She cried out, and the female lion seemed infuriated by the sound. It started squirming and wiggling to get out of the confines of the window. Sandy let loose with a loud scream.
Howard grasped Sylvia’s hands and pulled her from behind Sandy’s back. She was dead weight, unconscious, and he couldn’t get any traction because he couldn’t raise himself up. The lion was writhing frantically, claws and teeth and fur and instinct in a deadly bundle.
As Howard hauled the old woman from behind her back, Sandy felt herself lean into the suddenly unoccupied space. Now the beast was at least six inches away – not much, but a hell of a lot better than before. An improvement.
Sandy scooted sideways, staying just behind Howard. The creature shifted, turned a bit so it could get a better angle on its prey. When it opened its ragged tooth-filled maw, she could smell the disease on it, a fetid odor that wrapped itself around everything good and squeezed until it removed anything that was beautiful and replaced it with everything that was sharp and lethal. It smelled like death. Her death. The world’s death.
She was far enough away that she could stand. Howard was already on his feet, and they each grabbed one of Sylvia’s arms and dragged her to the back of the toppled car. They set her next to Beth, who was trying to calm down Alice. The girl was still screaming, the sound annoying and loud in the confined space. Beth had ceased her sympathetic coddling and was actually grabbing the girl by her arms and shaking her. Alice’s teeth clacked together, but she didn’t stop her incessant wailing.
After setting Sylvia gently down on her stomach, Sandy turned the old woman’s head, in case she vomited. The gashes on her back were wide and seeping. She would definitely require stitches if they survived. She moaned softly, and Sandy noticed that she had lost two of her three teeth somewhere during the fracas. Her mouth sunk in on itself, her bottom lip puffing up with each exhalation.
Howard stood and he grabbed hold of the long pole that he had formed into a weapon. When Sandy got to her feet, shooting the crying Alice a dirty look – why wouldn’t the damn kid shut up? – Howard took her hand and pressed Craig’s pole into it. He closed her fingers around it, tightened them.
The lioness was still squirming to free herself from the window’s trap. Her paws lashed out in every direction, her huge mouth opening and closing in protest. Her howls were growing louder, fighting for dominance against the teenage girl’s screams. The result was a cacophony that made Sandy want to run out of the subway car’s door and flee from the incessant noise.
Instead, she clutched the pole Howard had given her. Glancing over at him, she nodded. They both turned their gaze to the lioness, dangling from her hips, her front paws scraping against the sideways seats.
“It’s piñata time, baby,” Sandy said.
“Amen,” Howard answered, as they took positions on either side of the dangling creature.
Howard swung first, bashing the monster in the chops. Teeth flew across the car, clinking as they landed in the pools of broken glass. Blood flew from the thing’s mouth. The lioness, enraged, struck out at him. She missed, but her body swung a bit the other way, and Sandy, grasping her pole like Babe Ruth, hit the beast in the head as hard as she could. More teeth dropped to the floor, and the monster started howling, screeching with a primeval ferocity. Howard swung, struck the creature’s back. It swayed a bit, and Sandy smashed it in the head again. This time, she felt something, bone, crack under her blow. The monster’s left eye popped from its cracked skull, dangled by a nerve. It was slavering drool and gore from its pulverized and torn mouth.
The two of them continued beating the creature, first one, then the other. The beast, trapped and unable to escape, continued to growl until Howard landed a wallop that dislodged the top of the thing’s skull, and its head opened like an egg. Bits of bone and feline brain tissue splattered the walls.
Sandy hit it a few more times, just to be certain it wasn’t going to leap up after they thought it was dead, coming after them when they least expected it. She’d watched too many horror and action movies with Nicole to know what happens if you don’t make certain the bad guy is definitely, positively dead. They always got back up.
She noticed Howard gave the dead monster a few more smacks with his sharpened pole as well. It left long, glistening slashes in the lioness’s hide.
