That was the least of our problems. Where I was standing, half a dozen people were sweating profusely, scratching, or shaking. An old man leaning against a wall was shivering violently. Ugly, burst veins spread across his nose.
Horrified, I realized that all or nearly all the people in that car—in all the cars—were infected with TSJ. In a few hours, our car would be a rolling hell—a small space crowded with all those people turning into Undead. What would happen when the first transformations were complete? We had nowhere to run. It was a death trap and no one would get out alive.
With a jolt that would have thrown us to the ground if we weren’t wedged in so tight, the car began to move as the engines dragged their load, heading who-knew-where. The destination really didn’t matter. By the time we got there, we’d all be mindless monsters.
In every face, I read the same fear. Everyone saw a monster in the person standing next to him, parents and children alike. The good-natured Jamaican guy with dreadlocks, the pretty young mother cradling her newborn, singing a lullaby . . . In a few hours they’d be something far worse than the Green Guards who’d forced us in there.
A number of people pulled out containers filled with Cladoxpan. The fortunate ones had large bottles; others had a tiny amount or, worse, none at all, depending on what they’d been able to grab when they were arrested. If we’d been smart, we would’ve gathered up all that precious liquid and rationed it equally, but that wasn’t going to happen. Everyone clutched their bottle like a sullen dog with a bone. Shouts and threats came from the back of the car. Before the end of that trip, I was sure there’d be more than one murder.
I only had half of what Grapes gave me the night before. Distraught, I took out the bottle and shook it with the stupid hope that it would’ve magically filled up. My heart sank when I saw that I had only about five ounces left. I could hold out for three or four hours, no more. I was fucked.
Lucullus shifted in his basket, uncomfortable and sore. I had no room to set the basket on the floor, so I hung it over one arm and took him out of his prison. His wound didn’t look too bad, since someone had gone to the trouble of disinfecting it, but he’d lost a lot of blood. He must’ve been dying of thirst.
When I put him back in the basket, I realized it weighed too much for a basket with just an old blanket in it. Making sure no one saw me, I set Lucullus back in the basket as I rummaged around at the bottom. My hand found something round and cool. Pushing the blanket aside, I spotted a gallon-sized thermos. I cautiously unscrewed the cap and sniffed the contents. The familiar sweet, acid smell of Cladoxpan hit my nose.
I pawed deeper in the basket and found a compass, a combat knife like Prit’s, and best of all, a loaded 9mm Beretta. It wasn’t enough to hold off a boxcar filled with Undead, but it would give me a shot at survival if I made it to the train’s destination alive.
Who’d put all that in there and why? It must’ve been Strangärd, but why would the Swede risk his neck for me? Then I remembered the documents he’d insisted I take.
I elbowed my way to one of the little windows, where there was enough light to read. On one side of the page was a lot of legal mumbo jumbo accusing me of the murder of Mrs. Compton and sentencing me to expulsion. The interesting part was on the back.
The first sheet contained a very detailed map of the train route, pinpointing train stations, towns, distances, and main roads. The second had a short message; when I read it, my heart leapt for joy.
“We’re both fine. Survive and come back to us. I love you. L”
I looked up and smiled for the first time. The next few days were going to be hell. I’d have to find a way to survive, but at least I had a chance. And a goal: return to Gulfport and my friends. But one thought burned bright as a flame: Kill Grapes and Reverend Greene.
36
DEPORTATION CONVOY
300 MILES FROM GULFPORT
The train from hell just kept going. I thought it would never stop. The situation in the boxcar went from bad to worse. I didn’t see how I could make it.
After nearly five hours, the air inside the boxcar was an almost unbreathable soup of the body odor of a hundred and fifty sweaty people, sour vomit, and the sulfurous sticky smell of the shit scattered around the car. At the start of the trip, a few voices sensibly proposed converting one corner into a latrine. Everyone thought that was a good idea, except for one detail: nobody wanted it to be the corner closest to them.
