Howard said, “Yeah, from the poles in the car. Came in handy already a couple of times.”
“Nice,” the general said approvingly.
“Now what?” Sandy asked. “Do we head for the surface? What the heck’s going on up there anyway? We keep hearing these, like, sonic booms. Really loud.”
“It’s a mess,” Burns confirmed. “We’re probably safer down here in the tunnels for now, but that won’t last long. Pretty soon those things will be all over the place.”
Nicole added, “Manhattan’s been totally isolated. The Army has blown the bridges and sealed tunnels all the way around, so I don’t see how we’re all going to get somewhere safe. If our helicopter pilot can be reached, we have a ride out, but we need to be someplace that can be relatively secure for at least long enough for him to pick us up.”
“That’s if he hasn’t already been shot down,” Burns said. “Almost happened when he was deploying us.”
“And it better be someplace he can land the helicopter,” Nicole said. “If there are this many of us, we won’t be able to just grab a rope ladder and fly away.”
Sandy said, “If you’re trying to cheer us up, it’s not working.”
Howard spoke, “Other than Central Park up north, I don’t know where we can find someplace that’s flat.”
“Central Park’s right in the center of the damn island,” Burns said with a grunt as he sat down. “That’s a long flight from Brooklyn.”
“Just a few minutes.”
“You ever been shot at for just a few minutes?” the general asked. “Can stretch out for a long time.”
Something made a sound in the dark tunnel behind the group. Nicole and Burns swung around, their Colts jutting out like natural extensions of their arms. Their movement was so fast the others only noticed a blur of motion.
“You see anything?” Burns asked.
“No,” Nicole answered. Then she motioned with her head, never removing her eyes from the gloom where the noise had originated. “Everyone behind us.”
They stood still, waiting. Alice started sniffling again, and Sandy thought, Great. Here come the waterworks.
From the darkness, a voice emerged. “You can put the guns away. We’re human.”
Two figures emerged from the tunnel, two men covered in grime and dirt, their hair damp and their clothes utterly ruined. They wore hardhats with lights on top, which they switched on as they got closer.
“You’re looking for a way out?” the first man asked. “This is the guy to talk to.”
“Who are you?” Nicole asked.
“My name’s John Creed and this is Michael. He’s lived in these tunnels for years, pretty much knows every nook and cranny.”
“Pretty much,” Michael said, sheepishly.
“We’ve been back there, listening to you,” John continued.
Burns squinted. “You look vaguely familiar.”
“I’m a reporter,” John said. “If you’re who I think you are…”
“I am.”
“Then, I interviewed you.” He turned to Nicole. “And I spoke with you, too. About a year ago.”
Nicole grunted. “You misquoted me.”
“But I said you were gorgeous. Doesn’t that make up for something? Anyway, this is Michael, and he can get us out of here through the sewers and subways. He can probably lead us all out together.”
“That true?” Burns asked the homeless man.
Michael shrugged. “I probably can. Where do we need to go?”
“Palm Springs would be nice,” Beth said, and the group chuckled.
“How about you just get us off Manhattan,” Burns said. “Can you get us to Brooklyn? That’s where the hotel we’re staying at is located. That’s where the helicopter is.”
Michael thought for a moment, then nodded his shaggy head. “There are sewer tunnels that run from here to the mainland in almost every direction. If you wanna head that way, I think Brooklyn, Queens, even Long Island might be all right.”
“You can get us under the river?” Burns asked.
“I think so.”
Burns turned to Nicole, said, “They may have blocked the sewer tunnels, too. I’m pretty damn certain they blocked all the train tunnels, but… you think this might work?”
“It’s better than standing around and waiting for the city to collapse on top of us,” she said.
Burns turned toward the homeless man and said, “Okay. You lead us out of here and get us to a safe place.”
“Like there’s any such thing,” Howard whispered to Sandy.
