Douglas Preston - Reliquary

“What was that?” the waitress asked.

“I’m getting the hell out of here,” Kolb said. “Come on, Trumbull. The Fifty-ninth Street station can’t be more than a couple blocks back.”

“I’m staying right here.”

“Then you’re an idiot,” said Kolb. “You think I’m just gonna wait here for some gang to come busting through that door?”

Trumbull shook his aching head. The thing to do was stay put and stay calm. If you got up and called attention to yourself, the only thing you did was make yourself a mark.

There was another sound from the dark car, like rain pelting against metal.

Cautiously, Trumbull leaned forward, looking ahead toward the darkened car. Immediately, he saw that the window was splattered from the inside with something like paint. Thick paint, running down the window in black clots.

“What is it?” Kolb cried.

Some kids were vandalizing the car, splashing paint around. At least, it looked like paint, red paint. Maybe it was time to get the hell out, and before he had even articulated the thought he was up and running for the rear door of the car.

“Billy!” Kolb was on his feet following.

Behind him, Trumbull heard something slamming against the forward door, the shuffling patter of many feet, and then the sudden screaming of the waitress. Without stopping or looking back, he grabbed the handle and twisted it, throwing the sliding door open. He jumped across the coupling and wrenched open the door to the rearward car, Kolb right behind him, muttering “shit, shit, shit,” in a dull monody.

Trumbull had just enough time to notice that the last car was empty before the lights went out in the entire train. He glanced about wildly. The only illumination came from the faint, infrequent lights of the tunnel, and the distant yellow glow of the 59th Street station.

He stopped and turned to Kolb. “Let’s pry open the rear door.”

At that moment the sound of a gunshot echoed crazily from the car they’d just left. As the shot died away, Trumbull thought he could hear the faint sobbing of the waitress end abruptly.

“They cut his throat!” Kolb screamed, glancing over his shoulder.

“Shut up,” Trumbull hissed. No matter what sound reached his ears, he wasn’t looking back. He ran to the far door and grasped the rubber flanges, trying to pry them apart. “Help me!” he cried.

Kolb grabbed the other flange, the tears streaming down his face.

“ Pull, for Chrissakes!”

There was a sigh of air and the door gave way, flooding the car with a suffocating, earthy odor. Before he could move Trumbull felt himself shoved aside by Kolb, who jammed through the opening and leapt onto the tracks. Trumbull tensed himself for the leap, then froze. Several figures were coming into focus out of the darkness of the tunnel ahead of them, shambling toward Kolb. Trumbull opened his mouth, then closed it again, swaying weakly in disbelief. There was something horribly wrong, something unutterably foreign, about the way the figures moved. He watched as Kolb was surrounded. One of the figures grabbed Kolb’s hair, jerking his head back, while a second pinioned his arms. Kolb struggled soundlessly in jerky pantomime. A third stepped forward from the dim shadows, and, with a strangely delicate movement, flicked his hand across Kolb’s throat. Immediately, a hose of blood jetted in the direction of the train.

Trumbull shrank back in terror, falling to the floor and then scrambling to his knees, momentarily disoriented. He glanced back desperately at the car from which they’d run. In the darkness, he could see two figures crouched over the prone body of the waitress, working busily around her head…

Trumbull felt an indescribable desperation suddenly pierce his gut. He turned and leapt out of the emergency door, stumbling onto the tracks, running past the figures hovering over Kolb, racing for the dim far light of the station. Dinner and beer came up together in a rush, decorating his legs as he ran. He heard sounds of pursuit starting up behind him, crunching and thudding footfalls. A sob escaped his lips.

Then two more figures stepped out ahead of him on the tracks, cloaked and hooded, silhouetted against the distant light of the station. Trumbull stopped short as they began to move, loping toward him with a terrible speed. Behind him, the sounds of pursuit grew closer. A strange lethargy was turning his limbs to stone, and he felt his reason begin to give way. In a few seconds he’d be caught, just like Kolb…

And then, in the brief flash of a signal light, he caught a glimpse of one of the faces.

A single thought, clear and quite unmistakable, came to him through the haze of a night which had suddenly turned to nightmare. He realized what he had to do. Quickly, he scanned the tracks beneath him, located the yellow warning stripes and the bright clean rail, and thrust his foot beneath the shoe guard as the world dissolved in a flash of miraculous brilliance.

= 37 =

D’AGOSTA TRIED TO think of Yankee Stadium: the white orb of cowhide soaring through the blue July sky, the smell of grass newly ripped by a slide, the outfielder slamming into the wall, glove upraised. It was his form of transcendental meditation, a way to shut off the outside world and collect his thoughts. Especially useful when everything had gone totally to shit.

He kept his eyes shut a moment longer, trying to forget the sounds of the telephones, the slamming doors, the frantic secretaries. Somewhere, he knew, Waxie was rushing around like a turkey in heat. Thank God he wasn’t within squawking distance. Guess he isn’t so sure about old Jeffrey anymore, he thought. It brought no consolation.

With a sigh, D’Agosta forced his thoughts back to the strange figure of Alberta Muñoz, sole survivor of the subway massacre.

He had arrived just as she was being brought up an emergency exit at 66th Street on a stretcher: hands folded in her lap, pleasant vacant expression on her face, plump and motherly, her smooth brown skin in stark contrast to the sheets around her. God only knew how she’d managed to hide: she had not uttered a sound. The train itself had been turned into a temporary morgue: seven civilians and two TA workers dead, five with smashed skulls and throats cut to the backbone, three others with their heads completely missing, one electrocuted by the third rail. D’Agosta could almost smell the lawyers circling.

Mrs. Muñoz was now up at St. Luke’s in psychiatric seclusion. Waxie had hollered and pounded and threatened, but the admitting doctor was unyielding: no interviews until at least six that morning.

Three heads missing. The trails of blood were picked up immediately, but the hemoluminesence team was having a tough time in the labyrinth of wet tunnels. D’Agosta went over the setup once more in his head. Someone had cut a signal wire just beyond the 59th Street station, causing an immediate halting of all East Side express trains between 14th and 125th, leaving the one train trapped in the long approach to 86th Street. There they had waited, in ambush.

The whole setup took intelligence and planning, and perhaps an inside knowledge of the system. So far, no clear footprints had been found, but D’Agosta estimated there had been at least six of them. Six, but no more than ten. A well-planned, well-coordinated attack.

But why?

The SOC team had determined that the electrocuted man probably stepped on the third rail deliberately. D’Agosta wondered just what a man would have to see in order to do something like that. Whatever it was, Alberta Muñoz might have seen it, too. He had to talk to her before Waxie got there and ruined everything.

“D’Agosta!” a familiar voice bellowed, as if on cue. “What, are you frigging asleep ?”