It was by sheer luck that I stumbled into a familiar intersection within the post-apocalyptic LA. With my throat dried and stomach weeping I had very little hope left before I came into those street corners. From there I could find my directions, more or less, and slowly got myself closer and closer to the Black Pueblo. Thankfully I had been able to avoid the many clusters of zombies I came across since my lack of a weapon would have certainly killed me or forced me to teleport once more.

Now I was back within my home tunnel, pushing my way through the many merchants and customers before passing by the groups of people trying to live within the old subway cars and eventually I came out into my section of tunnel where the shelters were. Strangely the place was empty, everyone within their rooms, save for James standing in the middle with his back to me. He appeared to be talking on a radio of some type, probably to the Pariahs, telling them about getting rid of me, an insurgent.

My blood began to gain heat; flowing faster through my body has hairs raised across my skin alongside goose bumps as my anger towards James started to rise. My dislocated bone in my middle finger began to pound and throb and I massaged it lightly, wondering how good Giacomo was at fixing something like that. For now though it was just myself and James, with nothing in between. My body fell into a stalker mode, crouching low and stepping forth on my toes, avoiding every crevice and crack and pile of dirt on the ground in an effort to stay silent. I was very practiced in this from my days above ground trying to get by and I thanked my past silently, letting my anger completely take over.

James finished his radio conversation as I got just behind his body and rose up to his height. My hands rested themselves on either side of his face, from behind, and the twisted to the left with a force beyond something I thought I had. With a crack James’ neck snapped, and as I let him go he collapsed onto the ground, immediately killed. The whole thing happened slowly and deliberately, each movement flowing into the next and the results coming out as expected, though completely unexpected to me. 

I stood over James’ corpse, panting and sweating from an exertion I didn’t know I had used. I felt a hand lay upon my shoulder and slowly turned to face Roy, my body releasing tension and my fatigue rapidly setting in. “I expected to find you killing Giacomo before you killed James. Any particular reason?”

“He was a spy for the Pariahs. He teleported me out of here and I only just got back now.”

“How did you manage to get yourself teleported out of here?”

“Let’s just say I don’t do handshakes anymore. Aren’t you a little bit concerned over the death of James?”

“No, because while you were gone this whole time James told me he saw you wander off up above to chase after a zombie that had broken in somehow and he sent me on a wild goose chase after you. And while I was on that chase the Pariahs came here and took out our zombie residents.” He motioned to the shelter where Alex and Edward lived and I saw their door was very slightly ajar, with blood splattered around the doorway.

My heart sunk in my chest. I had been secretly hoping that I would be able to use those two to try and find the cure for the bacteria. And somehow I had started to become attached to the idea of not killing zombies who weren’t trying to kill me. Other residents in their shelters were starting to open their doors and slowly resume their usual business, though a fear and gloom mingled in the air above each of their heads and weighed heavy on us all. “Roy, did you just get back now?”

“Indeed I did.”

“How did you know the Pariahs attacked then?”

“Fiona has a radio hidden in her room. She can update me whenever I leave, and I can talk to her about what is happening in the outside world too when I explore. Very rare that that happens though. She said you wanted to talk to me, correct?”

“I’ve learned some interesting things recently about this place. But let’s talk in your room.”

“And so you just want to leave the body here?”

“Let it be a good reminder.” He took me into his room and I began to explain to him my plans for the exploration of the Black Pueblo and the extermination of the Hounds and Screamers, and hopefully the Stalkers if we found them as well. It took us well into the night, or what I assumed was night as I got tired, and we debated back and forth about the future of our world.

§§§§§

Roy and I pushed our way through the crowds of people passing through the Black Market in our search for recruits. We already had a list of twelve people who would join our forces for a raiding party if we called upon them, all of them rough mercenary soldiers who either had mild ties to the subway or who simply liked the idea of being paid. A couple of the merchants liked the idea of supplying this growing force and were pushing for more people to join us. I was surprised how driven Roy was to build this army and commit to this project, especially considering how long we had been talking about it and how much arguing over whether or not we could go through with it had been done. I saw within him now what I thought was the same thing Fiona must have seen in him when he was younger.

He pulled away from another merchant and held up the list as he spoke to me. “Two more. We have fourteen people now joining us, with six people willing to fight who live in the Black Road. An even twenty soldiers to take into combat, almost all of them trained from the survival up above. Some of the ones down here might be getting soft, including myself, but we’ll see how we do when faced with death. I’ve also got a few suppliers willing to help us out with weapons and ammunition but generally people are bringing whatever they can scavenge to the fight.   

