by Trevor Zaple
“Fuck you,” Amber replied, although she seemed amused rather than offended. “I have no problems with the dark. My dad worked on these tracks and he used to bring me down here all the time”.
Her words echoed up and down the tunnel and Mark thought of the unknowns following them. He winced at the volume that Amber’s echoes picked up but kept himself from saying anything. Emily’s warning about starting panics held him fast.
They walked in silence for half an hour and Mark’s flashlight picked up a widening of the tunnel. Moments later they entered the next station. As usual, he flashed the light around and checked out the surroundings. There were black-and-white barcode patterns on the wall and the signs read “St. Clair West”. After seeing that there was no movement in the platform area, and no interesting objects illuminated by his light, he returned to sussing out the path ahead. The group was silent, and as he listened to their movement in the darkness he heard a shuffling sound from far behind them. After a while he realized that it might not be that far behind them; the tunnels were long and laden with echoes, and the group behind them could be anywhere at all. He caught up to Emily and expressed his concerns in a low, urgent voice.
“So you can hear them now,” she replied, and Mark ground his teeth in frustration.
“I can, they’re getting louder. It’s starting to worry me”.
“Good, it’s been worrying me for a long time now. They’re getting closer. There’s also more of them than I originally thought”.
Mark was startled by this and his light flickered about the darkened station.
“What? How many?” he demanded quietly. Emily looked at him and her face was carefully set in the harsh electric glow.
“Do you remember what I said about not starting panics?” she asked mildly. Mark bit his tongue.
“Of course I do!” he seethed. “What –“
Emily looked at him levelly as they walked along, and her careful expression made his skin crawl.
“Many,” she said, and there was no more discussion of it then.
Jason sobbed and cackled as he stumbled in the darkness behind his Angel’s captors. The shuffling of the stalking figures behind him now filled his entire world; they were close enough that he could hear their breathing. It was horrid, a jangling wheeze that crammed the tunnel like a slithering autumn breeze. He watched the lights dance ahead of him, closer than they had ever been before, and found himself facing a dilemma. The time for sneaking had passed, he thought, considering the situation he found himself in. The most immediate solution was to catch up to his Angel’s captors, but that route, he felt, was folly. As soon as he revealed himself to them, they would tear into him with knives and claws, and use his intestines as garnishes to the rest of his flesh. The fact that he was positive that the group behind him would do it as well did not sit well with him.
As the things behind him grew closer he became convinced that there was a great number of them. He pictured the tunnel stuffed full of them: grey, swaying figures with jagged fingers and teeth filed to points. They were breathing in unison, like a gigantic flesh-hive, and the bellowing sound of it in his head threatened to drive him more insane than he already was.
They reached St. Clair West Station and he only waited for a minute by the entrance; he dove out after the group he was stalking and crawled along the subway floor once again. He sobbed harder as he scrabbled at the cold, flat dirt, wanting to wail until he deafened himself. He wanted to fill the tunnel with his screams, until the shambling cannibals behind him turned away in disgust. He would be safe then. His Angel would be safe then. He wondered if he could convince the cannibals to eat the others and leave his Angel and himself alone. He nearly turned around to ask them that, and threw himself flat to the ground. He wheezed stupid laughter, his lips flailing against the sour dirt. He might be crazy, he thought around pulsing, donkey-like laughing, but he wasn’t that crazy yet.
Mark was beside Emily, relieving Amber on lead flashlight detail, when the sound of looping, doltish laughter came floating up the tunnel. He spun around and darted to the back of their group, peering back into the darkness. He could see nothing, they were too far up the station platform to really see anything, but the dumb, almost inhuman laughter continued. As he waited in the cold, skittering black, he heard it slowly move closer. There was a touch on his elbow and he jumped two feet in the air, barely avoiding screaming. He came down and saw Carlos beside him, his expression apprehensive.
“The fuck is that, man?” he asked, the tension thick in his voice. Mark shrugged.
“Whoever is following us seems to be cracking up,” he said cautiously. He didn’t like the implications of it at all. The station seemed to crawl around him, in the parts that he couldn’t see. He looked at Carlos and saw a similar low terror in the man’s pensive expression. He checked Victoria, suddenly paranoid for her breathing and needing to check. She stirred but seemed otherwise alright. Olivia caught up to him and ran her hand down his back.
“Let me take her for a minute,” she murmured, and Mark began to unbuckle the strap. His back ached, and when he stretched to relieve it he heard several uncomfortable cracks.
“There are people behind us,” she whispered. “Not just the one who’s been following us all this time. Lot’s of people, Mark. I can hear them scuffling back there. There are people living down here”.
“I know,” Mark said. “Emily didn’t want to scare anyone, but…”
“It’s become pretty obvious”
“I know”.
They walked in silence for a time, and Mark’s heart-rate slowly, steadily climbed. He found himself wanting a bottle of water, and was about to find Carlos and his knapsack when Olivia whispered to him in the dark.
“Mark?”
“Yes?”
“What if they’ve followed us all of this way because they’re hungry?”
