Then the gun turned on Karen, who was still hunched in a corner. A glint that Jim didn't like came into Xavier's eye. "And you. Stand up." Karen didn't move. "Stand up!"
Karen did, but seemed like she barely had the energy or balance for it. She was whispering something under her breath. Jim couldn't make it out.
"I seen how you been looking at me," said Xavier. "All high and mighty and so much better than me. Well you ain't better than me!" He licked his lips and added, "Not better than me." Those words were quieter, but somehow they seemed more dangerous to Jim, like the hush that seemed to come into the air before a vicious lightning strike.
Xavier's eyes flicked over Jim's shoulder. Jim couldn't help himself. He looked. He knew he shouldn't, knew he should keep his eyes firmly glued on the gun and the deranged man holding it. But he glanced behind him.
The ghouls were there. Watching. Standing clustered around the lashed-shut door to the subway car. Their eyes seemed to glow in the hazy dim, illuminated by the searing glow of the lights that passed by outside the car, the red and white and yellow and green lights that would have seemed almost Christmasy in other circumstances, but which now simply cast everything in macabre and sickly tones.
The girls and the few boys were not moving. Just watching. Watching.
Waiting.
Jim was thrown back to the moment he looked down on his mother. Seeing her body for the first time after… after it happened. The blood. Wanting to touch her, wondering if she was dead. Knowing she was. The sense of expectation, the sense of dread. He wondered suddenly if his eyes had looked like those of the things that now watched the strange drama in the subway car.
Jim looked back at Xavier. The gangster's eyes had lowered a bit. No longer looking at the ghouls outside the car, but at the door. Or no, at….
"My belt," said Xavier. A sly grin spread across his lips. The grin made Jim feel like vomiting. It reminded him for some reason of Freddy. But a version of Freddy grown large and strong and dangerous. A predator who had graduated beyond ravaging helpless children.
Xavier's eyes moved to Karen. "Bring me my belt," he said.
"What?" She looked at the door. As if to remind her what the belt held back, the door rattled slightly as the ghouls pressed against the lashed door. "Are you insane?"
Xavier stepped closer. He cocked the gun. "Bring me my belt, bitch!" Karen didn't move. Xavier's grin grew wider, more cunning. Jim's flesh felt like it was going to crawl right off his bones as Xavier's free hand dropped to his jeans. He hitched at them. "Then you come here."
Karen looked shocked. Confused. Jim knew what was coming, and wondered if she did. Wondered if she knew but refused to admit it. "What?" she said again, her eyes wide and uncomprehending.
"Come help me with my pants, bitch," said Xavier. "They're falling down."
Karen looked at Jim. He saw now that she understood; saw a request for aid in her eyes. And he wanted to help her. He was a good guy. He prided himself in that, it was something he had hung to his whole life.
But he also saw Maddie. He saw Carolyn.
Was it better to die a hero, or to return to his girls?
He didn't move.
"Get over here, now!"
Karen stepped forward with a sob. Her feet moved strangely, hitching forward as though they were had been stuck in tar, like she had to jerk each one free before taking a step. Xavier watched her approach with clear relish, his grin no longer physically capable of widening, but somehow managing to grow more intense. The lights outside began streaking by more rapidly, the laser-like glints illuminating his sweaty face and the rapid flare of his nostrils.
"You don't have to –" began Adolfa.
"Shut up," rasped Xavier. He didn't look at her. His eyes remained glued to Karen, gleaming like those of a jackal. Jim wondered if this had been the man's intent from the beginning, from the first moment he had laid eyes on the woman. Jim knew about rapists, about sex crimes and the types of people who committed them. And he suspected that Xavier was the type called a sadistic rapist, a man who, once inflamed, might not stop until he killed or at least maimed his victims.
Karen was almost within reach of Xavier. Jim wondered again if he should do something. Try something. And again he saw his girls. Saw their faces in his mind.
He wasn't being weak. He was being smart. He was trying to survive for them.
