Read Online Metro by Stephen Romano - Free Book Online Page A

loud across the lawn, shatters a window in the front of the Kingdom, then strikes home and destroys the TV in the living room. The air is filled with the sound of crystal dynamite.
    Mark raises the assault monster and sights down carefully.
    He rides the last wave of the Xanax in his system, using it, focusing just like they trained him to.
    It all comes easier than breathing.
    The cop tries to fire again, but his finger freezes as Mark’s three shots chew the guy to hell, the modified rounds playing pinball with vital organs before chumming everything inside him into a living paste. The cop is gutted in this moment, and two of the bullets ricochetoff metal and rubber when they leave him. As he falls forward, just one goddamn foot from the open door of his squad car, the cop opens his mouth, and what’s left of his stomach evacuates up his throat in a meaty splatter, right into the concrete at his feet. The guy actually pukes up his own guts as he dies.
    Mark scans the lawn for Jackie’s Chevy Impala.
    Turns out it’s blocked in by the cop’s ride—and one of the Impala’s front tires is blown out too. What are the odds? Mark hears the air still hissing and sees the bullet holes stitched across the wheel well and driver’s door: what’s left of the barrage that killed the last cop. And other unfortunate law enforcement officers have already been summoned. Red lights are blowing up on panic boards all across the goddamn city.
    Mark’s got three or four seconds to make his call.
    It’s the squad car or nothing.
    Fuck.
    He suddenly looks up and sees two of his neighbors staring at him from across the street, standing just in front of their open front door. It’s the ancient hippie couple who always walk over in pajamas and buy his dirt weed—the non-hydro stash he keeps aside for the old-schoolers living off food stamps. Their names are Franklin and Toni. They are good people.
    They are looking at him like he is the devil right now.
    â€œGo back inside,” he says to them. “You want none of this.”
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    J ollie hears footfalls coming back in their direction.
    She shifts her great weight in the enclosed space, and Andy grabs her tighter, pulling her farther back. She resists him, feels trapped, naked in the dark. Because she is. Everything coming down so fast, so brutal. She wants to scream.
    â€œJollie? Andy?”
    Mark’s voice.
    She breaks free of Andy and scrambles out from under the bed, the air on her bare skin a chilling horror. She sees Mark slamming a long steel box closed. She smells the gunpowder and blood. And she sees the gory body of Spider-Girl. It doesn’t really register—like silly gross-out makeup and fake fangs on Halloween night. None of it seems real.
    Mark throws her clothes at her.
    â€œWe have thirty seconds to get the hell out of here.”
    Andy sticks his head out. “What the fuck just happened?”
    Mark looks at both of them, more seriously than he’s ever been about anything.
    â€œIt’s the end of the world,” he says.
    He grabs the Black Box by its long metal handle and grabs Jollie’s hand with the other. She gets dressed as he yanks her out the door and down the hall, Andy right behind them, the whole world a blur now, moving faster and faster. She never even has time to scream at the bodies in the living room—only clocks the pooling blood and the dead eyes and the smell of gunfire in tiny dreamlike bursts. It still doesn’t seem real at all.
    Andy sure as hell gets a damn good look at those bodies.
    He doesn’t scream either.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    P olice cars don’t have backseat safety belts for some insane reason, and Jollie thinks that’s just fucking absurd.
    Somewhere just outside of everything that is happening now, the screaming-activist reactionary that lives in even the most panicked version of her brilliant, overworked mind