What Happens in the Darkness

by Monica J. O'Rourke

  “Never mind.”

  “No luck?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “You’ll have to try the tracks then. Head uptown.”

  The tracks made her nervous. She knew the third rail was dangerous and could kill you because it was full of electricity. She’d heard a story about an old homeless man who peed on the tracks because that’s where the homeless sometimes went to the bathroom (her brother Raymond told her that), and his pee had made contact with the third rail and it was like a stream of lighter fluid on a charcoal briquette. Then the pee acted like a connection and the guy got fried, right up through his thing. Janelle imagined that that was a really awful way to die, but thought he had no business peeing on train tracks.

  “Which one is the third rail?” she asked.

  “Third rail? The one farthest away, I think. But there’s no electricity. The tracks should be safe.”

  “Oh.”

  “Take some supplies. Water, whatever you might need.”

  She grabbed her backpack and scavenged in the rubble. She stuffed a couple of bottles of water inside. A few feet away she found the lantern, but all that remained was a shattered pile of glass and metal.

  She went back over to Harry, and he took her hand. “Good luck, kiddo. And be careful. You can do this. Okay? Right? You’ll be fine.”

  “Right.” At least one of them was sure.

  “What about that bad man?” she asked. “What if he’s down there?”

  “He won’t be. The odds of him being down here are like a million to one.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. More like a billion to one.”

  Janelle sighed. She flashed the light into the station and followed the beam onto the tracks.

  They were in the Eighty-Sixth Street/Lexington Avenue station. She tried to remember what the next station would be … uptown, the next one was Ninety-Sixth Street? Of that she was fairly sure.

  “Ninety-Sixth is next, right?”

  “Right.”

  Uptown then.

  The flashlight once more became a beacon, pointing at the tracks and then into the tunnel that looked like a black, diseased mouth.

  She swallowed hard, wanting to not move, wanting to not do this.

  She followed the platform as far as she could before steel support beams and hunks of wall blocked her way, and she carefully dropped onto the tracks and followed the pathetic trail of light into the blackness.

  Chapter 4

  Martin stood, fingers wrapped around the bars, faced pressed between them.

  He looks terrible, Jeff thought. Emaciated. He wondered how long it would take for him to die. Again.

  “We’re getting our asses kicked. There’s almost nothing left on the base. The country is under attack, and no one knows for sure how bad it is. Communications have been cut off.”

  Martin snorted. “Why the hell are you telling me this? Do you think I care?”

  Several members of his “family” stood beside him. Jeff recognized Patrick, Lana, Rebecca. Patrick scared the hell out of Jeff. Not that Lana was much better. In the twenty-plus years Jeff held this job, he avoided them as much as possible. They weren’t terribly pleasant and clearly resented their incarceration. That information they had made abundantly clear. Many times.

  Jeff moved closer to the bars. “What can you do for me?”

  Martin was taken aback. “What? Why would I want to do anything for you?”

  “For your freedom—if I let you out—all of you—what can you promise me?”

  “Fuck you, Jeff,” Patrick yelled.

  “Why are you doing this?” Jeff cried. “I’m offering you freedom.”

  “At what price?” Martin moved away from the bars.

  Jeff watched him clutch his stomach as if in pain. Martin straightened and sat in the easy chair. The members of his family stepped away but remained standing. It felt to Jeff as if they were getting a better vantage point.

  Jeff said, “Name your price.”

  “No. You name the price. Stop playing games.”

  Jeff pulled up a chair and sat opposite Martin. “Help us fight. Help us win this thing.”

  “Impossible,” Martin said.

  “What? Why? What do you mean?”

  “Don’t play stupid. You know as well as I do what kind of numbers we’re up against.”

  “So what? It’s not like bullets can kill you. I don’t see—”

  “There are seven of us!” Patrick snapped, moving toward the bars until Martin raised his hand, stopping Patrick in his tracks. He scowled at Martin but obeyed. “Go to hell, Jeff.”

