George Right: D

But still, overcoming disgust—since there was nobody else to ask—he repeated the question:

“Do you hear me? What is this place? Seems I got lost.”

The figure hollowly murmured something under the scarf, but Tony could not distinguish the words. Was it English at all? In New York more than two hundred nationalities live…

“Sorry?” Logan asked again.

More unintelligible muttering, as if the creature’s mouth was filled by some viscous stuff. But this time, apparently, the words were different. It came to Tony’s mind that, probably, this being was not talking to him, but simply talked to himself, and, moreover, had done it for a long time already and would do it further… Not just a stinky tramp, but also a madman? Why not… especially taking into account that since Tony got on that ill-fated train, everything around him looked pretty crazy.

But while Logan was sure that he would be ignored again, the creature suddenly jerkily pulled his hand from under his arm and stretched it towards Tony.

Logan recoiled in horror, looking at what had come up from a dirty sleeve. It was not a hand in the usual sense. It was a swollen, shapeless, ulcerated stump, on which five wet hillocks stuck out like ugly flattened slugs—all that remained of fingers. Logan’s gaze jumped again to the wrapped face, and he understood that what he had accepted in the darkness as a scarf were actually bandages, sodden with pus and God knows what other discharges. He was not sure whether under these bandages (when were they last changed?) remained any skin, or if they had long ago grown into the sick meat.

The thought that it could touch him made Tony move back quickly, without looking behind him; he saw a dreadful stump directed towards him and heard a hollow illegible mutter from under the rotten bandages. A second later he stumbled against a curb and, helplessly waving his hands, crashed down, hitting his head against the sidewalk. A flash sparkled in his eyes and all sank in blackness.

Tony came to his senses, looking around in panic. Disgusting images appeared to him: sticky touches of the leprous creature—or what this disease was?—and his stinking breath right in Logan’s face, in his mouth… probably, even a kiss through dirty bandages (what if it nevertheless was a woman?) Was it simply a delusion of his scared imagination—or an echo of what really happened during his unconsciousness?

Anyway, the street was empty again. And there remained the same darkness—unless the fog had become thicker. But, possibly, Tony had been unconscious not too long. Strange, but he did not feel a pain in his head. However, having carefully touched it, he felt something wet and sticky.

“I’m going to see a doctor,” he promised himself. “As soon as I get out of here. And not only about a head injury. I’ll get tested for infections…”

But first, he needed to get out of here.

He stood up and turned right, walking along the street. However, the longer he walked, the more he doubted in his chosen direction. Underfoot was old crumbled asphalt. On the road, there were more dead birds, and not only pigeons. Here was a black raven, regarded by romanticists as a symbol of death, lying with its feet drawn into itself, there a worm-eaten albatross, and there… Logan smelled the largest of them earlier than he saw it: it was either a heron or a stork—in such a state of decay, it was impossible to know anymore. Tony knew that such birds live in New York parks, but never saw them flying in the city…

Meanwhile, from the fog, dark silhouettes of houses appeared, continuing to change. Here, they were of different height and architecture and were not arranged in monolithic rows along the sides of the street, but stuck out separately. Here, this one jutted forward to the very edge of the street, there, that one receded deep into the dark. Their locations resembled the curve of decayed teeth of a mutant from a horror movie. The blank walls with no windows occurred more and more often, and buildings with windows looked even worse. Tony doubted that such shabby ruins could exist even in the poorest and the most remote parts of New York, let alone the business area of Manhattan. Municipal services were simply obliged to demolish all this very long time ago before it crashed on somebody’s head… It seemed the majority of these buildings, though obviously multifamily, were not stone; in the cold air, the heavy, damp and musty smell of decaying wood was clearly present. Moreover, outlines of either some dilapidated villas or farm houses loomed ahead; but while such buildings usually stand in rural open space, here they were literally piled up, leaning against each other in terrible narrowness, interlocking by lopsided walls and fallen-in roofs and, probably, only for that reason had not yet collapsed completely.

Looking around, Logan almost stumbled against some object lying directly in the middle of the street and merging with the blackness of the asphalt. For a terrible instant it seemed to him that it was a swollen corpse—more precisely, a trunk without legs, arms or head. But it was only a very full black plastic garbage bag. All the same, looking at it was unpleasant. It seemed that it was just about to burst and spew out its fetid contents. How long had it been lying right in the middle of the road?

At this moment a quickly approaching noise—some rhythmical scratch and gnashing rustle—came from behind Tony. He turned back—and saw just few feet from himself the rapidly approaching blunt muzzle of a radiator, a heavy rectangular bumper, the blind cataracts of extinguished headlights, the dark glass of a windshield… He hardly had time to jump aside. The long vehicle rushed past without reducing speed, with a filthy sound—skwashhh!—squelching the garbage bag. Tony opened his mouth to shout out his opinion of the driver (certainly, Logan was guilty himself of walking in the street, but…)—but the abuse stuck in his throat. It was not the fact that the driver didn’t honk or even try to brake that amazed Tony most of all, but what kind of vehicle it was. A school bus. An ordinary yellow school bus that can be found on plenty of New York streets, as well as in any other American city… But not in the deadest hours of night.

Although, of course, anything could make a school bus driver go out at night. Perhaps, the bus urgently needed repair… or the driver simply used municipal transport for personal purposes… Yes, all these hypotheses were possible if there were no passengers in the bus. Those passengers for whom it was intended—children.

But, though there was no interior light, Tony had clearly discerned the white spots of faces pressed to windows from within. Yes, exactly—not simply half-turned somewhere inside, but pressed, flattened out against the glass faces and palms, as if children desperately and hopelessly tried to escape outside from a glass captivity of the bus, from the dark and narrow closed space in which they have been confined long, oh, very long already… so long that they had no more strength to struggle or even simply to move, and could only press their faces in mute despair against cold windows… The bus had already passed, but Tony still saw in his mind their flattened noses turned on one side, black holes of open mouths, dark stains shading their sunken eye sockets…

“Nonsense,” he told himself. “Just something I glimpsed in the dark. I saw it for no more than a second! It is simply some late excursion. Or the bus got delayed somewhere by a traffic jam… or a power failure…”

But why at night, moreover in a fog, had the headlights been switched off? And why, by the way, had he heard only a metal scratch and a garbage rustle from under the wheels—but not the sound of a working engine?

He looked after the departing bus. The tail lights did not burn, either. And in the back window a stiffened, warped face shone whitely. There was something especially wrong with it, and, an instant later, Tony understood, what exactly.