Primeval (Werewolf Apocalypse Book 2) (22 page)

Nicole looked up at the rows of signs trailing up the tall buildings. Many had been electronic, and they were blank and impassive, devoid of their usual bright lights and advertisements. The flat-iron building stood tall against the sky, surrounded with wrecked vehicles, mostly yellow cabs. Theaters with dark marquees had opened doors, as if someone had just walked out of their auditoriums. Hot dog vender carts had been overturned, the contents spilled across the sidewalks. There were no people in sight, but a few once-human Lycanthropes still milled in between the cars, searching for something to kill or destroy.

“Times Square,” Nicole announced. “Or it once was.”

Taylor Burns started using three-bullet bursts on his rifle, exploding the heads of the trailing monsters. The two packs had seen each other, and several of the beasts were intent on fighting with members of the opposite gang. Burns dropped three more, and Nicole slammed a magazine into her rifle.

“I’ve only got two more mags,” she shouted, scanning the chaos for the entrance to the subway.

“That’s one more than I’ve got,” he said, taking out another creature.

“Over there,” Nicole said, pointing. “Subway stairs.”

“Run,” he said as his last magazine ran out of bullets.

She covered Burns while he tossed the M-4 aside and withdrew one of the grenades from his vest. Her bullets sprayed into the crowd of creatures, which had grown to nearly fifty Lycanthropes. They were appearing from alleys, from inside cars, from beneath the cars, and above the cars. Sometimes they fought one another, but most of them seemed to have a single goal in mind – killing the two humans before they got away.

Burns hurried to the stairs, and he practically flew to the landing. His feet didn’t seem to touch the concrete. Moving backwards while firing the last bullets from her final magazines, Nicole watched the sidewalk seem to grow, enveloping the world, covering up the dozens of creatures she had just killed or maimed. By the time she took the last step backwards, the city was gone. It even seemed quieter than it had on the surface. She could still see a piece of blue sky and just the fuzzy tail of a stream of clouds overhead before one of the jets screamed above them.

“Come on,” Burns urged her, pulling on a sleeve. “Hurry.”

He led her down the last of the steps just as the dozens of creatures arrived at the top of the stairs. Their howls and grunts were loud, suddenly overwhelming. Several of the monsters leapt into the subway opening, landing roughly so that they snapped their necks or broke the bones of their forelegs. It didn’t stop them, and they stumbled forward on broken limbs, intently searching for their prey. Their fanged, saliva-dripping muzzles came into focus just as Burns tossed his grenade, pulling the pin with his left hand.

Nicole ducked instinctively as she saw the pineapple-shaped explosive fly over her head. When it went off, it blew bits and pieces of numerous creatures all over the entrance. Slivers and chunks of cement shot into the air, slamming into many of the monsters in the front of the line, acting as effective projectiles. As Nicole rolled away from the destruction, she saw a single hairy foot somersault past her, the bone sticking out of the meaty end of the knee.

When the dust and spiraling body parts cleared, Nicole saw the entire stairwell was sealed shut from the surface. The subway entrance had collapsed, effectively blocking the way for the monsters to follow the soldiers from Times Square to the underworld of the tunnels. A few of the beasts, trapped under cinder blocks and cement pieces writhed for a bit, ineffectively trying to escape from their partial burial. One was speared by long steel bars that emerged from the end of a chunk of concrete, stuck to the wall like a butterfly in a lepidopterist’s collection.

“That’s what I’m talking about!” General Burns whooped.

“Which way is the train?” Nicole asked, joining Burns on the platform.

The area was eerily silent and very dark. Emergency lighting dispelled a bit of the gloom, but it couldn’t hold back the long shadows emerging from deeper within the tunnel. A partially devoured corpse lay across the tracks, as if thrown there by one of the creatures. Enormous dead rats littered the floor of the tunnel, killed by something, perhaps the third rail. Nicole wondered whether the rail was still electrified despite the power outage.

