Undertow Excerpt

8/9/2019 Undertow Excerpt

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Copyright © 2015 by Michael Buckley

All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections

from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

The text was set in Dante MT Std .

Book design by Lisa Vega

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Buckley, Michael, 1969–

Undertow / Michael Buck ley.

pages cm

Summary: A sixteen-year-old girl is caught in an epic clash of

civilizations when a society of undersea warriors marches out

of the ocean into modern-day Coney Island.

ISBN 978-0-544-34825-7

[1. Survival — Fiction. 2. Love — Fiction.

3. Coney Island (New York, N.Y.) — Fiction. 4. Fantasy.] I. Title.

PZ7.B882323Un 2015

[Fic] — dc23 2014038317

Manufactured in the United States of America

TK 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

45XXXXXXXX


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C H A P T E R O N E

YOU CAN HEAR THEM COMING FROM BLOCKS AWAY , A LOW

thrum like the plucking of a bass string. As they

grow closer it becomes a buzz in your inner ear, like

hornets building a nest in your brain. By the time they reach

your street, when they are right outside your window, the

sound is unbearable: a rogue wave of moans and shrieks thatrises higher and higher into a great crescendo of terror, the

stuff of nightmares. You can’t sleep through it. There is no

pillow in the world big enough to block out their howls. Just

pull the blankets up over your head and wait for them to pass.

They will. They always do.

I am not without fear, but my curiosity gets the best of me

every time. I leap from my bed, pull up my blackout blinds,

press my face against the windowpane, and squint hard before

they melt back into the shadows. Like most nights, I am too

late. They’re here and then they’re gone, like lightning bolts

stabbing at the esh of night. The only evidence they werehere at all is the ragged wound in the peace and quiet.

But there’s still plenty to see. From not far behind comes a


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mob of men and boys armed with bats and booze, our neigh-

borhood’s self-appointed guard dogs. They bark threats and

give chase. And then, to close the show, here come the policewith their lights and squealing squad-car tires. An amplied

voice demands that everyone clear the streets, while a helicop-

ter hovers overhead, poking into backyards and abandoned

lots with its frantic spotlight. I hear a gunshot. Pop! Then more.

Pop! Pop!

It’s after curfew in Coney Island.

“You should be asleep,” my mother says. She’s a silhou-

ette in the yellow light of the hall. “Tomorrow is going to be a

crazy day.”

“They’re on the run tonight,” I explain.

She nudges some space next to me at the window andgazes into the now-empty street. Her shoulders and neck mus-

cles tighten into knots. Her breathing is heavy. She uses her

thumb to dig into the meat of her palms. I don’t like this ver-

sion of her — this jittery deer ready to sprint for cover at the

slightest sound. I miss my happy mom, my bouncy, ip-ops,

cutoff-shorts mom. My Summer Walker, version 1.0.

With a snap the blackout blind comes back down, and

she shoos me toward my bed. “They’re probably scavenging.

How’s your head?” she asks.

“It’s an F4, but it feels like it’s going to be an F5 soon.”

Mom inches. I have been getting migraines since I was atoddler, and somewhere along the line we started categorizing

their shapes and sizes like hurricanes. F1 is the ever-present

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storm in my gray matter. An F5 is a motherf’r, on-the-oor,

curled-up-in-a-ball, puking, sobbing, wanting-to-throw-rocks-

at God state of emergency. “You’ve wound yourself up over tomorrow,” she scolds.

“How can I not wind myself up over tomorrow?” I cry.

“Why is this place so hot?” she says, then rushes out of

my room. I follow and nd her frantically twisting the knobs

on our apartment’s sole air conditioner, a prehistoric, broken-

down dinosaur my father purchased before I was born. Each

night in the raging, humid heat of Coney Island it clings to life,

wheezing out puffs of air one might describe as toasty. Mom

pushes something, and the machine breaks into the hacking t

of an old chain smoker. She quickly turns another knob, and

it kicks and spits before settling back into its usual utteringrattle.

“We have money for a new one,” I say.

“That money is for emergencies,” she whispers.

“Mom, the emergency happened three years — ”

“I’ll run a bath.”

“I think I just need some — ”

Boom! The F5 has arrived. The pain is a sucker punch to the

temple, an explosion that feels like the plates of my skull have

just expanded and then fallen back down into a jumbled mess.

Heat spreads across my face, a forest re in my frontal lobe. It

sweeps down my neck and burns down the base of my spine. Ifall to my knees, hands on my ears, doing everything I can to

not vomit.

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“Mom,” I squeak.

She’s pulling on my arm, trying to get me up on my feet

again, but then — boom! — I’m on my back. I can barely remember where I am, who I am.

“Don’t panic, Lyric! Just breathe.” She crawls onto the oor

and wraps herself around me like she’s trying to shield me

from hand-grenade shrapnel. Her arms are strong. They whis-

per and soothe. I am your mother. I will take care of you.

“I hate my brain,” I whimper through snot and tears.

“I know.” She repeats it over and over again.

When I can stand, she helps me into the bathroom. I sit

on the edge of our claw-foot tub and watch cold water gather

around the rusty drain. When it’s full, she helps me out of my

clothes and steadies me. Stepping into it is like easing into acup of frozen yogurt: creamy, cold, comforting. It takes a while

to adjust to the temperature, but it’s the only thing that helps.

When I can stand it, I nestle down, deep as I can go.

“I miss the beach,” I say as I close my eyes for a moment,

ying off to the shoreline, where she and I would sit for hours

as the Atlantic’s roar scared off my pain. It eased the agony

without fail, like nature’s morphine, but we’re not allowed to

go to the beach anymore, not since they arrived.

“I miss it too.” Each word is interwoven with guilt. She

blames herself for what has happened to our neighborhood —

the ghting, the martial law, the hate. “Where’s Dad?” I say, hoping he wasn’t one of the cops

down in the street.

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She dips a washcloth into the water, wrings it out, then lays

it over my eyes. “At the precinct. Mike wants everyone to go

over the plans for tomorrow one more time. There are a lot ofmoving parts with the FBI and all those soldiers. But they’ll be

ready. Don’t be worried.”

“I’m not,” I lie.

“Things will get better. You’ll see.” Now she’s lying.

I sink down farther, completely submerging myself. It’s

down here where I feel most safe, where the headaches retreat,

where the roar of the water drowns out the thrum.

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C H A P T E R T W O

IHEAR HER TAPPING HER FOOT , HER IMPATIENT SIGHS , HER

orchestra of little noises demanding I start my day,

but I refuse to open my eyes. I was up all night with

a migraine, an anxious mother, and a father pacing back

and forth until he wore a path in the carpet. If I open my

eyes, I have to accept that it is Monday morning, the Mon-day morning all of Coney Island and I have been dreading

for months.

“Lyric Walker, I know you’re awake. Get your butt out of

that bed.”

“Go away.”

I slide farther under my sheet and curl in on myself all roly-

poly-like, hoping she will see my resolve and go to school with-

out me. If I can just get small enough, she will have to give up,

right?

“We’ve got to get you ready,” she says as she rips off my

cocoon. When I scramble for pillows, she snatches them awaytoo. There’s nowhere to hide, and when she turns off my


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sound machine and pulls up my blackout blinds, I surrender.

I’m going to school.

“I hate you, Bex Conrad,” I growl. “Blame the Big Guy. He told me to wake you up,” she says

as she turns her attention to my dresser drawers. She peers

inside each one, digging for buried treasures she’s overlooked

the hundred or so times she’s already gone through them. Bex

covets my clothes — all of them — because, one, I have the best

clothes, and two, her mom is a screwup who can’t hold a job

and wouldn’t give two thoughts if Bex wore a paper sack to

school. Today, however, she’s erce, wearing a black miniskirt

and a Hello Kitty T-shirt that’s easily two sizes too small for

her. She’s got on the Mary Janes she swiped from under my

bed last month that add a couple of inches to her already tall-ass frame. Her hair is clean and sleek, her makeup sick. Every-

thing about her shouts, “Jealous, much?” Which means she is

not here at this ungodly hour for my clothes.

