“Come on,” I said. “Let’s see if there really is a turnabout for the train. If not, we’ll have to drive backwards. We’ll go to station 41 and hit the saferoom there.” That was the closest place with a Desperado Club. I wanted to go in there and add more people to my chat list. We’d have to risk leaving the train on the tracks. It appeared the ghouls were avoiding this tunnel because it didn’t lead to regular platforms other than this one. Hopefully it remained that way.
“No. I’m staying here,” Madison said. She sat down firmly on the rocky ground and crossed her arms. She looked up at us defiantly. “Someone will come investigate what’s going on. I don’t know what you did, but transit security will sort it out. People are scattered, and they will come here. Even if here isn’t a real place, this is where they’ll go.”
“Is there really a transit security department?” I asked. “We’ve been up and down the line, and I haven’t seen any sign of them.”
She huffed. The woman did have a point. The workers who escaped the ghouls probably would be coming here. But I didn’t give a shit if she lived or not. If she couldn’t help us anymore, there was no point in keeping the murderous NPC with us. Part of me knew it wasn’t really her fault. That her personality and memories were programmed into her. I still didn’t care. She wasn’t from earth. She wasn’t a crawler, nor a former crawler as far as I could tell.
“If not security, then Rod will come,” she added out of nowhere. “Rod always comes.”
“Who the hell is Rod?”
“He’s her ex-husband, Carl. Haven’t you been paying attention? He’s also the CFO of the Iron Tangle and works at Station A,” Donut said. “Madison, are you sure?”
“Rod will come.”
“Bye, Madison,” I said, turning away. “Go fuck yourself, okay?”
“Right back at you, boxer boy.”
“I remember who she reminds me of!” Donut exclaimed as we returned to the Nightmare. “Miss Beatrice’s mom! She’s just like her. She was really mean. I never liked visiting. None of the cats there were very happy. I could tell she didn’t treat them as well as Miss Beatrice treated me.”
“Come on,” I said. The comparison didn’t seem so funny anymore. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
19
Time to level collapse: 4 days, 20 hours.
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to figure out how to turn the train around. There was a section of track designed for the purpose. The track was shaped like a T on its side, and I had to steam past it, get out and hit the switch, back into the base of the T, hit the switch again two times, and it turned the Nightmare around.
I managed to talk Zev into delaying our obligation to go on the show about pet and beauty pageants for six hours. She’d huffed and puffed, but since it wasn’t a live show, it turned out to not be a big deal. It would give us time to sleep, eat, get our training room time in, and shower. Plus I wanted to stick my head into the Desperado Club. Then we’d go on the stupid show, which would eat two or three hours. This close to the end, that seemed like a ridiculous waste of time.
We went down to station 41 and parked the train. I told Brandy our plans, and she seemed content to just sit there and idle. Donut leaped to my shoulder as I ascended the ladder. This station was exactly as I expected. One restaurant, one store, and the Desperado Club. There were multiple exits.
A line of red-tagged ghouls appeared on the map from all of the colored station landings, but they weren’t stopping. They remained on the tracks, shuffling higher.
Once we were up there, Donut finally released Mongo, and we headed for the saferoom, which was a Greek café called Everest. We skipped past the bopca and went straight to our personal space. We’d missed the last recap episode, and the announcement hadn’t been anything special. The leaderboard hadn’t moved.
As we entered the room, I received updates from both Meadow Lark and Bautista.
Imani and crew had safely ridden the conveyor system all the way down to Trainyard D, which also had a breached gate. Still, they’d arrived in a yard full of ghouls. They’d had a harrowing running and fighting battle. They’d taken shelter in the Iron Tangle administrative building outside of the yard. Elle had floated above the ghouls and frozen them by the hundreds, eventually killing all the ones surrounding the building. I got to listen to her bitch for five minutes straight about how little experience she’d received for it. Once they killed all the ones in the immediate area, all the newcomers ignored the building and walked straight back into the tunnels. The former Meadow Lark residents were currently holed up in the building planning their next move.
I suggested they take the employee train tunnel on foot up to the nearest transfer station.
Meanwhile, Bautista said the Kravyad wasn’t a boss monster at all, but instead was a multi-armed snake woman NPC, just like Madison had reported. The NPC had attempted to hypnotize the crawlers, but Bautista had somehow neutralized her ability to cast the spell. He said, “I used my last Voca Nye. The purple variant.” I had no idea what that meant.
But a new wrinkle had developed. Defenseless, the Kravyad was now threatening to kill herself if the crawlers got any closer. The crawlers remained on the platform while one of them, apparently a former police negotiator, was talking to her through the doorway. If she did kill herself, and that portal closed, it was going to get ugly. Less than half of them still had their hats which would allow them passage through the only other portals in the area, the portals above the abyss. That was their last practical chance to get to the stairwells after the employee portal. With less than five days left and the vast majority of the subway trains now stopped, those in the group without their souvenir hats were in very real danger of finding themselves stranded.
I trained my Powerful Strike, which did not advance, and then I collapsed into bed, sleeping the full two hours.
Afterward, Donut and I headed to the Desperado Club to talk to any remaining crawlers while Katia spent some time at her makeup table. We only had about an hour of free time before we’d get teleported away, and I didn’t want to waste it.
“Sledgie!” Donut cried when we entered the club. She jumped to the rock monster’s shoulder.
The cretin grumbled in greeting. A blue magic protection spell appeared around us, followed by a new one, this time a translucent shield spell, a real shield spell, that would also protect us from physical attacks. Between the two spells, we were now practically invulnerable while we were in the club.
“I bought shield spell,” Bomo said proudly. “The Sledge cast magic protect. I cast smack protect.”
“That’s really awesome,” I said. “We appreciate it.”
We moved to the dance floor, which was sparsely populated with actual crawlers. After explaining why I wanted to exchange everyone’s chat info, I ended up collecting an additional 10 names to my list.
“We should go into the Bitches and Penis Parade strip clubs to see if anybody is in there,” Donut said. “Plus I’ve always wanted to see a naked man dance around. One with better moves than that one weird guy who always came over when you were gone. He used to dance in the mirror and stare at himself and call himself a king. He’d put your socks on his wang and twirl them around in the mirror.”
I barely heard her. Instead, I was staring at the man sitting at the bar. “Holy shit,” I said. Donut hadn’t yet noticed the purple-skinned elf creature. I tapped her on the back and pointed. She turned and hissed, all of her hair poofing out.