Darkbound (25 page)

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Jim pushed
through the doors to the next
car.  The scream, Adolfa's scream, followed him.  Followed him like a
bloodhound that has caught the scent of a lifetime.  Like a stink that
would not be shaken loose.

Like past sins.

He ran into the
next car.  And blinked with surprise as silence fell with the power and
finality of a hammer blow.

All was quiet.

All was dark.

He couldn't see
anything, couldn't hear anything, couldn't feel anything.

Then a single light
shone.  A moonbeam, a pure white shaft of light that fell on the face of
an angel.

His  mother.

Jim looked down at
himself.  His hands were his hands.  His hands and yet
not
his
hands.  His body, yet
not
his body.  It was all different, yet
all the same.

He held a
knife.  But not Xavier's knife –

(
who's
Xavier?  where did that thought come from?
)

– no, this was just
an ordinary kitchen knife, taken from the block on the counter next to the
white stove that Mother always kept spotless.

He crept to
her.  He walked on feet that were bare, silent on a floor that had somehow
become wood –

(
wasn't it metal
just a moment ago?
)

– laminate, a light
color by day but dark and pooled in shadow now, in the deepest part of the
night.

Jim was
quiet.  Quiet as a mouse, quiet as any animal in any of the bedtime
stories that Mother had ever read to him.  But still she opened her eyes
when he stood by her.  Maybe that was part of being a mother.  Maybe
there was some extra sense given to parents that allowed them to know when
their children were near, even in their sleep.

Jim didn't
understand it, but he accepted it.  It didn't matter.

Mother smiled off
the cobwebs of sleep.  She reached for him.  "Jimmy, you
okay?" she said.  "Did you have a bad dream?"

Jim shook his
head.  "No."

"Then what is
it?"  Concern on her face.  Her beautiful face.

Jim leaned
in.  "You know how I took extra lemon drops without asking?"

She smiled. 
"Sorry I got mad."

"I'm sorry,
too," he said.

"It's
okay."  She started to pull him in for a hug.

He resisted. 
"No.  I'm not sorry for taking the candy.  Just that you reacted
so badly."

The first cut
surprised her.  She didn't scream, just sort of inhaled, a
"hah?" sound that excited his eleven-year-old brain on a level he
hadn't been aware of previously.  The second cut went into her
throat.  Not fatal, not right away.  But it tired her quickly. 
Her blood pumped out, soaked the sheets and the mattress.

After that she got
weaker and weaker.  Jim was able to grab the knife with both hands and
plunge it into her repeatedly.  Chest.  Legs.  Arms.  She
didn't scream.  Just made a strange noise, a surprised, pained groan.

"Ung-ung-ung,
" she
said. 
Jim
listened to the sound.  He smiled.  It was the sound of an early
inheritance.  Of no one telling him to go to bed early, to eat his
greens.  It was the sound of what he wanted, when he wanted.

He decided then
that that would be his job, his vocation, his profession: to have what he
wanted, to take what he needed.  An no one would tell him otherwise, no
one would tell him no.  He would have what he wanted. He deserved
it.  He was special.

Hadn't Mother
always told him so?

She was staring at
him.  Looking at him with eyes that looked so betrayed, so hurt. 
Which he didn't understand, because he was doing the responsible thing, the
only
thing.

He used the knife
again.  Blood pooled in her eyesockets when he was done.  She
thrashed a bit, but not much.  And she wasn't looking at him like that
anymore.

Jim ran away while
she was still bleeding, still thrashing.  He wiped off the knife first,
leaving it beside her.  Tears were in his eyes, he was crying
hysterically.  He would be found in the woods near the house in a few
hours.  The poor, traumatized boy who found his mother's body after she
was savagely murdered by a robber.  He had already stolen and hidden
several of her jewels, and he broke some panes of glass on the way out of the
house.

It was perfect.

No one would ever
know.

It was what he had
to do.  What he needed.

He ran through the
door.  Ran into the woods.  Into the strobing lights of fireflies and
winking stars.

The night swallowed
him.

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Jim blinked.
  The woods were
gone.  The trees and the house of his childhood had melted back into the
mists of happily hidden memory.  He looked at his hands, half-expecting to
see them the smooth, white hands of a sixth-grader again.  Half-expecting
to see them blanketed in his mother's blood.

They were his own
hands.  The hands of a middle-aged man.  And the blood on them was
not his mother's.  It was Adolfa's.

A clapping sound
jogged his attention back to the present.  To wherever or whenever or
whatever place he had found himself trapped in.

