Primeval (Werewolf Apocalypse Book 2) (18 page)

Sandy felt the entire car heave a sigh of relief. She had been tensed up, ready to fight off the monsters should they attack the subway train, but the beasts merely seemed to want a nap. Blood surrounded their mouths, matted in the brown and beige fur, so she figured they had recently eaten something … or someone. Otherwise, she was certain they would have been pouncing upon the car, tearing the doors open with their black claws and their horrible teeth.

She sat down, placing her homemade weapons next to her. Her arms were sore from standing stiff as a board for so long of a stretch. She rubbed them as Howard slumped down across the aisle from her. She could see the sweat running down his bald scalp. A few feet away, Craig flopped onto one of the seats, his long, sharpened metal railing gripped tightly in his right hand as though for security. He leaned forward, looking down at the prone, sleeping figure of Alice. Beth sat on the floor with her feet stuck out, Alice’s head in her lap. The girl snored softly. Sylvia rested on the other side of the train, away from everyone. Sandy thought she was sleeping, taking her usual afternoon nap, but she didn’t want to let anyone else know. She was probably a bit ashamed of her exhaustion.

Sandy, keeping her voice extremely quiet, whispered to Craig, “Would you have done it?”

“What?” he answered
sotto voce
.

“Would you have hurt Alice to keep her quiet?”

The man shrugged. “If it came to her or me, I pick me. I got a wife at home … hopefully she’s still there, still alive … in Queens. I look out for myself.”

“I wouldn’t have let you, you know.”

“I don’t see how you would’ve had a choice in the matter. Girl was getting loud. She needed to shut up. She got damn lucky she fainted before I had to take care of her.”

“That’s what they would do,” Beth added, nodding toward the slumbering monsters outside the car. “Those beasts. They don’t give a shit if they hurt someone as long as they take care of themselves.”

“Hey, I got a wife...”

Beth looked up, and her voice rose a bit. “She’s a goddamned sixteen-year-old kid.”

“Shh, be quiet,” Howard scolded.

“I’m just saying,” Craig said, raising his hands defensively in front of himself.

“And I’m just saying that you won’t lay a finger on this child,” Beth added. “What are we? Are we still humans? Or are we turning feral, just like those evil things out there? I’d like to believe that as people, as human beings, we can still hold on to a little bit of humanity.”

“Not much humanity when it’s your ass on the line,” Craig said. “You want to live in your fairy tale palace with Santa Claus, then you be my guest. In this world, the real world, you do what you have to do to survive. And I’m going to survive this here disaster.”

“Even at the price of a teenage girl’s life?” Sandy asked.

“Whatever it takes, baby. Whatever it takes.”

“You’re a real piece of work, Craig Chew,” Howard said, shaking his head.

“Like you wouldn’t knock her on the head to get her to be quiet?”

“No. I don’t think I would. She’s a kid.”

Sandy looked at Craig with a steely gaze. “It’s unanimous. You touch that little girl, and you’ll be sorry.”

“Screw all of you,” Craig muttered, and he stepped away from the group, heading for the back of the car to be alone with his anger. “Bunch of self-righteous hypocrites.”

He turned his back on the group, pouting.

Sandy shook her head. “Fucking savage. That’s all he is. A fucking savage.”

Howard shrugged, said, “This is New York. We’re all a little savage. Helps us endure the day to day.”

“Hey, lady,” Beth said, “thanks. This girl’s my responsibility. If I’d have known…”

“How could you?” Sandy asked, slipping down beside the Latina woman. “Like anyone could’ve predicted this? I got me a girlfriend who shoots these monsters down for a living. She didn’t see this coming, so how could anyone else?”

Beth looked up at her. “You guys…you been together, um, long?”

Howard backed away, looking uneasy and restless. He tiptoed over to Sylvia and sat next to her, but he was still listening to Sandy.

“You aren’t real comfortable with this, huh?” Sandy asked, grinning.

“I don’t know. It’s not something I’m very…well, I’m not really exposed to it, you know?”

