of the deck. I started to pull myself up, but she grabbed me and pulled me back onto the ice.

  She squeezed me tight and whispered in my ear, “I hope you’re a good swimmer.” For the record, you’d think it’d be scarier when zombies yelled and moaned at you, but my personal experience is that it’s far worse when they whisper.

  I tried to break free, but she spun me around and landed an elbow into my jaw that sent me sprawling across the ice.

  I looked up and saw my mom. She wanted to help, but she had a problem of her own. Despite all the purple ooze coming out of his stomach, the man was still putting up a good fight.

  “It’s been fun and all,” said Mom, “but we’re going to wrap this up.”

  She picked up one of the cans of paint and slammed it up into his chin. He tried to say something, but instead of words there were just some brief gurgling noises before black liquid started pouring from his mouth. A second later his body dropped right in front of her. He was dead.

  Meanwhile, I’d managed to get back to my feet, but the woman was still blocking my way back up off the ice, which was cracking even more.

  “A little help!” I called out.

  “Pulley!” shouted my mom.

  I looked up and saw that there was a pulley directly above me. Normally it was used to help lift boats out of the water, but now it was my escape route.

  I jumped straight up and grabbed onto it. Then, as the woman charged at me to pull me back down I did a double scissor kick and hit her in the head with each foot. She collapsed to the ice, dazed but not dead. That is, not until my mother pushed a rather large anchor over the edge of the slip and directly onto her. First the anchor smashed through the zombie, and then it broke through the ice as both of them sank down into the freezing water.

  I hung there for a moment, my sneakers dangling less than a foot above the icy lake as I tried to catch my breath.

  “Can you make it?” asked my mom as she reached out for me.

  I swung my body back and forth a couple times until I got close enough for her grab my legs and pull me to safety.

  We both plopped down onto the floor.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  I smiled. “I’m better than okay. How about you?”

  “Well, you know how much I love it when we get to share these mother-daughter moments.”

  We both laughed.

  “It may not be a normal family,” I said, “but it’s our family. This is what we do. This is who we are.”

  “You got that right,” said Mom.

  She turned her attention to the man and rolled him over onto his back. The massive stomach wound was actually more disgusting than I imagined, but I was too tired to get sick.

  “Let’s see what clues you have for us,” she said as she started checking the pockets of his coat and pants. She pulled out a phone, a wallet, and the paperback that he’d been reading.

  She handed me the book and started digging through his wallet.

  “Defending Manhattan,” I said, looking at the cover. “New York City during the Revolutionary War. Sounds boring.”

  “We have a name,” Mom said as she pulled out his ID. “Herman Prothro. West Eighty-Eighth Street.”

  She looked up at me. “That’s a nice neighborhood.”

  “So he’s a rich zombie,” I said. “Any idea what Herman Prothro does? I mean, other than read boring books and attack Omegas.”

  She pulled out a business card and held it up to the light to read it better. “It says that he’s the vice president of the Empire State Tungsten Company.”

  We shared a confused look for a moment before I asked, “What’s the Empire State Tungsten Company?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered as she flashed a grin. “But I think they need a new vice president.”

  She rolled him off of the wooden floor and he splashed through the hole in the ice. There was another gurgling, not unlike the one he made when he died, and then some bubbles as his body disappeared into the darkness.

  We exited through the door they had busted open and walk
ed in the park together for about forty-five minutes, until Mom felt confident that there were no other zombies following us.

  Our walk ended up behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking out over the Great Lawn. Because of the cold weather there was hardly anyone on it, but during spring and summer the Great Lawn becomes the ultimate New York picnic destination.

  “Do you remember when we used to come out here?” she asked. “Those amazing lunches that your dad made?”

  “Of course I do,” I said. “Those are some of my favorite memories ever.”

  “Mine too,” said Mom. “I want those to be the memories you have of me. Not images of me killing zombies in some freezing boathouse. I want you to remember me as a mother sitting on that blanket, reading stories to you.”

  “Like Alice in Wonderland?” I said.

  “Exactly. Remember me as the mom who read Alice in Wonderland to you.”

  “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then,” I said, quoting her favorite line.

  She smiled. “You still remember that too?”

  “I’ll always remember that. And now I finally understand it. I can’t go back to being that girl on the blanket. I was a different person then.”

  “I guess you were,” she replied. “I guess we all were different people.”

  She hugged me tight and I lingered in her arms.

  “I don’t know how long it’s going to be until we see each other again,” she said, sadness in her voice. “I’m going to have to hide deep.”

  “I know,” I said. “What should we do about Omega?”

  “Nothing. Nothing unless you hear different directly from me. Until then Omega is done.”

  I nodded.

  “I mean it, Molly. It can’t be like the boathouse, where you’re supposed to wait for me but you don’t.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But that was a pretty cool move, wasn’t it?”