Apocalypticon (8 page)

The Red Cap had a crucial decision to make--lie, or risk personal embarrassment in front of his peers. So, of course, he lied. “Oh. Yeah! Hey! Wow! Look at you!” he said, trying to sound convincing. “This is so crazy! What has it been--gosh, I don’t know how long.” Then, brave soul that he was, he took a real chance. “Has it been since...Arkansas?” he tried nervously.

Patrick jumped on the opportunity. “Arkansas!” he cried. “That’s exactly right! My God, the times we had, huh?” he beamed.

“Oh, yeah,” the Red Cap nodded. “I still get...just...chills. Thinking about it.”  

“Yeah! Wow! Just...just wow,” Patrick said, giving a low whistle. “Isn’t it crazy that after all these years, it took the apocalypse to get us back together?”

“Sure. When all it would have taken was a phone call,” the Red Cap said, laughing uncomfortably.

Patrick clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Wow, yeah, so, we need to catch up, we--actually, may we?” he asked, taking a careful tiptoe step into a gap in the line of guards.

The Red Cap looked conflicted, but now that he’d committed, it was better for him to embrace it. A lot of people were watching. “Oh! Yeah, yeah, come on through. Guys, let them through. These are old friends. From Arkansas!”

“Go Razorbacks,” Patrick said with a little fist pump. He slid between two stern looking guards. Ben followed close behind. “Go Wal-Mart,” he murmured. 

“So,” Patrick said, clapping the Red Cap on the shoulder and bobbing his head encouragingly. “We should catch up. What’ve you been up to? What’re you doing now?”

The Red Cap nodded. “Right, right, well, you know, I work for Amtrak,” he said, pointing to the patch on his shirt.

“Oh, yeah, right, of course. Sounds like a great gig, great...you know...side benefits...and stuff.”

“Yeah, it’s good. It’s good. Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

The three men stood awkwardly, Patrick rubbing the back of his neck, Ben trying to look uninterested, the Red Cap rocking back and forth on his heels. The other Amtrak employees were no longer paying them any attention, and the Red Cap seemed desperate to get out of the situation. He smiled and continued to nod. “Yeah,” he said again.

Patrick cleared his throat. “Ahem. So. What do you think we—“

“Stevens!” came a loud cry from across the bridge. The Red Cap snapped around at the sound of his name. A young, reddish-haired Red Cap was jogging in their direction. Stevens looked mightily relieved.

“Louis! There you are! Great! Louis, these are, ah...my friends,” he said, indicating the other two men.

Louis nodded politely, but he was obviously in a rush. “Horace wants us on cargo duty, stat.”

Stevens let out a massive breath of relief. “Oh! Right! Cargo duty!” He turned to Patrick. “Listen, I am
so
sorry, but I have to run. It was so good running into you, I’ve got to go, ah...will you two be all right finding your way out? I’m sorry, I have to go.”

“Oh, it’s fine! That’s fine, we’ll be fine,” Patrick said, waving him off. “Not a problem. Go on. We’ll be fine.”

“Okay, great. Well. So good to see you!”

“Oh, you too!” Stevens reached out a hand to shake. Patrick misread the gesture and moved in for a hug. By the time he realized his mistake, it was too late; he was committed. He embraced the Red Cap slowly and stiffly. Stevens shouldered nervously away, but patted Patrick on the back three times quickly. Then he turned and ran off with the other Red Cap.

Patrick turned to Ben and tapped his finger against his nose. “Just like I planned it.”

“Not bad,” Ben admitted. “I thought I was going to have to go fielder’s choice on these sons of bitches.” He swung the bat lazily for emphasis.

“That’s not--you don’t know baseball, do you?” he asked. Ben shrugged. “Well, what say we go find ourselves a train!”

Now that they had breached the security line, they found the way basically free and clear. A few of the patrolling Red Caps gave them suspicious looks, but most had seen them talking with Stevens, and if some of them hadn’t, well, the fact remained that these two strangers had made it past their defenses, so there must be a good reason for it. It wouldn’t do to question the front line’s abilities before the whole squad. The two travelers hurried across the bridge and up the concrete stairs to the left, to the northeast corner of the 222 South Riverside Plaza building. They nodded politely to the Red Caps guarding the door and were allowed to pass through the doorway. Patrick thought back to a time when he and Annie had ridden the train to St. Louis, back before Izzy was born. They’d used this very entrance, and the doors had slid open at their arrival. Now, those doors were gone, replaced by a huge, ragged hole blown out of the wall. They stepped through gingerly, avoiding dusty, charred rubble, and found themselves on a short landing with four flights of steps directly ahead. The middle rows of stairs were technically escalators, though they weren’t doing much escalating these days. “Pffft,” Patrick said, shooing a hand at the broken escalators. “They didn’t work last time I was here either. I don’t know why I pay my taxes, nothing changes.”

