Moonflower: Chapter Eight

King’s Street Station

08/31/24

Six days until Ring inspection

   The city of Dawson lay silent, blanketed in a thick fog, every shape twisting into a monstrous silhouette in the haze. Two figures darted between spots of cover, their eyes locked on the clouds, the heavy mist making them second guess their every move.

   “We're almost there.”

   Jacob may not have visited these streets since the end of the world, but he had come into the city a few years before the meteors lit the sky, and knew the roads well enough to guide Diana to where she needed to go. He closed his eyes for a second and wished on an unseen star that he was not leading her into the ravenous lion's den.

   In spite of the week of rest, the pain in his leg persisted, manifesting into a lingering limp that continued to limit their movements. Thankfully, Diana remained patient with him. She pointed out spots of uneven ground—or anywhere he could trip—without a word as they moved through the city block. He felt a blush color his ears, both self-conscious about the hindrance his dead weight was causing her and grateful for her attentive assistance.

   Finally the fog gave way and the tarnished red brick train station emerged into view. Its dark green and copper accents caught the light, giving it an almost old western movie-set look against the mossy abandoned street.

   “There.” His word shifted the woman's shoulders towards the intricate front of the three story building. “King’s Street Station.”

   King's Street Station was one of the only buildings left untouched by the bombing. It had remained in one piece while the other structures on the street were scarred with crumbling holes, which was one of the main reasons Goliath had chosen it for a supply hoard. The station was the best sealed option they had available to them in Dawson other than the fortress that was the jail.

   Diana's gulp was audible but her expression was as determined as ever. “Let's go.”

   “Wait!”

   His hand on her shoulder stopped her from approaching the double doors.

   “We can't just go runnin’ in guns blazin’. D'you even have a gun?”

   He knew the answer but the question was more to emphasize the point than to actually ask.

   She winced awkwardly. “I… have a knife?”

   He scowled, frustrated by her carelessness and by the rumble of his own hungry stomach. They were walking into a dangerous situation. The men who could be inside would not know he was alive, but they would be armed nonetheless—and no one in Dawson City Jail would hesitate to take out a hapless survivor like her.

   “Have you ever killed someone with it?”

   She shook her head. “Ha… Maybe you're right.”

   “Here, this way.”

   They snuck across the front, quickly and noiselessly slipping to the sheltered side alley of the enormous building. Jacob had never been there before, but in his experience the back doors of these kinds of establishments were left unlocked more often than not. 

   Protected by the shade, they turned the corner to where he believed the entrance should be. The sight of a red box tucked beside the door startled him stiff. It was the same type of box they used to lure the creature: full of explosives and fireworks—anything bright enough to call the attention of the half-blind beast. What was it doing out here?

   There must be someone inside.

   He grit his teeth. “We have t’be careful.”

   Diana's lack of response scared him into glancing around, the sudden jump in his stomach quickly subsiding as he found her paused over by the payphones, staring at the coin slots thoughtfully. Jacob tapped her arm as he spoke in a hushed voice.

   “Hey. You with me?”

   “Y-yes, sorry, I…” She steeled herself and nodded. “Yes.”

   “It's in and out, okay?” His grip tightened on the door as he clarified the plan to his unpredictable companion. “Get in, find this clue, and get out. Got it?”

   She didn't answer.

   Diana had tied up her hair into a tight bun but the long bangs framing her cheeks kept getting in her distant eyes. She should not be so distracted from the thing she had wanted so desperately. He peered into her face to catch her attention. “Diana?”

   She stopped, looking like she wanted to say something, but didn't. “Sorry, right. In and out—got it.”

   Jacob could feel her manner was uneasy and softened his tone. He let go of the door to stand close at her side. “What's goin’ on?”

   She was wringing her fingers when she spoke again. “Jacob… can… can we do something first?”

   “Huh?”

   “It's something my sister and I used to do with my parents growing up.” Her gaze wandered to the wall of ivy-covered payphones behind them and her brown eyes turned to little slits as she grinned calmly. “We'd do it before trips and school performances, and well, this feels… big.”

