It didn’t matter—she had no plans on going back up the way she came down. This cavern led somewhere, and she was going to find out where.
Dumont had other thoughts. “We need reinforcements,” he said. “We’ll head back up the tunnel and establish radio contact with the topside teams.”
“You’re not going anywhere till I’ve treated that leg. Find something to bite on. This is gonna hurt.” Bowcut slipped two field dressings from her rig, tore them open, and unraveled the bandages. “Ready?”
Dumont clenched his teeth and lowered his mask.
First, she used one bandage to tourniquet his leg. Then she wrapped her glove around the splinter and yanked it out of his thigh.
He bolted stiff and let out a muffled gasp.
Bowcut placed the dressing’s pad over his blood-soaked cargo pants, applied pressure to stem any bleeding, and wrapped the bandage tight.
Dumont’s wheezing gradually steadied. He heaved himself to a sitting position and slumped against a pile of rubble.
“Wait here,” she said, and rose to her feet. “I’ll be back soon.”
“Get back to the station as fast as you can.”
“I’m not going that way.” Bowcut aimed her light to where the stalactites dipped toward the ground and the cop’s dead body hung. “I’m going this way.”
“Jesus Christ. Who’s that?”
“It looks like Bradshaw’s partner, Officer Donaldson.”
“Head up the tunnel. We need more boots on the ground.”
“Think about it, Captain: teams are coming into the subway system regardless of what we do. This cavern leads to somewhere else aboveground.”
“How do you know?”
“How else did terrorists get to the Z Train? Look at the pick marks around you. They hacked their way here. What better way to bring weapons right to the heart of the city without being traced?”
Dumont focused his light on the wall. “I guess they could’ve widened the cavern below the stalactites . . .”
“Got a better explanation?”
He shook his head. “Digging out this cavern must’ve took years. I don’t know. The scale of it all . . .”
“The plans have been public for a decade. If this is the way they attacked the train, then we need to see where these tunnels go. I refuse to let whoever killed all those passengers and half of our team escape.”
“Okay, but listen. You come across these assholes, I don’t want you picking a fight alone. We go with my plan and find help. Understood?”
“You got it.”
Distant thumps resonated through the cavern.
She placed her hand over her light.
The noise grew louder and sounded more like footsteps. Someone in a hurry, heading in their direction.
Bowcut crouched behind an outcrop and raised her knife.
The footsteps slowed and stopped, she guessed around one hundred yards away, but the echo made it impossible to estimate. Whoever it was, an opportunity had presented itself.
“We’ll ambush them here,” Dumont said quietly.
“I’m tired of waiting. It’s time we fought back.”
“We’re better off—”
But Bowcut was already moving off in a crouched run, ducking below the stalactites, and dropping to her elbows and knees. She crawled over the rocky surface, ignoring Dumont’s whispered calls, and edged around a purple pool beneath the dead cop.
The quicker she informed Homeland Security about the entry and exit points, the faster they could shut down the route and begin their hunt for those responsible. But any attacker still lurking underground was hers. The memory of her dad, her brother, Christiansen, and Dalton would drive her blade. And the thought of David North, and those in the Pavilion, suffering a similar fate urged her forward.
Not that it was easy going. The ceiling rose into another pitch-black cave. She twisted her light’s head, reducing its output to a minimum, and a weak beam brightened her surroundings. A radio and a tattered dress lay on the ground in front of three dark passages.
Bowcut crept to the middle one, paused by its mouth, and listened for any suspicious sounds.
Water dripped into a distant pool. Nothing else.
She peered back toward the breach.
Dumont’s light cast a glow on the low-hanging stalactites.
Bowcut extended her knife and headed down the passage, softly placing her boots between the rocks and straining to catch any signs of movement. As the route twisted and turned and headed downward, though, she saw nothing.
The darkness was cloying, even with the little bit of light. She’d been in the city during a few blackouts, and that had been intense, but there was always something creating light, even during the darkest night. This was a solid black, though, pressing down around her, reminding her not just that she was alone, and not just that above her were tons of rock and millions of gallons of water, but all around could be the people trying to kill her.
She turned her light up just a bit.
A breeze yawned through the tunnel, carrying a faint crackle.
After several strides, smaller passages led off to the left and right, but she kept her direction of travel simple. Still, all the side tunnels were starting to concern her—it was starting to feel less like the work of a focused group mining toward the Jersey tunnel and more like an underground maze.
The crackling grew louder.
She continued to advance, ready for anyone who lay in wait. A part of her hoped she had the chance to get some revenge. A part of her hoped she didn’t meet anyone.
The ground and walls disappeared to her front.
Bowcut’s light speared into the blackness beyond, illuminating the ceiling of a cathedral-like cavern. She crawled to the edge and swept her aim across the far wall, highlighting hundreds of other dark holes. Both ends curved around, making it look like a giant underground arena, but it didn’t have a natural appearance. It felt like an underground Grand Canyon but bigger. A landlocked Mariana Trench.
A vast black abyss straight to hell.
