by Tom Reinhart
In its wake, large white feathers spun around in the air, slowly floating down to the ground. Some were pure white, others painted red with blood. I eased up off of Jennifer and we all moved off of the wall. Cell phones lay scattered on the ground, their dimly lit screens illuminating the carnage all around us. Body parts were everywhere; arms, legs, hands and heads, all scattered around on the ground. I couldn’t tell angel from human. The walls of the tunnel were splattered with blood. I could hear it dripping off the ceiling.
A few other people had managed to escape the train’s path and they quickly ran off down the tunnel and disappeared into the darkness like panicked rabbits running from the hounds. Somewhere back towards the platform, moans and yells began to drift through the tunnel again from the injured and the suffering. There was no sign of any more angels, but I knew that wouldn’t last.
Up ahead of us someone was walking back in our direction. From his silhouette and the large wrench in his hand, I knew it was Joe. He didn’t speak until he was right on us. “Everyone make it?” He looked at Jennifer and I, then leaned to look behind us. Margie and Steve were making their way up to us, stepping around the body parts. Joe looked back to me. “That was fucked up.” I didn’t really have much of a response. ‘Fucked up’ seemed understated and obvious. I was more interested in what was next.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
Jennifer was nervously looking around at the bodies on the ground. “I don’t want to stay here. I want to get out of the tunnel.”
Joe pointed further up the tracks, towards where he had come from. “I saw a side door up there about thirty yards, in a little alcove. Looks like a maintenance room or something. I didn’t get to try the door yet but if we can get in, it might be a good place to hide out for a while.”
Jennifer repeated her disagreement. “I really don’t want to stay down here.”
Steve answered her. “It’s not going to be safe up there on the street, at least not tonight. The best thing we can do is hide out until somebody gets things under control. The military, the police, I don’t know. But the only thing happening up there tonight is us dying. I’m going for the room.” He looked at Margie, hoping for her agreement.
“He’s right,” she said. “I don’t think anyone is going to do anything, to be honest, but I think I’d rather take my chances down here for now than commit suicide up there.”
I agreed as I took Jennifer’s hand. “Yeah,” I told her, “C’mon, let’s check out the room before more of those things come through the tunnel.”
She gave a reluctant nod but followed along beside me as Joe led us to the alcove. A couple minutes of stepping over body parts and we came to a small elevated platform on the left side of the tunnel. A few steps led up to an alcove that went several feet into the tunnel wall before ending at an old metal door. The paint had been peeling off of it for years, revealing the rust underneath. Joe got to the door ahead of everyone else, and it pushed right open.
It was a dusty old maintenance room, stocked with a bunch of crap only some of which I could recognize. It was all train and track parts, tools, and some odd shaped light bulbs. In the corner was what looked like a box of miscellaneous lost and found junk; random things they had picked up off of the tracks over the years. There was a desk with some log books on it, an ashtray full of cigarette butts, and a penthouse magazine. It wasn’t a big room, just big enough for the five of us to not be climbing on each other. I tried to lock the door, but the knob was busted up and there was no lock. It was a maintenance room, in need of maintenance.
Steve and Margie were rummaging through the tools. I saw Margie grab an old pocket knife. The rest of the stuff didn’t seem like it would be very useful. Eventually we all settled down to sitting on the floor, except for Joe who took a spot on the desk. None of us realized how exhausted we were from the last couple of hours, until we stopped running. Then your body signals catch up to you.
“What are we going to do now?” Steve asked.
Joe answered quickly. “I’m gonna ride this shit out right here for a while. In fact, help me out with this…” Joe hopped off the desk and began pushing it in front of the door, causing a couple of us to have to move to get out the way. Steve and Joe wedged the desk tight up against the door, and then both took a seat on it.
“That’s madness out there,” began Joe, “I don’t know what those fucking things are, but they’re killing everyone they can get their hands on. It would be nuts to try to go anywhere right now.”
“I’m sure by the morning somebody will be doing something,” Steve added. “The police, the military, the government; somebody will get control of this.”
“Nobody is going to do anything,” answered Margie defiantly. “This is bigger than that. Those aren’t terrorists. They’re not even human. This is…this is something religious, biblical. This is bad. Really bad.”
Joe was still steadfast in his atheistic stance. “Look lady, I respect everyone’s right to believe in what they want, but I ain’t buyin’ it. What happened to ‘love thy neighbor’? Or ‘turn the other cheek’? Those things aren’t from Heaven, they’re fucking murdering people.”
“Have you ever read the bible?” she asked him. “Noah’s ark? The great flood? The plagues and pestilence? Hell and damnation? I’ve got news for you; Heaven isn’t run by the girl scouts.”
“I’m sorry sister. I just don’t believe in any of that. The bible is just a book written by mortal men. Religion is used for control and profit. Christianity is the biggest hoax ever played on mankind. The Bible, real? I could bury a copy of The Hobbit under my house, and two thousand years from now when somebody digs it up, they’ll think it’s the history of the world and Bilbo Baggins was the fucking Messiah. It’s all nonsense.”
