And Tom Piper watched from afar as Esme and the coat went toppling down toward the train tracks and the impatient C, forty-four tons of stainless steel per car, roared home.
27
The C-train came to a stop at roughly the same position it always reached at this platform (at least when Chester London was at the brake). He had seen the woman on the tracks, but by then he had been reaching for the brake already. Trains took time to slow down. He knew he wouldn’t be held accountable…unless, of course, the woman on the tracks had been the reason for the red light.
He left his compartment and rushed out to the platform. Everyone stared in silent shock at the spot on the tracks where Esme fell, which was now covered by the second-to-last car of the C-train. The tragedy had turned the hundreds of people into mute, gawking statues.
All but one, that is. Tom Piper approached the back of the train. Cain42 had scurried away when he’d realized everyone’s attention was fixed on Esme, but even if the monster had remained there on the platform, Tom would still have bypassed him for her. The gray-haired special agent climbed down to the tracks. He refused to believe she was dead. He didn’t know what he could do to help her, but God help him, he was going to try.
Chester, meanwhile, noticed ragged bits of the long brown coat caught up in the front wheels. The woman had been holding that coat. Still, there wasn’t any blood on the subway car. That had to indicate something, didn’t it?
Tom was on his stomach now and peering into the dark underbelly of the C-train. He lay in the one-and-a-half foot ravine between the subway’s two main rails, among potato chip wrappers and rat feces. He ignored it all.
“I need a flashlight!” he called out.
Two of the paramedics who’d been manning the triage center were already climbing down to the tracks. One had a flashlight and handed it to him. Tom shone the beam along the undercarriage.
The other paramedic had a body bag.
“It’s Tom!” His voice cracked, like old leather. He needed water. “Can you hear me?”
He crawled farther, now half-underneath the subway car. If he could fit like this, perhaps she’d been able to. He peered forward. A pair of yellow eyes peered back at him. They belonged to a furry rat the size of a puppy. The plump rodent squeaked a curse at him and then scampered off.
Tom crawled another few feet forward. He was now completely under the aft of the last car. The flashlight beam extended to the last car’s fore section, but no farther. He heard more squeaking, but no breathing. No Esme.
To make matters worse, the folks on the platform had recovered from their horror and had recommenced their chattering gossip. But at least they’d exhibited a few minutes of awe. At least they hadn’t yet become too desensitized.
Not all of the folks on the platform had recovered. One in particular was drowning ocean-deep in post-traumatic stress. The paramedics couldn’t find anything wrong with Grover physically, aside from the typical aftereffects of prolonged tear gas (a mind-splitting headache, which they treated with Tylenol; and excess phlegm, which they treated with an empty plastic cup for him to spit into). No, the injuries he was suffering were invisible and thus all the more deadly.
For the past ten minutes, a veteran NYPD detective named Chuck Rowling had been attempting to get something, anything, out of the poor man that could help add order to the chaos in the last car. Rowling knew there was another FBI agent on the train, Esme Stuart, but his Herculean task was to wrangle some sense out of this witness who was so obviously still in shock.
Then the woman was pushed to the tracks, and Rowling’s interview stopped. He saw the man who did it and, as the train braked to its screeching halt at the other end of the platform, watched the black-coated assailant casually make his way back to the turnstile. With one hand on his holstered sidearm, Chuck Rowling was in pursuit.
His other hand went for his radio.
“She’s breathing!” shouted someone, and Rowling, by instinct, turned to look. The voice came from the subway train—no, below the subway train. The woman was alive? How was that even—
Rowling turned back to look for the man in the black coat, but he was gone.