He almost believed it. Almost believed the lie he was telling himself.
Xavier's hand shot forward with the speed of a striking viper. He grabbed Karen by the arm and pulled her closer, placing the muzzle of Olik's gun against her throat.
"Get on your knees." Karen shook her head. She sobbed. "I won't say it again."
Slowly, slowly, Karen lowered herself. Xavier switched the gun so it was pointed at her eye. She dropped her head, and now it was pointed at the top of her skull. Which was no consolation, Jim thought, since any angle at this range was an assured kill shot.
Jim caught Adolfa's eye. She looked terrified. And like him, she looked totally incapable of anything more than watching.
"Undo my pants," said Xavier. He laughed. "Should be easy. Belt's already off for you."
"Please," whispered Karen. Her voice was so low, so breathy, that Jim could barely hear it. It was the dream of a prayer, the last gasp of hope.
"I saved your life, bitch. With my belt, I saved your uptight, rich ass that's so much better than mine. So now I figure you owe me."
"Please," she said again. Even more quietly.
Xavier's smile disappeared. Rage flared across his face with the white-hot intensity of a sunspot. His free hand snapped out in a vicious punch that hammered Karen's already-bloody nose into a pulp, that knocked her senseless and possibly killed her where she knelt.
Or at least, that's what Jim figured should have happened.
NINE
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Xavier was fast. So fast his fist was a dark blur in the blackness of the subway car. So fast that the lights outside illuminated him only partially, like an old movie with frames missing. One moment he was standing before Karen, holding the gun to her head; and the next instant his fist was swinging toward her at something approaching the speed of sound.
But as fast as Xavier was, Karen was faster. As brutal and violent and devastating as his attack was, hers was more so.
Moving so quickly Jim could barely make out what she was doing, Karen leaned back and to the side at the last second, allowing Xavier's fist to pass by her face so close that it ruffled her hair. At the same time, her hands snapped up and slapped the gun. Jim didn't see what she did, but there was a sharp crack and Xavier screamed.
"You broke my fingers!" shouted Xavier. The gun fell from his hand, and Karen scooped it out of the air.
"That's not all I'm going to do to you," she said. The quaver was gone from her voice, the terror had absented itself from her eyes. In its place was… nothing. No fear, not even anger. Just a terrible void that Jim found even more terrifying than Xavier's homicidal rage.
Who is this woman? he thought. Who are all these people?
Xavier pulled his knife out with his good hand, and slashed at Karen. She was still on her knees, and Jim would have guessed that would put her at a severe disadvantage. But she didn't seem to mind her position. She brought up the gun and used it to blunt Xavier's knife attack, then rolled back effortlessly, a backwards somersault that put a few feet between them and ended with Karen back on her feet again.
The instant she was up, Karen fired two quick rounds. It didn't look to Jim like she even had time to aim. But Xavier screamed and lurched forward as both his feet more or less exploded. His knife fell from his hand and he lurched toward Karen, arms pinwheeling as he tried to find his balance atop feet that suddenly ended about two inches before where his toes had once been.
The knife slid across the metal floor of the subway car and stopped at Jim's feet. He swept it up and shoved it into his waistb
and, not thinking about using it as much as about keeping it away from Xavier.
Xavier was still stumbling toward Karen. She waited until the last second, then stepped calmly out of his way. She kicked Xavier in the back as he went by. He screamed, a guttural shriek that seemed like he had been wounded even worse by the kick than he had by the gunshots. A moment later, Jim saw why: the kick had buried the spike-heel of Karen's expensive boot a good two inches in the muscle of Xavier's lower back. The heel had broken off there and now jutted out of his back like a tent stake, just one more insult to his injuries.
Xavier went careening by Jim, still unable to stop his headlong fall down the aisle to the back of the car. Jim scuttled away from him, half jumping, half crabwalking.