At the far side of the subway car, Beth managed to calm Alice down so that the girl was whimpering a bit, but at least she had stopped that ungodly screaming. Sandy had been on the verge of pulling a “Craig” and knocking the chick out herself. She wasn’t pleased that her thoughts had gone to this dark side, but she had to admit that the nonstop yelling was not only irritating, but dangerous as well. She was like a dinner bell going off, announcing to every mutated creature in the vicinity that the human buffet was served. Luckily, Beth seemed to have gotten Alice’s hysterics under control. At least for now.
Other than the soft sniveling of the teenager, the subway car was strangely quiet. Sandy could hear her own breath, Howard’s too, coming in short adrenaline-fueled bursts.
“Are we okay?” Beth asked, smoothing down Alice’s hair. “Is it over?”
Sandy looked around the subway car. The whole thing was turned the wrong way, lying on its side. The windows were mostly crushed beneath their feet, and some of the seats were ripped from their positions. The dead lioness drooped from where she had gotten stuck and had been killed, her bleeding, crushed head leaking blood across the floor. In death, the creature seemed smaller, even though she had to measure twelve feet or more in length.
“I don’t know,” Sandy said, looking around. She noticed the emergency lights seemed a little dimmer, as if their power was diminishing bit by bit as the day went on. Her eyes swept past the tracks, where she saw a long bloodstain and two of the Lycanthrope creatures lying dead. There was something wrong with it all, though, something she couldn’t place right away.
Then she thought of it.
“Where’s the one with the mane?”
And then the female’s body was jerked backwards out of the window. Sandy shrieked, moving away, holding the pole out in front of herself.
Behind her, she heard Sylvia moan, low in her throat.
Beth cried out and Alice gave another one of her piercing shrieks.
Howard spun around, said, “Oh shit.”
When Sandy finally looked, Sylvia was on all fours, crawling toward Beth and Alice. As she moved, her face punched out, becoming a long snout, and her ears grew long and pointed, pressed backwards against the top of her sloping skull.
She was infected by the cuts on her back, Sandy realized. And we left her in here with us.
The old woman stopped, arched her back like an angry cat, then pulled herself up on her feet. Her legs snapped into wrong positions, and her boots were torn off and left on the floor. White hair was sprouting all over her face and body, and she started ripping at her clothing, tossing the shreds from her naked, hirsute body.
Her golden, nearly glowing eyes were pinpointed upon Alice and Beth.
Sandy rushed toward the old Lycanthrope, swinging her pole.
And suddenly, the train car was rocked again, and everyone, human or otherwise, was tossed into the center aisle. Sandy lost her grip on her pole, and she slammed into Howard’s back. Both of them tumbled into the creature that had once been Sylvia. Sandy tried to avoid the sprouting fangs in the monster’s mouth, which it opened and closed as though teething and in pain. She pushed on the thing’s barrel chest and shoved it into the next aisle, leaving a seat between it and her and Howard.
The subway car rocked again as the male lion attempted to force its head and shoulders through the hole opened by its daintier mate. It couldn’t get very far, but it was pushing as hard as it could.
With a jolt, the car separated from the couplings holding it to the rest of the subway train. Metal screeched as it was shoved horizontally over the tracks. The motion stopped with a lurch when the lion mutant smashed it aga
inst the opposite wall of the tunnel. Part of the roof of the car was crushed inward.
The beast was grasping blindly into the car’s window, like a cat after a mouse in a hole in the wall.
Sandy got her bearings, tried to stand, found herself entangled with Howard’s legs.
Somewhere, Alice was still screaming.
And with a roar, the Lycanthrope that had been Sylvia jumped onto the back of the seat behind Sandy’s head. It opened its jaws, exposing rows of fangs, and lines of thick drool dripped from its gaping mouth.
Nothing human remained in its face. Nothing remained of Sylvia. Now, she’d turned into a raging inferno of hunger, hatred, and need.
