The lights illuminated only a fraction of the darkened tunnels ahead. Maybe ten or twelve feet directly in front. The train must have been diesel generated and not one of the new fully electric ones. That was good.
The time the government spent trying to make everything self-sufficient and run on renewable energy and the damn stuff was useless at the first sign of a crisis. Diesel was dependable. It didn’t matter if the dead rose and the world fell. So long as you had a working engine and some heavy oil. It would work. The technologically advanced state, like the zombies it bred, rose up to bite them in the ass.
‘Are you alright?’ Logan asked, much calmer now, as Lizzie pushed the door ajar and joined him in the driver’s carriage.
‘Yeah. That was… scary.’ She said but smiled. Those kids on the bus had gotten to her but she was a strong girl, that much was clear, and she bounced back quickly. She gasped and pointed through the window ahead. Logan hadn’t been watching.
A zombie had wandered out right in front of the train. In his past life he had been a maintenance worker. He wore orange overalls that they just about saw before the train slammed right into him. His skull and chest cavity splattered across the window in a thick and sickening red mist.
‘Damn.’ Logan whispered as the train juddered but didn’t stop. He reached around the console looking for the wipers. He found them and turned them on along with the jets of water. He sprayed the window and set the wipers off like he was trying to get a bug smear off his car headlights.
The zombie’s hand was stuck in the wiper blades and every time he tried to wipe the blood smear away it slid across the window with a streak of blood in trail. It looked like it was waving.
Lizzie laughed first. It was sick and she felt ashamed but it was kind of funny. Logan turned to her to try and look condescending but it didn’t work and he started to smile and laugh a little too.
‘Hey!’ Lizzie defended herself. ‘If I ever turn, and you have to put me down, please make sure people get a laugh out of me too ok?’
‘Ok, I promise.’ He laughed and pulled himself up to sit on the driver’s chair. The hand finally fell away to the side and the joke passed. Lizzie would have to settle for the floor. She took out a leather bound diary and opened it up about half way.
‘You write in a diary?’ Logan asked a little surprised. He shouldn’t have been. He already had her figured out, or so he thought, so he already knew she had no family or friends around her. That would mean no one to confide in either.
‘Yeah.’ She admitted and even blushed. There was no need because he would have never judged her. ‘It’s not right to bottle it all up. I need to get it out somehow and it’s just safer to write it down. I don’t have to bottle it all up and have a big outburst at the expense of a boyfriend or anything like that. Keep’s me level headed really.’ Logan shrugged in an accepting way and turned his focus to the track ahead. He checked his radio. It was well out of range. His phone was useless now too with all the power and everything out.
Lizzie started writing.
I realized something today. When I looked into that bus full of children that I used to know. They really are dead. I had thought at first that they might just be sick and needed help. All that time I tried to get them to snap out of it. I thought they were just in a trance or something. All those wasted lives down at the station. I could have saved more of them if we had realized back then.
But I guess hindsight is 20:20. In the moment you don’t get that kind of time to think about things. You just follow your gut and hope that you make the right choices. I guess maybe my gut was wrong this time.
They aren’t sick and I can’t stop seeing people when I’m forced to put one down. I’m not killing people. I think I might be setting them free. I really hope that the souls of the victims that start to walk have passed on to whatever heaven they believe in.
But I sure as Hell wouldn’t want to be looking down on the Earth from up there to see my lifeless and soul-less body walking around attacking other’s. I would thank someone for putting my body down. They are monsters walking around wearing the faces of the living. They are demon’s walking around in the skin of the dead. I think anyway. Truth is I don’t know what they are and I don’t think anyone does.
My friend, General Logan, he certainly doesn’t. I haven’t told him that I know who he is yet. I recognized his name right away. Who could forget? He was the man who announced the walking plague to the world with that video.
Some people hate him for it. I don’t get why. I’m sure I must have thought at one point or another that he was lying, that he had faked the whole video, and that he wasn’t really a General or a Doctor at all.
But now that I have met him in the flesh. I know that he is the most trustworthy man I have ever known. I think I must have known him for about half a day and I can already tell that about him.
Maybe when someone saves your life so many times in such a short space of time you get a sense for them? And then he went back to save the ass hole who tried to rape me. Who does that?! A guy with a conscience? Or is it more than that? I wonder what he has gone through in his time that makes him need to save everyone.
I’ll bet he has some kind of God-complex. I bet he thinks he is invincible or un-killable. But if that’s what he needs to feel to be the man he is who am I to argue?
