Degeneration (12 page)

The people didn’t turn back. Instead, the crowd seemed to come forward
. The white-suit raised the loudspeaker again, nervous.

“
If you do not turn back immediately, we have been authorized to use deadly force in order to enforce this quarantine.
”

Somebody flung an empty bottle
at the white-suit and
startled him. He dropped the loudspeaker. As t
he crowd erupted in
angry protest, t
he frightened white-suit j
umped off of the Humvee and ran to safety.

T
he
guardsmen manning the turrets on
the
Humvees
opened fire into the crowd.

Men, women, and children
gave shrill screams as the gunfire tore into them
.
Bullet-riddled corpses collapsed on
the blood-soaked pavement
.

The guardsmen stopped firing, turrets
smoking.

The blood-
spl
attered crowd screamed and collapsed back in
on itself in a wild panic, trampling many
and stumbling over the already dead
.

Half of the panicked drivers tried to go in reverse while the other half tried to drive forward
.
A chain of collisions rippled down the street and
the drivers quickly realiz
ed that they had rendered
themselves
immobile.

One of the vehicles in the front tried to barrel through the checkpoint–

The .50 caliber rounds tore the vehicle and its occupants to shreds. The scrapped, bullet-riddled vehicle rolled to a stop, tangled in razorwire.

People abandoned their
cars and took off running away from the checkpoint towards the center of downtown.

Within minutes, the crowd in front of the Glenwood-Five Points checkpoint
had dispersed and all that was left behind were bullet-riddle corpses and countless abandoned vehicles.

Hours later,
Howell slowly opened his eyes. H
e was sure he was-

(
dead?
)

He was lying on the remains of a
fluorescent ceiling light.
The bulb had shattered and
glass shar
ds had embedded into his side. Something cold and heavy was lying on
him, crushing him, restricting his breathing.

He groaned and
,
with glass shards crackling
under
neath
him, t
urned his head. He saw that the
corpse of the old lady who
had been sitting next to him was lying on him, not breathing. She was
buried
along
with him under
neath
a
large
pile of luggag
e.

He laid his head back down and
coughed violently, spurting up blood. Howell knew he wasn't dead, but
also knew that he wasn’t
far from it. What happened? It had to
have
be
en
the bomb-

(
sensitive trigger perhaps?)

No, couldn't be. Howell knew he didn't buil
d mistakes. With painful effort
, he elbowed the old
woman
off
of him with a curse and clawed
his way
out of
the
luggage tomb
.

As he moved, his body ached
with
sharp pain. He ran a cautious hand
along his throbbing side and
felt
the
embedded
glass shards
protruding from his side. Carefully, he
pinched one of the shards and slowly pulled it out
; the pain was intense. He pulled out another shard, sweat beading across
his forehe
ad; it was longer,
more painful
to remove
, and
was coated with
dark
er
blood.
H
e
gave an agonizing cry
and threw the bloody piece of glass
down
. The other pieces inside him would have to wait
since he
couldn’t work up the nerve to even to
uch another one. 

He tried to calm
himself and loo
k around–

It
quickly became apparent that the bomb didn’t cause the damage. T
he whole
train car was laying upside-down
. He looked up at the
rows of
seats above him.
In some of the seats, people hung limp with their arms and legs dangling down, swaying side-to-side. They were
still
fastened against their seats by the seatbelts wrapped across their lap.

Those who hadn’t worn their seatbelts lay scattered and twisted amongst
the tossed luggage
.

Howell stood up and searched through the scattered luggage. He
finally found his duffle
underneath the
mangle
d corpse of man. He kicked the corpse
aside and
snatched the
duffle greedily. Moving carefully
, he
waded through the
mangled corpses and
scattered suitcases towards the exit door
.

At
the end of th
e car, in front of the exit door, he saw the corpse
of one of
the Amtrak cops.

Howell reached down and pulled the pistol
out of the cop's holster. He slid the gun under his belt, tucked the duffle under his
arm, and crawled up to the exit, using the
corpse
of the police officer as a stepstool.

The officer’s spine cracked audibly as
Howell’s bodyweight pressed down on it.

