Primeval (Werewolf Apocalypse Book 2) (31 page)

Alice was next to be shoved atop the train, followed closely by Beth. Once on top, they knelt next to each other, creeping forward side by side.

“What if one of those things gets up here?” Alice wondered aloud. “We’d be dead. I can barely breathe. We’d all be dead. We’re all going to die down here, aren’t we?”

“Well,” Beth said, trying to help the girl’s mood, “that Nicole’s one tough cookie, and she’s dealt with this kind of thing before.”

“Don’t try to make me feel better, coach. Nobody’s dealt with something like this before. It’s too damn big. The whole world’s fucked.”

“Alice…”

“No, listen,” she said as they crawled forward. “If we get out of this alive, and that’s a big ‘if,’ then what’ll we do? You going to tell me there’ll still be colleges and scholarships and goddamn volleyball? Everything’s different now. Everything. I think intramural sports are pretty much a thing of the past. So is college. So is a lot of what we thought was so important.”

They found the space where two cars were connected, and they stretched, reaching the next roof. Below them, they could hear and feel more of the creatures thrashing inside the subway car, trapped like the others, like goldfish in an aquarium.

“Maybe it is all different,” Beth said after they’d crossed the gap. “But at least we’re still together. I’m still here, still alive, and I still care about what happens to you.”

“It would probably be better if we all just died now,” Alice muttered.

John was next on the roof, and he crawled alone, thinking about the world. He could hear the volleyball coach and her pupil talking in the distance, one train car ahead of him. He wanted to interrupt them, to tell the girl that the human race was expert at bouncing back from catastrophes. Humankind had survived overwhelming setbacks before.

He wanted to tell her how he’d studied history at the university before he’d decided on journalism as a career. He remembered reading about the Black Death. When that dreaded disease had hit Europe, it had decimated the population, wiped out nearly sixty percent of the continent. Still, the people overcame it, bounced back eventually.

He wanted to tell Alice that with what scientists knew about disease nowadays, they could probably lick this new strain of virus before it killed anywhere near as many people as the Black Death did.

Plus,
he thought, convincing himself as much as he wanted to persuade the girl,
we’re in a big city. The biggest city. This is the worst possible place for an outbreak to have occurred. Lots of smaller towns could have stopped this from happening, nipped it in the bud before it got so cataclysmic, but with the number of rats alone, New York didn’t stand a chance.

By the time he’d arrived at the first juncture between subway cars, he’d managed to depress himself, and he wished he wasn’t alone. He wished someone was crawling next to him, even if it was a hopelessly optimistic volleyball coach. He heard Michael shuffling along behind him, creeping forward in the darkness. He suddenly wanted the homeless man by his side, overcoming this obstacle with him. He slowed and waited until Michael caught up with him.

“You okay?” Michael asked.

“Yeah, just thought I’d wait for you,” John answered.

Michael knew what he meant. The feeling of the walls compressing into you wasn’t so terrible when they moved together side by side.

Burns shoved Nicole up on the roof, and she helped pull him to her level. He bumped his head on the ceiling and cursed, scrunching his head lower on his shoulders. Moving through the dark, cramped area, they listened to the frenzied movements of the Lycans beneath them.

Nicole tried to get her mind off the tiny, constricted area they had to creep through. She asked Burns, “You think the reporter’s right? That this was all started by one of those werewolf cults?”

“It may have just been something that got out of hand,” he answered. “But fanatics are pretty much the same all over the world. They see what they believe as right, and to hell with anyone else’s life. If someone gets in the way of their ideology, then they take them out. Look at 9/11. There was this one preacher who was infected, one we took down in Memphis. You remember him?”

“Nope,” she said. “Wasn’t paying attention to ideology, General. Just doing my job and shooting the enemy.”

“Well, he truly believed God wanted everyone to return to a more primitive way of life, a savage, animalistic state. This preacher was collecting vials of the virus, tinkering with it. He was arrested a few times, but his followers hid everything from the authorities, and he always got off of any charges. Nothing would stick because the evidence disappeared. Now there had to have been a hell of a lot of followers, within the police force, too, to hide that much stuff. And I have to admit, the guy was charismatic, and if you had a weak will, he could have convinced you that the world was falling into ruin because mankind had become too big for our britches. But I always saw beyond the mask. In his eyes, this preacher was ten ways to batshit crazy. You ever see a picture of Jim Jones?”

“Yeah. Creepy bastard.”

“So, yeah, Jones had that great face, so charismatic. He just had ‘it.’ But if you looked into his eyes for a while, you could see the demons lurking there. Under the skin, behind the religion. He was another kind of monster.”

“Manson had that, too,” Nicole said.

“Exactly. Someone like that decides everyone should revert to a primeval state, become their animal selves again to please some God. Then this virus comes along. Seems to do the job right easy, and they play with the formula. These people may be totally cracked, but they’re not stupid. They find a way to eliminate the necessity of lunar cycles, which, after all, would have controlled people’s states of being. It would have made them think about their actions every time they woke up in the morning with blood on their hands. Not so pretty to be an animal when you can see the gory results of your actions in the morning.”

Nicole added, “A lot of people killed themselves after those first two nights in Cincinnati.”

“Yeah, because their human emotions got in the way. Our friend the postulated preacher wouldn’t have liked that. He’d want to let everyone have the gift of becoming an animal. Not for just the night, but for always. Think of it. Get rid of television and the smut, get rid of politics, abortion, crime, adultery, murder. We’d be out of a job, because there’d be no military.”

Nicole said, “They eat, they kill, and they mate. That’s their life. Some life.”

They crawled the rest of the distance in silence. Occasionally, a drop of cold water dripped onto Nicole’s neck, and she started at the feeling. Finally, they reached the front of the train, and they hopped down to the ground between the tracks.

