At first, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Chiaroscuro designs of pipes and metal, rust covering parts of it. As he pushed a bit more and took another step up toward the surface, he realized it was the bottom of a yellow cab that had been turned onto its side. One wheel was still spinning lazily, while the pungent aroma of spilled gasoline wafted over the area, aided by a slight breeze.
“Oh God,” John said, his voice a whisper.
“What do you see? What’s going on?” Michael asked from below.
“It’s the end of the world,” John answered.
John twisted his body around, spinning the manhole cover so he could get a view down the street, away from the bottom of the car. This was actually quite a bit worse, and he shook his head at the sight.
The road was filled with abandoned cars. Some of them were on fire, the heat blackening the husks of some, while others were crashed into each other, into light poles, into the sides of buildings. One had skidded sideways into the plate-glass window of a store, scattering electronics equipment across the street. A double-decker bus had crashed into the front of another building, and into the huge electronic sign that had adorned the front of the place. A few sparks still flashed, blue and white. Several of the lights and phone poles had toppled, crashing into the street. A heavy street lamp had fallen directly on top of one Volkswagen, crushing it in the middle as effectively as a meteor. Flames licked up and down the street, lapping at the spilled gasoline from the various wrecks. In the distance, a few streets farther, an explosion rocked the road. Cracks split up the middle, and a few pieces dropped down into the tunnel below.
Michael dodged these hunks of cement and blacktop. Instinctively raising his hands above his head to deflect any that got too close. He felt the rumble as the explosion tore through something major in the city’s infrastructure. He yelped in surprise.
John watched as a fireball blew the windows out of the fifteenth floor of a skyscraper. Glass shattered, blowing shards of death down into the street. Overhead, he heard the scream of three jets flying over the city. Gunfire erupted from the planes, then more of it erupted from a nearby alley. Someone hidden in the alley’s shadows was shooting back at the war planes, a final and futile attempt at bravado.
“Jesus wept,” he said.
The worst thing to John was the sheer quantity of bodies. Corpses lined the street, some of them whole, others in pieces strewn across the road in a bloody swath. He saw a leg with huge bite marks where the thigh would have normally connected to a body. A disembodied hand rested on its side a few feet away, a woman’s. Her nails had been painted recently, and she had been wearing a beautiful, huge diamond ring when her hand had been shredded from her wrist. A bone stuck out the back, clean as winter snow. A passenger hung out of the window of his yellow cab, his head bashed in so the brains ran out to the road. The driver had gone through the windshield when he had crashed. He lay across the hood, his left leg stuck in the glass. Something had torn his shirt off, flaying at the skin until it had pulled the driver’s intestines through the hole. They lay around him, half devoured.
The dead were everywhere, and the creatures eating the bodies slinked in and out between the cars, as if trying not to be seen. John saw two huge Lycans, at least eight feet tall, with hunched backs and hairy bodies, feasting upon the corpse of a young girl. They fought over the choicest cuts, growling and snapping at each other. Another beast ran after a woman futilely attempting to flee to the safety of a building across the street, which looked as though it hadn’t been damaged yet. It leapt upon her back, digging its claws into her neck. Her head popped off, rolling into the alley where the gunshots had emerged. She hadn’t even screamed once. The beast sat on its haunches, and it started in on the rest of her. A smaller mutant approached, and the larger one swatted it into a nearby car; its fur caught fire, and the thing ran squealing down the street. A pack of the giant rats streamed from a dark alley, racing into the sanctuary of a brownstone with a kicked-in door, chased by something larger that may have once been a dog. They were out of sight in seconds.
Another explosion rocked the ground, splitting the road even more, and John raised his eyes to witness a huge tower of flame fly up into the sky just over the tops of the nearby buildings. He felt the heat, even several streets away, and he heard the sizzle of his eyebrows singeing. The beasts in the streets yelped, running for the shadows of the alleys, hiding behind cars. Some of them dragged their meals along with them to finish later.
