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Zombies.
That
was the first
thought that came into Jim's head when he saw the shuffling mass of people in
the car that they had just exited.
The second thought
that popped into his head was, Where did they all come from?
Then he realized
that question was second to the issue that mattered most: survival.
They weren't
zombies. They couldn't be. But they were something bad.
Something monstrous and evil and deadly.
They were
young. Or
had
been young, before… whatever happened to them.
Most of them, he saw, were women. No, not women: girls, young
teens. Were they the figures he had seen clambering along the outside of
the train before? The ones he had glimpsed out of the corners of his
eyes? He didn't know how that could be possible. But then, what of
this day so far fell into the realm of possibility?
The girls – at
least fifty of them, with a few teen boys mixed among them as well – weren't
paying attention to Jim, or to any of the people in this car. They were
standing around something in the rear car, the one Jim and the others had just
come from. At first Jim couldn't see what the things were fixated on, but
then he realized: they were standing where Freddy the Perv had been.
Where he managed to both disintegrate and explode.
The girl-things
looked emaciated. Used. Dead in soul if not in body. Their
skin was scabbed and gray, diseased and lifeless. Their hair hung in
lusterless locks, their scalps easily visible in large areas where the hair had
thinned or fallen out completely.
Only their eyes
held something like life. They shone with a feral need, a hunger.
They focused on the circle of gore at the back of the rear subway car.
And when the things that had once been young girls had completely circled the
blood-spattered area that marked Freddy's demise, they all fell as one and
began lapping up the gore.
"Where they
come from?" said Olik in a whisper, still trying to pull the door shut.
"Dunno,
man," answered Xavier, panting. "I went through and looked back
and saw 'em, like, in the back of the car. Just there. Freaked the
shit outta me."
"And you not
come back for us?" said Olik.
"Tried.
Couldn't. It was a like a force field was in the way. All I could
get through was my arm."
Olik grunted as
though to say, "Interesting," but didn't spend any of his breath on
speech. Just bent his back to pulling the door. Jim thought about
trying to help, but couldn't see a place to squeeze in between the three people
already pulling at the car door. And part of him was too stupefied at
what he was watching to move. It was sickening. Fascinating.
And on a basic, primal level, somehow familiar.
How can it be familiar?
You've never seen this before. Never seen
anything
like this before.
But he couldn't
deny it. Like he was looking at a nightmare he had once had, a
half-remembered dream made suddenly flesh, Jim felt as though he had seen this
before. Or at least something like it.
Beyond the
still-open door, Jim saw two of the girls pick up opposite ends of one of the
shreds of Freddy's trench coat. They looked like they were maybe fourteen
years old. No older than sixteen. Young bodies, barely beginning to
change to womanhood. But their skin didn't contain the translucent beauty
of youth. It was gray and corrupt, flaking and disease-ridden. It
looked like the skin of corpses long-dead and even longer-forgotten. Open
sores festered on their cheeks, and Jim thought he could see things crawling in
the sores – maggots, or some other carrion-feeding insects.
The two girls
gripped the ends of the shred of Freddy's coat and began chewing it. Not
chewing
on
it, not like a dog with a rubber toy, but actually eating
it. Like a grotesque mockery of the famous spaghetti scene from
Lady
and the Tramp
, the two girls started chewing their way towards one another.
They reached the
center of the bloody rag/rope. When they came within an inch or two of
one another they seemed to recognize each other's existence for the first
time. Teeth still clamped around the gory cloth, they snarled.
Their eyes bulged, their jaws clenched.
Then they jumped at
one another. The girl on the left – a girl who might once have been a beautiful
young blonde girl but who was now a gaunt figure with mangy hair and thick
clusters of sores around her lips – immediately got the upper hand. She
coughed out the bit of Freddy's coat she hadn't consumed, and as soon as she
touched the other girl – a skeletal brunette with eyes sunken so deep in their
sockets they had almost disappeared – she clamped onto the other girl's face
with her teeth and began chewing.
The brunette
shrieked, but it was a wet, weak scream. And it terminated as, with a
triumphant shout, the blonde literally tore the brunette's face free from her
skull.
Jim gasped.
"Animals,"
whispered Olik. The huge man looked like he had just witnessed the
Apocalypse. "What could turn them into animals like this?"
The blonde girl who
had won the fight returned to slurping up the scattered patches of blood and
cloth that were all that remained of Freddy. Jim expected the other girl
to fall. The front of her head was literally nothing but a skull and
teeth, red and raw above a ragged blouse that was now stained by blood and bits
of skin. But she didn't fall, barely even seemed to notice her
wound. The brunette girl just crawled to a different spot in the
car. A blood-stained tongue snaked out from between her denuded teeth and
jaws, and she joined the rest of her sisters and brothers in licking the floor
clean.
Xavier didn't stop
trying to pull the dividing door shut, but he coughed suddenly. He
sounded like he was trying not to vomit.