“Tammy let him back in the house?”

She shrugs. Tammy is her mother in the loosest form of

the word. “Him” is the devil incarnate — her stepfather, Rus-

sell.

“What does he have to do before she’s had enough?”

“I guess something worse than assault and battery,” she

says ippantly.

I frown. Bex’s problems are hidden by walls made of jokesand smiles. Even after all this time, I am rarely allowed inside.

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“Bex, I — ”

She nds a black bangle I bought at a yard sale and slips it

onto her wrist. Then she takes a peek in the mirror. “This isnow mine.”

“Bex, seriously. Are you okay? Is he still drinking?”

“Where are all your sexy clothes? You have to look hot.”

“Bex, don’t change the subject.”

“We might be on TV.”

Bex continues rummaging through my things. She has

said all she’s going to on the subject. She’ll share when she’s

ready and not a moment sooner.

“Let’s skip school,” I say.

“They’re arresting everyone who tries.”

“My dad’s a cop.” “You think the Big Guy won’t arrest you?” She laughs, then

opens another drawer. “Where are the skirts, Lyric? Where are

the tank tops? Are you Amish all of a sudden?”

“Who cares what we wear? No one is going to notice us.

Not today.”

Bex stops and stares at me with a mix of horror and bewil-

derment. “They’ll notice us! There will be cameras every-

where, and I guarantee you we will both be on some website

like Hot Girls of Fish City dot-com. Unless you try to pull the

little-matchstick-girl look again, which I am here to prevent.”

I lumber to the window and cringe at what I see below.News trucks are parked up and down my street, each with a

massive satellite dish mounted on its roof. Reporters spring

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from them like jack-in-the-boxes and charge across the road

with camera operators in tow. They claim their inch of the

sidewalk and prep for their “live at the scene” reports. Thereare a few news choppers buzzing around in the sky too. The

whole world is looking into our shbowl today.

Bex abandons my dresser and moves on to my closet,

where an enormous overstuffed backpack blocks the door.

It’s the kind you take for climbing mountains, and it’s packed

tight. When she tries to shove it aside, it topples over, nearly

taking her with it.

“Will you do something with this, already? It’s always in

the way. What the hell is in it?”

“Just some stuff I’m going to donate to Goodwill,” I lie.

“Hey! I get rst dibs on everything,” she says with mockoffense. She goes to work on the zipper before I pull it away.

“It’s just socks and underwear.”

“You’re donating used socks and underwear to the poor?”

With all the bull I shovel every single day, I should be get-

ting pretty good at it, but I’m a total amateur when I have to lie

to Bex. I wish I could tell her the truth about everything, like

what is in the backpack, at the very bottom, loaded and ready,

just in case. It would be nice to tell someone — I would feel a lot

less lonely — but the truths I keep from her, and everyone else,

are just too burdensome to share. They’re the kind that stand

on your neck and won’t let you up. “That’s gross, Lyric,” she says, then shoos the backpack

away like it . . . well, like it’s really full of used socks and undies.

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The closet doors y open, followed by a symphony of squeals.

Inside are thrift-store treasures: artfully ripped jeans, vintage

band T-shirts, authentic 1950s housedresses, day-glo bangles,cocktail dresses, big clunky shoes (both awkward and terrible

for walking), and dozens of peculiar hats stored in hatboxes.

I’ve been collecting it all since I was ten, digging through bins

at the Salvation Army and stalking eBay. I had big plans for

these clothes, but now my closet is a museum dedicated to a

life interrupted. I can’t wear any of it, not if I want to fade into

the background of this town. Not that I want to, but it’s safer

that way.

Bex, however, refuses to give up on me.

“What says, Look at me?” she cries as she sorts through

the rack, dragging things out, eyeballing them, then tossingaside what does not meet her approval. “Oh, yes, this is the

one.”

She’s found it. Buried far in the back, as far as I could hide

it, is a vintage champagne-colored apper dress. She holds it

up against my body and gasps. It’s beaded and hangs about

midthigh on me, shimmering like heat on asphalt. I discovered

it buried inside an old chest at an estate sale in Gravesend and

guessed it was from the 1920s and probably one of a kind. The

owner’s son let me haggle him down to ten dollars just before

the vintage-shop vultures swooped through the doors. One

of them chased me — literally chased me — down the sidewalkand offered me three hundred bucks for it, but I couldn’t give it

up. I was in love. I carried it home like I would a newborn baby,

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hand washed it, repaired a few loose stitches, and fantasized

about the day my body would t into it. I was going to wear it

to school and watch boys fall downstairs when I walked by. Iwas going to cause a panic in that dress.

“This is so inappropriate.” Bex giggles and shoves it into

my hands. “It’s perfect.”

A little bit of my heart breaks when I swap it for a pair of

black jeans and a Bruce Springsteen T-shirt instead.

“TV! Internet!” Bex shouts, and yanks the clothes away.

“This outt will give birth to a billion mean comments. You’ll

become a meme like that bitchy cat. Don’t shake your head at

me. I’m serious. When it happens, I will pretend I don’t know

you. I’ll be a crappy friend, but I’ll do it. I swear.”

I reach for my clothes and she reluctantly hands them back.Her frown shouts, I miss the old Lyric!

I miss her too. I miss the glitter princess and the Sailor

Moon wannabe from four years ago. I miss the days when I

strutted along the catwalk known as Coney Island, all hair and

dangly earrings and clogs like I was fty feet tall. Now I have

to be small. I have to be a mouse. Squeak. Squeak.

There’s a heavy knock on the door, and then it slowly

opens. My father peeks in, if a six-foot-six-inch cop can peek

in anywhere. He’s a mountain, hands like catcher’s mitts, and

shoulders as broad as the Brooklyn Bridge. He’s in his police

uniform, black shirt and shorts, sunglasses, and his EasterIsland head — always watching, always unamused.

“Lyric, I need to speak to you,” he says, gesturing out into

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our tiny living-slash-dining-slash-closet room. I follow and

close the door behind me.

“I hope I don’t have to tell you how important it is for youto keep your head down today,” he lectures in a low voice.

“You don’t.”

“Lyric, don’t give me attitude. This is serious.”

“Dad, I know,” I say, squeezing past him to the kitchen,

where there is more room.

“Keep your distance. Don’t get involved. Don’t try to be

nice. Don’t talk to the new kids. Just go about your business.”

“I know!” I snap. How many times is he going to deliver

this lecture?

“I need to be sure,” he hollers.

My mother enters from her bedroom. Her raven hair istied up, and her face freshly scrubbed. She looks tired but still

beautiful. “Don’t ght while Bex is here,” she begs us.

“Sorry, but I’ve heard this speech a million times.”

“Cut me a break, Lyric, today of all days,” my father whis-

pers.

“Cut me a break. I’m the one who has to go there,” I cry,

then turn my attention to my mother. “Why are you still in

your pj’s? You should get dressed.”

She lowers her eyes and shifts from one foot to the next. It’s

a sad little dance she does when she’s upset.

“You’re not coming,” I say. I’m crushed and don’t care tohide it.

She inhales deeply and looks at my father “I want to, but — ”

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My irritation turns to rage and I roast him with my gaze.

“Just forget it.”

“It’s too dangerous,” my father explains. “There will bepolice and military everywhere, and then the kids, too. She

could be recognized.”

“Leonard, no one has identied me yet,” she says.

“The feds tracked almost all your friends down, Summer,

and each one of them disappeared, along with their families. It’s

just you and Angela Benningford now. We can’t take the risk.”

My mother winces like she’s been slapped. “Am I going to

miss her graduation?”

“You’re being ridiculous, Summer.”

