Unholy Torment

by Kristie Cook

  The train car was empty and loud, echoing the clanging metal of wheels on the tracks below. Tristan slammed the door shut, enclosing us in a pitch black so dark, even my excellent vision could barely see through it. He, Dorian, and I huddled together in a corner. Sasha grew to the size of a pony and curled in front of us, providing extra warmth. Blossom cuddled between her and Jax. The others found places, too, and finally, my team could truly rest.

  At least until we pulled into a station and our car didn’t move for several hours. We’d stopped at other stations along the way, and the sounds of people working outside hadn’t bothered us before, but after listening to the thoughts of the ones nearby now, I told the others we had to get out of there. They’d be loading up the five empty cars, including ours.

  The dark of night surrounded us when we slid out, and we had no idea where we’d arrived except in a big depot somewhere between Vorkuta and Moscow. We weren’t even positive how many days we’d been traveling since daylight was so short and we’d only seen what little had leaked through the cracks in the door. Our phones had all died a while ago, and I’d yet to figure out how to charge them without destroying them. Our guess had been two days had passed, at least, but a few of us thought three.

  Tristan led us away from the workers to a tight alley between train tracks.

  “We just need to keep heading west,” he said. “Straight west, northwest, southwest . . . it doesn’t matter. Let’s find another train.”

  We didn’t have to wait long. After identifying the Norman who served as supervisor, I followed his thoughts until he revealed what we sought. There were no empty cars on this train, so we climbed into one stacked with boxes, but with just enough room to fit us all.

  “We must be getting close to Moscow, based on the load,” Solomon said while we waited for the train to leave. “Only another day or two.”

  “I’m hungry,” Dorian said, not as a whine but as a statement of fact, punctuated by a growl from his stomach. We’d eaten all of the food we’d brought, and we were all starving, even the vampires. The mages couldn’t feed them because their own energies were sapped.

  Sheree sniffed the air. Vanessa cocked her head and sniffed, too, then nodded.

  “Food two cars up,” Sheree said. “Doesn’t smell like American food, but it’s edible.”

  Tristan edged the door open and peeked out, looked both ways, and then over his shoulder at us. “Back in a minute.”

  A few minutes later—during which I couldn’t breathe out of fear he’d be caught—he returned with his arms full of canned goods. Owen and Charlotte used magic to open what we discovered to be some of the nastiest meat I’d ever tasted. The picture on the cans made them look like Vienna sausages, but they tasted like—

  “These taste like ass.” Dorian made a face as he chewed the rubbery pieces.

  “And smell like farts,” Owen added, and I couldn’t argue.

  The gross factor was so high, it made it difficult to swallow even the bare minimum to supply us with energy. After the train had been moving for several minutes, Tristan cracked the door open and threw all the cans outside. We drained the last of the bottled water we had brought, trying to wash the taste out of our mouths.

  “Doesn’t Moscow have McDonald’s?” Dorian asked.

  “They do,” Owen said, “and we’re definitely making a stop.”

  “If it’s safe,” Tristan warned.

  “We’ll make it safe,” Owen said. “Ever fought a starving bear? That’ll be Dorian and me by the time we get there.”

  We talked about all the food we wanted to eat when we finally reached familiar choices, making ourselves even hungrier, but also distracting our minds from the long, uncomfortable trip. The distraction only lasted for so long, though. As each hour and then each day passed, we grew hungrier, thirstier, and grumpier. And I grew more pissed off at the Normans for their stupid traps and their refusal to trust us. We could have been fighting off the Daemoni by now, protecting their human butts, instead of taking all of this time just to travel halfway across Russia. Of course, the Daemoni put us in the middle of nowhere to start with, but I expected them to be conniving assholes. Not the Normans. By the time we reached Moscow an entire week since leaving the Amadis Island, I half-wondered why we should even fight for the Normans who’d been so easily swayed by evil.

  When we reached the outskirts of the city, though, I knew we had no choice. Somebody had to.

