Before Cain Strikes

by Joshua Corin

  Although it was possible.

  But unlikely.

  But possible.

  His appearance actually reminded Esme of Tom Piper. Six months ago, as her mentor had begun his slow recovery from his gunshot wounds, he, too, had been hooked up to a portable oxygen tank. She even remembered a picture of Tom taken from his attendance at the victims’ funerals, a picture that had appeared in several newspapers, usually accompanied by a sensational headline such as Head of Task Force Returns from Death’s Door.

  Had Cain42 seen the picture? Was this his way of mocking them?

  No, Esme concluded. That was absurd. She was projecting her own closed world onto the mind of a man she hadn’t even heard of a month ago. Still, something else was going on here. Her spider sense was tingling. A man like Cain42 just walks (well, limps) into a trap? She reached into her coat and withdrew her 9 mm (which had been bequeathed to her, along with a temporary badge, only hours ago). Technically, she wasn’t allowed to carry until she retook her exams at the firing range, but these were not ideal circumstances. Karl Ziegler was extending himself for her and she knew it. She was grateful. And she hated being grateful to a toad like Karl Ziegler.

  The doors of the train were closing. That was the cue for the agents to take down the suspect.

  “Are you going to hijack the train?” asked Fussy.

  “Shut up,” she replied.

  “I’ll take that as a maybe.”

  But before the agents could begin their approach on Cain42, Grover Kirk stood up, obscuring their line of approach. Why? Did Cain42 have a weapon on him? Through the two panes of smeared glass, it was difficult to tell. Regardless, the dickhead was about to get tossed, either by the frail loon in the oxygen mask or by the agents eager to get him out of the way.

  Esme glanced behind to make sure her own car was secure. By now most of the passengers (save a few scattered boys and girls ensconced in their own isolation) were staring back at her, as eager as she for whatever was about to happen.

  The train came to a halt.

  “Goddamn MTA,” muttered one of the passengers.

  Esme was leaning toward the window, almost pressing her face against the glass, when the tank of tear gas was activated. She didn’t even see Cain42 don his safety goggles or twist the valve. One minute he was chatting with Grover and then the next minute the last car of the A-train was opaque with smoke. Then the gunshots began.

  “Shit,” she concluded, and yanked open the sliding door. On the platform between the two cars, she withdrew her firearm. Thunderous gunshots continued to ring out—Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Her white earpiece repeated and intensified everything, including the agents’ coughing. She reached for the handle on the door and that was when she heard the first scream. And then another. And then another. The roars of the gunshots tapered off but the screams increased. People were dying in there.

  Taking into consideration that smoke rose, she ducked down to a crouch and tugged at the door to the last car. It was difficult to open from her position, but not impossible. It slid wide and the smoke plumed out. As her eyeballs began to boil (or at least felt like they were) and every meal she’d ever eaten began to rise up into her throat, she knew immediately this wasn’t just smoke. She remained on the platform, pulling the door shut before the tear gas could completely incapacitate her. Esme’s few seconds of exposure had reduced her vision to vague shapes and blurry colors.

  The twenty-four agents inside had been exposed now for almost a minute. By now they would be blind, disoriented and utterly at the whims of a serial murderer who was wearing a fucking gas mask. She tapped her tiny transmitter.

  “This is Special Agent Stuart. The scene has been compromised. Repeat: the scene has been compromised. The suspect’s teargassed the train car. All agents on-site appear incapacitated, and the train has stopped between Fourteenth and Thirty-fourth. How should I respond? Over.”

  She knew exactly how she should respond. She should open the door back up, crawl along the floor, pray the poisonous gasses had risen enough to allow her safe passage and take aim. And yet—

  “Copy that, Special Agent Stuart,” replied HQ. “Hold for instructions.”

  Hold for instructions? How long? Until all twenty-four agents (and Grover Kirk) were dead? That said, she wasn’t superhuman. If she entered the train car now, even if she held her breath, the effects of the tear gas would be instantaneous and debilitating. She needed a way to peer through the smoke, spot Cain42 and take him down from outside the car. But how?

