Chapter 3 - My World Shattered

  Knife in one hand and flare in the other, I looked for Amanda and saw her at once. She’d stepped in between the kids and the monsters stalking them. Amanda had made herself a barrier to save the kids, but one of the creatures had her pinned on the seats, same as I had been. The third creature had just stuck a short spear through one of the other passengers and was closing on the kids.

  I raced down the aisle toward the fight. The spear-wielding monster heard me coming and turned, stabbing at me with its weapon. I stepped up onto the seats, dodging the blow, and came around one of the support poles, attacking the monster from the side with my new blade. The dagger sunk into its arm. It hissed angrily at me, turning to cover the wound.

  Amanda was right there! She was almost nose to nose with the third monster. I just had to get there!

  The spear-monster was still in my way, though. By the light of the flare I had a much better look at these things. They looked like rats—if a rat was walking on two legs, standing four feet tall, and carrying weapons, anyway. The fur, the eyes, the ears, the face, even the long tails they were sporting all screamed of rats to me. Why were there rat-creatures attacking us? I had no idea. I just knew I had to stop them.

  I shoved the flare in the monster’s face and it backed away, still hissing. It stabbed at me with the spear, but only half-heartedly, like it was almost as afraid of me as I was of it. I doubted it feared the knife, which left the fire. These creatures seemed at home in the dark, so maybe light was bad for them? Or maybe they knew they’d go up like candles if I touched them with the flames.

  Either way, it was an advantage, and I pressed it. I pushed forward, shoving the flare at the monster over and over. It continued to give ground. Then I faked it out, shoving the flare at its face while at the same time shoving the knife in toward its gut. The ruse worked; distracted by the fire, it missed seeing the knife until it was too late and took a nasty cut.

  Then Amanda screamed in pain. I turned toward her; I couldn’t help it. She was still there on the seats, just three feet away from me. The rat creature had its knife buried in her gut, just below her ribs. She coughed up blood, and I knew she was dying.

  “Amanda! No!”

  My world shattered.

  She was everything good in my life.

  Amanda was smart. She was funny. She was dedicated, and loved kids. She’d make a rainy day brighter just with her smile. We’d been together for years, after meeting in college. We’d moved in together. Built a life together. God damn it all, I’d just been looking at engagement rings!

  All of that flashed through my mind in the brief second her scream lasted. Then the rat creature jerked upward with the knife, and she stopped moving.

  That was all it took. I lost it.

  I ignored the rat-thing with the spear and charged the one which had stabbed Amanda. Screaming with rage, I smashed it over the back with the flare, which set it aflame in an instant, and stabbed it between the ribs with my blade. The thing squealed, struggling to get away, but it was already on fire. It ran back toward the rear of the car, flames spreading across its body. It made it almost to the door before dropping to the floor.

  A sharp pain stabbed through my leg, and then it was my turn to scream. Spear Rat had taken advantage of my distraction to stab me. He yanked the spear back out. It had gone deep into the muscle of my thigh, and I felt hot blood pour down my leg, but it didn’t seem to have hit anything too vital, provided I kept most of my weight off the leg. I whirled toward it, brandishing the flare in its face. It backed up rapidly, then looked around.

  Both of its friends were on fire, neither of them moving. It looked back at me, and at the flame I carried. Then it pitched the spear directly at my face!

  I dodged, slipping sideways so the thing clattered against the wall of the train behind me. The toss was more distraction than attack, though, because the creature took the moment I was looking away to dash toward the rear of the car, leaping from seat to seat to floor and then out the door almost faster than I could track with my eyes.

  It was over. At least for the moment, we were safe again.

  Well, some of us were safe. There were bodies everywhere. It looked to me like most of the passengers were dead. I kept not looking at Amanda. I’d seen her face, her open eyes, and seen how much blood she’d lost. I knew she was gone.

  “Kids? You okay?” I staggered in their direction.

  “Yeah, we’re here, Mister Castle.” That was Sarah, a little blonde eleven year old. “You’re bleeding, though!”

  I looked down at my leg, and sure enough, there was a hole in my jeans and a spreading red patch from my blood. There had been a first aid kit in the front of the train. I made my way there, the kids moving out of my way as I limped there. I set the flare down carefully on the dash, where it promptly began melting through the controls. I had a hunch I wasn’t going to get in trouble for damaging public property, at this point, so I let it singe the plastic.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Getting a bandage over the wound wasn’t easy. I couldn’t just take the pants off on the train, not with weird monsters running around, so I put a pressure dressing on the wound, tying it in place with a long gauze wrap. It wasn’t perfect, but it would keep me from bleeding out.

  While I dressed the wound, I had the kids sound off. I was stunned to find all twelve of them were there, alive and in one piece. None of them were even injured. I wasn’t sure how we’d been so lucky. The monsters certainly had opportunities to attack the kids. My best guess was they saw the adults as more of a threat and moved to take us out first. I was just glad I’d scared off that last one, because I was running low on steam. Fighting off the third one might have been too much for me.

  None of the other adults had survived. I was on my own, stuck in a black tunnel with twelve terrified kids and at least one more monster. I wasn’t willing to bet that the escaped one didn’t have friends, so we had to assume there’d be more of them coming at us, sooner or later. That meant it was past time to get out of there.

