Metro

by Stephen Romano

  “Yes, she did, mother. Gretchen was a good soldier.”

  “She was more than that.”

  “Yes. She was.”

  “It’s okay to love her still, like you loved her then. The people we care about are never really gone. As long as we remember them and what they gave us.”

  “I’ll never forget, Mother. And I’m ready to do what must be done.”

  “It’s taken almost two decades to figure out who these people really are. I thought I was broken when I washed up on that shore. But then when I found out I was pregnant with you, it made me live again. Then I knew it was all meant to be. So we bided our time, while the world reeled in shock. The plane in Philadelphia was supposed to be one of their master strokes, as you know. But it turned into the Little War instead. We were able to use it to wake people up. We’ve seen shock and awe and human casualty all across the world. The little people, taking back what is theirs. You’ve been born into an America that was very different when you were conceived. That’s all it takes to change the world forever, my love. Just one hard crash and burn.”

  “I wish I could have seen the world before the crash.”

  “You have. In the movies and books left to us. The ones your father loved so much. I’ve given all of that to you.”

  “It’s not the same as actually being there, Mother. I wish . . . I just wish I could have been here with you. In the real Kingdom. In the House of JAM.”

  “You are, my love. We’re here, aren’t we?”

  “I know this is the house. I know this is the same living room all those parties and things happened in. But it’s an old husk. And not the same as actually being back in time—being in the world before the crash.”

  “It is, in a way. Many ghosts live in the remains of this room. If you respect them, they will make you strong. That’s why I brought you here. That’s why I wanted you to see it. Tomorrow, we go to the highest place. It was here in Austin all along, of course. It took us a while to figure that one out, but we really should have known. They were running their biggest operation out of Austin, after all. It would figure that the league of super villains would be right down the block.”

  “If it hadn’t been for Gretchen, we might never have discovered that.”

  “She was many things to us, my love. Many things.”

  “I am ready to honor her, Mother.”

  “Your father would be so proud. To look in your eyes. To see how strong you are. We sat right here in this living room more than twenty years ago, and we watched all those movies and listened to all that music together, and this room was filled with laughter. Just like it will be again. Just like there will be time for all tomorrow’s parties.”

  “That’s a Velvet Underground song, isn’t it? ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’?”

  “Of course it is, my love. Your father would have been so proud. Just like I am.”

  “Thank you, Mother.”

  “I know your training has been difficult. But it had to be done. You also had to be hard, like he was. Like Gretchen Underhill was—the hardest soldier ever produced by METRO. But our soldier in the end. Did I ever tell you that I met her first when she was just a little girl? Long before the Little War?”

  “Yes. I knew that. She told me.”

  “You crazy kids and your secrets.”

  “It wasn’t a secret. She said you rescued her from a monster.”

  “Yes. A monster who’s name I will never repeat.”

  “Good. The unworthy should be forgotten by history, Mother.”

  “Gretchen Underhill will be remembered forever. Her sacrifice was like your father’s. And you’re finally ready to lead Peanut’s men. We know exactly where to go now. So many men and women died to bring us there. It’s the building your father once said I could go straight to the top of. He knew I could track down every dictator and every operative and raid all the secret files in all the secret way stations of METRO. The monster who kidnapped Gretchen knew it too. That’s why he feared me. That’s why he wanted me. They knew we were standing right at ground zero all along.”

  “Ground zero is a funny place. It deceives like a motherfucker.”

  “Peanut used to say that.”

  “Of course he did, Mother. So did Gretchen. We all learned from the best.”

  “The war is nearly won. The people almost understand how METRO works. We only need one last moment of truth. One last broadcast. People are hungry for the truth now—not like they were in my youth. Nobody believed in the truth then. They believed in TV. They waited around to be ruled. Now, they’ve seen the things we’ve put on the Internet. The lies we’ve exposed. There are so many children out there—children just like you—and they are ready to storm the league of super villains, at last.”

  “There’s going to be a lot of blood, Mother.”

  “Blood always matters, my son.”

  “I think I’ve learned that too. We are all of the same blood.”

  “Yes we are, aren’t we, my love?”

  “Yes we are, Mother.”

  • • •

  There must be many witnesses.

  That’s what Jollie thinks, over and over, as the elevator goes up. That’s what she remembers most from her final instructions to her son, and it pounds the inside of her skull like a hammer mantra, the gun burning a hole in her pocket. The elevator is sweaty and dark, full of bad ghosts—she’s lived with them for a million years, but it’s always rough in the last few seconds before you make your real move. The memory of those years—the awful truth about everything—tugs just beneath the surface, tickling the base of her throat like first-date jitters or the dull swell of a kept secret. Everything is happening now, she thinks. We were brought forth from the bottom of the worst places on earth to be in this building. We fought the good fight like champs and here it all is, right in front of us. There must be no hesitation. There must be no mercy.

  There must be many witnesses.

  Or it all will mean nothing.