  And what if he had noticed her opening the door moments ago? What if he already knew she was there and was waiting? The screams continued, but they were becoming less frequent. Fewer men and women left to scream. Men and women with spouses and children. Men and women that Cain42 was slaughtering.

  She considered hopping off the platform and inching her way to the last car’s rear door—Cain42 would not be expecting her to come from there—but at this door, she served as a defense to every other passenger on the A-train should Cain42 come this way. Every option presented a dead end. But there had to be a solution. There was always a solution.

  “Still holding for instructions!” she yelled. “Over!”

  Silence. Goddamn it!

  Maybe if she fired a couple shots into the door’s windowpane and shattered it, the tear gas would vent out quicker and then—

  And then the train experienced a brief epileptic fit, rocking back and forth. Esme grabbed onto the last car’s door handle for support. It was a good thing, too. The A-train lunged forward, recommencing its trek toward Penn Station, and had Esme not grabbed hold of something, she probably would have been thrown from the platform altogether. Just then, the door to the second-to-last car opened. The fussy-looking man stood there, reaching out toward her with his arms. She grabbed one of them and let him pull her back inside the safety of his car. The door slid shut behind them.

  “Are we going to die?” asked another of the passengers.

  “What can we do to help?” asked another.

  Everyone must have heard the gunshots, or at least saw the smoke, or both. She recognized panic in their faces, yes, but also perseverance. These were New Yorkers. They were here to assist.

  “Back away from the door,” she replied.

  They backed away from the door.

  Ambient light poured into the car. They had entered Penn Station. Predictably, a sizable crowd, milling with impatience, had gathered on the subway platform to board the tardy uptown A-train.

  Any moment now, the doors would open.

  Some of the tear gas in the last car must have dissipated by now, but not all of it. And who knew what carnage lay inside?

  The A-train came to a stop.

  Esme took a deep breath. She held her Beretta at her side, both hands around the molded grip.

  With a chiming, the subway doors opened.

  Esme launched herself onto the platform in time to spot Cain42 scurry out of the last car and plunge himself into the crowd. He was heading for the turnstiles. He cut a swath through the human forest with a long, serrated hunting knife. He slashed indiscriminately. A few people tried to be heroes and stop him. They received the deepest cuts. By the time he’d climbed over the turnstiles, his dirty brown boots smacking against them with a resounding thump, seven pedestrians were on the floor, bleeding.

  Esme wished she could have stopped and helped them out. She wished she could have stopped and helped out whoever was left in the last car. But she knew she couldn’t. She had a priority. At that moment a psychopath was armed and on the loose in one of the most heavily populated train stations in the world, and goddamn it, she was going to catch him, or die trying.

  26

  Penn Station in the twenty-first century was less of a train depot, really, than an underground mall. It abounded with the shops, kiosks, eateries—all the popular franchises. What else was a commuter to do while waiting for his late train home to Westport or Ronkonkoma or, yes, Hoboken, but gra
b a hot dog at Nathan’s, a mass-market paperback at Hudson News and a chocolate-chip sundae at Häagen-Dazs? And this was the start of rush hour—4:45 p.m., according to the main concourse’s blue digital departure/arrival screens. Penn Station was wall-to-wall with would-be passengers. This was the sight which greeted Esme as she bounded up the cement staircase from the ACE subway platform.

  She also arrived just in time to witness droves of MTA and NYPD officers pour into the depot from every entrance. Word of the massacre must have gotten out, and in the span of seventy-five seconds, the police coordinated a complete and total lockdown of Penn Station. Esme wondered who was in charge, or if the local chiefs of police, Homeland Security and FBI were jockeying for authority. The airwaves were probably full of chatter, but she could hear none of it. Her earpiece must have snagged on something, and she no longer had it.

