Lost Boy by Tim Green

in.”
    â€œYeah.” Attack Dog laughed. “We’re goin’ that way anyhow. You’re welcome to join.”
    Something didn’t feel right about this, and every bit of good sense told Ryder to turn and run, but he couldn’t. He stood frozen there on the sidewalk as the gang started up the street against the flow of the crowd, but then Orange stopped and winked at him and motioned his chin to follow.
    Ryder thought of the major league player inside that stadium—his father—and the pleasant look on his face when their eyes met across the parking lot. Following Orange and his gang was a huge risk, but if Ryder could just have one word with his father, hand him the baseball, and deliver that note, it had to be worth the chance.
    Orange turned away, and Ryder yelled, “Wait up!” as he started off after them.

Just around the corner, a dirty and crumbling apartment building rose up above the storefronts on either side. They circled to the back of the building and went in through a rotten wood door. Ryder clutched the iron pipe railing as they descended into the dark. Where are we going? he thought to himself as the steps wavered beneath him. He followed the gang down into a basement that stank like nothing Ryder had ever smelled before. Toilet water gone bad mixed with puke and dog poop was all he could think of as he forced air from his throat up into his nose to keep the smell from getting in. Still, he could taste it as he breathed through his mouth. He had to breathe. The older boys in front of him talked and laughed like it was nothing, and he remembered learning in science class that if you smelled something long enough, you stopped smelling it at all.
    His feet hit the cool concrete floor. Up ahead, one of them flicked on a flashlight. Ryder heard small splashing sounds.Above, cobwebs thick as spaghetti hung limp from stained and moldy wooden beams. White plastic pipes and rusted iron ones crisscrossed each other, some hung by coat hangers and others by plastic collars. Ryder tried to step carefully through the shallow pond of bad water, the maze of hulking boilers and discarded appliances, and up through a broken brick wall into a man-sized black hole. The tunnel turned to dirt packed so tight it looked gray in the flicker of yellow light up ahead.
    It was impossible to believe, but the smell got worse, thick and hot so that Ryder had to concentrate hard to keep the cereal he’d had for breakfast in his stomach. They stepped out of the tunnel onto a concrete walkway and turned left. Below the walkway, a river of filth slogged silently along the bottom of a bigger tunnel. With every step, Ryder’s imagination haunted him with the idea that he was headed to his own grave. He heard the squeak of a rat that scurried over the top of his shoe before skittering along crumbling concrete. He looked at the empty blackness behind him, thinking that by now they must be under the stadium, or even past it, approaching the Harlem River.
    The walkway suddenly ended at a metal door and the five of them crowded up to it while Attack Dog held the light and Orange stuck something into the rusted keyhole, then cranked the handle. They slipped through and their voices became hushed. Orange held the door, looked back at Ryder, and mashed a finger to his lips. Ryder nodded that he understood, and followed Orange through the door.
    They came to a metal ladder and up they went with only the sound of their feet dinging the rungs as they passed through a concrete tube and stepped up onto the floor of a room crowdedby a maze of piping thick as tree trunks. A steady hum filled the space and Ryder swallowed the fresh air that poured in from somewhere above. Orange worked on the lock of another metal door that led into a vault where a pump the size of two city buses churned and growled.
    Halfway across a narrow metal bridge, Orange stopped and turned back, holding out a sports headband for