"No."
The voice was
quiet. Quiet, but it immediately stopped the mirth. There was a level
of desperation in it that cut off the joy in the car as effectively as a
machete slashing a throat.
Everyone at the
window turned to look at the person who had spoken. Karen. She had
backed away from the rest of them, moving into the center of the car –
(
the middle car?
the back car? which car
is
this?
)
– where she now
stood, still clutching her leather satchel. Her eyes were no longer calm,
no longer collected. They were wild and fever-bright, lit from within by
some strange fire that Jim fervently hoped never to understand.
"The cops are
here, the cops are here," she said. Olik started to reach into his
coat, no doubt going for his gun. "Don't," said Karen.
One hand darted into her satchel, then the case fell at her feet like a
discarded cocoon. Only what emerged was no butterfly ready to take
flight. Instead her hand was clenched around a much deadlier insect – a
small black bug with far too few legs and a deadly bite. An insect that
Jim recognized from news reports showing terrorists and middle-eastern
commandos as a micro-Uzi.
The world seemed to
sway under Jim's feet. He expected her to be carrying legal papers in her
case, maybe a laptop, even a personal
vibrator
would have been less of a
shock to see pulled out of the case right now.
"I knew you
were ass-kicker," said Olik. Admiration was unmistakable in his
voice as he eased his hand away from his own weapon.
"I thought you
were a lawyer," said Jim. The words sounded lame even to him, but he
couldn't stop them from coming out. He had to know. There was so
much that he didn't understand, and he just had to know
something
,
dammit.
Anything
.
"I said I was
in
acquisitions
," answered Karen. "And this is the only
chance I'm going to have to acquire my contract."
Olik shook
his head. He looked resigned, and stepped forward. Karen's gun
immediately trained on him. "Always I knew this day would
come," he said. "Men like me do not die in bed. Make it
quick."
Karen laughed, a
quick burst of mirthless noise that punched out of her like a bullet from her
gun. "I'm not here for you," Karen said. The micro-Uzi
adjusted its aim a half-inch. "Come on, Adolfa."
Jim's lower jaw
felt like it was probably going to bounce off his toes. Even more so when
the old lady didn't shrink away or even seem particularly surprised.
"Now? With the police right outside?"
"You and I
know that this is the only time I'll have. After this you'll just
disappear again. I don't have time to wait."
"May I say a
prayer?" asked Adolfa.
"No."
Karen's finger
whitened on the trigger.
And in the same
instant, Adolfa ripped in half.
================
================
Karen pulled
the trigger on her micro-Uzi,
and at the same moment the lights in the subway tunnel all extinguished. The
darkness enveloped them instantly, broken only by the sputter-flare of the
automatic weapon as it spat out its deadly payload.
Jim barely
noticed. He was too busy trying to sort out what he had just seen.
Adolfa. Torn
in two.
At first he thought
that it must be something like what had happened to Freddy. Then he
replayed what he had seen and realized that was wrong. She wasn't really
being pulled apart. Rather, she had split in
two
. Two exact
duplicates of the old
latina
. One of them remained in place, and
the other leaped to the side with the athletic ability of a circus acrobat.
Jim knew instantly
that the standing Adolfa was –
had
to be – the real one. He darted
forward and grabbed her. Pulled her back as Karen's tiny weapon continued
to stitch strobe flashes in the darkness of the subway car.
Karen was
screaming. Madness in her eyes. Madness and something else.
Terror? That was part of it, Jim thought. But there was something
else, too. Something he didn't understand – and perhaps didn't
want
to understand.
Whatever it was,
she didn't seem to notice the Adolfa that Jim had grabbed, the one he had
pulled back and who now almost sat atop him as they huddled together off to the
side of the car. She was fixated instead on the other Adolfa, the
impossibly lithe and gymnastic old lady who was swinging from hand straps and
metal bars like an Olympian.
Karen swung her gun
in a tight arc, following the old woman around the car. The sputtering
shots illuminated everything in stop-gap flashes. It made the lithe
Adolfa seem impossibly fast. Here one moment, then in the next flash she
was somehow five feet away. The next flash, another five feet away.
And in the next….
"I do not see
this," whispered Olik.
The impostor Adolfa
leaped up in the flash of another missed shot. Leaped up, but not the
mere few inches or even the foot she might have done. She jumped all the
way to the roof of the car, and there she clung like a huge arachnid. As
though the laws of gravity held no sway over her.
