Dark Days

by James Ponti

  It sounded boring to me, and I’m actually interested in birds. My mother convinced me to join the New York Audubon Society’s Junior Birder program when I was eight, and as a result I can now identify most of the birds that are common in the city. I even know the difference between red-tailed hawks, which like to nest along Fifth Avenue, and red-shouldered hawks, which sometimes fly over the park but won’t nest there.

  Across the top of the flyer were pictures of five birds: a warbler, a swan, a starling, a heron, and a pigeon. It was the pigeon that caught my attention. New York is overrun with pigeons. They’re everywhere. But the pigeon in this picture isn’t the type you’d find in Central Park. It’s the kind you’d find in Central Africa. It’s even called the African pigeon.

  If Professor Michael Stimola, PhD was actually a leading bird expert, how could he possibly make that mistake? I was trying to figure this out when Ms. White tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Molly, will you be joining us?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Probably not. It sounds really boring.”

  When I saw her expression, I realized she wasn’t talking about the lecture. The tardy bell had rung and she was about to close the door and start class.

  “Wait a second, you meant English class, didn’t you?”

  “That is why they pay me.”

  “Of course I’ll be joining you,” I said sheepishly. “And, for the record, I’m sure it won’t be boring at all.”

  “Better answer,” she replied.

  We were discussing A Wrinkle in Time, a science-fiction book about a girl who travels through time, searching for her lost father.

  It’s my favorite of the books we’ve read for class. I especially like Meg, the main character. She’s geeky, socially awkward, and desperate to reunite with a missing parent. In other words, she’s a lot like the girl I see in the mirror every morning. Despite this connection, I was having trouble staying interested in the class discussion.

  The mistake on the flyer just bothered me too much. So rather than take notes that might come in handy on our upcoming test, I doodled the names of the five birds down the side of my paper and stared at them.

  Warbler

  Swan

  Starling

  Heron

  Pigeon

  I’ll admit that I may have been making a big deal over nothing more than a simple mistake. I have been known to do that. I even have a history of overreacting to geographically misplaced birds.

  My dad loves to tell the story about when I was six years old and we visited a neighborhood that was decorated for Christmas. We were walking through a yard that was made to look like Santa’s workshop at the North Pole. I started laughing because there were giant plastic penguins in Santa hats. I didn’t mean to be rude. I thought it was a joke and that you were supposed to laugh, because everybody knows that penguins only live in the Southern Hemisphere, not the Northern.

  Well, apparently not everybody.

  It turns out it wasn’t a joke and the people who lived there were offended. I apologized and later my parents explained that you don’t always need to point out mistakes that others make. I usually do a good job of remembering that, but this was different. This was a bird expert giving a lecture at a top college.

  I kept doodling and filled in the formal names of the different species.

  orange-crowned warbler

  mute swan

  European starling

  great blue heron

  African pigeon

  It took me about thirty seconds to see it, but when I did I let out a hoot that made Ms. White stop in the middle of a sentence.

  “Is there something you’d like to add to the discussion, Molly?”

  All eyes trained on me. “Just . . . that it’s a . . . really good book.”

  “That’s all?” she asked, shooting me a look.

  I nodded. “Pretty much.”

  “Let’s hope your book report goes into greater detail.”

  “It will,” I promised.

  The instant she went back to talking, I looked back at my paper and smiled. My funk was over and my heart was racing as I drew a circle around the first letter in each name like I was playing a word search puzzle.

  It spelled out “Omega.”

  It had to be a message from my mother. She’s the one who made me join the Junior Birders, and she’d know I’d be the only student who could decipher the code. I don’t know how she got it posted next to the door to my English class, but I was certain she was trying to tell me something. I wanted to get a hall pass so I could go back and look for more clues on the flyer, but I figured I’d already caused enough distractions in this class for one day, so I waited until the bell rang.

  The lecture was scheduled for Saturday at noon. I couldn’t wait to tell the others. But then I noticed something else on the bottom. There were pictures of five more birds: an albatross, a loon, an owl, a nighthawk, and an eagle. Using the same coding method, I realized the first letter of each spelled out the word “alone.”

  I guess my mother didn’t want the others to come with me. Maybe it had to do with Natalie. If Mom knew she was undead, she might not trust her to be part of the team.

  That Saturday I took the train to 137th Street and walked the last couple blocks to the CCNY campus. (CCNY is the abbreviation for City College of New York.) Part of me felt like the time travelers in the book I was reading, because one moment I was walking in modern day New York, and then I passed through a giant archway and found myself in a secret world of tree-lined paths and gothic buildings. It was like Hogwarts in Harlem.

  The campus was built at the same time many of the city’s subway tunnels were being dug, and as a result the buildings were constructed out of the leftover rock. That’s right, it’s an entire campus made out of Manhattan schist. The first thought that went through my mind was that Natalie should think about going to college here where she would be surrounded by it. (That is, if Natalie turned out to be a zombie, which I was still hoping wouldn’t be the case.)