   He should be irritated at the time wasted, but something in her longing gaze made him feel almost sad, a melancholy nostalgia that he hadn't felt since he was a child. His tense shoulders dropped as he nodded with a simple smile.

   “Okay. What is it?”

   “Here, huddle up.”

   He blinked at her cluelessly.

   Diana lifted an eyebrow. “Like football?”

   “More of a baseball guy, myself.”

   “Oh.”

   The disdain she showed actually drew a laugh in the tense situation. “C’mon!”

   With only two in the huddle, they were forced to press their foreheads together, the strange intimacy making him feel a little nervous in the hug. With her hands reaching up to steady on his shoulders, he felt himself relaxing at her touch as she began to recite the mantra from her childhood.

   “Remember. We stay side by side, we always stick together, we watch each other's backs and…” She closed her eyes and turned a finger in a circle. “The coin slots in payphones go this way.”

   He studied her face, and when she looked back up, she was that familiar fully-determined woman again.

   “Okay. One, two, three… break!”

   Diana shoved the door open with her whole body and Jacob had to jump to catch it before it could slam into the wall on the other side. She cringed apologetically at his startled expression and they slipped into the dark building together.

   The station was dusted with wear on the outside, yet once inside those doors, it was as if you had stepped back in time.

   The pure alarm of the day it all happened was something you could feel in every fiber of the foyer. Yellow papers brushed across the floor, trash puddling at the corners with thick tufts of moss growing from them, benches shifted or thrown aside entirely. It was the scuffs on the subway tile that painted the worst picture. The idea that the people trapped inside had nowhere to go, dropping their luggage to run in a panic, scrambling and fighting to hide themselves from the endless wave of cosmic monstrosities outside those doors. Had anyone made it out?

   Jacob was strangely pained to see it like that. Though he had no connection to the place, the haunting memory of a day so profound frightened him to his core. He hurried his steps to catch up with his keeper as Diana lifted herself to check behind the vacant ticketing counter.

   “What're we lookin’ for?”

   “I'll know it when I see it.”

   Jacob swallowed nervously, poking his head around the echoey waiting area. There was no sign of Goliath's men.

   “Holy hell…”

   Her whispered word drew him back behind the desk to the employee break room where she was standing unmoving in the doorway.

   Bodies. At least twenty of them hunched over in corners and beside the empty vending machine, junk food packaging sitting ghostly still on the dusty floor as if they had not moved for centuries, the room left undisturbed for years until this very moment. Dark spots lay under each corpse. Fuck, how his heart dropped into his stomach to see so many small skeletons huddled close to the others’ half-decomposed ribs. Little t-shirts, skorts, chunky colorful sneakers… children's stuffed toys clutched tightly in their bony fingers. It made him sick.

   Jacob had to look away. On the vending machine beside the door, he read from white etchings in the black plastic cabinet. There was some kind of Arabic scraped into the dark surface on the side, then another shaky block of text in English slanted to fit just below. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me.’

   The other text must be a kind of prayer as well. Maybe Muslim? It should have brought him comfort to see how these people clung to a common supernatural hope right up until the end—but it didn't. This demonstration of their hand-in-hand empathy for each other only pointed a spotlight on how alone he truly was.

   Jacob shifted uncomfortably before noticing how the far wall of the room was covered in similar scratches that petered off into scrambled claw marks. No, not scratches. Those were tally marks.

   He knew why these people were here. Just like Jacob had been, they were too afraid to leave their hiding place, choosing to fade out in the filth of a backroom rather than face the terrifying unknown that lurked outside. Their safety had become their prison, a concept he was all too familiar with, and a fate he would no doubt share if he could not escape it now. He ran his fingers through his dirty blond hair and exhaled long and deep as it all set in.

   They needed to get out of this hell before it consumed them all.

   The tragedy was almost too much. Diana held her hand over her mouth, the stench of death that he was nearly accustomed to at this point still lingering to soak the space in decay after four whole years. She shook her head and took his hand.

   “C'mon.”

