After the End (2 page)

Before she looked away, she noted the rest of his attire, camouflage pants and shirt with the sleeves rolled up, heavy lace-up boots, dog tags hanging against his chest. Was he expecting a battle right here in the city, or did the army make these guys wear the uniform even when they were off duty? He was probably young and foolish enough to be proud of the fascist military look.

 Her gaze slid back to the serene-faced Buddha on the page of her book and she wished she'd remembered her Zen beliefs last night. She'd gone to meet Doyle at his place fully expecting to present the situation calmly and receive an equally peaceful agreement from her boyfriend.
Ex now
, she reminded herself. The man rarely got upset even when he was under a lot of pressure at the hospital where he worked, which from all accounts had been a madhouse recently due to the A7 virus. He was always reasonable. They rarely argued and when they did, their disagreements weren't heated. In fact, even as she'd told Doyle she thought they should break up, for a moment Lila couldn't remember why she was doing it. He really was so easy to get along with.

Then things had taken a strange turn. Even-tempered Doyle had lost it. He'd yelled and cursed and insulted her. Her adrenaline rising, Lila had yelled back. Things she hadn't known bothered her came spewing out. Before it was over, they were both displaying a passion their relationship had been sorely lacking for most of the time they were together.

Now that it was over, she felt a vague anxiety and melancholy and definitely regret for losing her temper, but nothing more powerful than that. She would miss having someone to do things with, a date she could count on, but beyond that she felt fairly confident Doyle would slide quickly and easily into the role of "a guy I used to date back in college." The thought made her sadder than the actual loss of him.

The train pulled out of the station, lights flickering again, and gathered steam as it clattered along the tracks. Lila brought her attention back to the text, which she really needed to read before class that afternoon. She concentrated for the length of a paragraph before looking up again.

A teenage boy and little girl who'd just boarded the train took the last empty seat in the back end of the compartment, the one in front of the soldier. The girl was asking the boy something and he was telling her to shut up.
Brother and sister
, Lila guessed.

Sitting directly in front of her, a fashionable, white-haired lady was focused on her magazine. An African American woman perhaps in her late twenties sat beside her. Lila tried to decide if the woman was wearing extensions in her abundant mass of braids.

She took a sip of her nearly empty coffee and stole another glance at GI Joe. He'd stopped watching the chatty Barbies and was staring out his window, legs sprawled in front of him, a backpack on the seat beside him. Lila smiled at the backpack, nothing military issue about it. The thing must be leftover from his high school days. The blue bag was decorated with signatures scrawled in black marker and a peeling bumper sticker of some local band.

Lila gave up trying to read and closed her book. She shoved it in her backpack, a neutral, unmarred navy, on the floor by her feet. As she leaned over to zip the bag closed, a shudder shook the car. She was thrown forward into the back of the seat in front of her then tossed back into her seat. Her neck snapped at the impact as the train came to an immediate, jolting stop. The lights went out, plunging the compartment into semi-darkness. Emergency light strips down the center of each aisle cast an eerie glow over the chaotic scene.

Cries and shouts resounded through the car. Piercing shrieks and "oh my Gods" came from the Barbie twins. Lila stood and craned her neck trying to see what was going on in the front of the compartment, but everyone else was rising too so she couldn't see anything except other people's backs and bobbing heads. She pressed her cheek close to the window, trying to look down the track, but the subway tunnel was too dark. Was this a collision or a derailment? Lila's heart pounded. She tried to calm down and reminded herself it could be worse. At least no one appeared to be hurt. The train couldn't have crashed into anything too hard. Maybe there'd simply been some massive power outage and they'd be stuck here for a while. She bent to pick up her backpack so she'd be ready if the conductor came to evacuate them.

Just then several loud screams cut across the babble of worried, excited voices. These weren't like the initial yells of surprise, but horrified screams of pain and fear.

"What the hell?" A low voice came from right beside her.

Lila turned to find GI Joe standing in the aisle beside her seat, staring toward the front of the car.

