Until now, he had simply been an anonymous face in a recurring nightmare. The face of the man who had chased my mother and me. The man who had terrified me and created my paralyzing fear of heights. But now that face had a name . . . and a voice.
“Hello?” he repeated.
The voice wasn’t ominous like I’d expected, but was actually kind of friendly instead. Still, I gulped before answering.
“Is this Marek Driggs? With the Sandhogs?”
“Yes, it is. Can I help you?”
I may not always be a quick thinker, but I was sitting in front of a computer that more than made up for it. After just a few mouse clicks, Zeus was spitting out page after page of information about Marek Driggs and the Sandhogs Local 147. As the pages filled the trio of monitors in front of me, I came up with a plan.
“I’m working on a project for school,” I said, trying not to stammer. “About the Sandhogs.”
The Sandhogs are the urban miners who dig the tunnels beneath Manhattan, and Local 147 is the labor union that represents them. The pictures scrolling across Zeus’s monitors told their amazing story. At any given moment hundreds of workers are operating giant earthmoving equipment and tunneling machinery underneath one of the busiest cities in the world. And hardly anybody even knows they exist.
“That’s fantastic,” he said, sounding like he truly meant it. “It’s about time the local schools paid some attention to the Sandhogs. You know, without them this city wouldn’t be possible.”
“They’re the men who make New York work,” I said, reading their slogan from the website in front of me.
“That’s exactly right!”
“That’s what I want to write about,” I told him, gaining confidence. “And for the assignment we’re supposed to do an interview.”
“Well, I’m not with the press office,” he replied. “But I don’t know anybody who understands the underground quite like I do.”
“Well, then,” I said, “maybe I could interview you.”
And that’s how I ended up making an appointment to interview Marek Driggs in his office.
I knew this went against everything Dr. H and Liberty had told me. But for reasons I didn’t fully understand, I needed to see him face-to-face. Both for me and for my mom. And unlike the flatline party, where I was ill prepared and made stupid mistakes, this time I had a good idea of what I was doing and who I was up against. I was going to be careful and smart.
I spent the next few days learning everything I could about the Sandhogs. The more I read, the more I was amazed by what they do. The Sandhogs are constantly at work underneath the city. And their history made them the perfect hiding place for the undead. The original zombies and some of the earliest Sandhogs both came from the crew of miners who dug the city’s first subway tunnel. And what better place is there for a zombie to work than deep beneath the city, surrounded by Manhattan schist?
I wasn’t planning to confront Marek. I just wanted to study him and figure out why he and my mother were enemies.
I had one big advantage. He still looked like he did when I first saw him, but I had aged and looked nothing like my five-year-old self.
That Thursday I was totally confident when I left school and went to the union headquarters. It’s located in Washington Heights, in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge. Before I went in, I put my Omega training to good use. I walked around the building looking for possible escape routes, just in case something did go wrong. And in my head I ran through my phony identity one more time to make sure I had it down. Unlike with Liberty, I was not about to give this guy my real name.
By the time I walked up to the receptionist, I was completely prepared.
“Hello. My name is Jennifer Steinbach, and I’m a student at Bronx Science,” I told her, using the name and school of the girl who’d beaten me at last year’s regional science fair. “I’m supposed to interview Mr. Driggs for a research paper I’m writing.”
So far, so good.
“Yes,” she said with a smile. “You’re a few minutes early. So why don’t you sit down with the others?”
It took a moment for what she said to register. “Others?”
She motioned to a nearby waiting area, where I saw the very unhappy trio of Natalie, Alex, and Grayson. I didn’t want to let the receptionist see my surprise, so I gave them a smile and a little wave.
“Hey, guys.”
Not one of them smiled back. They just glowered as I walked over to join them.
“What are you doing here?” I asked under my breath as I sat next to Natalie.
“Well, considering you couldn’t come up with anything better than Jennifer Steinbach and a research paper,” she answered, “I’d say we’re saving you.”
“How’d you even know I was going to be here?”
She nodded toward Grayson. “He told us.”
I looked at Grayson. “Who told you?”
He couldn’t help but smirk ever so slightly. “Zeus.”
I couldn’t believe it.
“A computer . . . tattled on me?”
“No, but it did generate a report on your unexpected search into the Book of the Dead. And the voice recognition software recorded your phone call because it detected a high level of distress in your speech patterns.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” I whispered to them. “This has nothing to do with you. Besides, I can handle it by myself.”
“If that’s what you think,” Alex said, looking right into my eyes, “then you haven’t listened to a thing we’ve tried to teach you. Omega today, Omega forever. You can’t turn it off and on. We’re a team. And by the way, you can’t handle it by yourself.”
Before I could respond, a well-dressed man in a suit came out to greet us. He had a boyish face with rosy cheeks, and was definitely not Marek Driggs.
“Are you the students for the interview?” he asked with a friendly smile, no hint of New York in his accent.