  “This is your war, not ours,” Martin added. “We don’t give a damn about you and your people.”

  “That’s the price for your freedom,” Jeff said. “We need your help.”

  “Forget it.”

  Jeff ran his hands over his face and groaned. “Don’t do this, Martin! I want to let you out.”

  “Then open the damn door.”

  “You can sire an army.”

  “I know what we can do. I said no.”

  “You’re willing to let your family die?”

  “They’re already dead.”

  “Don’t be coy, Martin. It’s beneath you.”

  A third voice came from the darkness behind Martin. “Don’t be stupid,” Lana said. “Get us out of here, Martin. Do what he says.”

  “Be quiet,” Martin said. “This isn’t your concern.”

  “Of course this is my concern!” she snapped, approaching the bars. Her face was as gaunt as Martin’s. She looked from Martin to Jeff and back again. “What’s your offer?” she asked Jeff.

  “Help us win this fight.”

  “Done. Open the door.”

  Jeff shook his head. “It’s not that simple. I need Martin to agree. I have no desire to become anyone’s dinner.”

  “You know that’d never happen,” Martin said.

  “I don’t know anything anymore. I know how hungry you are.”

  “You have my loyalty, Jeff. You’re a brother to me. I don’t think of you as food.”

  “How sweet,” Jeff said, shaking his head. “But no.”

  “Give us a minute,” Martin said to the others.

  They hesitated for a moment before the three walked into the darkness.

  “They want out,” Jeff said.

  “I know.”

  “Then stop being so damned selfish.”

  “Go to hell!”

  “Why are you suddenly fighting me on this?” Jeff asked. “I’m offering you your freedom. All of you. What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t trust you.”

  “Trust me? What’s there to trust? You agree to this, I unlock the cage. I don’t get this.”

  “This is involved. This could last for months, Jeff. Once I give my word, we’re in this till the end.”

  “So?”

  Martin inhaled deeply, a gesture Jeff knew was symbolic because they didn’t actually breathe.

  “A few days ago you begged me to let you out, to give you your freedom. What’s changed?”

  “This isn’t exactly freedom.”

  “Of course it is. You call the shots. You move around freely. Let’s call it a form of parole.”

  Martin smirked. “Coy really doesn’t suit you.”

  Jeff shrugged. “It’s all I know.”

  Martin nodded. “Fine. I can’t be selfish,” Martin said. “If it was only me I would die before agreeing to this. But I have my family to consider.”

  “You do.”

  “This is not my war. I don’t care who lives or dies. But I’ll help you.”

  “Good.”

  “On my terms, Jeff. We do this my way.”

  For a second Jeff wondered if the tables had just been turned on him, but he said, “Agreed,” and offered his hand.

  Martin ignored the hand. “Unlock the door.”

  Without power, the electronic mechanism wouldn’t work. The backup metho
d was simply a key, made of the same metal strong enough to contain the vampires in their cell.

  Jeff unlocked the door. He glanced at his watch. “I wouldn’t go anywhere yet if I were you. It’s about fourteen-hundred hours.”

  Martin ran his fingers through his short saffron hair. “Two o’clock, right? You’ve managed to completely manipulate the time in here.”

  Jeff shrugged. “Just one of many defense mechanisms in place. Listen, please don’t eat anyone left on base. There are towns a short distance from here.”

  “Fair enough,” Martin said, heading into the living room. “We’ll leave later this evening. After sunset.” He disappeared into the back.

  Jeff blinked, surprised Martin hadn’t immediately left the cell.

  Nothing separated them any longer.

  ***

  The flashlight beam tried to penetrate the dreariness of the tunnel, but the light stopped at the entrance as if cauterized. Janelle’s heart hammered in her ears. The flashlight slipped through her clammy fingers more than once, but she managed not to drop it.