  “What’s that smell?” Dorian asked, gagging worse than he had with the ass-meat. He covered his nose and mouth with his hand, trying to hold back vomit. I couldn’t blame him. The horrific stench made my own stomach lurch, raising bile into the back of my throat.

  “That, child, is the smell of rotting human flesh,” Solomon answered.

  Chapter 11

  When the train began to slow, we stood and gathered around the door, waiting for a moment to bail before we pulled into what we expected to be a large and crowded train station. Tristan held the door open just enough for us to watch the land pass through a small crack. We’d barely rolled into the suburbs when the metal wheels ground against the tracks, slowing the train to a screeching halt.

  “Why did we stop?” Dorian asked. “We’re not at a station.”

  Tristan shook his head. “Can you tell what’s going on, Alexis?”

  I searched for mind signatures, and only found one adult Norman. “A guy’s disconnecting part of the train two cars down.”

  A few seconds later, as I continued searching the area, a man in white protective gear ran toward our car, and we all jerked back, out of sight. He continued on past us.

  “Something’s wrong,” Sheree murmured.

  “As long as they don’t suspect us, I’m sure it’s fine,” Char said.

  “Was he really wearing a hazmat suit?” Blossom asked. I thought he had been, too.

  “Maybe something toxic’s in one of the cars,” Jax suggested.

  “There’s definitely something wrong,” I said, frowning as I searched the other mind signatures that had been with us all along, but for some reason I hadn’t really thought about. Probably because their thoughts weren’t clear, but jumbled. Incoherent. But not because they were drunk.

  Before I could speak up about them, we began moving again. Back the way we’d come.

  “What the hell?” Tristan muttered.

  “We’re leaving?” Sheree asked.

  “There are two cars full of young children back there,” I blurted, perplexed and now slightly panicked. Were those really child mind signatures? Like nearly infants? They sure felt like it, but I couldn’t find a single adult around, except for the engineer . . . who seemed to be abandoning them. Why? And why did we already head back when we’d never reached the destination?

  “Well, we’re not going back east. Better jump while we can,” Vanessa said.

  Tristan nodded his agreement and threw the door open. The train picked up speed quickly, so we all sprang without another thought and landed on a grassy embankment. I ran down the hill for the cars of babies. At least they sat in passenger cars and hadn’t been piled into cargo boxes. And when I arrived, I saw they weren’t babies. Children, yes, but not infants. Their mind signatures had confused me.

  “What’s wrong with them?” Dorian asked as the others caught up to me outside one of the parked cars full of children.

  Several faces looked out at us, many tear-stained. Why were they here alone? Why were we all being left here, several miles from the city limits and the train station? I searched outward, but found no mind signatures for miles. No, wait. A couple lingered here and there. But with the city landscape rising before us, there should have been hundreds of thousands in my reach. What happened to the people?

  “These kids are disabled,” Charlotte said, answering Dorian’s question, not mine. “Either mentally or physically.”

  The truth was evident in the disfigured faces and vacant eyes.

  “That’s why they were abandoned?”
I demanded, anger rising.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” Tristan said.

  He pushed open a door and entered the car, then spoke to the kids in Russian. A minute later, he came down, closing the door behind him.

  “Son of a bitch,” he growled as he kicked at a rock before returning to us. “Only one kid in there’s capable of speaking and has a basic understanding of what’s going on. They were sent away from their parents when the monsters attacked. The engineer told them their parents would come find them when it was safe. To sit here and wait.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s common in wartime for parents to send their children to safety. It happened a lot in World War II,” Charlotte said.

  “But didn’t they send them out of the cities?” Blossom asked. “To relatives in the country, where it was safer?”

  “Usually,” Char confirmed.

  My anger began to boil. “So why the hell are these children—more defenseless than anyone—sent to the biggest city in Russia, by themselves, where there are probably more monsters than anywhere? And then abandoned?”

  “Was there something wrong with the train?” Tristan asked me. “Is that why he uncoupled these cars?”

