Darkbound 2014.06.12

by Michaelbrent Collings

  The screen went black, then turned to a blue screen with a pair of icons: one for a web browser and one for a webmail program.

  Not the most personable homescreen, thought Jim. The girl's definitely a midtown lawyer.

  "What now?" said Karen.

  "NYPD has an online request form," said Freddy. Jim had to repress a shudder, because he suspected that the other man was a frequent reader of such request forms – probably as the subject of requests that the cops do something to keep him away from the neighborhood kids.

  "So what do you want me to request?" said Karen with a smirk. But she touched the web browser icon.

  "How about you request that they get us the hell off this train?" said Xavier.

  "Good start," said Olik.

  The tablet flickered. The web browser came on, and for a single moment Jim saw the familiar pattern of Google's search screen on the page.

  "Nice. Home free," breathed Freddy.

  Then the Google search screen disappeared. In its place, a face came into view. The face was bloated, swollen. The tongue protruded grossly, the individual taste buds visible even on the tablet's small screen. The eyes were rolled back, the scleras grey and bulging from the eye sockets.

  Adolfa gasped beside Jim. She crossed herself.

  The face disappeared. Another one flashed into view. This one was of a woman, her eyes looking up and in, rendering her slightly cross-eyed as though she were seeking to look at the ragged bullet-wound that had perforated her forehead.

  Then that face, too, was gone. Another came. And another, and another, and another. All of them were the faces of the dead, clearly victims of foul play. Gunshot wounds, knife wounds, loops and lassoes tied around necks, noses cut off and tongues cut out. Faster and faster they came, each image more gruesome than the last until they started to melt into each other. They became a single waxy entity, a thing that had fused into a nightmare essence of every kind of violence imaginable.

  The many-faced thing's mouth moved. The tongue had been hacked out at the roots, it had been cut in two, it had been yanked out with pliers, it had been grated off with a belt-sander. Jim knew all this just by looking at it, and knew that the others knew it as well – though he couldn't say how he knew either of these things.

  In spite of the fact that the thing – the things, the legion – was possessed either of no tongue or of a tongue that had been rent and torn a thousand times over, the face on Karen's tablet spoke. It spoke, and as it did its dead eyes opened. They roved over the assembled travelers, and Jim knew that they were looking at each person in turn.

  "Murderer," the voice whispered. The voice of the dead, bloody and torn and abused until its last breath was yanked from its lungs, until its will to live was crushed and destroyed and drowned in a tidal wave of blood.

  And now blood spilled from the thing's mouth. "Murderer," it said again. The words burbled and drowned in the fluid.

  Karen screamed, and Jim realized with a start that the blood wasn't just coming from the mouth of the death-thing on the screen; it was coming from the screen itself. Dark red fluid cascaded down the tablet screen like a bloody waterfall.

  The blood touched Karen's hands, covering them in an instant. It ran over her fingers, and her hands and arms ran red with blood. She screamed again, and this time she dropped the tablet.

  The small computer fell with a clatter to the steel floor of the subway car. It fell face-down, the images disappearing for a merciful moment. Then, though Jim was sure the tablet had come completely and utterly to rest – there was no remaining kinetic energy in the small computer – the tablet flipped itself over as though some unknown hand had turned it face up.

  The death-thing still looked at them. Its face still waxed and shifted from one maimed visage to another.

  A man, eyes put out by metal spikes….

  A woman, throat cut ear to ear….

  Another man, face all but obliterated by what Jim guessed must be a shotgun blast at point-blank range….

  And then a child. Young. Too young to contemplate, too young to believe. But there he was. Or perhaps she. The face was so young that it could as easily be a boy as it was a girl. And it was clearly dead as the others. Dead, eyes yellowed and lips blue and cheeks pale and waxy.

  Beside Jim, Adolfa sobbed. Xavier cursed nearby.

