Creepers (35 page)

"It'll be deserted about now, but it's still a major subway station. You'd better get talking, Russ. And if you believe in God, you'd better put in a personal call to him right away."

"Up yours, Dolchik," Matthews yelled, then hung up.

Ringo LaMarr was nicely stoned, nicely mellowed out He knew the feeling; it was like an old friend, a man's best friend. Hell, wasn't getting high what life was all about? As far as he was concerned, it was. That and making love to his lovely Marcie, the center of his world--though he'd never tell her that.

He leaned casually against the wall next to the newsstand just east of the corner of Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue. This was Ringo's spot, his little slice of Times Square's wild kingdom. On any night Ringo LaMarr and his woman, Marcie, could be found standing right there next to the stairs that led down into the subway. That is, if he weren't too high, or the weather wasn't too bad, or Marcie wasn't turning a trick in the shoddy hotel room they jokingly called "the bridal suite."

"We gonna sure have some party later on, Marcie, baby," Ringo cooed in her ear as his hand slipped under her arm to tug at the outer edge of her breast.

"You the only man's can make me see sparks." She giggled. Ringo liked to hear about his sexual prowess; it kinda turned her on, too.

"That's 'cause I cares about you, Marcie. That's 'cause I don't drive you like so many dudes do with their womens." His hand moved a bit farther, and he cupped her breast through the pink crocheted top of her garish outfit. "You really turn me on, babe. Really."

Marcie was going to counter with some cute remark about his three-hour hard-on driving her wild, when she heard a low, rumbling sound coming from somewhere to her right. She looked down the street to Eighth Avenue, but didn't see anything unusual. The same old faces were there, talking to the same old faces about the same old things. Yet, she was sure she'd heard something unusual. Or, more accurately, felt something. Involuntarily the muscles at the back of her neck began to tighten. "You hear somethin', Ringo? Like lots of folks running?"

"Running? Whatchu talking 'bout, woman?" His voice grew authoritarian like it always did when Marcie said something he couldn't immediately dismiss as damn-fool women's talk.

"I don't know, honey; it almost sounds like the wind down there in the subway." She moved away from Ringo out onto the sidewalk a few feet and stopped. Her arms automatically clasped themselves around her body in an unconscious gesture of self-protection.

"Come back here, Marcie. You beginning to act crazy."

"I--" she began, but the words never escaped her mouth. The initial thing that caught her attention was a policeman--a TA cop, actually--running up the stairs from the subway. At first he looked like any other uniformed transit cop, except he wasn't wearing a cap. Then she looked closer; the left side of his face had been torn away and what was left of his ear dangled down near his chin. The front of his uniform jacket was gone too, his shirt ripped away. Long rivulets of blood streamed over his abdomen and splattered against the concrete stairs with each step.

The cop stopped near the top of the stairs, his eyes wide with fright and agony. His mouth opened to say something, but no sound came out. He arched his back suddenly and flung his left arm over his shoulder, trying to pull something off his back, but he failed. After a moment's struggle, he pitched forward and fell, his lifeless eyes staring out into the hustle and bustle of Forty-second Street.

It was then Marcie saw the thing attached to the cop's back. She saw the creature raise its head from a deep wound, spilling blood down its troughlike tongue and over its teeth. It took a moment to grind a hunk of flesh to pulp, swallowed, then stared directly at Marcie. Its eyes opened wider and its hands relaxed its grip on the dead man. The creature rocked back onto its hind legs and sprang.

Marcie watched in frozen silence as the creeper arced through the air toward her. For a millisecond her eyes darted to Ringo, but he'd be no help. He was watching her like he always did, like she was some overgrown pet. No, Ringo couldn't help her out of this jam, not this time. When she felt the weight of the creeper's body against her, she looked from Ringo straight into the rheumy eyes of the creeper. Its breath smelled of death and blood and raw meat, but Marcie didn't mind, really. It would be over soon. She'd heard Death when she heard the rumbling sound; she'd seen it when she saw the policeman at the top of the stairs. And now, here she was staring it straight in the eyes.

