Dark Days

by James Ponti

  We all started that way but stopped a few moments later when we heard a squeaking noise coming toward us.

  “I hope it’s not ghost cows,” joked Grayson.

  “Whatever it is, we don’t want to come face to face with it,” said Natalie. “Let’s get back in the other tunnel.”

  “You mean the dark and dirty one?” I asked.

  “No, I mean the safe one,” corrected Natalie.

  “Good point.”

  We hurried back to the other tunnel and disappeared into the darkness. Then we watched to see who was coming.

  The creaking got louder and louder, and soon we could tell it was the sound of metal wheels going over the wooden floor. Every now and then there was a little conversation between two people, although we couldn’t make it out.

  Finally we saw two men, big strong Level 2s, dressed almost like miners with hardhats and lights. They were pulling an old metal flatbed cart, one of its wheels squeaking with every rotation. And even though it was dark, the cargo was bright and impossible to miss.

  Six shining gold bars.

  Wolfram

  We sat quietly in the tunnel until the two men and their cargo were long gone. Other than the steady squeak, squeak, squeak of their wheels fading in the distance, there was no other sound except for the occasional deep breath as we considered the magnitude of what we’d just seen. We crawled out and back into the cattle tunnel.

  “Okay, Mr. Math,” Natalie said, turning to Grayson. “How much are we talking about there?”

  “Let’s see,” he said. “According to what they told us on the tour each bar weighs twenty-seven pounds. That’s about $640,000 per bar. Multiply that by six bars and they were carrying around 3.8 million dollars in gold.”

  “Why are two L2s moving nearly four million dollars in gold?” asked Alex.

  “I imagine they’re stealing it,” Natalie said.

  “You’d think that,” answered Alex. “But they’re walking toward the gold vault, not away from it. They were coming from the river.”

  “Should we follow them?” I asked.

  Natalie shook her head. “No, that’s way too risky. I think we need to get back to the surface and get home.”

  “Home sounds good,” Grayson said.

  Alex’s sense of direction was right on. After about fifteen minutes of walking, the tunnel dumped us out next to the Hudson River.

  “This must have been where the cows were unloaded from the boats,” said Liberty.

  “Mmmm, that makes me think of hamburgers,” said Alex.

  Natalie laughed. “Everything makes you think of hamburgers.”

  “That’s not true,” he replied. “Little Italy makes me think of lasagna.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Everything makes you think of food.”

  Alex thought about this. “That’s probably true.”

  We were covered in dirt, dust, and sweat, but it felt good. We’d managed to escape the Dead Squad’s trap and I’d played a big part in that. We also knew that Marek was doing something with the gold from the Federal Reserve.

  “I’ll get word to your mother about what we found and see what she wants us to do next,” Liberty said.

  I was jealous that he had more access to Mom than I did, but I understood. “Great,” I said.

  “Let’s get home and get some rest,” Natalie said. “Good job, everyone.”

  “Especially you, Gopher,” Alex said with a wink.

  The others headed uptown while Grayson and I went south toward Battery Park, which is where the morning began. I could tell he was feeling down and wanted someone to talk to.

  “My dad’s working late tonight and my sister’s out with friends,” I said. “Mind if I come hang out with you?”

  “That’d be great,” he said.

  We took the subway to Fort Greene and walked toward Grayson’s neighborhood. After a few minutes without either of us saying a word, he looked up at me, his eyes red.

  “I’m quitting,” he said.

  “Quitting what?” I asked.

  “Omega.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I’m holding everyone back,” he said. “You’ve got Liberty. You’ve got Beth. They’re not even part of the team but they do more to help than I do.”

  There was a bench on the edge of the park and we sat down there.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “You’re so important to everything we’re doing. You’re . . . essential.”

  He laughed. “For someone who is so good at seeing things that are hidden, how can you possibly miss something so obvious? It happened again today. We got attacked on the corner and everybody took someone out but me.”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “And at the Chrysler Building everyone was great . . . but me. Even Beth, who minutes earlier didn’t even know that the undead existed, fought like a pro. Me? I would have been thrown off the Chrysler Building if Natalie hadn’t come back.”

  His face was pained and heartbroken. I knew that Omega meant as much to him as it did to me. This was really hard for him.

  “We all help in different ways,” I tried to explain.

  “That’s a nice way of saying I can’t fight,” he replied. “Do you know I’ve never killed one? In two years I’ve never once killed a zombie. And on New Year’s Eve, I was the one fighting Edmund first. I didn’t even slow him down, which is why he was able to do that to Natalie. It is one hundred percent my fault that she is undead.”

  “That’s absolutely not true,” I told him. “Believe me, because I think it’s one hundred percent my fault. You are so valuable to this team, Grayson. You have to see that. I understand why you’re upset, but you can’t leave us. We need you.”

  “I can’t even figure out why the tungsten’s important, and I’ve spent months on it. I’ve studied their records. I’ve researched geology books. And I’m stumped.”

  “Let’s solve it right now,” I said. “Tell me everything you know about tungsten.”

  “There’s too much to even tell.”