Karen was still
screaming. Still shooting.
The other-Adolfa
scuttled across the roof. Dodging shots. Hissing. Her mouth
opened, and Jim saw that the old woman's jaw extended impossibly far,
accommodating triple rows of needle-like teeth on both the top and bottom.
Karen's scream
elevated.
Under the scream,
another sound. A whine. The shriek of brakes.
The subway was
slowing.
Stopping.
The Adolfa-thing
moved like a lizard. Its jaws clicked shut. It hissed, and the
sound was otherworldly, the hiss of something that should never have been seen
by earthly eyes.
Click.
The magazine of
Karen's weapon was dry. She kept pulling the trigger, kept screaming and
pulling the trigger, but nothing happened. Just that dry
click click
click
.
The toothy thing
that had somehow assumed Adolfa's form dropped from the ceiling. Jim saw
that its hands had become hooked claws with lengthy talons. It reached
out and yanked the micro-Uzi from Karen's hands with such force that several of
the once-beautiful woman's fingers came away as well, yanked off at the
knuckles with wet pops that bounced horribly through the subway car.
Karen's scream took
on a wet, agonized quality.
The train stopped.
The doors opened.
The platform
outside, lit brilliantly before, was now dark.
Karen turned to the
now-open doorway. "Help!" she screamed out at the dark
platform. She must have decided that whatever she had been paid to
"acquire" Adolfa wasn't worth it. "Save us! Save
–"
Her voice cut
off. It ended so surely and so suddenly that Jim thought the Adolfa-thing
must have killed her. It must have plunged one of those dagger-talons
into her back and just pulled out her heart.
But no. Karen
was still breathing, he saw. Still looking around in the darkness with
those fever-spotted eyes, those eyes rimmed with madness and fear.
What was she
seeing?
Jim turned.
Looked at what Karen was looking at.
He saw that the
platform was still full. Not cops after all. But he
did
recognize them. Because he'd seen them all. Seen them very recently,
in fact.
A swollen,
drowned-looking face.
A woman with a
bullet-hole in her forehead.
A man whose tongue
had been yanked out, another whose tongue and lower jaw had been abraded away
to nothing with a belt sander.
Gunshot wounds,
knife wounds, men and women hung and cut and slashed and burned and maimed.
They stood silently
on the platform, looking through the subway car's windows, just as they had
looked through the glass of Karen's tablet. The faces of the dead.
And at the middle
of the platform, standing in front of the open doors… a child.
Tiny. No more than five or six. So young it wasn't clear whether it
was a boy or a girl. Beautiful. Angelic. And very dead.
Then, as had
happened on the tablet screen, the child's features started to melt. To
sag. It stepped into the car on legs that were wobbly, loose as though
they were made of rubber and skin alone and held no bone within them.
It pointed a
drooping finger at Karen.
Karen
screamed. The scream muted when the impostor Adolfa swiped out a
hand. Karen's throat became a bloody mass. The Adolfa-thing crushed
something in her hand, something Jim suspected was Karen's larynx. Then
another swipe, and Karen's lower jaw was pulled away in a single piece.
Her tongue, no longer enclosed by a mouth, drooped freely against the mangled
remains of her neck.
The child at the
door to the train pointed again.
"You," it
whispered. Its voice bubbled, like its lungs and throat were melting as
it spoke.
The Adolfa-thing
grabbed Karen by her upper jaw. Jim cringed, sure the thing was going to
pull the woman's head apart this time. But it didn't. It flicked
the brunette over her back like a grotesque, twitching knapsack.
Karen wasn't
screaming anymore. She wasn't even breathing, as far as Jim could
see. But she was alive, he knew. Whatever was happening didn't obey
the rules of life and death as they knew them. Karen was still alive,
still looking around with eyes that were insane and terrified and….
What?
There was that
other thing in her eyes, that third thing. A thing he felt like he had to
figure out.
Then she was
gone. The Adolfa-thing smiled as it passed, triple rows of teeth creating
a terrifying depth to its grin, and then it left the subway car. It
reached down with its free hand as it passed the melting child. It patted
the child's head.
The child's head
blatted
,
like a wet and rotten fruit that had been stepped on after being left out too
long in the sun.
The Adolfa-thing
pulled her hand free, and the child's head came off its body.