  "You killed me," said the child in a voice that was almost surprised. Its face began to melt. Not into another face, another horrid caricature of death, but like a candle losing its shape. Before all structure was gone, though, the child/creature/thing opened its sagging mouth and let loose a shriek. The sound was terrible, too loud to come from the tiny speakers built into the tablet. So loud that Jim felt like his ears might explode.

  He clapped his hands over his ears. Beside him, Adolfa did the same. So did Karen. Xavier. Freddy. Finally Olik did, too.

  There was a popping sound. Darkness reached heavy fingers farther into the subway car. Jim couldn't figure out what had happened for a moment, then realized that Karen's LED lamp had burst. The scream from the child on the tablet had destroyed her light.

  How is that possible? How is that possible? What's going on, what's happening and how is it possible?

  Jim suddenly realized he was screaming, but he couldn't hear the sound of his own voice. He was shrieking deaf pleas to no one and nothing. Mute before the banshee wail of anger and betrayal coming from the floor of the subway car.

  More popping sounds. Olik cursed. A moment later Jim felt something bite his leg. He realized what it was even in his pain: his phone, the screen shattering and sending shards through his pants leg. Nothing major, but his phone was shot. Probably Olik's, too. Probably everyone's phones were shot. Gone. They were on their own.

  With a final rising peal, the child's shriek rose to a level beyond any that Jim thought he could stand.

  I'm going to pass out.

  But he didn't pass out. Not quite. Sparkling blobs of tinsel and globes like Christmas ornaments began jumping in front of his eyes, but before he blacked out completely something that sounded like a small explosion cracked through the subway car.

  It was the tablet. The face of the undead child-thing screaming. The glass face of the tablet shattered and there was a single, searing flash of white light.

  Then all was silent.

  All was dark.

  EIGHT

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  Jim didn't know how long they remained in darkness. It could have been a second, it could have been an hour. Time suddenly seemed mutable. Minutes interchangeable with years. Millennia could be mistaken for microseconds.

  Is this what madness feels like?

  He suspected it was. He suspected that here, floating in absolute darkness on a train that was careening towards God-only-knew where, madness was not an arm's length away from him as it was for so many of the people who walked the surface of a sometimes horrific world. No, here it was a companion, a bosom friend, a soul mate.

  A soul mate.

  Then something flashed, so bright it momentarily made him forget what he had just seen on Karen's tablet. The light cast him back into memory: the glint of lightning bugs in the forest. Running through the trees, the forested area that served as his backyard after finding his mother's body. Her murdered corpse, stabbed so many times the doctors later told him that they couldn't count the wounds.

  Lightning bugs.

  He blinked. It would be so easy, he realized, so easy to lose himself in the madness that reached out for him. So easy to let himself go and thereby give himself permission to just forget about figuring out what was happening right now.

  Just give up.

  Then he saw Carolyn's face. Maddie's. His girls.

  The light came again. Not lightning bugs. He wasn't in that faraway forest, that long-ago place. He was in the train. The subway. Adolfa was holding onto him in the dark, he could hear her mumbling a prayer in Spanish, hushed tones that somehow spoke war
mth to him.

  The light flashed. It was coming from outside the subway car. And it was something so unexpectedly normal that he almost didn't recognize it. Xavier had pointed out that the train had somehow left its course, had somehow gone from a local train to an express route that went straight to some unknown destination, no stops, no new passengers. And with that change in service had come a blank darkness outside the train. Were it not for the click-clack of the wheels on the rails and the steady electrical hum of the motor, they could as well have been traveling through the vacuum of deep space or the even blanker nothing of a black hole.

  But now… lights. And they were the lights that typically flashed by whenever the train passed through a subway tunnel. Jim didn't know what they were called, exactly, but he assumed they were there as some kind of safety or maintenance lights. Red, yellow, green, white.

  And as soon as he recognized them, the lights came on in the car as well. The darkness dissipated. As though by finding a tiny piece of order, more order was called forth.

