The other prisoner we bring to our cause is a woman. She is taller than me, taller than any woman I’ve ever seen before. Her name is Mandy. Before I can even ask, she tells us, “I’m six-five, and yes, I played basketball.”
“Professional?” Roland asks.
Mandy shakes her head. “No money in professional women’s basketball. NBA players made millions, while WNBA players barely made a living wage. They had to get second jobs. No. I worked at Best Buy. Geek Squad.”
“That’s something I haven’t thought about in a long time,” I say.
“What’d you do to get put in here?” Lilly asks.
“Hacked into the District’s mainframe computers outside of Indianapolis,” Mandy says. I imagine I’m looking pretty surprised because she continues with, “I’m more brains than brawn, trust me.”
We shake hands, introduce ourselves to the new members of our band of rebels.
“So, you got a plan, friend?” Nacho asks me.
I shrug. “Thought we could wing it.”
“That’s always Jack’s plan,” Abby adds. “But I gotta give it to him, he’s still alive. Somehow.”
“Luck,” I say.
“Well, we’re gonna need a hell of a lot of that luck, I think,” Roland says. “And then some.
Twenty-Seven
Hours pass. No guard comes in. There’s no noise from the outside at all.
Mandy says, “They’re watching us. Somehow.”
I look around the vast cavern that was once a subway. I see no cameras. The lights running along the walls are barely lit, but they are lit. That means they’re plugged in somewhere.
“They know,” Mandy says.
“How?” Lilly asks. She is thinking exactly the same thing I am: How can they watch us if there are no cameras?
We wait a little longer. We don’t talk. Our silence, however, is drowned out by the gurgling of the zombies. By the shuffling of their feet. Their moans. At the end of the train, the woman cackles again. What she is cackling at, I have no idea.
The walls seem to be closing in. The zombies seem to be getting taller and taller. Soon they’ll be able to reach us with their blackened, flame-rigid arms.
I have to get out of here.
“We have to get up on that platform,” I say.
“Too high. Already thought of it,” Abby says. She sits cross-legged in front of me. She looks oddly at peace.
Next to her is Lilly and Roland, one on each side. Mandy and Nacho are sitting next to me.
“Don’t give up before you even try,” Mandy says. Normally, this kind of attitude would elicit a harsh reaction from Abby, but Mandy is so damn big, not even she will talk back. “If I gave up, I wouldn’t have gotten into the Overlord’s mainframe.”
“Then you wouldn’t be in here,” Lilly says. Her tone is almost bored. There’s no animosity in her voice.
Good, I think. I have to keep the group together, prevent them from falling out before we can reach the surface.
“Worth it,” Mandy says. “I know the District’s secrets now.”
“Like what?” Nacho asks.
Roland says, “They wouldn’t be secrets if she told us.”
Mandy shakes her head. “No, no. I don’t mind telling.”
“Well, like what, then?” Roland asks.
“I know they have weapons. Big weapons,” Mandy says.
“Obviously,” Abby says. “I was in the District for two years. I bet I know just as much as you.”
“You were in the District? Like how?” Roland says. His bottom lip quivers, and his eyes go stony.
I put a hand on his shoulder. “Easy. It’s not like that. She was held captive, too.”
Not exactly a lie.
Abby meets my eyes. There’s understanding in hers.
“Yeah. Captive,” she echoes. “I know some things, too.”
“Not as much as me. Unless you were a ‘Top Tier,’ as they call it, you don’t know squat,” Mandy says.
“It’s not a competition,” Lilly cuts in. “Tell us.”
“I know they have a store of weapons right here in this city. Why they’d bring more bombs to a place that has already been bombed, and is crawling with radiation, who knows?”
To say a lightbulb turned on in my head would be an understatement. The idea that comes to me is more like a comet, burning bright. Or a supernova, an exploding sun. Abby mentioned that this whole place was an arsenal, but I figured that just meant guns.
