When we entered the right-hand tunnel the feeling grew into a creeping dread. Jack stopped to peel open a chemical light for each of us. He bent them in the middle and shook them until they started to glow, then snapped them to our shirts so we could keep track of each other in the blackness of the tunnel. He had a halogen flashlight duct-taped to his SPAS-12 and he switched it on, revealing railroad tracks that marched off in a perfectly straight line-a depiction of infinity straight out of seventh grade geometry class, if your Junior High happened to convene in Hell.
Time pretty much lost all meaning as we moved down the tunnel. We walked on the tracks, our feet settling into a rhythm of stepping on every other railroad tie. I tried counting my steps for a while but got bored with that quickly. I looked over my shoulder from time to time, watching the glaring light of the station behind me shrink, wishing I could go back, but soon it had become no brighter than a bright star. We made no more noise than we could help, trying not to even breathe too hard.
The tunnel revealed by Jack’s flashlight was uniformly black, or even more than that. A dull dusty color that absorbed the light and gave back little to focus on. Now and again we would come across an electrical junction box on the wall or a signal light but these seemed to float in space, unmoored from reality. Reality was the tracks and the third rail that ran along side us and countless alcoves and recesses and emergency doorways built into walls pierced with Roman arches to cross-ventilate the twin tunnels. Holes where anything at all could be hiding.
Jack stopped abruptly ahead of us, his yellow-green chemical light nearly smacking my nose. I moved around him to see what had brought him up short.
A dead woman down on all fours on the tracks, scooping cockroaches into her mouth. When she looked up her cloudy eyes were like perfect mirrors, dazzling us with reflected light. Most of her upper lip was missing, giving her a permanent sneer. She climbed to her feet and started stumping toward us, the bullseye pattern of Jack’s light making strange watery shadows in her faded dress.
She was nearly on us before I realized that neither Jack nor Ayaan was going to shoot her. I stared at them and saw he was holding the barrel of her AK-47, pointing it at the ceiling. He looked back at me with an expression of indifferent curiosity.
One of the dead woman’s arms was bent up painfully under her breasts but the other stretched out to snatch at us. Her mouth was open wide as if she wanted to swallow us whole.
“Just like a baseball bat, Dekalb,” Jack said, reminding me of the machete in my hand.
She was so close her stink was on me, permeating my clothes. “Jesus,” I shrieked, and lunged forward, swinging with both hands, putting my weight into it. I felt her bony frame collide with my chest as the blade went right through her head, all resistance taking the form of a bad shock in my shoulder as if I’d been hit by a car but then she was lifeless, a rattling inanimate heap that slid down my pantleg and I was gasping, wheezing for breath, bending forward to see by the light of Jack’s flashlight that I had taken off the top of the dead woman’s head in a big diagonal slice that included one eye. She wasn’t getting back up.
“Why?” I asked.
Jack bent down beside me and put an arm around my shoulders. “I had to know if I was going to be carrying you. Now I know you can hold your mud.”
“And that’s a good thing?” I spat out everything in my mouth-my fear, her stink, the look on Ayaan’s face that showed real approval for the first time. Approval I fucking didn’t need, if that’s what it took to get it. I had just been hazed, of all things.
Jack squeezed my bicep and headed down the tunnel. I watched his chemical light recede for a moment, then jogged to catch up.
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Nineteen