  I threw my hands up. “I don’t know. The guy didn’t think anything about it. And apparently not, since he took off with the rest of it. Can you even do that with trains?”

  “If there are engines at both ends, yeah,” Owen said.

  “Which means there’s an engine at the other end,” I said.

  Tristan glanced at me and nodded. “We can at least get these kids to the station.”

  We ran down the length of a dozen cars to the engine. Tristan and Owen managed to fire it up, and the rest of us jumped into the car right behind it. It was stocked full of medical supplies. Why would the engineer leave this stuff out in the middle of nowhere, too? Surely somebody with a high-dollar contract on the delivery waited for these supplies. The situation grew more and more bizarre. More and more disconcerting.

  We stood at the door, watching the landscape go by as it became more urban. We began to slow and missed the platform by a good thirty yards by the time we stopped, but at least we’d brought the kids this far. A small crowd of people wearing dingy clothes, many ripped and raggedy, poured through the station’s doors, pushing each other out of the way as they swarmed toward the train.

  “Must be their parents,” Tristan said as he and Owen ran up to us. “Let’s get out of here before someone recognizes us.”

  We jumped from the car and hurried down the tracks, away from the station and the crowd.

  “Why would you bring them here?” A man with a thick Russian accent yelled from the roof of a building on the far side of the dozens of tracks. His voice sounded a lot like Solomon’s old buddy Evgeny, and his mind signature confirmed it. Bullets started hitting the ground at our feet, spraying gravel at our legs and erasing any doubt. We took off in a sprint. “Yeah, you run, you sick fucks!”

  We dashed across several lines of tracks and then up the hill that led away from the station and into the city. As we crested the embankment, I glanced over my shoulder to make sure the children were okay. Something felt off with the crowd, but I couldn’t figure it out. Well, besides the facts that bruises and cuts covered many of them and dry blood stained their clothes and crusted on their skin. They must have been through hell and back with the Daemoni attacks.

  Tristan and Dorian tugged at my hands, and I ran off with them, out of the train depot, down the street, and into the heart of a bad section of the city. Graffiti covered the dingy gray buildings. Homeless people loitered everywhere on the sidewalks—leaning against grime-covered buildings, sleeping half on the curbs and half in the gutters, wandering aimlessly with slow, bored gaits. The putrid sweet-and-sour smell of death, urine, and feces hung in the air, stronger here than it’d been before.

  “I think we should go back to the train station,” Blossom said, anxiety filling her tone. She held the collar of her shirt over her nose and mouth. “Find another train headed out the way we want to go.”

  Jax snorted. “You mean, where the bloody hunter is?”

  “I have a guy here who can get us out on a plane,” Tristan said. “He’s on the other side of the city, though.”

  He began moving quickly down the sidewalk, and we followed closely behind, keeping our group tight. Tristan and his guys—he had them all over the world, able to serve in all sorts of not-quite-legal ways, from creating false identifications to stowing us away on trains and planes.

  “Something’s seriously wrong here,” Vanessa said, her silver-coated brass knuckles already on her fists as her eyes darted around. How many times would we say it before we really believed it? “These aren’t people. They don’t smell right.”

  I grabbed the hilt of my dagger on my hip and thumbed the amethyst to make it appear as we passed a homeless woman who sat listlessly against the building, her head lolled to the side. Her skin shone a sickly greenish-gray, making her look dead. A newborn vampire in transition? Sheree’s claws came out, and so did everyone’s fangs. Then the bag lady’s eyes opened, blood seeping out of them and her ears. Her pupils were cloudy, as though she had the worst case of cataracts I’d ever seen. Her mouth dropped open, and then she snapped it closed. Broken bits of teeth fell through her lips.

  “She smells dead,” Solomon said even as the woman slowly pushed herself to her feet and snapped her jaw again.

  Another body that had been lying by the curb began to move, looking up at us. Blood leaked from his cloudy eyes, too. All the other homeless became more animated. All of them turned toward us, all with blood leaking from their orifices.