“What about when she gets married?” she groans.

“Summer.” “Are you going to let me see my grandchildren?” she cries.

My father throws up his hands. “You’re not a prisoner here.

We can always leave, Summer. If we left, we could have nor-

mal lives. I have friends at the blockade who could help us get

out even without identication. We could start over in Denver,

or — ”

“Shhhh!” I point at my bedroom door, quietly dreading

that Bex will burst through it with a million questions. It’s a

miracle that she hasn’t gured us out yet; the girl who hides in

ugly clothes, the mom who never leaves the house, the father

who lives on the edge of panic. I wait, but there is no burst, nomillion questions. She’s probably too busy liberating more of

my clothes.

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“I’m sorry,” my father whispers. “I saw Terrance Lir last

night. He’s escorting the children to school and acting as a

spokesperson.” “Is Rochelle with him? And Samuel?”

My father nods. “They’re all back. There are men with

them too. They look like Secret Service.”

“Where have they been?” I ask.

My father looks at his feet. There are rumors of prison

camps, detention centers, mass graves even, but no one knows

for sure. All we know is that most of Mom’s friends have van-

ished, and if we’re discovered, so will we.

“I don’t know, but they look horrible — skinny as sticks

and wearing the same clothes they had on the day they disap-

peared.” “Have you spoken to him?”

“Summer, I can’t! If someone saw us talking, they might

make the connection.”

“But he can tell us about my family,” my mother begs.

My father shakes his head. “It’s best if we keep our distance,

especially you, Lyric. He’s going to be in the school every day.

He’s probably going to reach out to you, but you have to avoid

him. You can’t let anyone think you know him.”

“You want me to ignore him?” This hurts my heart. Ter-

rance Lir was like an uncle to me when I was little. When he

and his family disappeared, we cried for days. I can’t imagineturning my back on him, especially if he’s been suffering.

My mother pulls me into a hug and squeezes like I am

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never coming home again. Her kiss leaves a wet ring of elec-

tricity on my cheek. “Be careful, and don’t forget to breathe.”

“You too.” She smiles at me. It’s a crumpled thing, too small for her

face. I remember when it used to shine like a star, fueled by

her endless joy, but now it’s running on fumes. She can’t even

muster enough power to bring her eyes along for the ride.

My father goes to his room and returns with his gun. While

I eat cereal, he checks the clip to see that it’s loaded, reinserts

it, and clicks off the safety. He double-checks the charge on

his Taser and gives two canisters of pepper spray good shakes

before putting them in his pockets. Then he turns to me.

“Get Bex. It’s time to go to school.”

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C H A P T E R T H R E E

AS SOON AS THE ELEVATOR DOORS OPEN , I WISH WE HAD

taken the stairs. Mrs. Novakova, short and squat,

is lurking inside, like a creepy garden gnome peer-

ing out of the brush.

“Getting off ?” I ask.

She frowns and shakes her head. Of course she’s not get-ting off. How else will she interrogate us? I press the button for

the lobby and hold my breath when the doors slide shut.

“You take these girls to the school, Leonard?” she asks my

father in her thick, growly accent. She’s been in our building

for fty years, ever since emigrating from Eastern Europe —

maybe Hungary, maybe Russia — I can’t remember. It’s some-

place where the neighbors used to spy on one another for the

government.

“Yes, Mrs. Novakova,” my father says as he watches the

oor counter blink from four to three to two . . .

Mrs. Novakova’s mouth curls in disapproval, revealing herlipstick-stained teeth. “You never catch me near that school

today. Mixing with us is wrong, especially the children. They


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are animals, and lthy, too! Always digging in trash cans,

making too many babies, and living in lth. Like gypsies back

home. Only good gypsy is dead gypsy. You stay away fromthem. You get disease. Who knows?”

“If they had a disease, I think we’d all have it by now,” my

father says. “They’ve been here awhile.”

“Make no difference! You have crazy cow disease for ten

years, then kaput! A man walks around, not even knowing he’s

dead. That’s their plan. They spread sick to us, wait for us to

die. I try to tell people. No one listens to old woman. Don’t you

bring one of them back here!”

“I won’t, Mrs. Novakova,” I say.

Bex looks like she’s going to laugh, until I shoot her a look.

Mrs. Novakova is old-school evil who rats on anyone she deemssuspicious. Neighbors who have found themselves on her bad

side have been dragged out of their beds and questioned by cops

and gang members alike. I’ve learned to let every word I say to

her roll around in my mouth to dull the sharp edges rst.

“What are police doing to get rid of them, Leonard? I pay

taxes for beach and I’d like to go down and take a walk,” she

barks. “My husband and I spent every Friday night strolling

along pier, until the coloreds and the Polacks took over. They

bad enough. Now it’s those things.”

It takes every ounce of self-restraint for me not to roll my

eyes. When her husband was alive, they fought day and night. An hour didn’t go by without her screaming to everyone who

would listen about what a disappointment he was, how he

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had never amounted to anything, how she should have mar-

ried Pavel, a very well-to-do tailor who had the common cour-

tesy to die young and leave his widow a fortune. Her husbandpassed away two years ago. He choked on some soup. Really. I

mean, who chokes to death on soup? Someone who’s looking

for a way out, that’s who.

By the time we reach the lobby, Mrs. Novakova has given

us an advanced-placement class on “the Chinks,” “the Spics,”

“the Japs,” “the Kikes,” and “the towel heads,” all of whom she

describes as lthy and “up to no good” and plotting to kill us

all. My father has a patience with her he never has with me.

He says “Good day,” and when the doors slide open he leads us

outside.

“Someday she’ll die,” he promises when she’s out of ear-shot.

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” I reply.

Unfortunately, outside it’s even more oppressive than

inside. It’s ninety-frickin’-eight degrees with a thousand per-

cent humidity. Welcome to the early morning ugh of Coney

Island, a sauna trapped inside an aquarium locked in a car-

wash next to a water park in hell. I sweat from every pore. My

jeans glue themselves to my legs. My bangs drip like I used

maple syrup to get just the right look. Awesome. I’m going to

look like I swam to school, and because the universe hates me,

here come the reporters to show the whole world my shame.They pounce like dogs on a pork chop, running across streets

and through front yards, scampering over parked cars and

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surrounding us with microphones and questions. Their eyes

are wide and eager. They ash smiles full of chalk-white teeth.

Their spray-on tans have dyed their faces a rusty orange. “Are you students at Hylan High?” one of them asks. Her

hair is so motionless, it could actually be a helmet. I ignore

her just like my father coached me. Keep your head down and

they’ll go away. It usually works, but there are hundreds of

them blocking the sidewalks and a dozen more racing in our

direction. The neighborhood has been swarming with report-

ers for three years. They have a free pass in and out of the

Zone, but I haven’t had to deal with this many in a while. Even

my father is thrown.

“Can you tell our viewers your names?” one of them

shouts. “My name is Officer Leonard Walker,” he says, stepping

between Bex and me and the cameras.

“And you’re a dad. Do you feel safe sending your girls to

school today?”

My father nods. “The National Guard, United Nations, U.S.

Army, Coast Guard, Homeland Security, and the Sixtieth and

Sixty-First Precinct SWAT teams will be on campus to make

sure things are safe. The NYPD Anti-Terrorism Division has

done a great job as well. The students will have better protec-

tion than the president of the United States today.”

“How do you feel about sending your daughters to schoolwith the — ”

“I think it’s a big step forward for everyone,” my father

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interrupts. He doesn’t believe it, but that’s what the mayor

wants all the police to say.

“Are you worried about violence?” “Not from them. Our neighbors on the beach are pretty

relaxed when they are unprovoked,” my father says as he con-

tinues to push us forward.

“Have you heard that Governor Bachman has threatened

to block the doors to prevent the new students from entering?”

another reporter asks.

“Then I hope I get to be the one that arrests her,” he says.

