tunnels upon his retirement, and so returned to them like a sailor retiring to the seas. Carl wore a headlamp, the beam moving with the shaking of his head.
Cray-Z, bothered by the light beam, let out a battle cry from the top of his barricade. “I am God’s fool, but they won’t take me this soon!”
Caver Carl and some others moved forward, attempting to tear down the pile. “One of the trains crash, they’ll drive us out of here for good!”
In an instant, Cray-Z leaped down from his pile, landing next to Fet. Fet went to him with arms outstretched, trying to calm the situation, hoping to put these folks to work for him. “Hold on everyone—”
Cray-Z wasn’t in the mood for talking. He swung his steel pipe at Fet, who instinctively blocked the blow with his left forearm. The pipe cracked the bone.
Fet howled, and then, using the heavy nail gun as a club, struck Cray-Z hard across the temple. It staggered the madman, but he kept coming. Fet cracked Cray-Z in the ribs, then kicked at the calf of his right leg, dislocating his leg at the knee, finally bringing him down.
“Listen!” yelled Caver Carl.
Fet stopped and did so.
The telltale rumble. He turned and saw, down the length of the track, a dusting of light against the curve in the tunnel wall.
The 5 train was approaching its U-turn.
The other moles continued to pull at the pieces of the pile, but it was no use. Cray-Z used his pipe to get up onto his one good leg, hopping up and down.
“Fucking sinners!” he howled. “You moles are all blind! Here they come! Now you have no choice but to fight them. Fight for your lives!”
The train bore down on them, and Fet saw that there was no time. He backed off from the impending catastrophe, the brightening train light illuminating Cray-Z’s dance: a mad jig on his bent leg.
As the train blew past him, Fet caught a glimpse of the driver’s face. She stared straight ahead, without expression. She had to have seen the debris. And yet she never applied the brake, she never did anything.
She had the thousand-yard-stare of a newly turned vampire.
The grating, metallic screech was nearly human in its outrage and its pain. Given the tunnels and their throat-like propensity for echoes, the cars stopped long before the awful sound did.
This train had many more bodies riding its exterior. Some were killed instantly — ground against and smeared along the edge of the platform. The rest rode the spectacular crash until the end. Once the cars came to a stop, they separated from the train like leeches detaching from flesh, dropping to the ground, getting their bearings.
Slowly, they turned toward the moles still standing there, staring in disbelief.
The riders walked out of the dust and smoke of the calamity, unfazed but for an odd, slinking gait. Their joints emitted a soft popping noise as they advanced.
Fet quickly went into his duffel bag, retrieving Setrakian’s improvised time bomb. He felt an intense burning in the right calf and looked down. A long, thin, needle-sharp piece of debris had somehow pierced his leg, all the way through. If he pulled it loose, the bleeding would be savage — and right now, blood was the last thing he wanted to smell of. He left it painfully lodged in his muscle mass.
Closer to the tracks, Cray-Z looked on in amazement. How could so many have survived?
Then, as the riders moved closer, even Cray-Z noticed that something was missing from these people. He detected traces of humanity in their faces, but it was only that: traces. Like the glimmer of greedy humanoid intelligence one sees inside the eyes of a hungry dog.
He recognized some of them, women and men from underground. Fellow moles — except for one figure. A lanky creature, pale and bare-chested, sculpted like an ivory figurine. A few strands of hair framed an angular, handsome, yet wholly possessed face.
It was Gabriel Bolivar. His music had not permeated the under-city demographic, and yet every eye fell upon him. He stood out from the rest that much, the showman he was in life carrying over into un-death. He wore black leather pants and cowboy boots, with no shirt. Every vein, muscle, and sinew in his torso was visible beneath his delicate, translucent skin.
Flanking him were two broken females. One’s arm was sliced open, a deep cut, slashing through flesh, muscle, and bone, nearly severing the limb. The cut did not bleed, but rather oozed — and not red blood, but a white substance more viscous than milk yet thinner in consistency than cream.
Caver Carl began to pray. His softly sobbing voice was so high, so full of fear, that Fet at first thought it belonged to a boy.
Bolivar pointed at the staring moles — and at once the riders were upon them.
The woman-thing ran straight at Caver Carl, knocking him back off his feet, landing on his chest, and pinning him to the ground. She smelled of moldy orange peels and spoiled meat. He tried to fend her off, but she gripped his arm and twisted it in the socket, snapping it instantly.
Her hot hand pushed at his chin with enormous strength. Carl’s head was forced back to the breaking point, his neck extended and fully exposed. From his upside-down perspective, by the light of his miner’s helmet, all he could see were legs and unlaced shoes and bare feet running past. A horde of creatures — reinforcements — came at them from the tunnels, a full-on invasion trampling through camp, beings clustered over twitching bodies.
A second creature joined the woman on him, tearing away his shirt in a frenzy. He felt a hard bite at his neck. Not a hinged bite — not teeth — but a puncture, followed immediately by a suction-like latching. The other clawed at the inseam of his trousers, shredding them below his groin and clamping onto the inside of his thigh.
Pain at first, a sharp burning. Then, within moments… numbness. The sensation was like that of a piston thumping against his muscle and flesh.
He was being drained. Carl attempted to scream, his open mouth finding no voice but only four long, hot fingers. The creature grabbed hold of his cheek from the inside, its talon-like nail slicing his gum all the way to the jawbone. Its flesh tasted salty, tangy — until it was overwhelmed by the coppery flavor of his own blood.
Fet had retreated immediately after the crash, knowing a losing battle when he saw one. The screaming was nearly unbearable, yet he had a mission to complete, and that was his focus.
He climbed backward into one of the ducts, finding there was barely enough space to accommodate him. One advantage to fear was that the adrenaline coursing through him had the effect of dilating his pupils, and he found he could see his environs with unnatural clarity.
He unwrapped the rags and twisted the timer one full rotation. Three minutes. One hundred eighty seconds. A soft-boiled egg.
He cursed his luck, now realizing that, with the vampire battle in the tunnel, he would have to travel deeper into the ducts used by vampires to transverse the river, but also backward, with his arm badly bruised and his leg dripping blood.
Before releasing the timer, he saw the bodies of the moles on the ground, squirming as they were consumed by clusters of vampires. They were already infected, already lost — all except for Cray-Z. He stood near a concrete pillar, watching like a blissful fool. And yet he was untouched by these dark things, unmolested as they rampaged past him.
Then Fet saw the lanky figure of Gabriel Bolivar approach Cray-Z. Cray-Z fell to his knees before the singer, the two of them outlined in smoke and dusty light, like figures in a Bible stamp.
Bolivar lay his hand upon Cray-Z’s head, and the madman bowed. He then kissed the hand, praying.
Fet had seen enough. He set the device down inside a gap and took his hand off the dial… one… two… three… counting in time with the ticking as he grabbed his duffel bag and retreated backward.
Fet kept pushing back, feeling his body ease after a while, lubricated by his own flowing blood.
… forty… forty-one… forty-two…
A cluster of creatures moved toward the duct entrance, attracted by the smell of Fet’s ambrosia. Fet saw
