It was now armed with a shard of Bryce’s spear. This wasn’t exactly a legendary weapon, but it would be enough to kill them all.
Griff thought it was better to fight the zombies in front. He grabbed Maddy’s arm and over the shrieks of the dead and the screaming of the soon to be dead, yelled, “We can fight them and get past.”
She pulled back, shaking her head. Her fear had spiked more than it should have and her nerves were jangling worse than they had been while on the roof of the burning building. The she-demon had come for her. It might play with Wilkes, killing him for fun, but maddy knew she was there with one true purpose.
“Maddy!” Griff yelled. “We have to fight them or…”
She tuned him out. The air had suddenly changed. There was building pressure as if something massive was coming right at them at great speed. Her mind pictured a missile hurtling towards them. “Not a missile,” she whispered in sudden realization.
The trains had stopped running the night before. It had been the last order from the mayor before he had boarded a helicopter, never to be seen again.
Although the trains had stopped, it didn’t mean they couldn’t be started again, not when there was still power running through the lines. Not long before Bryce’s group entered the tunnel, three conductors, their families and a hundred suddenly close friends had decided to escape the city in a desperate gamble. They had boarded an express train, removed the governor that restricted its speed, and were now hurtling along at breakneck velocity. It was conceded that they would have to maintain a certain momentum, a dangerous momentum to keep the train going if they hit a few stray zombies.
So far they hadn’t and their speed had begun to creep up. With so many stations mere black caverns, it was a ride that had the bravest of them holding on tight. For the weakest, it was all they could do to keep their sphincters puckered. The man at the controls was in something of a religious fugue state, in which he was sweating freely and repeating the Our Father over and over again.
Still, he was smart and quick, knowledgeable and experienced. His eyesight had degraded, however, and in the dark he didn’t see the people and monsters running along the express tracks. Not that it would’ve mattered. At eighty miles an hour, nothing short of a brick wall could’ve stopped that train in time.
Maddy caught the first hint of it as it dropped down a small slope a little less than a quarter mile away. Distance meant nothing, time meant everything. Eleven seconds was how long they had before the train reached them and in the middle of the chaos that was not much time. She wasted two seconds screaming a warning at the top of her lungs—it went unheard by almost everyone. She screamed again, “Traiiiin!” while yanking Griff around.
His eyes popped open and it took him a full second to react. By then, Maddy was already pushing people to the side, yelling the word, “Train! Train! Train!” over and over again. It was like a countdown.
With six seconds left, Nichola was the first to leap across to the west-side tracks. At five seconds, Sid flew through the metal columns, cradling his bottles. A few feet away, the soft gay man was trying to yank his much larger partner to the left, the big man had started going right instead.
At four seconds, everyone else was just realizing what the new emergency was. The Harrimans turned slowly towards the next set of tracks and eyed the rails; it would take a big step to get over all three without touching the electric one. A few feet down from them, little Tessa Deitch was in a full panic. Sickening fear had been growing in her since the day before. It had sat just below the surface ready to rise up and swallow her whole, and now it did. Her fear stopped her cold.
Victoria pushed her to the edge of the tracks. “Jump! Jump over the rails. Just don’t touch that one.” Her daughter wasn’t listening. She was staring at the onrushing train.
Griff was suddenly there. He grabbed the six-year-old and threw her onto the next track before leaping over himself. There was no time to save anyone else.
Of the two mercs, one made it, the other was caught in mid-leap and sent flying into one of the columns where his head was torn from his body. The mom with the two teenage boys accidentally stepped on the third rail and went stiff as a board until the train crashed into her. Her younger son died a second later. He had been too indecisive and had looked first one way, then the other. Then he was creamed by the train.
Mr. Harriman lived. He was holding his wife’s hands when the train took her. Her skin parted like wet tissue paper and what muscle she did have was soft as veal. He was left holding both of her hands by the stumps of her wrists.