  “Just start talking,” I said. “What are the basics?”

  “Tungsten is a rare, hard metal most often found in Canada, China, and Russia,” he said. “It’s gray and shiny. It’s used as the filament in lightbulbs and X-ray tubes, none of which have anything to do with Marek.”

  “Forget trying to connect it to Marek,” I said. “Just keep telling me about tungsten. It starts with a T but its chemical symbol is W. What’s that about?”

  “It comes from the Swedish word wolfram,” he said. “Tungsten’s chemical number is seventy-four. Its standard atomic weight is 183.84 and its density is 19.25 grams per centimeter cubed.”

  And that’s where he stopped.

  The eyes that were red with tears suddenly turned bright.

  “That’s it,” he said. “That’s how he’s doing it.”

  I smiled along with him and said, “You know I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, right? You know this is exactly why I said we needed you?”

  He looked at me, the white of his teeth appearing brighter than usual because of the remnants of dirt and dust on his face.

  “It’s exactly the same as gold,” he said. “Tungsten’s density and its properties are identical to gold. That’s what he’s doing. He’s swapping the tungsten with the gold in the Federal Reserve!”

  Back to School

  I don’t know how you go to school here,” Beth said as we walked across the campus. “It looks like it belongs in a horror movie.”

  She had a point. Once the home of a notorious mental hospital, MIST’s gothic architecture was scary enough on bright sunny days. But a fast-approaching storm had filled the sky with dark clouds, and the first week of summer vacation had given the school a certain level of abandoned eeriness.

  “Believe it or not, you get used to it,” I said as I typed a code into a keypad by the door to the library.

  “What’s the code?” she asked.

&nb
sp; I thought I’d give her a chance to test her code-breaking skills. “3, 35, 18, 39.”

  “Lithium, bromine, argon, yttrium,” she replied. “Li, Br, Ar, Y. Library. That’s easy enough.”

  Just as we had that first day beneath CCNY, our Omega team was arriving separately. We walked through the library without turning on any lights, navigating the stacks and the bookcases quickly. We took the stairs down to special collections, where the air had the scent of dust and old literature.

  “Look at those girls!”

  We looked across the room to see Mom waiting for us. The security light over her head gave her a slight green haze.

  “I miss you two so much.”

  She came over and hugged us, and before the others arrived we spent a few minutes talking about mundane things like our plans for the summer and the particulars of Beth’s job at the drama camp. Those are the details that meant the most to her, the little things that filled in the pictures of our lives.

  Alex and Grayson joined us a few minutes later. And a few minutes after that Natalie arrived with Liberty.

  “So I hear you guys have been busy,” Mom said. “Let’s see if we can figure out what to do next.”

  She led us back through the special collections to a small reading room. It looked like something you’d find in an old English manor, with a pair of overstuffed chairs, floor to ceiling oak bookcases, and even a fireplace. Without hesitating she walked right up to the fireplace, ducked down, and entered it. She pushed on the brick wall in the back and it opened up onto a staircase.

  “This way,” she said, directing us down the staircase.

  This led us to a cozy studio apartment that had a similar vibe as the reading room. There were bookcases and books everywhere.

  “Welcome to my home,” said Milton Blackwell as he greeted each one of us with a hearty handshake.

  “I thought your home was the lab underneath CCNY,” I said.

  He laughed. “When you’re over 140 years old, you get to have more than one. That’s more my home to work and this is more my home to relax and think. It’s where I lived the whole time I was principal of MIST. I like it because it keeps me close to school and because it comes with a fully-stocked library upstairs.”

  We all settled down on comfortable couches, and he poured us hot tea and served cookies.

  “Liberty filled us in on most of what you’ve learned, but we wanted to get everybody together,” Mom said. “Let’s go around the room and try to paint a full picture of what Marek’s up to.”

  “First of all, he’s stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the Federal Reserve Bank,” Grayson said. “He was part of the construction team that built the vault back in the 1920s and he must have left some sort of back door entrance that cuts through the Manhattan schist. All the security is focused on protecting it from above ground. No one would have thought you could come from underneath.”

  “That’s not even the brilliant part,” said Alex. “Tell him how he’s beating all the checks and balances.”

  “He’s swapping the gold bars a few at a time with bars made out of tungsten and coated with a layer of gold.”

  Milton’s head bobbed up and down as he did some mental calculations. “That is brilliant. Their properties are almost identical. They’d pass a lot of tests.”

  “That’s exactly right,” said Grayson.

  “How does this involve the historian from CCNY?” asked Mom.

  “She uncovered a secret tunnel the Sons of Liberty built during the Revolutionary War,” I explained. “She was planning to excavate and study it. If she did that, she would have found the old cattle tunnels Marek is using to move his tungsten and gold. By paying her to do something else, he protected his secret.”

  “I think there may be more to it than that,” Natalie said. “Molly was explaining how the forts were arranged on Manhattan during the Revolution. This professor is an expert in that and I think Marek is trying to borrow that knowledge.”

  This was a new revelation to me.

  “How?” I asked.