It was the
man.  The driver.  The too-thin person in the New York transit outfit
who had started all this, who had been the harbinger of this nightmare. 
He was standing in the middle of the subway car – what must be the
first
subway car, the
final
subway car – and clapping derisively.

"Very nicely
done, Jim," said the man.  He had a New York accent, a hint of the
Bronx that went perfectly with his outfit.  "You made it here, you
made it the farthest.  Kudos, cheers, and huzzah to you, my
friend."  He blew a raspberry in the air, a silly noise that somehow
sounded obscene in this place.

The clapping
suddenly felt like daggers against Jim's ears.  He needed it to
stop.  Rage rose up, red and dangerous, in his mind.

"You did this
to me," he said.

"Not at
all," said the gaunt man.  He kept clapping.  Louder now, the
clapping sounded like thunder.

"You
did
this to me!
" Jim shrieked, and rushed at the driver.  He held
Xavier's knife in front of him, like a divining rod that hungered for blood,
that could only be quenched by the sanguine taste of life pumping along its
length.

The driver watched
him come.  He kept clapping.  Kept clapping.  Kept clapping.

Jim screamed, a
wordless scream of mad frustration.  This wasn't fair!  He had tried
so hard, so many years of doing what he had to to get ahead, so many years of
work and effort to get to where he had a family, a life.  His girls.

And now this man,
this bastard was going to get in his way.

The knife reached
for the driver.  Questing for his blood.

The driver reached
out, his hands pushing forward as though he hungered to be pricked by the
blade.  As he did so, his face changed.  The skin puckered and then
fell away in a bloody sheet.  Only bone was left behind: the skull that
Jim had seen at the front of the subway train before he stepped on the last
car.

The driver's hand,
also bereft of flesh, continued reaching for the knife.  Finger bones
clicked around the blade.  Jim's hand stopped moving, its forward motion
arrested as perfectly and completely as if he had run into a brick wall. 
He
couldn't stop, though.  Not completely.  He kept running forward,
momentum driving him onward and folding his body around the knife and the hand
that held it, his breath forced out of him with an explosive puff.

Then he rebounded,
his feet slipping on the metal floor of the car.  He fell.  And
realized that there was warmth seeping across his pants.

He looked up.

The skeleton in the
transit outfit was still holding the knife.  It was smiling. 
"Fair's fair, Jim," it said.

Jim looked
down.  There was a long gash along his forearm, a vertical slit that was
pumping blood at an alarming rate.

"What…?"
he began.  "What did you do?"

The skull clicked
its teeth together.  "You've been a smart one, haven't you?"

Jim looked up at
the thing, at the beast that had come for him.  "I don't know what
you mean," he said defiantly, even as a terrifying coldness seeped into
his arms and legs.

The skull leaned in
close.  "Oh, don't you?" it said.  And in the dark holes of
its eyes Jim thought he saw something writhing, like a nest of snakes being
born and being eaten in a never-ending cycle of blood and death.

The demon driver
touched a single fleshless finger to Jim's chest.  He felt it like an
icepick, burrowing into his heart.  He screamed and felt…

Memory.

Looking at
Karen, worrying she might go insane.  That she might lose it. 
"Okay," he said, "how about I care because if you go nuts that's
one more thing
I
have to worry about in here?"  And she thought he was kidding. 
That he was really worried about her as a
person
.  But he wasn't
kidding.  He wanted – needed – her to live.  Needed them all to
live.  Because the more people who survived, the more bodies there were to
provide him with cover.

Olik wasn't the
only one who knew how to sleep when wolves were around....

And then he was
in a different place. Grinding the gun into Karen's head, telling himself he
couldn't let her get away from the door because there wasn't time.  But
there was time.  There was always time.  He just didn't want to be
the one to put his hands out the door, didn't want to be the one to be in
harm's way if there was someone else to do that work....

Another
place.  Pulling Adolfa away from gunfire as Karen pulled the trigger on
the micro-Uzi.  Only now there was no disguising what he was doing. 
There was no charity there, no philanthropy.  He just pulled her in front
of him.  He wasn't pulling her to safety, he was using her as a shield....

Then back in the
dark subway, the skull staring at him with those terrible dark eyes.

"Everything
you did was for you," said the skull.  "You understood the evil
around you not because you were a psychiatrist –"

"I never said
I
was
," said Jim.  He was almost gasping.  Desperation
coloring his voice.