They descended the steps slowly and carefully. The landing was at ground level, so the farther down they went, the farther underground they were. There were no skylights in the station, save a few fist-sized holes that had been blown into the ceiling. A handful of Red Caps scampered through the halls, running errands and paying no attention to the two strangers in the corridor. Every hundred feet of so, a candle burned on the floor along the wall, throwing dim, orange halos and long shadows. Patrick lifted the hammer from Ben’s belt loop. “Hey!” Ben cried, swatting at Patrick’s hand. But Patrick was adamant.

“You’re holding the bat, you can’t use it anyway.” Ben grumbled his assent. Patrick held the hammer in his left hand and took the baton from his pocket with his right, popping it open with a quick flick of the wrist. Behind him, Ben gripped the bat with both hands, ready to swing like Mike McGwire. Or was it Matt McGwire? Pat was right, Ben didn’t really know baseball.

They crept along the hall, passing between a ransacked McDonald’s counter on the right and the black, burned out husk of a Corner Bakery on the left. Something rustled across the McDonald’s linoleum. Patrick swung to the right and raised the hammer, his heart thudding in his chest. A rat raced out of the darkness and stopped three feet from where they stood. It raised its head and screamed at them, then turned and skittered around the corner.

“Jesus hell,” Ben cursed, breathing hard. “What are we
doing
down here?”

“It’s the only way I know to the platform,” Patrick said. “The train boards underground.”

“Shit, then let’s
walk
to Disney World. Above the underground, where there’s light.”

“It’s not far. Just be ready.”

“For what?”

Patrick shrugged. “For anything.”

They crept farther down the hall, coming to another set of stairs and broken down escalators. A huge advertisement for Chase Bank covered the steps and the escalator rails. Chase had been Patrick’s bank. “Hey, Ben,” he said, easing himself down the stairs. “Remember money?”

“I remember people
talking
about money. I don’t remember ever seeing any for myself. Also, Rule Number Seven.”
Money is no longer money. Food, weapons, shelter, and clothing are money.

At the bottom of the stairwell, they made a U-turn to the right. Through the gloom, Ben could just barely see the outlines of doorways. The hallway candlelight illuminated thin wisps of Monkey fog on the other side, making the dark air glow yellow. They nearly collided with a Red Cap as they turned the sharp corner. “Watch where you’re going, jackass!” she whispered, before taking off around the corner and up the stairs. Patrick turned to Ben. “Was she talking to you, or me?” Ben shrugged.

They moved cautiously down the hall. Patrick wished, not for the first time in his post-apocalyptic career, that he had an emergency survival flashlight. There was one in the emergency kit in the trunk of Annie’s car, the kind of flashlight that you powered with a hand crank, but it had gone up in flames like everything else. He’d searched everywhere for a replacement, but to no avail. Emergency flashlights were worth their weight in pre-M-Day gold.

“Which track is it?” Ben asked, nodding to the column of train tracks beyond the doors on their left.

Patrick shook his head. “A: How the hell should I know? And B: Those are the Metra rails. We’re not taking the Metra. I am
not
going to the suburbs.” He spit on the floor for emphasis.

After about thirty feet, they came to a hallway on the right. It, too, had once had electronically sliding doors, but they seemed to be in short supply these days.

They could hear voices now, faint voices coming from somewhere up ahead. The darkness looked a little less complete up there, and Patrick realized there must be light around the corner at the far end of the hall, maybe a hundred feet ahead. They crept toward it, their sneakers crunching over wrappers and magazines scattered around the floor. They passed a newsstand that had been smashed to bits. The Coca-Cola case now rested on its side, along with the magazine racks and snack shelves. Patrick noticed with some amusement that someone had bashed in the glass top in the center of the checkout counter and stolen the Illinois Lottery scratch-offs from their cubbies.

