Primeval (Werewolf Apocalypse Book 2) (33 page)

Nicole barked out orders as she lifted Beth into the car. “Get down between seats, away from any windows. Cover your neck with your hands, and put your head down between your legs.”

“Where’s Alice?” Beth shouted, noticing the girl wasn’t behind her where she’d thought she was. “Oh my God, where’s Alice?”

She pushed her way back out of the subway car, slapping away Nicole’s grasping hands.

“Beth!” she cried.

“She’s my responsibility.”

Taylor Burns jumped into the car, looked behind him to see exactly what he dreaded the most.

Alice knelt on the ground, her foot caught between two diverging rails. She was frantically yanking on her trapped ankle, but it was lodged in tightly. Beth was hurrying for her, but behind both of them, a couple of hundred yards back, the entire tunnel filled with flames. The explosion gave a huge
whumph!

Beth was knocked to the ground.

Suddenly, as in combat, Burns saw everything moving in slow motion.

He grabbed Nicole by the waist and shoved her into the car, where she landed in the aisle, one hand plummeting into the bloody ribcage of the corpse. She lifted her hand, looked at the gore covering it, and used her feet to scooch herself between two seats, away from the disgusting carcass.

Beth rose to her knees, her eyes drawn to the girl who’d been left in her care, her star player, her friend. Alice tugged at her foot, only implanting it farther between the tracks. She was focusing on extracting herself from this trap and was unaware of the wall of twirling flames speeding down the corridor at her. Beth cried out her name, dove into a forward lunge.

Burns watched in horror as the fireball swooped down the tunnel like one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. It was closer by the millisecond, and it reached all the way from one side of the tunnel to the other, burning everything in its path.

Beth ran forward a step. The dust on the floor raised in tiny puffs. Her other hand reached out for Alice as the girl heard the loud whooshing sound behind her. She started to turn, her black hair spindling out in graceful arcs as Beth’s second foot fell with a slam against the ground.

Burns shifted, ducked inside the protective subway car. He was shouting, but the sound of the burning ball of gas overwhelmed his words. Only Nicole saw his mouth moving, and she wondered what he was saying. His face was red with adrenaline as he dove to a space in between two seats away from any windows.

Beth took another step, was gaining ground, but the fireball was much faster.

The gas pipes running alongside the tracks on the tunnel walls burst open with small sparkling eruptions of flames. The metal twisted and bent outwards, fireworks of natural gas popping one after another down the corridor, traveling ahead of the mass of flames and heat. It bypassed Alice, heading directly down the tracks of the line.

As Alice finally turned the whole way around, twisting her foot into a painful position, she saw the wall-shaped inferno roiling toward her. She opened her mouth to scream, and the air was sucked from her lungs, collapsing them at the same time the flames smashed into her. Her hair burned away in half a second. Her eyes boiled and exploded from their sockets, and her skin turned black and peeled, sloughing from the bone in large chunks of well-done meat.

Burns covered his head with his coat and curled into a fetal position, giving Nicole a sharp kick as he did so.

Beth had almost stopped running, was trying to turn back toward the subway car, when the tsunami of flames hit her.

She thought,
This is it, then. This is death. Oh my dear Lord, it hurts so much.

But it didn’t hurt for long.

First, her gold cross flared with heat, scalding a religious brand between her breasts, and her earrings became so hot they liquefied her earlobes before dropping into melting silver puddles at her feet. Her crackling skin almost evaporated in the horrific heat. Her bones were instantly charred black, and the cartilage holding them together melted with the inferno. Her skeleton collapsed in a smoking heap as the fireball swept past her.

The blazing wall of flaming gas rolled forward, blasting against the side of the subway train. The force of its collision shifted the cars, pitching them off the tracks until they toppled onto one side. Couplings split apart or welded together. The sound of metal scraping against metal overwhelmed any other sound. The windows exploded inwards, covering the five survivors in shards of glass.

Nicole screamed, trying to hold on to one of the seats. The heat from the gas ball had turned the metal legs of the chairs into searing hot burners, and she screeched as the palm of her hand was scalded.

The train car groaned, tipping over onto its side. Now, the fireball was concentrated on the bottom of the car, and the people inside were tumbled end over end. Whenever one of them touched metal with bare skin, they screamed, and the smell of burnt flesh filled the cabin. Howard felt pieces of the windows lodge in his neck and hands as he tried to stop himself from rolling down the aisle. He fell over on his side, and John and Michael dropped next to him, their legs swimming into a pool of broken glass.

The fireball wasn’t done with the train. It toyed with it further, angling it away from the other cars, snapping its couplings and sending it screeching across the tracks in a shower of bright sparks. The sparks set off smaller explosions, little pops, like bottle rockets.

Nicole rolled several feet down the aisle, her legs entwined with the ribcage of the corpse, which was sizzling on the floor, cooking from the skillet-like heat of the bottom – now the side – of the car. She kicked at it, tried to stop herself by grasping at one of the metal poles that ran from ceiling to floor. With a cry of pain, she withdrew her hand from the searing metal, losing some of the skin on her palm. One of the seats was raked with claw marks, and she got her fingers into the edge of one. The orange plastic held. Her arm was nearly jerked out of its socket when she stopped herself.

Howard, Michael, and John had clasped hands, each holding on like a chain as the car tumbled onto its side and screeched across the ground of the tunnel. There was a jerk when it broke apart from the other subway cars, and John fell backwards, against the broken window that was suddenly beneath him. A shard of glass six inches long sliced into the top of his shoulder, and he screamed, reaching out a hand to try to recapture the rest of the group.