The reporters laugh and eye their camera operators hap-

pily. They’ve got their sound bite, and it looks like I’m going to

be on the news after all.

He scowls. “It’s time to move on, people. You’re blockingthe sidewalks. If you don’t disperse, I will have you arrested.”

“You can’t arrest us. We’re the press! We have rights,” they

cry.

“Not in the Zone,” he says.

The reporters drift away, grumbling about the Bill of

Rights, and when we can move again, I turn to my father.

“Remind me to give you a lecture about keeping your head

down,” I say, hoping it stings.

They call our neighborhood lots of things — the Zone, the

DMZ, Fish City. It’s two square miles of Coney Island that the

military, government, and police keep under constant surveil-lance. The territory spans the western part of the peninsula at

Surf Avenue, swallowing up the gated community of Sea Gate

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and Leon S. Kaiser Park. It travels east to Stillwell Avenue, and

in the north it borders Neptune Avenue, a block from where

I live. To the south is the ocean. There are two heavily forti-ed borders. The rst, the north, has tanks, two armed guard

towers, and a barbed-wire fence meant to keep us inside. If

you want out, you need to have proof of who you are: driver’s

license, birth certicate, and Social Security card. If you can’t

provide all three, you aren’t going anywhere. The second bor-

der is the boardwalk, once the home of Luna Park, the Cyclone

rollercoaster, Nathan’s Hot Dogs, and the Wonder Wheel.

Now it’s the home of a massive tent city inhabited by thirty

thousand immigrants who call themselves the Alpha, or the

First Men. They have a similar fence, guarded by two hundred

National Guard members. In the middle is a collapsing slumwith frequent, and violent, clashes. You get used to walking

around the bloodstains in the street.

So, why don’t we all move? Trust me, anyone with two

pennies to rub together is long gone. Within six months of

the Alphas’ arrival, the neighborhood lost ten thousand resi-

dents. They packed up, broke their leases, and never looked

back. Many of my friends were dragged by their parents to

points north — Bushwick, Sunset Park, Brownsville, East Har-

lem — essentially trading one span of urban blight for another.

They’re the lucky ones. The rest are stuck without the money

to move on. Sure, there are some who stayed out of loy-alty. They grew up here and aren’t going to surrender their

neighborhood, but most live in the housing projects and have

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nowhere else to go. The city doesn’t help poor people move

unless rich people want their homes.

And then there are my parents and me. We’ve got our ownscrewed-up reasons for staying, but hopefully it won’t be for

much longer.

“No way,” Bex cries when we turn the corner that leads to

our school. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of locals are here to

ogle. They mill about, taking pictures and uploading our lives

onto Instagram or Tumblr. Hot dog carts are parked along

the road; people sell bottles of water out of coolers. There’s

a guy making balloon animals, and another running around

with T-shirts commemorating today’s historic event. It looks

like a street fair, but there is nothing festive about the mood.

Something threatening and dangerous is in the air. It brushespast your arm, nudging you into an uncertain stride. It pokes

at your frustrations, reminds you that you’re an animal in an

overcrowded cage.

Beyond the looky-loos is an angry mob of hundreds, shout-

ing, chanting, bellowing threats into the air. Their words wear

brass knuckles. They carry signs, too. -

’ — all the classics, and, not surprisingly, a

lot with scribbled Bible verses.

“Stay close,” my father says as he takes my hand. In turn, I

grab Bex and we squirm into their numbers. I’m elbowed and

jostled until one of the protestors blocks our way. He’s wearinga T-shirt with an eagle ripping through an American ag on it

and those jeans with the elastic waistband I didn’t know they

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made for men. He’s as tall as he is wide, sweaty and red, and

ten minutes from a stroke. His sign misspells the word abomi-

nation. “You don’t have to go to school with monsters!” He sprays

spittle all over me.

“Actually we do,” Bex says. “It’s the law.”

“Don’t engage with them,” my father barks as he drags us

onward. “These people are on the edge. The slightest thing

could make them erupt. Use your head!”

As we get closer I see soldiers in green camouage uni-

forms. Each carries an assault rie strapped to his or her chest.

Some stand on street corners watching and waiting, their n-

gers resting on triggers. Some cruise slowly by in black jeeps

with high-pressure water cannons mounted on top. Otherslurk on rooftops and talk into radios. One is on horseback. He

trots back and forth behind a barricade, barking a laundry list

of rules into the air.

“Citizens must stay ten yards from the barricades unless

they are students, parents, or staff. Violators will be arrested.

Anyone can be stopped and searched. Individuals who do not

submit will be immediately arrested. Citizens who fail to obey

direct orders will be arrested.”

In the crowd is a stocky boy with shaggy brown hair hang-

ing in his eyes. He’s Latino, with milky brown skin and a wide

grin. His smartphone scans the crowd in every direction, cap-turing the protest and the vicious words. When he spots us, he

smiles, turning his lens on Bex and me.

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“Say hi to the world,” he urges.

“Hi, world. I’m Bex and this is Lyric and this sucks!”

He laughs, as usual. He nds Bex endlessly entertaining,and when they are together, the two turn into a couple of gig-

gling idiots. His name is Tito but we call him Shadow because

he’s been following Bex around since the fth grade, shortly

after we found him in our elementary school cafeteria try-

ing to get milk to dribble out of his eyeball. He swore he saw

someone do it online, so we watched with disgusted fascina-

tion. After three cartons, all he had managed to do was give

himself a headache, but Bex saw his potential as a friend and

a curiosity. Shadow gradually lost his baby fat and grew into

a handsome guy. Thank goodness he stopped trying to do the

milk trick. Now his fascination, aside from Bex, is making movies and

putting them on the Internet. There is a lot to document in the

Zone and an endless appetite for a peek inside. The Daily News

and the LA Times pay to use the videos he posts. I’ve seen some

of his stuff on CNN. His website gets a million views a month.

“Are they here yet?” Bex asks him.

He shakes his head and continues to record the crowd with

his phone. “Not yet, but I hear they’re on their way.”

My father talks to a soldier who points us toward some

blue police barricades that mark off a path to the front steps of

the school. He tells us we have to get in line, but I don’t see anyother students waiting, so I guess we’re rst, or maybe we’re

the only kids coming to school today. Many parents threatened

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to keep their children home when the integration plan was

announced, even under threat of arrest. Bex, Shadow, and I

might have the whole place to ourselves — well, except for the Alpha.

When we get to the front of the line, another cop orders us

to wait while he shouts something into his radio. He’s a short,

stubby replug who might as well have the word Irish tattooed

on his blotchy, freckled face. His white shirt is soaked through

with sweat and reveals way more than anyone should ever see.

His arms and hair glisten. Wet thumb stains smear the paper-

work on his clipboard.

When he sees my dad, his face falls as he eyes his list, like

he’s being asked to choose which one of us will live or die.

“Leonard? Your girl goes here?” My father nods. “Tommy, this is my daughter, Lyric, and

her friends Becca Conrad and — kid, what’s your name?”

Shadow grins. “Tito Ramirez.”

Irish Tommy takes our IDs and double-checks his list.

“Okay, kids. Keep your identication on you at all times. If you

are found in the halls without it, you will be arrested, whether

you’re this guy’s daughter or not. Got it?”

I nod my head.

“Once inside, go to your homerooms and stay there until

you’re told to move to the next class. The bells don’t mean any-

thing today. Do not linger in the halls or bathrooms betweenclasses. Your lockers are subject to search at any time. If a sol-

dier, police officer, teacher, or staff member tells you to do

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something, do it. We’re not putting up with any teenage crap

today. If you start a ght, argue, or look at anyone cross-eyed,

you’re going to the Tombs.” “No way!” Bex cries.

