Darkbound 2014.06.12

by Michaelbrent Collings

  The world seemed to sway under Jim's feet. He expected her to be carrying legal papers in her case, maybe a laptop, even a personal vibrator would have been less of a shock to see pulled out of the case right now.

  "I knew you were ass-kicker," said Olik. Admiration was unmistakable in his voice as he eased his hand away from his own weapon.

  "I thought you were a lawyer," said Jim. The words sounded lame even to him, but he couldn't stop them from coming out. He had to know. There was so much that he didn't understand, and he just had to know something, dammit. Anything.

  "I said I was in acquisitions," answered Karen. "And this is the only chance I'm going to have to acquire my contract."

  Olik shook his head. He looked resigned, and stepped forward. Karen's gun immediately trained on him. "Always I knew this day would come," he said. "Men like me do not die in bed. Make it quick."

  Karen laughed, a quick burst of mirthless noise that punched out of her like a bullet from her gun. "I'm not here for you," Karen said. The micro-Uzi adjusted its aim a half-inch. "Come on, Adolfa."

  Jim's lower jaw felt like it was probably going to bounce off his toes. Even more so when the old lady didn't shrink away or even seem particularly surprised. "Now? With the police right outside?"

  "You and I know that this is the only time I'll have. After this you'll just disappear again. I don't have time to wait."

  "May I say a prayer?" asked Adolfa.

  "No."

  Karen's finger whitened on the trigger.

  And in the same instant, Adolfa ripped in half.

  FIVE

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  Karen pulled the trigger on her micro-Uzi, and at the same moment the lights in the subway tunnel all extinguished. The darkness enveloped them instantly, broken only by the sputter-flare of the automatic weapon as it spat out its deadly payload.

  Jim barely noticed. He was too busy trying to sort out what he had just seen.

  Adolfa. Torn in two.

  At first he thought that it must be something like what had happened to Freddy. Then he replayed what he had seen and realized that was wrong. She wasn't really being pulled apart. Rather, she had split in two. Two exact duplicates of the old latina. One of them remained in place, and the other leaped to the side with the athletic ability of a circus acrobat.

  Jim knew instantly that the standing Adolfa was – had to be – the real one. He darted forward and grabbed her. Pulled her back as Karen's tiny weapon continued to stitch strobe flashes in the darkness of the subway car.

  Karen was screaming. Madness in her eyes. Madness and something else. Terror? That was part of it, Jim thought. But there was something else, too. Something he didn't understand – and perhaps didn't want to understand.

  Whatever it was, she didn't seem to notice the Adolfa that Jim had grabbed, the one he had pulled back and who now almost sat atop him as they huddled together off to the side of the car. She was fixated instead on the other Adolfa, the impossibly lithe and gymnastic old lady who was swinging from hand straps and metal bars like an Olympian.

  Karen swung her gun in a tight arc, following the old woman around the car. The sputtering shots illuminated everything in stop-gap flashes. It made the lithe Adolfa seem impossibly fast. Here one moment, then in the next flash she was somehow five feet away. The next flash, another five feet away. And in the next….

  "I do not see this," whispered Olik.

  The impostor Adolfa leaped up in the flash of another missed shot. Leaped up, but not the mere few inches or even the foot she might have done. She jumped all the way to the roof of the car, and there she clung like a huge arachnid. As though the laws of gravity held no sway over her.

  Karen was still screaming. Still shooting.

  The other-Adolfa scuttled across the roof. Dodging shots. Hissing. Her mouth opened, and Jim saw that the old woman's jaw extended impossibly far, accommodating triple rows of needle-like teeth on both the top and bottom.

  Karen's scream elevated.

  Under the scream, another sound. A whine. The shriek of brakes.

  The subway was slowing.

  Stopping.

  The Adolfa-thing moved like a lizard. Its jaws clicked shut. It hissed, and the sound was otherworldly, the hiss of something that should never have been seen by earthly eyes.

  Click.