  Jim looked around. Adolfa was sitting with him, but other than that everyone else had spread out in the darkness. It looked as though they were a group of sworn enemies, terrified that each would try some kind of mischief under cover of the black that had just enveloped them. Then he realized it wasn't that his fellow-passengers were concerned about each other: they were afraid of the tablet. Still sitting in the center of the train, its face shattered with the force of the shriek that had issued forth from its electronic circuitry – and from a place impossibly deeper and darker than that.

  The others were looking around now. Karen held her shaking hands in front of her face. The blood that had flowed out of the tablet had stained her expensive coat and shirtsleeves almost black, and the wrinkles of her knuckles and palms were caked with coagulating gore. She shuddered and began rubbing her hands against each other, but no matter how hard she rubbed, it seemed like the red wouldn't come off.

  She began to sob.

  Xavier sat beyond her, at the front of the car. He had wedged himself halfway under one of the seats, his knife out in front of him like he expected to be attacked at any moment.

  We are being attacked. But by what?

  The large black man shook himself. He stood suddenly, as though by moving quickly he might throw off whatever spell had cast itself around the group. Then he strode past Karen, to the tablet. He fell on one knee beside it and began stabbing it with the knife.

  Xavier didn't go crazy. He didn't start stabbing it maniacally, like an axe-murderer from some bad horror movie. He was methodical, his arm rising and falling with the perfect time of an expensive metronome. Clack. Clack. Clack. And the pure emotionless quality of his actions was more frightening than any crazed acting out would have been. Jim could see that he wasn't insane, he was just killing what he perceived as the only thing to be killed. For now.

  Adolfa shifted. The movement must have caught Xavier's eye, because the man glanced at her. The look, the dead, empty look in his eyes, was terrifying. Adolfa immediately stiffened. Jim didn't move, either. He thought it likely that anyone Xavier perceived as a threat in the next few moments would probably end up as thoroughly mangled as Karen's tablet.

  And indeed, a few seconds later there was almost nothing left of the electronic equipment. Just a few bits of plastic and glass on the metal floor of the car. Olik, who like everyone else had been watching Xavier without moving or speaking, finally stepped forward. He smiled a grim, almost angry smile. "You feel better?" he asked, and placed a thick hand on the gangbanger's shoulder.

  Xavier nodded. Jewels of sweat had appeared on his neck and forehead, and more had dampened his knit cap. "Just wanted whoever's doing this to know what I'm gonna do to them when I find 'em."

  Xavier clapped the man on the shoulder. "Good. Good fight in you," he said in his heavy, deep voice. "I heard that of you, too."

  "We're going to die here," said Karen.

  Everyone spun to look at her. She was still rubbing her hands on her clothes, the seat beside her, the metal poles nearby – anything she could use to create friction to burn off some of the blood that coated her skin. Jim thought it looked like she was sitting in the middle of a strangely-shaped butcher's block: everything crimson and stained, a place of death and killing.

  Karen held her hands up. They were as red as ever. "It won't come off," she whispered. Then she shook her head and repeated, "We're going to die here."

  Olik snorted. Xavier was more direct. "Speak for yourself, bitch."

  Karen erupted forward, running at Xavier and plowing into him. "DON'T CALL ME THAT!" she shrieked. Jim didn't think the woman could have weighed more than one hundred twenty pounds – probably only about half of what the gangbanger clocked in at. So he would have expected her to just bounce off the thug. But instead the two of them went down in a pile. Xavier oof'd as the air rushed out of him, and Karen cocked a very un-lawyerly fist, clearly intent on doing her best to pound some manners into the guy.

  Xavier was still holding his knife. Jim saw the man's hand tighten on the grip, knew that Karen was about to come to a very messy end. Maybe she'd be able to get a single punch in, but that was going to be it.

  Olik moved. One huge foot stepped on Xavier's arm, pinning his knife hand to the floor of the train. At the same time, he plucked Karen up by the collar with no visible effort. She looked like an errant puppy in his huge hands.

  "Stop, both of you," he growled.