Even if my father wasn’t a cop, I would know about the

Tombs. It’s a jail in lower Manhattan stocked with crackheads,

muggers, and rapists waiting for arraignment. It’s notoriously

dangerous. People walk out with their noses in different places

than when they went in. Sometimes people die in there. Bex’s

stepfather has spent more than a few nights inside Hell Hotel.

He comes home tame as a housecat, until it wears off and he’s

back to being an ass.

Tommy pats us down while another cop waves a metal-

detector wand over us in case Tommy didn’t nd everything.It goes wild over Shadow’s sack lunch, and when he empties it

the cops conscate his spoon.

“Okay, hand over the cell phones,” Irish Tommy says.

“Not cool!” Shadow cries.

My father looks just as surprised as me. “What if there’s an

emergency?”

“Don’t worry about emergencies. We’ve got SWAT teams

in every hallway, officers stationed in the bathrooms, and cam-

eras in every class,” Tommy says. “What you need to worry

about is some wacko ring a gun through a window because

one of these kids called him and told him which room has ash head in it. No phones.”

My father’s arm tenses. He hates how casually people use

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that ugly term. If he was allowed, he’d rip Tommy’s head off.

But he’s not allowed.

Bex reaches into her pocket and hands hers to my dad.“You keep it. No peeking.”

Shadow’s next. It’s like he’s handing over one of his kid-

neys. “People should be able to see what happens in there. This

is history,” he grumbles.

I set mine into my father’s hand while trying to make it

seem like it’s no big deal, but it is a very, very big deal. There

are pictures on it I don’t want him to see, pictures from when

I was not trying to disappear into the background. They’re

ancient but not something I want my daddy to see. Please don’t

look through the text messages. Oh, man! Don’t look in the Gabriel

folder!My imagination is hyperventilating into a paper bag. Satised, Irish Tommy jams his radio against his ear so he

can hear over the din. “Get ready! You’re going in as soon as

they get her off the steps.”

“Who?” Bex says.

He points along the barricades and up the stairs to the

front door. A middle-aged woman in a blue business suit is

blocking the doors and ashing her porcelain veneers to the

crowd. You can’t call her smile pretty. It’s a little too saccharine

and uncomfortable, like she has to stay focused on its corners

to keep it in place. She has crazy eyes, too, the kind where

you can see white all around the irises, but the crowd doesn’tseem to mind. They love Governor Pauline Bachman. Most

seventeen-year-olds wouldn’t recognize a politician, but I

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know this one well. My folks have spent endless nervous hours

watching her self-declared war against the Alpha. She’s a proud

thorn in the Alpha’s side, pushing for laws that deny themmedical care (which they’ve never asked for), and blocking

efforts to put them in permanent housing (which they would

never take). Some of her ideas fall squarely into the evil-and-

creepy category, like implanting tracking devices into their

bodies, shipping them to Guantánamo Bay, and forcing them

to undergo sterilization. Before the president ordered our

school system to open its doors to the Alpha, she was crusad-

ing for an electried wall to keep them away from us. Lots

of people write her off as a kook. They say her ideas are just

theatrics to appease her base of frightened voters and keep the

money rolling into her campaign. They call her a clown. I sayshe’s dangerous. Everywhere this clown goes, she brings her

own circus.

She lifts her trademark red-white-and-blue megaphone to

her mouth and releases a feedback whine over the crowd.

“The National Guard, Homeland Security, FEMA, local

police, and even the president of the United States have asked

me to step aside. They want me to go away. They don’t want

to know what the good people of the state of New York have to

say about this debacle. They don’t want to hear that this mis-

guided plan is putting your children in harm’s way! Well, folks,

that’s why I brought a megaphone!” The crowd’s roar rattles my head.

“Our schools are not the places to run social experiments.

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I have no problem with educating their . . . I guess you can call

them children, but that should be done in their own schools,

not ones paid for by hardworking, red-blooded American tax-payers! No, sir! Over my dead body!

“I will block these doors, and not one of them will step foot

inside, and I will not move until they drag me away. Hell, no, I

won’t go!”

The crowd adopts her chant and it shakes the air.

“All right,” Irish Tommy shouts at us. “Let’s go!”

“What about her?” my father cries as he points to Bachman.

“GO! GO!”

My father grabs my hand and starts up the path.

“No, Leonard,” Tommy shouts. “Just the kids.”

“That’s not what I was told at the precinct!” “Things are evolving, Leonard. You can’t go in!”

My father looks pained. “Be safe!”

“I will.” I hope it’s a promise I can keep.

“I’ll keep her out of trouble, Big Guy,” Bex says. She grabs

my hand and then Shadow’s, and the three of us sprint through

the barricades, past the ugly faces and their ugly signs.

Once we hit the top step, Bachman leaps in front of us. She

grabs my arm and turns my hands over to study my palms and

the skin between my ngers, then my neck. She’s putting on a

show for the crowd, and I’m too stunned to protest.

“She’s one of us,” Bachman cheers. “You don’t have to go inthere with them, honey.”

And then I hear the thrum. The governor hears it too, and

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she whips her head around, scanning for its source, but it’s

everywhere, a buzzing that grows and grows, and all we can

do is watch and wait. Bachman stammers, but words fail her.Like us, she’s trapped inside a pregnant pause in history.

When the noise is on top of us, I see a group of soldiers,

cops, and FBI agents rushing toward us. They push the crowd

aside to make room for another group that marches behind

them — the Alpha. It’s impossible to call them men. Men are

not hulking, copper-skinned towers of muscle. Men do not

charge down a street with spears raised and ready. They do not

wear armor made from enormous shells and bones, monstrous

lobster claws, and teeth. They do not use oysters the size of

truck tires as shields. They do not chant in an ancient language

in which every word sounds aggressive and hostile. They donot stretch their mouths as far as they can and bellow to the

clouds, growl and threaten the sky like they are challenging

the sun itself. These are not men.

The protestors have never seen anything like this. They

fall back, tumbling to the ground, and shriek when the next

group emerges. The newest additions to Hylan High’s student

body have arrived.

Many have scales.

Others have jagged rows of teeth, and mouths like open

wounds.

One of them is a teenaged mountain of power, a slightlysmaller version of one of the giant warriors who led the way.

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He has sunken eyes and tiny spikes on his neck, shoulders, and

forearms.

A girl with ghostly, gelatinous skin and eyes as big and blackas plums steps serenely forward. If you look closely enough,

you can see the blood coursing through her deep purple veins.

Even closer and you can see the hint of bones.

Another boy is no taller than an eight-year-old and has a

head like a gourd planted atop a thin, tottering body. He’s a

skeleton shrink-wrapped in gray skin, with long ngers and

black nails. His eyes are enormous chunks of coal, and his nose

is nothing more than two wet slits.

The last three look almost human. One is a delicate beauty,

slender and tall with tight red curls that cascade over her shoul-

ders and bounce lightly at the base of her spine. Pink and bluescales freckle her throat, her shoulders, and the inside of her

arms. She looks terried.

The other two look as if they’ve never been afraid of any-

thing in their lives. They’re golden gods, tall and strong with

sculpted limbs. The female is close to my height and age, with

cropped hair and a body that clearly skipped the awkward

phase. Her face is a case study in symmetry, favored by diz-

zying cheekbones and bright, full lips, but it’s also unsettling,

sharp, and serious. It’s not so much a face as it is a weapon,

as deadly as the spears of the titans who guard her. The boy

— well, he’s beautiful and troubling all at the same time. Hisface is strong and erce but marred with bruises. Murky green

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highlights border a purple contusion on his right cheek. Yet

who can focus on it when his eyes are so hypnotic? They’re vio-

lent whirlpools of green and blue, but just when I think I couldget pulled into them, I notice his damaged forearms. They’re

criss-crossed with scars like a Jackson Pollock painting, yet

they pale in comparison to something way more gruesome.