“Wait,” I say. “There are bombs here? Like, bombs that could level the whole city?”
Mandy nods. Crosses her massive arms. “See? I told you I know a lot.”
“We believed you,” Lilly says. She’s smiling as she adds, “Kinda…”
“And if you get to these bombs, you can set them off?” I ask.
Mandy doesn’t nod as quickly as before, and she shifts her gaze away from me to look out toward the milling zombies. Then she nods. “I guess I could. But we’d probably die. I don’t know how long we’d have before they blow.”
“I thought you knew everything,” Nacho says.
“I’d have to see them first,” Mandy says. “I didn’t see them, just the arsenal inventory list. I don’t know much about bombs, but I know their OS—that’s operating system—and I’m sure I could do whatever needs to be done.”
“Why, Jack?” Abby asks, leaning forward. She’s about to grill me.
I don’t like it when she gets like this.
“What’s our goal?” I ask.
“Get out of here alive,” Lilly says.
“Well, yeah, that’s our immediate goal, but what’s our ultimate goal?”
“Survive…” Lilly answers again.
I shake my head. “No. It’s to take down the District, weaken the one-eyed man’s army until his back is up against a wall. We’ve hit one of their operations, and look how they reacted. Imagine if we took out one of their cities.”
Abby shakes her head. “Jack, you’re crazy.”
“Sometimes you have to be crazy to be successful,” I remind her.
“Who said that one, Steve Jobs? Bill Gates?” Roland asks.
I shrug. “Probably.”
“So you want to get out of here and blow the place to hell?” Lilly says.
“Hell yeah!” Roland says. “Death to the District!”
This elicits a collective groan from the zombies below us.
“Even they’re on our side,” Nacho says, pointing. “They’re on any side that can give them meat.”
“We blow it up before they get here,” I continue with the plan. “Hopefully. We’re in enemy territory. I’ll have no luck taking down the Overlord here, we catch him on the run. We catch him someplace not crawling with hundreds of brainwashed District guards.”
Abby nods. “I mean, he’s got a point. As much as I hate to admit that.”
I’m grinning now, and Abby is looking at me like I’m radioactive.
“So we get you to the place the bombs are kept, and you can set them off?” I say to Mandy.
She nods. “I think so.”
I don’t intend to take any of them to the bombs with me. I just need to know where they are, and then I can figure out the rest. There’s no guarantee that I can get them out before the bombs go off, but they need hope, they need purpose to keep them going.
“One problem, Jack,” Lilly says. “We’re not getting anywhere while we’re still in here.”
I stand up. “Roland, give me a boost.”
Roland knows his limitations. He’s nothing but a twig. He brings one arm up and flexes a nonexistent muscle. “I won’t get you very high, if I know what you’re thinking.”
He’s right. Though I’ve lost pretty much everything since the dead took over, I still have some of my pride left. Not much, but enough not to blatantly ask a woman I’ve just met for help. Looking at Mandy, at the sheer size of her, I’m sure she could throw me through the rock ceiling.
“Just come on, Rola
nd,” I say.
He sighs, stands up. We cross the other cars toward the platform. Behind us, I hear Abby snicker. She knows what I’m planning to do, and she knows the outcome before it happens.
I tell Roland to kneel down. I tell him I’m going to get a running start, and he’s going to boost me up the dozen or so feet toward the fallen rock platform, where the one door is located.
He looks scared, but, God bless him, he goes along for the ride.
I get about fifteen feet of a head start. Each step is a pain. I’ve never been in really good shape, and the lack of solid meals and sleep have really caught up to me. If I had to judge, I figure I’m probably going about five miles per hour when I reach Roland. His knee is bent , his hands are resting palm-up, fingers laced together. My eyes burn with laser focus; Roland’s burn with fear.
I think, for the slightest of moments, We’re going to do it, it’s going to work!
My boot makes contact with his palms. I crouch, ready to spring forward, but the support beneath me gives out.