Across the canyon, something moved on a distant ledge. She tracked back to it and squinted her eyes, shining her light toward the ledge.
What the hell?
Six women knelt in a circle facing one another, trapped inside some kind of thick transparent shell.
Passengers? Are they alive?
A mix of determination and excitement rose inside her. People had survived the train wreck. But if they were here, imprisoned, it meant her prey lurked somewhere in the darkness . . .
Bowcut had to find a way through the maze of passages to the ledge and needed to move fast in case the enemy had already spotted her. She aimed the beam down to gain a quick appreciation of the cavern before turning the brightness down.
Her jaw dropped as she stared in disbelief.
Two hundred feet below, a mass of figures circled a man lying flat on his back. A greasy, translucent coating covered his naked corpse. Jeans, a T-shirt, and a hard hat lay by his side. It was a gruesome, jarring sight—one that she couldn’t quite make sense of.
What made even less sense were the figures close to him. They were near human in size but were definitely not human. Each had an extra set of arms, scaly skin, sharp claws, and thrashing tails. As she moved her focus to the outer circle, past twisted pieces of wreckage, their shapes gradually grew larger to nearly double the size of your average man.
She was so transfixed by the monstrous display that she didn’t notice until it was too late that a single huge creature, perching on a rusty cutter wheel at the end of the cavern, had rotated its bulbous head in Bowcut’s direction and locked its beady eyes on her.
The creature roared, revealing three rows of pointed teeth.
Hundreds of heads turned upward.
For a moment everyone and everything was still. And then creatures in the outer circle burst toward the passages. Others scaled the wall directly beneath her, grabbing rocks and dragging themselves
up at breakneck speed.
“Oh fuck!”
Bowcut jumped to her feet and sprinted back in the direction of Captain Dumont. Her boots hammered against the rock. Her light flashed around the walls. This living nightmare was way beyond anything Bradshaw had tried to convey. The appearance of such creatures was enough to destroy a person’s mind. But the pure malevolence that seemed to emanate from them—it was way beyond words.
Heavy footsteps crashed behind her, closing in by the second. She retraced her previous path, straining every sinew to move as fast as possible, but the tight quarters and low ceiling made this much more difficult. Finally, though, she reached one of the caves and looked around at each of the branches.
Shrieks rang through all four passages.
They were coming at her from all directions.
I’m trapped.
That almost locked her in place, but you didn’t get to where she was in the NYPD SWAT without experiencing some of the shittiest situations imaginable. For once she thanked some of those scumbag drug dealers and the firefights they put her through, because that kept her moving. Bowcut continued forward and rushed into the next cave. Dumont’s light still brightened the far end of the stalactites.
“Captain!” she yelled. “Check the rope!”
She dove to the ground and scrambled on her hands and knees, passing underneath the dead cop, who still dangled from the stalactites. As she crawled, her tac harness got stuck, and she frantically worked to free it, all the while listening to the snarls and shrieks blasting from the tunnel behind her. They were closing fast.
Not dying on my stomach below the stinking Hudson River.
Not.
Going.
To.
Die.
With the last thought, she unsnagged herself and bolted forward, making it to the breach.
Dumont sat against the rock. Mask raised. Head slumped on his shoulder. Eyes closed. In no state to escape or defend their position.
“Captain!”
His eyes flickered open for a moment.
She considered firing, taking everyone and everything down in a ball of scorching flames. It beat being torn to pieces before the creatures moved on to their next victim. She knew that would always be an option, but for now, she wasn’t ready to give up just yet.
That was until dark, snarling figures emerged from the passages, at least twenty that she could see: a gleaming black mass hunched below the stalactites.
Too many. My God, how are there so many?
Bowcut twisted her weapon-mounted light to the maximum output, shouldered her rifle, and aimed at the nearest creature. For some reason, it was incredibly important she see at least one of these monsters get fragged before being consumed by the inferno.
Okay, motherfuckers—let’s see how you like a bullet to the head before you get fried to a crisp.
She curled her finger around the trigger, knowing what had to be done . . .
But the creature screamed and retreated before she fired a single shot. Bowcut aimed at the next, focusing her powerful shaft of light on its chest . . .
It shot back into the passage.
She swept her rifle from side to side, covering the area underneath the stalactites. Every creature backed into the darkness. None reemerged.
Bowcut maintained her aim while catching her breath. Bright light from her rifle bathed the area around her and Dumont.
The discovery of the creatures astounded her, though not as much as pushing herself to within a second of detonating the methane, killing everyone in the close vicinity of her muzzle flash. She moved across to Dumont while keeping her light blazing toward the passages and dragged his gas mask over his face.
They were safe for the moment. More important, six women remained in the huge cavern. Going back meant facing near impossible odds, but she refused to leave the hostages behind, especially now that she had found a way of driving the creatures back. And it was about her survival, too . . .
But a single light wouldn’t do it. Not against the mass of creatures she saw in the cavern.
Bowcut needed a plan to fight something she knew barely anything about. Something the world knew nothing about.
