Darkbound (22 page)

Jim felt the book
in his pocket.  The square outline that held so many dreams in its pages.

He turned.

There were three
ghouls, standing so close that they might as well be one devilish monster with
three heads.  All three were in various states of dissolution, though all
were recognizable as once having been girls in their teens.  The rags of
once-cute clothes hung from their bony frames, t-shirts with fun logos draping
sunken breasts, skirts with pleats and ragged frills hanging below hip bones
that poked visibly through the girls' flesh.

One of the girls
was taller than the others.  She could have been a real beauty when alive,
with long legs and the kind of slim body structure that graced modeling
magazines the world over.  Her legs were planted wide, swaying slightly as
the subway continued on its trip to wherever it was going.

Jim looked at her
face.  One cheek was torn away, the flap hanging against her lower
jaw.  Her eyes stared sightlessly over him.  She wore makeup, a
garish amount that made him think of the girls who walked on certain street
corners in the less-reputable parts of the city.  The makeup was almost
the worst thing about her.

Jim felt Adolfa's
hand on his shoulder, still pushing.  He knelt.  Went to hands and
knees.  He didn't know if he could do this.  Didn't know if it was
possible physically
or
mentally.

But I'm going to
try
.

He edged forward,
the metal floor cool under his palms.

The ghoul's feet
came closer.  More than shoulder length apart, they were clad in what must
once have been bright yellow high heeled shoes.  Something that would
attract attention, certainly, in much the same way that her makeup would have
attracted attention.

Jim suddenly
thought of his mother.  She had hated girls like this.  Hated them so
much.

(
but she doesn't
hate anything now.  now she's at peace, at peace....
)

The subway rocked
for a moment, as though hitting a large seam on the tracks.  The ghoul sidestepped. 
The left foot almost collided with Jim.  He managed to roll with the
motion, though.  Then held himself still, so still that not even a breath
escaped him.  He could hear Adolfa and Olik, too, both of them inhaling as
though to hold their breath in concert with him.

He resumed pushing
forward.  No longer room to crawl.  Crawling would inevitably knock
him into the legs that now straddled him.  All he could do was sort of
worm
his way forward.  It took forever.  The train rolled and hummed beneath
him.

Where the hell
are we going?

Then he was
through.

He stood. 
Almost as dangerous as the crawl had been, since there were more dead things on
the other side of the ghoul, so close that if he stood wrong he would bump them
and trigger what he feared would be a chain reaction, a feeding frenzy.

Then he was
standing.  Safe.

Flash,
dark.  Flash, dark.

He caught Adolfa's
eye.  She nodded.  Her face was pale, she looked like she was going
to be sick.  Jim hoped she could hold back her nausea: he didn't know how
the zombies would react to someone vomiting, but he doubted it would be pretty.

Adolfa sunk down
out of sight.  Jim couldn't do anything but move out of the way.  He
couldn't even lean over to give her a hand.  There wasn't enough room for
that.

But Adolfa proved
far more agile than her years would seem to allow.  She was through the
zombie's parted legs and standing beside Jim in less time than it had seemed to
take him to traverse the same distance.

Olik was all that
remained.

The big man took
his place.  Jim hoped that there would even be enough room for the huge
Georgian to get between the zombie's legs.

Olik sunk out of
sight.

And as he did, the
zombies – all of them, every single one in the car – sighed.  And as had
happened before, it was as though one single entity was expressing itself
through fifty mouths.

And it sounded
hungry.

================

================

Flash, dark
.
Flash, dark
.

Jim blinked, his
body trying to turn away the assault of light and dark.  But it couldn't
do it.  There was no way to refuse it, no way to resist it.  The
darkness was too harsh, the light too sudden.  The contrast was
destructive, and he knew that unless he got out of this car soon he was going
to lose his mind.

Adolfa pressed into
him.  Lost as he was in the strobe patterns of black and white, Jim almost
didn't understand what was happening for a moment.  Then he realized: Olik
must be coming through.

Through? 
Through what?  Through
when
? 
Through
where
?

The world seemed to
gyre and whirl, to dance drunkenly.

Only it's not
the world, is it?  Not really.  Because then the world would be
nothing but the subway.  Nothing but this car, nothing but this metal
death
.

Adolfa's hand
closed on his. 
"Steady,
mi hijo
."

Mi hijo. 
My
son.

Jim clung to the
words and to the endearment beneath them.  Clung to them as much as – more
than – he clung to her hand.  The world steadied.

Flash,
dark.  Flash, dark
.

Olik stood.

"We go,"
he said.  And now he was the one who took point.  Jim didn't like
that.  He wanted to go first.  He felt too alone, too exposed at the
end of the human train that was being led through the car.

What if he
leaves you?  Leaves Adolfa?  Leaves you both to the wolves?

The voice that came
to Jim's mind wasn't exactly his.  It sounded like his voice, but it spoke
to him as though it was someone else, like a long-lost twin who had traveled
through time and space to find him in this instant, to warn him of the danger that
Olik represented.

