“Hey, brother!” called Fet. “What the hell are you doing?”
Cray-Z turned around, standing atop his junk pile like an artist in the throes of madness. He wielded a section of steel pipe in his hand. “It’s time!” he yelled, as though from the summit of a mountain. “Somebody had to do something!”
Fet was a moment finding his voice. “You’re gonna derail the goddamn train!”
“Now you’re down with the plan!” Cray-Z responded.
Now some of the other remaining moles ambled over, witnessing Cray-Z’s creation. “What have you done?” said one. His name was Caver Carl, a former trackman himself who found he could not leave the familiarity of the tunnels upon his retirement, and so returned to them like a sailor retiring to the seas. Carl wore a headlamp, the beam moving with the shaking of his head.
Cray-Z, bothered by the light beam, let out a battle cry from the top of his barricade. “I am God’s fool, but they won’t take me this soon!”
Caver Carl and some others moved forward, attempting to tear down the pile. “One of the trains crash, they’ll drive us out of here for good!”
In an instant, Cray-Z leaped down from his pile, landing next to Fet. Fet went to him with arms outstretched, trying to calm the situation, hoping to put these folks to work for him. “Hold on everyone—”
Cray-Z wasn’t in the mood for talking. He swung his steel pipe at Fet, who instinctively blocked the blow with his left forearm. The pipe cracked the bone.
Fet howled, and then, using the heavy nail gun as a club, struck Cray-Z hard across the temple. It staggered the madman, but he kept coming. Fet cracked Cray-Z in the ribs, then kicked at the calf of his right leg, dislocating his leg at the knee, finally bringing him down.
“Listen!” yelled Caver Carl.
Fet stopped and did so.
The telltale rumble. He turned and saw, down the length of the track, a dusting of light against the curve in the tunnel wall.
The 5 train was approaching its U-turn.
The other moles continued to pull at the pieces of the pile, but it was no use. Cray-Z used his pipe to get up onto his one good leg, hopping up and down.
“Fucking sinners!” he howled. “You moles are all blind! Here they come! Now you have no choice but to fight them. Fight for your lives!”
The train bore down on them, and Fet saw that there was no time. He backed off from the impending catastrophe, the brightening train light illuminating Cray-Z’s dance: a mad jig on his bent leg.
As the train blew past him, Fet caught a glimpse of the driver’s face. She stared straight ahead, without expression. She had to have seen the debris. And yet she never applied the brake, she never did anything.
She had the thousand-yard-stare of a newly turned vampire.
WHAM, the train impacted the obstruction, wheels spinning, churning. The front car punched into the debris, exploding it, chewing and carrying the larger objects for some thirty feet before jumping the track. The cars lurched to the right, striking the edge of the platform at the head of the loop, still skidding, trailing a comet of sparks. The engine car of the train then wobbled the other way, the cars behind it ribboning along—the train jackknifing in the narrow track space.
The grating, metallic screech was nearly human in its outrage and its pain. Given the tunnels and their throat-like propensity for echoes, the cars stopped long before the awful sound did.
This train had many more bodies riding its exterior. Some were killed instantly—ground against and smeared along the edge of the platform. The rest rode the spectacular crash until the end. Once the cars came to a stop, they separated from the train like leeches detaching from flesh, dropping to the ground, getting their bearings.
Slowly, they turned toward the moles still standing there, staring in disbelief.
The riders walked out of the dust and smoke of the calamity, unfazed but for an odd, slinking gait. Their joints emitted a soft popping noise as they advanced.
Fet quickly went into his duffel bag, retrieving Setrakian’s improvised time bomb. He felt an intense burning in the right calf and looked down. A long, thin, needle-sharp piece of debris had somehow pierced his leg, all the way through. If he pulled it loose, the bleeding would be savage—and right now, blood was the last thing he wanted to smell of. He left it painfully lodged in his muscle mass.
Closer to the tracks, Cray-Z looked on in amazement. How could so many have survived?
Then, as the riders moved closer, even Cray-Z noticed that something was missing from these people. He detected traces of humanity in their faces, but it was only that: traces. Like the glimmer of greedy humanoid intelligence one sees inside the eyes of a hungry dog.
He recognized some of them, women and men from underground. Fellow moles—except for one figure. A lanky creature, pale and bare-chested, sculpted like an ivory figurine. A few strands of hair framed an angular, handsome, yet wholly possessed face.
It was Gabriel Bolivar. His music had not permeated the under-city demographic, and yet every eye fell upon him. He stood out from the rest that much, the showman he was in life carrying over into un-death. He wore black leather pants and cowboy boots, with no shirt. Every vein, muscle, and sinew in his torso was visible beneath his delicate, translucent skin.
Flanking him were two broken females. One’s arm was sliced open, a deep cut, slashing through flesh, muscle, and bone, nearly severing the limb. The cut did not bleed, but rather oozed—and not red blood, but a white substance more viscous than milk yet thinner in consistency than cream.