Alex Van Helsing Voice of the Undead - By Jason Henderson Page 0,28

into a woman by mistake. He kept moving. He lingered for a moment next to the first entrance to the train, where a station official eyed him for a moment and then ignored him, taking him for just another confused kid looking for his train. Alex could count on the man to not only ask him no questions, but to be silently hoping Alex wouldn’t ask for any help, either.

Alex climbed up the stairs at the end and headed down to the center platforms, passing Sangster and Armstrong as he went. Sangster didn’t even glance up at him from his coffee and his copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. As Alex began to walk along track 3 on his left, he tried to reach out, cut away all noise and distraction. Nothing. Past the first ticket master and the next. Nothing.

Then he felt a whisper, a jagged hiss in his mind. Alex looked up the platform as various patrons of the station moved back and forth. “I felt something,” he said, and Armstrong responded. “Where?” he heard her say in his ear.

There was a pale man in a coat at the end of the platform, just under the terrace where Sangster and Armstrong sat. He was holding a cell phone, and now took it away from his ear, staring at its screen.

Make that very pale. The static hissed, but the guy was fifty feet away and so close to Armstrong and Sangster that they could spill their coffee on him.

Sangster spoke sharply. “Turn around and walk, Alex, that guy is taking your picture.”

Alex swiveled and started moving, scanning the trains. “How do you know?”

“He keeps sweeping the area with his phone.”

“Maybe it’s him I sensed,” Alex whispered.

“Just look for the train.”

Alex reached the end of the station, the end where he’d begun, and turned to begin the walk down the next couple of trains.

The clock chimed and the chipper voice bellowed across the cold station: “Attention: tracks two, four, and six departing immediately.”

Alex started moving faster, reaching the end of train 5. “Anything?” Sangster said in his ear, from where he sat with his coffee, far behind him.

“Is the photographer still there?”

“He’s moved on; I lost him in the crowd.”

There was a loud cry and at the end of the station, a pair of double doors opened. A soccer team poured in, shouting as they ran, all bare legs and green shorts, down the platform. Alex headed to the entrance to train 6’s last car, trying to listen, and was nearly knocked over by two Italian soccer players, both leaping up onto the train. He pushed back, shoving through the crowd.

A teenage girl in a long coat was hanging on to one of the soccer players. She laughed as she plowed into Alex, and Alex slipped around her. The crowd had grown larger. An older athlete, also in a soccer uniform but with a wool scarf over his shoulders, was shouting to the others in Italian, “Buona, ragazzi! Just a few minutes!”

Something hissed and buzzed in Alex’s ear, in his mind but as if outside of him. He spun around as students and soccer players smashed past.

A porter was opening up a cargo panel and unloading an enormous stack of boxes onto a rolling cart. Alex tried to make eye contact with Sangster and Armstrong, but they were blocked behind the boxes and the train.

The static increased and Alex turned to face the entrance of the station, approaching train 6’s entrance. The train official at the bottom of the steps did not notice him. The hissing was growing.

“Number six,” Alex said, “it’s number six.”

Alex peered up at the windows into the train, at sleepy faces either dozing or gazing out the window. There was a man with blond hair and a leather baseball cap glancing past him, and Alex found himself staring into the man’s eyes before he realized the hissing in his mind had forced him to stop.

The blond man stared back, and something like recognition came over him. He nodded, and Alex looked in the direction of his nod.

The porter slammed shut the panel on the side of the train and now he was approaching Alex at lightning speed. Alex felt something grab his collar. He opened his mouth, and a hand was placed over it. The ticket master moved away, looking elsewhere, and Alex tried to cry out as the porter dragged him onto the train, metal stairs smacking into the back of Alex’s legs as