Ringo craned his head toward Marcie, trying to see what the hell was going on. Looked like some punk was putting the make on her or something. He quickly stepped forward, squinting to clear his wobbly vision. The grass had rounded the edges of everything, and he wasn't quite sure what was real and what was his imagination. If it was a punk fooling with Marcie, he'd beat the shit out of him. No one fucked with Marcie LaMarr unless he paid Ringo first. When he finally reached her after what seemed a mile-long chase, Ringo was vaguely aware of the sounds of running and screams coming from behind him near the subway entrance. Hadn't Marcie said something about running? Maybe she was right, after all. He'd tell her soon's he fixed this punk who had her by the tits. Jesus, what the hell was this world coming to when you weren't safe even on Forty-second Street?

"You fucking with my woman, son?" Ringo demanded as he stalked right up to Marcie. The question went unanswered. "You deaf or somethin'?" There was so much shouting he could hardly, hear himself think. "Okay, brother, you asked for it." Ringo reached out and spun Marcie around.

The creeper had clawed through her throat to her backbone where it entered the cranial cavity. There was a lot of muscle here, and cartilage, as well as sinewy veins and arteries that fed the brain. It was a soft part of the body, but surrounded by toughness, like a chicken gizzard. It also made good eating. The creeper yanked its hand back slightly to secure the fingers, then began a systematic wrenching, twisting and turning as it pulled back. Gradually Marcie's entire throat pulled loose from her body. Her eyes, which were wide with abject terror, clouded, fluttered, then closed. She fell back onto the sidewalk with the creeper still holding tight. And when her body came to rest, her killer sucked the wad of bloody flesh into its mouth, expanding its floppy cheeks like a squirrel hording nuts, and scampered off down the sidewalk.

Ringo dropped to his knees beside Marcie. He couldn't take his eyes off her. He didn't believe what he'd seen. But the proof lay in front of him. He started to cry, gradually becoming conscious that the screaming around him was increasing. He looked from Marcie's mutilated body to the entrance of the subway. The doorway was crowded with the same creatures that had killed his woman. They fought, crawled over each other, clawing and scratching to get out onto the street. It seemed there were hundreds of them, all moving forward.

"You sons-of-bitches," Ringo shouted at them. "You killed my wife." He rose unsteadily to his feet and planted his legs wide apart. "You jes' ain't foolin' with a nobody. You foolin' with Ringo LaMarr and you done killed my wife."

Without another word, Ringo pulled a switchblade knife from his hip pocket, lowered his left shoulder, flicked the wicked blade open, and ran straight into the pack of creepers, slashing at them with the knife in a last desperate attempt to avenge Marcie's death. He disappeared into the roiling mass of creepers and, a minute later, what remained of his body surfaced above the turmoil and was discarded against the front of the newsstand.

At that very moment, the same scene was being reenacted up and down Forty-second Street in the vicinity of every subway exit. Hundreds of creepers, driven toward the killing grounds by the advancing National Guardsmen, fought their way up to the street to the very world they had forsaken. Most of the creepers had never seen the light of day except as it filtered down through the subway grates into their lairs. Because of some inborn predisposition, and the memory passed down through Theodore Alden and his descendants, the creatures "remembered" what it was like to live in die world of the sun, though they had never seen it. But to be thrown so suddenly into the world was terrifying for them.

They poured into the aboveground world along Forty-second Street from Eighth Avenue to Third Avenue, scattering like bedbugs under the glare of an unexpected light. They flowed out of the subway stations, quickly destroying the police stationed there as guards. The creepers weren't hungry, they were crazed, more crazed than they were when they searched for food. A combination of fear and the proliferation of the deadly mutant virus that coursed through their veins reduced the last vestiges of their humanity to rubble. They bubbled out of the subway into the cool night air, stopping traffic, attacking pedestrians, overrunning everything that stood in their way.