After some tense arguments, we still hadn’t chosen a corner, so people were relieving themselves anywhere they could. The car became a shit pile on wheels. A layer of stinking slime spread over the floor and flowed from side to side as the train rocked along.
I was relatively lucky. I’d staked out a spot against a wall, so I had a place to lean. I set Lucullus’s basket on the floor in front of me, blocking off about a foot of space that allowed me to turn around. The nearest window was about fifteen feet away, so most of the time, I was in the dark. When someone lit a cigarette or switched on a flashlight, I got a brief glimpse of my surroundings.
I used those moments to look at my cat. Lucullus was curled up tight at the bottom of the basket, in a restless half-sleep. Occasionally he stirred with a faint, pained meow that broke my heart. He must’ve felt sick from losing all that blood. I suspected his wound was infected.
My bigger problem was my unrelenting thirst. The Green Guards had loaded a couple of plastic drums of water into the car before they sealed the door. One of them disappeared into a corner and was jealously guarded by some grim-faced Latin Kings brandishing knives. The other drum was empty. I got chills thinking back on what happened to that drum. Any semblance of order evaporated as soon as someone opened it up. In the dim light, I heard screams and punches as the drum passed from hand to hand, spilling most of its contents. When it came to me, I only got a few sips before someone slugged me in the back, and then six people snatched it out of my hands.
I sat down in my little space and licked my moistened lips. I started to lick my fingers, which had gotten splashed when I grabbed the drum. I gasped when I realized my hands were dripping with blood, not water. As the fucking drum was passed around, it’d gotten drenched in some poor devil’s blood. It took every ounce of willpower I had not to throw up.
Thirst and hunger weren’t our only problems. We all knew we faced something worse, something that lived inside each of us and could show up anytime. Fear and anxiety plagued us as we jealously guarded our dwindling supply of Cladoxpan, our last defense against madness. After an hour, TSJ reared its ugly head in that dark boxcar.
The first to go was a heavyset woman in her fifties. She looked Caribbean. She’d probably already started transforming when they loaded her on the train, but in the chaos, no one noticed. She was on the other side of the car, so it was hard for me to see what was going on.
I peered over the crowd and got a glimpse of a girl in the back as she shouted in alarm and backed away in horror when she noticed that the woman’s skin was cold as ice and that the whites of her eyes were laced with broken, red veins. Panic spread through the crowd as the people next to her tried to back away. That triggered a disastrous human wave that spread in every direction. In an uncontrollable, blind panic, people fell over each other and got trampled. An old man landed hard on top of me as that giant wave plowed into us.
People shouted and screamed as they tried to break free of the mountain of bodies, but no one could move more than a few inches. People were smashed together and crushed in the stampede. Above the noise came that monotonous, raspy sound I’d heard so many times. A cross between a moan and a groan punctuated by rapid, labored breathing, like a person who’d just run a marathon. Every hair on my head stood on end and my stomach clenched in an icy ball.
“Mwaaaaeeergh . . . Mwaaaaaeeeeeeerghhh . . . ”
After a couple of minutes, there was a louder moan, almost a scream, poisonous and deat
hly, announcing that evil had awakened in that woman. Another woman in the same part of the boxcar cried out in pain. Then a man screamed.
Chaos broke out in the car. The crowd, blind and terrified, tried to flee in every direction, not caring what or who they crashed into. I had just enough time to crouch down and prop the basket between the wall and the crowd, forming a flimsy barricade. But my legs got trapped under someone and I couldn’t move. My head was pinned against the wall by the back of a man howling in pain, his right arm twisted unnaturally between two people grappling for their lives. I tried to pull away, but bodies were stacked up all around me. A skinny guy with a scraggly beard lay on the floor, his head almost touching mine. I could feel his hot, sharp breath on my face. His eyes were nearly popping out, and the veins in his neck bulged like thick cables as he made a superhuman effort, in vain, to break free. He shot me a crazed look and whispered “Help me,” barely audible in all this madness.
I wanted to help him, but one of my arms was pinned under my body. On top of that, if I pulled him free, I wouldn’t have any room to breathe. All I could do was stare in horror as the man’s face went from bright red to a terrible blue. Finally he fell over dead, his tongue hanging out of his mouth.