“That sure as shit isn’t nonsense out there right now,” I blurted out, joining into a conversation I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in. “There’s definitely something abnormal going on. Those things freaking fly, and they turn people to ash. And it’s not just here.” I glanced momentarily at Jennifer, who seemed to be showing signs of shock. “We saw news reports from the office before this started. It was happening in other cities, other countries. It’s global.”
“It’s fucked up,” added Steve.
“It’s the end of days,” Margie insisted again.
Joe just shook his head as he lay back onto the desk, no one saying anything else. We just sat for a long time, no one knowing for sure what to say, or what to do next, the minutes dragging by like hours. As the night wore on, the sounds from the streets above seeped steadily into the room. No more trains came through, and in the silence of the tunnel the sounds of the city had become strange whispers drifting through the darkness.
In the quiet stillness we could hear them, faint but terrifying. As we huddled in the dim light of the storage room, death was moving swiftly through the city. Street by street, building by building, on mighty unearthly wings it came. Eight million people in New York City, one by one being hunted down and cremated into a million tons of ash. Car crashes, gunfire, explosions, and the pleading of millions all warned of the religious apocalypse occurring just above us, it's sounds drifting lightly through the subway tunnel like a dark song of fate and biblical retribution.
Slowly throughout the night I watched the others fall asleep one by one. Sooner or later, the exhausted need sleep, no matter what’s going on. Eventually I must have succumbed to my own exhaustion, because the next thing I knew I was startled awake to the sound of the desk scraping along the floor. Joe was pulling the desk away from the door. My watch said it was 7:12am.
Jennifer had fallen asleep leaning against me, her head settling on my shoulder. The rest were stirring, slowly dusting themselves off, the looks on their faces a mixture of “did I dream that” and “what do we do now”. Joe was at the end of the maintenance alcove, looking both directions into the darkness of the subway tunnel. “I don’t hear anything,” he called back, “A few people may
be, far up the tunnel. They sound hurt.”
Steve’s fear was still paralyzing him. “What if those things are still out there?”
Joe answered with what now seemed his usual charm. “Well, we won’t know if we sit here and fucking starve to death, will we? I need to find a bathroom and something to eat,” he barked. I nudged Jennifer awake. In another time this would have been a great moment to savor, but not now. Now I watched her face change from the peaceful forgetfulness of sleep, to the fearful remembering of our situation.
“I don’t want to stay here any longer either,” Margie added. “I want to see what’s happening. Maybe it’s over.”
I joined Joe at the end of the alcove, and glanced out into the tunnel, both directions offering nothing but eerie dark silence.
“Maybe.”
Joe stepped off the raised platform, his dirty dress shoes landing with a clap on the tunnel floor. The rest of us followed, slowly, carrying what weapons we had. I helped Jennifer ease off the platform, her bare feet cut and bruised, her high heels somewhere back in the lobby of our office. “I don’t think we should go back where we came from. Let’s go forward to the next station.”
In the dim light coming from the alcove I could see Joe look at me and consider my words. He seemed to seriously weigh our options before answering. “Yeah, might as well. But hang on a second.” He turned and walked over to the opposite side of the tunnel. I saw him face close into the wall with his back to us, then I heard his zipper open, and the inevitable stream of urine puddling at his feet. “Anyone else? Might as well do it right now. Watch the third rail.”
No one moved for a few seconds, until a moment of self-evaluation made us realize Joe was right. I guessed none of us had gone all night. I watched Margie move twenty yards back in the direction we had come, into the dark where no one could see her squat. Jennifer gave me a sheepish look, and joined her. Steve was the only one that didn’t move. “I went earlier,” he announced, looking nervously up and down the tunnel. I wondered for a moment where in the little storage room he had urinated.
Once we had all taken care of our bodily needs, we began moving further into the tunnel, away from the station where we had been attacked. Nobody wanted to go back that way, and every now and then behind us we could hear the sounds of people calling out for help in the darkness; people in agony, people dying. The unknown ahead was somehow more comforting than the horror of what we were leaving behind.
The tunnel was a stark contrast to what it was the day before. There was no one running through, no screaming, and no cell phone lights frantically moving back and forth. The smell of death hung thickly in the air though, body parts still strewn around on the tunnel floor. For a brief second I thought I saw an arm moving, but wrote it off to rats having breakfast. I also realized we hadn’t heard a subway train come through all night, not since the one that took out the angels, and almost us.
We walked through near darkness, the only light a few dim fluorescent fixtures remotely scattered every fifty yards on the tunnel wall. Many weren’t working; while others were so dirty and filled with dead bugs they offered little light. There was just enough light here and there to guide us forward, hugging the walls to avoid any chance of tripping and stumbling on the tracks.