Bryce and the demon played a game of chicken, each daring the other to jump first. They stared into each other’s eyes until the last moment. Bryce jumped west and the demon went east.
Then the trained roared past, blood splashing onto the conductor’s window. A broken face came halfway through the glass next. It was a human face, something he hadn’t expected. He screamed and hit the brakes just as the train plowed through the pile of zombies. The sudden change in speed up front caused the third car to jump the tracks and from there things went to shit in a hurry. Forty-ton subway cars could not stop on a dime, especially traveling as fast as they were. They turned and tumbled and bent with a thunder that no storm could replicate.
The support columns separating the tracks could not take that kind of punishment and in a flash, they were blasted aside like a row of toothpicks.
Bryce felt the coming disaster and rolled as fast as he could, spinning over the local southbound tracks and under a cement lip where only rats scurried and nested. He rolled in, his head towards the terrifying chaos. He ducked away and looked back as Maddy found safety next to Griff under the lip. Victoria dragged her daughter to it as well, just as an 80,000 pound train car swept inches over them, people flying from it, scattering like broken dolls.
The next car was upside down as it whipped sideways across three sets of tracks. It swung by so low that the rails left grooves across what had once been its roof. The train car took Tessa with it as it ripped by. One second, she was there, being dragged to safety by her mother and the next she was gone without so much as leaving a drop of blood behind. Victoria screamed in anguish. It might as well have been a silent scream as nothing could be heard above the thundering.
Griff saw her pain clear as day. Strangely, after so much gloom, the tunnel was brighter now, lit by thousands of sparks. He could see, but what he could see was so terrible that he closed his eyes as the next car came on, bouncing and tumbling. The front of the car hammered Mr. Harriman into the wall of the tunnel, crushing every bone in his frail body and flattening him into a fresco of red and pink goo.
A moment later, the last car plowed into the tangle of metal in front of it. Then there were only the echoes of the crash, rolling endlessly down the tunnels beneath the city.
Shaking, Griff crawled from beneath the cement lip and stood staring about in shock. The tunnel, the tracks, the subway cars, were a conjoined, mutilated mess. Bodies and parts of bodies were everywhere, as were splashes of blood. The blood was like the city’s graffiti: colorful but ugly; a testament to man’s weakness. Dust and debris filled the dark air so that Bryce was only a ghost to him.
Bryce climbed up on the last train, hoping to see the broken body of the demon, hoping that his own personal nightmare was over. There was no sign of it.
A shiver went down his back. He saw Griff standing uselessly nearby. “Find out who’s still alive. We have to get moving.”
“What about the wounded?”
Bryce’s eyes flicked away. “We have to get moving on,” he repeated. “We’ll do our best to protect those who can walk.”
“And the ones who can’t?”
It took Bryce a long time to answer, “They’ll have to make a tough choice.”
Chapter 38
When Wilkes had jumped to the next set of tracks over and ran from the burnt, magenta-headed beast, he had thought his fear had peaked. Then came the train,
flying along in a silver blur. Like a fool he had stood there watching it come, thinking that everyone was going to die but him.
Then, when it crashed, Wilkes felt his heart seize up in his chest. It simply stopped out of sheer, overwhelming fear.
That fear kept him rooted in place, even as the third car turned sideways, taking out the metal columns like it was blowing out candles. The back of the train missed him by a hair. It came so close that the wind of its passing blew over him like the breath from a furious dragon.
He was in such a state that the wind alone toppled him over backwards. His knees, rigid as dandelion stalks, buckled and he fell with a warbling unheard cry.
After that, the next ten seconds passed in a rolling, crashing, oil-stinking fog where up and down changed position like Vegas dice thrown on green felt. His brain felt thrown, too and after it was all over, it was a few seconds before he realized that he was still alive. Alive, but buried beneath tons of metal.
Somehow he had ended up in a pocket that had been carved out of the floor of the tunnel by the impact of one of the trains. Around him were snapped-in-two railroad ties, twisted rails, broken hunks of cement, and most of a train car. He had only enough wiggle room to raise up a few inches and peer into the car through a gaping hole where a window had been.