After the longest, scariest five minutes of my life, the panic began to fade. The cries grew muted. People sobbed everywhere, calling to each other. Someone pulled one of the people off me so I could sit up. My right arm was still asleep, but I managed to stand up and lean against the wall. Wood splinters dug into my skin, but I ignored them.
Someone in that car was no longer human, and I couldn’t tell if the dark shapes walking toward me were human or Undead.
My hand trembled as I cocked the Beretta and rested it against my hip. Suddenly, a short, compact woman stumbled toward me. She was breathing rapidly and had her arms stretched out in front of her, like a drunken Frankenstein. I aimed the gun at her face. At that moment, the car rocked violently, shaking us like jelly beans in a jar, as the train crossed a section of broken track. I spread my legs to steady myself and grabbed some metal rivets in the wall to keep from falling.
When I looked up again, I couldn’t see her anywhere. Where are you, bitch? Where the fuck are you?
A man’s hand closed around my arm. I howled in terror and kneed the guy in the crotch. I slammed the butt of my gun against his temple, and he let out a strangled shriek and fell like a sack of laundry at my feet. I crouched down, pointing my gun in every direction, trying to spot any other threat. I noticed that my victim, lying unconscious with an ugly bruise on his temple, was a man in his late sixties. Not an Undead.
My panic subsided, but I didn’t feel ashamed of beating up an old man. That car was hell and I was fighting to save my soul.
Someone fired two shots and flashes lit up the car. The shots reverberated in that tight space so loudly that, for a moment, all I heard was an annoying, persistent hum.
Careful, cowboy. You’re not the only one with a gun.
Another wave of hysteria swept over the car. When the shooter fired his gun again, I caught a glimpse of the grim scene. The floor was piled high with bodies. Some were still moving amid moans; most were motionless. Everywhere groups of two or three people were fighting in a homicidal rage either because they thought the other person was an Undead or because they were trying to steal each other’s Cladoxpan.
Some guy yelled, “He’s got a gun! Get him!”
For one terrifying second, I thought he meant me, but the throng rushed in the direction of a kid who looked to be one of the Latin Kings. The shooter only had time to fire once more before the crazed mob fell on him, and kicked and punched him to death.
His death was a kind of turning point. Anger slowly subsided like water flowing down a drain. People who’d had each other in a death grip a moment before looked confused, as if they’d awakened from a bad dream. Their panic evaporated, and a mixture of fear, shame, and horror silently replaced it.
I surreptitiously tucked my Beretta back in the basket and made sure Lucullus was still alive in his feverish sleep. I helped a few people up and stepped to one side. The Caribbean woman lay dead in the middle of the car, her head split open. Beside her, a man with a torn neck was convulsing in a way we knew all too well.
“He’s changing,” someone in the shadows murmured. “We gotta do something.”
A pretty young woman, her face smeared with blood, tangled hair covering her shoulders, stepped forward. With a cold, unforgiving look on her face, she took the gun out of the dead shooter’s hand. Not missing a beat, she raised the gun, aimed at the convulsing man’s head, and pulled the trigger.
The shot opened a huge hole in the man’s face, and he stopped moving. The girl studied the guy for a while, then tossed the gun on the corpse.
“That was the last bullet,” she said in a flat voice.
Suddenly a cramp shook my body so hard I had to bend over. I straightened up, panting. My clothes were soaked in sweat. I must’ve been feverish for quite a while, but with all the chaos, I hadn’t realized it. I doubled over as an even stronger cramp washed over me and cried out in pain. A guy standing next to me shot me a suspicious look and backed away. I saw fear and disgust in his eyes. He looked at me like I was no longer a person; I was one of them.
Oh, no, no no, please. Not now, please.
“Everything’s under control,” I gasped, waving my hand like a drunk. “Be cool, pal.”
