OUR LIVING FUNERAL by Chelsey Baker
The heavy, beige colored subway doors closed with a definitive thud. Riley sat perfectly still in her seat, feeling the momentum of the train move her body as it slowly picked up speed again, careening down the track she couldn’t see. Her green eyes wandered until she could see her mother’s shoulders in her periphery, mere inches away from her own. Nancy had on a floral blouse with cut out shoulders. Riley could see her mother’s tan skin slightly sway as the subway rushed forward under the Chicago streets. Since the divorce, Riley’s mother had begun to dress like a woman half her age.
Nancy stared down at the grungy brown floor of the train. All she could see was a myriad of shoes and a piece of foil from a gum wrapper. She wiggled her feet, watching the overhead light shine off of her red toenails. Her eyes wandered to her daughter’s shoes beside her. She wore dingy black Chuck Taylors. A hole had begun to form near one of the soles.
“You need new shoes,” Nancy said quietly.
Riley glanced down at her feet. “These are fine,” she replied.
“Fine? There’s a hole in your right one.”
Riley sighed, staring at the fake happy people that smiled down at her from the advertisements that lined the ceiling of the train car. There were so many things, a litany of things, she could argue with her mother about. Her shoes felt too easy as the subject.
“I’ll get new ones, alright?” Riley said and scratched her cropped brown hair.
Nancy hated when Riley moved her arms about. She always tried to look away, but it felt as though her eyes were magnetic and couldn’t help but stare at the crooks of her daughter’s elbows. A series of red sores and bruises covered her daughter’s pale, sallow looking skin. Most had scabbed over but they still looked angry, defiant almost. It felt as though each little sore looked back at Nancy, mocking her.
“You didn’t have a long sleeved shirt to wear?”
Riley turned her neck to look at her mother. Her light brown eyes were steely as she gazed back. Fine lines surrounded the corners of Nancy’s lips. Riley had the same slightly upturned nose as her mother, but it was the only thing that looked familiar. It was the only thing they shared.
“I’m sorry that my addiction embarrasses you,” Riley snapped through gritted teeth.
She didn’t bother to keep her voice down. An elderly man with thick round glasses glanced at her before blinking and turning his head away.
It had only been four hours since Riley had been kicked out of the Gateway Alcohol and Drug Treatment Center, but she absorbed her mother’s shame as though it were her favorite sweater. It was familiar.
“I’m not embarrassed,” Nancy snapped, running a hand through her shoulder length brown hair. “I just… Don’t like to see what you’ve done to your body.”
Silence reigned. Mother and daughter listened as the train clicked and whirred along the track. Their bodies swayed slightly as the subway shifted upward, barreling up from underground towards Belmont. Riley watched as trees suddenly appeared on either side of the murky windows, brown and green blurs that lined the two story brownstones, built in rows along the track.
Her thoughts meandered to Gateway, and the way the woman at the front desk looked at her as she was being escorted out by security. She pictured the joint, all wrinkled and burnt, that her counselor had found in her room. It was just to take the edge off—the dive and plummet of withdrawal that had her body in a vice grip. But all they had seen was a rule broken.
Nancy sighed, feeling the subtle ache of a headache begin to form in the center of her forehead. Her thoughts were also on Gateway, and the conversation she had with Tim before she had driven to pick up her daughter.
“Jesus, she got kicked out again?” her ex-husband had complained on the phone. “How could you let this happen?”
She had hung up on him, but his words clung to the air around her like smoke. How could you let this happen? They were divorced and Riley’s addiction to heroin still caused them to argue. It felt like their marriage had died the moment their daughter put a needle to her flesh.
Nancy rubbed her temples, glancing at the people around them. The man with the thick glasses that sat across from them had dozed off, his head tilted back against the wall. A heavy set woman with bushy blonde hair read a romance novel beside him. To the right was a middle aged Asian man frowning as he stared down at his phone.
A cough rang out. Nancy followed the sound to the other side of the train, where a balding man sat in the corner. His skin was pasty and slightly shiny with sweat. He sat hunched in a dark green jacket, gazing at the floor.
Nancy’s stomach lurched and she forced herself to look away. The man looked how Riley did whenever she stopped using. Those days where her daughter shivered and said she was ready to be done with heroin for good. How many times had those words left her lips? How many times did Nancy have to endure hearing them, knowing they were false?
The train began to slow as it approached a stop. The dozing man opened his eyes, and got to his feet with a soft groan. The woman with the romance novel glanced up at him as she turned a page. The heavy subway doors slid open and the man trudged off. A young woman with a purple backpack walked onto the train, her tennis shoes squeaking slightly as she turned left and sat in an empty seat across from the coughing man.