“I don’t know”
She was silent for several more minutes. Mark thought that the next station might be no more than ten minutes up the track. He tried to picture the transit map in his head, wondering which station was coming up next. He had rarely come up this far, before the disappearance; he seemed to recall middle-class suburban housing and shopping districts. There might be food up above; his stomach grumbled lazily.
“Do you love her?”
Mark was taken aback.
“Of course.”
“Do you love me?”
“Of course,”
“Don’t make us suffer”.
He gritted his teeth and fought back the images that wanted to float out of the tunnel-induced darkness in his head.
They came to Eglington West and there was natural light once again. The tracks rose up until they were on the surface of the earth once again. The station was replete with windows, and the light of a full, high winter moon shone in through them. They blinked and stretched, feeling their spirits rise as they grew used to having regular vision again. Victoria slept on, and Mark smiled at her.
“Could use a load off of my feet,” Carlos remarked, and Amber seconded him. Emily looked at Mark and Olivia for a moment before responding.
“We can probably sit for a few minutes,” she said, her voice sounding far away. “I’m sure you’ve all figured out that there are some people following us, if you can’t hear it by now then I’m worried about your hearing. I still think they’re an hour or so back, though, so fifteen minutes won’t kill us. We should make good time even with the snow. It’s been cold enough that I think it will have hardened, so the walking should be easier”.
They took a seat against the platform and passed around water bottles. Carlos fished out two cans of tuna and they shared it around. Mark felt his energy return in a very small way. It did not seem to make much of a dent in the buildup of exhaustion that was threatening to settle in. He ate and drank while nervously watching the tunnel from which they had just emerged. He expected that it would spit forth crawling horrors, but nothing came through and they
were on their feet again.
“Bundle up, folks,” Emily advised, “we’re going outside”.
The light of the moon had felt like blessed relief to Jason and he had kissed the ground once he crawled out into it. He was only five minutes behind his Angel and he longed to reach out for her, to touch her with his shaking fingers and get his sanity back, snatch it back from the ankle-chewing things in the darkness that had stolen it in raw bites. One touch, one finger, and he would be whole again. He longed for it. Ached for it.
He watched them prepare for the chilling wind that blew and battered at the station’s windows. The rattling frightened him badly, but the thought of finding his Love, his Only, filled him with determination. He no longer heard the shuffling of the cannibals behind him. He no longer heard the sharp, garish gnashing of their filed teeth. He was profoundly grateful for this, yet uneasy now that he could no longer definitely pinpoint their existence. He wondered if they were waiting just inside the tunnel, watching him as he watched the kidnappers in turn. The thought made his palms sweat, despite the bitter cold. The longer he waited and watched, the more he became convinced that he was being watched. His skin crawled agonizingly, like small, pricking bugs crawling mindlessly. He squirmed and twisted, trying to rid himself of the idea, but there was no help for it.
The kidnappers rose up and out of the station, passing a weird mural on the station wall that looked like a depiction of various aspects of a streetcar. He found himself irritated and fascinated by it, and after a few minutes he had half-convinced himself that it was just a diseased figment of his imagination, a further symptom of the deepening madness that could be cured by the simple touch of the Purest Woman He’d Ever Known. His hands shook with the prospect, and his mind raced with the possibilities. He could run out to them, crying for his life. He would tell them about the cannibals that followed them, and then he would fall into his Angel’s arms. Her touch would restore his sanity, and he would ingratiate himself into their group. Then, at the first opportunity, he would hamstring them all and leave them to the tender mercies of the ghouls that followed behind. He grinned and clapped like a seal; the hooting noises that emerged from his garbled larynx were also rather seal-like in nature.
The wind stung at his cheeks but otherwise the transition to the surface tracks had gone well. The fresh air invigorated them, and the surface of the snow had indeed hardened as Emily had predicted. It gave a little underfoot but could be walked on with little difficulty. He had worried about Victoria at first, but her snug sling and blanket seemed to be doing an adequate job of keeping her warm. Olivia stayed near him now that they were on the surface; she seemed to spend a lot of time looking at him, drinking him.
The surface tracks lay directly between two parallel avenues, but was separated from them by a tall steel fence. On either side of the avenues they could see trees; here and there were outlines and hints of houses. The track stretched on into the distance, where a group of buildings grew out of the trees to the left. Bridges straddled the tracks at regular intervals.
They were passing under the first of these bridges when a cry went up from behind them. They whirled, guns out and aimed, but hesitated to fire when they saw the scraggly, pathetic figure who was running towards him. His head was bare, his skin pale and doughy. His hair, thin and growing patchy around the front, was a tangled mess that extended from his head in every direction. He was screaming “Please don’t kill me!” repeatedly as he stumbled towards them, and Mark’s first instinct was a vague disgust. He decided that this must be the unknown person who had originally been following them, and felt a wave of pity follow his original sneer. He looked scared more than dangerous, and, having had his own disturbing thoughts in that stygian blackness, Mark could empathize. He lowered his weapon and saw that the others were doing the same.
The kid reached them at full tilt and skidded into the snow in front of them on his knees. He reached up his filthy hands and began to whimper.
“Please don’t kill me, don’t kill me,” he pleaded. “They’re following me, they’re going to eat me, please don’t kill me”.