  “Ebola?” Char asked, and she twisted her fingers in the air. Something invisible clamped against my face, like a mask. “Don’t touch any of them. Tristan, we need to get out of here. Fast.”

  Her voice sounded muffled, and although I couldn’t see them, she must have put masks on all of us.

  “They sure want to touch us,” Blossom squealed as one moved closer to her and lifted its arm up, reaching for her face.

  Panic overcame me as realization hit.

  “They don’t have mind signatures,” I whispered. “Neither did the crowd at the station.”

  “None?” Solomon asked, narrowing his eyes at me.

  I shook my head. “I didn’t sense them when the train stopped the first time, and I don’t sense them now.”

  My heart picked up speed at the thought of what this could possibly mean.

  Vanessa let out a list of profanities. “We gotta get the fuck out of here!”

  “Run!” I shoved on Tristan’s back while grabbing Dorian’s hand. We sprinted down the block, jumping over motionless bodies, snaking around standing ones, all of them seemingly asleep, or even dead, but coming to consciousness as we passed. We rounded a corner to find a large crowd two blocks down.

  Someone yelled something in Russian, a man’s voice coming from our right—one of the few mind signatures I’d picked up on earlier. Not the hunter, thank the Angels. Tristan stopped in his tracks, and the rest of us plowed into him.

  “He said they’re all sick down there,” Tristan said. The man, sitting at a second story window over the shop next to us, continued talking, his voice rising with panic. “He says we need to get out of the streets. Everyone’s sick. This entire part of the city came ill within days, and it’s been quarantined. No, wait. He says . . .” He paused and looked back at me with his brow furrowed. “He says they’re dead, not just sick.”

  My heart went from racing to a full stop. My eyes felt like they’d popped out of my face. That explained the lack of mind signatures. “Zombies, Tristan? He’s saying they’re freaking zombies?”

  “The psychopath actually did it,” Vanessa muttered under her breath, but I was still stuck on what Tristan said to ask what she meant.

  “You said there was no such thing as zombies!” I accused my husband. I’d actually asked him o
nce.

  “I said there’s no such thing unless the Daemoni decide to create them,” he corrected.

  “And Lucas did it.” Vanessa’s voice filled with a mixture of disbelief and . . . awe? I spun around to stare at her. “He’d had mages working on special strains of super-contagious viruses, like Ebola, adding necromancy magic to the mix. I never thought he’d use it. Looks like he actually released something here, though.”

  The man in the window said something.

  “He says it started down there,” Solomon said, and our eyes followed to where the man pointed, toward the crowd. Beyond them rose a large, non-descript gray building. “Russia’s equivalent of the CDC.”

  We didn’t have time to figure out what this meant. As though it possessed a hive mind, the crowd down the street began moving toward us all at once. The ones we’d passed moments ago came around the corner, joined by many more. And once these zombies, or whatever they were, got moving, they didn’t lurch along, slow and klutzy. They moved nimbly—and with speed.

  “The children,” I shrieked. “We left them!”

  “Flash,” Charlotte said, and I thought for the first time ever, I heard panic in her voice. “We have to flash out of here.”

  “We’ll get trapped, though!” Blossom screeched.

  The zombies charged at us from all directions, their stinking, rotting flesh right in our faces now. My stomach heaved, and my heart flew into a gallop at the same time. We were already trapped, I thought as I slammed my dagger into one’s skull, and the body dropped, only to be replaced by another animated corpse. My blade slid into this one’s eye socket, but again, when it fell, another began climbing on top of it to get to me. Their breaths smelled of days-old death. Air rattled in their rotting throats and lungs. I sliced and jabbed, killing them once and for all, but too many had amassed for us to keep up with. We twisted and waved our hands, and several flew away, but there were always more sprinting down the roads at us. Tristan’s paralysis power didn’t work on them, and the mages’ spells had no effect, either. The dark necromancy magic made them immune.