Roland cries, “Son of a bitch!” and there’s a pretty sick cracking noise that I think comes from him, and we both fall over, tangled up on top of the subway car. I rock my head pretty hard against the metal, so hard that I see pinpricks of light hanging in front of me when I open my eyes.
Abby starts laughing, and the others follow pretty quickly.
“Sorry, Jack,” Roland says. “Maybe a decade ago I could’ve done that. I ain’t what I used to be.”
“You all right?” I ask him.
He nods. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” I say. “None of us are what we used to be.”
“That’s the truth,” Nacho says. “C’mon, Mandy. Let’s help.”
Next thing I know, Mandy and Nacho are pulling me up.
Mandy says, “On three. One…two…three!” and I’m flying upward like a damn rocket ship.
Mandy’s aim turns out to be impeccable. I hit the edge of the rock platform with my sternum. Before I can slip and fall down and think about having to go through that again, I find purchase with my fingers, which are looking more like claws.
“Nice throw!” Nacho says. He sounds very far away, like I’m teetering on the edge of a mountain instead of a platform a dozen or so feet up.
“All right, Jack?” Mandy asks.
“Yeah,” I manage to wheeze. “Never better.”
I pull myself up all the way. I know time is of the utmost importance, but I really just need a minute to catch my breath. I roll over on my back and stare at the dark ceiling high above me. It’s faintly lit with the radioactive green light, like the weird illumination you sometimes see coming off of various funguses. This air can’t be good for me, but I take a few deep breaths anyway. Lord knows I need them.
“You sure you’re all right?” Nacho calls up again.
Lilly and Abby are laughing, almost sounding like the cackling lady in the last car.
I get up on my knees and say, “Stop laughing. I don’t see you two up here, do I?”
“Because we’re not stupid,” Abby says.
Lilly cracks up. I’ve never heard her laugh so loudly. Her and Abby high-five. That’s good, I guess, them becoming friends. I remind myself we all need to stick together, even if it’s at my expense.
I stand up. My legs are a little shaky, but I manage. The hatch is right in front of me.
“What’s your plan, Jack?” Lilly asks.
“You’ll see,” I say.
“Oh God,” Lilly says.
I grab the handle around the hatch and bend down. ‘Never lift with your back, always bend your knees,’ that’s what Norm would be saying right now. God, I miss him. I take a deep breath, hold it, and give a yank with all the strength I have left in my body. The hatch—
Doesn’t move even the slightest bit.
I readjust my grip, give it another pull. In my back, a muscle—if you can call it that—gives me a warning twinge. I decide it’s probably best to stop. I sit down at the edge, let my feet dangle.
Roland, Nacho, and Mandy are looking at me. Abby and Lilly stand up. Abby puts her good hand on her hip, her stump on the other one.
“Well, that plan was a dud. What else do we got?” she wants to know.
“Hey, at least I tried,” I say.
That’s when I look past them, and see the old woman in the last car, the one who is constantly cackling. She is standing up now, too, watching me. Her lips are parted into quite possibly the creepiest smile I’ve ever seen in my life.
Faintly, I hear my name being called over and over again. I think it’s Lilly, but I’m too enraptured by this odd woman to answer. On the other side of the grimy window, the woman points behind her.
I cock my head, confused.
Her smile fades, and words form on her thin lips, words I can read perfectly. She mouths, ‘Through the tunnel lies the real Hell, but the real Hell is your escape.’
Twenty-Eight
“Mandy, are you sure you’re going to catch me?” I ask.
“I mean, the odds are pretty good,” she says, “but I wouldn’t exactly put money on it…”
That’s reassuring.
“If she misses, I got you, Jack,” Roland says.
Giving his skinny arms and beanpole body another glance, I highly doubt it. As I scoot closer off of the edge, our boosting failure is still fresh in my mind, probably because the rib I injured all those years ago is flaring with pain.
