AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But even with all their high-tech gear, they had their work cut out for them and then some.
I stared at my radio, which had been completely silent for the last ten minutes, then I couldn’t take it anymore. I stood and walked over to the cave and stuck my head in. Inside the entrance, it began to slope sharply down. It was oddly uniform. It looked almost man-made, like a subway tunnel to hell. Mr. Duke had explained that the cave, known as a lava tube, was a channel in the rock formed during a previous eruption. There was a raised stringy pattern in the floor and benchlike ledges along both walls where the explosives had been placed.
The radio I’d left behind me finally crackled for the first time, and I ran over to it.
“Render safe one. I repeat, render safe one. We got the first one,” came over the radio.
“Two. Render safe charge two.”
&nbs
p; I looked up at a smiling Nate as he arrived.
“We got three. Three is down,” said a voice as Nate gave me an amped-up high five.
“Mattie, this is Alpo,” came an urgent voice over the radio a moment later. “We see something smoking up the cave to our left. I repeat. We see something smoking over by you along the wall.”
There was a pause, then a one-word reply.
“Down!” screamed a voice as the rumble of an explosion went off deep inside the cave.
In super slow motion, I turned toward the mouth of the cave as I felt the shudder through the rock around me. It was the same shudder I felt when 26 Fed had come down, and I stared up at the blue of the sky waiting for the world to end.
Chapter 88
Great. Just great, Martin thought, looking out the van’s windshield as he woke up.
It was 6:00 a.m., and, no bones about it, his Escape from New York bid with the kids had failed spectacularly.
He was on I-95, but not outside the city, as per the plan. No, he was heading the wrong way—back into the city—in the East Bronx, parked off the side of the road, pointing south.
How it had happened he couldn’t say. He had tried valiantly to get upstate, like Mike had told him, but everywhere they had gone the roads had been blocked by accidents or police. All night long he kept getting shunted this way and that. Bottom line, he’d been forced back in exactly the wrong direction.
It got worse. They were now on a concrete bridge above a body of water, an inlet of some sort. The last sign they had passed before he had gone to sleep said CITY ISLAND.
He didn’t know too much about the Bronx, but even an Irishman knew that City Island was a place where there were seafood restaurants and fishing boats you could charter. Things really couldn’t be more dire. They were now stuck in the Bronx right by the not-so-beautiful sea.
He looked in the rearview mirror at the sleeping kids. At least they had finally zonked out. They were fed and watered after a stop at a gas station around three. There was no gas at the station, of course, as all the tanks were empty, but he’d let them go to town on sweets in the store.
They’d come out with Pringles, Combos, sodas, every variety of M&M’s known to man. Anything to keep them blissfully unaware of—what? Coming disaster? Apocalypse?
“Unbe-shighting-lievable,” he mumbled as he stared out at the graying sky, then at the E on the gas gauge.
“What was that?” said Seamus, sitting up.
“Nothing, Father,” said Martin. “Go back to sleep. We’re good.”
“Actually, Father…,” he added as he glanced out the window to his right.
“What is it, son?” said Seamus, yawning.
“Father, I was just thinking. We weren’t able to make it upstate, right?”
“I’ll say,” Seamus said, looking around. “We didn’t even make it out of the Boogie Down.”
“Well, look over there,” said Martin, pointing out the window at a stand of high-rises a couple of miles west on the horizon.
“That’s Co-op City,” said Seamus. “What about it?”
