Primeval (Werewolf Apocalypse Book 2) (32 page)

“Yet you’re a dealer in death. You kill things, people, for a living.”

“It’s not quite so random and arbitrary,” she protested, as he knew she would. “I shoot when I need to, to protect the country. This shit storm we have erupting in the city is killing children, women, innocents.”

“I’m afraid with these explosions, it’s completely out of control.”

Another blast knocked them around in the tunnel. Alice fell to her knees ahead of them and had to be helped up by Beth and Sandy.

“And if any of those explosions ignite all this gas down here, we’re gonna end up crispy critters. What do you think?” she asked.

“Hey, Michael,” Burns shouted.

The homeless man headed to the back of the queue to join up with Burns and Nicole. He looked tired, his eyes red-rimmed and glassy. Nicole suspected he needed a drink or a fix of some sort, but she felt she couldn’t really judge him for it. She could use a stiff shot of bourbon herself. Something top shelf, preferably, but anything would do.

“How much farther until we get back to the subway tunnels?” Burns asked.

“Fifty feet or so till the door on the right. Few more minutes.”

“Does this door close tight?” Burns asked.

Michael nodded. “I think so. You worried about this gas? I sure as hell am. Smells strong in here.”

Another rumble from the world above them, showering them with mortar dust.

“Yeah, it’s troubling me.”

“Start a fire down here, it’ll spread through the air like a ball of flames, faster than the trains went, even. No way anyone could outrun it.”

“Hey, it’s still better than being on the streets, right?” Nicole asked, forcing her voice to sound cheerful.

Burns grunted as they came upon the exit on their right.

“Through here,” Michael said, opening the metal door.

One by one, they stepped through, onto a metal platform and down a small flight of stairs. It was definitely another subway tunnel. The emergency lights were nearly burned out, but the floor was still crisscrossed with tracks. Two hundred yards ahead of them, a subway train sat motionless and empty on the second set of rails. As Burns stepped into the doorway, bringing up the rear of the group, he tightly shut the door behind him. At the moment the door closed, a large quake shook him off balance, sending him down the stairs on his side. He lodged himself halfway down, stopping his roll and hitting his cheek on a metal railing. It sliced open a gash from his eye to his lower lips, and blood seeped down his face. He brushed at it, smearing it with the back of his hand. He could sense by years of experience that it wasn’t a bad wound and would close on its own. When he gained his bearings, the others rushed back to him.

“I’m okay,” he said. “Just banged up a little. Nicole, check that door. Is it closed solid?”

She pulled on the lever, and the door didn’t catch. It breezed open easily. When she tried to close it again, it stuck just before it sealed itself. The smell of gas seeped through the opening.

“Sorry, sir,” she said. “Looks like that last bang warped the frame or the hinge or something.”

Standing, Burns brushed himself off. The blood on his cheek dripped a bit from his pointed chin. Sandy ripped off a part of her shirt from around the bottom, forming a bandage. She wrapped it gently around the general’s face, sealing off the wound.

“That’ll do for now,” she said as the yellow T-shirt material blossomed with crimson from beneath. “You’re gonna need stitches when we get out of here.”

“Aw, it ain’t that bad,” he said, scowling.

The earth shook beneath them. From above, they heard the unmistakable scream of a dying city, a building falling to the ground.

“Anyone else noticing how much closer together these explosions are coming?” Howard asked.

“Yep,” Burns said. “Thanks, Sandy. Stop hovering. If we get out of here, I’ll stitch it up myself.”

“You’re so macho. I could drown in the excess testosterone.”

Burns made a noncommittal mumble, which caused Sandy to giggle in spite of her fear. She sounded so young to him at that moment.

“Well,” he said as Sandy moved next to Nicole. “We’d better get moving. That door ain’t gonna stop the gas leaks. Looking at those pipes along the walls, we may have even more potential for an explosion in here.”

The group didn’t need any more urging, but another quake from farther down the tunnel accentuated their precarious situation.

7:10 p.m.

Sandy nudged Nicole in the shoulder as she walked next to her and flashed her lover a bright smile. Nicole tried to keep her poker face on, but she couldn’t stop the sides of her mouth from twitching a bit. She nudged Sandy back, and Sandy felt the body armor and weapons still concealed under Nicole’s jacket. They clinked together, unknown quantities of ammunition or grenades or other instruments for killing. She knew these things were the stock in trade for a member of the Lycan Sniper Team, but they were also a reminder of what lurked beneath her lover’s veneer. On the surface, she was still Nicole, the face, the taut skin, the muscles, those eyes that Sandy had fallen for. But beneath that exterior shell, there was something harder, as though the military had provided her with a reverse exoskeleton – soft on the outside, tough and unbreakable within. Many times, Sandy had tried to pierce that armor, and she sometimes felt as if she’d succeeded. Tonight, Nicole was having none of it. She was in full-on protector mode.

And in this shadowy subway tunnel, surrounded by fires and death and destruction, Sandy wouldn’t have it any other way.

Nicole said, “Why don’t you go back with the others? It’s better if I’m not distracted.”

“Am I distracting you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Sandy said, “I’ll join Beth and Alice.”

She stopped and let Nicole take the lead again, and she waited for the pair of women to join her. Alice was looking pretty rough around the edges, leaning into her coach, shaking a bit. Her eyes were half closed, and she seemed as if she could fall asleep at any moment. She forced Sandy to remember the way she had felt when Craig had wanted to knock her in the head to stop her screaming. It was almost a maternal feeling, a wish to protect something fragile from something savage. Still, she was a bit annoyed with the girl at the same time. She wanted to shake her and say, “Keep it together. You can lose your shit when we all get to safety.” Something prevented her from going that far, though. Probably the part of her that wanted to adopt every stray dog she saw on the streets. She often had to admit that she could be too much of a girly girl, but she also had to accept that this was the way she’d been constructed. Just as being gay was an indelible part of her, so was this nurturing instinct.