  There was no reflection for her to train her eyes on, only that shaft of flashlight spotlighting whatever rested on the tracks. She strained, listening for every sound. There was an occasional squeak, and rustling sounds, noises like something darting past, something unseen, and even when she whirled with the flashlight and tried to catch whatever it was, nothing was there. Just empty space, with an occasional puff of dirt kicked up by something scurrying.

  The smells were overwhelming: plaster, fetid water, and something rotting, something overripe. Dripping sounds bounced around somewhere in the tunnel, and she wondered if it was safe to drink. The few small bottles of water secured in her backpack wouldn’t last long.

  She slowly walked uptown along the tracks, sweeping the light in an attempt to see as much as possible. Against the walls were human shapes, close enough to see but she refused to look. Refused to believe the subway was littered with dead bodies. She knew the homeless lived in the subway tunnels, had done a report on them for humanities class, had seen their haunted faces as the train sped past them from station to station. Her mom never believed Janelle when she said she saw people in the tunnels. Said it was her imagination. When Janelle was insistent, her mom had told her they were probably MTA employees.

  Up ahead now on the tracks was a train.

  She stopped and aimed the light. The front car was the conductor’s car, and it was solid metal. Her flashlight beam wasn’t going to penetrate it.

  She aimed the light along both sides of the train to see how much room she’d have to maneuver.

  Not much.

  She’d have to walk sideways past the cars.

  The tunnel felt smaller somehow, as if it had shrunk in the last few minutes. She dropped her arm and focused the light on the track. What she wanted to do was drop to the ground, pull herself into a ball, and wait for someone to rescue her. She started crying, her shoulders shaking. She didn’t want to walk past that train. To have to look inside the cars, to have to sidle past such a constricting, horrible space. What if she got trapped? What then?

  What if someone was dead inside?

  Or worse—what if someone was alive inside?

  But she knew no one was going to rescue her, knew she had to keep moving. She lifted the light, aimed it at the train again, and moved toward it. Reaching the first car, she slowly turned sideways. Which way? Face away from the train, or toward it? See what was inside or walk blindly past? Her body shook as she tried to decide which was the lesser of two evils and opted to walk past facing the wall, not the cars. She stepped forward and maneuvered between the train and the wall.

  As if caressed by a cold breeze, the hair on her arms and on the nape of her neck suddenly bristled. She didn’t know why—she wasn’t any more frightened this second than she had been a minute ago. But something felt wrong. Something she hadn’t yet detected, as if some part of her instinctively knew.

  Something behind her … in the black maw of the tunnel, a darkness so thick and heavy it felt visceral, like it had hands and claws that could reach out and—

  She swallowed, sucking in her small stomach to make more room to move past the subway car.

  Something in that blackness tittered, a low, chittering sound, and she knew, just knew it was rocks falling, or the pipes dripping, or rats fighting but it wasn’t a laugh because that would be insane, that would be totally stupid, and she moved more quickly, unable to hold the flashlight up and still be able to walk at the same time, praying she didn’t bump into someone—something—in her path.

  When she opened her mouth she discovered she had no spit, that it had gone completely dry in there, that when she tried to lick her lips there was nothing to moisten them. She felt her heart trying to pound and rip its way through her ribcage.

  She kept moving, two-stepping the length of a ten-car subway, trying to outrun whatever was in the darkness, trying to lose her hearing so she would never have to know the sound of it again.

  But she wasn’t so lucky. It wasn’t closer, that much she had going for her, but it was louder; she heard its breathing off the tunnel walls, heard it laugh again, like it had suddenly remembered a funny joke and was quietly laughing, trying to keep the secret all to itself.

  She thought about the tall man, how he had tried to grab her, how he had terrified her.

  Janelle felt dizzy and was terrified of passing out. She kept moving, a sudden cold chill appearing in the stifling hot subway tunnel.

  Smells—like the time her dad found the rotting mouse in the heating vent in her bedroom—oozed through the sealed subway car doors. But this smell was much worse than the dead mouse; there was a thickness to it, like she was swallowing it whole.

  Then something was blocking her way, something she wasn’t sure she could climb over.

