Darkbound 2014.06.12

by Michaelbrent Collings

  Adolfa took a last, quivering look over her shoulder, then stepped into the space between the two cars. She paused on the platform, and Jim felt his heart lurch to a stop with her. He almost expected something to reach down from above and grab her, some tentacled beast from a place beyond Heaven and Hell, a thing that existed only to kill and to feed.

  He suddenly felt that he was never going to see the old woman again.

  Xavier jabbed Adolfa's back once more. She cried out. Hobbled forward. Bent and almost broken-seeming. To Jim she suddenly looked much older than she had, even though it was dark and he could see her only from behind. As though her will, her sense of self, had been shattered by this moment.

  Adolfa stepped into the next car. The darkness that lay beyond the threshold of the open door to the car swallowed her up as completely and utterly as if she had been dipped in an inkwell. One moment she was there, the next she was gone from sight.

  Xavier looked back at Olik, whom he had clearly accepted as some sort of de facto leader. Olik nodded.

  Xavier stretched forth his knife. He prodded at the darkness with the tip.

  Nothing happened.

  He moved into the darkness, bit by bit. His hand followed the knife. He hissed.

  "You okay, Xavier?" said Olik. He sounded genuinely concerned.

  "I'm fine, man," the thug said. He sounded angry, pissed that the others had heard him in a moment of verbal weakness. "Don't worry about me, worry about you."

  Olik gestured at the darkness beyond the car. "What you feel?"

  "I dunno, it's like –"

  Then Xavier's words cut off as he was bodily yanked into the darkness. And like Adolfa, he, too, was gone.

  THREE

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  Jim looked at Karen. The lawyer was just staring at the darkness, her face impassive. He didn't know how she could appear so calm. Freddy had literally disintegrated right in front of them, and now two more of their company had been pulled into some kind of black hole in the next car – a car that held God-only-knew what horror within it.

  "Xavier?" called Olik. "Xavier, my friend?" The big man was bent over, calling into the darkness of the next car as though he was leaning over a bottomless pit.

  Maybe that's what it is. Maybe the whole train is some kind of pit. Or shaft.

  But where does it lead?

  Jim thought about Freddy's eyes. Staring to the last. But not sightless, not dead as they should have been. Surely they should have been looking at nothing there at the end with all the blood he had lost, to say nothing of the trauma of having his body completely skinned and the meat ripped from his bones. But he wasn't dead. He had been alive. Alive, and painfully aware, even when his head was squeezed to a fraction of its correct size. Even when his brains had spurted from his mouth and nose and ears.

  Even then, Freddy had been awake, and alert. And in agony.

  Dear Lord, what's happening?

  Something interrupted Jim's musing. Just as well, since he felt himself spiraling into a depression. And he couldn't afford that. He had too much to live for. He had his girls, and when he saw them again he was going to hold them tight and it wouldn't matter that they'd fought, the important thing was that they would be together again.

  It was a hand. Coming from the depths of darkness of the next car, pushing forward as though with great effort, forcing itself through the black wall that separated the car Jim was in from one that had apparently swallowed Adolfa and Xavier.

  After a moment, Jim recognized the hand. Mostly because of the wickedly-sharp knife it held. It was Xavier's. The hand pushed through the darkness, followed by the gangbanger's arm up to the middle of his bicep. Then it stopped. The hand started waving frantically, so fast it was almost jerking.

  "What's going on?" said Karen.

  Jim shrugged. "Looks like he's saying 'come on' or 'hurry up.'"

  She looked at him, then back at Olik. The Georgian gestured them forward. "Go."

  Jim stepped forward in tandem with Karen. "Why doesn't he call for us if he wants us to come?" he said.

  "I don't know. But then," she gritted her teeth in a macabre imitation of a grin, "I haven't understood anything that's happened since the lights went out on this damn train."

  Xavier's arm looked dismembered, ending as it did in sudden darkness. Like it had been hacked off mid-bicep and was now being waved around by a ghost with a sick sense of humor. But regardless of what was doing it, the arm now started shaking even quicker: Come on, move it, get over here, get moving, move faster faster faster FASTER!

