Xavier's stomach continued swelling. The size of a basketball, then a beach ball. So big it seemed like it was going to have to burst, blowing Xavier to pieces right in front of them.
Karen took a step back. So did Olik. A moment later Adolfa joined them. Jim followed. Still watching. Still captivated, unable to turn away.
Xavier didn't burst. His shirt tore, ripping right down the middle and exposing a stomach branded with tattoos that had probably once been threatening works of art meant to mark him as a gang member of some renown but which were now distended so far they were distorted beyond recognition. The skin of his stomach continued stretching, stretching. Blood started to seep from it, as though it were tearing at a microscopic level.
"Please," whispered Xavier. Then he started screaming again.
And his stomach, the huge, bloated, cancerous thing, started moving. Not autonomously, not like it wanted to pull away and become a separate entity, but more like…
… "What is that?" said Karen…
… something was inside it.
Xavier put both hands – one whole, one half-ruined by Karen's well-placed bullet – on his stomach. He was still screaming, but the screaming had lost volume, as though his strength were waning. Or being siphoned off by something.
His belly bulged as though something were pushing against it from the inside. Then the bulge split, becoming two bulges. Then three. Jim had a momentary impression of a tail. Or tentacles.
Xavier's screams grew louder again.
The thing inside him was still growing. It was half as big as Xavier himself, an impossibly huge mass attached to him by skin that had stretched farther than was possible. Blood was running down his dark flesh, discoloring the tattoos that marked him, staining the floor around him.
"Help me," he whimpered. "Get it out of me." Then another scream wracked his body.
The bulges pushed around his stomach. Then they moved, converging on a point just below Xavier's ribs. Whatever was inside Xavier seemed to writhe, then burrow under his ribs. Jim wondered how that was possible, how the man's ribcage could contain something that size.
The answer came an instant later: crackling snaps ripped through the car as Xavier's ribcage burst outward, inflating his chest to twice, then three times, its normal circumference. But his skin still held. It bled, thick red coursing over and around it from every pore, but it held. Like the skin of a balloon, stretched to its limit but not ready to burst.
Xavier's screams turned to coughs. The writhing thing inside him moved up his chest cavity. Jim thought he could see tentacular extremities reaching into the man's neck, which started to swell.
"Help," said Xavier. His voice was a whisper, but his eyes shrieked.
The ghouls in the last car were still moaning, still gasping and shuddering like they were experiencing the most erotic experience of their un-lives.
Xavier stopped speaking, stopped shouting, stopped whimpering. The thing pushed into his throat. Like his stomach, like his chest, Xavier's throat seemed to inflate beyond its capacity. Jim could hear tiny snaps – what must be the vertebrae in the rapist's neck popping like ten-cent firecrackers. He looked at Xavier's feet, expecting to see them loose and limp, the nerves severed at last. But they still tapped that death-dance against the floor.
And yet, though his feet and legs moved, they were at the same time somehow… diminished. So was Xavier's stomach. The thing within him had moved out of his belly, and the skin there hung loosely, as though in passing the creature inside had robbed Xavier of most of his mass, most of his flesh. Indeed, now that Jim watched, Xavier's skin seemed to shrivel and wither. It was like he was mummifying, a thousand years of weathering and aging occurring in a moment.
Jim's eyes went back to Xavier's face. The man's face was still whole. His eyes still screaming and in pain.
The thing was in the rapist's throat. The throat had stretched so far it was wider around than Xavier's head, Jim guessed it had a circumference of at least twenty-four inches. Maybe more. Xavier's head looked like a grotesque pimple at the end of his neck.
More cracking. This time Jim couldn't pinpoint it for a moment. Then he saw that Xavier's mouth was open. Open as though he wanted to scream, but no sound coming out. Open wide. Too wide. He saw the gangbanger's mouth stretch beyond what it should, the corners of his lips growing white as the jaws underneath dislocated. Then the skin tore, Xavier's mouth widening by several inches on each side. Twin pops sounded, like low-caliber gunshots in the dark subway car.
Jim had been riveted by what was happening. So had everyone else, he guessed. Those two pops, though, shocked him into movement. He stepped back. Again.
Xavier's hand – desiccated and dried as though he had been sucked clean by a spider – reached out to Jim. His eyes pleaded with him. "Don't leave me," they said.
But his mouth continued splitting open. Wider. Wider.
And then something reached out from inside the man's mouth.
TEN
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Jim fell back with a scream of disgust and fear. Everyone did. Everyone but Karen.
Jim saw her face as she darted past. She no longer wore that dead expression, that visage that bore no pity or remorse. She had a visible emotion now: fear.
So why was she moving toward Xavier?
At first Jim thought she might be going to end his suffering. The man's mouth was split open so widely that the ends had disappeared around the back of his head. Jim was reminded of a game he had played as a kid: Mr. Mouth, a game where two half-spheres joined at the back by a single hinge formed an impossibly wide mouth that rotated around in a circle as kids tried to flip tokens into it.
Xavier's turned into Mr. Mouth.
Why doesn't she just shoot him?
His thoughts were going everywhere. He was in danger of losing it.
Focus, Jim. Keep cool.
