As Ryan stepped onto the empty platform, a shrill horn sounded. In front of him, the low silver train was already in motion to the right. He got a quick but unmistakable glimpse of purple-hooded behemoths clogging the middle of one of the cars before the train disappeared into the tunnel.
Across the tracks, beyond the row of ceiling supports, the opposite platform was empty—no passengers, no train.
“What do we do now?” Ricky asked.
Ryan turned to the woman with the unholstered, tiger-striped blaster. She didn’t look rattled by what she’d just seen, which surprised him. She looked really, really pissed off. “Which way is that train headed?”
“North to Herald Square,” she said.
“How many stops in that direction?” Mildred asked.
“It isn’t the number of stops,” the woman said. “They could get off anywhere, change trains, reverse direction. If you don’t know where they’re going...”
“We don’t know where they’re going or why,” Ryan said.
“Nukin’ hell!” J.B. exclaimed, screwing down his fedora with one hand. “We did this for nothing? We’re going to die for nothing?”
“Attention,” a voice bellowed through the speakers above the platform. “Attention, all subway passengers. This station is being cleared for security reasons. Repeat, this station is being cleared for security reasons. Until the procedure is complete, no more trains will be stopping here. For your own safety and the safety of those around you, please remain calm and follow the signs to the nearest street exit. If you need help, NYPD officers will be available to assist you.”
“What’s going on?” Krysty asked.
“The ESU is about to clean house,” the woman with the tiger-striped blaster said as the announcement began to repeat.
“Combat-trained, militarized police,” Mildred explained. “Automatic weapons. Grenades. Snipers. Explosives.”
“This place is about to be assaulted by men in black uniforms, battle helmets and armored vests,” the woman added. “They will see us as armed suspects at the scene of a mass murder or terrorist attack. They will shoot on sight. We have two choices. Abandon our weapons now, blend in with the other passengers as best we can before they sweep in and hope to hell they don’t review the station’s closed circuit video before we manage to get out—”
“We’re not going to throw away our blasters,” J.B. interrupted.
“That’s a nonstarter,” Mildred agreed.
“The other choice is to follow the purple hoodies down the tunnel,” the woman said.
“But they are on a train, my dear, and we are on foot,” Doc said.
“I don’t mean follow them down the tunnel to catch them,” the woman stated. “I mean go down the tunnel to get out of here. ESU will clear the station first and then move on to the tunnels. If you want to keep your guns and stay alive, we have to escape while they’re busy elsewhere.”
“Do you know the way?” Ryan asked.
“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do,” the woman said as she holstered the big gold blaster. “Follow me. My name’s Veronica, by the way. Veronica Currant. But you can call me Vee.”
They quickly exchanged names; there was no time for handshakes.
Overhead the loudspeaker voice boomed, “Attention subway passengers. Attention subway passengers. If you are injured and unable to move or find yourself trapped, please remain calm. Do not resist the approaching armed police officers. Obey all their commands. They will take you to safety and medical help as quickly as possible.”
Vee led them down to the end of the platform, then jumped down onto the rail bed. “Stay away from that,” she said, pointing to the left, at the third rail.
Ryan had already noticed the red warning sign that read Danger High Voltage. The lights in the tunnel were dim and widely spaced; the air rank and humid. A thick coating of black grime covered its walls and coated the clustered pipes and cables that ran along them.
They had trotted maybe fifty yards when Vee stopped at a barely visible hatch-style door on the right. It was unmarked. With a grunt, she leaned on the locking lever, and the door cracked open. “This is a tunnel-maintenance access and emergency exit,” she said. “From here we can get to the street.”
She leaned through the doorway, then a weak light came on inside.
“How do you know so much about this place?” Mildred asked as they filed into the cramped space. “Do you work here or something?”
“No, I just pick up odd, interesting tidbits in my job,” she said.
A very steep stairway led up, so steep there were support rails along both walls. When they shut and dogged the hatch door, it muffled the racket from the station. They ascended in silence, except for the sounds of their breathing.
Ryan could feel the strain in his thighs as he put one boot in front of another. They had done a lot of full-out running and fighting in a very short time span. Not to mention the aftereffects of the chron jump. J.B.’s comment about their sacrifice being all for nothing tried to go around and around in his head, but he shut it off.
The game wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot.
Not while they still drew breath.
At the top of the stairs, they found a long, darkened hallway with broad puddles of standing water on the floor. Steam pipes and conduit hung low above them; what looked like banks of generators and transformers, and their controlling circuit panels, stood behind locked cages of heavy wire. When Vee opened the exit door to an alley, the grinding din was back—wag horns, the steady growl of engines, sirens, now mixed with unintelligible bullhorn commands. They moved quickly between high, windowless brick walls, around a hard right corner to the mouth. The street leading to the subway entrance was now blocked off with police and emergency vehicles and flashing lights. Helicopters zigzagged across the sky overhead. No one had time to marvel at what was going on outside.
“Our position appears untenable,” Doc observed.
“Then we go back to her place,” Ricky said, nodding in Vee’s direction. “We get in the machine and go back home to Deathlands.”
“That isn’t possible,” Vee told him. “What you see happening on this street is what’s happening on my block. That’s the response when people get killed and cars get blown up. The whole area will have been cordoned off by armed police with helicopter overflights. No way in or out.”
“We shouldn’t have chased Magus onto the street,” J.B. opined. “We should have just followed at a distance until we had a chance to chill him, with no witnesses. Now we’re as dead as everyone else in this city. That apartment is our only way out.”
“Even if we could get back into her building, J.B.,” Ryan said, “even if we figured out the mat-trans’s controls and somehow made it to Deathlands, I think we’d arrive at the same redoubt with enforcers clawing at the door.”
“So,” Krysty said, “if the city sec men don’t kill us, the enforcers at the other end of the chron jump will. And if we survive here until the twentieth, the nuke strikes will take us out anyway.”
“That doesn’t leave many options,” Mildred stated.
“Except to have one hell of a send-off,” Krysty said.
“The mistake was all mine,” Ryan told them. “I brought this down on us. We should have waited outside the redoubt for Magus to come back. From the moment we set foot inside that place, we were fucked.”
“Stuck between a rock and another rock,” Doc said soberly.
They had been caught in countless tight spots in the past—or more correctly in the future—but they had always been able to figure a way out. This time perhaps not. A question occurred to Ryan: Could a person really die a hundred years before he was born? He kept it to himself.
“We still have some time left,” Vee said. “Can’t we change the future somehow? Avert this nuclear attack? What do you know about it?”
She sounded remarkably calm for someone who’d recently learned the world was going to blow up in a matter of hours, Doc thought.
“Precious little that would help that cause, my dear,” Doc said. “An all-out missile exchange between the United States and the Russians on January 20, 2001, created a global, nuclear holocaust that ended much of civilization. That conflagration and its aftermath necessarily complicates the unraveling of the whos, the wheres and the whens. Which one, if either, started it is unknown. It could have been initiated by a third party or a computer glitch—or misinterpreted data. Miscommunication, even. Because we don’t know the precise chain of circumstances that triggered Armageddon, altering the course of those events becomes difficult if not impossible.”
“If you’re thinking of warning someone about nukeday,” Krysty said, “who would listen?”
“You’re right,” Vee agreed. “No one is going to listen.”