Starting at his wrists and going all the way up to his elbow is a

jagged red gash in which sharp black blades sink in and out in

an agitated rhythm. Their edges are serrated, like an old lum-

berjack’s saw, and each time they pop out, there is a sickening

sucking sound, a Shhhtttiiikkkk! I’m unsure if he’s an angel or a

monster.

Bachman lifts her megaphone. “Not one more step!” she

shrieks. And just like that, the world starts spinning again. A cop

pushes past us and leaps up the stairs to put the governor in

handcuffs. They tighten around her wrists with a click-click-

click-click-click-click-click. Then he and another policeman take

her by the arms and lead her down the stairs, through the bar-

ricades, and into a nearby squad car. As they put her into the

back seat, Bachman turns and ashes the crowd a serpentine

grin. It lights a fuse that snakes through the mob, crackling

and popping as it goes, and with a jarring bang the crowd

pushes forward, led by a gang of thugs in bright-red shirts.

They toss trash cans into the mob. They smash bottles andtip over a cop car. They are the Coney Island Nine, the Niners

for short, and they won’t be satised with anything less than

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a full-scale riot. The police leap into action, bringing batons

down on their heads. A melee erupts. Boots grind ngers into

the asphalt. Agonized cries rise above the din. There is bloodand hate everywhere I look.

“Filthy animals! Go back to where you came from,” the

Niners shriek as they hurl dead catsh at us. One slams into

the wall next to me, leaving a sticky stain of scales and loose

eyeballs. Another one crashes into my face and knocks my sun-

glasses off, leaving me stunned and blind. Someone shoves me

through the front doors, and I stagger into the school alone,

tripping over my own feet and falling hard on the marble oor.

My hip screams like it’s on re, but I have no time to recover.

I’m in the midst of a stampede of fear and feet. A shoe comes

down on my pinky nger, and I cry out but keep crawling,scampering through the mob with my senses failing. Eventu-

ally I nd a wall and press myself against it, hoping I’m out of

the way. I use my shirt to wipe the gunk out of my eyes, only

to nd all six of the Alpha kids standing over me. The tall boy

with the bruises and the blades locks his eyes on me. They nar-

row with disdain and suspicion, his gaze falling on me like a

st. I am lth to him, a creepy-crawly he discovered under a

rock. But then his eyes soften. There’s recognition there, but

that can’t be possible. It was three years ago, and the beach was

crazy that morning — but still, there’s something in his face

that says he remembers me. I remember him, too.

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C H A P T E R F O U R

PEOPLE TALK ABOUT C ONEY I SLAND ’S PRE -A LPHA DAYS

like they were magical, like we all lived in the Dis-

neyland of Brooklyn. They forget our “Disneyland”

was really a garishly painted slum in a crumbling neighbor-

hood with rampant crime, a busy sex trade, a methadone

clinic, and a school system in the toilet. Sure, the Alpha didn’thelp. They turned the place into a police state. But it’s not like

we were all out in the streets singing “Kumbaya” the day

before.

There’s also this idea that the Alpha caused all the weird

racism and xenophobia, too, but whatever. This part of town

was always a hotbed of racial sludge, and the various groups

never played nice. The Chinese hated the Japanese, and the

Jamaicans hated the Koreans, and the Mexicans hated the Afri-

can Americans, and the Russians hated the Orthodox Jews,

and the white people hated all of them. And sometimes, on

very hot days, someone got stabbed because of the ag on hiscar. If America is a melting pot, Coney Island is the overcooked

crusty stuff on the bottom of the pan.


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lots, and I irted with boy after boy after boy. Anything we

missed was reported to us in texts, tiny bite-size dispatches

from the front lines of stupidity. Someone threw up on a cop,so-and-so made out with so-and-so, and this person got into a

ght with that person. By midnight we had hundreds of texts,

each a blossoming legend of teenage debauchery we knew

we’d talk about for years to come. I remember that a sophmore

named Jessie Combs woke up under the boardwalk spooning a

hobo. Jessie was a wild thing.

I drank up the hot June night, endless spectacle, and noise

until my brain rebelled and a migraine showed up around mid-

night to spoil my fun.

“Bad head?” Bex asked when I sat down on a vacant stoop.

“Bad head.” The steady pounding had started hours earlier, but I’d shoved it down and hoped it would wither from lack of

attention. Unfortunately this headache had a tenacious rhythm

that grew and grew.

“C’mon, we’ll take you home,” Shadow said.

The hangers-on groaned with complaints. Bex and Shadow

should have been pissed at me too; after all, I had ruined lots of

good times with my “condition,” but Bex turned on the others,

ring off insults and demanding their allegiance to me. Bex =

besty.

“Drop me at the beach,” I said.

“Will she be there?” Bex asked. I nodded. She was always there.

Bex grabbed one hand, Shadow the other, and we ran

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toward Surf Avenue, dodging the livery cabs that sped past

at all hours of the night and zigzagging through the pervy

drunks who milled in and out of the seedy bars. At the oldwooden boardwalk ramp near the Wonder Wheel, we ignored

the Park Closed sign and rushed to greet the Atlantic Ocean.

I took in a greedy breath of salty air and anticipated the relief.

The beach would x everything.

As I predicted, we found my mother sitting cross-legged

on the sand, her ip-ops tossed nearby and her hair tied back

with a band. She was a beautiful Buddha, hypnotically gor-

geous with olive skin, full lips, and eyes both blue and smoky.

Her body, like mine, was tall, long-legged, and hippy like a

belly dancer’s, but she didn’t have an ounce of the insecurities

that plagued me. She loved her body and it showed. Another’sperceived aw was her dazzling asset, and thus she was the

cause of much rubbernecking in our neighborhood. People fell

in love with her at rst sight. Even her walk, a danceable jig

that made small children giggle, transcended goofy into oddly

seductive.

“Can you sign for this package?” Shadow asked.

My mother frowned. “Your father would have a contrap-

tion if he knew you were out this late,” she said.

“It’s a conniption, Mom,” I said.

The group chuckled.

“I’m always messing up words,” she apologized.“Migraine?”

I nodded. “Probably an F3.”

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clients, some of whom traveled all the way from the Upper

East Side, an hour-and-a-half subway ride, to take her fty-

minute class. She knew her way around the om, so I surren-dered to her wisdom and clamped my eyes shut. I inhaled

deeply and followed her instructions, imagining the air ow-

ing into my limbs, my diaphragm, and my pelvis. I directed

it into my belly and guided it down my legs and into my toes

until my breath and body were one and the same. Soon I felt a

tap on my shoulder.

“Now you’re here.”

And I was. We got on our hands and knees and pressed the

tops of our feet into the damp sand. I eased into the child’s pose

and, oh man, that felt good. To this day yoga on the beach is

the best medicine for my migraines, better than teas or aspirinor acupuncture. Even better than the Novocain injections I got

when I knocked my front teeth out the day I fell off my bike on

the Marine Parkway Bridge. Each new pose — the downward

dog, the mountain, the pigeon — sent me to the creamy vanilla

bliss of a quiet mind. Om kicked the crap out of my migraines

every time. I miss om.

When we nished, we sat on the sand, lazy as cats, and

watched the crews put the amusement-park rides to bed. I fell

asleep at one point and woke with her hand on my shoulder.

“Your dad won’t sleep forever,” she said, signaling that it

was time to get back. We helped each other to our feet andretrieved our kicks, but we hadn’t taken more than a couple of

steps when we heard a rumbling coming from the water.

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“What is that?” I asked as I peered out into the dark, unable

to imagine what had created something so loud. I suspected

a humpback whale. A few had beached themselves over the years, but this sounded more rhythmic, more a deep plucking

than a whale song, and the sound was getting louder.