But that was about to change.
Ellen Cafferty knelt on the ledge in a circle of six women. She drew in a shuddering breath, still finding it hard to believe she was still alive. But for how much longer?
The beam of light that had focused on the transparent outer shell surrounding them—roughly a dome shape that looked like a thick layer of blistered skin—had given her hope, as well as her first view of her fellow hostages and the massive cavern, before the inky blackness returned.
The creatures hadn’t taken her far after grabbing her from the smaller cave, and she expected Tom to spearhead a team for an immediate rescue. Nobody would leave them down here.
Unless, that is, whoever—or, as she started thinking more and more, whatever—had launched a wider-ranging attack.
Two creatures hunched by her side, prodding, snarling, and flexing their claws in front of her face, blasting it with their acrid breath. The same noises came from the direction of the other women.
The thing she found odd after her brief glimpse around at the other hostages was she didn’t recognize any of them from the train. That wasn’t completely impossible—it was an exciting, busy event, and she hadn’t had time to meet everyone—but none of them wore the formal clothing of the other passengers.
That mystery would have to wait, though. First thing she needed to figure out was where the hell she was. Ellen thought back to her capture in the smaller cavern, searching for any clues to her location. A creature had carried her through twisting and turning passages into this huge underground space. Then a giant creature, who, unlike the rest, had glowing red eyes, had leaped down from the top of it and had scraped her in the same way as before, twisting a claw into her belly. After the literally gut-wrenching inspection, the place fell silent and she was dragged toward the ledge.
She shuddered at the memory.
But it gnawed at her, the strange, painful prodding. It clearly meant something to these creatures, and she couldn’t help but think they had a purpose—a goal. They were more than simple killing machines.
Otherwise we’d be dead already.
So one more piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit. And she was no closer to knowing where she was. The only thing she knew for certain was they had taken her deeper underground. She had no idea what was planned for them, but if someone didn’t arrive soon, she expected they would find out.
If she couldn’t find a way to escape.
Or kill herself . . .
Chapter Nineteen
Nothing had attacked the train since Christopher Fields’ death. The creatures sounded like they were focusing their efforts on the command center’s blast door, and the constant shockwaves rocked the train’s body. Cafferty expected them to shift their focus to the easier target soon, but he was happy for the reprieve—as long as they weren’t coming after the train, the chances of a rescue team arriving to save them increased.
North wheeled one of the modified oxygen tanks to Cafferty’s end of the car. He propped it in the aisle and squeezed the blowtorch trigger, and a concentrated stream of air hissed out of the stainless steel flame guard.
“Great job, David,” Cafferty said, hoping the oxygen was as lethal to the creatures as methane was to humans.
“Let’s pray it’s enough.”
“It has to be enough. It’s the only defense we’ve got.”
“Ce n’est pas vrai, Mr. Mayor,” Flament said from behind. “This is not true. We’ve got these lanterns.”
Cafferty gave the Frenchman a quizzical look.
“When the light shone on it, the creature’s movement slowed and the scream sounded like it was in pain. This gave me the courage. In France, we say il faut le voir pour—”
“I don’t mean to be rude, but please, cut to the chase.”
“S
eeing is believing, Mr. Mayor. Oxygen and light are our friends.”
Cafferty examined the reporter more closely again. “You’re very observant, Mr. Flament.”
“I’ve made a career out of observing things. In the army, it was an enemy at close range. I’d record their actions, look for potential weaknesses, process the information, and report to my superior. In my journalistic career, it is much the same. In all cases, accuracy is everything. Every detail can make a difference. ‘No stone unturned,’ as you say in English. The best path to success is knowing—”
“Again, Mr. Flament—”
“Call me Lucien.”
“Lucien, the short version is fine.”
Flament did a typical Gallic shrug, lifting his shoulders, opening his palms, and raising his eyebrows. “What can I say? I’m methodical. We leverage any observations that might be productive.”
“I mean you quickly put two and two—”
Heavy thuds shook the car’s roof at both ends.
“Well, we need to find something productive fast,” North said. “It sounds like they’ve stopped attacking the command center.”
“Raise the lanterns and anything else that lights up,” Cafferty shouted along the car. “Let’s blind these sons of bitches.”
Cops’ flashlights flicked on, smartphone flashes activated, and the orange glow of ten MTA LED lanterns were lifted high among an assortment of raised weapons, brightening the brilliant white interior.
A set of shiny black claws punched through the ceiling above North. They rapidly gouged out jagged lines in a rough square shape, similar in size to the holes in the front car’s floor. History was repeating itself.
Why change tactics? Cafferty thought. It clearly worked well the first time. Of course, last time the others weren’t ready to fight back. I just hope this Frenchman is as observant as he likes to believe he is.
Otherwise we’re screwed.
One of the MTA workers, holding his iPhone like a mini-shield, stood on his tiptoes and battered a wrench against the claws. The claws curled inward and pried off a section of the ceiling above Cafferty, opening the car like a pull-tab can of soda.
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