  Karen and Jim shared a look.

  "I don't think we –" began Jim.

  "Shut up," said Olik. The nearly imperturbable man sounded on the edge of losing it for the first time. His deep voice cracked. "Move." He stepped close to Jim, poking him with the gun he still held. "Move!"

  The gun ground into Jim's ribs. And even though he knew it was only in his mind, Jim felt like the weapon was hot, like it was burning him. He wouldn't be surprised to find a circular scar where the gun touched his body.

  It felt horrible. It also felt familiar, as though he were experiencing a premonition of his inevitable end.

  He stumbled forward. Toward the darkness. Toward the waving arm.

  Jim stepped out of the last car. For a split-second he thought about just hurling himself off the train. Throwing himself into the tunnel and hoping for the best. But of course even that was impossible: the platform between cars was completely enclosed, like an airlock between two different hostile environments. No way to escape. The only options were backward, into the death of the car behind... and forward, embracing the darkness of the car ahead.

  As soon as he was within a foot of the black wall that rose like a perfect line of vertical night, the thing that was like a dark force field between this car and the next – between this world and the next – Xavier's arm suddenly snapped forward. Jim screamed reflexively as the man's hand clamped down around his wrist, yanking him toward the darkness.

  Jim felt his own hand fling back. He didn't think about it. Just grabbed for something, anything. Like a man falling off a mountain, grabbing for his fellow-climbers, not worrying that the act of reaching for them might lead to their deaths as well. In the instant of falling the human animal does not think about the other, it thinks about itself. It thinks about stopping its plummeting descent. So Jim reached out. Felt something. Grabbed it.

  Xavier's arm was strong. Jim couldn't have resisted him even if he had been ready and waiting. As it was, he just stumbled forward. Touched the darkness.

  And felt like the world was ending as he passed through it, and went from one terror into another far worse.

  FOUR

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  "GET UP!"

  Someone was screaming, screaming. But it took a moment for Jim to realize who it was, who was doing the screaming, who the person was screaming at.

  It's me, he realized. He's yelling at me.

  A moment later he felt a hand practically ripping him to his feet. Xavier. It was Xavier. "Get up, man!" shouted the gangbanger. Then he let go of Jim and grabbed at something else. Jim looked behind him and saw Karen on the floor of the subway car. He realized he must have grabbed her when he was pulled through into…

  … what?

  No time to take in the details right now. Because there was a very seriously pissed off Olik on the floor as well, rolling around like a cross between a rabid bear and a turtle who can't quite get back to its feet. Karen must have pulled him through, Jim realized, just like he did to her.

  So we're all together again, he thought. Still one big happy family.

  "Get outta the way!" Xavier was screaming. He grabbed Olik unceremoniously by the waist of his pants and hauled him forward. Jim saw that the Georgian's legs were still hanging out into the no-man's-land between cars. But not for long: with one yank, Xavier had Olik tumbling ass over elb
ows the rest of the way into the car.

  Olik grunted as he hit a bank of seats with bruising force. He sprang to his feet almost instantly, both guns in his hands, his face a mask of rage.

  "What you think you're doing?" he bellowed, training the guns on Xavier.

  Xavier didn't even seem to notice the twin cannons pointed at him. He had his hands on the small lip of the subway door that was protruding from the steel bulkhead. Pulling on it with all his might. "Help me," he said. "Help me, dammit!"

  Jim felt his brain spinning like a drunken top. "Where's Adolfa?" he said. His words sounded slurred. His brain fuzzed. He didn't know if that was an effect of passing through the dark wall, or just sensory overload. Either way, he was having trouble processing things.

  "I'm here," said a familiar voice.

  Jim looked toward the sound. It was the old woman, huddled at the other end of the car. Looking terrified.

  Thuds. Movement. Jim looked back at the doorway he had just stumbled through. Saw that Olik was now helping Xavier pull the door shut. And then Karen joined them, as though heedless of the fact that only a moment ago she had been forced through that very door at gunpoint by these men. She knelt below Xavier and dropped her satchel in order to pull on the door as well.

