“With that kind of blood loss, he’s probably fairly dead,” John said, trying to sound as if the whole situation wasn’t scaring the shit out of him. “Not to sound cruel, but maybe we should watch out for ourselves. How many of those rats did you say are down here?”
“The underground is full of them. The closer you get to the sewers, the more you’ll see.”
“And the sewer is … where?”
Michael pointed, “Just past that wall.”
“Okay, yeah, we need to get topside right now. Sorry about your friend, but I don’t want to face another mutant. I’m sorry.”
Michael nodded. “All right. I’ll get you back to the surface. Then I’m coming back and looking for Jones. The poor guy’s had a hard enough life, and now this. I hope he’s not wounded.”
They turned toward the door of the little room, to face a pair of glowing yellow eyes in the blackness of the corridor. They were positioned higher up than the rat’s, a good foot and a half off the ground. With a low growl, they advanced forward, slowly, toward the light.
Michael lifted the tennis racket above his head, and John scanned the room for some kind of weapon – any kind of weapon – but he saw nothing. He turned back to the creature that stepped out of the darkness and into the beam of his flashlight.
It was a dog, or it had once been a dog. It stood almost three feet high on twisted, gnarled legs. Its snout was huge, out of proportion to the rest of its body, and sharp teeth poked out of its slavering maw from every direction – too many teeth for one mouth to contain. Its brown and white fur was patchy, long in some areas, almost piebald in others. Its talons clicked on the brickwork as it stalked towards them, its head lowered, the hackles on its back rising. It growled low and deep.
“Jake?” Michael said. “Oh my God, it’s Jake.”
Then, the beast lunged towards John.
Chapter 12
12:35 p.m.
Nicole dialed Sandy’s Blackberry number again as more footage of destruction played out on the flat-screen television in her hotel room. Once again, there was no answer. She bit her lip, blinked her eyes to prevent tears from emerging. She couldn’t show this kind of weakness in front of her superior officer. She wouldn’t allow herself to openly display emotion like that.
General Burns was on his cell phone, sitting at the little desk in the room and taking notes on hotel stationary. He grunted every once in a while. Nicole knew he’d fill her in when he was ready. In the meantime, she turned her attention back to the television, a hand in front of her mouth as she watched the footage.
Buildings were on fire, as were several cars. In the streets, amidst the black smoke and the running, panicking people, towering Lycanthropes loped, grabbing at helpless victims and burying their muzzles in the screaming pedestrians’ throats and chests. At their feet, huge rats scurried, occasionally followed by something bigger – mutated dogs and cats – that snapped at the vermin. Most of the footage was taken live from the air, the cameraperson safe within a helicopter, but some of the closeup video came from daring (or stupid, thought Nicole) camera operators in the streets.
She shook her head in disbelief. It was spreading so fast. It appeared as if the slightest scratch or bite would mutate a person within a minute or two. One piece of footage, taken by a videographer already referred to as dead, showed a man being bitten by one of the rats. He was beginning to transform even before he fell to his knees, his nose extending into a longer snout, his teeth pushing each other out of the way. It was a sobering piece of film.
If things continue this way, she thought, the whole state will be infected come morning.
Yet, inside her military brass-bound heart, she knew the army wouldn’t allow this to happen. Steps would be taken. The disease would be isolated and quarantined. She was already overhearing things General Burns was saying into his cell phone that confirmed this train of thought.
“We’re lucky Manhattan is an island,” he said with a glance towards her. “You might be able to contain it if you work fast enough.”
Nicole knew what this meant—bridges would be blown sky-high, any escape route off of Manhattan Island would be blocked…
… and her lover, Sandy, would be trapped right in the middle of a Lycanthropic Outbreak.
On the television screen, she saw a bus, roaring out of control, go hurtling into the side of the New York Times building. The huge electronic ticker tape dropped onto the roof of the vehicle, sparks flying in every direction from the wreckage. A fire ignited in the nearest alley amidst the trash, spreading swiftly.