John wanted to weep. The creatures were all over the place. The people, who had not been killed or transformed, were closeted away in spider holes no safer than his own hiding place. New York had been brought to its knees in a matter of hours. It was almost beyond comprehension.
He slid the manhole cover back into place and descended the rungs, retreating back to the depths of the darkened tunnel.
“Bad?” Michael asked.
“You’ve got no idea,” John said, sitting on a railing covered in black gunk. He didn’t care. Who gave a shit about the cleanliness of your clothes when the world was coming to a violent, unhappy end?
“Should I look?”
“If you want, but it’s ugly, man. I’m gonna have nightmares about this for the rest of my life – which may not be very long if what’s going on out there is indicative of the state of the rest of the world. Even if it’s just New York…” He paused, a gleam entering his eyes. “The jets.”
“Huh?”
“I saw jets flying over, combat jets with weapons and bombs. F-15s, if I remember right. They’re shutting off the island. Aw Christ, they’re cutting us off. That’s the explosions we’re hearing. They’re probably blowing bridges, ferries... what else connects us to the mainland?”
“Subway tunnels,” Michael volunteered, ascending the ladder-like structure and peering out at the chaos on Broadway. He knew he needed to see it for himself. Satisfied, horrified, he closed the manhole cover and retreated back to the safety of the concrete womb. “The subway tunnels,” he reiterated. “And the sewers.”
“Can they shut off every access to the sewer systems?”
“I don’t know. How the hell would I know something like that? But... there are a lot of them. Lots of tunnels down here, some of them not used for years and years.”
“There’s no way they can do that. No way. There’re too many.”
“You thinking about walking off the island in the sewers?”
“You’re the expert. You tell me if it’s possible.”
“Well, probably,” Michael said. “But it’s not going to be easy.”
“Trust me, it’s got to be easier than going up aboveground. It’s freaking chaos up there. Buildings are falling over, dead people all over the place; everything looks like it’s on fire. And I mean everything. Those creatures are everywhere you look. All kinds of them. We wouldn’t make it fifty feet.”
“Well, then, I guess we don’t have much of a choice, do we?” Michael asked. “We’d better head down, away from all this. I don’t want to get clobbered on the head when another explosion rips through a street. Plus, how long until those things get hungry or curious enough to look under the manhole covers? If they do, and we’re right here, we’re gonna be what’s for supper.”
“I’ll follow you,” John said, motioning for Michael to, once again, take the lead. The homeless man shook his head and started to walk.
“Ain’t this a bitch,” he said.
Chapter 25
2:03 p.m.
“What in God’s name is that?” Craig asked from inside the stalled subway car.
The group had gathered around Sandy as she wielded her makeshift weapons in each hand and watched the monster emerge from the darkness. Sylvia touched her shoulder, and Howard stood to her right, his long, sharpened pole held out in front of him. Behind her, Beth comforted Alice, who seemed to be getting sleepy from the Valium, much to everyone’s relief. The girl had stopped crying, but she was holding on to her volleyball coach
for dear life, as though she could drop to the floor, boneless, at any moment. Her eyes had gone all glassy. She made small, soft whimpering sounds.
The creature stepped out of the darkness of the distant tunnel into the fading red illumination of the nearby emergency lights. Its head was huge and shaggy, with wild tufts sticking out around its ears and jaws. Its eyes were slits of sickly yellow. It stood at least six feet tall, as large as any man, on four gigantic, black-taloned paws. Each paw was larger than a laptop computer. The mutant measured about nine to ten feet long, with huge muscles bunched up around its neck, forelegs, and its swishing tail, bulging out in lumpy masses. It opened its mouth and roared, exposing white teeth eight inches long, curved and pointed, sticking out of the beast’s maw in every direction, as if its muzzle was too small for the number of fangs. Its blue lips pulled back, and it lapped at something on the tracks with a long, black tongue.