Sandy raised her eyebrows. “You’re a gym teacher and a volleyball coach and you haven’t been exposed to lesbians?”

“I also coach golf.”

“Jeez, you must be wearing blinders or something.”

“I suppose I’m just not looking very hard.”

“Do you disapprove?”

“Not really. It just doesn’t matter a whole lot. Especially now.”

“It’ll matter if Nicole can get us out of here alive,” Sandy said. “And if I know my girl, you can bet she’s on her way right now.”

Sandy peered out the window at the two sleeping monstrosities a hundred yards from her. Shivering, she saw the doors were slightly ajar, the rats having eaten away some of the rubber that separated them when they were closed. If those huge beasts got it into their heads to enter the subway car, there would be very little any of them could do to hold them off. The weapons they had created from the metal pieces in the cabin suddenly seemed terribly ineffectual.

Alice stirred, smacked her lips. Beth stroked her hair, murmured something in the girl’s ear. She settled down, became quiet again.

Sandy wondered how long Alice could remain calm and asleep. Eventually, she would wake back up, scream or shout or panic. Then, Sandy would not only have the alerted Lycanthropes to worry about.

She’d also have to concern herself with the savage reactions of Craig Chew.

2:24 p.m.

As the helicopter took off, leaving behind the two soldiers, its rotors swept away much of the smoke from the burning oil on the street, and Nicole got a better look at the surrounding area. She’d been watching through the Sikorsky’s window, but her thoughts had been on reaching Sandy, not on her immediate surroundings. She’d taken in all the stunning chaos and destruction that was tearing New York City apart, but she’d lost the smaller picture: the things within reach of her weapons, the things she could affect. This was something she never did. Her mind was always on full alert, watchful and observant. The Lycanthropes could attack you from anywhere, so you needed to ascertain every place they could be lurking. She blinked, the smoke irritating her eyes even as it wafted away. Her concentration was now on full alert. She hefted the M-4 assault rifle into her arms and scanned the world around her.

General Burns was on her right-hand side, his own M-4 loaded and ready, held in his muscular arms while he puffed on a cigar. The helicopter disappeared from view, and she wished Hemmer a safe return to Brooklyn. Then, she returned her thoughts to location surveys.

The first thing she noticed was the way the streets were completely clogged with cars, either wrecked into each other or into buildings. The drivers must have been abruptly swarmed with creatures, probably the rats, and in the ensuing panic they had driven their cars blindly, madly. Many of the vehicles still contained partially eaten corpses. One yellow taxi cab had a body hanging halfway out of the door, the head and shoulders gnawed down to the bone. One car had actually driven up on top of another, its front end pointing at the blue sky. Blood streaked all along the sides of many of the vehicles, smears and desperate handprints covering doors and windows. There were also partially devoured bodies scattered in the street, stuffed in the small areas between cars and buses. They had probably been placed there by the Lycanthropes for consumption later, stored like canned meat in a cupboard.

Flames licked at some of the cars, and even more oil was spilled around them. Glass covered everything, blown out from the windows of the tall buildings above their heads. More fires were erupting from the gas lines in the skyscrapers.

It was a scene out of hell, a Roland Emmerich movie come to bloody and vivid life.

Nicole wound her way between two cars and only traversed a few feet before running into a smoking, burnt body. The black skin hugged the skeletal remains, randomly covered with tufts of smoldering material that were the dead person’s clothes once upon a time. The skull grinned up at her, bits of hair poking out in small patches.

Looking in the opposite direction, Nicole found her pathway obstructed by an overturned minivan. The side door was open, and blood had spattered all around the breach. Several long slashes had been clawed into the paint on the hood and side of the vehicle, testaments to the inhuman strength of the monsters.

Burns climbed on top of the hood of a station wagon, rifle ready at his side, cigar clenched between his white teeth. He scanned the horizon and motioned for Nicole to join him on his perch.

“We’re not going anywhere on the street,” he said, his speech slurred a bit by the cigar tucked into the corner of his mouth. “Gonna have to make our way on top of the cars.”

