George Right: D

All right. He will simply ask the boy whether help is necessary.

Tony passed along the car, continually catching the handrails (and why does this train shake so much? He didn’t remember such jolting on this line), and stopped opposite the child.

“Hey, kid!” he called, not too loudly so as not to frighten. “Are you all right?”

The child did not answer and did not react at all. From above Tony could not see his face—only a cap from under which a thin peaky nose, similar to a bird’s beak, stuck out. And something in this nose was… wrong. Repulsive.

Logan sat down on hunkers before the silent child, clinging by hand to an empty seat to the left. Even in such a position, Tony did not see clearly the face hidden by a cap and a collar. Only a bone white nose-beak bent from top to bottom, and sharply prominent cheekbones with deep shadows under them. The boy was probably very thin, even emaciated.

Tony called him again, but the child still did not move nor in any way showed that he heard. Logan felt real dismay at the silence of this strange child in an empty night train. Most of all he would like to stand up and go away—not even to his former seat, but to another car. Nevertheless, he reached out and, having mumbled, “Don’t be afraid, I only want to see whether you are okay,” pulled the cap from the boy.

And was struck dumb with an open mouth.

The head appeared to be almost absolutely bald, only here and there, like mold stains, weightless white shreds grew. The mushroom-like skull was fitted with a dry skin, all in senile pigment spots and so thin that it seemed likely to tear at any moment; under the skin knotty blue veins boldly bulged. An unnaturally big forehead, standing out like two hillocks, hung over the small wrinkled face which had gathered in folds around the fallen-in mouth and deeply sunken eyes. These eyes, the muddy sick eyes of a decrepit old man, were open and looked directly at Logan, without moving and without blinking.

“S-sorry,” Tony stammered, put the cap on the knees of the sitting child, and hastily stood up. He felt too awkward to remain here, so he decided to go to the next car. Ignoring a sign forbidding transiting cars on the move, he opened the car door and stepped into the space between cars. The tunnel roar deafened him, and the cold wind angrily jerked his hair and shirt. The clanking metal of two narrow semicircular platforms shook underfoot as if aiming to dump him on the rails, and low-sagged soft handrails on each side hardly could prevent it. Tony hastily seized the door handle ahead and tried to turn it, but the door refused to open. In an instant panic attack, Logan fancied that he could not go back either, and would have to ride between cars until the nearest station… at the best case. He desperately jerked the handle again, and this time the door yielded—previously he had simply pulled in the wrong direction, Tony realized, walking into the new car.

There was nobody here, either. Well, okay, no passengers is better than… And, after all, this small person, apparently, is really a child, not an old dwarf, Logan thought. There is such an illness… genetic, as far as he remembered…

Then he still needed to inform the train operator. The seriously ill child was alone at night and, seemingly, in complete prostration…

Tony approached an intercom and pressed the button. No voice answered him, but from the speaker a small noise was heard, showing that communication had been established.

“Here… that is, not here, but in the next car, an old boy… that is, I wanted to say, a little boy is sick with old age…” Tony confusedly began. And what, by the way, if the train operator had not heard about such an illness and decides it’s a prank? “It seems to me, there is a person here who needs help. Do you hear me? Hello?”

Still nobody answered. But from the speaker came… sounds. At first, Tony thought the noise was just interference. But no, it did not resemble the usual static and cracklings. More likely such a sound can be produced only by something wet… sticky… mucous… if it slowly moves, coming unstuck and sticking together again.

“Hello?” Logan once again shouted, but the only response was the same sounds.

“Nevertheless, it’s interference,” Tony told to himself. “This piece of crap is faulty.”

And what works normally in this train?!

Maps of the subway and of the current route, seemingly, were absent in this car, too. There was only the advertising pasted between windows. What was, by the way, advertised here? Logan had gotten used to ignoring posters in the subway, without giving them a look even in boredom, but now he suddenly felt curious. He looked at the nearest poster.

“CORPSES. THE EXHIBITION”

Tony shuddered when his eyes stopped at the large letters. Then he remembered hearing about this exhibition. Its founder was some German pathologist who built a large-scale exposition of embalmed human bodies, displaying them in various poses and dissections, whole and in parts, showing the structure of muscles, sinews and visceral organs… Probably, really informative, especially for medical students, but Logan absolutely was not a fan of such shows and would not go there even if the entrance fee were paid to visitors, not by them. Giving one more look at the poster—which displayed a color image of a skinless pregnant woman whose laid-open belly contained a lengthways-cut fetus within the stretched ring of her cleaved uterus (why didn’t various activists either for or against abortions raise a cry?)—Tony fastidiously frowned and went farther along the car.

His glance indifferently slipped across the next poster, an eyesore probably to each passenger of the New York subway. A schematic red figure struggled against closing car doors. “Hold your urge to hold the doors. Wait for the next train.” And something about you making everyone wait and how many trains are regularly late because of such irresponsible passengers… Oh yes, of course. Who would object to waiting ten minutes or even more for the next train? No, better let everyone be several seconds late, than I for a quarter of an hour.

Tony was already going to move on, but something forced him to turn back again. Something was wrong with this poster. And in the following moment he understood what exactly.

The head of the red figure was almost completely cut off by the subway doors. Blood splashes were scattered around. Blood also splashed down the closing edges of doors forming a kind of guillotine.

Haw. It seems that someone understood that plain warnings didn’t work and decided to strengthen the emotional impact. Though, of course, real doors of subway cars are not capable of such things…

By the way, the exhibition advertising differed from the usual, too, Logan realized. First, there was this ripped up woman instead of cheerful dead sportsmen. Secondly, the title was a bit different. It seems that that exhibition was called “Bodies,” instead of “Corpses.” But, what’s a slight difference in wording?

At this moment the train began sharply braking, and Logan, having missed a handrail by his hand, clumsily plopped down on a seat. Outside the windows, dimly lit numbers “14” on breast boards of eagles passed. “Fourteenth Street?” Q trains definitely stop at the 14th Street station, but Logan could not remember these eagles. Some nasty story was connected with this station… Oh yes, a major accident with casualties in the early nineties. Tony was in elementary school in Connecticut at that time, but remembered how his parents had discussed this accident. More precisely, not the smash-up itself, but the fact that the train operator—or were they still called motormen that time?—was sentenced to fifteen years of prison for it. So, by now he should be released…