Jim didn't know what was going on, didn't know how Karen had managed to avoid death or worse. But he did know that wounded animals were often more dangerous than they had been when healthy and whole, so he gave Xavier as wide a berth as possible.
He didn't go all the way to Karen, though. Because she still had that dead look in her eyes, that terrible void where a soul should be. And that scared him even worse than the possibility of being hurt by the wounded and angry gangbanger.
Xavier finally came to a stop, sliding on the stubs of his now half-complete feet and slamming into the back window of the subway car.
The ghouls, still there, still watching, had their hands against the other side of the glass, fingers wide as though reaching for him.
Xavier bounced off the window face-first. He hit it so hard it cracked. Blood splashed across the glass and he bounced off the door then fell hard beside it. He moaned.
The ghouls on the other side of the door started licking the glass, trying to get at Xavier's blood that now dripped in thin lines only a few millimeters beyond their reach.
"Get up," said Karen.
Xavier's only answer was another moan.
Karen pulled the trigger on the gun. The suppressor whiffed and as if by magic a ding appeared in the floor only a few centimeters from Xavier's crotch.
"Shit, woman!" he half-shouted, half-cried. "You gonna blow my nuts off."
"Eventually," she said. Her eyes looked like black holes in the darkness of the subway car, like they had fallen away from her skull and left only pits behind. "Get up."
"What…?" someone mumbled. Jim realized Olik had regained consciousness at some point. He was sitting halfway up, looking around with a dazed expression, though Jim couldn't tell if that was because he was concussed or just confused at the turn of events that had just taken place.
Karen glanced at Olik, then focused her dead gaze back at Xavier. "Get up," she repeated.
Jim felt like he was watching a tennis match performed at light speed. His eyes whipped back and forth, trying to look at both Karen and Xavier at once.
Xavier groaned. Then screamed as Karen fired another shot and another inch of his right foot disappeared. "Get up," she said. "Or I'll kill you one tiny piece at a time."
Xavier was crying now. Jim thought it was a strange sight, the tears running down the tough man's cheeks, streaming over the four tattooed tears under his eye and then mingling with snot and spit that dripped to the floor as he tried to push himself up.
He wondered how many men and women had faced Xavier like this. How many had wept, how many had begged for mercy. Had pleaded with him for their own sakes, and the sakes of their families.
And how many had received the mercy they prayed for.
Not many.
Then Jim frowned. It was still dark in the car. Still black in the shadows. But he thought he saw something move. Something… there!
At first he couldn't figure out what they were. They looked like some kind of strange grubs or sickeningly thick worms, their bodies bloated and distended by a bellyful of blood. Then his stomach lurched as he realized. Realized what they were.
He saw it in his mind, the memory of Xavier's hand flashing out. Just a moment ago –
(had it been a moment, or forever? it seemed like forever, how long have we been here?)
– cutting at the ghouls that tried to get through the door, slashing at their hands, slicing at their fingers, hacking them off.
Hacking them off.
Jim looked at the grotesque crawling things he thought he had seen in the minute flashes of illumination provided by the lights outside the subway. There! There they were again! And no, they weren't worms, weren't grubs.
They were fingers.
The dismembered digits moved along the floor like sickly slugs, searching for sustenance in the evernight of the subway. And they had found it. Had found their way to the blood that trailed from Xavier's ruined feet.
"Please," whimpered the gangbanger, unaware of the things wriggling toward his prostrate form.
"I'll count to five," said Karen.
"You'll kill me no matter what," said Xavier.
"Yes," she said. "But there's dead, and then there's slow dead." She took a step toward him. "One."
Jim opened his mouth to say something, but he didn't have a chance. He thought the ghouls' fingers would take a few seconds to work their way forward, but they were fast. So fast it shocked him. It was impossible – not that any of this was possible – but the things suddenly lurched forward. They seemed to clamp onto the hashed edges of Xavier's mangled feet. Jim had an instant in which he glimpsed something, an impression of something strange and toothy, and then Xavier started screaming.
