Ralph spared him a puzzled glance and shrugged.
Magnus pressed his head to the window, tried to see towards the front of the train. Nothing. There were fields on both sides of the train, and beyond them were deep ranks of trees that led into darkness. He stared into the trees for a while. Shadows moved, stopped, and moved again. He got the feeling of something stirring within the inky darkness. His skin broke out in gooseflesh.
He looked away.
“What’s going on?” Joel asked from behind. Frank was reassuring Florence.
Anxiety and pent-up anger began to take hold on the collective emotions of the refugees; a single pulse composed of their combined heartbeats, growing faster with every second that the reason for the train’s stop was not revealed.
Magnus could hear voices from the next carriage. Arguments were breaking out.
Ralph was looking down the aisle, trying to see past the standing bodies.
“What’s going on?” said Magnus.
“Maybe we’ll be told in a minute.”
The speakers in the carriage buzzed with static, and a tinny voice spoke: “Uh, please stay calm. Do not panic. There is an obstruction on the track. Do not panic. In a moment the driver will be passing through the carriages to the other end of the train so we can reverse... ”
Cold sweat broke out on Magnus’s back and ran down his spine.
The carriage rocked gently on its wheels. At the back of the carriage, a woman screamed. She was pointing out the window, towards the trees flanking the train. Someone asked her what was wrong. She shrank away from the window, her face stretched and pale.
“There’s something out there!” she cried. “Something in the trees!”
Magnus looked at the trees. He moved towards the window until his nose was touching the glass. The shadows were moving again. Gaining shape. Coalescing.
Coming towards the train.
He retreated from the window.
A man burst from the trees, sprinting towards the train. He was topless. His jeans had been torn into rags. His upper body had developed dark lesions. His left arm was withered into a hooked appendage. Magnus couldn’t hear him, but he could tell that from the shape of the man’s mouth and the crazed intent in his eyes, he was screaming.
“Infected!” someone said.
Another man bolted from the trees, running for the train. Then, another. Four, five, six. All of them were horribly deformed.
“They’re on the other side as well!” a woman cried.
Heads turned. Magnus managed to peer between the scrum of bodies blocking the aisle, and saw men and women tearing down the field towards the train.
“Oh shit,” Magnus said.
The infected emerged from both sides.
Panic broke out on the carriage. The infected kept coming. The fields on either side of the train were filled with them.
Magnus looked past the infected people. He was so scared that his heart almost stopped.
Something large was coming through the trees.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
The thing began as an amorphous shadow skulking within the tree line, and then it emerged. Frank’s hands tightened around Florence; an instinctive act of protection. The other refugees saw it, too. The carriage was full of screaming and crying. A lone voice begged its god for help that wasn’t coming.
The train driver, a plump and sweaty man, was trying to make his way up the aisle, towards the other end of the train. He was struggling to wriggle through the bodies crowding the carriage. He was too big. He shouted and swore at them to let him through. They ignored him, staring at the thing coming at them from out of the trees.
The creature loomed almost thirty feet tall; a spindly, dangling abomination. Frank couldn’t take his eyes away from it.
Joel was shaking his head. His eyes were wide and shivering with tears. He rubbed the rash on the side of his neck. He looked at Frank, opened his mouth to speak, but words failed him.
The creature broke through the trees, pushing branches from its path. Frank couldn’t see it clearly, but its tall, bloated body appeared to be pulsing. There were tendrils attached to its main mass. Then it opened its mouth, and despite the carriage interior’s muffling effect, its screech was high-pitched and anguished. The carriage trembled.
The infected people reached the train and began to pound, scratch and claw upon it. The refugees looked down at them, safe for now, until they found a way inside.
The tall thing skittered across the field on rows of insect legs. It moaned dully as it moved.
“What the fuck is that?” said Ralph.
Frank saw its body in detail for the first time, and he wished it to be the last. The creature halted by the train, looming over it, casting a shadow that darkened the inside of the carriage. Its tendrils were tipped with stingers or sharpened claws. There were human faces partly-submerged within its mass, and the flailing naked arms of those people were hanging from its flesh, their fingers grasping at the air. Faces and body parts were dripping a pale fluid onto the ground. The beast was a growth of half-absorbed bodies and screaming faces. They were still alive. They were part of the creature, assimilated into its body. A monster composed of human bodies and infected flesh.
Those human eyes, so many of them, appraised the contents of the train. One of the eyes, bloodshot and staring, seemed to find Frank and focus on him. It was using the eyes of its human victims to navigate. Its body was veiny and pulsing, throbbing dully and slowly like a pig’s heart. It didn’t possess a face, but there was a mouth, and it opened just a little into a vulva-like aperture showing pink gums and a glistening passage leading to somewhere he didn’t want to visit.
The beast had no teeth. It didn’t need teeth.
One of the tendrils scraped against the window, its claw scoring a line in the glass. It left behind a smear of sticky fluid.
“What is it?” asked Joel.
The tendrils shot forward and grabbed the carriage, shaking it. People collided and fell into the aisles.
Magnus said, “I can hear the people inside it. They’re talking to me. Can’t you hear them?”
“What are they saying?” Frank asked.
“They want to absorb us. Eat us.”
“That’s good to know,” said Ralph.
The beast shuddered and the faces within its body opened their mouths and screamed. It was the sound of a hundred people suffering, trapped in a feverish half-existence of agony and hunger.
“Those poor people,” said Joel. “Dear God.”
The ceiling of the carriage trembled; there was a ripping, screeching sound and several of the tendrils plunged through the roof, into the carriage. Part of the ceiling directly over the middle of the carriage was ripped away. The beast caught the scent of the people inside the train. The refugees retreated from the ragged hole, scrambling away, panicking and squabbling and screaming.
The tendrils descended. A woman screamed and a tendril whipped towards her and wrapped around her neck. Two men tried to grab her, but the tendril dragged her from where she cowered and took her away. The woman screamed until she was silenced by something wet and sucking. Frank thought of those pink gums and that vaginal mouth and he shivered. Bile rose in his throat. He put himself between Florence and the hole in the ceiling. She was crying.
The two men who’d attempted to save her were also grabbed by other tendrils and taken. Their screams were brief.
More of the roof was ripped away. A screech of metal. A rush of cold air. The hole grew bigger. The sudden stink of the beast, like raw meat.
More tendrils crept through the hole, twitching and jerking at every human heartbeat.
The beast screamed.
Joel screamed.
Others screamed with him.