As he began to wonder about the others in the group, hisflashlight illuminated something unexpected. A glowing, red light shone back athim, and then was gone. He moved his flashlight to find it again, and there itwas. It was the reflective taillight of a train. As they moved closer, thetrain's outline coalesced out of the gloom of the tunnel. Its white metalfairly glowed in the blackness of the passageway.
They stood regarding the obsolete machine as if it werethe fossilized corpse of some extinct beast. In the cold of the tunnel, theirbreath billowed in front of them.
Lou stood in front of the group and turned around,pointing his flashlight at the ground. "I'm going to go check itout," he whispered. "You guys stay here, but be ready."
"For what?" Katie asked.
Lou had no answer; he just shrugged his shoulder andturned his back to the others. He leaned around the side of the train, keepinghis flashlight low. The train was meant to dock at a platform, so the doors ofthe train came up to his shin. The windows were at chest level, so he crouchedlow and leaned to the side, shining his flashlight at the doors of the train.They were closed. That was a relief. Finally, things were going their way.
He stood up, breathing easier, and then jumped as a loudthump resonated from inside the train. It was followed by more thumps as heraised his flashlight to see inside the windows. Faces... dead, rotting facespressed against the glass. Mort watched from the side as Lou panned hisflashlight down the side of the train. Holy shit! Mort thought. That'sa lot of dead people.
The train seemed as if it were packed with the dead.Behind the faces, clumsy hands pawed at the glass as if they could press theirway out of the train. Brown blood smears obscured the faces in the train, butthey were there, pounding against the glass of the MAX train. The tunnelreverberated with the noise.
If any of the dead were lurking in the tunnel, this noisewould surely draw them in their direction.
"Come on, man. Let's go. Waitin' around ain't gonnado us any good in here," Mort said, panic rising in his voice, as hissweat turned cold on his body. Lou just looked at him. Nothing needed to besaid. The group moved swiftly past the train. Mort tried to not shine his lightin the windows, but he couldn't resist. The dead faces moved past him, slightlyblurred by his own speed and the blood smears on the windows of the train.
The entire train began to rock side to side as thetrapped mass of rotting flesh became agitated by their passing. Then theypassed it by, and the train receded into the past, a time capsule that no onewould ever dare to open. How long would that train sit there, the dead standinginside, waiting for a release that would never come, standing shoulder toshoulder, forever locked in a vision of hell. Mort's mind reeled at all of theways that one could die and be trapped on the planet now. Before, dying was badenough. The thought of not existing was a terrible one. The thought of existingin a diminished way, trapped in something you couldn't escape from... that wassomehow even worse than not existing at all. Nowadays, the way you died wasalmost as important as the fact that you died. Had a heart attack in aport-o-potty? Good luck smelling shit for the rest of your life. Got hit by acar? Have fun being trapped under that wheel for eternity. Accidentally getyour head cut off? Hope you enjoy the view.
Mort's mind was flooded with horrible ways to die, andthen a new one presented itself right in front of them. They had been steadilyclimbing upward for the last 15 minutes, stumbling over the rock-strewn floorof the tunnel. His calves and thighs burned as the tunnel pitched upward,slicing through the hills that separated Portland from the surrounding suburbs.Out of nowhere, his flashlight caught the flash of a pair of yellow eyesburning in the darkness. A roar soon followed.
"What the fuck is that?" Mort said.
"It sounded like a lion," Katie replied.
Chapter 14: A Day at the Zoo
Days ago...
Where was everyone? Lila Bathgate sat in the zoo'ssecurity room, staring at the blank monitors. The zoo had been quiet the lastfew days, with very few visitors, but today it seemed positively dead. As theon-site caretaker of the Oregon Zoo, she was used to getting up early in themorning and doing her rounds, feeding animals, checking enclosures to see ifits occupants were up and about, and various other duties that usually involveda shovel and some bio-degradable plastic bags. Usually, by the time she was donewith her rounds, the park would be populated by handfuls of early-rising animallovers.
She looked up at the sun in the sky. Today was a perfectday. Warm, but not too warm, and yet there was no one in the park. In fact, shehadn't seen another human for the entire day. When she called her supervisor, adumpy lady with impossibly wide hips who had hired her straight out of college,there was no answer. There hadn't even been a chance to leave a message. Allshe had heard on the other end of the phone had been silence. It was as if hersupervisor's phone simply didn't exist.
Maybe it didn't, she thought. Maybe her supervisorhad changed phone numbers when she hadn't been paying attention. Lila wasn'tparticularly adept at keeping up with people in the first place. Animals wereher only concern. But when no one had showed up to the zoo by eleven in themorning, not even any of the employees, Lila knew that something was up.
She only knew of one other person that was as dedicatedto the job as she was, Sy the security guard. What he did in his booth was hisown business, but in the three years that she had been taking care of theanimals at the zoo,