“Great,” Nicole said, heading over to her lover. “We’re all back together again.”

Alice said, “We all made it.”

“Not much danger,” Burns said. “Psychologically nasty, but nothing came for us.”

“Not yet, at least,” Alice mumbled.

Sandy rolled her eyes. The girl’s negativity was definitely getting to her. It almost made her sympathize with the late Craig Chew.

Taylor Burns said, “Not to break up our little reunion, but does anyone else smell gas again?”

“Yeah,” Nicole said. “Getting pretty strong, too.”

“Michael, we have very much farther to go?” Burns asked.

The homeless man said, “Maybe a quarter mile, then we can cross back to the sewers.”

“Okay. Then let’s do it fast,” Burns said.

They moved forward around another corner, passing ladders and watching every side for a sudden attack. The water around their feet grew darker and thicker. Passing a tunnel crossroad, Michael led them forward, not even looking in the left or right passages. They splashed as they moved, no matter how quiet they tried to be.

“Stop a second, everyone,” Nicole said, raising a hand. “I hear something.”

They all paused, and the splashing stopped. Behind them, in the darkness, they heard the noise. Something was swishing through the shallow water toward them, and moving at a good clip if the splattering noises were any indication. They turned their lights back toward the sounds, and several of them held their breath. Alice clutched at Beth, and the coach moved in front of the girl, shielding her from whatever was coming.

“We should be moving,” Burns stage-whispered out of the corner of his mouth. “The gas.”

“One calamity at a time,” Nicole said.

The splashing continued tracking toward them. The sound grew louder, more frenzied. Whatever was trailing them had picked up their scent and was determined to get to them.

“Hello?” asked a deep male voice from out of the dark tunnel. “Hello?”

“It’s a person,” Alice said with a huge sigh. Her hand went to her chest as if to slow down her racing heartbeat.

A figure slowly stepped into the beams of their flashlights, a man about six feet tall with dark brown hair and a trimmed beard. He wore the yellow jumpsuit of a sanitation worker and a hardhat. He stopped at the crossroads of the tunnels they had just passed, shielding his eyes from the lights.

“You’re human?” Burns asked, not lowering his gun.

The man nodded. “Yeah. Name’s Mark Tyree. I was working my shift when I got separated from the other guys. Rats, everywhere. Had to be millions of them.”

“Well, you can join us if you want,” Sandy offered. “We’re heading for Brooklyn.”

“I can help,” Tyree said with a disarming grin. “I know these sewers inside and out. Been working them damn near my whole life. There’s a shortcut ahead. If you just go…”

In a blur, a huge alligator sprung from the left tunnel of the crossroads, twisting its snout and biting down on the sanitation worker’s groin area. The man screamed, and the gator shook its head back and forth until there was a snap from Mark Tyree’s neck, and he hung in the reptile’s mouth like a rag doll. The alligator bit down harder, and blood flew from the man’s raggedy torso.

The group scurried away, but Burns raised his gun while retreating. Nicole immediately grabbed the end of it, swinging it to the wall.

“Gas, remember? Don’t fire your weapon.”

“Shit, sorry.”

As they ran away, farther down the corridor, Michael turned to John and said, “That look like our old friend to you?”

“He had the same smile,” John said. “Recognize it anywhere.”

They almost laughed. They stopped when they heard the crunching of the sanitation worker’s bones in the jaws of the huge alligator behind them. It didn’t seem so funny all of a sudden.

6:50 p.m.

The group had traversed the tracks before entering another tunnel, a passageway linking two lines of the subway. Michael still took point, recognizing landmarks and graffiti that led him to the next area on their journey.

Burns stepped closer to Nicole, who was speaking with Sandy in low tones. Overhead, another explosion rocked the tunnel with a bass note of doom, shaking dust onto the group of travelers. Burns watched the women’s faces, the way they shyly smiled at each other, the glint in their eyes. There was no doubt this was a pair of reunited lovers. Though the thought of the two women together in any intimate way was both exciting and disturbing to the general, he was glad to see Nicole in such good spirits. He hoped the feeling could last, even if only for a few more hours.

“Can an old man butt in for a minute?” he asked Sandy. “I need to talk with my soldier for a bit. If that’s, um, acceptable?”

“Of course it is, Taylor,” Sandy replied, giving him the grin of a patient, doting daughter. “I’ll go up there with Beth and Alice, see how the girl’s doing.”

He nodded, and she squeezed Nicole’s hand once, a display of strength and confidence. Afterwards, Sandy hurried ahead, glancing back at them only once before falling in step with the coach and her ward.

“The smell of that gas is getting pretty thick,” Burns said in a soft voice. “And I am getting extremely disturbed by all the rumbling overhead. After that street caved into the sewer, I don’t know how long the whole infrastructure can last.”

“You worried it’ll all fall down on us?”

“Well, yeah. Plus, with the gas and all those explosions up top…”

As if in confirmation, another blast rattled the group. Nicole put a hand out to steady herself against a wall.

“They’re coming pretty fast now,” he said.

“You think those are gas explosions? Main lines catching fire?”

He nodded, and she whistled.

“I do.”

“If those are gas mains exploding, then half of the Big Apple’s getting roasted like black marshmallows.”

He shook his head solemnly. “More like all of it. That many fires with no firefighters, most of the water mains probably busted, too – it will be an inferno up there.”

“If you’re trying to comfort me, you’re doing a piss poor job of it,” she said.

“Ain’t no comfort coming from me, just plain harsh facts. You know I wouldn’t sugarcoat anything.”

“I know, I know,” she said. “That much destruction, though. Like when Japan got hit with that earthquake and the tsunami, that kind of devastation – it staggers me. That’s all. I can’t wrap my head around that much death.”