All Sandy wanted to do was close her eyes and let the endless noise of the monsters and the screams and the metal and glass breaking to go far, far away. She couldn’t handle much more. She wanted it all to end.
Then, she thought she heard gunfire outside the crumpled, ruined subway car.
Nicole, was her first thought, and even just the name made her smile. Nicole, is that you?
Chapter 39
3:20 p.m.
Nicole and General Taylor Burns had run into a few of the Lycanthropes on their journey through the subway tunnel, but they were surprisingly few and far between. A well-placed blast from the M-9 pistols took care of them, but Nicole pointed out that they were running dangerously low on ammo.
Burns grunted, said, “I noticed. Won’t be long and the M-9s won’t be much use at all. I still have a few more clips.”
“We could always use them as blackjacks and pistol-whip the bastards.”
“That’s only in the movies,” he said, shooting at a creature that leapt at them from the shadows. It fell to the floor with two bullets between its eyes.
“Well,” she said. “Guess it’s a good thing my hands are lethal weapons.”
“Oh, I don’t think it’ll come to that. Not yet. I got a couple of grenades still.”
“Those could be scary underground like this,” she said as something roared loudly down the tunnel. “Jesus, what was that?”
“Sounded big.”
“It sounded flipping huge.”
As they paused to listen, Nicole heard something beneath the horrible bestial battle cry. She turned to Burns, who met her eyes and grinned.
“People,” she said. “Those are people screaming.”
“Let’s go kick some monster ass,” Burns said as they rushed forward into the tunnel.
As they rounded a turn, they saw a stalled subway car ahead. When they got closer, they could see that it had nearly been destroyed, on its side with the silver exterior dented and crumpled in places. Something enormous was trying to force itself into one section of the car.
“Holy shit, is that a lion?” Burns asked, raising his rifle.
Nicole let off a few shots from her Colt, nicking the beast across its back. Crimson dots appeared on the tawny hide. It didn’t look as if the bullets had done much damage to the gigantic creature, but the pain got its attention. The thing pulled itself out of the window of the overturned subway car and turned its golden gaze onto these new interlopers. Shaking its mane, it lowered its head, licking its lips. Someone within the subway car was screaming.
Nicole aimed as the creature readied itself to spring at them. Firing off a few rounds, she took out the monster’s left eye, which exploded into a yellow and red mess. The beast roared in pain, and Taylor Burns fired into its chest. Bullet wounds appeared on the creature, but it still marched toward them, stopping once to paw at the ruins of its eye. Nicole fired into its head until she ran out of ammunition, then she tossed the empty clip aside, feeling for her second and last clip.
Burns’ pistol sputtered, clicking on empty, and he shook the clip from the bottom and reloaded.
The creature started loping toward them, away from the subway car. It couldn’t run straight, obviously injured and confused with all the pain, its eyesight all messed up from the wound, but it was still making progress.
Nicole fired a single shot at it, then another. Wounds blossomed on its fur.
Burns shouted, “Get down!”
She almost didn’t see the grenade he threw at the beast. It landed just in front of the monster, and the creature was so preoccupied with its charge and the awful pain it was suffering that it paid no attention to the pineapple-shaped explosive; it stepped right over it. The grenade went off as the mutant’s stomach was passing over, and its power blasted the beast into two halves. The front of the lion continued for a few steps, dragging a ribcage and several yards of intestine. The hind legs and the lion’s tail blew across the tunnel, smashing into the wall. The creature turned its shaggy head, as though wondering what had just happened to its rear half, then it slumped to the ground, its tongue hanging out of the corner of its mouth.
Inside the overturned subway car, people were screaming. Nicole headed for the train, her Colt at her side. Burns followed her, pounding on the side of his ears.
“I think I blew an eardrum,” he said.
“Listen,” she said. “I hear…”
The screaming got louder, several voices, including one so familiar that it brought a smile to the soldiers’ faces. Nicole rushed the car, climbing on top of it. Burns moved to the side, looking through the doorway at the front. It was sideways, but it gave him a good view of the interior and the drama that was playing out within.