Michael thought it over for a moment, biting his lower lip. When he looked back up at the group, who were leaning forward in anticipation, he said, “All right. If we take the subway south and east, just following this line, it would take us to Brooklyn. If, like you said, they’ve blocked the tunnels, I can get us through a sewer system under the East River.”
“And if they’ve thought of the sewers and have blocked them?” Nicole asked. Everyone looked at her as though she’d just kicked a puppy. She said, “Well, come on, it’s possible. These aren’t idiots we’re dealing with, it’s the U.S. Army.”
“We have to hope they haven’t gotten to that yet,” Michael said.
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Burns said. “How are we set for weapons?”
He and Nicole still had their Colts and two grenades, but the ammunition was running pretty low. She was on her last magazine. Before long, they would be reduced to knives and sticks.
“We made these in the subway car,” Howard said, showing off the long, sharpened poles.
“I have these,” Sandy said, whipping out the curled pieces of metal and flourishing them like a very slow and very sad ninja.
Howard nudged Sandy, and he asked under his breath, “Is this your girlfriend?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Nice,” he said with a thumbs-up. “Tough and pretty.”
“Let’s get us a couple more of those poles,” Burns ordered the group. “Arm our friends here who are gonna lead us out of the dark and into Brooklyn.”
“There’s a difference?” Howard said quietly to Sandy, and she laughed. They made their way back to the subway car in front of the overturned one they had inhabited. There were blood spatters and pieces of what had been human beings a few hours ago scattered everywhere. It was a gruesome scene of carnage, and Sandy opted to stay outside the car.
“I already have my weapons,” she said, leaning on her girlfriend.
Howard and Taylor Burns commenced kicking the metal poles, snapping two more off from their moorings at the ceiling and floor. They flattened the ends with their shoes, pounding them to a fine point. When they tested the ends, they found them ragged but fairly sharp.
“Very nice,” Burns said, handing one of the poles to Beth, who took it with a grateful look.
After Burns observed the teenager for a while, he decided Alice wasn’t going to be much help with a huge pike like he’d just created. He secured one end of the pole between two armrests on a seat and bent it backwards. Then he wriggled it back and forth until it snapped in two, leaving a shiny two-foot weapon that Alice should be able to handle. The girl didn’t want to take the pole at first, shaking her head.
“No,” she said. “I can’t… I can’t kill something like that.”
“You will if you need to,” Burns said in his most accommodating voice, which, honestly, wasn’t that soothing. “You might not even need it, but if the time arrives when one of those things is barreling down on you, you will thank me afterwards.”
“I don’t think I can.”
“Use it to help protect your teacher here.”
“But, killing is so wrong. I—”
“Take the goddamn pole,” Burns hollered, shoving it into her hand and closing the fingers around it. He squeezed hard before letting go of the girl, and he was pleased when she turned away from him, still clutching the weapon.
Beth, however, was giving him t
he stink eye.
“What?” he asked.
“You have to be so brutal? She’s a kid,” the coach said.
“And if she wants to grow up, she’s gonna have to defend herself. Don’t give me all that peace and love and unicorn rainbows and lollipops bullshit. You haven’t seen New York’s streets. It is ugly as hell up there. Nobody’s gonna survive if they don’t do their part and stick with the group.”
“Shouldn’t we be protecting the young?” Beth asked. “Isn’t that what makes us civilized?”
“Ain’t nothing civilized about what’s happening up top, sister. Besides, think of it as just another extra weapon if we lose or break one of our own. We’ll soon be thankful of everything we can get. I used up half a dozen magazines on the way down here. I’m down to just a few more bullets and we are doing battle with those things using sticks and stones. I say, we take whatever we can find. Search those corpses. Maybe someone was carrying when the subway got attacked.”
“Good idea,” Howard said, and he immediately started rifling through the pockets of the bodies on the train. Sandy moved forward to help, but when she came across a particularly disgusting mess, in which a man’s chest cavity had been hollowed out, she went white and had to sit down for a minute with her head between her legs. Nicole wandered over to her.