  The magazine of Karen's weapon was dry. She kept pulling the trigger, kept screaming and pulling the trigger, but nothing happened. Just that dry click click click.

  The toothy thing that had somehow assumed Adolfa's form dropped from the ceiling. Jim saw that its hands had become hooked claws with lengthy talons. It reached out and yanked the micro-Uzi from Karen's hands with such force that several of the once-beautiful woman's fingers came away as well, yanked off at the knuckles with wet pops that bounced horribly through the subway car.

  Karen's scream took on a wet, agonized quality.

  The train stopped.

  The doors opened.

  The platform outside, lit brilliantly before, was now dark.

  Karen turned to the now-open doorway. "Help!" she screamed out at the dark platform. She must have decided that whatever she had been paid to "acquire" Adolfa wasn't worth it. "Save us! Save –"

  Her voice cut off. It ended so surely and so suddenly that Jim thought the Adolfa-thing must have killed her. It must have plunged one of those dagger-talons into her back and just pulled out her heart.

  But no. Karen was still breathing, he saw. Still looking around in the darkness with those fever-spotted eyes, those eyes rimmed with madness and fear.

  What was she seeing?

  Jim turned. Looked at what Karen was looking at.

  He saw that the platform was still full. Not cops after all. But he did recognize them. Because he'd seen them all. Seen them very recently, in fact.

  A swollen, drowned-looking face.

  A woman with a bullet-hole in her forehead.

  A man whose tongue had been yanked out, another whose tongue and lower jaw had been abraded away to nothing with a belt sander.

  Gunshot wounds, knife wounds, men and women hung and cut and slashed and burned and maimed.

  They stood silently on the platform, looking through the subway car's windows, just as they had looked through the glass of Karen's tablet. The faces of the dead.

  And at the middle of the platform, standing in front of the open doors… a child. Tiny. No more than five or six. So young it wasn't clear whether it was a boy or a girl. Beautiful. Angelic. And very dead.

  Then, as had happened on the tablet screen, the child's features started to melt. To sag. It stepped into the car on legs that were wobbly, loose as though they were made of rubber and skin alone and held no bone within them.

  It pointed a drooping finger at Karen.

  Karen screamed. The scream muted when the impostor Adolfa swiped out a hand. Karen's throat became a bloody mass. The Adolfa-thing crushed something in her hand, something Jim suspected was Karen's larynx. Then another swipe, and Karen's lower jaw was pulled away in a single piece. Her tongue, no longer enclosed by a mouth, drooped freely against the mangled remains of her neck.

  The child at the door to the train pointed again.

  "You," it whispered. Its voice bubbled, like its lungs and throat were melting as it spoke.

  The Adolfa-thing grabbed Karen by her upper jaw. Jim cringed, sure the thing was going to pull the woman's head apart this time. But it didn't. It flicked the brunette over her back like a grotesque, twitching knapsack.

  Karen wasn't screaming anymore. She wasn't even breathing, as far as Jim could see. But she was alive, he knew. Whatever was happening didn't obey the rules of life and death as they knew them. Karen was still alive, still looking around with eyes that were insane and terrified and….

  What?

  There was that other thing in her eyes, that third thing. A thing he felt like he had to figure out.

  Then she was gon
e. The Adolfa-thing smiled as it passed, triple rows of teeth creating a terrifying depth to its grin, and then it left the subway car. It reached down with its free hand as it passed the melting child. It patted the child's head.

  The child's head blatted, like a wet and rotten fruit that had been stepped on after being left out too long in the sun.

  The Adolfa-thing pulled her hand free, and the child's head came off its body.

  Olik said something in his native language that was half scream, half whisper. Jim didn't understand the word, but he understood the terror behind it. He was feeling it, too.

  The child's body didn't fall. It just stood there as its head rolled around in the Adolfa-thing's grasp like putty, becoming more and more amorphous, and then finally it had lost all shape or trace of identity. It merged with the Adolfa impostor's own flesh and disappeared.