General Burns snapped his phone closed and glanced over at Nicole. She raised her eyebrows, asking without speaking. They’d been working together long enough to know what the other was thinking. It was almost a telepathic link.
“They’re gonna blow the bridges,” he said. “Sort of like Cincinnati, but this time we can really call it an island. Nobody gets in, nobody gets out. After they cut the place off, I don’t know what they plan on doing. They might bomb it.”
“Sandy’s out there someplace.”
“And I’m really sorry, but you know we have to stop this thing from spreading. I mean, look at the TV.”
It was now showing footage of a city block on fire, cars stopped in the middle of the road, some crashed into each other. Any pathway a fire department could take was blocked by the abandoned vehicles in the middle of the road. As they watched, a woman cowering behind the closed windows of her Saab was pulled from the vehicle by a creature that smashed the glass and yanked the screaming victim out by her long blond hair.
Nicole sighed, lowering her head, thinking.
Burns put a hand on her shoulder and gave her a few uncertain, hesitant pats. “I really am sorry.”
There was a loud boom outside, and they rushed to the window where they had a good view of the Brooklyn Bridge. A plane was flying over, launching missiles at the structure. It hit the base, and the bridge wavered for a moment, then it tilted to one side. The street down the center of the monument, full of cars and pedestrians fleeing the city, went sideways. The vehicles slid off the pavement, skidding into the river below. A second jet came from the other direction, and it launched more missiles. The middle of the bridge was engulfed in fireballs that rose two hundred feet into the sky. The bridge groaned, and then gave in to gravity. The Gothic arches crumbled into the East River, and pieces of wood from the pedestrian walkway burst into flame. The suspension cables snapped with loud twang noises Nicole could hear even within the insulated walls of their hotel room. Smoke billowed out of the center of the bridge, and the water beneath it roiled in fury. By the time the smoke cleared, the bridge Walt Whitman had once called “the best medicine his soul had ever experienced,” the world’s first steel suspension bridge, a mile of brilliant design and architecture, was little more than rubble in the churning water.
The jets returned, their missiles firing at the Manhattan Bridge this time.
Nicole turned her back on the window, unable to get images of Sandy caught in the crossfire of the planes out of her mind. She saw her lover burning, trapped beneath bricks and wood and rubble.
She frantically dialed Sandy’s Blackberry number again.
She had to reach her. She had to know what to do.
Behind her, General Burns gawked at the destruction out of the window, wondering if it was all going to be enough, if they could ever contain something so virulent, so evil.
Chapter 13
12:44 p.m.
In the stalled subway car, deep beneath the streets of Manhattan, Sandy and the other people with her listened as a deep, muffled boom sounded. She thought it could be an explosion, which would explain the power outage and the immobilization of the train, but shouldn’t the explosion have come before the subway stopped running? And where exactly was this explosion? The sound reverberated in the tunnel, making it hard to figure out if the noise came from above or underground.
She was nervous in the dark. The lights
had all extinguished with the exception of a few red emergency beacons, which encased the tunnel in a crimson glow. Sandy felt as though she was in Hell. All that was missing was a demon or two.
“Well, if we’re gonna be stuck here for a while,” the young black man said, “we ought to know who we’re stuck with. I’m Howard Reigel. I was on my way home after a rehearsal. I’m a dancer in the new Disney show at the Palace. I hate to say it, but I play a chameleon. Eh, a job’s a job.”
The Latino woman, never removing her arm from the teenage girl’s shoulder, said, “I’m Beth Chavez. I’m a volleyball coach in Newark, and this is Alice Smith, my star player. We were going to visit Alice’s grandmother in Brooklyn when the train broke down. I grew up here in the city, but I’ve never seen anything like this happen.”
“Me either,” Alice said, her voice high-pitched, almost babyish in tone.