I stood up to greet him. “Yes, but I thought we were meeting with Mr. Driggs.”
“You are,” he answered. “I’m his assistant, Michael. I’m just here to take you to his office.”
At first I thought it was kind of strange because the headquarters weren’t particularly big. It didn’t seem like we’d need a guide. But then Michael opened a cabinet and started pulling out red hard hats with the Sandhogs logo on the side.
“What are those for?” Alex asked.
“Didn’t you know?” Michael responded. “Mr. Driggs keeps his office underground, close to the construction site. He always wants to be near the workers, so that he can best address their needs and concerns.”
The four of us shared a desperate look, and I was ready to call off the whole thing when Natalie stepped to the front.
“Sounds cool,” she said, totally selling it. “How do we get underground?”
Without realizing it, I had put my friends into the impossible situation I most wanted to avoid. In order to help me, they were going to have to break rules they did not want to break. They were about to head into Dead City, and there was no way to alert the Prime-O.
Michael led us out of the building and down the street for a couple of blocks until we reached a construction site. He went to talk to a security guard, which left us alone for a moment.
“I am so sorry,” I told them. “I didn’t want to drag you into this.”
“Well, we’re dragged,” Natalie said. “So we might as well do this right.” She paused for a moment. “We’ll deal with how angry we are later.”
“What can you tell us about Driggs?” Alex asked.
“He’s very secretive and very bad,” I told them. “He’s one of the original thirteen zombies dating back to the subway explosion in 1896. And he’s the guy who chased my mom and me when I was a kid. The time when we got stuck out on the roof.”
“Really?” Grayson was concerned. He knew how much that moment haunted me. “You’re certain it’s him?”
I nodded.
“Well, that explains why you went crazy,” Alex said with a laugh that actually made me feel better. “But I’ll tell you, there’s one thing I’ll never be able to forgive you for.”
“What’s that?”
“Making us from Bronx Science. They’re our biggest rivals. You know how much I hate those guys.”
He smiled and winked, and I realized how lucky I was to have the three of them as friends.
Michael came back from the guard shack. “We’re all set,” he said. “Just make sure you keep on your hard hats the entire time.”
He led us to a large freight elevator. Instead of a door, it had a gate that Michael had to pull down until it snapped closed. As the elevator descended, we could look through the links of the gate and see the different layers of rock as we passed them.
“We’re going down about thirty floors,” Michael said, his voice rising so he could be heard over the elevator’s motor. “But there’s only one stop, so it doesn’t take long.”
When the elevator reached the bottom, we stepped out into a world unlike anything I’d ever seen. We were in a massive cavern at least a hundred feet high. I couldn’t even see the ceiling because all the dust from the digging formed a haze above our heads. We practically had to yell to be heard over the rock pulverizers.
“It looks like something out of a science-fiction movie,” Grayson said.
I nodded. “Exactly what I was thinking.”
“Let’s hope it’s not one of the science-fiction movies where the aliens eat the arriving astronauts,” Alex joked, leaning in.
I looked up and saw a line of giant dump trucks belching exhaust as they climbed through tunnels that spider-webbed in every direction. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out how they got all the equipment down here. Michael must have read my mind because he explained it to us.
“A lot of the time, they have to take the equipment apart on the surface, send it down in the elevator in pieces, and rebuild it here. It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” Natalie said, truly impressed.
“Marek’s office is right over here,” he said as he led us to a trailer on the edge of the construction site.
Seeing a photo of Marek Driggs was one thing. I didn’t realize how hard it would be to see him face-to-face. I almost screamed when he met us at the door.
When we locked eyes, I had no doubt he was the man who had chased my mother and me. But I couldn’t believe how much he had cleaned himself up. Even down here in an underground construction trailer, he was dressed in a suit like a Wall Street lawyer.
It didn’t help that he was incredibly charming and friendly. He greeted each one of us with a big smile and a hearty handshake. He even offered us sodas from his mini-fridge.
“How was the ride down?” he asked us. “Something, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” Natalie said, taking charge when it was apparent I was too tongue-tied.
“Well, I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you all have shown an interest in what we do down here.” He turned to his assistant. “Michael, give us thirty minutes. Then they’ll need an escort back.”
I was frightened simply seeing him, but the really terrifying thing was how nice he was. If I didn’t know what I knew, I would have been totally fooled. He told us about the history of the Sandhogs and some of the important projects they had completed. He pulled out diagrams and blueprints and explained how the tunneling worked and what they did with all the rock they dug out.
He gave us everything we’d need to write a thorough term paper and absolutely nothing that helped me understand why he tormented my mother or why Liberty said he was so dangerous.
I hated to say it, but he seemed awesome.
Then, when there were about five minutes left, he looked right at me.
“You know,” he said, “even in the bad light we have down here, you have absolutely beautiful eyes.”
It was awkward, and I didn’t know how to respond.
“Thank you.”
Then he dropped the bomb.
“You look so much like your mother.”