  The child's body, now headless, ran up Karen's form. Scaling her like a decapitated mountain climber, it clambered up her ankles, her legs, her pelvis and stomach and breasts. It climbed to her raw, perforated neck.

  Karen couldn't speak. Couldn't make the words, Jim knew. But she started making noise as the headless child made its way up her frame.

  "Ung-ung-ung."

  Jim felt shivers writhe up his spine, as though shadowing the shivering ascent of the tiny form on Karen's body. The woman was still held in place by the hooked talon of Adolfa's doppelganger, the claw that went through her upper jaw like a hook through a fish.

  "Ung-ung-ung."

  Karen was making the same sounds Freddy had made.

  The headless child, the beast masquerading as a child that should be dead and cold and motionless but somehow was not, plunged its neck toward Karen's face. And as it did, the rest of the corpses on the platform moved toward her. They closed in on her in a ring, each of them reaching out a hand. The ones that were too far to touch her pulled off bits of their bodies: ears, fingers, noses. They threw the pieces of themselves at Karen, and soon her mutilated body was covered in bloody pieces of the already-dead.

  She was still making that noise. That terrible noise. "Ung-ung-ung." It was worse than a scream. Screams were what you did when you still had strength, your body's way of saying, Please save me. This thing Karen was doing was different. No hope for salvation. Only a quiet pleading for death. For oblivion. Please kill me. Destroy me. End me.

  The child-thing touched its neck to Karen. She started coughing. Blood poured from her nose. Her eyes. Just a bit at first, and then more and more. The blood became a flooding river, a torrent that covered the headless body hunched on her. So much it should have killed her.

  But she was still alive. Her eyes still aware.

  Her body started to shrivel. Like an apricot left out too long on a summer day. Her skin wrinkled, aged. Her eyes remained bright, but the skin that had been so lovely only a moment before now mottled, then spotted, then crinkled, then cracked. The expensive clothing she had been wearing grew loose and then fluttered free.

  Karen was nude, her form a grotesque parody of mummification. But where the ancients had mummified their dead to show them honor and prepare them for safe trips in the afterlife, Jim suspected that this had no such purpose. No, the things masquerading as the dead around Karen were interested in her pain. He could see it in the way they moved, in the way they swayed as if in a trance. They seemed linked to Karen's suffering.

  "For the love of God," whispered Adolfa. "Can't someone stop it?"

  No one moved.

  Karen's figure withered still further. She became nothing more than stick-like bones wrapped in parchment-skin, yellow and dusty. The things around her sighed.

  But Karen was still alive. Making that terror/pain/knowing noise. That mad noise. That noise of… something that Jim didn't understand.

  For some reason, he thought of the fight with Carolyn. He didn't want a fight to be the last thing she remembered of him.

  The things around Karen sighed. They seemed to start melting, their forms growing amorphous. Their limbs drooped like waxen figures too close to a fire. Then their bodies fell into one another, pooling. There was only the headless child-thing on Karen's shriveled, living corpse. Everything else, all the other dead creatures had become a primordial ooze, a thrashing pool of gelatin.

  The child-thing reached down with one hand. It touched the horrid pool that writhed all around the platform. The blob oozed up the child's arm. Covered it. Covered the child's body. Then covered Karen's body as well.

  "Ung-ung-ung."

  The sound she was making disappeared as she was enveloped in the grotesque substance that was all that was left of the dead. Cocooned in decay, a chrysalid wrapped forever in the festering remains of the things that had once been dead and now were something beyond death, something worse. Something dead but alive, dead but hungry.

  The doors to the subway shut.

  The subway lurched into motion. Carrying Jim and Olik and Adolfa away from the platform, from the sound, from Karen.

  The platform dropped back. Soon, mercifully, it was lost in the darkness.

  And the subway continued on.

  3 FARES

  We love to go on picnics. I work a lot at the office – the practice has finally started picking up – so it's rare that we get to do so, but when we can we spread out a feast. Maddie picks what we eat, which means there are a lot of crackers and chips and sugared cereal and it usually ends with upset tummies – mine often the first one.