Howell climbed up
and tumbled over
the
top edge of the door. He landed outside of the car and rolled over onto his back, screaming in pain as the glass shards slid deeper into his lacerations. After lying still for a minute, withering in pain, he stood,
spat blood, and took
a look around.

Wreckage
lay strewn all around him.
Train cars were scattered everywhere and multiple fires billowed black smoke into the air.

Despite the chaotic scene of the derailment, Howell’s thoughts inevitably drifted back to his bomb. He unzipped his duffle and looked–

“Shit,” he said faintly. The
timer
that he had activated when he thought that the Amtrak cops were going to arrest him was still counting
down
diligently by
the microsecond.
He only had eight hours until the bomb would detonate.
Eight hours to get to New York?
Normally, it wouldn’t be
improbable, but he noticed that
the day looked anything but normal.

Army helicop
ters hovered between the skyscrapers and smoke billowed out
from the center of
down
town. Burglar alarms and sirens wailed
everywhere. In the surrounding streets
, he saw
people running around aimlessly, many carrying boxes or
armfuls of clothes with the tags still on. Shouts and gunfire echoed in the distance. H
i
s first thoug
ht was that he was in the middle of a riot
.
But–

H
owell’s gaze slowly
went
back to the
train
accident itself.

If a train crashe
d in a major city, Howell
expect
ed
to see all sorts of fir
st responders
. However, the only people
at the scene were six people in hazmat suits checking corpses
.
One of the white-suits spotted him.

The white-suit
unslung the rifle from his shoulder and started to cross the street–

A Humvee
honked and caused the
white-suit
to stumble bac
kwards onto the curb.
A long convoy of
Humvees sped past and weaved in-between
the
train
wreckage that littered the street.

The white-suit
stared at the procession, momentarily forgetting about the man on the other side of the street. When the convoy finally
passed
, Howell was gone
. The white-suit
grumbled and figured that the man would get rounded up by another patrol, so it didn’t
matter. He went back to work checking
corpses.

Howell staggered along
the side of
McDowell Street
, heading deeper into downtown, gripping his bleeding left side
. Abando
ned vehicles, many loaded down
with luggage,
haphazardly
clogged the roa
d. He
lurched along the
glass-littered sidewalk past
shops and cafes that had their windows shat
tered and their contents looted out.

The city looked empty.

Howell
trudged on
as t
he shouts and gunfire echoing
in the distance started to ebb and the pedestrian traffic started to dissipate.

As Howell passed a Starbucks
, a man
leapt
out through
the shattered storefront window
carrying a cash register with the cords still
attached. The man
stared at Howell
for a second
and took off runni
ng down the opposite direction, headed towards an intersection.

Howell watched, stunned, and then raised a hand-

“
Wait!
What the hell is going on?
” Howell shouted
.

Suddenly, two white vans
careened into the intersection and skidded to a stop
. The man
dropped the cash register and
ran back towards Howell but
tripped
and landed
on the sidewalk, coughing violently, struggling to get back on his feet.

Four white-suits hopped out of the vans,
each totting automatic
weapons. They
surrounde
d the man at gunpoint.

“
Freeze!”
one of the white-suits
ordered, his voice muffled by his plastic faceshield.
“Put your hands above your head! Now!”

The man placed his hands above his head, shaking, terrified.

One of the
other white-suits
opened
one of the van’s rear doors
. Inside the back of the van, people
, all coughing and sneezing,
sat on metallic benches
with their hands zip-cuffed in their laps
. They looked
at Howell with feverish
faces.

A white-suit bound the man’s hands together with zip-cuffs
and
shoved
him inside
the van
.

“Where are you taking me?” the man asked,
terrified
.

“
We’re taking you to a FEMA s
taging
c
enter,
” a white-suit replied
. Before the man could protest
, the rear door of the van
slammed shut.

Howell watched in confusion,
clinching his
wounded
side.

One of the white-suit
s pointed at Howell
and quickly alerted the other
white-suited
soldiers.
They all turned and aimed their rifles
at Howell.

“
You! On the sidewalk! Stay where you are!”
one of the
m
ordered.

Howell abruptly t
urned and ran inside the Starbucks
.

A spray of bullets struck the sidewalk in Howell’s wake and ricocheted
off of the Starbucks’ facade
, chipping bricks and shattering what little glass remained intact
along the store’s windowsill
.