  But it wasn’t rocks, as she’d thought. It—

  It was a woman and a child, their bodies twisted together, the kid’s arms around the woman’s neck.

  Janelle shuddered violently, wanted to shriek, and slammed her palm over her mouth. Terrified of crying out, that whatever was behind her in the darkness would hear. But unable to take the light off the horrible sight.

  The only thing left on the kid’s head was below its nose. The top half was crushed and covered with something like thick red jelly. His baseball cap had been smashed into the pulp. Between his legs was a teddy bear.

  “No,” she cried, unable to stop herself.

  Then, from the darkness, a voice: “Janelle …” A whisper, the hint of a voice. Calling her name. Then laughter, a low chuckling, and she knew it was the bad man. Had to be.

  “I’m coming …” he whispered again.

  Janelle sucked in a deep breath and ran, jumping over the bodies. She tripped and scraped her leg on something sharp, falling on her knees, catching herself on her palms.

  But she was away from them, and farther away from the thing in the darkness.

  Steel girders crisscrossed her path, and chunks of rock and brick and concrete littered the tracks, seeming to worsen as she approached the Ninety-Sixth Street station. She managed to climb the platform and rushed toward the turnstile, her flashlight beam leading the way.

  She reached the stairwell to one exit. Blocked.

  She clambered across the platform to the other side, the northeast corner. Also blocked.

  Poking out from beneath this pile of rocks was a pair of legs, mangled and bloody, the jeans shredded.

  Janelle screamed and stumbled backward. She leaned against a wall. With a shaking hand she waved the light around. The exits were blocked. The bottom steps taunted her. She climbed back under the turnstile, back into the station.

  People had apparently had the same idea to take shelter in the subway and were now crushed. Dead bodies lay scattered everywhere. More body parts, more crushed heads oozing blood and brains, and Janelle wasn’t sure how much more of that she could take.

  Most bodies w
ere piled on top of each other near the exit, as if they had been trying to escape. Janelle screamed again, covered her mouth with a filthy hand. Her stomach threatened to empty itself.

  No one had survived.

  She sobbed when she saw the kids. Lying side by side or on top of each other, as if they had huddled for protection. Some held hands, their small bodies broken, covered in rock. Covered in blood. She wondered where their moms and dads had gone, why they were all alone.

  She became keenly aware she was sharing space with dead bodies, and her imagination kicked into overdrive. It was easy to picture them, now all bloody and mangled, so very pissed they were dead and she wasn’t, ambling toward her, arms outstretched like something out of a Mummy movie, coming after her with twisted, grabbing fingers, smelling rotten, reeking of putrid death and—

  And she had to get out of there.

  She turned toward the tracks but didn’t want to go. Dreaded the thought of facing those bodies by the train, of facing that darkness again. But she couldn’t stay here. Not with these dead bodies. There was no exit out of here either.

  Something grabbed Janelle’s arm.

  She screamed. That thing from the tunnel had caught her, that rotten tall man. He’d found her and now he had her, and now she would die too.

  Whatever horrible, oozing, laughing mess that held her in its grip was planning to chew into her stomach, rip out her guts.

  She yanked on her arm and tried to pull away. She aimed the light in its face.

  One half of its head was crushed, the hair wet and matted with blood that looked black in the dim light. One of its eyes bulged like an overripe grape. This mess threw back her head and opened her mouth. Her teeth were shattered bits. The woman coughed and groaned.

  Janelle shrieked and frantically pulled away, heard the injured woman fall to the ground as Janelle scuttled in the opposite direction, back on to the tracks. Guilt filled her when she realized she’d left the woman alone to suffer, but Janelle was too scared to turn back.

  She ran the length of the platform. The entrance to the next uptown station was completely blocked by concrete.

  She raised her shaking arm and shined the flashlight into the downtown tunnel. It swallowed the beam whole. But she had no choice. She would have to go back to the Eighty-Sixth Street station. Back where she came from. Back through that miserable black hole.