Darkbound (23 page)

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The next
car looked like the first one
had, the original car that had started all this.  Modern.  Glass and
aluminum.  Graffiti and ads.  A car that belonged not to nightmare
but to reality – if reality had any meaning left to them.

To Jim was almost
depressing in a way, as though the train was telling them that no matter how
far along they got, they would always end up back where they started.

Adolfa looked
around the car as though afraid it might disappear from around them.  She
muttered something under her breath.

"What was
that?" Jim asked.  He didn't really care what it was.  He said
it for something to say, for a way to blank out the terrible sound of Olik's
screams, and the worse sound of his daughters' shrieking.

"Spanish,"
said Adolfa.  "Something that means, 'Last to first, first to
last.'"

"Sounds like
something out of the Bible."

"It is."

She crossed herself
and stepped forward, pulling Jim along with her.  But only a step or
two.  Then she started to cough.  The cough doubled her over, a
chopping, grating hack that sounded wet and slimy, the cough of someone well
into serious illness.

Jim put out a
steadying hand.  "You okay?"

Adolfa nodded, but
didn't stop coughing.  She kept hacking, and though Jim couldn't see her
face, the sliver of her profile that he
could
see turned deep red.

Finally the coughs
seemed to dissipate.  Adolfa gripped his arm as though the attack had
stolen her strength, as though she might keel over.  Then she pushed
herself fully upright.  She was panting.

"You sure
you're all right?"

She nodded, gulped,
nodded again.  "Maybe I will sit down for a moment," she said.

Jim led her to one
of the plastic seats that jutted like shiny tumors out of the walls of the
subway car.

"At least the
lights are on again," he said.

Adolfa nodded and
smiled.  But the smile crumpled in on itself as another coughing fit
seized her halfway to the seat.  This one was worse than the first.

After all that had
gone before, Jim half expected her head to explode, or some alien parasite to
crawl out of her eyes.  But she just coughed.  It was mundane, almost
banal considering all that they had been through.

Just a cough.

And this is how the
world ends, he thought insanely.  Not with a bang, but with a cough.

Jim looked out the
windows.  The subway seemed to be traveling faster than ever, the lights
rocketing by at eye-scorching speeds, so fast that they were streaks in the
otherwise pure darkness of the tunnel.  He wondered what he might see if
the train were to slow down enough to allow them a view of their surroundings.

He wondered if he
wanted
to see.

For a moment a part
of his mind knew.  A part of him understood what was happening.  And
it screamed deep within him, in a hidden part that kept his darkest moments,
his blackest memories.  The place that remembered the things that
frightened him most, that had made him who he was and had motivated him to seek
out people like Carolyn and Maddie, good people who would keep him safe from
the evils that seemed to rear themselves at every turn in a wicked world.

Then the knowledge
was gone.  Gone like the lights that streaked past, dazzling and blinding
but too fast to track, too quick to comprehend.

"You all
right,
mi hijo
?"

Jim blinked. 
He was staring at the darkness beyond the window glass.  How long had he
been lost in thought, in almost-comprehension?  He didn't know.  He
looked at Adolfa.  She was still red, still panting, so it couldn't have
been too long.

He forced a
smile.  "Isn't that my line?"  He sat next to her and put
an arm around her shoulder.  "Are
you
okay?"

Adolfa tried to
smile.  No cough this time but the smile still died before it was properly
born.  She shrugged.  "Not sure I'll ever be okay
again."  Her body shivered, a shudder so severe it was nearly a
convulsion.  "What happened to Olik…."

Jim nodded. 
He squeezed Adolfa's shoulder.  "I know."

"Will that
happen to us?"

"I don't
know."  How could he know?  How could any of them know what was
going to happen next, if none of them knew what was going on around them?

Sorta like life
.

Jim frowned. 
He didn't like that train of thought.  Life was a good thing.  It
meant
something.  There was more to it than just pain and fear.  So he
wasn't going to fall into a pit of cynicism and permanent angst just because of
what was happening right now.

What about
because of what happened
before
? 
What happened to
her
?  To
all of them
?

No.  No.  NO!

"Jim?  Jim?!"

Again he
blinked.  Again he didn't know how long his mind had been away.  Lost
in thought and in a burgeoning madness that crept ever closer, ever
closer.  The subway seemed to be dragging him to it.  Last Stop:
Insanity
.

"We have to
get off this thing," he said.

"I'd love
that," said Adolfa.  "Any ideas?"

He looked
around.  The car presented nothing new.  Seats.  Poles. 
Ads.

A map.

He got up.  He
went to it.

Like the map that
they had seen in the earlier car, this one bore only the barest resemblance to
a typical New York subway route map.  The colors, the symbols – even the
lettering itself – were all wrong.

But there was one
thing he understood.  A black "X" that all the routes now seemed
to run to.  And above it: "
LAST STOP
."  His thought
of a moment ago seemed suddenly prescient.

Last Stop:
Insanity.