I kneeled down next the basket and took out the thermos of Cladoxpan. My hands were shaking so hard that I could barely unscrew the lid. The first wonderful drink transported me out of that train car for a moment. The liquid flowed down my throat, shutting out the hell around me, and opening all my thirsty cells.
I screwed the lid back on and closed my eyes, savoring that glorious sensation. A part of my mind screamed, This is what heroin addicts must feel like when they shoot up. Hello, addiction. I’m your willing slave. I’d have to deal with my addiction later.
“So now whadda we do?” someone asked in a slightly guilty voice.
“Help the wounded,” someone else replied.
“First we’d better bash in the heads of the dead,” said the girl who’d done the shooting. She said it matter-of-factly, like she was talking about going shopping.
Honey, while you’re out, would you stop by the grocery store and pick up a dozen oranges? Oh, and while you’re at it, bash in the head of that dead child next to you.
“How do we do that?” murmured a frightened woman whose little girl pressed against her skirt, her eyes flooded with terror. “We don’t have any weapons.”
One of the surviving Latin Kings came forward, rummaged through his dead compañero’s clothes, and pulled out a hammer with a razor-sharp claw. Without a word, he walked over to the body of a twelve-year-old boy and brought the hammer down on his head with a loud chop. His eyes dark and vacant like a shark’s, he kept pounding steadily until he was satisfied the job was done. The back of the boy’s head looked like strawberry jam, with pieces of bone sticking out.
“That’s how you do it.” He handed the hammer to the man next to him, who held it away from himself as if it were a live snake. “Any blunt object will do. Just make sure the person’s dead.”
The other passengers looked at him for a moment, horrified.
“You can’t be serious,” muttered the man to my right.
Suddenly, one of the bodies lying on the floor shook.
“There’s your answer, jackass,” said the kid with a shrug.
The man holding the hammer hesitated, swallowed hard, then stepped forward and struck the convulsing corpse in the head. As if someone had fired a starter’s pistol, nearly all the living passengers began to stalk the glut of dead bodies lying on the floor, hitting their heads with a variety of objects.
The scene looked like something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. We were
covered with bits of blood and brains. The boxcar’s walls were painted with grotesque blood spatters that dripped slowly onto the floor amid lumps of gray matter.
Someone vomited. I shrugged and took another sip of Cladoxpan. Nothing disgusted me now. I’d long since passed my threshold for horror. Besides, there was nothing solid in my stomach.
The next few hours seemed endless. The train rolled along with a monotonous rhythm, punctuated by brief stops. I couldn’t figure out why. Once, for no apparent reason, we even backed up for a couple of miles.
Occasionally there was a thud and the entire train shook. We assumed the train had collided with objects on the track. We could guess what those objects were. I slowly and tortuously wrestled my way to one of the windows. I climbed up a mountain of corpses piled there and peeked out the window.
At first I felt relief. The outside air was fresh and invigorating compared to the stench inside the car. Then when I figured out where we were and how far we’d traveled, my soul fell to my feet. The train was rolling across a parched plain. Groves of twisted trees dotted the landscape. We must be somewhere in south Texas, near the Mexican border. The map that Strangärd gave me showed distances and directions, but not the names of states.
The atmosphere inside the car was gloomy. Talk was at a minimum. We were all lost in our thoughts. Even the cries and groans had stopped, replaced by deep resignation and a fear of the unknown. No one knew where we were headed, but we all wanted the trip to end soon. Nothing could be worse than being locked in that train car of death.
Of the original hundred and fifty exiles in the car, fewer than half were still alive. The rest had been crushed to death or had their heads bashed in. We survivors now had more room to move around. Any Cladoxpan on the corpses had been looted. I’d shamelessly rummaged through the clothes of the skinny guy who died by my side and found a small flask. I topped off the contents of my thermos, which I hid at the bottom of the basket under Lucullus. I didn’t want it to get around that I had such a big stash of Cladoxpan. I kept the gun hidden too. The Latin King’s death proved that a gun was no guarantee of survival. People were desperate and had nothing to lose.
The Wrath of the Just (Apocalypse Z) Page 21