  “I saw it last night,” she said. “I was looking at a map of all the RUNY construction sites and I noticed it looked a lot like the map you showed me of the Revolutionary War forts. The layout is the same.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Liberty.

  “I don’t think he’s building entertainment centers underground,” she said. “I think that’s what they’ll look like.”

  “But they’ll really be forts,” I said, getting her point.

  “Think about it,” she said. “He has hundreds of millions of dollars to build underground forts and arm an undead army.”

  “This is freaky stuff,” Beth said. “How are we going to stop him?”

  “We may not have to,” Alex said. “The Dead Squad changed the frequency of their communication channel after our little battle at the Chrysler Building, but after some searching I found the new one and have been able to listen in on their conversations for the last couple days. They don’t talk as much as they used to, but I can tell one thing for sure. Marek is sick.”

  “That’s what we understand too,” Mom said.

  “His body is rejecting most of the transplants,” Alex replied. “And they are searching for the two of you around the clock.”

  “Why are they looking for Mom and Milton?” asked Beth. “What do they have to do with Marek being sick?”

  There was a slight pause in the conversation, and then Milton answered, “My brother needs my body parts in order to survive.”

  Beth’s eyes opened wide. She went to say something, but she couldn’t make the words.

  “We know,” I said. “It’s beyond gross.”

  Everyone was silent for a minute, then I shook my head and went on. “He may be sick,” I said. “But he’s making a public appearance tomorrow.”

  “Where?” asked Mom.

  “The Central Park Zoo,” I said. “I got another letter yesterday.”

  I handed the envelope to my mother. Inside there was a map of the Central Park Zoo and a press release that said Marek Blackwell was going to break ground on construction for a new exhibit at the zoo. There was also a note, which Mom read aloud.

  “When Marek makes his announcement, everything will be clear.”

  “Scary, huh?” I said.

  “Yes,” replied my mother.

  “It has shades of New Year’s Eve,” added Alex. “We go expecting one announcement, and it turns out to be something else.”

  “I know,” I answered. “That’s why I don’t want to make any recommendation about what we should do. I just thought I should share it with all of you.”

  “First of all, what happened on New Year’s wasn’t your fault,” said Natalie. “And secondly, you know what we have to do.”

  “She’s right,” said Mom. “We have to be there.”

  Groundbreaking Development

  It was a beautiful June day and crowds packed the Central Park Zoo. There were seven of us there. Alex, Beth, and I were together near the sea lion exhibit while Natalie, Grayson, and Liberty were over by the snow monkeys. My mom was the wildcard; she was taking advantage of the fact that you can look into the zoo from the walkway that runs through the park. She blended in with the tourists hanging out by the Delacorte Clock.

  None of us were next to the penguins, which is where Marek was making his announcement. We wanted to be close enough to see and hear what was going on but not where he’d be likely to see us. Although we were somewhat exposed, we felt comfortable that the undead weren’t going to attack us in front of a bunch of kids on summer vacation at the zoo. Marek was building a new reputation as a civic leader and couldn’t let anything he was involved with become too messy.

  “Anything interesting?” I asked Alex, who was listening in on the Dead Squad’s communications.

  “Nope,” he said. “Hardly any chatter at all.”

  I gave him a look. “Chatter? Did you learn that reading some book abou
t cops?”

  He looked a little hurt at the dig. “That’s what my uncle Paul calls it.”

  “I’m just kidding,” I said. “I do that when I’m nervous.”

  “There’s Mr. Evil,” said Beth.

  Marek Blackwell arrived with the zoo director, and the two of them approached a small podium and microphone. Like always, he was well dressed with a crisp coat and tie despite the hot June afternoon. They stood in front of a few dozen people, including some members of the press. Among them were some television news crews, including one with Brock Hampton, the local reporter who often broadcasts coded messages to the undead.

  “I’d like to welcome everyone and thank you for coming,” the director said into the microphone. “We are going to have a short presentation today about an exciting new addition we’re adding to the zoo. Marek Blackwell has donated a very generous sum of money to support a new habitat for the penguins here at the Central Park Zoo. Today we are breaking ground on what will be a state-of-the-art facility for some of the zoo’s most popular residents. I’d like to introduce Marek Blackwell.”

  There was applause as Marek moved to the microphone. He seemed frail and uneasy.

  “I think you’re right,” I said to Alex. “He looks sick.”

  Someone handed him a gold-plated shovel, and he said, “I know a little something about digging.”

  This elicited polite laughter from the people in the crowd.

  “I’ve spent most of my life under this great city, digging holes to carry everything from drinking water to subways,” he continued. “And now I am reinventing underground New York, but that doesn’t mean I’m not concerned about what happens up here on the surface.”

  There was some more laughter, and I had to admit that he had undeniable charm. It was easy to see how he got people to support him.

  “When I put this shovel into the ground, it will mark the beginning of a new habitat for the zoo’s penguins. It’s my hope that it will be a treasure for the families of New York but also for the scientists who study these amazing animals. That means so much to me because of my brother Milton.”

  Alex and I exchanged looks. We had no idea what he was talking about.