Monster Island(60)

Your partner, theoretically, would be holding a single action hunting rifle, of which there were exactly three in the booth, or a pistol-there were dozens of those though only a couple of cardboard boxes of ammunition for them. There were plenty of knives, though, and sledgehammers and riot control batons. “I’m guessing you’re not much with a firearm anyway,” Jack said, looking over his arsenal. He settled on a machete with an eighteen inch blade-originally a gardening implement. It felt well-balanced in my hand and the grip was rubberized for comfort but I didn’t relish using it.

“You’re kidding,” I hoped.

“Sharpened it myself. Let me do the fighting, alright? You can be the radioman.” He locked the booth up again and we went off to find Ayaan. She was with Marisol, who was painting her fingernails. The girl soldier snapped to attention when she saw Jack but she couldn’t stop from bubbling when she addressed me.

“She used to be a movie star,” Ayaan told me, and I had to fight the urge to laugh. “She was in the ‘Runaway Bride’, with Julia Roberts but her scenes were cut out in post-production. I think she is the most beautiful woman in the world, now.”

Ayaan was sixteen years old. When I was her age I dressed like Kurt Cobain and memorized all the words to “Lithium”. I guess we take our heroes where we find them. “We’re going for the drugs,” I told her. That broke the spell. She immediately set about cleaning and checking her weapon and gathering up her pack.

I tried to be discrete as Jack and Marisol said goodbye but I was itching to get started. Jack had a plan, and while he hadn’t let me in on it yet I knew it would be good.

“If you don’t come back,” Marisol said, pushing Jack’s glasses back up his nose. She couldn’t seem to finish her sentence.

“Then you’re all screwed.” Jack put his arm around her hips.

“Dekalb,” she said to my turned back, “do you begin to see why I had to marry a politician? At least Montclair knows how to lie. Get out of here. I’ll be listening on this end. Not that I can do anything if you get into trouble, but at least I’ll be able to hear your dying screams.”

Jack actually laughed at that, something that had seemed impossible the night before. He gave Marisol a final probing kiss and then lead us deep into the bowels of the subway station… and right to the S Train Platform. The gaping twin mouths of the tunnels like the business end of a double-barreled shotgun lay just beyond a steel gate.

He expected our shock, of course, and he tried to explain as he fished a mammoth set of keys out of his pocket. “The tunnel runs all the way to Grand Central, nonstop. The power’s off so we don’t need to worry about the third rail. Yes, it will be dark in there but it’s also unpopulated, as far as we can tell. We’ve never seen a stray corpse come out of that tunnel.”

“It’s a deserted subway tunnel and the dead have come back to life,” I said, as if he might have missed the obvious.

“It’ll take us halfway across the city,” Jack insisted, unlocking the gate. “Almost right to the UN and it’s a closed environment the whole way.”

“Have you never seen any horror movie?” Ayaan demanded, but she filed through the gate like the rest of us.

Jack locked the gate behind him and started off down the platform at a steady clip. I rushed to keep up. Electric lights shone from the ceiling and the white tiles of the walls were no more dirty than the ones in the concourse but the platform felt tangibly different-colder, less inviting. There was no protection here from the city at large.

When we entered the right-hand tunnel the feeling grew into a creeping dread. Jack stopped to peel open a chemical light for each of us. He bent them in the middle and shook them until they started to glow, then snapped them to our shirts so we could keep track of each other in the blackness of the tunnel. He had a halogen flashlight duct-taped to his SPAS-12 and he switched it on, revealing railroad tracks that marched off in a perfectly straight line-a depiction of infinity straight out of seventh grade geometry class, if your Junior High happened to convene in Hell.

Time pretty much lost all meaning as we moved down the tunnel. We walked on the tracks, our feet settling into a rhythm of stepping on every other railroad tie. I tried counting my steps for a while but got bored with that quickly. I looked over my shoulder from time to time, watching the glaring light of the station behind me shrink, wishing I could go back, but soon it had become no brighter than a bright star. We made no more noise than we could help, trying not to even breathe too hard.