Putting her arm around Sandy, she asked, “You okay, babe?”
“Yes. No. No, of course I’m not okay,” Sandy said. “You see this shit every day in your work. I don’t know how you keep sane. This is… this is monstrous.”
“Well, it’s usually not this bad. Okay, it’s never been this bad. I think what we’re witnessing upstairs is the end of society as we know it. I don’t see how the world can survive after this virus, this new one, gets loose. And it will. We can probably contain it in Manhattan for a while, but it’ll never stay in one place.”
“You’re my hero,” Sandy said, leaning into Nicole and giving her a smooch. “You know that, right?”
“I guess I do.”
“Nicole, are we really going to get out of this? Be honest with me. No B.S. Can we get out and survive?”
Nicole thought for a moment. “I hope so. All I can offer, sweetie. Hope. And it’s not such a bad thing. We get to the helicopter and off this island, I’ll feel a whole lot better, but until we are lifting off and I can see the damn Statue of Liberty in the rearview mirror, I can’t say much more than I hope so.”
Chapter 40
4:13 p.m.
The group had conversed as they dug through the remains of the dead people on the various subway cars. They filled each other in on their stories, how they’d arrived at that spot at that particular time. As they worked, they even brought Alice out of her shell for a few minutes, and the girl joined in the conversation. Burns even made a joke, albeit a bad one.
After their exploration of all the subway cars and the corpses inside of them, they had pillaged a pile containing four knives, one set of brass knuckles, and a loaded revolver discovered on an elderly, bearded man missing most of his chest. It contained all six rounds, but it looked puny in Burns’ hand. However, he knew any bullet placed in the right spot would kill a man. Or a Lycanthrope. Slow it down at the very least.
They divvied up the spoils. Knives went to Sandy, Beth, and Howard and the knuckle-dusters went to Alice. Beth didn’t think the girl would ever use them, but it would probably comfort her to wear them. And no one felt Alice should be carrying a knife.
From the middle of the train, Howard gave a loud shout. Having tracked a blood trail to the control car, he uncovered the half-eaten corpse of the engineer, four fresh flashlights, a miner’s hat with a battery-powered light on top of it, a handful of flares, and another gun. This time it was a double-barreled, pump-action shotgun. He cocked it and grinned.
“I do love that sound,” he said. “But it looks like there are just the two shells.”
“Can you use that?” Burns asked.
“Grew up in the mountains of West Virginia,” Howard answered. “Had plenty of practice when things got skinny. Hunted rabbits, mostly.”
“So let’s see who we have here,” Burns whispered to Nicole. “Me, you, your sweet-natured hippie girlfriend…”
“Hey!” Sandy objected.
Nicole said, “Well, you are kind of a flower child.”
Burns continued, “A homeless guy who knows the tunnels, a reporter who knows all about the Lycan Virus, a lady coach who knows volleyball, a black guy who’s a dancer…”
“And a damn good one,” Howard interjected. He did a couple spins to prove his point.
“Yeah,” Burns said with a grunt. “That’s just dandy. And we got us a kid so scared she’s liable to whack us over the head before she hurts one of the monsters. That about cover it?”
“Well,” Nicole said. “We got a lot of moxie.”
“That never stopped a runaway killing machine before.”
Nicole conceded that he had a point. They were the very definition of ragtag, motley. Most of their weapons were homemade and not likely to help in a situation like she and the general had faced around the public library. By now, there were probably twice as many of those things running around the streets, creating new monsters every time they clawed or bit a victim.
“Hey,” Sandy said, nudging her. “You’re someplace else. What’s going on in that thick head of yours?”
“I was thinking of how it must be on the streets. You haven’t seen how many of those things are up there. Thousands of them, tens of thousands, and every time they scratch someone, they’re turning them into another Lycan.”
“Just like Sylvia,” Sandy said. “I’ve seen it work. Took just a couple of minutes.”
“I think most of the city’s probably infected by now.”