The tall Latino woman had shoulder-length brown hair and green eyes. She wore a suit that screamed “off the rack but trying hard anyway,” and her voice was tinged with a blue collar Brooklyn accent. Her ward, Alice, was nearly as tall as Beth Chavez, but she seemed so much smaller, as if diminished by proximity. Her hair was a bit longer, blond, in a ponytail, and she had striking blue eyes. Sandy figured she would be exceptionally beautiful once she grew out of the gangly, coltish stage of adolescence.
Beth Chavez continued, “Alice is being scoped by several major colleges, and when she graduates next year, she’s going to have her pick of scholarships. Isn’t that right, honey?”
The sixteen-year-old girl nodded, but she kept her eyes lowered to the floor. Sandy figured she was shy and probably more than a little embarrassed by her coach’s praise.
Sandy volunteered to go next. She introduced herself and told the little group that she was in New York to see the site where her brother had died. There were comforting noises from the old Jewish lady, Sylvia Levy, who instantly took Sandy’s hand in her cold, arthritic one and patted it.
“You poor dear,” she said. “So many people lost family on that awful day. I hate to say it, but I rejoiced when we killed Bin Laden in that compound.”
“You don’t think that’s what this is, do you?” Sandy asked. “An act of terrorism or retaliation? We all heard that explosion a few minutes ago.”
“Probably just typical city noise,” Craig Chew said, taking off his suit jacket. He had rings of perspiration under his arms that were alarmingly large. His hair was red and pasted down with some kind of gel. His small brown eyes rested like pebbles on the shores of his chubby cheeks. He had more chins than a Chinese phone book. He said, “You hear all kinds of weird noises when you’ve lived here long enough. That was probably just construction work.”
“Sounded like something blew up to me,” Howard Reigel said, shrugging his muscular shoulders. He had removed his iPod and had put it in his shoe bag.
Alice inched closer to her coach and whispered, “What if it is the terrorists? What if we’re trapped down here forever?”
Beth answered as calmly as she could. “That’s a lot of ‘ifs’, Alice. Let’s see what happens for certain before we go making assumptions. Like the gentleman said, it could have just been construction in the tunnels.”
“The point is,” Craig Chew said, “none of us know what the hell it is. Could have been anything. We need to just sit tight and wait.”
Sandy noticed people in other cars were opening the doors and stepping out of the trains, across the barrier between tracks. They were stretching and walking around between the other sets of rails, speaking with each other, some calmly, others gesturing frenetically. She imagined their discussions were running similar to the one occurring in her own subway car. She pointed to the groups outside.
“Looks like the rest of the train’s setting themselves free,” she said. “Having a smoke, talking.”
“Stupid jackasses,” Craig Chew said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief that he stuffed back into his shirt pocket. “If the train starts up again, they’re going to be left high and dry and have to walk the rest of the way.”
“Plus, there are the rats,” Howard added. “I saw a bunch of them before we left the platform. It looked like they were heading toward the surface, but who knows how many of those suckers are still down here. I’ve never been bitten by a rat, and I ain’t starting now.”
The young girl moved herself even closer to Beth Chavez, almost as if she wanted to climb into the taller woman’s skin to escape from the giant rodents. Sandy wondered how she was such a great athlete when she seemed as scared as a rabbit. Perhaps she was so familiar with the world of the volleyball court that she felt more at home there than in the real world.
One of the passengers from another car, a young man in a black leather jacket – cigarette in the corner of his mouth, silver flask in hand – pounded on the windows of their car. “Hey, come on out. Join the rest of us.”
Alice burrowed farther. Sandy glared at the man, said, “Leave us alone.”
The leather-clad smoker shrugged it off, said, “Fine. Whatever. No skin off my back, but you’re missing the party.”