He's a
sex-trader.  He's a slaver.  He's used you before and he'll do it
again
.

The big man stepped
gingerly between two half-dressed girls, dead girls with dead eyes and teeth
that were startlingly white in the light/dark of the subway car.  He
pulled Adolfa with him.  The two zombie girls didn't notice either of
them.  They stared into nothing, into dreams of their demise, perhaps, or
the blank nothings of their futures.

Flash,
dark.  Flash, dark
.

Jim stepped between
the dead girls.  One of them was wearing the decrepit remains of a
cheerleader's outfit.  The other wore jeans and a tank top.  Both
stood slump-shouldered, and he somehow knew that their posture had nothing to
do with their state of decomposition.  It was something that had been done
to them in life.  It was the
reason
for their death.

Flash,
dark.  Flash, dark
.

The front of the
car was only a few feet away.  Within reach.  Within hope.

Hope was the
worst.  Jim knew that hope was the thing that allowed fear to
thrive.  Without hope there was nothing for fear to feed on.  But
when hope bloomed, that meant that there was once again something to
lose.  Something to be terrified of living without.

Hope came. 
Came like the bright flash of the lamps all around the ancient subway car. 
And on its heels, the dark bite of terror.

"Go, go,
vámonos,
vámonos
," said Adolfa.  Her voice, whispered in half-dark,
half-light, was so intense that Jim knew without having to look at her face
that she was feeling the same dread, the same creeping horror that this was it,
the last moment they had before all was extinguished, before the lights went
out for the last time.

Something was
happening behind them.  A rustle as the zombies began to move.

"Don't
look," said Jim.  "Don't look back."

Adolfa jerked, her
head moving as though she
was
going to look, then stopping and forcing
herself forward, onward.

The door was
close.  Would it be open?  Unlocked?

Whatever was
happening behind them grew more strident.  Insistent.  It demanded
attention.

There were three
zombies between Jim, Olik, and Adolfa... and the door out of the car. 
They stared in different directions, dead to the world.  Jim saw Olik
eyeing them, obviously determining the best way to thread his way between them
without touching them, without drawing the attention of the dead girls. 
Like the rest of the creatures, they were dressed brightly, almost
gaudily.  Like the rest of the creatures, their dead eyes gazed at
nothing, peered into a void of lost dreams and horrific memories that Jim hoped
he would never understand.

Olik stopped
suddenly.  He stared at one of the ghouls.  She was dressed skimpily,
a pair of short shorts that showed off thighs whose flesh was peeling away in
mottled chunks and a tight tank top that revealed far more than it hid. 
The kind of thing that Jim hoped Maddie would
never
wear.

If he was even
around to
have
that argument with her.

Olik remained
riveted to the zombie.  He bore a strange expression on his face, one that
Jim couldn't place.  Then he could place it, but didn't understand it: it
was...
familiarity
.

The sounds behind
them grew louder.  Hisses.  Thuds.  Jim didn't look back. 
Didn't
have
to look back to know that the zombies were attacking one
another again.  He didn't know why they would be doing that, what would
motivate them to tear into one another, but that was what had to be happening.

The three ghouls –
including the one that Olik seemed to be transfixed by – suddenly shifted their
sightless gaze, latching their eyes onto whatever was happening in the back of
the car.

Flash,
dark.  Flash, dark
.

Jim worried that
the zombies would see him and Olik and Adolfa – would really
see
them.  But the three girl-things didn't notice them.  They shambled
toward the back of the car, and Jim and his companions simply stepped aside and
let them move past.

The way to the door
was clear.

"Home
free," said Jim.  He looked at Adolfa.  Smiled.  She smiled
back.

They moved to the
door in two quick steps.

Flash,
dark.  Flash, dark
.

The disturbance
behind them got louder.  Louder.

Jim reached for the
door to the car.

Something was
shrieking.

Jim's fingers
stopped moving, halting as though they had run into an invisible force field.

Flash,
dark.  Flash, dark
.

The shrieking
wasn't the inhuman sound of the ghouls.  It wasn't any of the inhuman
noises they had heard on this longest of trips to nowhere.

It was Olik.

================

================

The big
man's screams were so raw and
ragged that Jim fully expected to turn around and find that Olik had fallen
prey to one of the zombies, or that he had been pulled apart like Freddy the
Perv had.

But nothing had
touched Olik.  Nothing at all.

He was standing
there in the light/dark/light/dark, screaming and screaming and screaming, and
nothing
had touched him.
 He was alone.

The big man was
staring behind them.  Looking back into the car.

Jim followed his
gaze.  He saw the disturbance.  The zombies in the car had all
converged on something.  Jim couldn't see what it was for a moment,
because the things were packed so tightly that not a single photon could have
squeezed between them.  There was no way to see what they were huddled
around.

Then the zombies
parted.  They stood as if to accommodate Jim's unspoken need to see what
was hiding in their midst.  They turned, and he thought they were looking
at him, then realized they were staring at Olik.

Olik was still
screaming.

Jim didn't
scream.  But he felt his throat suddenly grow parched, as though he had
tried to swallow a handful of sand.