  "Let me up, motherf –" began Xavier. The vituperation became a choked-off scream as Olik ground his boot down. Then, turning to Karen, he punched her viciously in the face. There was a distinctive crack as her nose crumpled beneath his fist. Blood spurted. Karen flew back under the power of the blow. She hit one of the upright aluminum support bars, slingshotting around it and landing in a heap on the floor just beyond.

  Jim was agape. He had a moment to wonder again who Olik was. Then the Georgian spoke. "Don't do this," he growled. "Don't attack each other. Problem isn't here," he said, gesturing at the passengers. "Problem is whoever is doing this." He glared at Xavier. "Don't make trouble in here."

  "She hit me!" said Xavier. Jim was surprised how much the thug sounded like a peeved toddler in that moment.

  Olik nodded. "And I punished her for this," he said. He shook a huge fist at Xavier. "Don't make me do same to you." Xavier glared, but finally nodded. "Besides…." Olik leaned in and whispered something in Xavier's ear. Xavier started, then looked at Karen, who was getting slowly to her feet, holding her blood-crusted hands to her spurting nose.

  "What?" said Xavier. He sounded shocked. He looked at Olik with a strange light in his eyes. Admiration? Jim couldn't be sure, but he thought so.

  Olik just nodded, then turned to everyone. "We need to put our heads together, yes? To think. Not to be enemies now."

  "What's doing this?" asked Karen. She gave up holding her hands under her nose and just let the blood flow. Jim noted that even with a severely broken nose she still put most women's looks to shame. Some very good genetics at work there.

  "That's what we figure out first," said Olik with an approving nod. "But we don't do it fighting, yes? We do it talking. We look around." He tapped his temple with a huge finger. "We use this."

  Adolfa laughed. Jim looked at her with a mixture of dismay and admiration. The laugh hadn't been a mirthful one, but one of dismissal. "Strange words from a man who shoots so quickly," she said.

  Olik looked as though he was trying to decide whether to be angry with her. Then he smiled ruefully and shrugged. "Everyone entitled to shoot when he sees the dead coming, yes?" he said. "Besides. Gun is away." He looked around the train car. It was rocking, click-clack-click-clack-click-clack. Lights still flashing outside the windows. Still moving, still going somewhere.

  But where? Jim wondered. And how long would it take to get there?

  "I think we have time," said Olik. "Time to think."

  "Why you say that, man?" said Xavier. He g
ot up as well, sitting on one of the plastic seats across from Jim. His knife was gone again, disappeared to whatever alternate universe location the gangbanger hid his weapons. Jim wondered what other armaments the guy might have on his person. Olik, too: just the two guns, or did he have more? A few knives, perhaps, or a grenade or two? Maybe an ankle-holster with a portable nuke?

  "I say we have time because we are still safe," said Olik. He gestured around the car. "We are stuck here, but whatever is happening, it is to scare, not to kill, yes?"

  Jim nodded.

  Karen held up her hands. "What about this?"

  "Not killing," said Olik. "You are still alive. Still alive, so still we can survive. Still we can escape this, whatever it is. Where there is life, there is hope, yes?"

  Olik smiled. Karen smiled back, which was a surprise, Jim thought, considering that the Georgian had just cracked her nose like a walnut less than a minute ago. But at the same time, Jim felt like smiling, too. Because Olik was making some sense. They weren't dead, they weren't even hurt. Not really. Just trapped and scared.

  So they could make it through whatever was happening.

  They would make it.

  Adolfa patted Jim, and he understood that she wasn't just trying to buoy him up, she was also saying that she felt better, too. That Olik's words had given her hope. Given them all hope. Even Xavier was smiling. It was a real smile, too. Not the smile of a predator contemplating which piece of its still-living prey to bite, but the smile of someone who believes he will survive to see another day.

  Jim felt a smile cross his own face, as well.

  And then the screaming started.

  NINE

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  Freddy the Perv was the one making the noise. Jim had completely – blessedly – forgotten the man was even on the subway, hunched as he was in the back of the car like a dog that feared a beating. And from the looks Jim glimpsed on the others' faces, he could tell they had done the same.