Dead Judgment

by Flint Maxwell

  “One problem, Jack,” Lilly says. “We’re not getting anywhere while we’re still in here.”

  I stand up. “Roland, give me a boost.”

  Roland knows his limitations. He’s nothing but a twig. He brings one arm up and flexes a nonexistent muscle. “I won’t get you very high, if I know what you’re thinking.”

  He’s right. Though I’ve lost pretty much everything since the dead took over, I still have some of my pride left. Not much, but enough not to blatantly ask a woman I’ve just met for help. Looking at Mandy, at the sheer size of her, I’m sure she could throw me through the rock ceiling.

  “Just come on, Roland,” I say.

  He sighs, stands up. We cross the other cars toward the platform. Behind us, I hear Abby snicker. She knows what I’m planning to do, and she knows the outcome before it happens.

  I tell Roland to kneel down. I tell him I’m going to get a running start, and he’s going to boost me up the dozen or so feet toward the fallen rock platform, where the one door is located.

  He looks scared, but, God bless him, he goes along for the ride.

  I get about fifteen feet of a head start. Each step is a pain. I’ve never been in really good shape, and the lack of solid meals and sleep have really caught up to me. If I had to judge, I figure I’m probably going about five miles per hour when I reach Roland. His knee is bent , his hands are resting palm-up, fingers laced together. My eyes burn with laser focus; Roland’s burn with fear.

  I think, for the slightest of moments, We’re going to do it, it’s going to work!

  My boot makes contact with his palms. I crouch, ready to spring forward, but the support beneath me gives out.

  Roland cries, “Son of a bitch!” and there’s a pretty sick cracking noise that I think comes from him, and we both fall over, tangled up on top of the subway car. I rock my head pretty hard against the metal, so hard that I see pinpricks of light hanging in front of me when I open my eyes.

  Abby starts laughing, and the others follow pretty quickly.

  “Sorry, Jack,” Roland says. “Maybe a decade ago I could’ve done that. I ain’t what I used to be.”

  “You all right?” I ask him.

  He nods. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize,” I say. “None of us are what we used to be.”

  “That’s the truth,” Nacho says. “C’mon, Mandy. Let’s help.”

  Next thing I know, Mandy and Nacho are pulling me up.

  Mandy says, “On three. One…two…three!” and I’m flying upward like a damn rocket ship.

  Mandy’s aim turns out to be impeccable. I hit the edge of the rock platform with my sternum. Before I can slip and fall down and think about having to go through that again, I find purchase with my fingers, which are looking more like claws.

  “Nice throw!” Nacho says. He sounds very far away, like I’m teetering on the edge of a mountain instead of a platform a dozen or so feet up.

  “All right, Jack?” Mandy asks.

  “Yeah,” I manage to wheeze. “Never better.”

  I pull myself up all the way. I know time is of the utmost importance, but I really just need a minute to catch my breath. I roll over on my back and stare at the dark ceiling high above me. It’s faintly lit with the radioactive green light, like the weird illumination you sometimes see coming off of various funguses. This air can’t be good for me, but I take a few deep breaths anyway. Lord knows I need them.

  “You sure you’re all right?” Nacho calls up again.

  Lilly and Abby are laughing, almost sounding like the cackling lady in the last car.

  I get up on my knees and say, “Stop laughing. I don’t see you two up here, do I?”

  “Because we’re not stupid,” Abby says.

  Lilly cracks up. I’ve never heard her laugh so loudly. Her and Abby high-five. That’s good, I guess, them becoming friends. I remind myself we all need to stick together, even if it’s at my expense.

  I stand up. My legs are a little shaky, but I manage. The hatch is right in front of me.

  “What’s your plan, Jack?” Lilly asks.

  “You’ll see,” I say.

  “Oh God,” Lilly says.

  I grab the handle around the hatch and bend down. ‘Never lift with your back, always bend your knees,’ that’s what Norm would be saying right now. God, I miss him. I take a deep breath, hold it, and give a yank with all the strength I have left in my body. The hatch—

  Doesn’t move even the slightest bit.

