The Fall

That’s where they took them.”

“Took them?” said Eph, a chill trickling down his spine. “Who—who took them?”

Just then, a track signal lit up nearby. Eph jumped back. “This track still active?”

Fet said, “The 5 train still turns around on the inner loop.”

Cray-Z spat onto the tracks. “Man knows his trains.”

Light grew inside the space as the train approached, brightening the old station, bringing it briefly to life. Mayor Koch shook under Eph’s hand.

“You watch real close, now,” said Cray-Z. “No blinking!” He covered his blind eye and smiled his mostly toothless smile.

The train thundered past them, taking the turn a little faster than usual. The cars were nearly vacant inside, maybe one or two people visible through the windows, here and there a solitary straphanger. Abovegrounders just passing through.

Cray-Z gripped Eph’s forearm as the end of the train approached. “There—right there —”

In the flickering light of the passing train, Fet and Eph saw something on the rear exterior of the final car. A cluster of figures—of bodies, people—flat against the outside of the train. Clinging to it like remoras riding a steel shark.

“You see that?” exulted Cray-Z. “You see ’em all? The Other People.”

Eph shook loose of Cray-Z’s grip, taking a few steps forward away from him and Mayor Koch, the train finishing its loop and dwindling into darkness, the light leaving the tunnel like water down a drain.

Cray-Z started hustling back to his shack. “Somebody has to do something, right? You guys just decided it for me. These are the dark angels at the end of time. They’ll snatch us all if we let ’em.”

Fet took a few lumbering steps after the receding train, before stopping and looking back at Eph. “The tunnels. It’s how they get across. They can’t go over moving water, right? Not unassisted.”

Eph was right there with him. “But under the water. Nothing stops them from that.”

“Progress,” said Fet. “This is the trouble progress gets us in. What do you call it—when you figure out you can get away with shit that nobody made up a specific rule for?”

“A loophole,” said Eph.

“Exactly. This, right here?” Fet opened his arms, gesturing at their surroundings. “We just discovered one giant gaping loophole.”

The Coach

THE LUXURY COACH bus departed New Jersey’s St. Lucia’s Home for the Blind in the early afternoon, headed for an exclusive academy in Upstate New York.

The driver, with his corny stories and an entire catalog of knock-knock jokes, made the journey fun for his passengers, some sixty nervous children between the ages of seven and twelve. Their cases had been culled from emergency-room reports throughout the tristate area. These children were recently visually impaired—all had been accidentally blinded by the recent lunar occultation—and, for many, this was their first trip without a parent present.

Their scholarships, all offered and provided by the Palmer Foundation, included this orientation-like camp outing, an immersive retreat in adaptive techniques for the newly blind. Their chaperones—nine young adult graduates of St. Lucia’s—were each legally blind, meaning their central visual acuity rated 20/200 or less, though they had some residual light perception. The children in their care were all clinically NLP, or “no light perception,” meaning totally blind. The driver was the only sighted person on board.

The traffic was slow in many spots, due to the jam-ups surrounding Greater New York, but the driver kept the children entertained with riddles and banter. At other times, he narrated the ride, or described the interesting things he could see out the window, or invented details in order to make the mundane interesting. He was a longtime employee of St. Lucia’s, who didn’t mind playing the clown. He knew that one secret to unlocking the potential of these traumatized children, and opening their hearts to the challenges ahead, was to feed their imagination and involve and engage them.

“Knock-knock.”

Who’s there?

“Disguise.”

Disguise who?

“Disguise jokes are killing me.”

The stop at McDonald’s went well, all things considered, except that the Happy Meal toy was a hologram card. The driver sat apart from the group, watching the youngsters finding their French fries with tentative hands, having not yet learned to “clock” their meal for ease of consumption. At the same time, unlike the majority of blind children who were born sight-impaired, McDonald’s had visual meaning for them, and they seemed to find comfort in the smooth plastic swivel chairs and oversize drinking straws.

Back on the road, the three-hour ride stretched into double that amount of time. The chaperones led the children singing in rounds, then broadcast some audiobooks on the overhead video screens. A number of the younger children, their biological clocks thrown off by blindness, dozed on and off.

The chaperones perceived the change in light quality through the coach windows, aware of darkness falling outside. The coach moved more swiftly as they got into New York State—until all at once they felt it decelerate suddenly, enough so that stuffed animals and drink cups fell to the floor.

The coach pulled to the side and stopped.

“What is it?” asked the lead chaperone, a twenty-four-year-old assistant teacher named Joni, sitting closest to the front of the bus.

“Don’t know… something strange. Just sit tight. I’ll be right back.”

Then the driver was gone, but the chaperones were too busy to worry—anytime the coach stopped, hands went up for assistance to the restroom in back.

Some ten minutes later, the driver returned. He started up the bus without a word, despite the fact that the chaperones were still supervising bathroom trips. Joni’s request to him to wait was ignored, but the kids were eventually helped back to their seats, and everyone was okay.

The coach rolled on quietly from there. The audio program was not continued. The driver’s banter ceased, and, in fact, he refused to respond to any questions Joni asked, seated right behind him in the first row. She grew alarmed, but decided she must not let the others sense her concern. She told herself that the coach was still moving properly, they were traveling at an appropriate rate of speed, and anyway they had to be close to their destination by now.

Some time later, the coach turned onto a dirt road, waking everyone up. Then it rolled onto even rougher ground, everyone holding on, drinks spilling into laps as the bus bumped along. They endured this shaking for one full minute—until the bus abruptly stopped.

The driver turned off the engine and they heard the door fold open with a pneumatic hiss. He departed without a word, his keys jingling faintly into the distance.

Joni instructed the chaperones to wait. If they had indeed arrived at the academy, as Joni hoped, they would be greeted by the staff at any moment. The problem of the silent bus driver could be addressed at the appropriate time.

Increasingly, however, it seemed that this was not the case, and that no one was coming to greet them.

Joni gripped the back of her seat and stood, feeling her way to the open door. She called into the darkness:

“Hello?”

She heard nothing other than the popping and pinging of the coach’s cooling engine, and the flutter of a passing bird’s wings.