“What about the people inside the buildings? They should be safe.”
“If this was like what happened in Cincinnati, then I’d say you’re right. But this is a lot worse. With this stuff infecting rats, dogs, cats, anything mammalian, then those things can get into houses and apartment buildings.”
“I saw a pack of mutated rats right before getting on the subway. There were a lot of them together, dozens, and they were chasing a woman, as if herding her to a corner so they could get at her easier.”
“New York has always had a rat problem. Now there’ll be millions of the little bastards out there with a single thought in their infected skulls – eat and kill.”
Sandy shivered, leaned in closer to Nicole. The soldier put her arm around her and sniffed her hair, which, despite the day’s horrific events, still smelled like strawberry shampoo.
“Don’t get too cozy over there,” Burns said. “We’ll need to be moving soon. Who knows what the Army’s got planned for this burg. I wouldn’t put it past them to take a stand and get rid of this virus once and for all.”
“Shit, Burns,” Nicole said. “You talking nuclear?”
“It would wipe the disease away before it got loose. Probably be very popular with the American voters if it stopped the spread. I can think of a dozen politicians who’d want to bomb New York on principle alone, but now they’ve got a valid reason.”
“They can’t do that, can they?” asked Sandy. “They’d kill millions of people.”
“And save hundreds of millions more. I don’t like it either, but given the choice of the infection getting out of the Manhattan Zone and destroying the city, well, I’d have to choose saving the rest of the world.”
Sandy said, “Surely someone out there can find a cure.”
“You’ve seen how fast this thing has spread. Crazy fast. One minute, the news is talking about a few rat attacks, and the next the Army’s blowing up the bridges.”
“Which makes me wonder how much we knew beforehand,” Nicole said. “Those jets got to New York awfully fast.”
“Don’t look at me,” Burns protested. “If the government knew this was gonna break loose, they didn’t inform me. Makes me wonder, though, wh
y they approved a vacation for both me and you, Nicole. They didn’t say diddly-squat when we said we wanted to go to New York City for a week.”
“I said I wanted to go. You just followed me like some demented stalker.”
“Still, it doesn’t seem a little far-fetched to you? Here we are, two of the leaders of the Lycan Sniper Squad, and we’re right across the river when all hell breaks loose. We always wondered about the speed in which we found out about the Cincinnati outbreak, but there wasn’t much proof.”
John sauntered over and leaned into the conversation. “There’s all kind of proof that the military was behind the Cincinnati incident. None of it’s substantial in itself, but there were plenty of stories regarding the way the military could have unleashed the whole Lycan Virus as biological warfare gone wrong. I’ve written plenty of those stories myself.”
Burns scoffed. “Rumors and hearsay.”
“Yeah, most of it was, but added together it looked less like a natural extension of what that one German scientist was working on and more like a gigantic Strangelove ‘whoops’ situation. It got loose somehow, right? We never determined how, exactly. Then, you guys were called in and were set up before the first full moon expired. That rings of a cover-your-ass strategy, and we all know that the military machine’s known for its CYA abilities. They were awfully prepared for that outbreak, as shown by the uncanny promptness of the Army’s arrival. Now we have a new situation and a new outbreak. I’m not saying this was intentionally started by the government as some whacko biological experiment. I’m not one of those crazy conspiracy theorists who think the government controls everything. But I am a realist. I saw a couple of those packs of rats on the streets. Michael had seen a few as well. But we never envisioned so many people getting infected so fast.
“It’s terrifying if you think of it. I had a glimpse of what Manhattan has become, through a manhole, and that happened within a few hours. By now, the last families left uninfected are barricaded inside their buildings, probably trying to stave off any more attacks. And before the first big rat attacks had been talked about on the news, before anyone figured out that this was some mutated version of the Lycan Virus, we have bridges and tunnels blown and the whole city is isolated as only an island can be. Isolated. Like a control group.”
Primeval (Werewolf Apocalypse Book 2) Page 21