  I readjust my grip, give it another pull. In my back, a muscle—if you can call it that—gives me a warning twinge. I decide it’s probably best to stop. I sit down at the edge, let my feet dangle.

  Roland, Nacho, and Mandy are looking at me. Abby and Lilly stand up. Abby puts her good hand on her hip, her stump on the other one.

  “Well, that plan was a dud. What else do we got?” she wants to know.

  “Hey, at least I tried,” I say.

  That’s when I look past them, and see the old woman in the last car, the one who is constantly cackling. She is standing up now, too, watching me. Her lips are parted into quite possibly the creepiest smile I’ve ever seen in my life.

  Faintly, I hear my name being called over and over again. I think it’s Lilly, but I’m too enraptured by this odd woman to answer. On the other side of the grimy window, the woman points behind her.

  I cock my head, confused.

  Her smile fades, and words form on her thin lips, words I can read perfectly. She mouths, ‘Through the tunnel lies the real Hell, but the real Hell is your escape.’

  28

  “Mandy, are you sure you’re going to catch me?” I ask.

  “I mean, the odds are pretty good,” she says, “but I wouldn’t exactly put money on it…”

  That’s reassuring.

  “If she misses, I got you, Jack,” Roland says.

  Giving his skinny arms and beanpole body another glance, I highly doubt it. As I scoot closer off of the edge, our boosting failure is still fresh in my mind, probably because the rib I injured all those years ago is flaring with pain.

  I originally hurt it when I tackled Pat Huber off of the roof of the Woodhaven Recreation Center because he had a gun and was being crazy. If I managed to survive that fall, I can survive this. I hope.

  The woman has sat down again, retreated back to her corner, huddled into herself. Her dirty clothes hang from her thin frame like an oversized blanket. She is hugging her knees. My eyes keep flicking over to her, and Abby catches on to this. She turns, looks, and turns back, arches her eyebrows.

  “Come on, Jack,” Mandy says.

  I look down at their upturned faces, their opened arms. It’s hard not to picture them as zombies waiting for me, waiting to sink what’s left of their teeth into my flesh.

  I let go of the edge, and fall for what feels like a long time. Then—

  I’m being cradled in Mandy’s arms.

  “Aww,” Lilly says. “That’s so cute.”

  “Shut up,” I say. Mandy puts me down.

  “You look like you’ve had an epiphany or something,” Abby says.

  I ignore her, keep walking to the last car.

  “What are you doing?” Lilly asks.

  The woman starts laughing again. As I get closer and closer to her car, I smell the death within. This woman is not going to make it much longer. She has withered away to virtually nothing, and the Grim Reaper awaits her in the other corner.

  The rest of the group follows me. I cross one car, two cars, three. I’m near the tunnel. The closer I am to it, the more it glows that radioactive green color, like some disease is slowly spreading from organ to organ, place to place.

  “What are you doing?” Abby echoes Lilly. Then a little lower: “She’s crazy. You know that, right?”

  “Aren’t we all a little crazy?” I say.

  “Well said, amigo,” Nacho says. “I think that for years.” He says it in his broken English that is getting easier and
easier to understand.

  I nod at Nacho. “She might not be as crazy as we think.”

  “Want to put money on that?” Lilly asks.

  I pull the pockets of my pants inside out. “Broke,” I say.

  Approaching the edge of the makeshift opening in the older woman’s subway car very carefully, I raise my hand to let her know I mean no harm.

  She looks up at me with hazy eyes.

  Living in Chicago, you see a lot of homeless people and a lot of the homeless people were usually high as hell on smack or crack or some other drug that rhymes with those two. You’d see this glazed look in their eyes, this look like they had no idea where they were or what they were doing, and it had a way of breaking your heart.

  That’s how this woman looks in her tin can of a cell.

  “Hello,” I say, careful to keep my voice low. I don’t want to disturb her, or shock her to the point of cutting off all conversation. “Is there a way out of here through the tunnel?”

  She doesn’t answer for a long moment. The gurgles and moans of the zombies, and the sounds of them slapping at the glass, fill this silence.

