Nate Kenyon - Day One

Hanscomb took another step back, as if ready to bolt. Hawke hadn’t realized how far gone she was since they had started walking the tunnel. Bringing up her family had pushed her too far. Her face was streaked with tears, her eyes haunted pockets of bruised flesh. Her entire body shook like a frightened dog.

“It’s the end of the world,” she whispered. The light was relentless. “There’s no help; they’re all killers. My babies…”

She stopped as the crowd pushed forward again, all of them straining to hear. “I think my husband’s cheating on me,” she said. Tears made her cheeks glitter. “Maybe he’s not even downtown. He’s probably with her now. Oh God.”

“Crazy bitch,” the fat man said. “Why are you scaring Patty like that?” The threat of violence hovered in the air. He put his hand on his wife’s shoulder, but she shrank away from him. He looked around at the others from the train, shook his giant head. “These people ain’t going to help us. We should have taken the Seventy-seventh Street platform up, like I said.”

More murmurs, people talking at once, the tension rising still higher. These people had been trapped for hours, and they were ready to snap. The fat man took a step toward Hanscomb, who shrieked and nearly lost her footing, and Hawke was beginning to think things might get out of control quickly when emergency lights in the tunnel blinked on, along with a crack and hum like high-power lines.

The light washed over them, people standing out in stark relief. Everyone froze for a moment, and then the fat man’s wife screamed, her eyes bugging out as she pushed apart the crowd and staggered away, clutching her belly as if she might be sick.

Hawke turned toward where she had been looking. Sarah Hanscomb was in the midst of a grand mal seizure, her mouth frozen in a rictus of pain, her head turned upward at a strange angle, muscles rigid. No, not a seizure. She was making a noise like popping corn as she shuddered in place. Hawke realized it was the sound of her flesh crackling like a pig roasting over a flame. He looked down and saw her ankle touching the third rail, her clothes already beginning to smoke, wisps coming off her hair and the ridges of her cheekbones.

It seemed to go on forever, Hanscomb held upright by the six hundred volts of electricity coursing through her body as she died and fell backward across the second set of tracks, still shuddering as if her body refused to let go of what was already gone.

As she fell, a deep rumble came from somewhere up the tunnel.

Everyone looked at one another in silence, frozen in the weight of the moment. The rumble grew louder, pebbles beginning to dance at their feet, a gust of wind sucking at them as if something huge had taken a deep breath.

There was a train coming.

3:42 P.M.

VASCO WENT FIRST, running hard, Young behind him. Hawke took one more look at Sarah Hanscomb’s smoldering remains, his body feeling hot and raw as if his own skin had burned away and he had been left exposed. He wondered if anything had gone through her mind before the pain washed her away like a giant wave across a dune. And then he turned and ran with them, rushing recklessly through the shadows, the tracks beginning to hum under him as he risked a glance back and saw the lights of two trains bearing down, filling both sides of the tunnel as they came.

He ran harder, faster, gaining on Young until he was nearly even with her and the bright lights of the Hunter College stop were approaching fast on their right, but the trains were so close now, he could feel the vibration in his teeth. Someone was shouting behind them, the sound nearly drowned out by the howling of the machines. He looked back one more time and saw the remaining group pushing one another frantically as they fought to escape, tangled up in the narrow space. He couldn’t see the fat man or his wife anywhere. The sound of the trains was deafening, the thunder of the tracks rising up as Hawke flew over the uneven ground.

Vasco reached the platform first, vaulting with both hands like a gymnast as the flashlight clattered across the floor, his legs just clearing the concrete edge before he rolled, reached back and swung Young up by her forearms, the muscles knotting in his shoulders as he grunted with the strain.

Hawke reached it a moment later and took the leap less gracefully, his fingers scrabbling on the rough surface and his chest slamming into the edge and nearly bouncing him back off before he managed to twist up and over it. He thought of offering a hand to Hanscomb before he remembered, Sarah is dead, and in his head he saw her smoking face and rippled skin and eyes bulging before they popped like swollen blisters. The image burned into him and he wanted to steel himself against it, wanted it not to matter, but she had become one of them without him realizing it, and her loss was a wounding of them all, like a slow but fatal bleed.

The platform was narrow. He scrambled to his knees and faced the tracks. The front runners of the other group reached the platform just as the two trains came barreling through, side by side, both heading downtown. The trains were going way too fast, with nobody in the closest conductors’ chairs, and he caught a glimpse of the blurred, horror-stricken faces of those still inside as they clawed uselessly at the windows and doors.

The first man was trying to climb up when the closer train cut him down like a mower through grass. Something wet hit Hawke’s face and he turned away as the hot wind buffeted him and the screaming of the machines grew deafeningly loud, or perhaps they were his own screams as he crouched, hunched over and rocking, wiping someone else’s blood from his eyes.

The trains rocketed through and disappeared, bringing another gust of wind and then a swiftly diminishing moan. The survivors were left on the abandoned platform as the overhead lights winked out again and darkness descended over them like a hot, suffocating blanket.

Hawke tasted blood and spat on the floor, nausea washing over him. These people all had families, children, parents; they all had lives and lovers. What had happened was intentional, cold-blooded and cruel, a carefully orchestrated elimination of some kind.

We’re a potential threat, Young had said. He had a sudden, terrifying vision of dozens of these trains across the city all racing toward one another like crosshairs on a target, making beelines for Grand Central and Penn Station and other underground emergency checkpoints.

Another death trap.

A minute later, a muffled thud shook the floor, followed by several more in quick succession; then a concussion rolled back down the tunnel and washed over them, the walls shivering, sending dust and debris and pieces of the ceiling raining down. Hawke curled into a tight ball, arms over his head, and as the debris finally stopped falling he tentatively sat back up, blinking against the spots that danced before his eyes, and against the tears.

Hawke felt that man’s blood splatter him again and again, watched it happen in his mind’s eye like a film clip that kept replaying itself. He scrubbed at himself furiously with his sleeve and kept muttering the word “no,” a flat denial, a refusal. He was speaking without really hearing it, only wanting to hear his own voice. How many people had just died at Grand Central? Had it happened elsewhere? Was it just those on the trains, or had there been crowds of hundreds or thousands gathered there, waiting for help?

Vasco moaned from the dark somewhere to Hawke’s right. Hawke breathed in concrete dust and smoke, coughing hard enough to tear at his lungs. He needed light. It was too dark down here, too suffocating, the walls and ceiling pressing down on him. He thought of Robin as he got to his feet, a heightened focus coming over him, a burning rage that began deep in his belly and spread through his limbs. He tried to remember which direction the flashlight had gone after it had left Vasco’s hand and nearly stumbled over a vague shape, catching himself on Young’s back. He patted at her; she was sprawled out, facedown but breathing. He tried to think of where she had been in relation to the platform; the flashlight had landed in the area just beyond where Vasco had pulled her up.