Vadim reached the ramp, where he was joined by New Boy. Princess and the Fräulein had already disappeared into the lower concourse on the other side of the station. New Boy covered him as he changed magazines. He was backing down the ramp when he noticed a SWAT shooter, who’d been lying in a puddle of blood in the middle of the main concourse, was standing up now. He must have been playing dead after being ambushed by the Fräulein’s fireteam. Now he was standing up in the middle of a gunfight, just staring at Vadim. Vadim finished reloading his AK-74 and raised it to his shoulder, but didn’t shoot. The man didn’t have a weapon in his hand. He just stared until Vadim had backed out of sight. It was strange, but Vadim had been in enough battles to know that combat could do odd things to people’s minds.
“DOWN! DOWN!” NEW Boy ordered in English. The civilians on the ground were trying to crawl out of the way of the two Spetsnaz commandos as they sprinted through the lower concourse. Vadim was looking for Princess and the Fräulein. If they could meet up with them, then they could escape along the tracks. He pushed away thoughts of how pointless escape was – presumably they’d be affected by whatever biological agent had been in the locker. All escape could provide was the opportunity to choose how to die. Somehow that seemed important.
Vadim glanced behind him and almost tripped over a commuter lying face-down on the floor, hands over his head. He couldn’t see any police behind him. This would be a nightmare for them, hunting well-armed, well-trained, experienced soldiers in the tangled warren of tunnels beneath the main concourse. It reminded Vadim of hunting mujahideen in the qanāt irrigation tunnels, except now they were the guerrilla fighters.
Not guerrilla fighters: terrorists, he told himself. It wasn’t evident yet what they had done, what he had done, but enemies or not, he was sure he had committed a monstrous war crime against these people.
Ahead of him he could see Princess and the Fräulein also sprinting through the lower concourse towards them. The surviving members of the other fireteam were almost level with the devastated baggage area when the fallen FBI SWAT team started standing back up. Vadim skidded to a halt and stared. It didn’t make any sense. A couple of them might have survived, badly wounded, but not all of them; and all of them were standing up. New Boy stopped so quickly he slipped over, sliding into some of the cowering civilians. Vadim had thought he had seen every horror the human race could inflict on itself, but this was something else: the supernature that Communism denied, or else science gone mad. He couldn’t quite process what he was seeing. Then the dead agents fell on the civilians. They didn’t move like people, but like animals, pouncing on the screaming commuters. Vadim watched as teeth were sunk into flesh, blood gouting from fresh wounds. He watched as they started to feed. Starving people had been forced to eat the dead during the siege of Stalingrad, but that had been nothing like the feeding frenzy that was unfolding before their eyes.
We did this.
“Move! Run! That way! Now!” Vadim screamed, the muscles on his neck standing out. He pulled civilians to their feet, helping them back the way they came with the toe of his boot.
New Boy had moved against the wall by the entrance to one of the tunnels, and was trying to get a clear shot: Russian, American, it didn’t matter. This was humans against something else.
“Run, you stupid bastards, run!” The panicking civilians knocked into Vadim as he tried to get a shot. He watched as one of the SWAT members pounced high into the air, bringing a screaming woman down. It reminded Vadim of lions hunting. Not lions, baboon packs. Another raised its head from its kill, tendrils of flesh dangling from a red mouth. A clear shot. The butt of the rifle hammering into his shoulder was almost comforting, the flickering muzzle flash turning the cave-like lower concourse into a picture of hell. The bloody-mouthed SWAT agent was knocked away from its prey by the three-round burst, but it was up again almost immediately. Vadim’s eyes widened. For the first time in over forty years of conflict, he didn’t know what to do. The thing charged him, dripping hands outstretched, reaching for him. Vadim fired again, convincing himself he had missed the first time, desperately searching for a rational explanation. Another hit. Three rounds, centre mass. The creature staggered slightly but continued charging.
Body armour, Vadim told himself. He was aware of New Boy firing as well, burning through ammunition. The charging, bloody creature was almost on him. Vadim flicked the AK-74’s selector to single-shot, raised the weapon slightly, and fired. The once human creature’s face caved in and it hit the ground, sliding towards him.
“Head shots!” Vadim shouted to New Boy. It was easier said than done. The SWAT team had been wearing Kevlar helmets. He could hear firing from the other side of the feeding pack: the Fräulein and Princess. Vadim realised that he had been so appalled by what he had seen he hadn’t even considered that the other two remaining members of the squad would be in their field of fire.
“We have to get out of here!” New Boy shouted, shooting another charging corpse in the helmet, its jaw already hanging off. It barely seemed to register the impact. New Boy adjusted his aim and squeezed the trigger again, blowing the thing’s brains out the back of its skull. He was right; they were about to be overrun. The Fräulein and Princess could look after themselves, and they had set up secondary and tertiary rendezvous points if things didn’t go to plan.
“Platform!” Vadim shouted, and both of them ran.
THERE WAS A train at the platform. The closest thing Vadim had to a plan was to get in front of the train and make their way out of the station on the rails. He’d had better plans in his life.
He stopped and turned. Five of the things had chased New Boy and him onto the platform. Two of them leapt onto the train and more screams joined the cacophony. Vadim raised his AK-74 to his shoulder. His breath burned in his lungs. He was too old for this, and he knew it. He fired, missed. Tried to steady his aim and only then realised that, for the first time in decades, his hands were shaking. He tried to control his breathing, remember everything he knew about shooting. One of the creatures dropped, taken down by New Boy. The younger man was a better shot than he was. New Boy fired again, and another dropped.
Come on, old man. He squeezed the trigger. The third creature went down. There was shouting from behind him, and his busy mind tried to translate the panicked English as he turned. There was a young black man, little more than a boy, in a Transit Police officer’s uniform. He held a revolver in two shaking hands, terrified civilians behind him. Everything seemed to slow down. He watched the hammer come down. The muzzle flash grew in slow motion from the barrel of the gun. The hammer blow to the chest. He was lying down, staring at the grimy ceiling.
I deserve this, worse than this. He had betrayed these people, these Americans, these humans. He was looking up at New Boy through a tunnel when one of the things jumped through the train’s window, taking the younger soldier to the ground.
THEN EVERYTHING WENT red for a while.
CHAPTER SIX
1607 Eastern Standard Time (EST), 16th November 1987
Grand Central Station, New York City