My mother was stone still, her eyes locked on the tides, her

face more serious and focused than I had ever seen it. Without

her smile she was almost unrecognizable, but I had no time to

question her. Like a sonic boom, the plucking became a trum-

peting roar so loud, I nearly fell over. I took a step closer to

the water, desperate to see what was out there, but my mother

grabbed my wrist and pulled me back, hard. Her grip was so

strong, I cried out, shocked at the pain. It felt like my arm was

about to come out of its socket. “Mom, you’re hurting me!”

“Wait here,” she ordered, then took off like a shot, diving

into the waves with outstretched arms and disappearing into

its black unknown. For the longest time, there was no sign

of her at all, and in my growing panic I charged in after her

until I was waist deep. I shouted her name until my throat

was raw, but when I still could not nd her, I went into hys-

terics. I was sure she had drowned. I ran back to the beach

for my cell phone to call my father but remembered I had

burned out the battery with all the texting. I was helpless and

alone. After several excruciating minutes, she nally surfaced a

few yards away, but everything that was Summer Walker had

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changed. What came out of that water looked like my mother

but seemed more like a cornered animal.

“What’s out there? What did you see?” “We should get back to the apartment,” she said, and with-

out another word she turned and led us home. I begged for

answers the whole way, but she refused to speak of what had

just happened, and as soon as we were through the door, she

locked herself inside her bedroom.

“Mom?”

“Go to bed, Lyric,” she whispered back. “You’ll wake your

father.”

My dreams were brutal that night. In them my mother

fought against a hungry sea with waves like greedy hands pull-

ing her down into its dark, insatiable maw. I dove in to rescue heronly to nd myself pulled in as well. In the morning I woke shiv-

ering, my sheets soaked with sweat. I changed and charged into

the living room, ready to demand answers, but my mother was

gone. Instead I found my father leaning on the kitchen counter,

his face buried in a letter in my mother’s handwriting. He didn’t

notice me at rst, but when he caught me sneaking a peek, he

crunched the note into a ball and shoved it into his pocket.

“Is that about the whale?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“The noise from last night. It was crazy loud. It could have

been a whale. Maybe it’s still there. Maybe we should go downand see.”

“NO!” he commanded. “I want you off the beach today.”

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“Okay, you don’t have to yell!”

“What did your mother do when she heard it?”

“She jumped into the water.” His face went pale, and I felt I had somehow betrayed her,

though I couldn’t say why.

“Dad? What’s wrong?”

Ignoring me, he reached into his pocket, pulled out hisphone, and dialed a number.

“Mike, it’s me. I’m not coming in today. Yeah, I’ve got this

thing in my chest,” he said, not even bothering to fake a cough

or the sniffles. I was stunned. My father never took a day off

from work. He always said we couldn’t afford it, and our col-

lection of “as is” IKEA furniture was proof. Being one of New

York’s Finest also made him one of New York’s Brokest, and hedragged himself into the precinct even when most men would

be planning their funerals.

“Stay here,” he said when he’d hung up. “Keep the door

locked and your phone near you, and stay off of it. If anything

happens, I’ll come home right away. Wait for me.”

“What could happen?”

“If your mother comes back, keep her here and call me. Do

not let her leave this apartment.”

He raced into the bathroom, and I heard him take the lid

off the toilet tank. Curious, I followed him and saw that he

was pulling a storage bag from inside. It was lled with money.He reached into it, grabbed a handful, and stuffed it all into

my hands. It was more cash than I had ever seen — fties and

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hundreds — easily a thousand dollars. The rest he put back

where he’d found it.

“What is this?” I cried. “For emergencies,” he said as he darted to his bedroom.

“What emergencies?” I shouted, but was again ignored.

Through the open door I could see him pulling on his work

shirt and strapping on his gun belt. A moment later he was tak-

ing his pistol out of its lock box under the bed and shoving it

into its holster.

“Dad, why do you need your gun if you aren’t going to

work?” I asked, but he didn’t answer. He blasted through the

front door and was gone.

I had my shoes in my hand before the door closed. I had

heard what he said, but I wasn’t having any of it. The way I sawit, he was only in charge as long as he was sane, and something

crazy was clearly taking place. I skipped the elevator and ew

down four ights, hoping I could stop him the second he hit

the lobby, but when I got there, he was gone. I dashed into the

street, craning my neck in both directions, but he was nowhere

in sight.

I stood in the middle of the road, concocting a horrible

scenario. My mother had left my father. The note was a

“Dear John” letter. It had sent him over the edge. He was

going to stop her, maybe even kill her. I was going to be an

orphan. Yes, a little dramatic, especially in light of the fact that

my parents were desperately, disgustingly, embarrassingly in

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love. They were so into each other, it was gross. I couldn’t

count how many times I had walked in on them and their

baby-making practice. No way my mom would leave him, andno way my dad would hurt her, right?

But then my brain reached into its hard drive and found

about a hundred stories my father had shared about arresting

some husband or wife who had snapped and killed their spouse.

“No one saw it coming” was how he ended every one.

So, yeah, I was ung back into freak-out mode. I ran up

and down the beach, looking for them. I snooped around the

minor league baseball stadium and explored the end of the pier

where the Mexican kids used raw chicken legs as bait for crabs.

I searched the streets and alleys like a lost kid in the super-

market ghting back hysterics. Eventually I was too tired andoverheated to keep looking, so I made my way to a bench out-

side Rudy’s Bar and pulled out my phone. With nothing else to

do, I resorted to a strategy that had always worked for me in

the past — passive-aggressive texting. The rst text went to my

mother.

GOOD MORNING. IT’S UR DAUGHTER. REMEMBER ME?

When I didn’t hear anything, I cut back on the passive and

amped up the aggressive.

WHERE THE HELL R U?

Cursing had always been the right bait for a quick callback,

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but ten minutes passed without a reply, so I turned my frustra-

tions onto my father.

IS EVERYONE ON DRUGS?

Nothing. It was time for something more drastic.

I’M PREGNANT AND I’M KEEPING IT.

After ten minutes without a peep, I just couldn’t hold back

the tears.

BOTH OF U R GROUNDED.

I pulled myself together and decided the best thing I could

do was go home after all. Maybe Mom would show up. Whenshe did, she could tell me this was all a big nothing. We’d have a

good laugh. It would be a story they’d tell when I was an adult:

The time Lyric thought her father was going to kill me. Ha, ha, ha! I

was all set to go when I noticed a group of people on the beach.

I counted nineteen of them, all walking hand in hand toward

the surf. When they got to the water’s edge, they knelt down

to pray. At rst I didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t unusual to

see congregations on the beach back then. People got married

there, baptized themselves and their squalling babies, and even

launched little canoes full of owers and candles, meant to sail

to the dearly departed in the afterworld. But this group wasdifferent because my mother was with them.

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I hopped the tiny fence that lined the beach and ran to her

side. When I reached her, I bent down and saw the same wor ried

gaze from the night before. She was transxed on the ocean,and it took me several seconds to pull her out of her trance.

“Lyric, go home,” she begged, suddenly frantic. Her eyes

were wild, her pupils dilated. She took my hands in her own

and I could feel she was trembling.

“Why? What is this? Who are these people?”

“Don’t question me. Just go!”

I took a step back. My mother had never raised her voice

to me before, even when I deserved it. I had no frame of ref-

erence for her fury. It confused me, froze me where I stood.

We caught the attention of a woman kneeling beside her, a tall

beauty with platinum hair. She turned toward us and shot us awrathful glare, then barked threateningly — yes, barked, like a

dog, or rather like the deep-throated sea lions at the aquarium.

It was loud and ridiculous and shocking, so I laughed, because

that’s what you do when a crazy person does something crazy

and you’re feeling a little crazy yourself. It only made the

woman howl at me louder.

“Lyric, please,” my mother pleaded. “Just go!”

“But — ”

We were interrupted by the loud vibrating sound that I’d

heard the night before. In response, a man in the group cried

out in excitement. He leaped to his feet and pointed towardthe waves, but I couldn’t look. I was too astonished. The man

was Mr. Lir, a guy who had babysat me, had put bandages on

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my bloody knees, and had taken me and his son, Samuel, to

the Bronx Zoo every summer until I was ten.