I was torn on emotions. Was I excited to be exploring this place? Was I so attached that I would even feel such an emotion? I was it fear of what was out there? We had no idea. I had travelled far and only come across Hounds and while I made it sound like little in my head they were certainly a danger. But they weren’t what Roy seemed concerned with. The Screamers were top in his mind. They attacked in groups, roved in raiding parties, and retreated like soldiers. I pointed out that if they were launching raids then they had to live somewhere nearby. They wouldn’t just send little raiding parties if they lived far away; they would send their entire force. Perhaps I feared my own excitement. I was changing, I could see that, going from a desolate survivalist and lone wanderer to a family man, loving my new home and trying to look out for everyone.

Was I though? I still felt like I would kill a zombie without hesitating. I still thought I could kill anyone in the Black Pueblo if I had to, flee from that place and go live out on the surface again. My escapade in the Pariah outpost had shown me that I could still be a ruthless killer and ingenious survivor but while I did it all emotions nagged at me to do this for a greater purpose, greater good. I almost needed a moment to sit alone in my room and shuffle through my thoughts to figure out who I was now but I couldn’t. I needed to push forward with the plan, to clean this place up so that everyone, myself included, could have a safe place to live, just as my parents wanted me to have.

Roy took me back to the Black Road and pulled out a small little watch from his pocket. “Knowing the time down here is more important to me than living, at this point. When I know the time I know how long I’ve been down here and I wonder how much longer I have until something changes and we are saved or killed.” He smashed the watch against the ground, the tiny filaments of glass twinkling in grimy light and dancing through the air before bouncing off the ground and resting there. “Time is up.” The fourteen we had recruited had followed us back from the Black Market and stood watching Roy’s antic, some with glee, others with mild amusement, and still more wondering why their own time was being wasted. We were joined by four residents from the shelters, two of which were Chris’ parents, one whom I did not recognize, and the last one was Fiona, well-equipped for the upcoming battle. A couple of the merchants from the Market shuffled up behind us and dropped some weapons and ammunition, and one dropped a couple of medical supplies. Everything was snatched up in moments and fought over. I ended up grabbing a more modern pistol than my old revolver and this one had a small blade attached to the underside of the muzzle so I could stab as much as shoot.

By the end of the rush Roy was the only one without a weapon on him visibly. I saw Giacomo shuffle out from his room dragging his prototype sword behind him and my blood flow changed with my emotions. He left the sword at Roy’s feet before catching my eye. “How’s your finger?” I looked down at the finger that I had dislocated when I punched the ground earlier. Giacomo had set it back in place and given it a makeshift wrap. While I hated him immensely he did make a good doctor when called upon. Everyone seemed to have their job in this place, whether I liked them or not and he at least made a better doctor than the one the Pariahs had had. Roy strapped the sword’s generator onto his back and tested to see if it was in working condition.

With a smile on his face he turned to face the darkness of the unknown subway tunnel in front of us. Fiona stood beside me and she reached over and squeezed my hand for reassurance before placing it back on her rather large shotgun. And so Roy led us forth into the shadows. The mercenaries behind me had varying dispositions about what was about to happen. Most did not realize the weight behind this fight for safety or the dangers of the forthcoming trip. I don’t even think I fully understood the weight of the trip. Some of the men behind us whooped and cheered in exaggerated excitement, not knowing that we may have to walk in the subway for days before we found the Screamers. Other men stood in grim silence or talked unenthusiastically to other soldiers about their trips and journeys about how they didn’t really want to be here. Others spoke about the reward Roy was offering, a permanent home in the Black Pueblo for anyone who wanted one, provided we won. We had a couple of vacancies since James, Alex, and Edward had died and I wasn’t sure if Roy even expected to survive this.

Only a few of us had various lights and they shuffled up to the front to illuminate the way. To me, though it felt eerily familiar, I couldn’t recognize any particular part of the subway. Each part looked like the next part and I couldn’t tell how close I was to where Chris had died or how far we were from the Pueblo. While I looked for it I couldn’t find the hole along the tunnel wall that I had seen on my way back from the Hounds and it made me wonder if it had been real or just created by my stress and fatigue at the time. I still had yet to tell anyone that I had even found it to begin with, just like I had not told anyone the source of the zombies. No use changing their focus now.

