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He could hear it now, even feel on his face the rush of the air the train was pushing in front of it.
The rest of them were right behind him, and suddenly he was there.
A plywood panel, covering a hole in the subway tu
"No!" he heard Heather yell as she realized what he was going to do. But it was too late.
Jeff hurled himself at the sheet of plywood, launching his body over the electrified rail, his arms raised, his body twisting so he'd hit the wood with his shoulder. If it held, and he dropped back-
His body smashed against the plywood. The nails holding it to the concrete squealed… but held, and Jeff dropped to the subway bed, missing the deadly third rail by a fraction of an inch.
There was a blare from a horn, and then the scream of brakes. Jeff looked up to see the train still hurtling toward him, and for a moment he froze, caught in the juggernaut's headlight like a jackrabbit. Then another voice crashed through the cacophony.
"Down! Now!"
Instinctively obeying his father's voice, Jeff dropped facedown into the gravel, then heard his father's voice bellow out again.
"Fire!"
Over the roar of the onrushing train there was a blast of gunfire. Jeff shrank away from it, but it was over almost as soon as it began, and when the blasting guns fell silent, everything had changed.
Light, daylight, was pouring through the hole in the concrete that only a moment before had been covered by the now-shattered sheet of plywood. Jeff scrambled to his feet and, with his father on one side, Heather on the other, and Jinx shoving him from behind, hurtled through the opening in the subway tu
It had changed since the last time he'd seen it, months ago, when his class in urban construction had taken another tour of the huge site where half a dozen buildings had stood. It had been a vast pit filled with heavy equipment meant for burrowing deep into the earth beneath the city. By now the pit had bottomed out, and the pile drivers were at work-the pile drivers he'd heard from deep within the tu
All around them there were wooden forms for the concrete that would soon begin to fill the pit, and as Jeff gazed at them, he realized that just a couple of weeks later-maybe even less-the opening he'd just come through would have been blocked off forever.
But it didn't matter. None of it mattered, for he was free- free of the Tombs and free of the tu
Reaching out and pulling Heather close, Jeff drew the cool afternoon air deep into his lungs, then leaned down and put his lips close to Heather's ear. "What do you say we walk home?" he murmured. "I think I'd just as soon skip the subway."
Randall Converse's grip on his father's hand tightened as he gazed down the stairs. "Don't want to," he said, hanging back and tugging his father's arm. Stepping away from the stream of people emerging from the subway onto Broadway, Jeff squatted down so his eyes were almost level with his son's. The four-year-old's features had taken on the stubborn, frowning expression that was a perfect replica of his grandfather's face when Keith had made up his mind and wasn't about to have it changed. "It's okay, Randy," Jeff said, doing his best to keep his voice from giving away his own nervousness about going into the subway. Years later he still felt a twinge of anxiety whenever he went beneath the streets of the city. On the trains and platforms, he constantly found himself glancing over his shoulder, sca
He could now see the same fear in Randy's eyes that he'd seen in his mother's when she'd begged him not to take her grandson into the tu
Randy said nothing, but Jeff saw the fear in the boy's expression start to fade as curiosity replaced it. "And you want to see where I used to live before you were born, don't you?"
Randy nodded, but there was enough uncertainty in his eyes that Jeff lifted him up into his arms. "How about if I carry you?"
"No!" Randy instantly objected. "I'm not a baby!"
Setting the boy back on his feet, Jeff took his son's hand and together they started walking down into the subway station.
A familiar knot of anxiety began to form deep in Jeff's belly.
"Now, this isn't so bad, is it?" he asked as they settled onto a bench in a well-lit car a few minutes later.
Randy shook his head, but said nothing until the train moved from the station into the darkness of the tu
The thought of actually walking through the tu
As the train moved north, Jeff sensed that Randy was starting to relax. As the stations flashed by one after another, so did his memories of the days he'd spent trapped in the tu
But in the end, the nightmare he'd lived since he'd saved Cynthia Allen's life in the station at 110th Street had finally ended. He and Heather had been married a month after his escape, and nine months to the day after the wedding, Randy had been born.
With that, everything in their lives had changed once more.
He finished architecture school and moved back to Bridgehampton, since neither he nor Heather wanted to raise Randy in the city.
In the days following Jeff's escape from the tu
It seemed Perry Randall had been the victim of a mugger.
Carey Atkinson had committed suicide in the face of a failing marriage, mounting debts, and a looming scandal in the Police Department.
Monsignor Terrence McGuire had retreated to an isolated monastery in Tuscany.
Judge Otto Vandenberg had died of a stroke and Arch Cranston had succumbed to a heart attack a day later.