  Jim looked up. Shook his head. What's going on? he wondered.

  Then he realized that he could see through the door; that whatever power had kept them from seeing into the car, it did not keep them from seeing out. It was like a one-way mirror. Only in this case it wasn't a reflective surface on one side, it was a fathomless plane cut from deepest space.

  But from this side… from this side they could see into the car they had just come from.

  They could see what was coming for them.

  FIVE

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  Zombies. That was the first thought that came into Jim's head when he saw the shuffling mass of people in the car that they had just exited.

  The second thought that popped into his head was, Where did they all come from?

  Then he realized that question was second to the issue that mattered most: survival.

  They weren't zombies. They couldn't be. But they were something bad. Something monstrous and evil and deadly.

  They were young. Or had been young, before… whatever happened to them. Most of them, he saw, were women. No, not women: girls, young teens. Were they the figures he had seen clambering along the outside of the train before? The ones he had glimpsed out of the corners of his eyes? He didn't know how that could be possible. But then, what of this day so far fell into the realm of possibility?

  The girls – at least fifty of them, with a few teen boys mixed among them as well – weren't paying attention to Jim, or to any of the people in this car. They were standing around something in the rear car, the one Jim and the others had just come from. At first Jim couldn't see what the things were fixated on, but then he realized: they were standing where Freddy the Perv had been. Where he managed to both disintegrate and explode.

  The girl-things looked emaciated. Used. Dead in soul if not in body. Their skin was scabbed and gray, diseased and lifeless. Their hair hung in lusterless locks, their scalps easily visible in large areas where the hair had thinned or fallen out completely.

  Only their eyes held something like life. They shone with a feral need, a hunger. They focused on the circle of gore at the back of the rear subway car. And when the things that had once been young girls had completely circled the blood-spattered area that marked Freddy's demise, they all fell as one and began lapping up the gore.

  "Where they come from?" said Olik in a whisper, still trying to pull the door shut.

  "Dunno, man," answered Xavier, panting. "I went through and looked back and saw 'em, like, in the back of the car. Just there. Freaked the shit outta me."

  "And you not come back for us?" said Olik.

  "Tried. Couldn't. It was a like a force field was in the way. All I could get through was my arm."

  Olik grunted as though to say, "Interesting," but didn't spend any of his breath on speech. Just bent his back to pulling the door. Jim thought about trying to help, but couldn't see a place to squeeze in between the three people already pulling at the car door. And part of him was too stupefied at what he was watching to move. It was sickening. Fascinating. And on a basic, primal level, somehow familiar.

  How can it be familiar? You've never seen this before. Never seen anything like this before.

  But he couldn't deny it. Like he was looking at a nightmare he had once had, a half-remembered dream made suddenly flesh, Jim felt as though he had seen this before. Or at least something like it.

  Beyond the still-open door, Jim saw two of the girls pick up opposite ends of one of the shreds of Freddy's trench coat. They looked like they were maybe fourteen years old. No older than sixteen. Young bodies, barely beginning to change to womanhood. But their skin didn't contain the translucent beauty of youth. It was gray and corrupt, flaking and disease-ridden. It looked like the skin of corpses long-dead and even longer-forgotten. Open sores festered on their cheeks, and Jim thought he could see things crawling in the sores – maggots, or some other carrion-feeding insects.

  The two girls gripped the ends of the shred of Freddy's coat and began chewing it. Not chewing on it, not like a dog with a rubber toy, but actually eating it. Like a grotesque mockery of the famous spaghetti scene from Lady and the Tramp, the two girls started chewing their way towards one another.

  They reached the center of the bloody rag/rope. When they came within an inch or two of one another they seemed to recognize each other's existence for the first time. Teeth still clamped around the gory cloth, they snarled. Their eyes bulged, their jaws clenched.