I still had no indication of time and as we continued forth I wondered more and more why Roy broke that watch. It would have been very useful for keeping track of how long this was taking for further reference and would somehow calm me with the knowledge that I had been walking for a long time. Everyone in the group seemed to feel the same way as our talking had ceased, the only sounds the jingling of ammunition and weapons clicking together as we walked or small knick knacks on the mercenaries’ persons making noises. This tunnel was almost always straight as well so I could not even count corners to pass the time. I could simply take a step forward, then another, and another, and so on and so forth until we came across where the Hounds nested. It made me wonder how my little pup was doing, having been left alone while I was teleported and now being left in the care of one of the Black Road’s residents. Perhaps after this was over I would just spend a few days with him training him and bonding. I wondered why I had never thought of this deeply before. It was a genius idea if I was living up on the surface. Of course I didn’t live there anymore...

Roy stopped the group as the Hounds grouped in front of us. They seemed unsure of what to do, having never been confronted by a mass gang of people traveling together and being used to picking off lone wolves. They lined up in almost organized ranks as we did similar, standing off in the middle of the derelict subway tunnels of the post-apocalyptic world. Together we raised our guns and the Hounds seemed to growl in a unified response.

I never fired a shot.

I didn’t do anything.

I heard everything.

And afterwards all the Hounds were dead. All the mercenaries had unloaded their guns and rounds into the Hounds before anything could respond, killing them en masse. It was like a firing line against them. None of them escaped or had time to even lunge at us. They were all simply dead. Roy seemed to be mildly shocked for a moment before he turned to the nests where the puppies lay and began quietly stabbing them to prevent the Hounds from returning. Soon we all joined and were stabbing or beating the small creatures with whatever we had on us. It sickened me, and every little dog I looked at I saw my own puppy within but I also remembered how ruthless these mutant animals were and my blade went in to them a little easier.

We pushed the bodies to the sides of the railways, as best we could, and left them there to rot. In such a warm, damp environment I wondered if they would decompose quickly or if the lack of life down here would keep their bodies there for a long time to come. Either way we pushed forward again and continued up the tunnel.

Our group made it around a bend and again we were stopped, though not because we had come across more enemies. Instead the tunnel reverberated with the sound of water flowing over an edge, perhaps a waterfall, though none of us had ever heard one before. And mixed in with it we heard voices. They chattered and bickered, raising and lowering their voices in a dialect I didn’t comprehend and from the looks of it nobody else in the group was following what was being said either. Roy and Fiona though gave each other a look as though they recognized the language, though didn’t comprehend it. And that could only mean that we had found the Screamers.

I was sent ahead with two other mercenaries to scout ahead. For some reason I was put in charge, perhaps because of my survival skills combined with my knowledge of the Black Road, though in all honesty, I couldn’t see how my skills could help me scout an area any better than hardened veterans of surviving. Still I shimmied along the wall, peeking around corners when I could, and keeping myself as inconspicuous as possible. As my team moved forth we started to see a light at the end of our tunnel, growing in brightness and size as we edged closer and closer. The sounds grew louder with the light and urged our feet on both faster and slower at the same time, excitement mingling with cautious fear.

I was lucky. I got the first true look at what was ahead. I crouched in the shadows of the tunnels at the edge of the light and looked out into what I was now calling in my head, the Screamer Pueblo. The subway tunnel opened up into a massive sort of cave, where the tracks continued onward across a very large wide bridge, but all around and under them was open air. Over on the left were large round drainage pipes where water flowed down the walls into a river below. The whole thing was lit up by multiple light fixtures in the ceiling, remnants from an earlier age. Along the railway bridge were makeshift homes constructed from debris, rubble, and metal. The whole town was made of patchwork. There were some Screamers wandering through the town between the homes, some visiting small open huts that represented vendors while others talked in the middle of the tracks, forming the loud conversation we could hear down the tunnel. At the end of the town the tracks re-entered a tunnel and the tunnel was sealed off with a large blast door that looked exactly like the one at the start of the Black Pueblo.

Counting heads came out to around seven visible Screamers who were armed. There were a couple others around who were unarmed or much smaller and I guessed them to be women and children. They did not have the typical Screamer mask but they did wear a mask over their faces, perhaps to keep with their culture or maybe all of these creatures were horribly disfigured mutants.

As I continued to watch them I was beset with nerves, my stomach tightening and palms sweating. I withdrew my pistol and rubbed its barrel with my sleeve in some sort of nerve-calming ritual. There was no glitter or sparkle in the metal of my weapon, even if it was in relatively decent condition. I saw nothing in it, other than a tool for survival and warfare. I remember finding shiny objects out in the wastes when I first entered. They were such a sparkling rarity I just had to have them and would risk life and limb to get my hands on them. Now I saw nothing in the shine of the world. Everything had dulled for me. Instead I found a lustre in science and the hope of a cure, a far cry from my original goal of living for just one more year.

