Then I shot Fang a look that said, Thank you for that lovely image. He almost grinned at me.
Iggy felt the train first. “Everyone off the rails,” he said, standing still until I took his arm. We all stepped over to a yucky, disgusting wall and pressed ourselves as flat against it as possible.
Thirty seconds later, a train rushed past so fast that its slipstream made us
sway toward it. I kept my knee shoved against Angel so she wouldn’t be pulled off her feet.
“Well, that was fairly nerve-racking,” I said as we gingerly peeled ourselves off the wall.
“Who’s there?” The voice was querulous, aggressive, and rough, as if its owner had spent the last fifty years smoking cigarettes. Maybe he had.
We walked forward, on the alert, wings starting to unfold a tiny bit in case we suddenly needed to go airborne.
“Nobody,” I called convincingly as we turned the bend of the tunnel.
“Whoa,” the Gasman breathed.
Before us was a city. A small, ragged city in Manhattan’s basement. Groups of people clotted a large concrete cavern. The ceiling was three stories above us and dripped with paint stalactites and humid condensation.
Several unwashed faces looked toward us, and someone said, “Not cops. Kids.”
They turned away, uninterested, except for one woman who seemed to be wearing about five layers of clothing. “You got food?” she barked.
Silently, Nudge pulled a napkin-wrapped knish out of her pocket and handed it over. The woman sniffed it, looked at it, then turned her back to us and started eating.
Here and there the cavern was dotted with fifty-gallon oil drums in which people had made fires. It was a warm spring night, but the fires provided the only light and helped get rid of the dank chill that was creeping up my legs.
It was a whole new world, made up of homeless people, people who didn’t fit in anywhere, runaways . . . We saw a handful of kids who looked around our age.
I realized that my head was aching. It had been growing worse all evening, and now I just wanted to go to sleep.
“Over there,” said the knish woman, pointing. We looked and saw a narrow concrete ledge built into a wall. It was hundreds of feet long, and people were sleeping on it, sitting on it, marking off their territory with old blankets or cardboard boxes. The woman had pointed out a thirty-foot-long section that seemed unoccupied.
I looked at Fang, and he shrugged. It wasn’t as nice as the park, but it was warm, dry, and seemed somewhat safe. We scrambled up the ledge, with me boosting Angel. Keeping our backs to everyone, we stacked our fists and tapped twice. Almost instantly, Nudge lay down, pillowing her head on her hands.
Fang and I sat with our backs against the wall. I dropped my head into my hands and started rubbing my temples.
“You okay?” Fang asked.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “I’ll be better tomorrow.”
“Go to sleep,” said Fang. “I’ll take the first watch.”
I gave him a grateful smile, and soon I was out, out, out—with no idea how we would ever know it was morning.
84
The brain explosion came again while I was sleeping.
One moment I was lost in a dream in which I was strolling lazily through a field of yellow flowers, like a dopey shampoo commercial, and the next I had jackknifed into a sitting position, holding my head and feeling like this was it: Death had finally come for me, and it wasn’t taking no for an answer.
My breaths were tight hisses. Jagged shards of pain ripped through my skull, and I heard myself whimper. Please let it be fast, I begged God. Please just end it, end it, end it now. Please, please, please.
“Max?” Fang’s low voice, right by my ear, seeped through the waves of agony. I couldn’t respond. My face was awash with tears. If I had been standing on a cliff, nothing could have kept me from throwing myself off. With my wings tucked in.
Inside my brain, images flashed incomprehensibly, making me sick, assaulting my senses with pictures, words, sounds. A voice speaking gibberish. Maybe it was mine.
As if from a great distance, I felt Fang’s hand on my shoulder, but it was like watching a movie—it seemed totally unrelated to what I was going through. My teeth were clenched so hard my jaw ached, and then I tasted blood—I had bitten into my lip.