The car was on its side. There were bodies strewn about. All were bleeding and broken, but not all of them were dead. One or two lifted an arm or rubbed their head, groaning as they did.
Wilkes went to rub his own head, which was aching and spinning. Only his jacket was caught on something. Immediately, his mind screamed: I’m trapped! The panic which had been his one driving force not too many seconds before, bubbled up in his chest. The bubble went right to his throat and closed it so tight that he couldn’t breathe. In terror, he started to jerk and twist, and with a gasp of despair, he ripped his arm up through his jacket and stared at it.
Blood leaked from a long cut beneath his elbow—and that was okay. His arm could move and he could feel his fingers…they were all crushed and bruised, and the pain was akin to a shrieking numbness, but they still wiggled on command.
His other arm was just as perfect as it always was. His legs, on the other hand, ached and when he tried to move, he found they were well and truly trapped.
“Hey you,” he whispered to a teenage girl. From what he could see of her, she was pretty. Beneath her heavy coat, she was something of a lump, but her lips were full and her eyes were dark and sad. She had the warm tan of a Puerto Rican who had just come back from a visit to the island. Sadness was not meant for a girl like her. Men would trip over themselves for a chance to see her smile.
“I need help,” Wilkes said.
She shook her head and looked down at her lumpy coat where a dark stain was spreading.
“Ah crap,” Wilkes whispered. “Hold on. Maybe I can…” He twisted and felt a sharp pain in one knee, but that wasn’t what stopped his words in mid-sentence. His little carved-out pocket wasn’t a perfect crater. One side went out for a bit like a trough and when he glanced down it through the gloom beneath the twisted metal and broken cars, he saw something move.
At first it was just a shadow and yet the shadow gave off an overwhelming feeling of dread. In his hard little heart he knew it was the magenta-haired demon.
Somehow the burnt creature had survived and now it was coming for the girl and anyone else it could find alive. Wilkes should’ve screamed for help, or warned the girl. He should have done anything besides cowering in fear.
“My stomach hurts,” the girl said to him in a begging whisper.
Wilkes closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. The demon woman, burnt and horrible, was crawling closer, dragging her legs and leaving a bloody slime behind her like some monstrous evil slug. It slithered nearer, sniffing the air. Then it slid into the car and, it was so horrifying that Wilkes hid himself behind his hands.
“No,” the girl said in a terrified whisper, her eyes jacked wide. “Don’t please.”
The demon crawled on, faster now. In a slick of shadow and blood it engulfed the girl and the sound of it chewing through her neck was enough to drive Wilkes mad. He crushed his hands into his ears, uncaring of the pain in his fingers.
There was another wounded person in the car; a boy of ten. His left leg was broken in two places; his ribs were stove in on one side; he had blood gushing from a wound in his head. Despite all this, he knew better than to try to hide. He tried to stagger from the wreckage, but the demon was greedy and gave up on the girl. It crawled after the boy and caught him as he fell from the car.
With his broken ribs, he could barely breathe, let alone call out or scream. He could only beg in a gurgling whisper. Somehow that horrible sound managed to sneak past Wilkes’ hands. The whispers crawled between the cracks of his fingers, into his ears and straight to his soul. It was a rotted soul. He still did nothing.
Then Bryce was there, looking tall, his face fierce and angry. He was weaponless and yet his very presence was enough to send the demon scurrying beneath the subway car like a great burnt rat. Down there her claws and fangs would be an advantage, but Bryce followed her down regardless, stopping only when he saw Wilkes.
“I’m trapped,” Wilkes said. He said it defensively, as an excuse.
“We’ll get you out.” Bryce paused unsure which way to go. He wanted to follow after the burnt demon—she was weak and it was smart to kill her now rather than have her spring up later healed and even stronger.