Burns nodded his head into the darkness to his right. He said, “Well, Brooklyn would be that a way.”

“Then that’s where Sandy is.” Nicole checked her ammunition supply, then gloomily raised her eyes to Burns. “All I’ve got left is the M-9,” she said.

“I know. I’m low, too.”

“Let’s hope we don’t run into another huge group of Lycans,” she muttered, almost growling the words. “Another pack as big as that last one, and we’re toast.”

“Speaking of toast, you’d better eat something.” He pulled out a Power Bar and bit into it. “Don’t know when we’ll get the chance again.”

Burns finished the bar in three bites and jumped off the platform onto the tracks. The sound echoed off the tunnel walls, amplified many times over. He turned to help Nicole to the ground, but she was already beside him. He shook his head. He should have known she wouldn’t need any assistance from an old geezer like him. She marched past him.

“I guess chivalry is officially dead, huh?” he said with a chuckle.

“Fuck that noise,” Nicole said, not turning around to look at him, squinting into the nearly dark passage. “I’m more of a man than you’ll ever be, Burns.”

“Yeah,” he said, finishing their old personal joke. “And more woman than I’ll ever get. Let’s go save the damsel that’s actually in distress. Maybe she’ll be grateful to me.”

Nicole gave a bark of a laugh, pulling out her mini-flashlight. Within a few steps, they were swallowed by the darkness.

2:59 p.m.

John Creed watched Michael as the man stopped in front of a swath of gang graffiti that looked like balloon letters spelling out an obscene epithet. The homeless man looked at the word, ran a hand through his shaggy blond hair, and lowered his gaze to the ground. He observed the trickle of water streaming down the center of the sewer passage.

“We’re lost,” he said, finally, forming the words John had been certain he would hear. The only words he truly didn’t want the man to say. He had figured Michael didn’t know where they were going, but he didn’t dare ask him. Once the thought was admitted, it became something real, something true.

“Jesus, I didn’t want you to say that,” John said.

“I’m sorry, but I’m all turned around. After that last chase with the rats, I think I should’ve taken you up a level, not down to this one.”

John couldn’t criticize the guy. The rats had spilled out of a drainage pipe, and they had run away, taking several fast turns and climbing down a ladder as fast as they could, then taking several more corners until they came face-to-face with this dead-end brick wall and the strange vaginal reference. John wondered if the graffiti referred to a specific woman or to a mere section of her that was a bit more salacious. For all he knew, it could mean a physical crack in the wall, although he didn’t spy any.

“We could retrace our steps, find our bearings.”

“You’d trust yourself to find your way again?” Michael asked, leaning against a damp wall. Beads of moisture soaked into his shirt, but he didn’t notice.

“You weren’t keeping track, huh?”

“Hell no, not with those mutant things running right behind us. Is it me, or do they look even bigger than the first ones we saw?”

“Probably because they got so much closer this time. So, you don’t know where we are. What comes next?”

Michael shrugged his thin shoulders. “I guess we go forward. The sewers will lead us somewhere. They all come out of the ground someplace.”

“I’m not so sure I want to be aboveground right now,” John admitted. “From the sounds we’re hearing, those rumblings, there is some bad shit happening right above our heads. We’re deep enough that the noise should be dampened a lot, but those explosions and crashes and stuff – that’s just too scary. Whatever it is, it’s fucking loud.”

“End days,” John said, little more than a whisper.

“You’re not one of those are you?” John asked. “A believer like that?”

“Oh, I think God’s real, but I never supposed the end was near, like in those crazy cartoon signs. But, when we looked outside, and I see those creatures down here coming at us, hell, maybe there’s something to it all. God knows, I’ve been wrong about enough in my life that it’s cost me everything. This could be my redemption.”

“Get me out of here alive and you’re good with God?” John had to struggle not to laugh. “I didn’t think I’d rate that high on the Big Guy’s list.”