"Shut up!" shouted Karen. Her eyes remained empty.
Xavier didn't shut up. He kept screaming. Jim saw the things, the finger-teeth-worm things, disappear into the raw meat-wounds of the rapist's feet. Xavier's scream took on a new, more strident, jagged tone.
"Get it outta me!" he shrieked. "Get it outta me!"
Karen frowned. "Stop it!"
"Get it outta me!"
Jim moved away from Xavier. He didn't want to be next to Karen, but he wanted to be near whatever was happening to the rapist even less.
"Get it outta me!"
Karen fired the gun again. Another bullet wound appeared, this one tearing off a portion of Xavier's right hand. He didn't even seem to notice.
But Jim noticed the things that seemed to swim out of pools of darkness under the seats, fingers and thumbs that oozed out of shadow and then lurched to the unfinished stump of Xavier's hand.
"What… what are those?" said a dazed voice. Olik.
"What…?" said Karen, clearly about to echo the sentiment.
Just as had the ones Jim saw earlier, the bits of flesh launched themselves at Xavier's bloody tissue. Again there was the momentary impression of teeth, of grinding, burrowing maws. Then the ghouls' invasive fingers slid inside Xavier's hand, burrowing their way into his wounds.
Xavier's screams reached a range and decibel level so high that Jim expected the windows of the subway to shatter. Expected to feel blood spurting from his eyes, his brains sliding through his ears.
Then, under the scream, he heard another sound. He couldn't figure out where it was coming from at first, then realized it was coming from beyond the closed door to the back car. The ghouls.
He looked through the windows. The ghouls were panting. Their dead eyes closed, their mouths open. Their wounds, still wet and dark and oozing, seemed to pulse in the lights that flashed by outside the subway train.
They moaned. Not like they were in pain, but rather like they had found themselves captured by deepest pleasure. As with their screams before, the moan seemed to be singular, an individual sound somehow issuing simultaneously from dozens of throats.
The sound was low, keening. Orgasmic.
"Get it outta me! I don't want it in me!" Xavier's panicked cries grew more strident, and as they did the ghouls' panting grew more pronounced, more heated and deeper. As though they found sexual release through whatever was happening to the man.
Then Xavier threw his head back and screamed louder than before. His back arched.
Jim felt some
thing and almost jumped out of his skin before he realized it was Adolfa. She had again crept forward. Once more taking comfort in the group.
Jim looked behind them. The front door to the car was closed, the window dark. He suspected – knew, somehow – that they couldn't get out there. They were stuck here with whatever was happening to Xavier.
Xavier's screams changed. They started rattling, wheezing. Jim looked back at the man and gaped. He blinked rapidly, unsure what he was seeing. Then sure what he was seeing, but unable to believe it.
"My God," said Olik.
"No," said Karen. "I don't think so."
Adolfa crossed herself.
Xavier's mutilated feet began kicking a speedy tattoo against the floor of the subway car, a rat-ta-tat-tat tapping that bounced through the frame of the entire car, through the seats and support poles and through Jim's own bones.
"Don't let it in me," gasped Xavier. But Jim could see that it was already too late for that.
Xavier was on his back now. His stomach grew bloated, distended like that of one of those kids you saw on late-night infomercials about third-world countries, the ones that offered to let you adopt someone for only a buck a day. The skin of the man's belly must have been pressing painfully against the inside of his coat, for he unzipped it with his good hand, gasping as he did so.
Underneath the coat, Xavier was wearing only a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of some energy drink. It, too, was stretched tight against the huge mound of the man's belly. But at least it was cotton, so it couldn't hurt as much as the constricting coat must have.
"Help," panted Xavier. No one moved. Well, not true. Olik moved: he got slowly to his feet. But neither Jim nor any of the others approached Xavier. They just watched. Jim didn't know about the others, but he couldn't have looked away if he had been offered a million dollars and a way off the train.
Darkbound 2014.06.12 Page 10