   Jacob hated to suggest it, but the necessity was staring them in the face. “Shouldn't we… take their clothes?”

   The adult jacket that covered the lap of one of the children filled him with grief. Diana's grip tightened on his long fingers. “No. Let them rest.”

   The door shut with a soft click, the pair leaving the mass grave alone with its sorrow.

   Jacob pushed the gruesome images from his mind, still scanning around the building for some kind of sign. Diana had not suggested that any of the skeletons were wearing her family's clothing—though that meant little, considering how that scene was only a microcosm of the world outside their borders. What was waiting for them if they ever managed to climb over the Ring walls? Nothing good. There were only more monsters outside, and they would be far stronger than the wounded creature occupying Dawson City. Jacob bit his lip and tried to think positively like she did, but it was becoming more impossible by the second. He glanced at Diana's intense expression. She was still searching, the conviction just as strong as the day they had met, so sure that her family had been the ones to make it out. His hand slipped from hers and he hoped that he would not have to be there the day that she discovered the truth.

   “Do you hear that?”

   She was whispering again, craning her neck to see farther down through the darkness of the back hallway. They were almost to the storage rooms.

   Jacob stood still and listened. One voice… no, two separate voices, told them that the danger he had so desperately hoped to avoid was upon them.

   Before he could utter a word of caution Diana was moving to sneak closer to the sound, his hand just missing her arm to stop her. She was already inside the next room when he hurriedly limped to the door, panic rocketing through his veins, the voices growing louder with every step.

   Boxes of homemade explosives lined the musty room, some on tables, some stacked together into unstable towers on the floor. There were double doors with big windows leading into the next section of the room, and Jacob's breath caught in his throat as he realized they were right beside where the two prisoners were talking.

   Diana beckoned him to where she was crouched, hidden behind a table, her back to the glass of the doors. He defied every instinct and bravely crawled to the opposite side of her while his brain scrambled for a way to get her away from them.

   “… those two were fuckin’ useless.” They could overhear the disembodied men chatting absently to each other. He knew those gruff voices and, more importantly, they knew him. “But someone's still gonna have to learn to be the new marksman now.”

   “Yeah, but that don't look so hard. And ‘ey, two more rations for the rest of us!”

   Jacob felt a nauseous wave at their cold laugh. Aaron was a prick, but Tomás had always been surprisingly decent to him, not as overtly selfish as the others. It was unsettling to hear the apathy in his tone.

   Diana was shaking his arm. “Look.”

   On the far wall to their right, under the corner of a map of the entire city, half of a word was visible. He blinked and squinted hard. Dia… no way, was that her name? The spray paint looked pretty old, but there it was, the name Diana scrawled up on the torn paper in thick, red lettering. The angle of the drooping edge of the map was blocking the rest of the message from sight in their restricting hiding place. Diana couldn't see from behind him, but neither could Jacob.

   “What does it say?”

   His second of hesitation was too long for the agitated woman. “Move!”

   “Careful!”

   She clamored over him, her head peeking out dangerously far towards the hidden wall.

   “I can't get a good look, I'm getting closer.”

   “What?!”

   It was too late. She was already up, ducking around the table and scurrying over to the next spot of cover before he could stop her.

   “Diana!” He hissed after her, mortified and frozen in fear. “Diana?!”

   His eyes darted to the room behind them as the panic rose in his lungs. If they were to even glance to the side, the two prisoners would discover her, and if she turned around, she would see them.

   He gripped anxiously at the edge of the table. “Dian—ah!”

   One of the storage boxes that was delicately balanced on the edge of his hiding spot smashed to the ground from his clumsy reach, a thousand plastic shards splintering across the tile in an instant.

   Aaron glanced up. “What was that?”

   The two men exchanged looks. Tomás slipped the weapon strap from his shoulder suspiciously and slowly approached the next room. He made a quick signal with his hand and Aaron nodded without a sound, turning around and slipping out to weave through the building towards the front entrance.

   “Show yourself!” 

