She paced the ticket hall. She blew her hands and clapped her arms to get warm.
She crossed to the equipment pile. She pulled clothes from a canvas duffle. She pulled on an over-sized fire coat and turned up the cuffs.
‘Did I hear right?’ asked Wade. ‘Nine shells?’
Lupe picked up a fire axe and took a couple of practice swings.
‘We’ll be okay,’ she said. ‘Any of those bastards make it inside, we’ll take care of them.’
‘What about me?’ said Wade. ‘I want a knife.’
‘You’re blind.’
‘I can fight.’
She upturned a tool bag. She found a lock-knife and put it in his hand.
‘Thanks.’
He flipped it open and tested the blade with his thumb.
‘Hey, Lupe.’
‘What?’
‘I heard there’s a bike out there, in the street.’
‘Yeah. Other side of the alley.’
‘What kind?’
‘No idea.’
‘Messed up?’
‘Looked in one piece.’
‘A Harley?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Describe it.’
‘Chromed out. High handlebars, ape hangers. Extended forks. Someone spent a lot of money on that bike. Lavished a whole lot of love. She was somebody’s baby.’
‘How old?’
‘God knows.’
‘What did the cylinder look like? Was it a panhead?’
‘Dude, I don’t know shit about bikes.’
‘Man. If only I had my eyes.’
‘You wouldn’t last long out there, brother.’
‘Fuck it. I just want a ride. I want to be under the sky. I don’t want to die down here, in this sewer like a roach, you know? Anywhere but here.’
‘Yeah,’ said Lupe. ‘Yeah, I hear what you’re saying.’
Donahue and Lupe dragged a table from the IRT office. They hauled it across the ticket hall, kicked it over and blocked the platform stairwell.
‘So what exactly did you see?’ asked Lupe.
‘I’m not sure. Something in the water, below the surface. Bubbles. Ripples. Reckon they could survive under water? Infected? How long can they last without air?’
‘Might have been rats,’ said Lupe. ‘You can bet the flood water drove a swarm of rats from the tunnels. Bet there are plenty swimming around down here.’
‘No more surprises. We stick together. No wandering off alone, all right? Line-of-sight, at all times.’
‘Relax. You got the gun.’
‘I got nine rounds. Won’t go far. You guys stay sharp, all right?’
Galloway sat on the bench, sweating and rocking, teeth clenched in pain.
Donahue knelt in front of him. She loaded a hypodermic, jabbed into his bicep and shot Galloway 20mg of Demerol.
He relaxed as opiate bliss washed over him.
‘Let me see your neck,’ said Donahue.
He pulled his collar aside. Bruised. No blood.
‘Quite a hickey. Show me your hand.’
Galloway held out his right hand, sticky with blood. The forefinger was bitten through at the knuckle.
Donahue wriggled on two pairs of Nitrile gloves.
‘Hold still.’
She rinsed the injured hand with mineral water and began to swab it clean with cotton wool. She didn’t look him in the eye.
‘Doesn’t look like you lost too much blood. Vasoconstriction. The cold worked in your favour.’
‘It’ll be okay, right?’ he asked. ‘Few stitches. It’ll be fine, yeah?’
‘Relax,’ she said. Calming voice. ‘Let me do my thing.’
She knelt beside plenty of injured folk during her time as an EMT. Pedestrians who ignored DONT WALK and got their legs crushed by a truck. Balcony jumpers impaled on railings, broke-backed but with a weird look of acceptance as if this horror were an average day in a lifetime of bad luck and failure. Disoriented stab victims lying on a sidewalk, trying to plug a wound with their hands, trying to tell her, as they slid into unconsciousness, they had looked into the dumb, dull eyes of the kid demanding their wallet and seen the true face of evil.
She had a personal code. Soothe, but don’t lie. Say: Help is on its way. Don’t say: You’ll be fine.
‘There,’ she said, dabbing the wound clean. ‘Looks a bit better.’
She felt icy detachment steal over her. A familiar mindset. The willed callousness she adopted each time she faced catastrophic injuries, certain her patient could not be saved, nothing to be done but supervise a painless death.
Galloway was infected. A talking corpse.
She stitched the stump with suture, and lashed bandage in place with micropore tape.
‘We’ll give you regular shots,’ she said. ‘Should dull the pain.’
She gathered up bloody swabs and scraps of suture, balled them ready to be hurled into the flood water.
‘You have to amputate my arm,’ said Galloway. ‘You guys are trained EMTs. You have medical gear. Drugs. Scalpels. You’ve got to cut my arm at the elbow. Before the disease spreads.’
Donahue shook her head.
‘Sorry, bro. You know the score. One bite. That’s all it takes. You’re infected. No antidote. No cure.’
He looked up at her like a frightened child.
‘There must be something you can do.’
Lupe joined them. She stood over Galloway. She held out an axe.
‘Tie a tourniquet, if you want, and bring down the blade. But we both know you’re done. Best decide how you want to spend your last hours.’
‘Congratulations,’ said Wade with a grim smile. ‘You just joined the cyanide club.’
‘It’ll be all right,’ said Sicknote, looking up from the elaborate artwork slowly metastasising across the ticket hall floor. ‘It’s a blessing, in a way. No more thought. No more you. It’ll be beautiful.’
Galloway scuffed the mural with his boot.
‘Fuck the lot of you. Talking like I’m already dead. Fuck you all.’
He crossed the ticket hall and sat on the platform stairwell steps. He contemplated the subterranean blackness below.
28
Trinity Church. A sombre gothic-revival structure built from massive blocks of limestone. The spire had toppled. The nave was open to the sky. Rain dripped from shattered arch spans, danced on pews and marble tiles.
Lightning flash.
The dead sat in rows. A succession of suicides. Scattered pill pots. Skulls vaporised by shotguns. Throats gouged by strop razors.
The dead faced a rubble-strewn altar and toppled cross. Congregants at a macabre Eucharist.
Thunder crack.
A priest lay sprawled on the altar steps. He slowly climbed to his feet. Cassock streaked with pus. One arm gone.
He looked up, mesmerised by roiling cloud and forked lightning. Rain splashed his rotted skull-face.
Movement among the congregation. Infected among the dead. Those that were too sick to die; already infected when they opened their veins.
They climbed to their feet and stumbled along the pews, kicked cadavers aside, until they reached the aisle.
Some kind of unspoken command jerked revenants to their feet and propelled them towards the doorway at the back of the nave.
The priest hobbled down the centre aisle, dragging a useless leg behind him. Other infected fell in line.
The great bronze doors hung off their hinges. The rotted horde filed out of the church and stumbled down stone steps into the street.
Lightning flash.
A garbage truck lay on its side, driver still buckled in his seat. He vomited maggots.