The doors came to a close, and everyone leaned to the right as the train began to move. Riley felt her stomach drop slightly as the tracks began to dip down, hurling underground again. The train grew darker as it sunk into a tunnel.
The sickly looking man began to cough again, his body heaving with the effort. Nancy found herself unable to take her eyes off him. It wasn’t just the germs he spread with his incessant coughing, there was something about his eyes that looked strange, though she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
As she watched him, the man slowly rose unsteadily to his feet. His eyes were dazed as he stared at the sticky brown floor of the L train. He opened his mouth and a low, almost guttural sound emanated from his pale lips.
“What the—“ Riley began when the man suddenly turned to his right and lunged at the young woman with the purple backpack.
The woman stared up in horror as the man opened his mouth wide and bit into her neck with a sickening, sepulchral noise. He tore into her flesh. Nancy and Riley watched in horror and leapt from their seats, as the other train goers cried out and screamed. There were eight people total, including the sick man. All of them flew over seats and down the aisle way.
All but one.
The heavy set blonde woman trembled in her seat, her brown eyes wide with shock as she watched the sick man continue to devour the young woman. Her hazel eyes were turned toward the ceiling, but they could no longer see.
Riley and her mother stood with the others on the opposite side of the train. There were five of them total. The middle aged Asian man who had been on his phone clutched at his heart through his shirt, breathing heavily. A teenaged girl cried in the corner, her heavy black eyeliner ran down her face. Between the two was a muscular black man with a gold earring. Riley stared at the blonde woman, her fingers still clutching the pages of her romance novel in her seat.
“MOVE!” Riley bellowed.
Her voice was loud and frantic. The sick man looked up from the young woman’s corpse, his face covered in her blood. His eyes, which seemed to have turned slightly yellow, shifted from Riley to the blonde lady. He growled, shoving the dead woman aside as though she were a rag doll, and stood upright. His gaze seemed hazy and unfocused. Nancy got the distinct impression that the man, whoever he was, was no longer fully there. His movements were clumsy, uncoordinated, and his expression was vacant. She wondered if he had lost all cognitive function.
The passengers on the train watched as the sick man charge forward just as the blonde woman did. She tossed herself from her seat, but her heavy body made her slow. The sick man squealed and jumped onto the woman’s back.
She cried out as h
er legs buckled underneath his weight. Before her head hit the ground, he had already dug his teeth into the side of her neck. Blood gushed onto the floor of the train as he made contact with her carotid artery.
“No!” shrieked the teen, frantically shaking her head. Her dyed black hair flew about her face as she stared at the growing pool of blood on the floor.
“Quiet!” the black man snapped, glaring at her. “You’ll attract its attention.”
“Oh,” Riley said and pushed between the two. Behind them was a metal door with a square window in the center. Below the window, in bold red letters read STOP DO NOT OPEN EMERGENCY USE ONLY.
Riley grabbed the silver handle and jerked it to the left, hearing the gears shift. She opened the door and waved at her mother and the others. “Into the next car!” she urged.
The Asian man was the first to run through, followed by the black man. He had grabbed the teenager’s hand and pulled her after him. Nancy looked at her daughter with an appalled expression, then walked over the threshold.
The next car only had two people in it. One was a red haired man with clusters of freckles all over his face. He immediately stood up, watching as everyone piled in with a bemused expression. The other passenger was a middle aged woman with beautiful olive toned skin.
“What the hell is going on?” the red haired man demanded, looking at each of them.
“We don’t know, this man just started attacking people!” the teenaged girl blubbered. She touched the metal spikes on her choker nervously.
“It’s alright,” the black man said, staring into their former car through the window. “The door is locked; he can’t get to us.”
Nancy stepped around the group and walked to the right wall of the train. Halfway up was a metal box that jutted out from the wall. On the left side was a speaker and a small silver button. “I’m gonna call the conductor,” she said, and pressed the button down with her index finger.
“Hello?” Nancy said into the speaker. “There is an emergency! A man is attacking people! The police need to be called!”
Her request was met with a few moments of static and then nothing.
“Hello?!” she yelled. “Can anybody fucking hear me?!”
The teenager sobbed and sank into a seat. The Asian man sat beside her, blinking over and over again. Riley wondered if he was in shock.
“Is anybody getting service?” the black man asked, frowning down at the phone in his hand.
One by one each Chicagoan whipped out their phones and shook their heads. There were many sections of the L where nobody got service. They were underground, beneath several layers of metal and concrete.
“What do we do? What do we do?” the teenager asked, her pale, skinny body trembling.
“We should keep moving,” the Asian man said, his voice soft but certain. “We should put as much distance between us and that man as humanly possible.”
The black man shook his head, absentmindedly touching his moustache. “I disagree. I think we should stay here and make sure that the man doesn’t go anywhere or hurts anyone else,” he reasoned. “He could easily go through the other emergency door the opposite way.”