“Lyric, go, now!” my mother said as she and her friends gotto their feet. They linked their hands together and raised them

over their heads, facing out at the horizon.

“They are here!” Mr. Lir shouted.

I turned my eyes to the water, and my throat was seized

by dread. There were people rising out of the surf, about fty

of them. Yet they were not people. They were something else.

Each was easily over six feet tall and heavily muscled, with skin

like a copper penny and dressed in bizarre armor made from

bones and shells. They all held weapons — tridents or spears or

huge, heavy hammers — and they waved them around aggres-

sively. Behind them was a second wave of people who were notas hulking as the rst group but just as intimidating. They held

no weapons, because theirs were in their bodies: vicious blades

that came right out of their arms. Two men from this group

were at the center and stood out among the rest. One had a

shaved head and wore a goatee sculpted into a point beneath

his chin. The other had long, golden hair like a lion and wore

sea glass around his neck and hands. With them was a woman

whose breathtaking beauty seemed to multiply with every

steps she took toward me, yet there was something unsettling

about her as well, something predatory and vicious, like a

great white shark hiding in the body of a woman. To her rightwas an elderly woman wearing what would best be described

as a nun’s habit, only made from the skin of some dark-furred

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animal. It covered her entire body, exposing only her face and

hands, and the “habit” formed a strange hammerlike shape on

either side of her head. And then there was the boy. He was about my age, with

hair cut short and eyes blue and bright, eyes that burned a glow-

ing echo I could see even when I closed my own. He looked

lost and confused, troubled by what he was seeing around him,

like he was seeing the world for the rst time.

Behind him came others who were far more strange and

whose names I would learn later: the Nix with their teeth and

claws, the quietly condent Ceto, and the Sirena, whose every

emotion was revealed in colorful scales. There were some I

haven’t seen since that day — translucent-skinned ones and

people with tentacles for limbs. All of them were in a state ofmetamorphosis. Tails became legs. Fins sank into esh. Gills

vanished, causing their owners to choke on their rst breaths

of air. There were elderly creatures, babies, teenagers, and

families, all climbing onto the beach, eyeing us with wide-

eyed wonder. At rst they numbered in the hundreds, then

thousands, until eventually I could no longer see the sand for

all the bodies.

Panic broke out all around me. Sunbathers abandoned

towels, coolers, and chairs. They trampled one another to get

away, and children became separated from parents. Yet in the

chaos I heard someone calling my name. I searched the crowd,careful not to get knocked over in the rush, and spotted my

father sprinting toward us with his gun in hand.

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“Summer! You promised Lyric would not be part of this!”

he shouted.

“It’s not my fault. She found me, Leonard!” my mothercried. “Please take her home.”

“We’re all going!” he demanded.

My mother pulled away from him. “You know I have to do

this. I have a responsibility to them.”

“What about your responsibility to us?” my father said.

“Will someone please tell me what’s happening?” I

screamed.

Mr. Lir pushed his way through people to join us. “Sum-

mer, send your family away. It is not safe for them to be here.”

My father waved him off. “It’s not safe for any of us, Ter-

rance. People will take pictures of this — they’re taking pic-tures right now — and if we stay on this beach any longer, we

are all going to be in them. They’ll gure out what you are,

what Samuel and Lyric are, and they’ll come for them. They’ll

come for all of us.”

“What did you say?” I cried. “What am I?”

“I’m sorry, Lyric. We didn’t know how to tell you,” my

mother said, and as she took my face in her hands I saw faint

pink- and rose-colored patches appear on her neck and fore-arms. They were scales, like those on a sh or a snake, both

beautiful and terribly wrong.

I shrieked and fell backward. “What are you?” I cried. “We can explain later, Lyric,” my father cried. “Right now

we have to get out of here. Summer, come with us.”

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My mother stared at him for a long moment, perhaps weigh-

ing every day of their life together against the responsibility she

felt to the strange visitors, and then she turned to the ocean andher scales turned re-engine red and blistering white.

“Tell them I’m sorry, Terrance,” she said without even

looking at him. “Try to make them understand.”

“Summer, you cannot turn your back on our people,” Mr.

Lir shouted. “They’ll call you a traitor. You’ll be an untouch-

able!”

“We have to run,” she said as she took my hand. My father

took the other, and we ed through the crowd while her odd

friends called out to us with their bizarre, angry words.

NEW YORK POST

SCHOOL OF FISH: ALPHA KIDS CAUSE

CHAOS ON FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL

by Naomi Rifkin

Today the President got his way. Six Alpha kids went to schoolin Coney Island, soaking the city for millions to keep themsafe, and turning Hylan High School upside down. Before ithad even opened its doors, these nonhuman students hadstarted a riot predicted by this columnist and everyone elsewith a brain. Two thousand police from all over New York,as well as thousands of National Guard soldiers, tried to keeporder as thousands more came out to protest this bogus plan.One hundred and four people were arrested, and there werescores of injuries.

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The cost to taxpayers for the beefed-up security promisesto be mind-boggling.

“No one’s sure how much it will cost, but it’s going to bea pretty penny,” said an insider in the mayor’s accountingoffice who wished to remain anonymous. I don’t blame him.I wouldn’t want to be held accountable for the money we’rewasting on kids who don’t even want to learn. The man-hoursthat went into planning this, the overtime — it’s going to shockpeople when it all comes out. And this is just the rst day.

But the real costs come at the expense of the people livingin Fish City. Bloody brawls between police and the activistgroup the Coney Island Nine are almost a daily occurrence. Isay the cops need to back off. The Niners are the real locals inlower Brooklyn, a group of community organizers memorial-izing the nine U.S. soldiers who were butchered in a confronta-tion with the Alpha. We should put our trust in a group that is

trying to make sure that never happens again.

“These creatures may walk around like people, but theyaren’t people,” said Mitchell Parker, a lieutenant in the CI9.“They’re animals. We don’t put wild dogs in school. They’redangerous.”

Governor Bachman, who in my humble opinion is the only

elected official who hasn’t lost her mind, was on hand to givea voice to the thousands who want the Alpha to swim backto sea, and what did it get her? A trip downtown in handcuffs.

“We’re going to keep working to stop this plan, and if Ihave to be arrested every single day, then so be it,” she says.Good for her.

In the meantime, New Yorkers should plan to pull out theircheckbooks. This little experiment is going to break the bank.

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against the federal government, charging that it has kid-

napped members of the Alpha and their human families.

According to the ling, the suit also claims that officialsknow the whereabouts of nearly fty-two missing indi-

viduals, all of whom are connected with the Alpha. The

suit demands their immediate release.

Lawyers representing the State Department call the

suit baffling and claim to have no knowledge about themissing individuals, but NYCLU lawyer Andrea Quind-

lin says she has proof, including a witness who claims

to have been inside a secret camp where the Alpha are

being held.

“The government has been singing this song for three

years. They throw up their hands and claim they’re in

the dark. It’s a lie, and we can prove it,” said Quindlin

during a press conference held this morning at the Wash-

ington Memorial Arch. “They can’t pretend they don’t

know anything anymore. We’ve got a witness who was

there. He saw what is happening.”

Quindlin declined to identify the witness for fear that

it would compromise his safety but said his testimony

would be “damning.”

Speculation has swirled since the rst member of the

Alpha vanished three years ago, along with his human

wife and two young daughters. Charles Sands and his

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wife, Kathryn, as well as Belle, age twelve, and Lara,

age eight, were reported missing less than a month after

Charles confessed to being a member of a group popu-larly known as “the originals,” who arrived twenty years

earlier and masqueraded as human.

Seventeen of “the originals” and their human families

have been reported missing. Another is rumored to have

died in a car accident. Two others are believed to remainat large.

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