The creepers, caught between the advancing armies of Guardsmen that moved east-west toward a central point, attacked everything in sight. Those civilians who could, ran into shops, buildings, and hotels and locked the doors behind them to keep the monsters out. Those who couldn't, died. The newspapers later reported that there were between four and six hundred creepers counted dead on Forty-second Street alone when it was all over.

By the time they emerged into the night, the National Guard was being assisted by the NYPD and several truck-loads of men from a nearby Army base in New Jersey. The military cordoned off an area stretching from Twelfth Avenue to First Avenue and from Fiftieth Street to Twenty-eighth Street. But by then it was too late, the damage had been done, the creepers had broken loose and were on the rampage.

The battle between the creepers and the armies lasted five hours. In the end there were forty civilians dead, twenty-five men from the combined official forces, and hundreds of wounded. During the cleanup that followed the next morning as the sun rose shimmery and grainy over the battle scene, a media blackout was enacted. Despite the angry protestations of station managers, network executives, and newspaper editors, the remaining police stood their ground.

The truth, however, was that no television station would have, could have, dared broadcast the scenes captured so vividly on videotape. The carnage along Forty-second Street was appalling. No slaughterhouse would have begun to compare its daily quotas to the death that spilled every gutter and across every pavement on that most famous of all New York streets. The air was filled until midmorning with the plaintive shrieks of ambulances, and the crumpled, twisted bodies of the creepers lay piled four and five deep like dead mice after a fumigation.

The rabies vaccine proved effective in all cases, and a follow-up of survivors a year later showed no unexpected side effects. The subway was completely cleaned up and the number of transit cops was tripled. The new safety precautions for New Yorkers rivaled those of London during the blitz. Subway crime became almost nonexistent, more passengers rode the system, and the TA actually started to show a monetary surplus, a surplus that could be plowed back into the system.

A federal investigating commission set up to study the creeper phenomenon publicly praised Mayor Russ Matthews for his quick thinking in handling such a "strange and unusual" situation. Privately it chastised him for ignoring Dolchik's repeated warnings and for allowing the situation to deteriorate to the point where dealing with it had proved so costly both in money and in human life. Frank Corelli's name never appeared in any of the dispositions and, in the end, the committee decided that no one person was at fault for the creeper disaster. It recommended that a monthly spot check of the subway tunnels be made to avert a recurrence.

Russ Matthews was defeated that November by a man who promised "law and order." Though the word "creeper" was never once mentioned by either side, insiders clearly saw that they were the issue that tipped the election away from the incumbent. Matthews went back to private law practice and left New York for good.

Stan Dolchik retired from the city government a couple of years early and moved to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, with his wife, Marsha, where he opened a private-detective agency that specialized in following errant husbands. Dolchik was fond of saying that he'd traded the creepers of New York for the creeps of south Florida. And, all other things being equal, he preferred the subway variety.

And the people of New York continued their lives as if nothing had ever happened. They clucked their tongues at the bloodbath, shivered momentarily at the thought of riding the subway, and once again thanked God it wasn't they who'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time--this time, at least. For a few months, "I survived New York's Creeper Caper" T-shirts and buttons were popular, but with time, people forgot and settled back to their daily lives, confident that such a terror could happen only once.

The creepers were dead.

December 24

Christmas Eve

Chapter 17

"Frank, the tree is perfect," Louise cooed as she brought him a cup of heavily brandied eggnog. "It's going to be the best Christmas ever."

"It's the first of the best Christmases ever." Corelli scooped her into his arms and playfully nibbled her ear.

She raised her glass in a toast: "To us, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Corelli, now...and forever."

They linked arms and sipped from each other's glass, savoring the fiery alcohol tempered by the rich coolness of eggs and cream.

"Where's Lisa?" Frank asked. "She should be celebrating, too."