<\/p>\n
Something passed through Daryl.\u00a0 He felt a cloying presence settle in his chest, a pressure like someone was pushing down on him.\u00a0 His pulse pounded in his ears, then a terrible sickness rose in his stomach.\u00a0 It moved him off his feet and brought him to his knees.\u00a0 He reached out and gripped the side of the seat, one hand still on the emergency latch.\u00a0 There was no sense of space in the darkness of the tunnel.\u00a0 With that blackness came the possessive grip of fear.\u00a0 The nausea continued to rise and he gritted his teeth as an invasive, echoing thrum passed through his skull and body. It felt as if something burrowed deep within him was trying to escape.\u00a0 Then there was nothing.\u00a0 No feeling at all.\u00a0\u00a0 Absolute silence followed, a dead calm within his mind and all around him.\u00a0 He reached out, feeling as if his arm were asleep, and pulled the Style Section girl close to him.\u00a0 He felt her hair against his face and that brought him back to reality, away from the overwhelming, singular nothingness. Never before had he measured his life in heartbeats.\u00a0 He wanted\u00a0 to close his eyes and simply go away.<\/p>\n
She was convulsing, gagging, and trying to push away but then she, too, seemed overcome by the strange, drifting calmness.<\/p>\n
Slowly, he became aware of the world again.\u00a0 He took a shuddering breath, heard his body again.\u00a0 Yes, alive.\u00a0 Had he died for a second?\u00a0 It sure felt like it.\u00a0 He opened his eyes and looked around.\u00a0 Darkness still enveloped the car, but there was a faint light coming from somewhere ahead.\u00a0 He brought his other arm around and hugged the Style Section girl close.\u00a0 Everything was moving slowly, then the world seemed to speed up to normal.\u00a0 The people in the car were screaming again, the girl shoved away then grabbed his shoulder, shouting.\u00a0 The sickness was gone, and he turned blind eyes towards her face, tried to hear what she was saying.<\/p>\n
Panic pushed the commuters beyond the ability to cope when the emergency floodlights clicked on in the tunnel, washing out that strange faint light.\u00a0 The stronger commuters punched and kicked their way to the doors, clawing at them uselessly and not even thinking of the emergency release, mounted beside the center door.\u00a0 People in the car ahead had pulled that latch, though, and were pouring out onto the platform.\u00a0 Nobody was thinking straight, and they were all turning vicious.\u00a0 The train car borrowed from images of horror films \u2013 blinding white beams crisscrossing the darkness, nameless figures moving desperately, the tunnel outside forbidding and filled with dancing shadows.<\/p>\n
Daryl stood up, pulling the girl with him, and put his hand on the emergency latch again, looking out the rear door at nothing but blackness and the occasional emergency light, which seemed to be devoured before the beam could hit the ground.\u00a0 But others had noticed them behind the dark divider and began clawing against the door, probably mistaking them for somebody in charge.\u00a0 It wouldn\u2019t hold long against the panicked crowd.\u00a0 The\u00a0 center doors were finally open, though, and most of the commuters poured out onto the catwalk running the length of the tunnel.\u00a0 The car began to empty, with the exception of a handful of people.\u00a0 Daryl watched their silhouettes through the tinted glass.\u00a0 They stood well clear of the panic-driven fray, then they turned their heads up to the air as if they were smelling something and, in unison, looked back down towards him.\u00a0 He would only have been a shadow to them, in the dark and behind the tinted glass, but he felt as if their eyes were boring into him.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He stepped away just as the girl popped open the rear door, letting it swing wide and staring down at a three foot drop to the train tracks below.<\/p>\n
Other commuters were spread on the floor, shapeless shadows clutching at themselves as if they had been wounded.\u00a0 He watched as they rose, one by one, and stood calmly, also turning towards him.<\/p>\n
The girl had turned to him and was whispering something, but his mind was racing.\u00a0 He blinked and tried to focus on what she was saying.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat do we do?\u00a0 Do we jump down?\u00a0 What about the electricity?\u201d she was speaking in a breathless rush, and he turned sideways to glance out the rear door and the darkness beyond.\u00a0 Then he heard her gasp and looked back at the flimsy dividing door.<\/p>\n
The closest of the strange, calm people stepped forward and, in one fluid motion, slammed its fist into the Plexiglas divider.\u00a0 He couldn\u2019t tell if it was a man or a woman.\u00a0 He could only make out a shadow given form behind the brown-tinted window in the door.\u00a0 The plastic spiderwebbed like thin ice and buckled under that one punch, and he jerked backward.\u00a0 Another shadow joined the first and pushed the divider partially inward.\u00a0 The snarling face of a young woman appeared, backlit by the floodlights.\u00a0 She reached through and put her hand on the door handle.\u00a0 Reacting with a speed that surprised Daryl, the Style Section girl kicked the woman\u2019s hand viciously, but that didn\u2019t seem to do much.\u00a0 Then a new sound filled Daryl\u2019s world.\u00a0 A rushing, tumbling sound.\u00a0 Trash whipped into the view of the emergency lights, skittering down the raised walkway and the track bed.<\/p>\n
He put his hand on the Style section girl\u2019s shoulder.\u00a0 \u201cFire,\u201d he said.\u00a0 Somebody outside the car screamed and Daryl looked past the snarling woman towards the front of the car.\u00a0 An angry, orange glow bloomed in the distance.\u00a0 A wall of flame visible and horridly clear through all six cars.<\/p>\n
The crazy woman popped the door open and paused as if lost in thought.\u00a0 She cocked her head, a distant look in her eyes, and, with a snarl, she spun around to stare forward.\u00a0\u00a0 Daryl shoved the Style section girl into the driver\u2019s booth, then stepped in himself and let the door slam, locking once again.\u00a0 The crazy woman screamed, an inhuman sound, but it was directed at something else.\u00a0 Daryl pulled off his jacket and crouched down between the driver\u2019s seat and the wall, dragging the girl down with him and draping the coat over their heads.<\/p>\n
The people outside were screaming and, for a dull moment, Daryl felt like laughing.\u00a0 Then he closed his eyes and everything switched speed once again.\u00a0 He heard his breath, the breath of the girl next to him as she clutched his shirt, and then he heard the rushing sound come closer, a powerful blast of hot air pouring through the windows and the grill at the base of the door.<\/p>\n
The car began to shudder, the walls rattling around him and the thin door shaking viciously in the frame.\u00a0 Light filled the car, rising up under Daryl\u2019s jacket and glaring through the fabric.\u00a0 He closed his eyes but there was no refuge.\u00a0 He could hear a stressed creaking, like cutting glass, from all around, but he didn\u2019t want to open his eyes to look.\u00a0 The floor rocked violently as something, somewhere, exploded, then the train car bucked left and right and an unbearable heat filled the air around them.\u00a0 The girl was screaming into his ear, but it was only a distant buzz against the holocaust outside.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[404],"class_list":["post-372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nachos-lousy-novel","tag-nachos-lousy-novel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=372"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":870,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372\/revisions\/870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}