Darkbound by Michaelbrent Collings Page B

things in the last car didn't seem to notice.  They were still
licking up Freddy's blood, still eating the last bits of his clothing.
    What happens
when it's all gone?
    Apparently the same
thought occurred to Karen.  "I think we need to hurry, guys,"
she grunted.
    "Yeah,"
said Xavier.  He was pulling so hard that Jim thought his coat might split
right up his back.  But the door wasn't closing.  Like it didn't want
to close.  Like it had a mind of its own and was actively resisting them.
    And maybe that's
not too far off, Jim thought.  Maybe this whole train has a mind of
its own.
    Then he realized
that would mean that the vehicle was a monster… and they were in its
stomach.  A long metallic digestive tract that perhaps they had only begun
to pass through.  And that thought was every bit as disquieting as the
sight of the rotting girls and boys eating the remains of what had once been a
human being.
    Another fight
erupted in the back car, this time between two girls and a boy.  Like all
of the others, the figures looked like they had once been young, perhaps in
their early teens.  But whatever force had brought them here and wasted
their features had also leached any youthful vigor from them.  What
remained was only rot and hunger, a rabid need to feed cloaked in decomposition
and disease.
    A lust for blood.
    The three were
fighting over a bit of cloth.  Each held it with a hand, each unwilling to
let go.  Like the two girls before, the three jumped at each other, teeth
clicking as they snapped at one another's faces and throats.  This time,
though, the fight spilled over into the rest of the company of ghouls. 
    Soon all were
embroiled, screaming, slashing out with fingernails that were cracked and
broken into sharp shards.  Blood splashed, flesh flayed. 
    But Jim noted that
the blood that spilled from the things in the car was different from the blood
on the floor, from Freddy's blood.  It was darker.  Feculent. 
Like it had stopped pumping long ago, and had simply lain and rotted in the
kids' already-dead veins.
    Suddenly there was
a click, and the subway door released.  "There!" Xavier
grunted.  The door closed a few inches.
    At the same time,
Olik said, "Damn."  Jim looked and saw that the huge man had cut
himself on something when the door released.  Red blood streamed down his
palm.  Tiny tributaries branched off the main flow, racing one another to
the edge of his hand.
    Olik, Xavier, and
Karen kept pulling at the door.  It kept resisting.
    One of the red
trails won the sprint to the lower edge of Olik's meaty palm.  Blood
gathered there for a moment, curling into a tight crimson ball.  Then the
ball loosed itself into the air, a single drop that plummeted to the metal of
the car floor.
    The drop touched
the floor soundlessly.  There was no tremor, no hint of any change in the
air that Jim could sense.  But at the instant the blood touched the car,
the brawling ghouls in the car beyond the door instantly stilled.  They
were all wounded by now, some of them so badly that Jim would have thought –
under ordinary circumstances – that they absolutely must lay down and wait to
die of their wounds.  There were limbs lost, bowels that drooped in
looping coils behind some of them.  But their injuries weren't stopping
them; weren't even slowing them down.
    And now, as the
drop of Olik's blood on the floor was joined by another, and then another, the
zombies all turned their heads toward the slowly-closing door.  They
seemed to notice for the first time that they were not alone.
    "Close
door!" shouted Olik, and his face grew bright red with the strain.
    "I'm trying,
man!" screamed Xavier.
    Jim watched in
horror as the teen-things, faces and bodies raw and bloody and maimed, opened
their mouths as one.  Their teeth, like their fingernails, were neglected
and half-rotten.  They had become splintered shadows of themselves,
pointed shards that looked wickedly sharp.
    They
screamed.  The