Darkbound 2014.06.12 Read online

  But they weren't going to forget him again. Not if they lived to be a million years old.

  Freddy was shouting, screaming, shrieking. A sound almost as loud and insistently horrifying as the one that had come out of the montage of corpses on Karen's tablet. Even worse, in a way, because the noise that had come from the electronic device had been one of rage and hate. And it hadn't been one of them. One of the six passengers in the car.

  This noise, though, the sound that was coming out of Freddy's mouth in a sustained, high-pitched whistle, was one of pure, unfiltered pain. And it was definitely pain that had come to scratch out a home, a dark den, among their number.

  "What? What's happening?" shouted Xavier. Freddy didn't answer, and the thug took a step toward him. "You better shut your face, man, or I'll shut it for –"

  Then Xavier stopped moving. Stopped like he'd been paralyzed, like he'd been trapped in some sort of force field. If it weren't for the subtle rock of his body on the train, Jim could almost have believed he was looking at a wax statue of incredibly lifelike craftsmanship.

  Jim looked back at Freddy, and he saw why the man was screaming so loudly. Saw also why Xavier had stopped moving toward the trench-coated man.

  Freddy had his hands up in front of his face. Normal skin tones, though they looked somewhat sickly in the flickering fluorescent light of the subway car. His fingers were moving. Not bending at the knuckles, not knotting into fists. They weren't moving in any way that Jim had ever seen fingers move, in fact. They were almost writhing, he finally realized with a start. The thumbs, too. Like the digits were ten snakes that had awakened to find themselves attached at the base to some horrid tumor, and were now trying to escape from it.

  At first Jim thought Freddy's fingers looked almost boneless. Then he realized how wrong that was. They didn't look boneless at all. Indeed, that was why Freddy was screaming so loud: underneath the sound of the scream, Jim could hear pin-crackles, a series of crunches so tiny and dampened they were almost delicate.

  Freddy's fingers weren't simply moving, they were being twisted. Wrung like rags between strong hands, and the bones inside them had to be turning to splinters, then honeycombs, then jelly.

  There was a moment of blessed, terrible silence as Freddy stopped screaming. He panted, breaths coming in staccato bursts that made Jim think of the needle on a sewing machine, dancing up and down. But instead of making pillows or quilts or comfy bits of homey goodness, this would have to be a sewing machine of the variety that Ed Gein would have used, a needle for stitching lengths of skin into macabre creations intended only for the enjoyment of the damned.

  Freddy inhaled deeply, a clear precursor to another scream.

  Xavier cursed.

  Adolfa crossed herself.

  Karen did not speak, but Jim saw her eyes alight with horror.

  Only Olik seemed impassive.

  Then there was another crunch, this one louder than the others had been. Freddy's impending scream was stolen from his lungs, streaming out in an exhalation of pain so intense it could be seen in every clenched muscle of his body.

  His fingers – all of them – suddenly bent back on themselves. Bent double, like an unseen muscle-man had folded them backwards, folded them in half as easily as Jim might fold a soda can. The tortured skin of Freddy's fingers finally gave way, breaking at the unnatural corners that had just appeared. Freddy's flesh ruptured, bursting like the stomachs of so many over-gorged mosquitos, and a fine spray of blood flew into the air. It aerosolized almost immediately, a cloud of red that first dispersed and then disappeared.

  Adolfa started to chant under her breath. Jim didn't speak more than a few words of Spanish – the tenacious holdovers from his school days – but he could tell it was a prayer.

  "Padre nuestro, que estás en el cielo," she said.

  Popping sounds came from Freddy's fingers. It couldn't be bones, a strangely detached part of Jim's mind reasoned. They had to be Jell-O by now. The pops had to be the tendons giving way.

  Karen retched.

  Freddy inhaled again. Another attempt to scream. Again, he failed to finish the action.

  "Santificado sea tu nombre. Venga tu reino."

  The perv's fingers snapped straight again, like they had been yanked forward. He exhaled, a shuddering breath that would have sounded almost orgasmic in other circumstances. But the expression on his face allowed only one interpretation: Freddy was in the grips of utmost agony.

