Read Online What Happens in the Darkness by Monica J. O'Rourke - Free Book Online

there.
    She turned toward the tracks but didn’t want to go. Dreaded the thought of facing those bodies by the train, of facing that darkness again. But she couldn’t stay here. Not with these dead bodies. There was no exit out of here either.
    Something grabbed Janelle’s arm.
    She screamed. That thing from the tunnel had caught her, that rotten tall man. He’d found her and now he had her, and now she would die too.
    Whatever horrible, oozing, laughing mess that held her in its grip was planning to chew into her stomach, rip out her guts.
    She yanked on her arm and tried to pull away. She aimed the light in its face.
    One half of its head was crushed, the hair wet and matted with blood that looked black in the dim light. One of its eyes bulged like an overripe grape. This mess threw back her head and opened her mouth. Her teeth were shattered bits. The woman coughed and groaned.
    Janelle shrieked and frantically pulled away, heard the injured woman fall to the ground as Janelle scuttled in the opposite direction, back on to the tracks. Guilt filled her when she realized she’d left the woman alone to suffer, but Janelle was too scared to turn back.
    She ran the length of the platform. The entrance to the next uptown station was completely blocked by concrete.
    She raised her shaking arm and shined the flashlight into the downtown tunnel. It swallowed the beam whole. But she had no choice. She would have to go back to the Eighty-Sixth Street station. Back where she came from. Back through that miserable black hole.
    The hurt woman hadn’t come from the dark tunnel, Janelle thought. She’d probably been a victim of the bomb. But Janelle couldn’t go back and face her. Just couldn’t.
    So whatever had been in the dark before—breathing down her back in the inky shadows, unseen but felt —was probably still there.

 
     
    Chapter 5 
     
     
    Janelle knew she needed to be more careful—a lot more careful—because getting injured down here would mean the end of everything. No one was coming to rescue her. No one would answer her screams for help. Even if Harry heard her, he couldn’t walk. So she would die alone in a pitch-black tomb, attacked by rats and whatever else was crawling or slithering around in the darkness.
    That first step back into the tunnel had been the worst. Noises surrounded her, low growling and high-pitched squeaks and squeals, the rhythm of metallic clangs and crumbling debris. Echoing sounds, like rocks being kicked, and something smashing against metal posts.
    By what, she didn’t want to imagine.
    No weapons anywhere, and Janelle had been keeping an eye out for one. A metal pole, a chunk of wood, a brick. Anything solid. Anything at all. Concrete lay everywhere, but most of it was in enormous slabs, or small hand-sized chunks that crumbled when she picked them up.
    She aimed the light, spotlighting her path, and she took her first few steps alongside the train, jumping over the dead mother and child. She craned her neck, straining to hear anything lurking ahead in the darkness and heard nothing.
    The smell from the subway cars—stench of decaying trash, of sweat and body odor and something even more awful—had grown worse. It oozed through the closed car doors, wafted through cracks in the seams and in the reinforced Plexiglas windows.
    She stopped.
    The door to the next car was open.
    Her breath caught in her throat. She was sure that door had been closed before. How had it gotten open?
    She froze. To go back now meant death, meant being trapped for sure, meant facing that badly mangled woman, facing those dead bodies. She had to go forward. But to go forward … could she even get her legs to work?
    Pressing herself against the tunnel wall, she aimed the light down the tracks and beneath the train with a hand shaking so badly she could barely control the flashlight.
    Nothing there. Nothing hiding.
    She took a tiny step toward the open door and sidled along the tunnel wall, bits of