Immediately after the newsstand, the hall opened up into a high-ceilinged lobby. A tall set of staircases rose off to the right, leading back up to street level, where dim, yellow light filtered in through more busted doors. Farther to the right, Union Station continued underground, beneath Canal Street and over to the original Union Station building. Patrick peered down the long, dark hall and saw sparks in the distance that might have been fires burning on the station floor. To their left was the entrance to the Amtrak waiting rooms. Here, too, the sliding doors had been ripped from their tracks and tossed haphazardly aside. There were loud shouts coming from the waiting room, and they decided to bypass it. They continued straight down the hall.

“Need help with your bags?” a voice rasped from the stairwell. Ben jumped and swung his bat in the general direction of the voice. He swung so hard that the momentum carried it around in a full arc, missing Patrick’s skull by centimeters. “Need help with your bags?” the voice asked again in a ragged, choking tone. Patrick peered into the darkness. A lumpy figure crouched on the stairs, swaying gently back and forth. “Need help with your bags?”

“I don’t think he’s talking to us,” Patrick whispered. He took a cautious step closer, hammer raised, poised to strike. The man on the stairs wasn’t facing them. He crouched on the balls of his feet, back against the railing, staring at the opposite stairwell.

“Need help with your bags?”

Patrick lowered the hammer and quietly backed away. “Come on. Let’s go.”

“My God, this is so creepy,” Ben whispered. “Hey. Let me hold the machete.”

“Jesus, no!” Patrick hissed. “That’s literally the only way this situation gets more terrifying.”

The hall terminated at the Amtrak platforms. They could just barely see the straight outlines of the train tracks in the darkness ahead. The glow of light grew brighter to the left. They turned the corner and found a group of Red Caps surrounding a short man in a blue hat. The man in blue hovered over some papers splayed out on the floor, the Red Caps illuminating them with old-fashioned oil lamps.

Patrick had been on enough Amtrak trains to know that while the Red Caps might be the muscle, the Blue Caps were the brains. A blue cap signified a member of the on-board train crew, the servicemen, the ticket-takers, and the conductor. The Blue Cap was his man.

He pulled Ben back around the corner, into the darkness. “Okay,” he whispered. “It’s game time. Are you ready?”

Ben nodded. “What’s the plan?”

“Do you trust me?”

“Not really, no. What’s the plan?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

Patrick hesitated. “Because you won’t like it.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Ben asked.

“No, I mean you
really
won’t like it.”

“Fine, then just tell me what it is so I can refuse to go along with it.”

“No, see, that’s why I need you to trust me.”

“Patrick, tell me the plan.”

“Do you trust me?”

“I’d trust you a lot more if you told me the plan.”

“I want you to look me in the eyes and say, ‘Patrick, I trust you.’”

“Okay, okay, I get it. Patrick, I trust you.”

“Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“No matter what?”

“Yes, no matter what.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Of course I mean it!” Ben hissed. “I trust you, okay? I trust you, I trust you, I fucking trust you!”

“Okay. Remember you said that.”

Ben furrowed his brow. He was about to ask why, but before he could make a sound, Patrick hauled off and whacked him in the face with the hammer.

Ben’s howls of pain brought the Amtrak crew running. Patrick slipped the hammer into his belt loop as the Red Caps skidded around the corner, weapons brandished. They held their lanterns up to the scene before them. Orange light flickered over Ben’s writhing body on the ground. Patrick stood over him angrily, his fists planted firmly on his hips.

“I demand to know who’s responsible for this!” he cried. The Red Caps looked from one to another, confused. “Well? Speak up!”

The man in the blue hat shouldered his way through the mob of Red Caps, which was no easy feat, given his diminutive stature. He stood no taller than 5’5”, more than a full head shorter than the shortest Red Cap. A long, brown mustache bushed from beneath his nose and tapered to drooping points below the corners of his mouth. His eyes were lost behind a pair of small, circle-rimmed glasses that would have been a better fit for a United States Postmaster, circa 1883. Though he was on the husky side, he must have lost at least a little weight since the apocalypse, because he kept hitching up his pants as he moved. “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded, huffing in consternation.

“That is precisely what I’d like to know!” Patrick said. “One of your Red Caps attacked my poor friend here with some sort of blunt instrument. I demand to know why, and I demand justice! Where’s the conductor of your train?”

“I am the conductor,” the little man said, puffing his chest out. “Now what’s this about an attack?”

“One of your men came tearing through here with some sort of weapon and smashed it directly into my friend’s face! I mean, just look at him! He’s hideous now!” He indicated Ben’s crumpled form with both hands. He was moaning loudly, cursing with angry nonsense.