Primeval (Werewolf Apocalypse Book 2) (14 page)

Things had been quiet for several minutes in a row outside the train, and Sandy, looking out at the tracks, didn’t see any of the creatures waiting around. She sighed with relief.

“Anything?” Craig asked.

She answered, “I don’t see any of them. That doesn’t mean they aren’t lurking in the shadows or are gathered somewhere in the train…”

“…eating that poor man,” whispered Sylvia. “My God, he sounded… he sounded…”

“Yeah, I know,” Sandy said. “My girlfriend said she was on her way to rescue us. We should just stay here and remain quiet.”

Those weren’t Nicole’s exact words, but the intention was there.

In the distance, down the dark tunnel, something metal overturned, clanging loudly. Sandy ducked her head back down behind the plastic orange and tan seats. She waited a moment before looking up again. There was something moving in the dark end of the tunnel, but she couldn’t make out what it was – human or beast or animal. She could just see, almost merely sense, that something was moving.

“What is it?” Howard asked, sneaking his shaved head above the seat so he could get a look.

“I don’t know,” Sandy said. “But I don’t think I like it.”

There was another sound, a rattling noise, high-pitched and metallic. The motion occurred again in the inky blackness farther down the tracks, possibly on the other side of the barrier. It seemed a bit closer this time, as though something was moving toward the subway car. Sandy held her breath.

“It sounds familiar,” Sylvia muttered. “I know that sound.”

In a moment, Sandy saw an elderly woman covered in at least four sweaters and a sock hat pushing a grocery cart out of the shadows and into the glow of a red light. She moved at a leisurely pace, and her cart wobbled, almost overturning every time she hit a bump. She was smoking a cigarette, and the end sparked brightly when she inhaled.

“It’s just a homeless woman,” Sandy said, breathing comfortably for the first time in what seemed like minutes.

“We need to get her in this car,” Beth said. “My God, she’s out there in the open where any of those things could get her.”

Craig said, “How do we know one of them hasn’t already? She could be bitten, scratched, wounded. She could turn as soon as we get her in here.”

“And how would we get the doors closed?” Sylvia asked. “Once they’re pried open, how do we close them again?”

“We can’t just leave her out there,” Howard said. “Can we? I mean, can we really do that? What kind of people would that make us?”

“The kind that survive,” Craig said.

The old woman kept moving forward, shoving hard and muttering to herself as she bounced the cart along. Sandy could now see the piles of black plastic bags in the pushcart, piled three or four high, probably everything the old woman owned.

Sandy spotted movement out of the corner of her eye, and she turned to see a dark mass heading directly for the old woman, something low to the ground and huge. As it got closer, the crone must have sensed something, and she turned slowly to peer into the darkness of the tunnel behind her. Leaning over, the old woman squinted, and then she spun on her heels and started running toward the subway train, leaving her possessions behind her. Sandy was surprised at the bag lady’s burst of agility and speed.

When the mass swarmed into the red light of the tracks, Sandy saw the horde of mutant rats, hundreds or thousands of them, scrabbling after the woman. They dragged their naked, pulpy tails behind them. Their black talons scraped along the cement ground, loud when in such a vast hunting party. Their mouths opened and closed as they hurtled toward the woman, exposing rows of shark-like fangs.

“Jesus God,” Howard said as they just kept appearing from the tunnel. “How many of them are there?”

“Must be thousands,” Sandy said.

The creatures kept appearing, a multitude clamoring on top of each other, a sea of brown and black fur and teeth and claws. They descended upon the old woman, who fell beneath them, screaming for a moment before being completely obscured from view. All Sandy could see were the swarming mutants as they completely covered the woman. Her protestations stopped abruptly, after only a second or two.

But the rats kept coming, flooding out of the tunnel until the entire track was covered by their wriggling bodies. They moved fast, even for rats, and they soon arrived at the subway train.

Sandy backed away from the glass, asking, “Can they get in through the windows? What about the doors?”