  “Come on, let’s just leave her alone,” Abby says. “She just wants some peace.” She grabs me.

  I think about putting up a fight and standing my ground, but part of me says she’s right. This woman is crazy, and maybe I’m crazy too, for thinking that she mouthed something to me.

  Just as I turn around, the woman’s hoarse voice reaches my ears. “Yes,” she says, “there is a way.”

  I spin to face her. “Did you guys hear that?”

  They all look at me like I’m crazy, Abby especially so. “Yes, Jack…we heard that,” she says.

  I lean over the edge of the opening, look this woman in her rheumy eyes. “Where’s the opening? Where is it?” I ask her.

  The lady stands up now, and her clothes look even baggier than before. There is a wound on her wrist—not a bite mark, but a gash, like someone hit her with a blade. It’s festering, the flesh around it purple and swollen, and it looks beyond the need of amputation. With this injured hand, she points out the windows on her left, where the tracks lay crookedly, disappearing into the mouth of the tunnel that is glowing with its radioactive green light.

  “There,” she says. “There is the way. They come from there.”

  “Who does?” I ask.

  “The hobgoblins,” she says. Her eyes widen. “Don’t you see them? Ooh, they’re everywhere. Nasty little creatures.” She shrieks and jumps, causing pretty much all of us to jump. “There’s one now.” She points.

  Roland looks down at his right foot. There’s nothing there, but he shifts away regardless.

  “Crazy,” Abby whispers. “I told you so.”

  Lilly mumbles her agreement.

  “Can you describe the hobgoblins to me?” I ask the woman.

  I realize I’m really grasping at straws here, but what else do we have going for us? The rest of the place is sealed shut. I could follow the power lines that connect to the lights, but whatever hole they are funneled through will be too small for us to squeeze into. Not to mention that in order to reach those power lines, we’d need the ability to scale the walls like Spider-Man. So if talking to a crazy woman on borrowed time is my best shot at getting out of here before the Overlord can come and kill us, then by God, I’m going to take that chance.

  She purses her lips, and moves them around, thinking. “Are you insane?” she asks me.

  “Pot, kettle,” Mandy says, and Nacho laughs, but I don’t think he fully understands the meaning of that saying, with his broken English and all.

  “They’re right there!” the woman says. She turns her head so fast she’s a blur. It’s like she’s following a hummingbird that’s zigging and zagging around her backyard. “Oh geez, you missed it. It was right there, the little stinker. I call that one Bruno. He’s always getting into my fresh bread.”

  “Fresh bread,” Abby whispers. “The craziness thickens.”

  “My eyes aren’t what they used to be,” I say. “Please, just describe them to us.”

  The woman caresses the loose skin of her face with a shaky hand, thinking deeply. “It’s not easy,” she says. “Describing them. They’re tricky little bastards. Sometimes they look one way, and then a few hours later, they look entirely different.”

  “Cuckoo,” Abby whispers, covering her mouth as she speaks. I do my best to ignore her. It’s not easy.

  “Sometimes they look like little green men—you know, like those aliens in Roswell, New Mexico?”

  I nod.

  “But they’re much uglier, like they have diseases or something. They won’t talk to me. They just make these terrible faces, and stick their tongues out and blow raspberries.” The woman’s features becomes pinched. “Oh God, do I just wanna rip their little faces off, the clever bastards. The zombies don’t notice them. They weave in and out of their legs like rats, except they’re much bigger. Uglier, too.”

  “Thank you,” I tell the lady.

  Unlike the rest of the people in my group, I’m managing a straight face. Abby looks close to bursting, but she’s never been one to humor bullshit. I, on the other hand, was a writer of fiction before all the world went to hell, so it’s safe to say I keep an open mind. I mean, how can one not, when the world is overrun with zombies, these fantastical creatures meant for fiction?

  Still, hobgoblins? There must be some place where I draw the line, right? Keeping that straight face, it’s tough, I’ll admit.

  I say, “Where do they come from?”

