36
The train from hell just kept going. I thought it would never stop. The situation in the boxcar went from bad to worse. I didn’t see how I could make it.
After nearly five hours, the air inside the boxcar was an almost unbreathable soup of the body odor of a hundred and fifty sweaty people, sour vomit, and the sulfurous sticky smell of the shit scattered around the car. At the start of the trip, a few voices sensibly proposed converting one corner into a latrine. Everyone thought that was a good idea, except for one detaiclass="underline" nobody wanted it to be the corner closest to them.
After some tense arguments, we still hadn’t chosen a corner, so people were relieving themselves anywhere they could. The car became a shit pile on wheels. A layer of stinking slime spread over the floor and flowed from side to side as the train rocked along.
I was relatively lucky. I’d staked out a spot against a wall, so I had a place to lean. I set Lucullus’s basket on the floor in front of me, blocking off about a foot of space that allowed me to turn around. The nearest window was about fifteen feet away, so most of the time, I was in the dark. When someone lit a cigarette or switched on a flashlight, I got a brief glimpse of my surroundings.
I used those moments to look at my cat. Lucullus was curled up tight at the bottom of the basket, in a restless half-sleep. Occasionally he stirred with a faint, pained meow that broke my heart. He must’ve felt sick from losing all that blood. I suspected his wound was infected.
My bigger problem was my unrelenting thirst. The Green Guards had loaded a couple of plastic drums of water into the car before they sealed the door. One of them disappeared into a corner and was jealously guarded by some grim-faced Latin Kings brandishing knives. The other drum was empty. I got chills thinking back on what happened to that drum. Any semblance of order evaporated as soon as someone opened it up. In the dim light, I heard screams and punches as the drum passed from hand to hand, spilling most of its contents. When it came to me, I only got a few sips before someone slugged me in the back, and then six people snatched it out of my hands.
I sat down in my little space and licked my moistened lips. I started to lick my fingers, which had gotten splashed when I grabbed the drum. I gasped when I realized my hands were dripping with blood, not water. As the fucking drum was passed around, it’d gotten drenched in some poor devil’s blood. It took every ounce of willpower I had not to throw up.
Thirst and hunger weren’t our only problems. We all knew we faced something worse, something that lived inside each of us and could show up anytime. Fear and anxiety plagued us as we jealously guarded our dwindling supply of Cladoxpan, our last defense against madness. After an hour, TSJ reared its ugly head in that dark boxcar.
The first to go was a heavyset woman in her fifties. She looked Caribbean. She’d probably already started transforming when they loaded her on the train, but in the chaos, no one noticed. She was on the other side of the car, so it was hard for me to see what was going on.
I peered over the crowd and got a glimpse of a girl in the back as she shouted in alarm and backed away in horror when she noticed that the woman’s skin was cold as ice and that the whites of her eyes were laced with broken, red veins. Panic spread through the crowd as the people next to her tried to back away. That triggered a disastrous human wave that spread in every direction. In an uncontrollable, blind panic, people fell over each other and got trampled. An old man landed hard on top of me as that giant wave plowed into us.
People shouted and screamed as they tried to break free of the mountain of bodies, but no one could move more than a few inches. People were smashed together and crushed in the stampede. Above the noise came that monotonous, raspy sound I’d heard so many times. A cross between a moan and a groan punctuated by rapid, labored breathing, like a person who’d just run a marathon. Every hair on my head stood on end and my stomach clenched in an icy ball.
“Mwaaaaeeergh… Mwaaaaaeeeeeeerghhh… ”
After a couple of minutes, there was a louder moan, almost a scream, poisonous and deathly, announcing that evil had awakened in that woman. Another woman in the same part of the boxcar cried out in pain. Then a man screamed.
Chaos broke out in the car. The crowd, blind and terrified, tried to flee in every direction, not caring what or who they crashed into. I had just enough time to crouch down and prop the basket between the wall and the crowd, forming a flimsy barricade. But my legs got trapped under someone and I couldn’t move. My head was pinned against the wall by the back of a man howling in pain, his right arm twisted unnaturally between two people grappling for their lives. I tried to pull away, but bodies were stacked up all around me. A skinny guy with a scraggly beard lay on the floor, his head almost touching mine. I could feel his hot, sharp breath on my face. His eyes were nearly popping out, and the veins in his neck bulged like thick cables as he made a superhuman effort, in vain, to break free. He shot me a crazed look and whispered “Help me,” barely audible in all this madness.
I wanted to help him, but one of my arms was pinned under my body. On top of that, if I pulled him free, I wouldn’t have any room to breathe. All I could do was stare in horror as the man’s face went from bright red to a terrible blue. Finally he fell over dead, his tongue hanging out of his mouth.
After the longest, scariest five minutes of my life, the panic began to fade. The cries grew muted. People sobbed everywhere, calling to each other. Someone pulled one of the people off me so I could sit up. My right arm was still asleep, but I managed to stand up and lean against the wall. Wood splinters dug into my skin, but I ignored them.
Someone in that car was no longer human, and I couldn’t tell if the dark shapes walking toward me were human or Undead.
My hand trembled as I cocked the Beretta and rested it against my hip. Suddenly, a short, compact woman stumbled toward me. She was breathing rapidly and had her arms stretched out in front of her, like a drunken Frankenstein. I aimed the gun at her face. At that moment, the car rocked violently, shaking us like jelly beans in a jar, as the train crossed a section of broken track. I spread my legs to steady myself and grabbed some metal rivets in the wall to keep from falling.
When I looked up again, I couldn’t see her anywhere. Where are you, bitch? Where the fuck are you?
A man’s hand closed around my arm. I howled in terror and kneed the guy in the crotch. I slammed the butt of my gun against his temple, and he let out a strangled shriek and fell like a sack of laundry at my feet. I crouched down, pointing my gun in every direction, trying to spot any other threat. I noticed that my victim, lying unconscious with an ugly bruise on his temple, was a man in his late sixties. Not an Undead.
My panic subsided, but I didn’t feel ashamed of beating up an old man. That car was hell and I was fighting to save my soul.
Someone fired two shots and flashes lit up the car. The shots reverberated in that tight space so loudly that, for a moment, all I heard was an annoying, persistent hum.
Careful, cowboy. You’re not the only one with a gun.
Another wave of hysteria swept over the car. When the shooter fired his gun again, I caught a glimpse of the grim scene. The floor was piled high with bodies. Some were still moving amid moans; most were motionless. Everywhere groups of two or three people were fighting in a homicidal rage either because they thought the other person was an Undead or because they were trying to steal each other’s Cladoxpan.