  The elevator dings and the strike team leaves the car together and they file into the hallway. There is only one door at the very end. As high as you can possibly go. On the floors and the ground below them, the war rumbles on. You can hear the gunshots, even up here. She limps along, behind her son, who leads the men. The leg brace still gives her some shit when it’s cold outside. The entire world stands on the brink of its most profound awakening. Mark Jones Meeker stands ready to tell them all the truth about November 12. Two men with cameras flank him, streaming video to twenty different remote locations and five satellites. Nobody will ever doubt his words again. Not after this morning.

  There will be many, many witnesses.

  She remembers her true love’s face. Remembers that their love was what really saved the world. Remembers the monster she almost became, in his arms, on that horrible night in the corridor of love and freedom. Remembers that they just can’t do this to us.

  She whispers his real name.

  Whispers that she loves her son, one last time.

  Then her son kicks in that door and sees the faces of all those cold, lifeless men and women. Sees the face of Senator Bob Wilson among them. A living dead man in a room full of living dead men. The immortals who control everything, in the highest place you can possibly go. They all stand stock still, facing twelve machine guns and three cameras.

  Our girl smiles at Senator Bob, sensing that the moment has come.

  The moment is perfect.

  And so her son kills everybody in the room.

  making METRO

  Acknowledgements and Thanks

  This is the section of the book normally reserved for special thanks and (sometimes) funny little anecdotes from the author. I used to not like doing this for various reasons. But you change as you get older. I kind of enjoy it now, though I try to keep my praise and
blame short-and-to-the-point most of the time. There are few things more uncomfortable, in my opinion, than an artist who can’t shut up about how awesome he is. But since METRO had some fairly interesting things happen to it on the way to market, this section will be a bit longer than usual. Please bear with me.

  First, I must thank the editorial staff.

  You see, this book was originally one of those “backburner” projects created over a fairly long time between other gigs. Some people call them “trunk novels.” It was written in two marathon sprints, one taking place in December of 2011, the other in December of 2012. In total, the first draft of METRO took about five weeks to crank out, over a period of one year exactly. The novel then “sat in the can” for two more years while I wrote several other things, did some movie business, and prepared my book Black Light to become a television series. (It’s still in development as of this writing. Ah, Hollywood.) METRO finally went to Ed Schlesinger, my editor on Resurrection Express, who believed in the story and graciously found it a home at Pocket Star.

  Not long after we closed the deal, I was nearly killed.

  This happened early in 2014, when a speeding truck ran me down on the sidewalk. I was walking and talking on my cell phone to a nice young lady in the contracts department at Disney, who’s name was actually Rebecca Fear. (Yeah. Seriously. Sometimes you just can’t make this shit up.) I was then bounced across the hood and broken in many places. Woke up almost twenty-four hours later with a bum leg and a bladder that had been ripped apart. In the ten months that followed, I learned how to walk and go to the bathroom again. It was not easy.

  During the latter half of this difficult time, I also set to work rewriting and editing METRO and, in the process, created what I hope is a pretty decent novel by mercilessly removing many thousands of words from a bloated, self-indulgent manuscript. I credit much of my “objectivity” in excising so many elements I was truly dazzled by in the first draft to the abnormally long gestation period the book experienced, but also to the fact that I nearly lost my life just before attempting the rewrite. Let me tell you, people, when your very existence as a human being lies in shambles—your body, your career, your everything—and all you have to put the pieces back together is sheer common sense and force of will, let’s just say that the forest always becomes a lot more visible for the trees. I also credit the superior, revised version to a few really smart people who just stood there and said, “This is too goddamn long, Stephen—cut a few notes.”

  Those people were, in order of appearance:

  My agent, David Hale Smith. (“Romanoize it, man!”)

  A really smart reader at Inkwell Management named Jack Carr. (The opening and closing “conversation only” bookends were basically his idea.)

  And of course, Ed Schlesinger, who is a genuine genius when it comes to this stuff. His sage advice and thoughtful notes were invaluable, constructive, and fun as hell to work with. Ed and I had a really important conversation early in 2015, just before I took out the scissors and started cutting, about the difference between chicks who dig Peter Parker and people who are just plain mentally ill. My intention with METRO was to create a good story, sure, and I wanted it to mean something, yes—but there is that difference.

  Which brings me to the next note of thanks.

  Many things I create harken back to my childhood in some way. Often, I base entire works on ideas I had twenty or thirty years earlier. (See also: Shock Festival.) The acronym METRO was actually something I invented as a young lad of twelve, when I designed a homemade role-playing game about a futuristic strike team of zombie hunters. I liked the nerdy incongruity of having METRO stand for something entirely different than what most people normally think it means. It just seemed kinda . . . well, cool to me. In this case, it stood for “Mutant Elimination TaskfoRce Operation.” (Brilliant, no? Hey—I was freakin’ twelve.) I later resurrected the team for an unpublished graphic novel project and modified the acronym to “Massively Explosive Tactical Reaction Operation,” with input from my dear old friend Scott Hiles. He came up with the “Tactical Reaction” idea, which I thought was so much cooler and way more grown-up and stuff. (Cough. Rolls eyes.) Many years later, when I decided to write a novel called METRO, I realized it was time to get serious. What did it really mean? Massively Explosive Mutants were just silly, man. (Cough. Rolls eyes.) I put this question to my father during my first creative woolgathering sessions on the book, and we decided for some reason that the letter “M” probably stood for “Multi.” But Multi WHAT?