  The largest building on campus is Shepard Hall, which looks like a medieval cathedral. It’s even decorated with gargoyles and grotesque statues on the walls and archways. The presentation was scheduled for a lecture hall on the third floor, and even though I got there right before the noon start time, the room was entirely empty. Apparently, I wasn’t the only person who thought it sounded boring.

  I took a seat in the middle of the third row. Moments later a giant bell in the building’s main tower struck twelve times, and I heard someone enter the room behind me and close the door.

  I turned to see a man with a friendly face and a close-cropped white beard. He wore jeans and a sport coat along with a black beret that gave him the air of professorial creativity.

  “Hello, I’m Dr. Stimola, and I’d like to welcome you to the City College Lecture Series,” he announced, starting right up while he was still in the back of the room fumbling with some equipment. “I’m an ornithologist, and if any of you are unfamiliar with that term, ‘ornithology,’ it’s the study of birds.”

  Any of us? I looked around the room to make sure that I was still the only other person there. I was.

  The lights dimmed, and a picture of a green-headed duck was projected on a screen at the front of the room.

  “I’d like for us to get started with some of the more common birds in the park,” he continued. “This is Anas platyrhynchos, better known as the Mallard or the wild duck.”

  I was totally confused. He was acting like there was a room full of students, and I was worried that I’d misread the clue and was now stuck in a two-hour lecture about birds given by a man even more socially awkward than I am. He continued to drone on about the mallard, and I was trying to figure out a way to excuse myself when a tap on my shoulder startled me. I almost leapt out of my seat.

  “Shh,” he whispered.

  I turned to see that it was the professor. At some point when he was setting up, he’d stopped talki
ng and was instead playing a prerecorded version of the lecture.

  “Hello, Molly. Your mother wanted me to tell you that the Gingerbread House was entirely your fault.”

  I was totally confused for a moment, and then I made the connection. Once, when we were on a vacation to Pennsylvania, I picked a place for us to eat lunch. It was called the Gingerbread House and it was terrible. Everyone blamed me for the lousy meal and I was banned from picking restaurants from that point on. I thought this was completely unfair for one simple reason.

  “I was five years old,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief.

  “You know who else was five years old?” he asked.

  I thought about it for a moment and answered, “Mozart, when he started composing music.”

  It was a running joke between my mother and me. She said that if Mozart was old enough to compose music, I was old enough to take the blame for the Gingerbread House.

  “Is that why you wanted me to come here today?” I asked. “So you could blame me for something I did when I was five?”

  “No,” he said with a nice smile. “I’m blaming you so you’ll know that your mother sent me and that it’s safe to come with me.”

  “Come with you where?” I asked.

  “I’ll let her tell you when we get there.”

  “I’m going to see my Mom?”

  He nodded. “And she’s not alone.”

  The Catacombs of CCNY

  The presentation continued on autopilot as the prerecorded lecture played and pictures of birds were projected onto the screen. Meanwhile, I followed the professor into an office that was located at the front of the lecture hall, and he signaled me to be quiet until we were inside and he shut the door.

  “We’ve got a lot to do and not a lot of time,” he added. “So please give me your backpack.”

  “Why?” I asked as I handed it to him.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s where they hid it.”

  “Hid what?” I asked.

  “It’s easier if I just show it to you,” he said as he started digging through my backpack. The shelves in his office were filled with books about birds and beautiful black-and-white photos of the city.

  “Cool shot,” I said, admiring one of the Chrysler Building.

  “Thanks,” he said as he kept digging. “I started off taking pictures of birds, and then I became fascinated with the city and its architecture.”

  I already knew that I liked him.

  We could hear the lecture continue in the other room. “The northern cardinal has a wingspan of twenty-five to thirty-one centimeters . . .”

  “By the way, my real class discussions are much more interesting. This one was intentionally designed to keep people away.”

  I laughed. “It seems to have worked, but why go to all of the trouble of having a recording.”

  “I locked the door and put up a ‘do not interrupt’ sign, but just in case any of Marek’s men come and put an ear up to the door, I want them to overhear the most boring lecture in the history of mankind. It should get rid of them pretty quickly.”

  “I don’t think anyone was following me,” I said. “I was careful.”

  “They don’t need to follow you,” he said as he turned a pocket of my backpack inside out. “They have this.” He pointed at a small silver and glass capsule that was hidden in one of the seams.

  “What is that?” I asked in total disbelief.

  “An RFID chip,” he explained. “Radio-frequency identification. It’s what they put in pet collars so you can find your dog if he gets lost.”

  I was stunned. “Does that mean they’ve been listening to me?”

  “No, it’s not a microphone,” he said. “They can’t hear anything. They can’t even track where you are all the time. That would burn through the battery too quickly. But whenever they want to find you, they can send a signal and they’ll get a reply on a map.”

  “I can’t believe it,” I said. “So you’re destroying it?”

  “I’m doing no such thing,” he said. “If we destroyed it they’d know you found it and they’d come up with another way to track you. Let them think they’ve got you fooled. Just don’t ever forget it’s in there. For now, though, we’re going to leave it behind.”