All along the track, Sandy saw people moving out of the protection of their cars, opening windows and doors as if the air was better in the nearly dark, red-lit tunnel. She wanted to shout at them, to tell them to use their brains, but it seemed as though they were turning the whole disaster into a celebration and a sobering voice like hers wouldn’t be welcomed amidst the cocktail conversations. She shook her head.
“Stupid.”
“What’s that dearie?” Sylvia asked, leaning closer to hear her.
“I said they’re all stupid, getting out of the safety of the train.”
“Who’s to say we aren’t just as dumb waiting around inside like trapped rats?” Craig Chew asked.
Another shudder accompanied by a loud booming noise shook the subway. Several of the people milling around the tracks fell over or had to grab hold of someone else to maintain their balance. Dust crumbled down from the roof of the tunnel, sending several people outside the train into coughing fits. Others laughed at the pratfalls their fellow passengers had taken.
“That was loud,” Howard Reigel said. “And it sounded close as hell.”
“I can’t stand this,” Alice said, peering out the window.
Sandy tried dialing Nicole on her Blackberry again, but then set it aside with a long sigh. Still no connection. And she was getting tired of feeling impotent, of not knowing what was happening in the world above her head. It almost made her understand why the people in the other cars wanted to wander freely in the tunnel. They were reaching out for explanations, even though they probably all realized they wouldn’t get any this deep underground. Still, people needed reassuring, no matter how much they were endangering themselves.
Craig stood and moved toward the doors. He perused them for a moment, as if trying to make up his mind whether to open them or not.
“Don’t be a schlemiel, Mr. Chew,” Sylvia said. “We’re safer in here. Pretty soon, the subway will start running again and we’ll leave all those poor fools out there on the tracks. They’ll have to schlep all the way home.”
“What if it doesn’t start again?” he asked.
“It’s too soon to know anything like that,” Sandy said, standing and peering out the windows. She thought she heard another sonic boom, but it was faint. Whatever was going on outside seemed to be moving away from them. “If we’re patient for a while, we might get some instruction, maybe even find out what’s really happening out there.”
Alice asked, “You think it’s like the Bible says? Is it the End Times?”
Beth smoothed her hair down, clucking her tongue at the girl. “It’s probably just construction, like Mr. Chew says.”
Mr. Chew was still considering the doors and the possible opportunity of escape and relative freedom. He was sweating heavily, and Sandy noticed for the first time how warm it was getting in the subway car. The air con
ditioning must have gone out along with the lights. A bead of perspiration trickled down the side of her face.
As she watched the tunnel for some indication of what was happening or any sign of rescue, she thought she saw a blur of motion out of the corner of her eye. The red emergency lighting didn’t help her vision much. It appeared as if the ground around the rails was moving, undulating as though in the middle of an earthquake. She squinted, held her hand against the glass to obscure any reflection.
“There’s something out there,” she said.
Immediately, Howard Reigel was by her side, fast on his dancer’s feet. He was soon joined by the others.
“What is it? Where?” he asked.
Sandy said, “Look at the ground, by the rails out there.”
Some of the people wandering outside their cars were pointing at the same area. Then, they were all peering into the darkness, a few of them backing up slowly.
Sandy heard a sound, soft, like a squeaking wheel that needed oiled. She realized what it was before anyone else.
“Oh God,” she said. “They’re rats!”
And they flooded into view – thousands of rats, maybe tens of thousands. A squirming, slithering carpet of the beasts. All of them were mutated, larger than usual, and with a horrifying abundance of teeth sticking out of their mouths. Long, naked tails whipped back and forth, like aggravated cats, and their eyes glowed a sickly yellow in the crimson glow of the emergency lighting.
Sandy had never seen so many rats in one place, and she’d certainly never seen such humongous beasts as these creatures swarming toward their subway train.
She wanted to close her eyes to the horror.
But she couldn’t.
Instead, she picked up her Blackberry and dialed.
And dialed again.
And again.
Chapter 14
Primeval (Werewolf Apocalypse Book 2) Page 7