  So . . . when in doubt . . . grab a dictionary, folks.

  That’s just what my dad did. He grabbed a goddamn dictionary and started looking for words that began with the letter “E.” You know, something that might be cool and thrillery. This search went on for a good healthy twenty minutes. The word he finally found that sounded groovy was . . . wait for it . . .

  Endemic.

  That one word became the backbone of the entire book. I already knew it was going to be about some slacker in a rock and roll crashpad who turns out to be La Femme Nikita, and I knew that he would somehow be tricked into crashing with a hijacked plane in a climax that would eerily mirror the tragic events of September 11, 2001, but I had no idea where he came from or how he got on that plane until that night. Everything just fell into place from there. So, if you read METRO and liked it, please thank my father, Rock Romano, for suggesting a shadow world of endemic spies and assassins. And Scott Hiles, for making them into a Tactical Reaction Operation. Rock and Scott are, along with silly old me, the true grandfathers of the novel you’ve just read.

  Also, if you read METRO and liked it, please tell a friend.

  Seriously.

  The final official “shout out” must go to a man who does not exist. Technically. He is Richard Bachman, a fine writer of horror and science fiction novels, who died many years ago—from “cancer of the pseudonym”—when someone figured out that he was really Stephen King. Stephen, as Richard, wrote my second-favorite dystopian future sci-fi book—a dark little number you may have seen as an Arnold Schwarzenegger action film called The Running Man. The book, which that film was (very loosely) based on, was truly prophetic. It was published first in 1982 and predicted the rise of reality TV. It also contains a countdown-to-zero device, quite similar to the one I deployed—not once, but twice—in the rewrite of METRO. Because this device was so essential in jumpstarting much of my adrenaline during such a challenging revision period, I feel I must thank Richard for using it. After all, we only steal from the best, yes? So thanks, Mister Bachman. You rule.

  Oh. And one last thing.

  I’d like to point out that the high-tension violence so prevalent in a lot of my work is not there because I’m a “horror geek” or because I think death and mutilation sell or because I’m being cute or whatever. It is simply a natural extension of how I partially see the world and humanity in general, and it’s there because I feel that, in essence, I am telling the truth. We live on a violent planet. I, myself, am the victim of violent crime. I believe that true horror is something each of us must face at some point in our lives, whether it’s the destruction of privately held personal realities or the face of a monster staring into yours as it attempts to beat you to death with a crowbar. This may seem myopic and even cynical to some, but the idea that people like Darian Stanwell and organizations like METRO don’t exist is not only naive and absurd, it is also criminally dangerous. It means you are not prepared. It means you live in denial. I also believe that it’s possible to defeat men like Darian Stanwell. I believe that we, as a human species, have great potential for evolution and an unlimited capacity for good. I hope you read that here, too. And if you do, you’ll probably believe me what I tell you that I did not kill nearly seven hundred innocent people at the climax of my novel to be cute, either. Nor was I aiming for controversy or sales. I felt I was telling the truth. Just remember that none of it is real,
okay? I made this shit up. That’s why it’s called fiction.

  Okay, so let’s finish the official acknowledgments and I’m outta here.

  The following people are awesome:

  Teighlor Darr, Robert Jacques, Joe Fay, Mike and Sarah Talbot-Haynes, Noah David Henson, Justin Barrera, Chris Jones, Chris Head, Rosalyn Mandola, Steven Beard, Anthony Goon, Christine Goldsmith, Jenny Wade, Isabella Haller, John Dark, Elliot Black, Harlan Ellison (for “Sleeping Beauty”), James “Jimmy” Cooper, Marc Savlov, Bryan Geer, Snake Plissken, Tom Piccirilli, Philip Nutman, Anya Martin, Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan, John Schoenfelder, Don Coscarelli, Blake Crouch, David J. Schow, William Kotzwinkle, Elizabeth Gundy, Spider-Man, Kurt Vonnegut, John Crawford, Shawn Lewis (still a depraved creature), Berlin, Dave Mustaine, Greg Rucka and Brian Azzarello and all the great writers at Inkwell who supported Resurrection Express, Lindsay Brigman, Jan Michael Vincent, Lewis John Carlino, Charles Bronson, Sally Romano Esquire, Jack Williams, David Blatty, John Klyza, Ashley Laurence, and Leif Jonker.

  (If I left your name out, please INSERT HERE and add a cool story about yourself.)

  Extra special thanks to Louise Burke and all my friends at Simon & Schuster, who keep believing.

  And please . . . do tell a friend.

  To my mother:

  I love you and I live on.

  Stephen Romano

  May 2015

  Don't miss out on the acclaimed thriller!

  A juiced-up, whacked-out, back-to-the-wall book that reads like a ride through the Knife and Gun Club on the night of a full moon, riding the Resurrection Express will leave you dizzy from betrayal, speechless from reversals, and quite possibly battered and broken by its revelations.” —Greg Rucka, New York Times bestselling author of Alpha and creator of the Eisner Award–winning Queen & Country series