The small horde of
ghoulish things in the last car didn't seem to notice. They were still
licking up Freddy's blood, still eating the last bits of his clothing.
What happens
when it's all gone?
Apparently the same
thought occurred to Karen. "I think we need to hurry, guys,"
she grunted.
"Yeah,"
said Xavier. He was pulling so hard that Jim thought his coat might split
right up his back. But the door wasn't closing. Like it didn't want
to close. Like it had a mind of its own and was actively resisting them.
And maybe that's
not too far off, Jim thought. Maybe this whole
train
has a mind of
its own.
Then he realized
that would mean that the vehicle was a monster… and they were in its
stomach. A long metallic digestive tract that perhaps they had only begun
to pass through. And that thought was every bit as disquieting as the
sight of the rotting girls and boys eating the remains of what had once been a
human being.
Another fight
erupted in the back car, this time between two girls and a boy. Like all
of the others, the figures looked like they had once been young, perhaps in
their early teens. But whatever force had brought them here and wasted
their features had also leached any youthful vigor from them. What
remained was only rot and hunger, a rabid need to feed cloaked in decomposition
and disease.
A lust for blood.
The three were
fighting over a bit of cloth. Each held it with a hand, each unwilling to
let go. Like the two girls before, the three jumped at each other, teeth
clicking as they snapped at one another's faces and throats. This time,
though, the fight spilled over into the rest of the company of ghouls.
Soon all were
embroiled, screaming, slashing out with fingernails that were cracked and
broken into sharp shards. Blood splashed, flesh flayed.
But Jim noted that
the blood that spilled from the things in the car was different from the blood
on the floor, from Freddy's blood. It was darker. Feculent.
Like it had stopped pumping long ago, and had simply lain and rotted in the
kids' already-dead veins.
Suddenly there was
a click, and the subway door released. "There!" Xavier
grunted. The door closed a few inches.
At the same time,
Olik said, "Damn." Jim looked and saw that the huge man had cut
himself on something when the door released. Red blood streamed down his
palm. Tiny tributaries branched off the main flow, racing one another to
the edge of his hand.
Olik, Xavier, and
Karen kept pulling at the door. It kept resisting.
One of the red
trails won the sprint to the lower edge of Olik's meaty palm. Blood
gathered there for a moment, curling into a tight crimson ball. Then the
ball loosed itself into the air, a single drop that plummeted to the metal of
the car floor.
The drop touched
the floor soundlessly. There was no tremor, no hint of any change in the
air that Jim could sense. But at the instant the blood touched the car,
the brawling ghouls in the car beyond the door instantly stilled. They
were all wounded by now, some of them so badly that Jim would have thought –
under ordinary circumstances – that they absolutely must lay down and wait to
die of their wounds. There were limbs lost, bowels that drooped in
looping coils behind some of them. But their injuries weren't stopping
them; weren't even slowing them down.
And now, as the
drop of Olik's blood on the floor was joined by another, and then another, the
zombies all turned their heads toward the slowly-closing door. They
seemed to notice for the first time that they were not alone.
"Close
door!" shouted Olik, and his face grew bright red with the strain.
"I'm trying,
man!" screamed Xavier.
Jim watched in
horror as the teen-things, faces and bodies raw and bloody and maimed, opened
their mouths as one. Their teeth, like their fingernails, were neglected
and half-rotten. They had become splintered shadows of themselves,
pointed shards that looked wickedly sharp.
They
screamed. The scream was like a single voice, a lone entity that spoke
through many mouths. A beast that knew nothing of pain or fear or love or
empathy. Only hunger. Only feeding.
The ghouls shuffle-ran
toward the door.
And Jim knew –
absolutely and certainly – that there was no way the door was going to be
closed in time.
The things – the
things that didn't notice when their faces were torn off, when their arms were
ripped from their bodies or when their guts yanked out – were going to get into
the car with Jim and his fellow travelers. And the things were clearly
very,
very
hungry.
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Jim felt
like the blood in his veins had
been replaced by quick-drying cement. He couldn't think, couldn't move,
couldn't so much as
breathe
. The sight of a horde of snarling,
shuffling, snapping things that might once have been high school-age kids
moving his way was almost too much for his mind to cope with.
He wondered for an
insane moment if he would have had the fight with Carolyn and Maddie if he had
known the day was going to turn out this way.
Thought of his
girls snapped him out of his stupor. He wanted to see them again.
To whisper sorry and I forgive you and I love you. To hold them and never
let them go.
He couldn't die
here. He couldn't.
Jim sprang
forward. He thought he might lend a hand pulling on the door. Might
add his strength and perhaps with his help the group could pull door shut and
secure it before the horde fell upon them. But that was foolish.
Only a moment before he hadn't moved to help because there hadn't been room,
and that hadn't changed. Xavier, Olik, and Karen were pulling, screaming
and shrieking with the effort. There was no room for Jim.
So what was he
going to do?
Karen let go.
She started to crawl away. Whimpering. And that was when Jim knew
what he
could
do. "No you don't!" he shouted. He
shoved her back into place.
