Poe stepped closer into the light until she saw the high ceiling of the station waiting area. Her head was four feet short of the platform above.
“ Fuck me,” she grunted as she pushed a crouching man up at the expense of her lower back.
“Thank goodness for drugs! Get up, you! You don’t want to mess with a train.”
The whistle sounded nightmarishly closer. The Metro Red Line was supposed to be a dead route.
“Poe! Are you down there?” Megan screamed over the sound of cattle crying to be helped and the blaring of the train.
Poe shook her head before answering. “Yeah, I’m here.” She elbowed her way to the front, lowered her goggles to her neck, and sheathed her gun. The station lights blared into her cornea. The mob scene reminded her of a Laker championship game she once saw as a kid where crazed fans trampled a basketball player’s spouse.
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“Take my hand,” said a voice she recognized to be Morales’. Poe clutched his arms. As she was getting pulled up, two or three cattle hung on to her legs. They were screaming above the train whistle for help. The whoosh of wind extinguishing the last of the candles many cattle still held added to the madness.
Stuck, Poe hollered, “Let go! Stop it!” But her voice was drowned out by Morales and Megan’s desperate bellows and the frenzied cries. She gave her throat a rest as she glimpsed the headlights of the train emerging from the dark tunnel.
Half of her body was suspended where the cattle hung on to her legs. She could feel their bony ribs as they hugged her limbs.
But it was the desperation on Megan and Morales’
faces as they tried unsuccessfully to pull her to safety that made her sob. She opened her mouth to tell her friends about Penny, but there wasn’t enough time. She closed her eyes and prepared to be separated from her lower extremities.
That was when her belly hit the platform, sprawled between the exhausted bodies of Megan and Morales, her boots missing the train by a hair. The three remained panting as they watched the train slow.
“Poe, you crazy girl,” Megan cried, embracing her friend.
Morales joined in by taking Poe’s face between his large hands and planting a slapdash kiss on the mouth.
“What are you trying to do, suffocate me?” said Poe breathlessly but with mock anger.
“Sorry to interrupt the love fest, but you three better get up and head for Platform C,” urged a familiar voice with a linty edge. “As you can see, the Council just brought in a trainload of reinforcements, and from the looks of it, they came from North Hollywood.”
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“Sainvire?” said Poe inaudibly. Perhaps his keen ears heard her whisper for he looked directly into her face, drinking in her unkempt, beaten appearance. He was there. All would be well.
“Poe,” he nodded then glanced at the tracks.
“Glad the train didn’t get you.”
With those words, Poe lost her concentration and looked behind her. Pieces of body parts decorated the edges of the tracks. She gagged. The scene reminded her of a magazine her sister had smuggled into their house when they were kids. It was the print version of Faces of Death. There was a whole section on Japanese salarymen who threw themselves in front of moving trains.
Megan gave her shoulders a squeeze. “C’mon, Poe.”
Morales cocked his Magnum and asked, “Want to ride piggyback?” Poe shook her head and thanked her friends for pulling her up just in time.
“It’s nothing, Poe. You’d do the same for us,”
Megan answered. “Besides, we were doing a poor job of it. My uncle, here, had to give the extra tug.”
Poe looked to where Sainvire stood, tense and bloodied. Bodies were stacked high for the day and Sainvire was aware of each and every one. He stared unsmiling and said, “Get a move on. Platform C is on the other side of the station, where the long distance tracks pick up.”
(((
“The train is loaded with overseers and vampire farmers,” said Rodney, an African American soldier, walking briskly alongside Sainvire.
“The best-laid plans gone to seed,” said Sainvire with flint. “So the Council’s secret weapons turn out to 328
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be farmers and rancher vampires with sun immunity?
They could’ve used them earlier when the sun was still up.” He allowed himself a small victory, though the working subway spur used by cattle that afternoon, thought to be decommissioned long ago, rankled him.
The subway train that nearly flattened Poe originated from the