  "Hágase tu voluntad en la tierra como en el cielo."

  A horrible odor suddenly pervaded the subway car. Metallic and acrid, Jim had never smelled anything like it. His mind coughed up an image of car batteries cooking in an industrial oven, though he had no idea why he would think of that.

  "Danos hoy nustro pan de cada día."

  A hissing sound joined the terrible stench that had suffused the car. Everyone looked around. Jim did, too, though he already knew where the sound was coming from. He suspected the others probably did, too. Perhaps they, like him, just didn't want to see, to know, any more.

  But they did look. They had to. He knew that. They all knew that. They had to look. To see what was happening. Because it might happen to any of them next. So they had to see, in order to survive.

  If that was even possible.

  "Perdona nuestras ofensas…"

  Freddy's fingers. No longer bent. But no longer straight, either. They sagged like putty, and then began to hiss and spit. They grew black and charred, and the skin sloughed off in flakes and then in sheets that left raw red meat beneath. This was the source of the smell, the smell of batteries cooking in an oven, of flesh melting in the heat of the sun.

  "... como también nosotros perdonamos a los que nos ofenden."

  Then the meat bubbled and blackened as well. It frothed like an oily surf washing up to a polluted shore. And when the froth fizzed away, Freddy's fingers were…

  "No nos dejes caer en tentación…"

  … gone.

  "… y líbranos del mal."

  Freddy looked at his hands, at the ten cauterized nubs where fingers had once been. And finally, finally, he managed to do what he had been attempting through the last moments.

  Freddy the Perv screamed. And screamed and screamed and did not stop.

  Adolfa crossed herself. She kissed her own still-present fingers.

  "Amen."

  TEN

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  ================

  "What's going on? What the hell's going on?" Xavier spat the words like bullets, as though convinced that if he spoke with enough vehemence or vitriol then the words themselves might force whoever was doing all this to reveal themselves and release their captive passengers.

  Adolfa had a grip on Jim's arm again, and her other hand was clutching her blouse above her bosom. He wondered if she was having a heart attack; wondered what he would do if she was having a heart attack. It wasn't like he could perform CPR and wait for the paramedics to show up.

  Freddy had stopped screaming. He was wheezing in the back of the car, looking at the blood-black stumps where his fingers had been, tears of pain and disbelief pouring down his cheeks. Olik stepped close to the wounded man, his pale face cocked to one side in a way Jim thought looked almost like absent curiosity. Which was insane. The Georgian should have been scared out of his mind, shouldn't he? Because whatever had just happened was enough to scare anyone out of his or her mind – anyone who had a mind to begin with, at least.

  Unless he's the one doing it.

  The thought came quite surprisingly, but there was a certain kind of appeal to it. Jim glanced at the huge man, who now had his head tilted to the other side, as though to get a different view of the suffering man in the back of the subway car.

  Certainly Olik was the only one who had seemed to take everything that came in stride. Had seemed unfazed throughout… whatever was happening.

  He was the one who shot the window.

  Jim looked at the window in the
door at the front of the car. Though the side windows had become transparent again, allowing the lights outside to be seen, the window at the front of the car was still black as pitch, as paint. Dark as the blackest part of space. He wondered if they did manage to force the door open, if they would get into the next subway car, or if it would just open into a void, into a blank nothing where existence had no meaning.

  Focus, Jim. Concentrate on the problem.

  He looked back at Olik. The Georgian hadn't moved. And apparently Jim wasn't the only one who had noticed the big man's imperturbability. Because at that moment Xavier moved forward, his now-you-see-it-now-you-don't knife visible once more.

  "You did this, man," said the gangbanger.

  Olik half-turned, as though whatever might be happening was less interesting than the fantastic view of Freddy the Miraculous Melting Man. "What?" he said.

  "You heard me," snarled Xavier. "Hey, man, look at me when I talk to you."