There were two
girls in the midst of the zombies.  Not dead.  Alive.  Alive,
and bright, and terrified.  They looked young, perhaps only thirteen or
fourteen.  Young and horror-stricken as they huddled in the center of the
living corpses that encircled them. 

Olik was still shrieking,
but the wordless scream had morphed to something else: "Nina! 
Sanatha!"

The two girls in
the middle of the circle looked up.  They screamed back at him. 
Fingers reaching for the big man.

Jim felt something
tugging at him.  It was Adolfa, pulling him back toward the front
door.  He didn't move.  He felt like he had been fastened to the
floor, nailed to the spot.  He had to watch what was happening.  To
bear witness.

Olik reached out to
the two girls.  "Nina!"  He stepped toward them, but immediately
several of the ghouls moved to intercept him.  Jim expected that they
would attack him, but they didn't.  The zombies just stood between him and
the two girls at the center of the car, staring at the big man with eyes that
saw nothing of the pain on his face.

The other zombies
had watched his approach.  Now they turned back to the two girls. 
The girls were similar in size, but one was blonde and one brunette.  They
had the same eyes, though.  Sisters, Jim guessed.  They looked familiar
somehow.

They looked, he
realized, like beautiful, unhardened versions of Olik.

The zombies
surrounded the girls.  Sighing in that singular voice, that one voice that
came from many throats.  And this time it didn't just moan, it
spoke.  "
Huuuunngryyyyy
."

The girls
screamed.  Held each other.

One of the ghouls
reached out.  Touched the girl with the dark hair.

"Nina!"
Olik shouted.

Flash,
dark.  Flash, dark
.

Nina
screamed.  Screamed louder when the zombie's touch turned into a
pinch.  Not like it was trying to rip the flesh from her bones, but like
it was...
sampling
her.  Seeing how tender she was, checking the
quality of her body.

And now from the
churning mass of monsters, another hand reached out.  It touched the other
girl.  Sanatha.  She shouted as well, a high-pitched shriek that was
as much surprise as horror.  She looked at Olik and babbled something in a
foreign tongue.

Jim looked at
Olik.  The big man reached out, still blocked by the ghouls.  He was
crying.

A claw-like hand
swiped at Sanatha.  Raked a bloody furrow in her leg.  She screamed
and fell.  Olik screamed as well.  He seemed to go insane, trying to
break through the wall of zombies between him and the girls.  But they
held him back effortlessly.  He collapsed, weeping, and they hauled him to
his feet.  Pulled his hair back so he had to watch.

Nina and Sanatha
were yanked, pulled.  Clawed, bitten.  Soon they were bleeding from
dozens of wounds, their clothing in tatters.

Jim saw Olik pull
away.  Saw him clench his face, trying to shut out the vision that he saw
in the flashing light/dark of the car.

One of the ghouls
that held Olik reached out – almost delicately – and pulled his eyelids
off.  The girl-thing flicked the bits of skin away as Olik screamed, blood
running around his eye sockets, but he could no longer blink, could no longer
look away from the vision of the girls being pulled to pieces in front of him.

One of the ghouls
pushed through the circle.  Most of the things were girls.  Most of
them.  This one, though, wasn't.  It was male, and that fact was easy
to be seen.  It was nude, and visibly excited by what it saw as it moved
into the circle.

"No, no,
no no no!
" screamed Olik. 
"Not my babies!"

The ghouls paid him
no heed.  The ones forcing him to watch pulled him toward the circle that surrounded
the girls.  The ghouls in that circle were no longer clawing at them, they
were pulling at their clothes, exposing shivering flesh.

Jim knew what was
happening.  Knew but couldn't believe, couldn't accept.  Not
this.  Not this.

Olik was screaming.

"Not my
babies, not my babies, not my bab
ieeeeezzzzz!
"

Jim felt Adolfa's
hand on his arm.  Pulling him again.  He heard a click and knew that
she must have opened the door to the next car.

This car had taken
its victim.

Olik was still
screaming as Jim let himself be pulled away from the obscenity behind
him.  The stolid criminal was gone, replaced by a hysterical father who
saw his world disappearing, defiled and demeaned.  The screams of the
girls in the center of the circle matched that of the big man.  His voice
and theirs' mingled and matched in a horrific harmony that bled into
madness.  Then, in the moment of greatest savagery, the moment when the
worst was happening, the zombies gripping Olik took hold of his shoulders and
others took hold of his head and both sets of dead girls yanked.

There was a tearing
sound, a shearing rip that tore not just through the air but through Jim's
mind, pushing him close to madness as well.  Olik's head came away from
his shoulders.  Flesh and bone and blood sprayed and now Olik was in two
pieces, both held upright by the rotted hands that clutched his flesh.

But – impossibly –
the man still screamed.  Still screamed as his daughters screamed, as they
were savaged by things come for them from beyond the darkest reaches of
nightmare.

Adolfa's hand
pulled Jim's.  He let her.

He stepped with her
into the darkness of the next car.

Olik's scream
followed them.

And the subway
continued on.