But the other demon was close. Bryce could feel its dark presence lurking out there. It was injured otherwise it would’ve attacked by now. The question was how injured? Bryce had already seen that it could take a terrific beating and still remain dangerous. And with its newly grown claws…
“I need a weapon,” he muttered. Without a weapon, he felt naked and weak. That was the deciding factor. He had nothing to take down the demon with. It would have to wait, and hopefully they would be long gone before the thing healed. He was just thinking that it couldn’t be that much further to the FBI headquarters when his eyes fell on the Puerto Rican girl. She was still alive, and because the world had become a sick place, he knew she would be alive hours from then, when the demons returned.
Their eyes locked. In hers was a spark of hope. In his was dread. He couldn’t save her and he couldn’t leave her, or the others, behind. Not alive, at least. He nodded and quickly glanced away to Wilkes. The mercenary was only half-visible and looked like he was being swallowed by the earth.
“Where’s Griff,” Bryce asked him, forcing his eyes away from the girl. Bryce had been growing as a man and a person, but he wasn’t man enough yet to murder this girl in cold blood. He doubted he could even order someone else to do it. But he could push it all onto Griff.
“Dunno.”
“I’ll be right back,” he told Wilkes, and started for the front of the car which had been torn clear off.
Wilkes saw right through him. “Get back here you coward. Don’t you fucking leave me!”
Bryce hesitated at the door. “I said I’ll be back.” He returned quickly with Griff, Maddy and a shell-shocked Sid Pitts, who sipped from one of his bottles that had miraculously survived intact. Bryce said nothing of the scene in the subway car, and couldn’t bring himself to look at the girl.
Maddy went to her and knelt. Her trembling hands opened the girl’s coat and then uselessly traced her wounds. Maddy could feel her pain and fear. It came off her in waves. There was only one thing that could be done for her and she saw that Bryce was doing everything in his power to pretend not to know what that was. It was cowardly, but she wasn’t going to blame him.
Griff’s eyes bounded over the entire bloody, body-strewn car. His mind was still echoing from the crash and he was having trouble prioritizing what should be done from one second to the next. Wilkes helped focus him by demanding loudly to be saved. He used those exact words: “Save me!”
“Maybe we can just pull him out?” Bryce su
ggested. No one else had a better idea, so Bryce took one arm and Griff the other. With Wilkes cursing and shamelessly begging for them to be careful, they pulled him out. He lost a little flesh and most of his pants, but he could stand on his own and limp about, inventing new curses with each semi-hop. It was a successful extraction and yet Sid stumbled away, mumbling about how fucked-up the world was.
“What’s wrong with him?” Wilkes asked, then he saw the pretty girl with the big eyes. They were big, unseeing eyes now. Wordlessly, Maddy tossed away a chunk of bloody cement, shut the girl’s eyes and followed Sid out.
“Shit,” Bryce whispered, embarrassed at his weakness. Maddy had done what he couldn’t and his shame made him hang his head. It took an effort to leave the train car. There would be more wounded and they all would have to be dealt with, most in the same manner.
When the train crashed, there had been a hundred and eighteen people on board, most in the first few cars. These were demolished. The first car had been crushed like a soda can. The second was twisted and bent in two. The third and fourth had merged and from the front spewed an insane multicolored goo that had once been a dozen people.
Bryce stood on the car, feeling the strength leach out of him. It wasn’t the dead that drained him, it was the living. They were beginning to moan and beg for help, but there was so little that could be done for them. There were no more hospitals or even doctors, for that matter. They had no equipment to pull them from the wreckage and even if they could get them out…
“We got to go,” Wilkes said, breaking in on Bryce’s misery.
“Now that you’re safe, we have to go? Is that it, you worthless piece of…”
Wilkes hissed him quiet and pointed. Zombies were crawling over the wreckage. Some were broken and torn, barely able to move and some were perfectly intact. They were all hungry.
“Gather everyone who can walk,” Bryce ordered. “I’ll try to give you a few minutes.”
Heroes of the Undead | Book 1 | The Culling Page 28