Michael looked at him, his eyes wide and red-rimmed. “Could be some sort of purpose.”

And in that moment, John realized what was going through Michael Keene’s mind. He was seeing this mission to get to safe ground as some sort of redemption for his past sins, atonement for the way he had treated his family, the way he’d chosen the drugs over his girlfriend and job, the way he had fallen from grace into a hell of a labyrinth of tunnels and filth-encrusted sewers. He figured that if he got John out of Manhattan alive, he could rise above the low place he had sunk to. He could start on a middle ground somewhere, make a new life for himself. He could shake off the sewer rat within and find the human being buried beneath all the grime and shit. He could aspire to something new…

…and it was all dependent upon John’s survival.

In a way, he was flattered. He also wondered if it was doing Michael any kind of good to have so much riding upon helping a single person. If he did die – and the way New York was falling to the beasts, it was a pretty good bet he would get killed before the day was done – John would be devastated. He would be lost again. No amount of hope could ever get him motivated enough to get back into the world again.

But what are we without hope?
John wondered.
If I didn’t think there was a chance at surviving this clusterfuck, would I even be trying? And if we make it, it’ll be the best story I’ve ever written in my life.
Pulitzer prizes weren’t out of the question. If there were still prizes when they emerged into this crazed new world.

“Well, we can’t go any farther this way,” John said, waving at the brick wall with the graffiti. “Let’s backtrack a little and take the next turn we didn’t take.”

John moved next to him and put an arm around the homeless man’s shoulder. Michael smelled ripe, unwashed, but John presumed he smelled just as bad. The gesture felt false, like that of a bad actor in a crappy straight-to-DVD movie. He hoped it seemed genuine to Michael, but the poor guy was probably as cognizant of John’s pathetic attempt to cheer him up as John was.

“Can it be any worse than this?” John asked. “A dead end? If those things showed up now, we’d be cornered and eaten within seconds. I don’t like it. I don’t want to be eaten; it’s a thing I have. By the time we hear the pitter-patter of little rat feet, they’d be all over us. Let’s try somewhere else.”

Michael nodded. “All right.”

As they headed back up the tunnel, John prayed they weren’t marching straight into the path of the horde of rats. Then he realized what he was doing, and he was astonished.

He hadn’t actually prayed to God for anything in over twenty years.

He thought,
Maybe there’s actually something to this whole redemption through salvation thing.

Or maybe I’m just more desperate than I’ve been in twenty years.

Michael rushed past him, and John was at his heels. The two of them moved until they came to a split in the passage.

“We came that way last time,” Michael said, pointing down a corridor. “Let’s try this one.”

He led John down the right-hand passageway. The reporter listened as they stepped through the ankle-deep water that trickled along the center of the path. All he could hear were their footsteps and the dripping of condensation from the brickwork. No rat noises, no claws scrabbling along the concrete.

As they traveled, however, the water grew deeper, and John found himself sloshing through six inches of brown muck. He tried not to think about what was making the water that color. Or the stink that permeated the air down here. He focused on Michael’s back and said another quick prayer while he tried to keep up with the man.

God, if you get me out of this, I’ll do anything to help Michael Keene get back on his feet again. I don’t care what it costs me, but if we make it out of here alive, I owe you big time. Just like I’ll owe him.

In the distance, he heard something roar, something huge, a primeval guttural sound like a creature from the Jurassic period. It made the water that had condensed on the ceiling shake loose, and for a moment it felt like it was raining in the sewer system. John reached out and leaned against a wall, feeling the rough texture of brick beneath his fingers. The roar ended, and Michael turned to look back at John, his eyes large and very white in the gloom.

“What the heck was that?” he asked, clearly shaken.

“Something big,” John answered. “And yet another reason for us to move faster.”

As they started walking again, John wondered what kind of odds they had on getting out alive. Whatever they were, they were stacked against them.