“How are you two doing?” she asked.

Beth said, “Better, I think. We’ve had a little time to catch our breath, even with the smell of this gas.”

“It makes me sleepy,” Alice said with a wide yawn. “I wish we could rest.”

“We will when we get somewhere safe,” Sandy said. “You just hang in there until we do.”

“I’ll try,” the girl whined, the frustration pinching her voice and causing it to go higher in tone. “But it’s hard. And probably stupid. We’re all going to die, you know.”

The urge to give the girl a quick smack in the face welled up in Sandy, and she shoved it back down again, thinking,
I won’t end up like Craig. I can’t let myself be dragged down to that Neanderthal’s level.

Instead, she forced herself to grin and said, “I’m going to talk to Howard a little.”

“Okay,” Beth said.

Howard was behind them, so Sandy waited in place a bit and let him catch up with her. He was also looking tired, with red circles around his large, kind eyes. He dragged his long pole a bit, as though it was getting heavy.

“As the self-appointed group cheerleader,” Sandy said, “I’m here to check up on you. Yay team, and all that crap.”

“Oh, I’m all right,” he said, slowing down a bit.

“Faster,” Burns cried from behind him. “We need to keep moving faster.”

“We’re all tired,” Sandy said, picking up their pace a little. “But it can’t be much farther.”

John Creed joined them, keeping in step, and he said, “You know, this is probably all futile, all this running. I’ve written enough stories in the past about people trying to get out of bad situations – Darfur, Chechnya – and it rarely ends well.”

“Thanks for totally ruining all my valiant cheerleading attempts,” Sandy grumbled, even though in her heart she knew he was probably right.

“Oh, there’s still a chance of us getting to Brooklyn. My man Michael up there,” he said, nodding to the front of the line, “and your gal Nicole are doing their best. Only, what’s going to be in Brooklyn when we get there?”

“I’m trying real hard not to think about it,” Howard said. “Jeez, are you always such a downer?”

“Yeah, I am. You see enough garbage in this world, it’s hard to pick up on the nice human interest bullshit. You tend to see the things that are dark and bleak and hopeless and depressing. News, in other words.”

“The jaded journalist,” Sandy said. “Such a cliché. Ever since
His Girl Friday
.”

“Great movie,” John said with a nod. “Even if it is a remake. But the real world of journalism is a lot nastier. People always profess to want to see nice stories, stories that make them feel good about their fellow humans. But what sells the most papers or gets the most hits online? Serial killers, celebrities in downward spirals, and natural disasters. It’s a sad truth.”

“But those are just things that catch people’s interest,” Sandy said.

Howard agreed. “Hey, I love me a good Charlie Sheen scandal.”

“But if you want to believe in the happy-happy crap, like we’re gonna leave this tunnel and be embraced into Brooklyn’s welcoming arms and all the mutants are miraculously killed, you’ve got a sad awakening coming to you, Sandy.”

“You think it’s spread to the other boroughs?” Howard asked.

“Hey, if we can walk through a sewer tunnel to Brooklyn, who’s to say the rats haven’t already done so? I haven’t seen many of them around lately.”

“You’re right,” Sandy said. “Still, a girl needs to hope. Without that…”

“I know,” John said, reaching over and squeezing her shoulder. “I want to believe it, too. Only my damn clichéd journalistic pessimism keeps intruding.”

“What do you think, Taylor?” Sandy asked, turning to face Burns and walking backwards.

“I think the faster we can get out of here the better our chances. Pick up the pace.”

She saluted him, said, “Yes, sir.”

He mumbled, “Damn it, I wish I had a cigar.”

7:30 p.m.

The band of survivors had nearly reached the stalled subway car when the biggest explosion yet hurled them all to the ground. The noise was deafening, and Burns swiveled back to see the metal door that had allowed them ingress from the sewer to the subway, now blown off its hinges. A fireball the size of his living room burst into the tunnel behind them. The flames leapt into their world, then back into the sewer, as if sucked back into a dragon’s maw. Bricks shot out of the walls, and several of the pipes running down the cavernous passage caught fire, the flames licking their way down the iron in search of a perforation.

He knew if the conflagration entered those pipes, their group would be engulfed in a searing ball of fire that would traverse the tunnel like a bullet through the barrel of a gun. It would sweep across everything in seconds, turn everything to cinders.

“Move it!” he screamed. “Get in that subway car up there. Now, now, now!”

The group was on their feet and running toward the empty car. Nicole arrived first and turned to help the others get inside. She knew what was coming, heard it in the rumble from the dark area at the other end of the tunnel. The gas mains were broken open, and there was going to be a huge fire any minute. They’d all be burned alive if they didn’t get to safety, and the subway train was the only thing in sight that might keep out the flames.

Might.

The cluster of runners fumbled over each other, and Sandy arrived at the car first. Nicole grabbed her arm and pulled her into the car. She immediately hurried to a position between two seats, stepping over a corpse that lay mostly eaten in the center aisle. It was stripped nearly to the bone, so she couldn’t even tell if it had been a man or a woman.

Michael was next, and he stood just inside the doorway for a moment, gathering his bearings. He cried out at the sight of the body in the aisle. Nicole had to tell him to hurry and proceed inside and hunker down between the seats. He moved at her order, and she helped John up. The journalist immediately headed for a place next to a solid wall. He noticed claw marks along the interior, scratched into the plastic and metal walls of the train. The Lycanthropes had been here, had done their dirty work, and had left already.

Howard fluidly jumped into the car, his movements graceful, his landing adept. He tumbled to a place near a wall between tall plastic seats. His white eyes looked around the gloom and focused on Sandy.