"No, you carefully
avoided that."  The skull grinned horribly.  "As though not
lying at this point might help you."  The Bronx voice laughed. 
It touched Jim in the chest again, and again the pain was bright and
terrible.  "But you didn't need to be a shrink, pal, didja? 
Because you already knew about the kinds of people you were dealing with. 
You had
been
all of those people, hadn't you?"  The pain in
Jim's chest was almost too much to bear, but somehow grew worse.

 "Why
me?" he asked.  His voice was almost a whimper, a weak version of the
strength it had once been.

The driver seemed
to find that oh-so-amusing.  "My kingdom for a hypocrite," it
said with a chuckle.  "Why you?"  It touched Jim's
head.  Again came the pain like someone had taken a blowtorch to his exposed
nerve endings.

"Freddy was a
pedophile," whispered the skull.  "So he went first. 
Because you can't let things like that stay around."

And now Jim
saw.  Saw what Freddy had seen: the children that came to him in the first
car, that crowded around him and surrounded him.  "Make them stop
touching me," said Freddy the Perv.  "They're touching me, make
them stop," he said in much the same way that those children had said when
he touched them, when he molested them and destroyed their innocence.  And
no one saw them, no one saw their pain.  Just as no one saw them now, when
they came to exact their revenge.  No one had seen or believed the
children he had savaged in life, so it was only just that no one see them come
for their vengeance.  No one saw them as they pulled apart the fingers
that had touched them, as they tore away the lips that had kissed them, as they
destroyed him one cell at a time... knowing that he would find himself back in
the car soon, ready for them to minister to him once again.

Jim gasped. 
Back in the subway car but for a moment before the skull, the driver who
commanded this strange world, said, "But what's worse, I wonder: a
pedophile or a serial rapist?"

Xavier. 
The things invading him.  Like phalluses forcing into his secret
places.  "Get it outta me!  Get it outta me!"  And
then a creature, born of sin and shame and rape most foul, a creature that he
would bear and that would destroy him in its birthing.  And that in turn
would become him and his legacy, a microcosm of a tragedy played out so many
times in so many places all over the world.  A tragedy still being played
out, just as Xavier was still being born and pulled apart by his seed, and born
and dying and born and dying into infinity.

"For that was
his punishment," whispered the skull.  Its finger twisted against
Jim's skin, bringing fresh agony.

Karen.  A
woman whose only life was death.  A name in an anonymous inbox, a sum in a
Cayman Islands account, and she would end a life.  There was no emotion in
her, no life in her own heart.  She had killed many – had come to kill
Adolfa, on the last day of her own life.  Hired by Scott and Kim, who had
grown tired of waiting for the old bitch to die so they could take over the
"family business."  The hit had gone wrong, she had taken three
bullets from Adolfa's bodyguard – or thought she had, before finding herself
somehow aboard the subway platform.  But she took it as a sign.  And
another sign when Adolfa was there, too.  She could complete the job. 
Could earn her commission.

But every person
she had ever slain had appeared on her tablet.  Had named her for what she
was.  A murderer.  Her hands had run red with their blood, blood that
would never come clean, would never be anything but bright against her skin.

Then they had
come
for her – even the
little girl she'd killed for a jealous mistress – and dragged her off the
subway.  And now she was one with them, experiencing the pain of their
lives, cut short for eternity.

"Stop,"
whispered Jim.

"No,"
said the driver.  "This doesn't stop.  That's the point."

Another
twist.  Another pain.

Olik.  A
man who went from pornography in his own country to a thriving international
internet pornography business to a lively trade in the sex slave
industry.  So many families broken as he took their daughters, and
sometimes sons, to quench the appetites of others.  It was only
appropriate that he should see his own daughters fall to the same urges. 
That he should have his head hung on a pole to watch their defilement forever.

Jim was
crying.  Screaming as more pain came.

Adolfa.  A
sweet old lady who runs the family business.  Overseeing accounting. 
New "product."  And running the competition out of business –
and into the ground.  So her punishment is to spend forever in the pain
she inflicted on countless addicts.  Watched over by her own "loving
family," who will wait forever for her to die, not out of love, but out of
greed.  Selling her to buy the drugs she has built, just as so many others
sold their sons, their daughters, their own flesh for the wares she offered.

She has no hope
of respite.  For she has reduced human suffering to a question of how much
money can be gleaned before dissolution.

And in the
subway, dissolution never comes.

Jim shook his
head.  "No," he said.  "This isn't fair.  It
isn't fair."   He looked up at the skull.  "What about
my girls?"

The skull's grin
widened.  "What
about
your girls?"  And it touched
him one more time.