"We're not
going to make it!" she shouted. She tried to pull away from him.
Jim didn't think
about anything but Carolyn and Maddie. Their faces hung before his eyes
for an instant, and the next thing he knew, he was reaching into Olik's
jacket. The big man grunted but couldn't stop pulling on the door, not
even when Jim pulled one of the man's guns free of his shoulder holster and
then ground it into the back of Karen's head. There was no time for them
to change places; it had to be her. Her or they were all dead.
"Pull, dammit!"
he screamed.
Karen shrieked in
fear. But she kept pulling. The door closed, inch by inch.
And the things beyond the door came toward them, foot by foot.
It was going to be
close.
Jim saw the blood
on the floor, the spots where Olik's cut had dripped. He thought of the
things fighting over the grotesque remains of Freddy. Then he moved
again, slamming his hand against the back of the nearest seat. He hit a
hard ridge of plastic. The seam slashed through the back of his hand, and
he felt a hot rush of pain as blood coursed from the cut.
He took three steps
back to Karen, Olik, and Xavier. "Duck!" he shouted to
Xavier. Xavier did, and Jim pushed his hand between the gap between door
and jamb. He flicked it, and droplets of dark blood flew into the rear
car. They disappeared from sight almost immediately, but out of sight was
not out of mind in this instance: the ghouls immediately lifted their noses
like starved prisoners of war who have just smelled a three-course meal.
They fell to their knees, snuffling and licking at every surface they could
find.
"Good,
good!" shouted Olik, returning to his position and continuing to
pull. The door was almost shut.
Then one of the
things, a ghoul that looked like it might once have been a redheaded girl of sixteen,
suddenly threw itself toward them.
It moved with more
speed and alacrity than the others. Whether that was because she had
gained strength from the feast of Freddy, or because of "natural"
prowess, or some other reason, Jim couldn't say. But she was ten feet
away one moment, and in the next, Olik was screaming.
The scream was
surprising, both in its suddenness and because it turned the man's voice from a
deep bass to a high soprano. It might have been comical in other
circumstances. Not here, though. Not now.
The redhead grabbed
Olik's hand, the one that was still on the outside of the subway door, and
began chewing it. Like Freddy's coat, Jim could tell there was no intent
to simply bite it for effect: the thing was resolutely attempting to eat Olik's
flesh, to swallow it whole.
Olik's scream rose,
rose, rose. He fumbled with his other hand, reaching in his coat.
Not finding what he wanted.
Xavier stood,
pulled out his knife. He reached around the door. Slammed the knife
through the redheaded girl's eye. The eye seemed to pop, gray jelly and
too-dark blood splatting down her cheek. Xavier grunted and pushed, and
all six inches of the blade disappeared into the girl's head. Deep into
her brain.
It didn't seem to
bother her in the slightest. She grunted. Bared her teeth, which
were clamped around Olik's three smallest fingers and part of his wrist.
And she kept
chewing.
Olik drew
breath. Screamed again. Another scream joined his. It was
Karen, shrieking but not letting go of the door, still pulling it shut.
The rest of the
things in the rear car started to stand. Apparently they had licked Jim's
blood clean. They moved toward Olik, who was spurting the precious fluid
now, his blood coating the floor between the cars.
Olik was still fumbling
in his coat, and finally managed to get at what he had been trying for.
He pulled out his second gun and unloaded a flurry of shots at the redheaded
ghoul. She jerked and shuddered as each slug entered her. Even in
his distress Olik aimed precisely, placing the rounds in the ghoul's head and
face. And Jim realized that the bullets must have been some kind of soft-
or hollow-points, because each one seemed to take off half a pound of flesh as
it passed through the ghoul's head. By the time Olik emptied his magazine
it was nothing but jaws and hanging shards of skull and flesh.
But the thing kept
chewing. Gnawing.
Eating
.
Xavier looked at
the rest of the things heading at them and returned to pulling at the
door. He looked at Jim. "Shoot him," he said.
"What?"
Jim said. Shook Olik? He felt numb. Overloaded again.
"Shoot him,
man!" screamed the gangster. "Shoot him and buy us some
time."
"No!"
shouted Olik.
Karen pulled at the
door. Screaming wordlessly. Her eyes seemed blank, like she had
checked out mentally.
"Don't do
it," shouted Olik, and put another shot through the shredded nub of bone
and teeth that were all that remained of the ghoul outside the car door.
He almost sobbed. "It won't let go."
"Shoot
him!" shouted Xavier.
For a second, Jim
couldn't figure out why Xavier was telling him to shoot Olik. He had
almost forgotten that he was holding Olik's other gun. Then he looked
down. At the gun. At Olik. At the horde. They were
almost there.
"Don't,"
whispered Olik. "I fix this." He dropped his gun.
Empty. He held out his hand to Jim. "I fix this."
"Shoot
him!" screamed Xavier.
Jim thought of
Carolyn. Maddie. He only had a moment.