Sandy tumbled, her jacket getting caught around her face so that she couldn’t see anything. She rebounded between seats in the aisle, falling blindly across one when the car overturned. She found herself one seat over from John, Howard, and Michael, and she called out to them. She could hear the glass beneath her feet as she tried to right herself, but by the time she got the jacket off of her head, she was falling again, the car skidding on its side, pushed forward beside the tracks by the force of the fireball.

Taylor Burns held onto the side of the seat he was crouched behind, his legs stretched out to the one in front of him. When the wall of fire hit the side of the car, he saw the flames leap in a furious ballet at the windows, then the whole world started to reel. He shoved his legs out farther, securing himself between the seats, and he held the position until the car decoupled from the others, lurching onto its side and skidding ahead along the path of the tunnel. He fell to his left, tumbled end over end down the length of the car, bumping into Nicole at the other side. Along the way, everything in his jacket was shaken loose, and weapons and ammunition clattered all over the cab.

Including the two grenades, both of which bounced to the other end of the car.

Fire enveloped the train, and the air became stifling hot. It was difficult to breathe, and the survivors all reached out for some sort of human contact. Nicole and Burns held on to each other, using their legs as leverage, the soles of their shoes melting against the hot metal of the seats.

Burns shouted, “The grenades!”

The noise of the fire and explosions was so loud Nicole couldn’t hear him, even from only a few feet away. She gave him a puzzled look.

The subway car came to a stop, hitting the far wall of the tunnel, and all of the survivors tumbled into the aisle, extricated from their moorings. The fireball continued down the tunnel, away from them. Everything inside the car was hot to the touch, and the rubber floorings were melting into a sticky pond of goo.

Burns was the first to cry out in the sudden silence. “Grenade!”

He shoved at Nicole, pushing her toward the back exit, screaming for her to get out of the car.

He knew that with the intense heat, the ammunition or the grenades could explode at any moment.

He grabbed Sandy’s hand as the first round of ammunition fired within the cab, winging off the walls. It pinged twice, then shot out a somehow-still-intact window in a flowering of glass shards. Sandy ducked her head instinctively, but Burns pulled her around himself, shoving her toward the exit where Nicole waited to give her a hand.

He moved farther down the aisle until he saw John against the wall. A second round got hot enough to blow, and another bullet ricocheted around the cab, pinging with each change in direction. Burns fell behind one of the seats where the bullet eventually lodged. He grasped John by the shoulders, and then pulled his hand back when it encountered something sharp. John cried out, and Burns saw the shard of glass buried in the meat of the man’s shoulder. He gave John a hearty push.

“Get to the exit in the back!” he shouted, unsure if the man could hear him. At least he would see the urgency in his eyes. “The other end has two very hot grenades in it.”

That got them moving, fumbling and crawling over each other, trying to avoid the melted rubber on the floor. Michael was rushing beside Burns when another round of ammunition heated up enough to fire, smashing a window. Then another shot went off from someplace in the car, and all three men ducked their heads in unison as they scurried to the back exit.

Burns snarled orders at them. “Hurry up, faster, faster. Do you wanna die?” He didn’t know if they could hear him over the distant roar of the departing fireball and the whiz-bang of rounds of ammo heating up and shooting off.

Howard shouted as he leapt from the back of the subway car, landing in a crouch beside the rails on the ground. He felt disoriented, as though his whole world had been capsized and shaken up.

Nicole and Sandy had fled about fifty yards away from the subway and farther from the fire wall that was nearly out of sight down the tunnel. They shouted for Howard to hurry up, to get away from the train in case something else went off within it.

John was getting ready to leap from the back of the car when another bullet reached its firing temperature and exploded. It ricocheted off the walls twice before slamming into John’s back. The reporter screamed in surprise and fell forward out of the car. His face hit the ground with the sound of crunching bone, and he knew his nose was broken. He saw stars for a moment, before he heard the slapping of Michael’s feet as he jumped to safety.

Burns gave the subway car a final look, searching for the grenades. They had been lucky the things hadn’t gone off, but he wondered if they had melted into the rubber of the floor. He hopped to the ground, caught his breath, and scooped John up under one arm and Michael under the other. John’s face was a Rorschach of blood. Burns pulled the two of them away from the car at the same moment he heard the explosives go off.

The three men were knocked forward by the double blast, one grenade going off directly after the other. The front end of the subway car burst into thousands of pieces, each flying in different directions. A seat went soaring over the three men’s heads as they lay prone, and Burns tried to cover the two civilians under his arms. One metal handrail zinged over them, landing near Nicole, Sandy, and Howard’s hiding place. Another slammed into John’s side, further injuring the reporter.

“Oh no,” Burns said, feeling John gasp for breath.

In moments, the debris had all landed, and dust clouded up the area so it was difficult to see. Burns turned toward John, who was lying on his face, his arms spread out next to him. His right shoulder was bleeding where a large piece of glass had impaled him.

Gently, Burns turned him on his side. John coughed, and gore splattered down Burns’ front. The reporter’s face was crushed inwards, and several of his teeth were either broken or shattered.

“Aw, shit, man,” Burns said. “Here, hold still, this is gonna hurt like a bitch.”

“What?” John muttered through shattered teeth.

Burns pinched the piece of glass emerging from the reporter’s back and gently pulled it out of his shoulder muscle. It bled a bit more, but it didn’t seem as though it had severed an artery or anything too vital. John rolled onto his back with a sigh and a grimace.

“It would… have… made a… terrific… story,” John gasped, moving his bloody lips like a fish out of water, gasping for air.

“It’s not over yet,” Burns said while the others gathered around the bleeding man. “You’re hurt, but you’re not dead. Leastwise not yet. Can you stand?”

“Don’t… think so,” John said, but Burns was already lifting him to his feet. He cried out in pain as a sharp stabbing sensation pierced his body.

“Sure you can. Look at you,” Burns said.