‘Hey, snap out of it.’ Logan got up from his seat and she put her book down right away and peered into the darkness with him. They were coming up on the next station and there were a few zombies on the track. They were just stood there in the dark not moving at all. As soon as they heard the rattle of the metal wheels along the track they started to stir.
‘Is this where we get off?’
‘No. We stay on this train right up through Manhattan and it will lead us to Central Park Avenue. We need to take that to where my friend, the Doctor, has the containment net set up in a little place called Valhalla.’ Logan started pushing the lever forward. The one that controlled both speed and braking.
He was going to punch through the line of zombies and take as many of them down as he needed to. The train was light and fast. It would take a lot of them in one place to stop it. It didn’t look like there were enough of them by his eyes.
‘You ready?’ He turned to face Lizzie before pushing the lever as hard as possible. ‘Get your head down.’ He took her by the arm and pulled her close to him. He shielded most of her body with his and made sure her head was behind his shoulders. One thump, then another, then five more. They hadn’t started to scream or howl. The train was rocking back and forth on the tracks violently. Thud! Thud, thud! Three more went under the wheels and they could hear their bones crack and skulls smash. Only a few more and they were through the tunnel past the next darkened station.
‘It’s over now.’ Logan let her go and started washing the thick black blood off the window again. There must have been a hundred or more stations on this line! He pulled back on the lever and slowed the train down. He didn’t want to risk derailing. He glanced at his watch, hidden under the sleeve of his jacket. They were making good time but Cygan still had a nervous finger hovering over that button!
The next few stations were mostly deserted and a slow pace sufficed. There might have been the odd zombie standing on the platform waiting for his or her morning commuter but nothing worse than that. They had been very lucky so far.
‘So this General Cygan?’ Lizzie began and relaxed a little. She brushed past Logan and sat down in the driver’s chair. He was stood arched forward peering through the dark looking for the next threat. She slumped back and put her feet up on the console.
‘What about him?’ Logan asked a little defensively.
‘What’s his problem?’ She fired back.
‘He...’ Logan paused a little to think his phrasing though.
‘He doesn’t understand.’
‘What do
you mean?’ She asked rocking from side to side impatiently and fidgety in her seat. ‘You said he was an old friend?’
‘And he always will be. A difference of opinion doesn’t mean I don’t still count him as my friend. Just because he finds himself on the wrong side this time doesn’t mean that the man behind the stars isn’t my friend.’ Logan explained and turned briefly to face her.
‘I…I don’t understand.’ She sat still for a second and pulled her legs down.
‘Kind of how the civil war tore apart a brother from his brother, or a son from his father, in that opinions on slavery and other causes were polarized. I never got that. Just because a war finds you on the wrong side to that of your family or your friend doesn’t mean that person has to stop being your dad or your brother or your best buddy. This is a war too whether we like it or not.’ Logan spoke slowly and softly. That was a well-conditioned opinion that seemed to have been formed with experience in mind. Logan continued.
‘He earned his commission in Vietnam, a long time before I joined the Air Force. He doesn’t understand how to fight a war like this one. He sees the Vietcong hiding in the trees and in the tunnels and he sees an arsenal of nuclear bombs that he can use to burn them out. It’s almost like he has tunnel vision or something like that. He can only see a situation through his old eyes. He has a list of problems the length of his arm and a list of solutions that he can count on his fingers of one hand. Those solutions are formed by his limited past experiences and he can’t think outside of the box he is trapped in. How many people do you suppose died in the city alone because of their need to grasp hold tightly of their former lives, or to solutions informed by that former life? How many boarded the window’s only to have them come crashing in? How many …’
‘You mean me?’ She asked a little embarrassed. She had taken that option too but she had been lucky to live a little longer than the ones he was talking about.
‘I suppose.’ That hurt her. ‘But then you have to understand him too. He is taking a solution that he knows, one that is familiar to him, one that’s comfortable. Only problem is, unlike you, he can’t see his error and realize that a new problem needs a new solution. When reality shifted around us, only those that can shift with it, will be able to keep on surviving.’
He stopped talking there. He could see her reflection in the window ahead of him. His words had cut deep and had hit a nerve. He hadn’t been trying to upset her or condemn her for not having tried to get out sooner. Some people could be trapped. Some people refused to let go of the things they used to glue themselves to their world and their reality. They feared that when they let go their lives would mean nothing and they would drift away into the void of meaninglessness
He didn’t count her as one of them. She was a fighter and no doubt about it. But she was young and as green as they came. He would let her sulk a little and didn’t try to talk to her again for a while.