Nicole hopped up on the hood of the vehicle next to Taylor Burns’, and she got her first clear view of their location. The lion statues in front of the next building indicated that it was the New York Public Library. To the southwest of them, she saw the half-crumpled Empire State Building, the thin spire at its tip upside down and impaling the street, stabbing into the underground tunnel beneath. Bryant Park was just on the other side of the public library, and it was torn asunder by heavy construction, roped off with yellow tape that fluttered in the wind. A massive unoccupied bulldozer sat at the far end of the park near several overturned Ping-Pong tables. The library itself seemed relatively unharmed. There was no smoke belching out of it, nor were there any flames reaching out of its windows.

The streets around them, however, were a diorama of pandemonium. The cars and trucks, buses and vans, corpses and ruins of once-great skyscrapers blocked their way in every direction.
Burns was right
, Nicole decided.
If we’re traveling at all, we’re doing it on the backs of the wrecked cars.

Hopping onto Burns’ station wagon aerie, she said, “The subway entrance is just a few blocks west. Hemmer got us pretty damn close.”

“Knew he would,” Burns puffed. “Uh oh, we got company at seven o’clock.”

Spinning, Nicole shouldered her rifle, peering through the scope. A pack of five Lycanthropes were rushing at them from 39th Street. Having had the same idea as the soldiers, they were leaping from car to car, their talons gripping the roofs with assured confidence. They were somewhat larger than the beasts she was used to seeing, at least seven to eight feet tall, but appearing even larger when stretched out and charging at her.

Nicole sighted, fired, and blew the skull off the top of the leader’s head in a bloom of blood, bone, and brains. It flopped down between the cars, crashing into an open sedan door, dead before it hit the ground. She heard Burns fire, too, and a second beast fell, the left side of its face blown away in a horrendous splash of gore. Nicole turned her rifle, sighted on the third creature as it halted to a stop, wondering what had happened to its brothers. She pulled the trigger, a sudden calm enveloping her as she surrendered her actions back into automatic soldier mode. She hit the creature in the mouth, the bullet emerging from the back of its furry head, leaving a bloody trail.

Burns fired next to her, missed his target, and cursed loudly as the monster leapt onto the bed of a pick-up truck two cars away from them. The Lycanthrope jumped onto the next vehicle, bridging the gap and starting for the station wagon. Nicole swung her M-4 around, but Burns had already fired again, and the monster dropped awkwardly in between the station wagon and the next car, smacking its head against a window and breaking it.

There was a brief moment of calm. Nicole could hear her quickened breathing, deep but controlled. Beside her, Burns pulled the cigar out of his mouth and blew a smoke ring.

“There’s gonna be more,” he said.

Looking north, Nicole responded, “There already are.”

A pack of approximately twenty-five Lycanthropes was hurtling toward them from about a block away, leaping from car roof to car roof, crumpling the metal as they landed. Sometimes they fell off, into the gaps between the cars, but they were still making remarkable speed.

“Crap, look east,” Nicole shouted, pointing.

A swarm of the mutated rats were moving like a writhing, squirming carpet of brown and black fur. Each one was at least two feet long, and they jabbered as they headed directly for Nicole and Burns, yellow eyes targeting their prey.

“We gotta get off the streets,” General Burns said, opening fire on the pack of werewolf-like creatures. He emptied the clip, dropping all but six of the beasts. Letting the used magazine fall to the ground, he expertly reloaded.

“To the library,” Nicole said, already jumping from car to car. “It’s not on fire and the doors are shut. Probably not many of those things inside.”

She stopped for a moment to let him catch up with her as she sighted and blew away two more of the approaching monsters. From the other side of the street, a new group of creatures started slinking in between the cars, moving like huge cats on the prowl for live flesh. With a start, Nicole realized that this was exactly what these things were. They were cats, changed by the bite of something else. They were three feet long, with misshapen snouts full of ragged teeth. Their paws were silent as they moved, like sharks circling the cars.