"What is it? What do you see?" she asked, climbing onto her seat to try to get a better view.

"I don't know, but I think we'd better—"

A woman's howling shriek was cut off, ending in a loud gurgle.

"We've gotta go, now!" The soldier grabbed Lila's arm and jerked her into the aisle with him. He shoved her behind him toward the door between compartments. It was closed. Lila's fingers scrabbled against glass and metal as she struggled to open it. As the screaming at the front of the car increased, she jerked the door open. Hands pushed against her back, propelling her into the space between cars. She tripped on the uneven metal floor, stumbled down the steps to the track, banging her knee against the edge of the car before her foot hit pavement. She was spun aside and slammed against the subway car as people shoved her out of the way..

In the dark, a hand grabbed her wrist and pulled. "This way."

"What is it? What's happening?" She didn't know if she'd said it or thought it. Questions repeated in a continuous loop in her head while the horrifying screaming inside the compartment went on and on. It wasn't just one or two voices now, but many as if a massacre were taking place.

"Over here." The soldier sounded confident and his hand was strong. Lila ran with him and so did some others. She could hardly see the other people in the dark, only feel their bodies pressing around her. They were running like a herd of gazelles racing before cheetahs. Jesus, what was happening back there? What was coming after them?

The man running beside her stopped so abruptly he nearly jerked her arm from its socket. He crouched and did something on the ground. Lila stared blindly at his dark shape and realized he was prying open a manhole grate. The crowd divided like water, flowing around them this way and that, but some people became aware of what he was doing and huddled around, waiting.

There was a clang of metal. The soldier rose and spoke quickly. "Whatever's on that train, I don't want to try to run from it straight down a tunnel. If we go into the storm sewer, maybe we'll have a better chance to escape."

The idea of descending into a pitch black abyss didn't seem like much of an alternative to running for the nearest station, but Lila could see his logic. If they couldn't outrun whatever was coming, they should hide. One man was already climbing into the hole. Lila's eyes had adjusted to the very dim light and she could make out the shapes of her fellow travelers enough to see that the next person clambering into the pit was the African American woman with the braids. Following her was her seatmate, the white-haired lady.

Lila turned to the teenage boy and his little sister standing beside her. "You going with them?"

"I guess." He stooped to talk to the girl, who was crying. She shook her head. Her brother grabbed her arms and his cajoling voice grew angry.

Lila looked back at the train, its huge silver body like the carcass of some great beast lying in the tunnel. Adrenaline, sharp as knives, lanced through her veins. Her heart pounded so hard her chest was tight and she could scarcely breathe. More people were spilling out of the subway cars both nearby and farther down the track. More yells and screams, muffled by the closed windows came from inside the compartments. As Lila watched, the silhouette of a person stumbled off the train and dropped to the pavement. The woman crawled across the ground, crying.

Lila took a step toward her to offer help then stopped. Another person was lurching down the steps right behind the woman. There was something wrong with the dark figure and the way it moved with a jerky gait like a marionette. Lila didn't know how she knew the person wasn't a victim. She just felt it.

The hair on Lilas's nape lifted and she backed away. Turning, she grabbed the little girl by one hand and the older boy by the arm. "Move! Now!" She pushed them toward the open manhole, where another man was just disappearing from sight.

"I'll pass your sister down to you," she promised the boy, and he began to climb the ladder. Before he'd gotten very far, Lila lifted the crying girl beneath the armpits and slung her into the pit. She glanced back at the lurching figure—several of them now moving alongside the train. One grabbed a running woman and pulled her close as if in a lover's embrace. Lila didn't see what happened next but screams rang in her ears.

The top of the ladder was clear so she began her own descent, her sandals slipping on the metal rungs. From below came the echoing sound of voices, hands reaching for her and helping her off the ladder.

"Something's coming," she gasped breathlessly. "Something—"

"Is that everyone?" The soldier was beside her. She caught a glimpse of his profile in the darkness as he looked up to the gray circle above.