“I think we’re safe for now,” Craig answered.

The vermin surrounded the train car, sensing the food on the other side of the metal and glass. They pressed their faces against the doors, stood on their hind legs and scratched at the silver metal exterior, attempting to reach the prey inside. Several of them had bloodstains around their mouths and forepaws.

Sandy saw the whole tunnel’s floor was a writhing brown and black mass. The beasts scrambled on top of each other, straining to get to something to devour, something to fill their aching stomachs. They acted on instinct, like a pack of wolves instead of rats.

They were stumbling on top of one another at the doors, six or seven rats high, each struggling to get inside the train compartment. Their claws scratched along the glass, and some had discovered the rubber divider that ran down the middle of the doors. They gnawed at it, but it was too small an area for them to get their entire heads through, let alone their fat, swollen bodies. They stuck their muzzles through the chewed-through spaces, spitting out rubber, gnashing their enormous teeth.

Alice started to scream, even though Beth held the girl close to her. Sandy had to admit to herself that she wanted to let loose, too, but she held her own shouts inside, looking around the car for some sort of weapon. She saw nothing that could be of use, so she grabbed Nicole’s present, the iPad still in its box, and she started swinging it at the snouts of the creatures as they poked them through where the rubber divider had been. They had gnawed it completely away from the ground to four or five feet up. The iPad felt comfortingly solid as she swung it, bashing in several of the creatures’ noses. Small, sharp fangs were dislodged, and they clattered to the floor. Still more of the giant rodents took the place of the first, shoving forward until they mashed their faces into the car. She swung again, grinned when rat blood splattered across the door.

Behind her, she heard a fumbling sound, and she turned briefly to see Howard and Craig shoving Craig’s cloth suit jacket into the gap created by two of the rats trying to get into the car. Howard looked around and grabbed Sylvia’s environmentally friendly cloth shopping bags, dumping the contents onto another seat.

Sandy swiped at the new snouts again, crushing the top one, which withdrew. It was soon replaced by another.

All around the subway car, the mutant creatures swarmed. They were five or six deep, blocking out everything below waist level, and they kept chewing on the rubber at the doors and windows.

Howard and Craig swung the jacket and the cloth bags against the door, blocking out the sight of the rats climbing on top of each other, scurrying to get closer. Howard shoved the various sacks into different holes, avoiding the rats’ chomping teeth.

“They’ll chew right through those,” Sandy said.

“But it’ll take them a while longer,” Howard explained. “Even if it’s just a few minutes…”

Alice began sobbing, the sound loud in the car, even over the sound of the rats outside. Beth searched through her purse and removed a prescription bottle of pills. Knocking two of them into the palm of her hand, she ordered Alice to gulp them down.

“Valium,” she said. “It’ll calm your nerves.”

After her ward took her pills, Beth took one for herself, swallowing it dry. Sandy nearly asked her for one, but decided to keep her mind unclouded by drugs. She needed to keep her thinking clearheaded.

“We need some kind of weapon,” she said, looking around the place.

Sylvia pulled a small knife from her purse and said, “I got a shiv.”

Howard started to grin and told Craig, “Hey, come help me over here.”

He stepped over to the metal post that ran from floor to ceiling. Studying it for a moment, he placed his back against the wall, squirming at the way the rats started attacking the metal and glass of the subway car right behind him. Their fury increased with his near proximity. He kicked out at the metal bar, and it groaned a bit. He kicked again, then again.

“Gonna make me a club,” he said.

Craig moved to the next post and started emulating the young man. “I got it,” he said, striking the metal with his boot heel.

Howard’s bar came loose at the top, but several screws still attached it to the floor. He grabbed hold of it and bent it down toward his feet. The metal groaned in protest, but it bowed to his strength. He twisted it a few times, and the bar came loose. It ended up about four feet in length, and the edge where he’d bent it till it broke was sunken inwards and sharp on the end. He wielded it like a massive sword.