I held the pistol up in front of me and looked down the barrel as though I were shooting off the head of one last Screamer. With an inhuman screech, a Screamer’s head jumped out in front of us. “Holy shit!” Reflexively I squeezed the trigger and a bullet exploded out of my gun’s chamber, flashing through the brain of the Screamer and bursting out the back side, splattering all of us with drops of blood mixed with more fleshy pieces. The Screamer toppled over backwards and the others in the town collectively stared at us as I held a shaking gun out in front of my face.

The town burst into activity as doors were thrown open on the huts and different creatures rushed in or out of the shacks to join in the fight or flee from it. The two mercenaries reacted faster than I could have, cocking their weapons and spraying the crowds ahead with bullets while I started calculating numbers. My years above had taught me to always factor in the odds when facing crowds, especially with zombies, instead of simply trying to outgun them. Soon enough it looked like there were about twenty Screamer soldiers in the town taking up positions behind whatever cover they could. Some of them even ripped pieces off of the homes and used the rusty metal as a shield. And a couple were caught by shots and were sprawled out on the ground. I was baffled at the number of these things living down here, while we had to hire outside muscle to commit to a fight. Unlike us it seemed that they were more of a community, a tribe working together, breeding and growing and welcoming more into their ranks until they became what they were now. It was almost what I wanted the Black Pueblo to do now, with a little bit of hope, and a cure...

Roy’s voice brought me back to the fight. He had heard us down the tunnel and was shouting orders to fall back until they could arrive. I began to step back but saw the two mercenaries press themselves to the tunnel walls and continue to fight. Apparently commands were lost on these hired men and I looked behind me to see more of them charge forward ahead of Roy, eager for the combat they were paid to do. One of them threw a grenade forward into the crowd and the Screamers scattered. Some went inside while others hid deeper between the huts. Roy caught up to me as the mercenaries surged forward, panting from such an arduous dash with a large generator strapped to his back. “Take prisoners if they surrender.” It came out in a breath as he sucked in some breath and dashed forward into combat.

I watched the chaos unfold in combat as our men bashed Screamers with the butts of rifles and shot off volleys of fire from point blank range. One of them, a larger burlesque man, threw a Screamer through the flimsy door of a house then leapt in after him, only to fly back out as the front wall of the house exploded outwards. I had finally seen the power behind the sonic generator strapped to the masks of Screamer soldiers. The man, easily two hundred pounds, was flung across the subway tracks and flipped over the edge, falling down into the sewage river below. With that first release of a sonic wave, the battlefield suddenly morphed and shifted as it was our turn to scatter. Sonic blasts pulsed through the subway rails and tore apart houses, sending chunks of debris and bodies streaking through the surrounding air.  

I gripped my pistol tight in my hand, feeling my heart reverberating throughout my chest and body for a moment as I stood against the tunnel wall on the outskirts of the town. And I joined them. 

I dashed forward into combat, ducking behind another soldier we had brought along with us then popping out behind him as his body was pierced through with bullets. I wiped the blood from my face as he spun from the force of being shot. I realized I was popping out from behind him into open ground between homes and quickly dove to my left and rolled through the door. I instantly sprang up from the roll into a standing position, something from my survival days sticking with me, a rule I learned where one can never spend too much time lying down. It was the wise choice as I took in my surroundings. In the corner a Screamer without a sonic mask was huddled in the corner hugging a small child close and a Screamer soldier stood above them looking down. He twisted around at the sight of me but before he could do anything I pulled out my pistol and fired off three shots, two into his left leg and one into his right shoulder. My aim was better than I thought it would be, my gun skills coming more reflexively than anything else. 

The Screamer stumbled back against the wall and dropped his gun to the floor. The huddling Screamer grasped at him and made hysterical noises that were muffled by their mask. They were grabbing at the holes I had put in him and trying to cover them with whatever they possibly could. I heard some yelling from behind me and spun on my heel to find myself face to face with yet another Screamer. This one seemed just as shocked to see me as I did him though and I used the opportunity to lash out with the end of my pistol and watched with relish as the blade under my barrel slashed across the Screamer's chest.  

My relish was in vain though as the slash was only deep enough to cut through leather patchwork armour and form a light laceration across the skin. It didn’t stop the Screamer at all and he threw the tip of his gun up and caught me across the cheek with the rifle, sending me sprawling across the ground. And sending my mind into spiral. Suddenly there was grit in my mouth. Mixing with blood. The force of my body hitting the ground was spreading through my bones. I was almost losing consciousness over it. The dirt in my mouth circled around and hit. My tongue. And I snapped back from my reverie and spit it out. 