The olive skinned woman quietly came forward to stand with the others. “You say he has hurt people?” she said with an accent Riley could not quite place.
“Not just hurt, he killed them!” the gothic teen said as black makeup continued to cascade down her face.
“Perhaps we should kill him? It’d be self-defense,” the foreign woman reasoned, shrugging her shoulders. She wore a quartz necklace that made a soft tinkling sound as she moved.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, I’m not killing anyone!” said the red haired man, jabbing his thumb into his mustard colored sweater. “For all I know you guys are the crazy ones!”
The black man took a step forward, glaring into his face. “All you need to do is look through that god damn window to know we aren’t crazy,” he snarled.
“Get out of my face!” the red haired man barked and pushed his palms against the man’s chest.
Within seconds, the black man grabbed him by the collar of his sweater and shoved him. Surprised, the red haired man stumbled backwards, tripping on his own feet. His body fell into the emergency door, his head making contact with the window with a sharp crack.
Nancy flung herself between the two of them with her arms stretched out and her palms up. “Hey!” she snapped angrily. “Attacking each other is going to get us nowhere!”
The red haired man rubbed at the back of his head, a scowl on his face. The black man took a deep breath then looked down at Nancy with a curt nod.
“Okay,” he said, breathing out. “Okay.”
Riley ran a hand through her cropped brown hair, trying desperately not to think about getting high. Such a situation would tempt any addict, she was sure.
“Maybe we should move to the next car?” she suggested. “I doubt all of the intercoms are broken, and if we can contact the conductor, he can reach out to the police.”
The Asian man nodded his head vigorously in agreement, but the black man frowned down at the ground.
“I think if we were to keep moving, panic would spread. You saw what happened to that woman when she was paralyzed with fear,” he reasoned, crossing his arms across his muscular chest. “I think as long as we know where the man is, we should remain here.”
“I don’t want to die…,” murmured the teen girl, her black hair falling around her face as she stared mournfully into her lap.
“Nobody else is fucking dying, alright?” Riley growled. “That man, whatever happened to him, looks messed up in the head.”
“Well, obviously—”the black man interjected.
“No, I meant that he doesn’t seem to be high functioning anymore,” Riley said, cutting him off. “I don’t know what happened, but I think the cognitive parts of his brain aren’t working.”
Nancy blinked at Riley, surprised to hear her very own thoughts come out of her daughter’s mouth.
“I agree,” Nancy murmured—which made Riley look surprised in turn.
“Well, that’s great and all, but what are we going to do?” snapped the freckled man.
Suddenly, the emergency door on the opposite side of the train was opened and a blonde man, who appeared to be in his forties, poked his head into the car.
“Everything alright?” he asked. “We’ve been hearing a lot of yelling,” he pointed behind him with his thumb.
The Asian man shook his head while the teen visibly shivered.
“No, man,” said the black man with a grimace. “A man has started attacking and eating people. We have him isolated in the next car. Seems to be some kind of virus or infection.”
The blonde man blinked at him. Riley could see his Adam’s apple bob nervously above his teal colored necktie. “He’s…. eating people?” he repeated, just barely above a whisper.
“Yes,” Nancy nodded. “And we’ve been trying to contact—“
But the blonde man had shut the door with a definitive slam. Riley and Nancy watched, their jaws flying open, as the man locked the door behind him. He continued to look through the window, his expression a mixture of sorrow and resolve.
“Hey!” the black man growled, reaching the door in a couple of strides. He pounded his fist against the wall, staring at the blonde man as if he could kill him with his eyes.
“Open the door!” he demanded.
The blonde man stared back, his mouth turned down at the corners. He slowly shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he mouthed. “Not safe.”
The teen stared at the man from his seat, her blue eyes wide with fear. “Oh my god, we’re gonna die!” she wailed and began to cry with renewed fury.
Hesitantly, the Asian man slowly moved his arm around the girl’s shoulder, patting her awkwardly. To his surprise, she turned into his embrace, resting her head into the crook of his neck.
“Hopefully they contact the conductor in that car,” Riley said, still star
ing at the blonde man. He had the decency to look sheepish as they made eye contact.
The black man slammed his fist against the door again, then turned his back to it. He sat down in the nearest seat and rested his elbows on his legs. He shook his head over and over again.
Nancy sighed, trying to suppress the rising panic she felt deep in her gut. “Okay,” she said to herself. “Okay, let’s think…”
She began to pace in a small circle on the brown floor of the train. Everyone was quiet apart from the teen, who continued to sob into the Asian man’s shoulder.
The red haired man, who had been leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, suddenly lifted an index finger. “What if we pull the emergency brake? The conductor will instantly be notified that something is wrong,” he said.
Our Dead Bodies [Anthology] Page 5