Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

“Look there,” someone said from the platform. Another one shrieked; there were several shouts of “Get a cop,” “Call an ambulance,” and the like. A quintet of bloody children spilled out of the tunnel, their clothes in tatters.

“There’s been an accident!”

“Oh my God!”

A brutalized teenager and three equally bloody adults, one of them a savage woman with a shovel, followed after the children. Now smoke poured out of the tunnel, smoke that stank of chemicals. People started going for the stairs, tentatively at first, then like they meant it. Behind the smoke, the nose of a train slowing to full stop, like a snake that poked its snoot into a rabbit hole and decided to park there.

What was this?

Nobody bombed New York, but this looked like IRA shit, PLO, Red Brigade. Could it have come here, that foreign germ of violence as food for newspapers? No. This was something new. Or perhaps something so old and awful it had been forgotten on purpose. Because now four of the bleeding children (and they weren’t really children, were they? Had their eyes not shone in the tunnel?) turned around to face the bleeding adults running at them. They curled into balls like kids in a duck-and-cover drill from the fifties, their hands clasped behind their necks, their heads tucked between their knees. The madwoman with the shovel stood over the dark-haired little girl and rose up like King Arthur about to drive Excalibur into its stone; she was on her tiptoes, almost on point. “Stop!” a hysterical cop next to you yelled, his revolver almost next to your ear. He was going to shoot. Thank God you got your hand over your ear in time. Not because your partial deafness would have been such a big deal in the grand scheme of things, what with so many people about to die so strangely, but had you been deafened, you might not have heard the sweet boy who would speak in a moment—but not yet, he was just making his way to the platform.

Now the cop shot at just the instant the lunatic drove down with her shovel. The shot caught her in the hip, turned her just a little, but she caught the kid in the knee, clipped the leg off, and even sparked the running rail beneath, but the kid didn’t scream. The woman screamed. You couldn’t know, of course, that she screamed not because she was shot but because she missed the child’s neck. That her aim was decapitation. That the child had gambled that even this brutal, crazed woman wouldn’t be strong enough to cut her head off with her limbs protecting it, not with one blow, but that the little girl who was so rarely wrong had made a millennial mistake. The woman was that strong. Would have taken the girl’s head and arm clean off, drawing a very long, sad story to its end.

Only she missed.

And she wouldn’t get another chance, even though she raised her bloody shovel once again. The cop must have put his time in at the range; even jacked up at what he was seeing, his second shot was better, took part of shovel-woman’s head off, but she didn’t fall. She just looked momentarily confused, like she was struggling to say a word she had forgotten. She looked at the blade of her shovel as though it might be written there. The other adults were doing violence to the other children. People were yelling at them to stop.

Now the sweet boy climbed onto the platform and held his hands up. Everyone looked, you looked, too. He left small, bloody footprints behind him. You wouldn’t remember his face, it would blur in your memory, but you remember that his face was sweet, as was his voice.

“Everyone! Listen! Help us! The grown-ups are hurting us! You must pull their heads off! You must hold them down and shock them on the bad rail!”

Yes, we will!

Such a sweet boy, who could want to hurt an angel of his rank?

“Do not let them speak!” he said, and you resolved to keep them silent. Your eyes spilled over, tears streamed down your cheeks with the pathos of it, your mouth opened and you drooled on your shirt or sweater or tie, your saliva ran like you were starving and someone had tucked grains of salt under your tongue. No time for salt, though. You had to save these angels from the murderers on the tracks.

Was that how it happened? Was that why you did it? I’m only guessing here. I only know what I saw.

What you saw, I think, was a triumph of mankind, of Manhattan, manna from above, the end of bystanderism forever, I am my brother’s keeper, we are, all of us, going down onto those tracks . And you did. One big wave of you in your sport coats and London Fogs and turtlenecks; in your saris and jumpsuits and Grateful Dead T-shirts under peacoats and down vests and leather, in your wool caps, deerstalkers, and babushkas, smelling of Old Spice and Marlboros and sub-polyester sweat, you poured over the lip of that platform, elbowing each other out of the way for the privilege of tearing the killers apart, especially the one with the shovel. The mad are supposed to have inhuman strength, and these were no exception. The wild black man in the funky vest tore a man’s arm off trying to save the woman. The very pale one in the olive jacket used his knife, tried to cut his way through the crowd and save the woman. But there was no saving her, you were all over her, a swarm of you. She brained the first ones, busted teeth and jaws, she swore and bit in a fury with teeth that belonged on a tiger, she was a tiger, but you bore her down, those of you up front, took her shovel from her, stuffed your hands and arms in her mouth though she bit and bit deep. You turned for a moment to see those in the back handing up the children, and a miracle happened, didn’t it? These bloody things who seemed too hurt to live were healing before your eyes. The little girl got passed backward over heads; nobody could find the leg that had been cut from her, but that’s because it was on again! Now you turned front and the vile tiger-woman-thing was closer to the rail. It was as slow as tug-of-war, moving her there. A POP! and sizzle as a woman in a fox-trimmed coat touched the rail, jerked, and smoked, her fox smoking, too. A man in a security-guard outfit made contact next, jostled into it by the crowd, his life ending in a violent spasm that curled him so the back of his head almost touched his heels. And then it was her turn. You saw her face before she went, her skin the color of ash, her gorgon’s eyes, her mouth open in a snarl. Her teeth like a tiger’s. A vampire? Why not? Who else would want to hurt that honeyed boy?

“Die, you fucking monster!” you yelled, though you don’t normally swear.

And die she did.

The saxophonist, grunting and drooling, wrestled her foot into the lethal rail. Her hand had been gripping the running rail, so the current went fully through her, exploded her hands, popped off her head, set her hair stinkingly ablaze.

A common noise went up of gagged cries and shouts; all those train-moving amps and volts were hungry, they didn’t stop with her. The saxophonist jerked and burned as well, his ridiculous comb-over standing on end. The guy in the powder-blue suit caught fire; he kicked his loafers off and wiggled his argyle-besocked feet almost comically. Several others who had been wrestling her died, though none so spectacularly. A good dozen, maybe a score were injured.

You were not among these; you had not been strong or early enough to get to the front. But here came the teenaged boy, the dirty one, spared because the sweet boy had said the grown-ups are hurting us , and, whatever he was, this one was no grown-up. He looked you in the eye.

I looked at you, I don’t know which one you were, I looked at so many. I saw Margaret burning. I saw Old Boy down, his hands on a grenade, half a dozen hands on his, holding them together, holding the pin in, and here came the college boy with the mane of frizzy red hair and the shovel. I tensed to spring down but saw that I was too late. The shovel fell. Old Boy died the death, the college boy holding up his trophy while the tongue in it moved in and out, as though the last taste in its mouth were unpleasant. The boy yelled a nasal, unlikely war whoop, then stood slack.