The Final Hour

CHAPTER THIRTY

I had no idea where we were or where we were going. I just followed Mike. He seemed to know the way, dodging and weaving through the park with absolute certainty. I remembered Milton One had told me he’d been studying maps all night.

At first, the choppers didn’t come after us. I think they’d lost sight of us, trying to get away from the exploding plane. But as Mike and I raced through the darkness, I heard the pulsing throb of their rotors growing louder behind us. I looked over my shoulder and saw their powerful spotlights sweeping the night. One of them seemed to have stayed behind with Rose. The other two were looking for us.

“Keep close,” Mike shouted back to me.

I did. He ran along a line of trees, his path tracing the shapes of their shadows. The shifting patches of dark thrown by the tree trunks and the bare branches gave us some cover and Mike made the most of it. All around us, the chopper spotlights swept back and forth over the grass, searching and searching.

But they’d lost us. By the time we reached the edge of the park, the throb of the rotors was growing dimmer as the choppers headed off over the trees in the wrong direction.

Following Mike, I stepped off the soft grass onto hard pavement. And I stopped. Mike was there, standing at the edge of the sidewalk. I followed his gaze, looked up and saw tall buildings standing black against the night. Their windows were broken and lightless. They seemed abandoned.

Mike slapped my shoulder and gestured with his head. He started running again. I went after him.

We wove down these dark, abandoned streets. There were no people anywhere. It seemed the city-or the borough-wherever we were-was completely empty.

Then we turned a corner-and suddenly there the people were. On a broad brightly lit boulevard, a large crowd moved in a steady line past stores and under streetlamps. There were police everywhere, too, standing on the outskirts of the crowd, scanning the people closely as they passed.

Mike and I stood on the corner of a shadowy side street. He swiped at his face with his hands, trying to use his own sweat to wash the grime off his cheeks, trying to make himself look as normal as possible. I did the same.

When he was done, Mike gave a quick tug at my elbow and started moving again. I followed him.

We joined the masses, moving with the human tide. In the distance I could hear sirens, lots of sirens. Then there came the beat of the choppers too. I looked up and saw a police helicopter hovering in the air right above us. When I glanced over at the patrolmen on the ground, they were all murmuring into their walkie-talkies. I figured they were getting the word about the crash in the park and our escape. I figured they were being told to look out for us. I felt the policemen’s eyes on me as we passed by them-I felt sure they were all looking straight at me. But I guess Mike knew that in a crowd like that, it would be hard to pick out any one person. Anyway, he shoved his way into the center of the throng and I went with him and no one spotted us.

We walked steadily along, pushed and carried by the flow of people. After a few minutes, I saw where we were heading. There was a subway stop on the corner up ahead. It was a stairway leading down from the sidewalk, the opening in the pavement surrounded by a low green barrier. At least one branch of the river of people was flowing into the opening and cascading down the stairs. Another few seconds, and Mike and I were cascading down with them.

As the lights of the streets, and the cold of the evening air, gave way to the muted light and the dank stuffy atmosphere of the enclosed subway station, I felt myself relax a little. I felt safer here, belowground, out of the open, away from the choppers.

As we reached the bottom of the stairs, I looked around the station, peering over the heads of the people around me. There was a ticket booth in the tiled enclosure and ticket machines against the wall and a row of turnstiles leading to the subway platform. There were more cops also, patrolmen in blue uniforms: one in the ticket area, two more that I could see on the platform, watching the crowds.

Mike muscled his way to the ticket machines and came back to me with a ticket. Then he motioned me toward the turnstiles. The crowd grew denser as the turnstiles slowed the people’s progress. We pushed in close to the thickening mass. Reached the turnstiles, swiped our tickets, pushed through. We walked directly past one of the patrolmen guarding the platform. My shoulder nearly brushed him as I went by, we were that close. I felt my breath catch as his eyes went over me, but then we were past him-and the next moment, the train shot into the station, the windows flashing as it roared and rattled past.

The train slowed, stopped. The doors opened. No one left the car. The crowd just poured in like water into a funnel. I had to shoulder my way through the dense mass to make it on. Then the doors closed and Mike and I were crushed together, packed in so tightly with the others I could hardly breathe.

The train started moving again.

Someone shouted drunkenly, “Happy New Year!”

We headed into Manhattan.