  If only I’d said that sooner. If I’d just insisted we leave right away, maybe… I shoved those dark thoughts aside. There was too much I needed to take care of in the here and now.

  “You kids stay here. Don’t move, okay?” I said. “I’m going to go check the rest of the car for anything we can use, and then we’re going to go.”

  “What about Miss Kepler?” Maria asked.

  I winced, letting my eyes close a moment as the pain washed over me. That wound was still too new. I wasn’t ready to process it, yet. “She’s gone, Maria. I’ll come back to get her later, but she’d want me to get you out of here. So that’s what I’m gonna do, all right?”

  She nodded with a serious face, her eyes bright with tears. I turned away before I started crying, too.

  I checked the other passengers first, but all of them were gone. There had been six grownups in the train car. I was the last one still breathing. When I got to Amanda, I carefully closed her eyes, then slipped her raincoat from her bag and laid it over her. It was the best I could do. There was no way we could haul her body out of this place, not under the circumstances anyway. I’d have to come back for her later, like I told the kids.

  I picked up her purse and fished through it, grabbing a few odds and ends. Chapstick. Hand sanitizer. A little notepad and pen. Her wallet. The tiny plushie I made her last month at a craft fair we’d gone to together. All of it went into my messenger bag.

  From there, I went to checking out the two dead monsters. Both of them were heavily singed, but by using the flare as a light source I was able to get a much better look at them. They were rat-like, all right. They looked for all the world like some sort of weird merger between human and rat. I’d seen things like this before, but only in video games.

  I reached out and poked the first one I’d killed with the knife I captured. Nothing happened, so I poked it hard enough to puncture the skin and there was still no response. It was dead, for sure. Wincing against the smell—if I thought they smelled bad before, they were ten times worse after being set on fire—I started checking the thing over, looking for any clues about what it was or where it came from.

  As soon as I touched it, something appeared in my palm. It was a small, clear crystal, about the size of a fingernail. Even by today’s standards, that was weird as hell, and then the thing vanished, literally sinking into my hand like it was being absorbed by my skin.

  What the hell was that?

  Before I could do anything more to react, a rush of new thoughts flooded my mind. These thoughts felt like memories, but it also felt wrong to call them memories, since this wasn't even close to anything I'd directly experienced. The knowledge unfolded in my brain without me having to do anything at all. I knew—just knew, somehow—that the crystal had made me stronger than I’d ever been before.

  Alongside the memories, I got an image in my mind of an elaborate network of swirling energy. In the center were five ‘sockets,’ all interconnected. One socket was now filled with a small clear stone, while the other four looked…weird. Like they ought to be able to fit a similar stone, but were blocked. I felt like I needed to do something to unlock them.

  Magical Stones

  Point 1: Clear Stone - Strength

  Point 2: X

  Point 3: X

  Point 4: X

  Point 5: X

  There wasn’t much else of value on the rat. The chunks of metal and leather it wore as a sort of light armor might have once been worth messing with, but as badly burned as they were, it was better to just leave it. I went to the second rat-thing and touched it, too, which gave me a second clear crystal. This one didn’t get sucked into my skin, though. Maybe it was one per customer?

  No, that didn’t ring true. Whatever this stuff was, I had multiple sockets for them. I could feel that, in my head. I just hadn’t unlocked the other spots, yet. How I knew that, I wasn’t sure. Just part of the package of fake memories the thing gave me, I supposed.

  The whole thing was creepy, but when I stood, I realized I did feel stronger. That was a welcome sensation. If those things came back at me, some extra strength would do me a lot of good.

  In the meantime, though, I had to get the kids out of there and back home to their parents. That’s what Amanda would have wanted. What she would have done, if she was still there with me. I snatched the spear from where it had clattered to the ground and stowed the knife in my bag, then returned to the front of the car. Fortunately, I had a decent idea how to get the kids on board.

  “Okay, kids. We’re going to do this together. You all with me?”

  I got a lot of very serious nods.

  “You’ve all seen movies with monsters and stuff, right?” I asked.

  More nods.

  “Good. Somehow, we’re in a story like one of those movies, but for real,” I told them. Hey, it was the best story I could think of quickly! “We need to move fast, move quietly, and stay together. Everyone buddy up and watch your buddies!”

  More nods. Kids moved closer to friends and quickly paired off.

  I checked the door in the front. It was pretty solidly stuck shut. Fortunately, we had another way out. I went to the back of the train, where the rear door still stood ajar, and peered out. No sign of monsters, thank god.

  “All clear. Let’s go!” I hissed.

  The kids came rushing down the center aisle to me and followed me out onto the tracks. The guttering light of the flare gave us plenty of illumination to see by. But which way should we go?

  Toward the rear was the direction the monsters had come from. It was also the direction of home, and these kids’ parents. What finally decided me was that I knew we’d entered the tunnels like thirty seconds before the lights all went out. We were in the tunnel on the Cambridge side of the Charles River, but not by much, and the fastest way out was back the way we came.

  We set off, walking cautiously alongside the train until we were past it, and then started moving more quickly down the tunnel, which sloped gradually upward, hopefully toward the light.

  The kids didn’t see my silent tears as we left the love of my life in the dark behind us.