Judgment Day: Part 4

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After that, he was aware only of darkness.  No sense, no feeling.  Just a strange, drifting motion in his head and stomach.  Was this death?  Thoughts lanced across his mind with more clarity than he had ever known.  But not a life in review, just mundane ramblings.  Guesses and ideas about what was happening, the sensation of the girl next to him and how she felt against his body.  Random thoughts, each one feeling like crystal shattering inside him; a perfect element to their noise.  The thoughts came slow, too, as if they were growing, rising, then falling again in some alien gravity.

Was he unconscious?  He tried to open his eyes but couldn’t.  It was the eye-watering smell of burnt plastic that brought him out of it.   Cautiously, he looked up.  The tinted glass in the driver’s door had melted, the area around the windows and the rear door blackened.  He climbed shakily to his feet and looked through the broken window into the dark car.  There was a light up ahead, what appeared to be flames from the lead car, and no sign of the crazy woman or the other calm people.  No sign of any movement, just the shadowy mounds of the dead.  An image his overworked mind accepted without a flinch, though he knew horror would come to him in his future dreams.  If he had a future.  The Style Section girl was awake, too.  She clutched his hand and he helped her stand up.

“What a perfect end for a pathetic life,” he muttered.  The door was warped and he had to throw his shoulder against it to get it open, then he led the girl out of the cab and moved carefully down the aisle.  She leaned against him, wide-eyed and silent.  Outside, on the catwalk, the bodies of all his fellow commuters were scattered and burnt, some leaning against the train, others sprawled on the narrow walkway.  Inside the car, a few people lay broken over the seats.  The darkness was oppressive, most of the emergency lights having blown out in the fireball. It was enough, though.  He didn’t want to see the full picture, he wanted this to be some sort of dream, a fevered illusion.  The smell was sickening, and that was enough for his imagination.  He turned back and faced the narrow emergency exit that would drop them down to the tracks.  Maybe that would be the better way to go, backtrack to the Forest Glen station and head away from fire and a trainload of corpses.

“Okay,” he said to the girl, his voice barely moving above a scratched whisper.  “We’re going to head back.”  He started to lead the way but she stopped him.

“We’re closer to the Wheaton station.” She whispered, “I don’t want to walk a mile or more through these tunnels.”

Daryl grabbed her shoulders, “Look, it’s the tunnel or forward into fire and a few hundred corpses.”

She didn’t reply.  Staring ahead, she drew a breath and closed her eyes,  coming to grips that the impossible was happening to them, the regular world had just left them behind over the course of a few minutes.  Then she spoke, her voice breaking, “We’ve got to get out of the tunnel…” she sucked back a sob and grabbed his wrist with both her hands.  “My God, what happened?”

Daryl closed his eyes and nodded.  She was right.  They were only a couple minutes from the Wheaton station, and the walk back through a mile or more of darkness to Forest Glen didn’t settle well.  But, the bodies.  The thought of facing them, in darkness or in light, was almost too much to process.  There was more, too.  The bizarre people who had attacked them just before the fireball.  What had happened with them?  What caused such inhuman behavior and focus?  He squeezed her hand and, with his other hand, tilted her head towards his so that their noses touched.  “What’s your name?” he asked softly.

“Molly…” barely a whisper, a terrified breath.

“Okay, Molly.  I’m Daryl.  We’re okay. We got through the worst of it, right?”

She shook her head.  No.

“We’re going to go out the back here, then get up onto the walkway.  We’ll head to Wheaton, like you say.  Okay?  There’ll be help there.”

She nodded, looking over her shoulder towards the walkway, but there was nothing to see.  She blinked, two tears rolling down her soot-covered cheeks.

Daryl jumped down onto the concrete track bed.  He put out his arms and helped Molly down, then he lifted her up onto the raised service platform and climbed up beside her.  They both stood for a moment, staring down towards the fire at the front of the car and the piles of shadows filling the platform between them and the yellow-orange glow.  He wondered about the air, which must have been pumped into these tunnels.  If that system was down, too, they probably didn’t have much time.  Where were the emergency crews?  Flashlights, shouts, help from above?

He kept his eyes ahead, but it was slow moving through the dead, his fellow commuters.  He tried to pick his way between the bodies, gingerly tiptoeing and, occasionally, walking with his body pressed hard against the side of the train or the wall.   The air was stale with the stench of burnt flesh and plastic, leaving a foul taste in the back of his throat.  He watched for signs along the wall indicating an emergency exit for workmen.  Something to get them out of this hell as quickly as possible.

They hadn’t even made it past the length of the car before Daryl felt as if he were about to throw up.  The tunnel was filling with smoke and he was having trouble focusing on the faint firelight ahead.  Molly’s sweaty hand was clutching his so hard it started to feel like it was pressing against a central nerve,  jumping through his body like a current.  Her panicked breaths had turned to choking sobs.

The lead car was burning, though the fire seemed to be contained.  There wasn’t much to burn, anyway.  The carpet and the pools of plastic and vinyl beneath the seats gave off weak, low flames.  The front end of the car was crumpled, a broken mass of smoldering metal.  Along the side of the wall, where the train had been rocked off the tracks, electrical sparks sputtered from the wires that ran in shielded conduits along the walls.  There would have been no walking away from this but, six cars away, they’d been spared.  Then Molly’s hand pressed against his back and he turned.

“Why are we stopping?” she asked.

He shook his head, blinking.  Had they stopped?  Jesus, how long had he been standing in place staring into the smoke?  “We need to get out of this tunnel,” he muttered.

“Yeah, no kidding.” Her voice was sharp and low.  He looked down at her for, but her eyes were fixed on the fire ahead.

They started walking again, coming up along the wrecked lead car, and were able to make out several figures standing against the low flames.  Daryl stopped again and Molly bumped into him.

“What?” she asked, peering around him.  “People?  How’d they live through it?”

He shook his head.

“Well?”

“I guess we see if they need help,” he muttered, his words slurring a bit.  There was no defining the trepidation he felt as he approached the shattered doors of the lead car.  Something was very wrong, the world had been turned upside down, and as he peered through the melted, blackened windows, he realized it was impossible that anyone could have lived through the fire.  Six cars and an emergency platform full of the dead yet, here, standing against the low flames, four people stood motionless, staring down at a cluster of five others.  The group of five were all on the floor, looking up at the other survivors with undisguised terror.  The four standing looked like severe burn victims – skin charred and blackened, the remnants of their clothing mingling with melted flesh.  They showed no sign of pain, not even discomfort.  Their stares were calm, fixed on the group of survivors who must have worked their way up the platform as well, just steps ahead of them in the blackness and inching towards the light of the lead car.    But these burnt people…it was impossible.  No one could survive those wounds, no one could stand like that with such unwavering calm.

“What’s wrong with them?” Molly whispered.

When she spoke, the closest of the burnt people turned and looked directly at Daryl.  He couldn’t tell if it had been a man or a woman, even when it smiled with white teeth and stepped closer to the window.  Daryl’s eyes widened and he stepped back into Molly, who seemed paralyzed.

“There it is,” the burnt person said, a woman’s voice.  “Same as earlier.”

Daryl swallowed, his gaze still transfixed by the ruined face.  “Do you…do you need help?”

One of the other burnt people laughed, “He does not know!”

The one who had spoken first, her smile unwavering, said, “We don’t need help…”