Olik said something
in his native language that was half scream, half whisper. Jim didn't
understand the word, but he understood the terror behind it. He was
feeling it, too.
The child's body
didn't fall. It just stood there as its head rolled around in the Adolfa-thing's
grasp like putty, becoming more and more amorphous, and then finally it had
lost all shape or trace of identity. It merged with the Adolfa impostor's
own flesh and disappeared.
The child's body,
now headless, ran up Karen's form. Scaling her like a decapitated
mountain climber, it clambered up her ankles, her legs, her pelvis and stomach
and breasts. It climbed to her raw, perforated neck.
Karen couldn't
speak. Couldn't make the words, Jim knew. But she started making
noise as the headless child made its way up her frame.
"
Ung-ung-ung.
"
Jim felt shivers
writhe up his spine, as though shadowing the shivering ascent of the tiny form
on Karen's body. The woman was still held in place by the hooked talon of
Adolfa's doppelganger, the claw that went through her upper jaw like a hook
through a fish.
"
Ung-ung-ung.
"
Karen was making
the same sounds Freddy had made.
The headless child,
the beast masquerading as a child that should be dead and cold and motionless but
somehow was not, plunged its neck toward Karen's face. And as it did, the
rest of the corpses on the platform moved toward her. They closed in on
her in a ring, each of them reaching out a hand. The ones that were too
far to touch her pulled off bits of their bodies: ears, fingers, noses.
They threw the pieces of themselves at Karen, and soon her mutilated body was
covered in bloody pieces of the already-dead.
She was still
making that noise.
That terrible noise. "
Ung-ung-ung.
"
It was worse than
a scream. Screams were what you did when you still had strength, your
body's way of saying,
Please save me.
This thing Karen was doing
was different. No hope for salvation. Only a quiet pleading for
death. For oblivion.
Please kill me
.
Destroy
me.
End
me.
The child-thing
touched its neck to Karen. She started coughing. Blood poured from
her nose. Her eyes. Just a bit at first, and then more and
more. The blood became a flooding river, a torrent that covered the
headless body hunched on her. So much it should have killed her.
But she was still
alive. Her eyes still aware.
Her body started to
shrivel. Like an apricot left out too long on a summer day. Her
skin wrinkled, aged. Her eyes remained bright, but the skin that had been
so lovely only a moment before now mottled, then spotted, then crinkled, then
cracked. The expensive clothing she had been wearing grew loose and then
fluttered free.
Karen was nude, her
form a grotesque parody of mummification. But where the ancients had
mummified their dead to show them honor and prepare them for safe trips in the
afterlife, Jim suspected that this had no such purpose. No, the things
masquerading as the dead around Karen were interested in her pain. He
could see it in the way they moved, in the way they swayed as if in a
trance. They seemed linked to Karen's suffering.
"For the love
of God," whispered Adolfa. "Can't someone stop it?"
No one moved.
Karen's figure
withered still further. She became nothing more than stick-like bones
wrapped in parchment-skin, yellow and dusty. The things around her
sighed.
But Karen was still
alive. Making that terror/pain/knowing noise. That mad noise.
That noise of… something that Jim didn't understand.
For some reason, he
thought of the fight with Carolyn. He didn't want a fight to be the last
thing she remembered of him.
The things around
Karen sighed. They seemed to start melting, their forms growing
amorphous. Their limbs drooped like waxen figures too close to a
fire. Then their bodies fell into one another, pooling. There was
only the headless child-thing on Karen's shriveled, living corpse.
Everything else, all the other dead creatures had become a primordial ooze, a
thrashing pool of gelatin.
The child-thing
reached down with one hand. It touched the horrid pool that writhed all
around the platform. The blob oozed up the child's arm. Covered
it. Covered the child's body. Then covered Karen's body as well.
"
Ung-ung-ung.
"
The sound she was
making disappeared as she was enveloped in the grotesque substance that was all
that was left of the dead. Cocooned in decay, a chrysalid wrapped forever
in the festering remains of the things that had once been dead and now were
something beyond death, something worse. Something dead but alive, dead
but hungry.
The doors to the
subway shut.
The subway lurched
into motion. Carrying Jim and Olik and Adolfa away from the platform,
from the sound, from Karen.
The platform
dropped back. Soon, mercifully, it was lost in the darkness.
And the subway
continued on.