“I think it was a lion,” Sandy suggested. “See the mane? Only, this thing is gigantic.”
“It’s infected,” said Howard. “Like the rats. Like the people who turned out there, only this motherfucker’s escaped from the zoo or something.”
“Central Park Zoo has lions,” Craig suggested.
“You mean it had lions,” Sandy said.
“Don’t let it get me,” Alice said, breaking her tragically short drug-induced silence. “Please, don’t let it get me.”
“There she goes again,” Craig said, watching the lion rear its head back up. “You’re gonna have to keep her quiet.”
Beth shrugged, “I’m trying.” She turned to the shaking girl and said, “It’s all right. It can’t get in here.”
“Don’t let it in, coach. It’s going to kill me. Look at it. It wants to get in here and kill us all!”
The girl’s voice had risen from a whisper to a near shriek. Beth was rubbing Alice’s arm, stroking it gently, reassuringly.
“Shut her up,” Craig said, moving beside the girl.
“Alice, sweetie, look at me,” Beth said in her most calming speech. “I need you to look in my eyes.”
“It’s gonna get me,” Alice cried, looking out at the monster.
Its ears were sticking up. It had discerned something, but it still hadn’t figured out where the noise was coming from.
“Shut her the hell up,” Craig warned, raising his hand, “or I will.” He raised his pole in a threatening manner, as if he had no problem with smacking the girl upside the head with it and knocking her unconscious. His eyes, tinged in the red light, looked rabid and scary, and Sandy knew he would harm this child to save himself without regret or the least bit of remorse.
“Alice, shh,” Beth said, covering the girl’s mouth with her hands. The teenager shoved them away, slapping at them, working herself up to a hysteric level.
Craig tensed his muscles, readied himself to deliver the blow to the sixteen-year-old.
Outside the car, the monstrous lion looked back into the dark tunnel and gave a roar that shook the windows of the train. Its ears were sticking straight up and wavering back and forth, like SETI satellite dishes searching for a signal. Deep in the darkness, a second roar answered, weaker than the first and still farther away, but it related a single thought to everyone on the train – there’s another one out there!
Sandy turned to Alice, saw the same idea fight its way into her mind, and saw the wildness enter the girl’s eyes. She probably figured the creatures knew she was inside, so young and tender. Alice took one look out the window as the mutant lion swerved its shaggy head back towards the car, and she collapsed, fainting gracefully into Beth’s arms. The coach caught her before she hurt herself, and then gently lowered the girl to the floor. She took such care with Alice’s head that Sandy knew she truly cared for the girl, that she was probably more than Beth’s star player. As the coach brushed the hair from Alice’s face, Sandy thought, This is her surrogate daughter. For some reason, this woman looks upon Alice as her own child.
Craig lowered his weapon, watching the girl rest on the floor of the subway car. He looked relieved.
And she was a little embarrassed to discover she might have done the same thing.
The creature let loose another loud cry.
“Nobody move,” Sandy whispered as something stirred within the inky blackness of the tunnel’s depths. “Don’t talk. Don’t speak. Maybe they’ll go on their way and not notice us.”
She knew it was wishful thinking, but if they were going to have any chance at all of surviving, they couldn’t draw the giant creature’s attention to them. The thing had claws the length of Sandy’s fingers. A couple of metal pieces of the subway car, sharpened or not, wouldn’t stand a chance against talons that big. And that wasn’t even factoring the teeth into the equation.
The second mutant materialized into the red illumination. This monster was slightly smaller than the other, and it lacked the shaggy mane of the huge male. It moved gracefully, despite its bulk, muscles rippling under its heavily furred hide. Its tail switched back and forth. It padded over to the male, its footsteps eerily silent. It nuzzled its head against the mane of the other monster in greeting, and then it started looking around at its new domain.
When it gazed over at the stalled train, Sandy thought the female was looking directly at her, its slanted yellow eyes peering into her soul.
The female roared, exposing its massive, curved teeth.
