Adam Baker - Terminus

‘Maybe Galloway is toying with us.’

‘Average prowler has the brains of a cockroach. They don’t play games.’

‘Some are pretty smart.’

‘They tear people up. That’s the height of their ambition.’

‘Maybe those guys in the street are just foot soldiers. Drones. Ever think of that? Maybe there is a hierarchy. Creatures we haven’t seen yet.’

‘Give your imagination a break, all right? Get some rest.’

Lupe stood. She turned to Donahue and Tombes.

‘Anytime we leave this room, we go in pairs, okay? From now on nobody moves on their own.’

They nodded.

‘No more sleep. And no more pills, Donnie. We need to stay frosty. We have to watch our backs at all times.’

Lupe pulled at the plant room door. Jammed. Roof subsidence. The frame had begun to distort, wedging the door closed.

‘Son of a bitch.’

Lupe braced a foot against the wall, gripped the handle and strained until the door juddered open with a tortured wood-shriek.

She shone her flashlight round the cavernous darkness of the ticket hall, probed shadows, checked for movement. She clapped a hand over her mouth and nose to mask the stench of incinerated flesh.

‘No point going out there again,’ said Donahue.

‘We better make sure they’re all dead.’

Lupe and Donahue advanced into the hall. Lupe carried an axe. Donahue carried a steel pike.

They crossed the ticket hall. Eerie silence. Their flashlights shafted through blue haze. Skeletal bodies. Carbonised limbs. Petrified screams.

Lupe crossed herself.

‘Santa Muerte,’ she murmured.

Donahue coughed and blinked away tears.

‘Damned smoke.’

The walls, pillars and ceiling had been seared by flame. The two-toned white and terracotta tiles burned uniform black.

The bench was charcoal. The wall clock was a fist of melted cogs.

Shattered tiles of the station sign:

Lupe looked up at the leaded glass bowl mounted on the ceiling.

‘Guess we killed the lights,’ said Donahue.

Lupe lifted the axe and smashed the soot-blackened dome. She shielded her eyes from falling glass. A couple of sodium bulbs still shone within. They cast a weak piss-yellow glow.

‘Better than nothing.’

Donahue looked around. One of the central pillars had fractured. Concrete had split and crumbled to powder, exposing a buckled steel column at its core.

‘Jeez. Guess heat damage really trashed the place.’

Scattered tiles. Porcelain crunched underfoot like broken glass.

A deep fissure in the roof. Donahue trained the beam of her flashlight and examined the jagged fracture. It ran from the entrance stairwell to the back of the hall.

‘The whole building is starting to come apart. It could drop on our heads any minute.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Stick around much longer, this place will be our tomb.’

Donahue studied the fissure, tensed for gunshot cracks that would signal the roof was about to buckle and collapse.

Lupe began to laugh.

‘What’s so funny?’ asked Donahue.

Lupe walked away, chuckling, shaking her head.

‘Seriously, what’s so fucking funny?’

Crumpled bodies blocked the office doorway. Smoke curled from charcoal flesh. Twisted, interlocked limbs. Grinning skulls. Stench like bacon.

‘Help me shift these bodies,’ said Lupe.

‘Why?’

‘We could be down here hours yet. I don’t want to look at these bastards. Sure as hell don’t want to breathe their stink.’

‘Leave it to me,’ said Donahue. ‘Won’t be the first poor souls I bagged and tagged.’

She wrapped a bandana round her mouth and nose.

‘Pulled four kids out the ashes once. Gas explosion. A tenement in Queens. Cooked them real good.’

She pulled on leather gloves.

‘Propane. Nasty shit. Heavier than air. Pools like liquid.’

She took a deep breath and gripped an arm. Rigor stiff. Flesh tore and leaked pus. She dragged the brittle corpse across the ticket hall and kicked it down the platform steps. It tumbled down the stairway, shedding crisped skin, scattering toes and fingers, and was lost in darkness.

Lupe stood over a second body lying contorted in the office doorway. Hispanic girl, silver crucifix melted to her breast bone. Shrivelled remnants of a maid uniform. The Cedars. A beaux-arts hotel off Wall Street.

Lupe contemplated the corpse like she was staring down at her own doppelgänger. Waitress. Cleaner. Laundry girl. The kind of life Lupe could have led if she swallowed her pride and punched a clock.

She brought down her axe in a hard chop. The blade embedded in the thorax of the charred corpse. She dragged the cadaver across the ticket hall. She tugged the axe free and kicked the body down the platform steps. She heard it tumble. She heard it splash.

They retrieved bodies from the entrance stairwell. They dragged them across the ticket hall and pitched them down the platform steps into the flooded tunnel.

‘We ought to get out of here,’ said Lupe. ‘Place is screwed.’

‘The Federal roof is the only landing site for half a mile.’

‘We could wait across the street. Find a basement.’

‘To hell with that,’ said Donahue. ‘Fenwick Street was padlocked. People forgot it was here. That’s why it was a perfect holdout. But every other subterranean space, cellars, underground parking structures, MTA stations, got overrun by refugees. Hundreds of people. Their pets, their bags, their bedding. If we head into any of those sublevels we could find an army of prowlers waiting for us. It would be like kicking an ant nest.’

‘What’s the time?’ asked Lupe.

Donahue checked her watch.

‘One. One in the morning.’

‘Fucking chopper,’ muttered Lupe. ‘Scoping the Adirondacks? In the middle of the night? What kind of bullshit is that?’

‘Infected folks are warmer than background. Not by much, but they’ve got a signature. The chopper will buzz Avalanche Lake, overfly the forest a few times. If there is anyone stumbling around between the trees, they’ll stand out plainer than day.’

‘I don’t like it,’ said Lupe. ‘I don’t like sitting here, waiting to be saved. Every instinct tells me to get moving, get the hell out of here.’

‘You said it yourself. There’s nowhere to go. Just got to survive until dawn.’

‘Fuck that shit. Get on the radio. Talk to Ridgeway. Apply some leverage. We’ve got Ekks, and we’ve got his papers. How about we put a match to his research? Toast some marshmallows over that notebook? About time we called the shots. If they want their vaccine, their cure, they have to come get it. Right now.’

The office door hung from its hinges. Lupe lifted it aside.

Smoking wreckage. A toppled desk. Smashed chairs. Broken furniture still danced with licks of flame. Varnish bubbled and popped.

Donahue untabbed an extinguisher and trained a jet of carbon smoke. Stuttering gas roar. She swept the hose cone back and forth. A typhoon of fire-suppressant vapour engulfed the debris, leaving the shattered desk and chairs coated in white residue like frost.

She threw the extinguisher aside and began to kick through the wreckage. Carbon fog curled round her feet.

A body huddled in the corner. Black, mummified, rictus grin.

Dunkin’ Donuts.

The guy had punched through the door ablaze and careened off the walls, blinded by flame. He set the place alight, turned the room to a furnace. Convulsions gave way to paralysis as cooked muscles and ligaments began to contract, pulling him to the ground, curling him foetal. Finally, the polyester Donuts cap melted to his scalp and mercifully cooked his brain.

Donahue grabbed the cadaver’s foot with a gloved hand. Skin crumbled and flaked. She dragged the corpse from the room.