Mark recoiled from him, his hands rising away. The look in the kid’s eyes was poisonous, a mixture of hatred, greed, and abject fear. He felt bitter saliva rise on his tongue.
“He’s absolutely crazy,” he said, feeling his original disgust return. Then he got a closer look at the kid’s face and felt a nasty shock.
“Holy shit, Carlos, isn’t this the kid that threw up on your shoes?”
Carlos looked the kid over and nodded slowly.
“Yeah…at that party back before…anyway, yeah, that’s him. We were on the roof, and he came running up…”
“Oh, right,” Amber chimed in. “He came stumbling over and puked on you. You smelled like it for the rest of the night”.
“Oh, the poor kid,” Olivia clucked, “I remember him. He looked so scared”. She inspected him more closely, and Jason edged closer to her.
“He looks scared now,” she said, and he fell forward against her, his hands brushing at her thickly layered pants.
“MY LIFE!” he shouted, joy flooding into him like water into a glass. Then, a moment later, the joy left him and he pitched forward into the snow.
“It didn’t work!” he shouted, his voice strangled. “IT DIDN’T WORK!”. He began pummelling at the snow with his fists, repeating it didn’t work and wailing. Emily looked at him, and then looked at the silent rows of trees that stood sentinel around them. Mark looked at the low, elegant form of the subway station, his nerves tightening up and starting to ring.
“He’s fucking crazy,” Mark opined, never taking his eyes off of the subway station. Was there something moving back there? He peered into the moonlit gloom and decided it was just the wind, playing tricks on his eyes. “What are we going to do with him?”
“We can’t just leave him here,” Olivia said. Emily nodded, seeming to be lost in thought.
“We certainly can’t,” she agreed after a moment. “If we left him here he would just pick up and follow us again, and we might lose track of him”. She smiled. “Although I really doubt it. He’s really a terrible stalker”.
“Plus, there’s those people following us,” Carlos chimed in. “If we leave him behind, they might get him”.
“I wouldn’t want that on my conscience,” Amber agreed, her teeth beginning to chatter. Emily pursed her lips and followed Mark’s gaze to the station.
“I don’t think they’ll follow us out here,” she concluded. “The open wind would batter them, freeze them, and kill them. If they followed us for that long then they were probably starving, but even that, I don’t think, is a reason to follow us out into the open”.
“They’ll eat me,” Jason whispered. “They’ll tear my skin off and bury their faces into my body and chew and spit and snarl and eat. Eat me all up,”
“No one’s going to eat you, man,” Carlos said, although he sounded distrustful of his own voice. Jason continued to whisper his litany of fear as though nothing had been said.
“Drag him along, if you have to,” Emily said. “We have to get moving”.
The walk along the northbound rails was grueling. The wind blew down their corridor like a rush of icy, needling water, soaking what little exposed skin they had. Jason fared the worst out of all of them for this. His entire head was bare, where the others had carefully scavenged hooded winter coats, and his face was a deep, sore-looking red. The further they walked, the more he stumbled, falling every few steps and sobbing miserably. Mark felt a form of pity at first, but as they approached the next station he began feeling a deep-seated annoyance towards him. Without him, they would have been much further ahead than they were, and the miniature delays were wearing on him.
After Jason stumbled and fell four times in a row Mark stomped over to where he had fallen and knelt smoothly beside him.
“Listen, friend,” he said, “we really have to pick up the pace here. My wife and baby need to g
et inside and rest, and you’re keeping them from doing that”.
Jason looked up at him, and his expression was astonished. Mark took a step back. For his part, Jason saw the donkey from the night of the party, standing over him and braying. The donkey-speech slowly translated into regular speech in his mind, and a deep anger began to burn up from within him.
“Your wife?” he rasped. “Your baby?” A horrified idea had formed in his mind after the donkey’s braying, stinking tongue had wrapped it’s way into a filthy curl around his brain. His ANGEL! This diseased beast had rutted with his Angel! They had made a pissy, squalling baby together! His mouth wouldn’t close, despite the howl of the clenching wind against his sensitive teeth. This filthy fucking beast! He imagined them fucking, imagined their animalistic grunting filling the air, and he felt his stomach rebel. He gritted his teeth and stared at Mark, stared until he felt like he could burn smoking holes into the whinnying bastard.
Mark took another step back and considered the kid coldly. The kid’s eyes were dangerous, he thought, like burning coals that he could see twitch and cavort in the moonlight. He tightened his grip on his .357, ready to squeeze the trigger at provocation. Irritation had given way to a grim species of fear.
Not yet Jason’s mind whispered, and from the flicking he heard around it he envisioned it as a black, sinuous snake talking to him. Not yet. You will know when the time comes, when you’ll be able to get all of them. He closed his lips and forced a smile to crease across his face.
“I’m sorry,” Jason said woodenly. “You’re right. We need to move quickly. Let us continue, sure”. He held his hand out, a mute appeal for help. Mark took it after a moment, his eyes distrustful. He helped Jason up and then turned around to continue walking. Jason grinned at his back and seethed, finding a hot upswell of rage filling him. He restrained himself, however. The snake was right. There would be time, soon enough.