Craig’s bar came loose near the ceiling of the car, nearly snapping in half with the force of his kick. Sandy decided she’d better re-evaluate the big guy. He may have had an extra thirty pounds on him, but he seemed pretty strong.

The vibrations within the subway car stirred the rats up outside. They squalled and fought each other, scratching at the doors and chewing at the rubber with even more insane single-mindedness. More of their jabbering mouths and snouts pushed through the crack in the doors, and Sandy thought she witnessed them inch open slightly. Swearing, she started pounding on the rats with the iPad again, trying to crush their skulls so that they remained stuck in the crack, another barrier for the masses behind them to chew through.

Howard used his pole to smack more of the mutants trying to enter their car. Shoving with the sharp end, he ran the pole through one rat’s neck and pulled, jamming it into the gap as his weapon came back red and bloody from the little corpse.

“Take that, sucker!” he shouted with a grin. He turned to Sandy and said, “Few more like that one, and we got us a rat force field.”

Something roared in the northern darkness of the tunnel, answered by another howl nearer to the subway. The sound reverberated in the shaft, making it seem even louder than it was.

With a loud screeching, the rats began to scramble away from the car, tumbling over each other to flee as a horde in the opposite direction from where they’d emerged.

“What was that?” Alice asked. The girl’s eyes were wide and wobbling, like a cornered animal. Sandy wished her coach had remembered the Valium earlier. Maybe Alice would have been more even-keeled by now.

“It’s scaring the rats away,” Howard said. “So, it’s nothing good. Guarantee that.”

Within thirty seconds, the tunnel was clear of the thousands of vermin that had taken flight, seeking refuge from whatever was coming down the tunnel now. The old bag lady’s skeleton lay a few yards from the train, the bones picked clean of any flesh, the eye sockets black and empty.

The roaring came again out of the pitch blackness farther down the tunnel, louder this time, closer.

Turning, Sandy tried to peel one of the metal strips off the glass of an advertisement in a frame in the car. She figured she could use the glass in the frame as a sharp weapon. When she tore the strip off, the pane fell to the floor and clinked. Realizing it was merely some form of cheap plastic, she scanned the car for something else that could be formed into a weapon.

Grinning, Sandy hurried to one of the shiny metal handrests by the orange seats. It was curved with two smaller crescent shaped pieces inside so that passengers had something to grab hold of when entering and exiting the train. She steadied her back and kicked hard at the thing, recalling all those judo lessons Nicole had forced her to take last year.

The armrest went flying across the car, and Alice cried out in surprise. When Sandy retrieved it, she flipped the curved piece of metal in her hand, a bit bigger, getting a feel for its weight. Then, she smashed the end under her sneaker. She had to stomp on it several times to get a finer edge on it. Now it resembled a boomerang with sharp, nearly knife-like edges on each side. She nodded in satisfaction.

“My girl’s a badass,” Howard said as he started kicking the other handrests out of place. Craig joined in, and soon they had three more of the homemade weapons.

They gave one to Sylvia, who tried to refuse, but eventually took it, keeping her “shiv” clutched in her right hand. When Sandy looked closer at it, she saw it was merely a steak knife. One went to Beth, who nodded her thanks. They didn’t even think to offer any weapon to the terrified high-schooler trembling in the coach’s arms. Alice had enough issues without worrying about self-defense.

Sandy took one in each hand, holding them tight, testing them against an unseen enemy. She could strike up or down, slash sideways – they really were very user-friendly. Howard hefted his pole, pointing the sharp end out toward the crimson-lit tracks and the tunnels beyond them. Craig assumed a similar position, but he looked ridiculous, an overweight, balding man with a bad haircut and a very big stick. Then again, it had worked for Teddy Roosevelt.

Beth stood, pulled the slightly groggy Alice up with her. Sandy wondered if the girl was going into shock or if the Valium really was working that quickly. If anyone in the group was going to be a liability, it was going to be Alice, and that was too bad. Her athletic skills would have come in very useful.