You'll end up like Mom. Just like her.
Keep it together.
Karen darted to the back of the car. Not to Xavier after all. She grabbed her leather satchel, which she had dropped there a few minutes and a million years ago when they had first entered this car. Then she hurried back to the rest of the group.
"What's in there?" asked Olik with a look at Karen's satchel. It was a perfectly legitimate question but one that struck Jim as unimportant considering what was going on a few feet away.
Karen didn't answer.
The ghouls in the final car exhaled climactically. Xavier coughed. Retched. Things pushed out of his mouth. Jim expected to see the ghouls' fingers, the things that had forced themselves into the other man. He figured they would have sucked him dry somehow, would have grown in size and strength and would emerge even hungrier for human flesh.
But he was wrong.
It wasn't disembodied fingers that squeezed out of Xavier's ever-widening, ever-tearing mouth. It was entire hands. Tiny, dark, coated with mucus and blood. They pulled themselves out of the gangster's raggedly stretched mouth. Followed by thin arms. Shoulders.
A head.
Black hair, plastered tightly against the skull beneath.
And under the hair….
Jim felt his stomach draw into a frozen knot, felt his testicles pull tight against him. He would have thrown up, but his body knew somehow that to do so would be to use time he did not have. To do so would be to stay and die.
"What is this?" said Olik, wonder and disgust mixing in his voice.
"Blasfemia," whispered Adolfa.
Jim shuffled back. He bumped into something soft. Adolfa. Or maybe Karen. He didn't care. He just wanted to get away.
The tiny arms reached for them. Small eyes opened, and as they did the light at last went out of Xavier's eyes. His withered body relaxed, went limp. But Jim didn't think the man's suffering was over.
The tiny hands….
Olik was whispering. One word over and over, something in his language. A word that could only be a denial, a
whispered refusal to believe.
The hands reached… reached for them….
Jim looked behind them. Hoping that the door at the other end of the car would be open, hoping that they could get to the next car.
It wasn't open. But there was something there. Standing on the other side of the still-closed door at the front of the car.
The driver. The conductor of the train. The skull Jim had seen driving the subway when all this hellish nightmare had begun.
But not a skull, he saw now. Just a terribly thin man. Old and drawn, like he had been living far too long underground and had suffered terribly for lack of sunlight and open air. His skin was so white it fairly illuminated the space between the cars. The transit cap on his head seemed large and unwieldy on his head.
He locked eyes with Jim. Smiled and raised a finger to his cap. An oddly old-fashioned movement that was beyond insane given the circumstances.
The driver's smile widened. Lights flashed outside the train. The ghouls in the last car moaned at the same moment, and when the light and sound collided, it seemed as though Jim could see the skull again, the skull he thought he had first seen driving the train.
Then the old man stepped back. Stepped back. And, still smiling, disappeared into the darkness of the next car.
The door to the next car slid silently open.
Jim hesitated. Perhaps they would be better off here. Things had just been going from bad to worse, after all.
Then he looked back at Xavier's destroyed form. At the… thing… that was still crawling out of his mouth. The dark arms. The nude body.
The tattoos that covered it. Gang signs. Four of the tattoos, on the thing's grotesque, misshapen face, looked like tiny tears.
The thing looked up at them. Looked up at Jim. "Help," it whispered. And the voice was small and weak and pitiful… and chillingly familiar. Xavier's voice.
The rest of the tiny body, the replica that had been born of itself, slid out of its father/self's mouth. Completely nude, it lay in a pool of blood and tears on the cold floor of the subway car. It tried to push up on small arms emblazoned with gang symbols.
Beyond the glass, in the back car, the ghouls moaned.
The small thing screamed. It fell to its back.
Its stomach started to bulge. "Get it outta me!" it screamed. "Get it outta me!" The stomach started to move. Its ribcage started to crackle.
The cycle was beginning again.
At the same moment the belt on the back door fell away and the back door opened. The ghouls shuffled in. Moaning with the pleasure of the damned, rubbing their wounds and injuries as though doing so brought them to greater heights of ecstasy. They writhed over and among themselves like an orgy of the dead. They surrounded the tiny thing that had come out of Xavier, that was Xavier; that had killed Xavier and borne Xavier and would do so again.
The Xavier-thing shrieked. Its mouth started crackling open. Tiny fingers – even tinier this time – appeared at the corners.
When will it end? Will he get smaller and smaller until he puffs out of existence? Or will this go on forever?
Jim felt hands at his arms. Pulling him. Adolfa? Karen? Olik? He didn't know. He couldn't tell. He didn't want to – couldn't – look away from the thing that had killed Xavier, the thing that had taken his place and become him.
The hands pulled him back.
They pulled him through the door to the enclosed platform between cars. Then to the next car in the subway.
He watched Xavier's eyes. Watched them scream. And knew. Knew, somehow, that for Xavier this was not going to end.
Then the ghouls encircled the smaller body that had come from Xavier and become Xavier and now had another Xavier within him and coming from him. The ghouls moaned in that strange single voice, they writhed over him, they became a creeping, wriggling mass of dead-alive flesh. They sighed and seemed to melt into one another. It was impossible to tell where one body ended and another began. It was an endless round of death and pain, a never ending circle of doom.