  Jim, still seated beside Adolfa, pulled his feet out of the way as Xavier walked past. So did the latina, though she was small enough he suspected she could have stretched out full-length in the center aisle and not posed any kind of stumbling danger. But he understood the impulse: the look on the thug's face was more than just dangerous. There was murder there, pure and simple. He glanced down the car at Karen. The lawyer had picked up her satchel and was holding it tightly in her blood-stained hands, like a security blanket that might protect her from the nightmare that all of them had found themselves contained within.

  Olik turned to look at Xavier. Not quickly, not in a panic, not even with any particular excitement that Jim could see. But there was still a noticeable increase in the tension in the car.

  Please, God, let me get through this. Let me get back to Carolyn and Maddie.

  "Okay, friend. I'm looking at you," said Olik. His voice – normally booming and authoritative, was quiet. And that scared Jim, too.

  "You doing this, man?" said Xavier. He kept advancing on Olik. "You doing this shit? Because this shit is scaring me, it's scaring…" and he motioned at everyone else with his knife, "… alla them." Now he pointed the knife at Olik. "But it ain't scaring you."

  Olik seemed almost amused. "Oh, it scare me plenty," he said, some of the boom returning to his accented tones. Then his features hardened again. "Everything here scare Olik plenty."

  "Really?" Xavier clearly wasn't convinced. "'Cause you seem real calm, man. And you know things, right? You know about her," he said, gesturing at Karen. "You know who I am. But who are you? What are you doing here?"

  Olik sighed. "I am just Olik."

  "Last name." Xavier was close enough now that he could have reached out and touched the bigger man with his knife.

  Olik sighed again. "I am Olik Vardanisdze."

  The tip of Xavier's knife faltered. Not much. But visibly. Jim looked at Adolfa. He cocked an eyebrow as if to say, do you understand any of this? She shook her head, a quick back-and-forth that was barely more than a shiver. But enough. She was in the dark, too.

  "Vardani…." Xavier's knife dropped a bit more.

  "Yes," said Olik. "And I wouldn't do this." He gestured around the car. "There is no percentage in it."

  Then both men spun to face Freddy as the wounded man yipped and twisted around. What was left of his mangled hands whipped around like black and red windmill arms.

  "What now?" whispered Adolfa. Jim couldn't think of an answer. He just patted her hand.

  Freddy yipped again. Spun again. He sounded for all the world like a dog being pinched by merciless children.

  A third yelp, and this time Freddy added a short shout: "Stop it!"

  Xavier and Olik looked at each other. Olik cocked an eyebrow as if to say, "You see? I'm not touching him." Then both backed away from Freddy as if in unspoken agreement to get away from whatever danger zone had enveloped the unlucky passenger.

  Jim almost didn't understand what they were worried about. He couldn't comprehend what would be worse than what he had seen already happening to Freddy.

  Surely the worst is over, he thought. Things just can't get worse.

  But as soon as he thought that he remembered his mother, chiding him for saying something like that when young. "Don't say things can't get any worse," she said. "Don't ever say that. It's like a dare to God."

  And she had been right. Look what had happened to her, after all.

  Freddy spun around like a dog chasing its tail. His trench coat flared. "Stop it," he said. He looked pleadingly at the other passengers. "They're touching me," he said. "Make them stop touching me." His voice, always annoyingly whiny, was now so wheezy it was almost a mockery of human speech. "They're touching me, make them stop!"

  Jim looked at Adolfa again. He wondered if his eyes looked as terrified as hers did. Probably.

  Then Freddy stopped spinning. He screamed and stood up straight, rigid. At first Jim couldn't see any reason for his pain.

  Then he did. A trickle at first, barely noticeable. A thin line of red that appeared at the right corner of Freddy's mouth. Blood. Just the tiniest bit, and Jim still couldn't understand why Freddy was screaming – louder, in fact, than he had when his fingers had been pulverized and melted by whatever acid had destroyed them.

  Then the quality of Freddy's scream changed. It didn't gurgle or hiss, the tone didn't raise or lower. It was as though the shape of the man's mouth, the sound tunnel through which the scream issued, was somehow altering in shape. Jim looked around, wishing he could keep his eyes off what was happening, knowing he would look back; had to look back.