  Then they jumped at one another. The girl on the left – a girl who might once have been a beautiful young blonde girl but who was now a gaunt figure with mangy hair and thick clusters of sores around her lips – immediately got the upper hand. She coughed out the bit of Freddy's coat she hadn't consumed, and as soon as she touched the other girl – a skeletal brunette with eyes sunken so deep in their sockets they had almost disappeared – she clamped onto the other girl's face with her teeth and began chewing.

  The brunette shrieked, but it was a wet, weak scream. And it terminated as, with a triumphant shout, the blonde literally tore the brunette's face free from her skull.

  Jim gasped.

  "Animals," whispered Olik. The huge man looked like he had just witnessed the Apocalypse. "What could turn them into animals like this?"

  The blonde girl who had won the fight returned to slurping up the scattered patches of blood and cloth that were all that remained of Freddy. Jim expected the other girl to fall. The front of her head was literally nothing but a skull and teeth, red and raw above a ragged blouse that was now stained by blood and bits of skin. But she didn't fall, barely even seemed to notice her wound. The brunette girl just crawled to a different spot in the car. A blood-stained tongue snaked out from between her denuded teeth and jaws, and she joined the rest of her sisters and brothers in licking the floor clean.

  Xavier didn't stop trying to pull the dividing door shut, but he coughed suddenly. He sounded like he was trying not to vomit.

  The small horde of ghoulish things in the last car didn't seem to notice. They were still licking up Freddy's blood, still eating the last bits of his clothing.

  What happens when it's all gone?

  Apparently the same thought occurred to Karen. "I think we need to hurry, guys," she grunted.

  "Yeah," said Xavier. He was pulling so hard that Jim thought his coat might split right up his back. But the door wasn't closing. Like it didn't want to close. Like it had a mind of its own and was actively resisting them.

  And maybe that's not too far off, Jim thought. Maybe this whole train has a mind of its own.

  Then he realized that would mean that the vehicle was a monster… and they were in its stomach. A long m
etallic digestive tract that perhaps they had only begun to pass through. And that thought was every bit as disquieting as the sight of the rotting girls and boys eating the remains of what had once been a human being.

  Another fight erupted in the back car, this time between two girls and a boy. Like all of the others, the figures looked like they had once been young, perhaps in their early teens. But whatever force had brought them here and wasted their features had also leached any youthful vigor from them. What remained was only rot and hunger, a rabid need to feed cloaked in decomposition and disease.

  A lust for blood.

  The three were fighting over a bit of cloth. Each held it with a hand, each unwilling to let go. Like the two girls before, the three jumped at each other, teeth clicking as they snapped at one another's faces and throats. This time, though, the fight spilled over into the rest of the company of ghouls.

  Soon all were embroiled, screaming, slashing out with fingernails that were cracked and broken into sharp shards. Blood splashed, flesh flayed.

  But Jim noted that the blood that spilled from the things in the car was different from the blood on the floor, from Freddy's blood. It was darker. Feculent. Like it had stopped pumping long ago, and had simply lain and rotted in the kids' already-dead veins.

  Suddenly there was a click, and the subway door released. "There!" Xavier grunted. The door closed a few inches.

  At the same time, Olik said, "Damn." Jim looked and saw that the huge man had cut himself on something when the door released. Red blood streamed down his palm. Tiny tributaries branched off the main flow, racing one another to the edge of his hand.

  Olik, Xavier, and Karen kept pulling at the door. It kept resisting.

  One of the red trails won the sprint to the lower edge of Olik's meaty palm. Blood gathered there for a moment, curling into a tight crimson ball. Then the ball loosed itself into the air, a single drop that plummeted to the metal of the car floor.

  The drop touched the floor soundlessly. There was no tremor, no hint of any change in the air that Jim could sense. But at the instant the blood touched the car, the brawling ghouls in the car beyond the door instantly stilled. They were all wounded by now, some of them so badly that Jim would have thought – under ordinary circumstances – that they absolutely must lay down and wait to die of their wounds. There were limbs lost, bowels that drooped in looping coils behind some of them. But their injuries weren't stopping them; weren't even slowing them down.