"Close it! You'd better close it. Hurry!" The whole point of hiding down here would be lost if the—whatever those people were—spotted the open manhole cover.

GI Joe climbed back up the ladder, his body blocking the light overhead. He reached out and pulled the metal cover back into place. The black circle moved across the opening like an eclipse, plunging them into total darkness.

"What now? We can't even see," someone spoke above the little girl's sobbing.

"Anyone have a lighter or matches?" Lila knew the soldier's voice already. How could he sound so calm in the middle of this disaster?

"I do," came a young female voice, followed by the sound of someone scrabbling through a purse. Lila thought of her abandoned backpack, the comparative religions textbook which she knew she'd never see again. She stood in the darkness, listening to the muffled sounds of trauma and running footsteps overhead and felt the warmth of bodies all around her, heard the other people murmuring and moving.

The storm sewer smelled like a monkey house at the zoo, a potent, urine-soaked stench that singed her nostrils. Her body tensed and she fought against the urge to scream. A primitive fear of things that lurked in the dark twisted her gut, but surely nothing down here could be any worse than whatever horrible thing was happening up above.

Several people were whispering about terrorists and the possibility of some kind of massive strike on the city. One man suggested a fast acting, flesh eating virus and someone else told him to shut the hell up. Several people tried to make calls on their cell phones but of course there was no signal down here.

The girl with the lighter located it and struck a flame. In the tiny flickering light, Lila could see little beyond the brown face of the lighter's owner—the woman with the braids. She held the lighter out from her body to try to shed its glow on the space around them. It was less garbage-strewn and rat-infested than Lila had expected, which made sense. This was a storm drain, a run-off for rainwater, not an open sewer despite the smell of piss. Luckily there hadn't been rain in weeks and the concrete floor was pretty dry. The tunnel stretched in both directions like the subway above, disappearing quickly into blackness.

Lila counted ten in their group. In addition to the soldier, the brother and sister, and the two women from the seat in front of her, there was a tall, middle-aged man in a suit and an older Hispanic man wearing a Mets baseball cap. A pretty woman in a tailored blouse and slacks, whose hair straggled from its stylish twist stood with her arms folded protectively over her chest. Beside her was a man with crew cut white hair. The name tag on his gray industrial uniform proclaimed him "Omar Everett."

GI Joe scanned the tunnel in both directions and pointed to the right. "The nearest station would be that way. All we have to do is keep walking straight and we should get there in about ten minutes. We'll conserve the lighter. Only turn it on when necessary."

"No way," Everett said. "I'm not walking blind. We don't know when the next exit will be. We should wait here until whatever's happening quiets down, then go up and check things out."

"He's right," the woman with her pale blond hair in a bun agreed. "We have no idea what we'd be heading into in the dark. Besides, someone in authority will come soon to help. We should be nearby."

"I don't think anyone's coming," Lila said carefully. "At least not for a long time. We're probably on our own. Getting to the next station and then the street is our best bet."

"Look. We can stand here and argue or get moving, but either way, the lighter's going off. We'll need it later." GI Joe managed to sound absolutely confident without coming across as arrogant. The woman with the lighter doused it immediately.

"Maybe we should introduce ourselves." The blonde woman's voice sounded louder when they were all shrouded in darkness. "I'm Ann Hanson."

"I don't think it matters, lady. We can talk later. Right now we should just get the hell out of here!" The latino accent gave away the speaker as the man in the Mets cap.

"I agree. We should go before someone finds us here," came the voice of the lighter owner.

Or some
thing
.
Lila couldn't shake the image of that lurching shadow grabbing a woman and pulling her close. The shape had been human, but there'd been something very strange about the way it moved.

"Yeah, something seriously messed up is going on up there. No way should we stick around," the teenage boy mumbled.

"I don't want anyone crapping out halfway there. We can take turns carrying the kid. What about the lady with the white hair. Can you make it even if it's a few miles?" The soldier's voice sounded impatient now. Lila could tell he was frustrated and anxious to get moving.