  The lady points into the darkness of the tunnel. “Back there,” she says. “There’s a door about this high.” She raises her hand about two feet from the car’s floor. “And this wide.” This time, she uses both hands to make a foot-wide gap between her palms. “They come and go as they please. I holler at them a lot, tell them they need to start paying rent or I’m telling the Overlord, and the Overlord doesn’t take too kindly to squatters, but they just laugh and make their faces at me.” She crosses her arms and sticks her bottom lip out. I see her top teeth in this expression—or rather, her lack of top teeth.

  “I think they locked her up and sentenced her to death for insanity,” Roland says. I look at him out of the corner of my eye. There’s no smile on his face. He’s serious. The disgust I have for the Overlord and his terrible District is almost overwhelming. What kind of government executes people because they’re crazy?

  “That would make a lot of sense,” Abby whispers. “I mean, she is crazy. Not that I agree with her getting executed for it.”

  “Do you think I can fit through there?” I ask the woman.

  She shakes her head. “You don’t look like much of a hobgoblin, son.”

  “Well, I’m not—” I begin.

  “Unless…you are a hobgoblin!” She shoots up from the bench and raises her hands high above her head, shrieking. The sound causes a few of us to step back. Not me. I stand my ground.

  “Hobgoblin!” the lady yells. “Evil hobgoblin!”

  This goes on for a solid thirty seconds. The zombies take notice of her screaming, and like one large mass clumped together, they sway to the left, their leaking bodies trailing blood and muck behind them.

  “Uh, Jack,” Abby says in a subdued voice that still manages to carry over the shrieking woman. “Can we have a moment?”

  I almost can’t turn away from the car. I’ve seen a lot of weird things in my time on the road, but this, a woman in a makeshift prison shouting ‘Evil hobgoblin!’ at me, is definitely near the top of the list. Not exactly at the top, but definitely up there.

  “So, you do realize she is completely crazy, right?” Abby asks. “Like completely off her rocker, talk-to-the-birds-and-think-they’re-talking-back crazy. Like tinfoil hat crazy. Like—”

  “Why don’t you just say she’s thinks-she-sees-hobgoblins crazy?” Lilly chimes in.

  “Okay, guys,” I say. “This isn’t a joke. Mental illness is
a real thing.”

  “So are zombies, but we joke about them, don’t we?” Abby replies.

  I see there’s no arguing with her, so I just nod and say, “Yes, I know she is crazy.”

  “And you know there’s no possible way that little hobgoblins are running around this place, completely unnoticed by us or the zombies, right?” she continues.

  I don’t answer instantly. My head is somewhere else; where it is, I just can’t say.

  “Jack?” Lilly is snapping her fingers in front of my face. “Jack, don’t tell me you’ve fallen off your rocker, too.”

  I shake my head, blink a couple of times. “Yes, I understand there are no hobgoblins around here.”

  “Or anywhere…right?” Abby intones.

  “Well…” I say, “that’s a completely different argument.”

  Abby throws up her arms as if trying to get God’s attention. As it has been for the last fifteen years or so, He’s not answering.

  “Listen,” I say, “this is all I’m thinking. Craziness is somewhat grounded in reality. There are cases where the person suffering from mental instability is too far gone, yes, of course, I know this, but this woman doesn’t seem too far gone to me. Not yet.”

  “So the hobgoblins are something?” Roland asks.

  I nod. “Not exactly hobgoblins, but something is tricking her brain into thinking that’s what it is. Something tangible.”

  Everyone is just looking at me like I’m the crazy one now. I can’t really blame them.

  The woman continues her wailing, but now she’s saying, “EVIL GREEN HOBGOBLINS! ALL OF THEM! EVIL GREEN HOBGOBLINS!”

  “I don’t know about goblins,” Nacho says, “but there’s green light everywhere. No?”

  Roland nods.

  And that’s when another idea invades my head like a comet plummeting through the atmosphere. It hits me so hard, I almost fall backward.

  “That’s it,” I say. “The radioactive-ness or whatever.”

  “Very scientific, Jack,” Lilly says.

  “Don’t act like you know what to call it, either,” Abby says. Lilly rolls her eyes at this; she’s picking up on Abby’s mannerisms more and more.

  Anyway, I see that I have Abby’s attention.