Chapter 26
2:05 p.m.
Nicole watched the sky as the trio of jets flew past them again, their formation a textbook example of military precision. As they sped out of sight, the helicopter lifted off the roof of the hotel, and she wondered, What the hell are we doing? This is insane.
“Here we go,” Tom Hemmer shouted, as he clicked several buttons and pulled up on the steering.
There was a brief moment when Nicole felt as if she were weightless when the copter took flight, rising straight up into the air then tilting a bit as it spun around, heading for Manhattan. The cabin was surprisingly quiet, but she could still hear muffled explosions coming from the island. While she watched out the side window, the Empire State Building leaned to the left and collapsed. One side of it seemed to slough off the other, followed by the rest of the skyscraper. Even as they crossed the river, Nicole could hear the overwhelming cacophony of the building crumbling to the ground. Dust and fires blew from the site, gas lines exploded, and if she squinted, she could see the outlines of people falling to their death. It brought back memories of the 9/11 attacks, and she had to close her eyes for a moment. It was too much to see, the deaths of so many souls, the utter destruction of an architectural wonder of the world.
Alone in her head, she told herself that this was temporary. The government would get a handle on the situation, just as they had in Cincinnati, and they’d bring her unit in to play cleanup after they stopped the spread of the virus. Only this time it was a more populous area, full of stately, tall buildings and monuments, and the disease was spreading at a terrifying speed. Manhattan was probably a write-off.
Opening her eyes again, she saw they had crossed over the East River. The Empire State was still disintegrating, knocking into the building across the street from it and setting off a chain reaction where one building smashed into another which fell upon another – a hellish giant’s game of dominos. The streets were full of crashed cars, overturned buses, and yellow cabs on fire. Nicole saw people, tiny from her vantage point, running through the streets, seeking some kind of shelter. Several were crushed by the crumbling structures and the large chunks of cement and iron falling from up high. Huge sheets of glass tumbled end over end, finally smashing to the pavement, shooting shards in every direction like lethal missiles. One unlucky woman was neatly sliced in two, from her head to her navel, by a long falling window pane. Instantly, the two halves were beset by horrific monsters, which started to feast upon the woman’s remains, oblivious to the chaos around them.
One of the crumbling buildings drooped to the
side, finally resting against a more solid stone skyscraper. It wavered, but remained standing, and the two formed a forty-five-degree triangle with the streets below.
Tom Hemmer shouted, “Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen.”
He veered the helicopter lower, until it was passing just beneath the newly created arch of the two buildings. Bits of glass rained down on the copter for a moment, then it cleared the rubble.
“See that one up there? That’s on Broadway,” Hemmer said.
“The one that’s on fire?” Burns asked, incredulous.
“No, the one next to it.”
“Oh shit!” Nicole screamed, noticing that there was something following them. “We have a bogey behind us.”
Hemmer said, “When did they pick us up? Didn’t see them. Okay, kiddies, you might lose your lunches, but we’re gonna try and lose this creep.”
“Good luck,” she replied. “It’s an F-15. Nice little—”
“I can outfly that old junker,” Hemmer said, and the world dropped out from beneath them all.
The whirlybird plunged suddenly, losing twenty-five feet of altitude, and it started flying in between the extant skyscrapers twenty or thirty feet above street level. The buildings loomed over them, forming a Cyclopean maze, their shadows blocking out most of the sunlight. The F-15 remained up high, above the rooftops, speeding away from them until it was out of sight. Within a few seconds, it reappeared over their heads.
Hemmer steered the helicopter deftly between the buildings, making a left turn, following Broadway north. Zipping through the streets of the midtown shopping district, the trio in the helicopter avoided most of the fires, although Nicole drew in her breath more than a few times. A burst of flame exploded from a fortieth story window. Pieces of glass rained down on them, and burning cloth slid down the front dome of the medical helicopter. Hemmer pulled up, and the copter lurched another fifty feet higher as another jet soared over their heads.
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