He shivered, then
forced his mind away from that idea.  There had to be an answer here.

Below the words
"
LAST STOP
" there were other letters in languages he didn't
understand.  But though he didn't understand them, he got a definite chill
looking at them.  A sense of finality.

No, not just
finality.  Oblivion.  Like the stop meant not merely an end to the
train's forward motion, but to
everything
.  As though eternity
itself would end in the moment the subway car pulled into that station.

And next to the
"X," next to the "
LAST STOP
" marker… a dot.

It was moving.

"Is that
us?" said Adolfa.  She had gotten up and now stood beside him. 
And Jim could tell from the breathy quality of her voice that she, too, felt
his fear, felt the terror that he felt.  The sense that whatever happened
when the train reached its final destination would make everything that had
happened before seem like a pleasant daydream in comparison.

The dot phased into
a position a tiny bit closer to the
LAST STOP
.

"Is that
us?" repeated the old woman.

"Yes,"
said Jim.  "I think it is."

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Adolfa let
a small scream escape, then
began running frantically around the subway car.  She pushed on the
windows, pulled at the door at the front of the car.  None of it
opened.  None of it offered a way out.

Jim didn't
move.  He just watched the dot, the dot that was them, moving ever closer
to the point that represented… what?

Again he
knew.  For a moment, an instant, he
knew
.  Then the moment was
past and again his mind was in darkness.

I'm coming
Carolyn.  I'm coming Maddie.  I promise.

He hoped it wasn't
a lie.

Adolfa coughed
again.  This time the coughing became a damp retching.  She bent over
and clutched at her stomach, and when she stood twin streams of blood ran from
her nostrils.

Jim went to
her.  "Hey, you're bleeding."  He pulled a handkerchief
from his pocket.  He dabbed at the blood but it wouldn't stop. 
"Sit down."  He guided the old lady to a seat.

"Damn,"
she whispered.  Her voice bubbled around the blood, making her sound like
she was drowning.

She looked at Jim,
and he recoiled.  "What?" she said.

He shook his
head.  He didn't know how to answer her.  Where only a moment before
she had seemed like a healthy older woman, suddenly her flesh was sagging,
changing.  The skin of her face seemed like it was no longer attached to
her skull, drooping strangely and giving her the appearance of someone who had
suffered a severe stroke.

"What?"
Adolfa said again.  "What ish it?"  Her voice was slurring,
and at the end of the question she unleashed another flurry of coughs.

Tic… tictictic…
tic….

Jim looked down
automatically, his eyes tracking the sound of something plinking against the
metal floor of the subway car.  He didn't see what had made the sound for
a moment, his eyes tracking wildly left and right and up and down without
spotting anything.  Then he saw them: splashes of red with white centers.

Blood.  Blood
and...
teeth
.

He looked back at
Adolfa.  Her face was still sagging, the skin loosening ever
further.  And now her baglike chin was covered in blood, both from her
still-sluicing nostrils and from the blood drooling thinly from her
mouth.  From the holes where many of her teeth had been.

As Jim watched,
Adolfa reached with shaking fingers into her mouth and plucked out a molar. 
Jim knew – he
knew,
dammit – that Adolfa had been possessed of a wide,
pleasant, white smile.  But the tooth that she pulled out was yellow and
rotted.  It was the tooth of someone who had been drinking cola for years
and hadn't ever bothered with brushing her teeth in the interim.

A fresh gout of
blood spurted over Adolfa's lips when she pulled the rotten tooth out of her
jaw.  She didn't seem to notice.  She laughed.  The laugh was
bereft of humor, the laugh that takes over when horror has reached such an
extreme that the only choices are to laugh or to allow oblivion to claim you.

"What'sh going
on?" she said.  The words still bubbled, and another tooth pushed its
way out of her mouth with the sound.  Her skin had sagged so far that her
eyes were almost invisible, displaced by the strange change in her facial
layout.  Her nasal bones poked through skin that Jim was fairly sure had
once covered Adolfa's forehead.  The effect was less gory than much of
what he had seen on the subway, but more sickening in a strange way.  As
though seeing a human pulled apart bit by bit was less offensive to nature than
merely watching it adjusted by a few inches.

Adolfa patted
herself.  Her dress, which before had fit her well, now hung
loosely.  Her breasts had become dangling sacks of flesh, low and
sickly.  Her thighs had become visibly thinner, and yet what flesh
remained of them was all fatty tissue.  She had no muscle tone left, like
a calf that had been raised in a too-small cage for the sole purpose of being
slaughtered for veal.

Adolfa started to
cry.  "Thish can't be happening to me," she said. 
"Not to me.  Not to
me
."

She sagged. 
Jim caught her.  His flesh crawled.  He liked Adolfa.  But in
that moment he wished that someone – anyone – else could have been there to
catch her.  What had happened to her was too unsettling, too grotesque.

"Adolfa?"
he said after a moment.

There was no
answer.

And Jim wondered if
he was the only one left in the subway.