Nicole knew it was Sandy’s voice she had heard. Other than some minor fights, she’d never heard her girlfriend scream, but she recognized that tone without even seeing her. Looking down through the shattered window of the subway, she saw the top of Sandy’s head as she rushed down the length of the train, holding something long and shiny in her hands. Behind her, a gray and white Lycanthrope dogged her footsteps. It had its claws out in front of itself, lashing out at her as it stalked closer.
Nicole didn’t even think as she raised the Colt and fired downwards through the window and into the top of the creature’s head. The bullets emerged from the bottom of the monster’s face, blowing its lower jaw off in a spray of teeth and blood. It stumbled for a moment, and Nicole thought she would have to shoot it again, but it fell to its knees and slumped sideways against an ugly orange and beige seat.
Overhead, something exploded on the surface, with a force so loud and destructive, it rattled the entire tunnel. Bits of tile fell from their moorings, tinkling as they hit the floor. Nicole wondered what was happening up there above them. She suspected she wouldn’t want to be close enough to know.
She hollered into the window, “Sandy? Are you all right?”
The blond, curly hair came back into view through the hole, and Sandy looked up at her with those hazel eyes Nicole had fallen in love with. She was a bit the worse for wear, some smudges on her skin, her clothes dirty and torn, and she had a few small cuts on her face, but she was still Sandy, and she was a sight for Nicole’s poor tired eyes.
“Somehow,” Sandy said, beaming up at her lover. “I knew it was you.”
“How’s that?”
“The total destruction,” Sandy said with a laugh. “Help me out.”
“Any more of those things in there?” Nicole asked, extending a hand.
As Sandy took her hand, Nicole pulled her up to the top of the overturned subway car through the broken window, where they stood side by side.
“No, babe,” Sandy said. “You got them all.”
They embraced in a long kiss then separated, and Nicole regained the steely-eyed look of a soldier on duty. The brief softness of the moment was over, and she was all business again. She almost seemed a little embarrassed by her public display of emotion.
“I knew you’d get here,” Sandy said, stepping a few inches away from Nicole. “I told everyone else that you’d come for me.”
“How many more are in there?”
There was a thud and General Burns kicked in the sideways door, which sat at ground level; the car shook a bit. Sandy started to lose her balan
ce, but Nicole caught her in her arms, and Sandy fell against her. At the touch of her skin against her hands, Nicole forgot herself again. She leaned into her girlfriend and kissed her several more times. It felt good to have Sandy in her arms; it felt right somehow, as if they were destined for this reunion – a perfect fit. In that moment, Nicole didn’t even care if Taylor Burns was gaping at her. All she wanted to do was kiss this wonderful woman.
As they broke apart, Sandy exhaled, her face flushed. “Well,” she said. “Hang on to that thought. When we get out of here, we’ll pick up where we left off.”
“You can count on it.”
From below, they heard Burns shout, “When you two are finished making out, I suggest you come down to our level. Only if you’re finished, though.”
Nicole leapt off the train, her face burning at the thought of her commanding officer watching her suck face with her girlfriend. It seemed like an invasion of privacy. She brushed herself off and glanced over to see Burns grinning at her.
“What?”
He shook his head, still grinning.
“What is it?”
“Just...” he said. “Lesbians are hot.”
“You are such a perv,” she said, helping Sandy to the ground. She set her down gently, not wanting to let go of her hand.
Howard, Beth, and Alice had joined them by the tracks, having been assisted through the sideways door by Taylor Burns. They looked terrified, anxious about this new couple of soldiers joining them. Beth had claimed Craig’s dented metal pole, and Howard clutched his own tightly, ready to use it at any time. Alice held out two objects toward Sandy, who took them. They were her own smaller, sharper weapons, the curved handles and the gleaming steel.
“You made those yourselves?” Burns asked.
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