I originally hurt it when I tackled Pat Huber off of the roof of the Woodhaven Recreation Center because he had a gun and was being crazy. If I managed to survive that fall, I can survive this. I hope.
The woman has sat down again, retreated back to her corner, huddled into herself. Her dirty clothes hang from her thin frame like an oversized blanket. She is hugging her knees. My eyes keep flicking over to her, and Abby catches on to this. She turns, looks, and turns back, arches her eyebrows.
“Come on, Jack,” Mandy says.
I look down at their upturned faces, their opened arms. It’s hard not to picture them as zombies waiting for me, waiting to sink what’s left of their teeth into my flesh.
I let go of the edge, and fall for what feels like a long time. Then—
I’m being cradled in Mandy’s arms.
“Aww,” Lilly says. “That’s so cute.”
“Shut up,” I say. Mandy puts me down.
“You look like you’ve had an epiphany or something,” Abby says.
I ignore her, keep walking to the last car.
“What are you doing?” Lilly asks.
The woman starts laughing again. As I get closer and closer to her car, I smell the death within. This woman is not going to make it much longer. She has withered away to virtually nothing, and the Grim Reaper awaits her in the other corner.
The rest of the group follows me. I cross one car, two cars, three. I’m near the tunnel. The closer I am to it, the more it glows that radioactive green color, like some disease is slowly spreading from organ to organ, place to place.
“What are you doing?” Abby echoes Lilly. Then a little lower: “She’s crazy. You know that, right?”
“Aren’t we all a little crazy?” I say.
“Well said, amigo,” Nacho says. “I think that for years.” He says it in his broken English that is getting easier and easier to understand.
I nod at Nacho. “She might not be as crazy as we think.”
“Want to put money on that?” Lilly asks.
I pull the pockets of my pants inside out. “Broke,” I say.
Approaching the edge of the makeshift opening in the older woman’s subway car very carefully, I raise my hand to let her know I mean no harm.
She looks up at me with hazy eyes.
Living in Chicago, you see a lot of homeless people and a lot of the homeless people were usually high as hell on smack or crack or some other drug that rhymes with those two. You’d see this glazed look in their eyes, this look like they
had no idea where they were or what they were doing, and it had a way of breaking your heart.
That’s how this woman looks in her tin can of a cell.
“Hello,” I say, careful to keep my voice low. I don’t want to disturb her, or shock her to the point of cutting off all conversation. “Is there a way out of here through the tunnel?”
She doesn’t answer for a long moment. The gurgles and moans of the zombies, and the sounds of them slapping at the glass, fill this silence.
“Come on, let’s just leave her alone,” Abby says. “She just wants some peace.” She grabs me.
I think about putting up a fight and standing my ground, but part of me says she’s right. This woman is crazy, and maybe I’m crazy too, for thinking that she mouthed something to me.
Just as I turn around, the woman’s hoarse voice reaches my ears. “Yes,” she says, “there is a way.”
I spin to face her. “Did you guys hear that?”
They all look at me like I’m crazy, Abby especially so. “Yes, Jack…we heard that,” she says.
I lean over the edge of the opening, look this woman in her rheumy eyes. “Where’s the opening? Where is it?” I ask her.
The lady stands up now, and her clothes look even baggier than before. There is a wound on her wrist—not a bite mark, but a gash, like someone hit her with a blade. It’s festering, the flesh around it purple and swollen, and it looks beyond the need of amputation. With this injured hand, she points out the windows on her left, where the tracks lay crookedly, disappearing into the mouth of the tunnel that is glowing with its radioactive green light.
“There,” she says. “There is the way. They come from there.”
“Who does?” I ask.
“The hobgoblins,” she says. Her eyes widen. “Don’t you see them? Ooh, they’re everywhere. Nasty little creatures.” She shrieks and jumps, causing pretty much all of us to jump. “There’s one now.” She points.
Roland looks down at his right foot. There’s nothing there, but he shifts away regardless.
“Crazy,” Abby whispers. “I told you so.”
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