Xavier screamed.
Hands – Adolfa's, Jim thought – reached out and pulled the door closed. It slid shut and he heard it latch. Darkness fell in the car beyond it.
But the sounds could still be heard. The sounds of a man dying and being reborn into pain, over and over and on and on forever.
And the subway continued on.
4 FARES
Carolyn was asleep on the couch with Maddie curled up in her arms tonight. Carolyn ate too much banana bread and had to sleep it off, I think.
Neither one was moving, which is rare, especially for Maddie. The girl has more energy than a speed freak.
But tonight they were just there. One asleep, one watching cartoons. I could watch them. It was a perfect moment. My girls.
ONE
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This subway car was a bit different than the last two had been.
It took a few minutes for Jim to realize what the difference was. He was still reeling from what he had just seen, from the strange unreality that he had somehow been trapped within. So at first he didn't notice the fact that the seats were no longer hard gray plastic, the poles no longer burnished aluminum. Instead, the chairs were covered by a thin upholstery, a soft cloth that was the same color as the seats in the back two cars had been but seemed much older. And the poles themselves were missing, replaced by simple leather straps that hung every few feet along the length of the car.
Like most New York subway users, Jim knew what a "straphanger" was – it was a name for a commuter, taken from the old days when all the subways had been outfitted with straps just like the ones that hung in this car. But as the more modern cars had been phased into use, the straps had seemed to grow more and more exotic. Like an endangered species, one that now hid in plain sight so that even on the rare occasion when you were traveling in a car that had the old straps, you barely noticed them – and even when they were there, any New Yorker worth his or her salt almost never used them.
So why did it seem like this car had them so prominently? So prevalently? And what was with the upholstery?
Jim took a step and noticed that the floor seemed to be wrong, too. Gone was the dark gray metal of the car they had just exited. This floor was a different shade. Hard to tell in the streaking light that shattered the darkness in laser glints, but it seemed to be dark red, perhaps even the deep maroon of newly-spilt blood.
All in all, it led to a strange sense of age, as though this car had been lifted out of a bygone era and pushed its way into the middle of a more modern train. Only the ads, plastered over each of the windows, seemed to be as modern as the cars they had just come from. But that just added to the strange sense of disconnect, the anachronistic quality of seeing a banner hawking the newest Broadway show on this too-old car making Jim feel almost dizzy.
A strange blanket seemed to lay itself over Jim's thoughts. He could hear screaming. He thought it must be Xavier, or the thing that had somehow both killed Xavier and at the same time become Xavier. Then he realized that wasn't it. No, the screams he heard weren't coming from beyond the closed door at the back of the car. They were coming from his own mind. The screams of a murdered mother, the screams of death come to one far too young.
Jim stumbled. His legs felt like the strength had run out of them. Hands gripped him. Guided him to one of the nearby seats. It turned out that the upholstery wasn't much softer than the plastic seats had been. Perhaps worn thin from too many years of use, perhaps never that soft to begin with. Either way, the seats pinched at his legs as though angry to be used this way.
"You okay?" Eyes swam in the darkness before him. It was Adolfa, he realized, almost invisible in her dark clothing. Her grandmotherly face full of concern and a kind of saintly woe that seemed utterly out of place in this train of otherworldly horrors.
"I don't know," Jim mumbled. The only honest answer. He looked around, almost ridiculously proud of himself
for managing to complete the movement without vomiting on himself.
Karen was moving up and down the car. There was something odd about her gait, and Jim thought at first that she must have been injured in the flight from one car to the next. Then he realized that wasn't it. It was her boots. One of them was taller than the other.
She left one heel in Xavier's back. Before he….
The thought trailed off into a vague sense of malaise, as though his mind could not approach what had just happened in a direct fashion. Only obliquely, in quick glances. To look at some things too long would be to embrace madness.
But Xavier… he became himself. A smaller himself that became a smaller himself that was becoming….
Jim heard the screams in his mind; the shrieks of the would-be rapist: "Get it outta me!" And then the sickening shredding of his face parting to allow his smaller doppelganger to crawl forth.
Karen stopped her restless motion. Jim focused on her, focused on her and in so doing tried to focus his thoughts away from memory. He looked at her form – still beautiful even in the star-streaked un-night of the subway tunnel – looked at the leather satchel that she still carried. He wondered what was in it.
Karen reached out and pushed against one of the windows that lined the length of the car. Her lips pursed with effort, but the window didn't give. She reached a bit higher and pulled on something. Jim couldn't make out what it was at first, then saw it was a cord of some kind. It ran the entirety of the car. An emergency stop cord, he realized. The kind that hadn't been in use for decades.
Where are we?
Karen took a few more lurching steps, then frowned and kicked out suddenly. Her remaining heel snapped off against the side of a seat with a crack that made Jim jump. And as much as the sound surprised him he was amazed at the offhand precision of the kick. Even if he hadn't just seen her take Xavier apart, he would have known just from that movement that she was not a woman he'd want to cross in a dark alley… or even a bright alley, for that matter.
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