  Humans are drawn to horror, he thought. We read it in books, we watch it on movie screens. We slow down during traffic accidents to get a good look. We obsess over the latest celebrity shooting, the latest news of death and destruction. And on the off chance that there is no such macabre occurrence in the offing, we just wait a minute and someone will commit some atrocity. It's as though humanity can't exist without horror, without fear. Without hopelessness battering at them.

  He looked back to the rear of the car. The sound of Freddy's scream was still shifting. The trickle at the corner of his mouth had grown. Blood was streaming all around his lips, in fact. Not like it was coming from inside his mouth, though, but like it was coming from inside the lips themselves, like the capillaries within them were rupturing and the blood somehow pouring through the skin.

  A tearing sound pulled through the air of the car, through Jim's ears and mind. Freddy's scream reached a crescendo, a fever-pitch.

  Freddy's lips tore off his face.

  Jim almost couldn't believe what he was seeing. Surely if someone on the street had told him about this, he would have recommended some heavy medications.

  Am I mad? Have I gone insane?

  The lips came free, exposing Freddy's scarlet-stained gums and red-running teeth. The man was still rigid, though whether with pain or because he was being held there by some invisible force, Jim couldn't tell.

  Jim tried to follow the lips as they flew off Freddy's face, but he couldn't. One second they were attached to the weaselly man's face, the next instant they flew into the air in a spray of spit and blood, and then…

  … they were gone.

  They didn't flip out of sight somewhere in the car. Jim didn't just lose sight of them. Rather it was as though somewhere a few inches away from Freddy's body they had… shifted was the best word that he could think of. They had shifted from here to there. From the place where Freddy screamed to the place where the cause of his screaming had come from.

  Xavier and Olik turned and took three quick steps, retreating in a fast but orderly way, like soldiers leaving unexpectedly hostile territory. They drew even with Jim and Adolfa, then turned back to look at Freddy.

  The hunger to view horror is universal.

  Freddy fell to the floor, his fingerless hands hitting the steel with a horrid, wet thwop. He looked up at his fellow passengers, and Jim realized absently that Karen had crept up t
o join the rest of the passengers. She was still holding her satchel protectively in front of her chest, but she – like Olik and Xavier – had apparently decided that the only safe place to be was with the group. Perhaps the same genetic coding that required human beings to immerse themselves in terror at every turn also required that they do so in the presence of their fellow travelers.

  Freddy's lipless mouth opened and closed. His teeth clacked together, and blood drooled down his chin.

  Jim thought, insanely, that Freddy would never be able to eat another lollipop. You need lips for lollipops.

  "Hep me," said Freddy, the words distorted and odd. "Shtop them."

  No one moved. Freddy's teeth clacked.

  He screamed again. Again Jim couldn't see why, couldn't see what was occurring now. Olik muttered a soft curse – he was the first to see what was happening. It was like what happened with Freddy's lips. Only this time the blood was appearing at the corners of Freddy's eyes. Weeping blood, like a blasphemous recreation of a holy miracle.

  Adolfa whispered, "Santísima Virgen."

  Freddy's mouth started pouring blood at the same moment. No trickle this time, but a fountain of crimson. "Sh-sh-shave m-m-me," he managed to stammer. Then there was a triple-tear, three shearing rips. Two small puffs of blood and one large one.

  Jim tried to follow what came away. Again he couldn't. Again the objects shifted. They went from here to there and were gone. Gone, but not forgotten. Gone, but not before he saw what they were. Gone, but not before the image of Freddy's tongue exploding whole from his mouth was burnt forever into Jim's mind. Gone, but not until after he saw the other man's eyelids ripped away, leaving forever-unblinking orbs staring in terror and pain.

  Freddy's face was a mask of blood. He tried to crawl to them. He couldn't even scream, just made a terrible ung-ung-ung sound that was worse than any screaming.

  Freddy stared at them all with eyes made far too large by their exposure, with a mouth running blood like a crimson fountain.

  "Ung-ung-ung."

  Xavier and Olik backed away until they knocked into Karen. Jim felt a strange looseness at his center and knew he was about to lose control of his bladder.