  The good news: with all of the exits sealed, Cain42 wasn’t going anywhere. The bad news: now the concourse was even more crowded, and locating the man among the masses had suddenly become exponentially more difficult. He’d stopped cutting his way to freedom. He was blending in.

  Esme focused on what she remembered of his attire: brown ball cap, brown coat, brown boots. Hardly a costume that stood out, but maybe if—

  There it was.

  In a pile by a trash bin.

  Sigh.

  As she approached the pile of clothes, a hand firmly clasped her left biceps. Heart pounding, she immediately spun around, Beretta at the ready—and faced off against two SWAT team members swathed in body armor and armed with submachine guns, their laser sights pointed squarely at her chest.

  “Put down your weapon immediately,” said one.

  “I’m FBI,” she replied.

  Esme reached into her coat pocket for her temporary badge.

  The men pawed at their triggers. Their crimson laser beams concentrated on her heart.

  “Okay, okay,” she said, and lowered her sidearm. This was the second time in ten minutes that her identity as an FBI agent had been called into question. Exasperating. One of the SWAT officers reached into her coat pocket and removed her badge. Examined it. Showed it to his partner.

  “We need to call this in.”

  “Of course you do,” she replied. “However, in the meantime, do you mind if I leave you gentlemen and continue my pursuit of, you know, the crazy man with the knife?”

  They ignored her and commenced radio correspondence with their superiors. Sighing, Esme glanced back at Cain42’s brown coat, hat and boots. He could have been wearing anything underneath. As she looked closer, she noticed the gas mask and goggles he’d worn among the discards. He must have thought he was one clever son of a bitch.

  Then Esme noticed something else—a fresh stain on the left shoulder of the brown coat. She knelt down to take a closer look. The dark stain was still wet, and contained two holes, one larger than the other.

  Bullet holes and a bloodstain.

  One of the agents in the subway car must have shot him.

  All she had to do now was locate, among all the thousands in here, the man with the matching wound.

  Before entering the last car on the uptown A-train, the first responders sealed off the area. They actually sealed off two areas—one to contain the crime scene and another to corral the hundreds of witnesses, which included those on the platform when the train arrived and those in the second-to-last car who’d peered over Esme’s shoulder as the carnage began. Ideally, the witnesses would be separated from one another to lessen the likelihood of memory-bleed (wherein the witnesses’ chat with one another about what they saw and their collective memories coalesce into an unreliable amalgam), but this was far from an ideal situation. There was a third, smaller area being set up now by the paramedics. This was the triage center. Two of the people Cain42 had slashed during his escape were already dead.

  The forensics teams, with their kits and swabs and digital cameras, arrived shortly after the paramedics. Scouring the crime scene would prove to be problematic, though. There was just so much blood spatter on the floor and walls of the train car. The slightest misstep, the most accidental nudge, and the fluid pattern would be irrevocably altered. They needed to maintain the evidence, if only to tell the story of this massacre.

  They all knew how the story ended.

  The forensics photographer stood at the threshold of one of the doorways, carefully avoiding the scarlet footprints (size fourteen) left by Cain42 when he made his getaway. She prepped her camera and did a quick count of the bodies. Twenty-five. Most appeared to have had their throats slit. Very deep incisions, too. The slashed necks also explained the sheer quantity of spilled blood, which was splashed every which way, across ceiling, floor and walls. Even the plastic-plated advertisements, with their dentist-enhanced grins and exaggerations of pleasure, had been Jackson-Pollocked.

  The bodies lay scattered throughout the car, some on the floor, some on the orange seats, some half on, half off. Some held guns. Some were as empty-handed as the day they were born. None were at peace.

  The forensics photographer took note of the smell of the place. Bitter. Perhaps a remnant of the tear gas or of the gunfire. Or perhaps what she smelled was soullessness itself.

  She turned away from the train car, took a deep breath to steady her lungs and then turned back to commence her photography. The memory card in her camera could hold countless images. Today it would get its fill.