  But I love it. The park is bright and lovely. It's like nothing can go wrong there.

  ONE

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  The lights didn't return. Not the ones outside the subway car, and certainly none inside the traveling coffin. Darkness ruled, and light was but a memory.

  The three remaining passengers stood frozen in the black for a long time. Jim stared out the windows of the closed doors for what could have been hours, as though if he waited long enough he might have a chance at piercing not only the darkness outside but the darkness that had fallen around his mind. Hopelessness.

  He finally turned away, making his way to a seat by touch. He couldn't see anything. Couldn't feel anything, either, beyond an acute sense of how unfair this all was. What had he ever done to deserve this? Why was he here? Where the hell was here?

  "What do you think is going on?" whispered Adolfa.

  Jim started. He hadn't heard her creeping closer. Now, though, he heard the low rustle of her clothing as she sat near to him.

  "I don't know," he said. He whispered as well. He didn't know why he felt compelled to do so, but he couldn't deny that he felt like speaking too loud right now would be some kind of a sin. He wasn't much of a church-goer – he was too much a man of science and rationality to spend much time on things like that – but he couldn't deny he felt weirdly like he was sitting in a sanctuary or a confessional right now. "What do you think is happening?"

  "Ay, mi hijo," she said. "I don't know."

  "That lady – Karen."

  "Yes?"

  "She wanted to kill you."

  "She didn't, though."

  "No. But why did she want to in the first place?"

  He could feel Adolfa's shrug even in the darkness. Or maybe it was just his imagination, giving him something to hold onto so that he didn't go mad from the lack of sensory input. "I dunno," she said. "Crazy lady."

  Jim was silent for a moment. There was no question that Karen had been crazy. Sane people didn't walk around New York subways with micro-Uzis in leather cases waiting for opportune moments to gun down old ladies. And yet....

  "I guess," he finally said.

  "But I don't think the crazy lady is our big problem," added Adolfa.

  On that point there was no doubt.

  "What's going on?" Jim said. He knew he'd already said that, but he couldn't help asking again. As if by repetition he might force Adolfa to provide some hint of information she had withheld until now. Like a child who says
, "Please? Please? Pleeeeeeease?" knowing it's that last, drawn-out word that will break a parent's defenses.

  How much of life is like that? he wondered briefly. How often do we just do the same thing over and over, hoping to get lucky and end up with the outcome we want? Some people said insanity was doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different result, but wasn't that what we did all the time as a species? Just swinging from the trees and collecting fruit and hoping that one of us lucked out and mutated enough to climb down and start building cities? Where of course we obsessed about constructing the tallest buildings so we could climb back up to the heights we had just abandoned by jumping down from the trees.

  I suppose we're all a bit insane, he thought.

  "I don't know," said Adolfa. She didn't sound angry at having to answer the same question twice. Jim liked her even more for that. She was almost an archetypical grandmother-type. The kind of woman who would always have cookies waiting for you when you visited, who would always have a hug when you needed one.

  Unfortunately, he didn't need cookies or a hug now. He needed answers. He needed to get back to his girls.

  More noises, heavy and solid thumps on the flooring, announced the arrival of Olik. "I join you, yes?"

  "Sure." Jim didn't like the guy. Didn't like what he was, his profession – if you could call it that – but he could hardly deny the man access to this part of the car. What was he going to do, say, "No this part's off limits, go find your own subway car that denies the laws of the universe to sit in"?

  Olik sat down somewhere in the darkness nearby.

  "So we have lost one more?"

  Though phrased as such, Jim could tell it wasn't really a question. Neither he nor Adolfa replied. Silence stretched out between the three of them. It grew uncomfortable, but Jim didn't want to be the one to break it. He just wanted all this to be over. He thought again about just sitting down and waiting. Waiting either for all this to end of its own accord – for someone to come and rescue them – or for something to come and finish him off. It was an ever-more appealing concept.