Fifteen minutes or so further into the tunnel, we heard someone up ahead. Just one voice, a mixture of mumbling and whimpering, like someone hurt or scared. We continued forward, peering into the darkness for whatever was ahead of us. Drawing nearer to the voice, a stench grew in the air. The smell of body odor, mixed with defecation and death. “Jeez,” blurted Jennifer, “what is that?”
A few yards further we saw the dark silhouette of a man leaning against the wall of the tunnel. He was sort of standing, mostly hunched over, mumbling to himself. As soon as he saw us, he moved to the middle of the tunnel, facing us, and called out. “Hey! Hey! Over here!”
“Shhhh!” Joe yelled back. “Shut up. Be quiet.”
“I’m hurt. Can you help me get out of here?”
When we were very close, Joe lit up his cell phone and shined it towards the man. Jennifer gasped loudly while Steve blurted out a “Holy crap…” In the dim light of the cell phone, we could see the man was indeed injured. He was covered in blood; his head split wide open, cracked grotesquely in half. On the left side pieces of his skull were protruding out through his scalp, and I swear I could see parts of his brain. One arm appeared to be broken near the shoulder, swinging unnaturally as he moved, as if it were disconnected. He stank badly. He was no longer bleeding; globs of coagulated blood caked into his clothes and hair. His skin was ashen gray, like a dead man’s.
“Help me, please,” he cried through badly broken teeth and strangely blue lips.
“What the hell happened to you, man?” Joe asked.
The man seemed to struggle with his thoughts for a moment, confused, as if he couldn’t remember. “A bus. No…a…the train. I was in the tunnel… and a train hit me.”
“The train hit you? Yeah, it looks like the train freaking hit you, pal.”
The man took a couple more steps toward us, and stepped onto the third rail. His body jolted violently as if in the midst of a powerful seizure. Sparks flew from around his ankles as the smell of burning flesh filled the air. We all took a few steps back. “Jesus Christ….” I heard Steve exclaim. When the man finally stumbled off the rail, we all expected him to fall dead. His knees buckled a bit and he almost went down, but he caught himself and stood again, still alive. He stood there for a moment dazed, smoke easing off what was left of his head. He just stared at us, as if he was just now seeing us for the first time.
“What the fuck,” yelled Joe. “Dude, you alright?”
It took a moment, but the man answered. “Hey! Can you help me get out of here?” His words were strangely slurred, and he wobbled like a drunk, but he stood.
Joe turned to us. “There’s something not fucking right here. This guy should be dead.”
Behind Joe I saw the man take another step, then hit the third rail again. More sparks flew from his feet, smoke flowed from his torn pants, and this time he screamed in pain. He fell in a spasm onto the ground, lost contact with the rail, and just lay there motionless. No one spoke for several moments until Joe moved a little closer, shining the cell light on him. “He’s gotta be dead now.”
Suddenly the man moaned and turned over on his back, the gap in his skull having grown wider. Now I could clearly see his brain exposed, almost like it was going to fall out of his head. Jennifer turned away.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Joe mumbled.
The injured man reached up an arm towards Joe. “Help me. Help me up!” A puff of smoke came out of his mouth as he spoke. Then as he shifted around on the ground trying to get up, he hit the third rail again. His eyes opened wide like a gold fish as his body jerked around violently on the ground. Joe quickly stepped back away from him. This time it seemed as though the man had become stuck on the rails, his pseudo-electrocution continuing on and on endlessly.
In his violent convulsions I saw pieces of his broken skull coming off. We all backed away, and then hugging the wall moved around him. All the while he convulsed on the ground, trapped on the electrified rail, still reaching for us and calling out in a broken garbled voice, “Help…me….help ….me!”
Joe urged us to move forward. “Come on. He’s dead. He’s fucking dead. We can’t help him.”
“He’s not dead,” Jennifer argued. “He’s hurt. We can’t just leave him.”
“Look at him. Look at him!” Joe yelled, pointing behind us. “What are you gonna do with that? He’s in fucking pieces.”
Jennifer looked back at the man, and I could see in the phone light she was crying. I moved to her and turned her away. “C’mon, let’s go.” We began walking further up the tunnel, away from the man who was still bouncing around in sparks on the ground behind us.
Steve broke thirty yards of silence. “What the hell was tha
t? That guy should’ve been dead.”
“He was dead,” answered Joe.
“He was up talking to us. He’s still yelling back there,” Steve argued.
“Did you fucking see him? Did you smell him? You see his friggin’ head? If that guy wasn’t dead, he was seconds from it”
Suddenly I remembered what I had seen the day before; the jumpers from the building across the street, still alive in the road fifty stories below. I couldn’t keep the thought to myself. “We saw this yesterday,” I started, “in the street. The jumpers. The broken couple in the road when we came out of the alley. I watched them jump from the roof of the building. They were all busted up, but they were still alive.”
A long silence went by before Margie spoke up. “People aren’t dying.”
“What are you talking about? We watched angels turn people into ashes. That’s pretty fucking dead.” Joe yelled, probably louder than he intended.