   Tomás's words went unanswered. He held his breath as he peered in through the dirty glass of the doors. The dark room was still obscured, though the inmate squinted his eyes at a hint of movement on the side. He inhaled hard and jumped through the double doors, firearm at the ready.

   “Ah, c'mon.” The critter was poking about the plastic curiously, uninterested in the gunman above them. “Mangy vermin, get outta here!”

   His boot connected with the rat with a heavy thump and it squeaked and scurried away, leaving the prisoner alone and confused in the empty station.

   Jacob could hardly breathe. That was too fucking close. The risky escape they had just barely managed to make had almost gotten them caught again.

   Diana threw the door open in front of them and the two spilled out onto the sidewalk, leaning against the red bricks, panting and wheezing to catch their breath.

   Jacob banished his fearful quaking with a sharp shout of frustration. “That was insane! Diana, you could've gotten us fuckin’ killed!”

   She didn't answer him, her gaze locked forward on the payphones as he repeated her name.

   “Diana?! Diana—”

   “They made it.”

   He stared back, suddenly quiet. “What?”

   “The trucks made it to the station.” Her searching eyes met his, lighting up as the miraculous realization washed over her. “My family made it to the station!”

   So she had gotten a look at the message before they had run. Jacob listened silently as she jittered from the excited news.

   “It was in Lilly's writing, I know it! It—it said they're taking the train to Monaghan street.”

   “That's the station just outside town,” he confirmed tentatively, trying not to let the question of what this meant for them derail her jubilation. Now Diana would be as desperate to get out as he was, but would she hold true to her promise to take him with her? 

   “We can make it if we get t’ the breach before they inspect again.”

   The sudden grip on his arms shook him. Diana was smiling so big, like he had just given her the world. 

   “We're almost there, Jacob! Holy shit…”

   He subdued the fearful voice inside him and allowed himself to cheer her on for finally letting a curse cross her lips. “There ya fuckin’ go!”

   She laughed with him as they held each other for a moment, the anticipation of what was ahead mixed with the relief of what they had just experienced buzzing through them. He couldn't see her reasoning but he wouldn't question the woman's motive for dragging his useless ass along with her.

   “C'mon,” he smiled proudly as he started moving, “We gotta get outta he—”

   They had barely made it past the corner when Jacob sensed a swoosh of air a millisecond before the sharp impact to the side of his skull. Next thing he knew he was on his hands and knees on the sidewalk, blood running from his temple down into his face as he reeled, dazed from the throbbing pressure in his head.

   “Ah… wha..?”

   A cry pulled him back to reality, his name being called over and over again in a woman's frantic voice. He tried standing but lost balance immediately, the sharp ringing in his ears even worse than before.

   “Mama?”

   Shaking his head, the dark and fuzzy ghostly blobs possessing the alleyway slowly came into focus through the thin red inky sheen. The towering shape of Aaron appeared, and Jacob's fear instinct returned in an instant to immediately send him lurching away from the scene. Jacob's back was to the alley wall and he watched in horror as the brute grabbed a ferocious Diana and shoved her into the payphones where they fought. Her grip was impossibly tight on the bloodied rifle between them as they battled to win the crucial weapon. 

   The salty taste of his own blood drew Jacob back into the moment. He stumbled, on his feet again but unable to move, leaning up against the front of the station as their fight faded to a blur before him. He fought away the confusion just in time to catch a glimpse of Diana going for a sweeping kick. It made impact, but with little effect—the convict recovered immediately and headbutted her to try and loosen her handle on the gun. They were screaming at each other but Jacob could not decipher what. He wiped the red from his eyes and realized in one terrible moment that the box of explosives was only a few feet from where they wrestled.

   “D… Diana…”

   He tried to warn her but his voice wouldn't rise above a whisper. He coughed painfully, clinging to the bricks for support before trying again. “Diana, w-wait!”

   She couldn't hear him. She was twisting the rifle but the big man was much stronger, the barrel shifting farther and farther in the direction of the red plastic box.

   “Diana, the—”

   He didn't get the words out before the gun went off and he was thrown from his feet in a white blast.