  Other amateur photographers had, of course, beaten her to the exclusive. By the time the police had arrived on the subway platform, every civilian who’d been on the train or waiting on the platform for the train had snapped off a dozen shots with their camera phones. The wireless signal strength down here was spotty at best, but not unheard of. Hundreds of low-resolution DIY images were already being texted and forwarded and reforwarded all across New York City, sharing the massacre with the masses.

  The forensics photographer took a careful step into the train car. There was a body underneath an orange seat across the aisle. It was the body of a tall man. His back was to her. He appeared to be bald and—

  The photographer staggered back, nearly dropping her camera. The man had rolled over and was facing her. His throat was untouched and his eyes were wide with terror.

  Before running his MetroCard through the turnstile at the Fourteenth Street Station, Cain42 stopped across the street at a Duane Reade. He bought a bottle of water, a Milky Way candy bar and refilled his prescription for Ventolin, a short-term asthma preventative that would allow him to overexert himself physically over the next few hours with little fear of inducing an attack. The only side effect he ever noticed was an increased heart rate, but since he only took it before a kill, he never was completely sure that the increased heart rate was a result of the medication or a by-product of his pregame excitement.

  He changed out his regular nebulizer for the Ventolin, activated it, pocketed the inhaler, fixed his oxygen mask to his mouth and, with his gas tank in tow, slowly made his way down, down, down and into the underbelly of Fourteenth Street. Halfway down the cement stairs, a young man offered to help carry his oxygen tank for him. No, thank you. Once at the platform, waiting for the A-train to arrive, he split his Milky Way in two and offered half to the young man, who politely said no to the delicious combination of nougat and milk chocolate. Cain42 washed the candy bar down with his water and tossed the empty wrapper and the empty bottle into a nearby receptacle. How he abhorred littering.

  The killing was over now, but his heart was still galloping within his chest. Each staccato beat pumped more and more blood to his perforated left shoulder. No matter how much pressure he put on the wound, the bleeding just wouldn’t stop. The sleeve of his left arm was drenched now, but he only knew that because he could see it. He couldn’t feel it. The arm had gone numb.

  He needed help, and he needed help fast.

  There was the triage center down on the ACE platform, but so many of the people there had seen his face, if only fo
r a moment. No, his only salvation lay outside Penn Station. So he moseyed toward the massive Seventh Street exit, which of course was under heavy guard by a team of SWAT officers. But he knew they’d lower their weapons as soon as they saw him. Because although Cain42 had borrowed the discarded clothes—the oversize brown boots and that ass-ugly brown coat—from a homeless man who’d been napping near the Manhattan Bridge, underneath them he wore the uniform of a transit cop, and this was the uniform they would see. They would lead him up the ascending stairs into daylight and freedom….

  Except…wait. Who was that over there holding his coat, talking with those other two SWAT officers? She looked so familiar. Where had he recently seen her face…?

  That was Esme Stuart. Galileo’s Esme. Grover Kirk’s Esme.

  Timothy Hammond’s Esme.

  In the aftermath of the Galileo murders, Cain42 had seen her photograph on TV, but he had also seen her photograph again as recently as last night, while perusing Grover’s book. Esme Stuart.

  And she had his coat. From which she could surmise that he’d been shot in the left shoulder. And, judging from the reactions of the two SWAT officers beside her, they were radioing in that vital piece of information to every other armed cop in Penn Station.

  Esme frickin’ Stuart.

  Okay, so the daylight and the freedom would have to wait. No big deal. That just meant he had one more job to do. With as much casualness as he could muster (given that ten percent of his body was currently hanging wet and limp by his side), he made his way toward a nearby clothing store. Why someone would feel the need to buy jeans at a train station was beyond him, but more to the point, one of the two clerks currently in the store was a man in his thirties who might, in poor light, be mistaken for his cousin. The other clerk was a teenage girl. That made the man the manager. Good.

  “I need you to come with me,” said Cain42 to the manager.

  The manager took one look at Cain42’s uniform and didn’t even hesitate. “Of course.”