  He placed the backpack on his desk.

  “If they look for you in the next two hours, they’ll think you’re here,” he said. “Which is good, because we don’t want them to know where you’ll really be.”

  He opened a closet door and pulled on a shelf to reveal a hidden door and a spiral staircase running through the building.

  “Cool, isn’t it?” he said when he saw my reaction.

  “Amazing,” I said. “Where’s it go?”

  He flashed a big smile. “Have you ever heard of the catacombs of CCNY?”

  “No?”

  “That’s good,” he said as he started making his way down the stairs. “We like to keep them a secret.”

  The staircase was the color of tarnished brass and seemed to descend forever as I followed the professor all the way to the bottom. There we reached a long narrow tunnel cut into the Manhattan schist. The walls were close enough so I could reach out and touch both sides at the same time. It’s a good thing I’m only scared of heights, because if I were claustrophobic I might have passed out.

  “Stay close,” he said as he motioned for me to follow. “The lighting’s bad and you do not want to get lost down here.”

  “You got that right,” I replied as I hurried to keep up with his pace.

  As far as freaky scary elements go, the tunnel had plenty. The lights were dim and spaced far enough apart so that you had to walk through pools of total darkness every twenty feet or so. But that was nothing compared to the otherworldly rumbling and hissing noises that passed overhead at regular intervals. The professor assured me that although they sounded like a phantom army of disembodied souls coming to attack us, they were actually caused by something much more mundane.

  “Steam pipes,” he explained, pointing toward the ceiling. “They heat up the buildings on campus.”

  “They do a good job on the tunnel, too,” I replied, wiping the sweat from my forehead. “It’s like a rainforest down here.”

  Soon we veered into a mazelike series of brick passageways. I tried to memorize the turns but quickly lost track. I was hopelessly confused by the time we dead-ended into a wall with three large pipes running along it. Each pipe had a valve control that looked like a steering wheel, and hanging from each wheel was a metal sign reading, CAUTION—EXTREME HEAT.

  “This is where it gets tricky,” he said ominously.

  I nodded back toward the path we just traveled. “You mean all of that wasn’t tricky?”

  He laughed.

  “Okay, this is where it gets trickier. Two of these are release valves. If you turn either one, it will let off a steam blast that can be as hot as four hundred degrees.”

  “So I’m guessing we don’t want to turn those,” I said.

  “No we don’t,” he said. “But if any of Marek’s men ever made it this far and they were trying to locate what I’m about to show you . . .”

  “They wouldn’t be able to tell which one wasn’t real,” I said, finishing his sentence. “Because they can’t feel the heat on the pipes.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “You’re good at this.”

  He turned the middle wheel and I reflexively braced for a blast of steam, but instead there was only the sound of a door opening. The wheel was actually a giant doorknob, and when he pushed on it, that portion of the brick wall opened to reveal a large laboratory.

  “Welcome to the Workshop,” he said with dramatic flair.

  The lab looked like something out of an old Frankenstein movie but modern. It was as if someone had taken the scientific equipment of a century ago and partially updated it so that it seemed both antique and new at the same time. Across the room two scientists were working on an experiment. They wore thick wh
ite lab coats and aviator-style safety goggles with blue lenses. It took me a moment to recognize that one of them was my mother.

  “Molly!” she said as she took off the goggles. “I knew you’d figure out the clue.”

  She hurried over and wrapped me up in a huge hug. For a moment I closed my eyes and ignored our surroundings. It was just my mother and me, and I needed this more than anything.

  “What is this place?” I asked, admiring at it all.

  “We call it the Workshop,” she said. “It’s where we do research and planning. I guess you could say that it’s Omega’s headquarters.”

  As her lab partner approached and took off his goggles, I realized that it was Dr. Gootman, or rather the man I knew as Dr. Gootman when he was principal at MIST. I later learned he was actually Milton Blackwell, one of the so-called Unlucky 13, the original zombies who became undead when an explosion killed the crew digging the city’s first subway tunnel. He founded Omega to keep his brother Marek and the other eleven from getting out of control.

  “Hi, Dr. Gootman . . . or should I call you Mr. Blackwell . . . or is it Dr. Blackwell?”

  “Let’s go with Milton.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling both cool and awkward at the same time. “Milton.”

  “You’re the first one to arrive,” Mom said. “So why don’t I show you around while we wait for the others?”

  “There are others coming?” I asked, surprised. “The code on the flyer said you wanted me to come alone.”

  “We did want you to come alone,” she said. “If all of you were together, your trackers would have set off an alarm.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The radio frequency ID tags they put on you and the rest of your team,” she said. “They’re not only designed so that Marek’s men can find you but also to let them know if you are working together. If any three of the trackers are in the same location other than at school, it sets off an alarm.”

  “That’s why we sent each of you a separate message to lead you to different starting points across the city,” said Milton. “It took a lot of planning, but it was necessary, because we can’t let Marek find out about this lab. We still have too much work to do.”