Chapter 18: Nine Paces

Chapter 18: Chapter 18: Nine Paces

They came down all at once.

Twenty-two stalkers let go of the ceiling together, and for one awful second the air above the platform was full of pale, falling bodies. They landed on all fours, spread out like spilled water, and came across the platform faster than anything that size had a right to move.

"Go," Elias said.

Aveline went. Not at the stalkers but past them, in a full sprint down the platform toward the tunnel mouth, cutting through anything in her path without slowing. A half second later, Elias understood. The stalkers already in the station were a problem. The ones still pouring out of the tunnel were an endless problem. Close the tunnel, and the problem had a number.

She reached the arch, turned, and planted her feet.

Nine paces of black brick. One knight.

The first stalker that came out of the dark behind her never touched the platform. It leapt off the tunnel wall, claws out, and Aveline cut it out of the air in a single stroke; its two halves hit the tracks separately. The second came low along the rails, and she drove her shield rim through its skull. The third and fourth came together. She took one on her shield and one on her sword and shoved them both back into the dark.

Behind Elias, a rifle cracked.

Marcus had climbed onto the roof of the ticket booth in the middle of the platform. He knelt there with the rifle at his shoulder, firing without hurry, one round at a time. Each round left the barrel glowing faint blue, and none of them missed. A stalker leaping at Elias’s back dropped mid-air with a hole under its jaw. Another, clinging to the ceiling above the train, let go and fell like a stone.

His magazine never ran dry. The system, apparently, had decided ammunition was its problem now.

"They’re not looking at us," Marcus said. "Why aren’t they looking at us?"

Elias watched. The stalkers that weren’t fighting were climbing the sides of the train, pressing their eyeless faces to the windows, clawing at the glass. Inside, people were screaming and pounding on the windows.

And every time someone pounded, the stalkers nearest that window turned toward the sound.

"They hunt by sound," Elias said. "The noise inside the train is drawing them in."

"Then make it quiet," Marcus said, and shot the stalker clinging to the third car’s window.

Elias ran for the front of the train.

The lead car sat closest to the tunnel mouth, eight meters from Aveline’s back. He found the emergency release under a plastic cover beside the door, yanked it, and threw his good shoulder into the door until it shuddered open on its track.

"Out! Up the stairs! Stay against the wall, and don’t run!"

Twenty people spilled out past him. He counted them without meaning to. Then he looked down the platform at the other seven cars stretching away into the dark, and his stomach dropped.

The train was more than a hundred and fifty meters long, and his summons couldn’t go more than thirty from him. If he walked down the platform to open the rear cars, Aveline would be ripped away from the tunnel mouth. The tunnel would open, and every stalker in the gate would pour out.

He couldn’t go to them.

So they had to come to him.

Through the open door, at the very front of the car, the driver’s cab hung open, its driver nowhere in sight. On the console sat a microphone on a coiled cord.

Elias climbed into the cab, picked up the microphone, pressed the button, and spoke as calmly as he ever had in his life.

"Attention, passengers." His voice came out of every speaker in every car, steady and low. "Please stop knocking on the windows. The noise is attracting them. Stay quiet and walk forward through the connecting doors toward the front of the train. Don’t run. Don’t shout. There’s a way out at the front."

He let go of the button.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, all along the train, the pounding stopped.

In the Link, the blue dots began to move, slowly at first and then steadily, shuffling through the doors between cars toward him. The red dots clinging to the windows hesitated. With no noise to follow, they turned their blind heads, searching.

Marcus shot them while they searched.

Elias went back to the door and started waving people out. Car eight emptied into car seven, car seven into car six. The blue dots flowed forward like water through a pipe, and he sent them up the stairs one after another. Fifteen red markers left. Ten. Seven.

Then the flow stopped.

He saw it in the Link first: a cluster of blue dots in the third car that had stopped moving. They were bunched against the connecting door between cars three and two, and the people behind them were starting to back up.

Elias ran to the third car’s platform door and looked through the glass.

A family. A father with a bleeding forehead, a mother holding a toddler, a boy of about ten clinging to her coat, and a few more passengers behind them. In front of them, the connecting door into car two was crumpled inward, its frame bent like a soda can where something heavy had struck the train when it stopped. It wouldn’t open. The platform door in front of Elias was bent the same way.

He grabbed the emergency release. It came off in his hand.

"Marcus, the third car’s jammed."

"Copy." The rifle cracked twice. "Working the roof."

Elias set his feet and hauled on the door’s rubber seal with his good arm. It moved a centimeter. Without thinking, he put his left hand on it too, and his cracked forearm flared so badly that his vision went white at the edges. He pulled anyway. Two centimeters. Three.

Above him, metal shrieked.

He looked up. On the roof of the third car, three stalkers had found the seam where two panels met. Their claws were working into it, peeling the metal back like the lid of a can, and through the widening gap he could see the faces of the people inside, staring up.

The mother clamped her hand over the toddler’s mouth. The boy started to scream.

Every stalker in the station turned toward the sound.

"Marcus," Elias said.

"I see it," Marcus said. "Three on one line. Give me two seconds."

The roof gave way.