I rolled to the right just as the Screamer opened fire on me. The first two bullets hit their mark, one connecting with my shoulder and embedding itself in my bone and the other burned through my bicep and muscle and came out the other side. My whole arm tingled as electricity ran through from the tips of my fingers up through my clavicle and my body responded to the pain with shock. As the electricity ran out fire filled its place and my arm burned and the heat began to spread outward from my shoulder across my chest. 

A loud bang cracked through the air as another gunshot was fired, this time though from behind the Screamer. The Screamer flew forward towards me and collapsed next to, a large hole cratered into its back. I looked up to see a mercenary soldier towering above me, a smoking shotgun in his hand. He turned and unloaded another round into the Screamer I had shot, before cracking open the barrel of his gun and placing in more slugs. Once reloaded he cocked the gun at the remaining Screamer and its child. I quickly propped myself up with an elbow, ignoring the searing pain through my chest that was spreading down into my legs. "Don't fucking shoot them you psycho. They surrendered." 

The soldier looked down at me then back over to the two against the wall, snorting a little and spitting out of the corner of his mouth. "Says who? When'd they surrender?" 

"Doesn't matter. Before you got here, just get out of here. Thanks for the save. Go kill some more innocents while you're at it." 

"You little subway fuckers think you know what's right for the world just cause you live in your little holes, when you don't know shit about the world. When was the last time you fought a zombie as it tried to rip your face off?" He turned and pressed against the wall next to the door, checked around outside, then ducked off. I heard more shots form his shotgun before he toppled backwards in front of the door, his chest almost smoking from the recent impact of iron and steel.  

I looked over his way and nearly snickered if it didn't cause me pain. "Shit happens sucker." I rolled onto my side and attempted to lift myself. I gagged in reflex to the pain as my left arm flopped off my body and hung across my chest. I dropped back to the ground and lay in the squalor of a very poorly constructed house. Roy dove through the door panting and pulled the sword's generator off from his back. He looked over at me lying on the ground and laughed a little.  

"Are you even alive Noname? I can't believe you stuck with that. You're such an idiot. Just give yourself a name you moron and stick with it." 

"I'll never pick one jackass." Roy laughed some more and limped over to me. He didn't seem to be crippled or shot, just something going on with his foot, perhaps a sprain or just a little twist while running from what was happening outside. 

"I don't believe you at all." He looked over at the pair of Screamers in the corner huddled over a dead body. "Are they keepers?" 

"They surrendered, though unofficially. I don't know what to do with them so I just left them in the corner. Why are we laughing so much?" I chuckled a little, or perhaps I spasmed silently and only thought I was laughing. I was fairly certain I wanted to laugh, though I truly could not understand in such horrendous conditions.  

"It comes from war stress or something. We keep fighting and stressing out until eventually we snap and find a better way to cope by doing something we like, such as laughing." 

"I haven't laughed in years Roy. At least not with someone. Silly question but can you die form bleeding out if you're shot in the arm a couple times?" 

Roy ripped off some strips of fabric and tied them around my arm. "Am I going to have to leave you here then and come back after we win?" 

"No I can still shoot with my right. If you at least get me standing I should be ok." Roy lifted me gingerly until I was roughly upright as Fiona burst in. She looked at us two than the tow in the corner and lowered the two pistols she held in her hands, the barrels still smoking. Her usually beautiful face was coated in a mixture of grime and blood and I saw Roy's face soften in reaction to seeing her. His grip on me also loosened, nearly causing me to drop to the floor again. Before speaking to either of us Fiona went over to the Screamers in the corner and seemed to speak some soothing words to them in a quiet tone, though what she was really saying I could not hear. I looked at Roy and him to me before he shrugged and went to put the generator back on. The two in the corner seemed to calm down a little with Fiona's words, until a massive explosion ripped apart the front of the house and left us without a front wall. Fragments of metal hurled past us and clattered against the floor and back wall.  

I looked out upon the wreckage we had created. bodies were strewn across the subway tracks in the most awkward of chaotic patterns, mingling with new puddles of blood and constantly shifting trickles and streams. Chunks of the edge of the bridge were blown apart and gouged out by sonic blasts and grenades alike. Only some of the homes were intact or at least standing. Most had toppled over or broken down on one side or another. metal was split and twisted in ways I couldn't even imagine, or comprehend as I looked at them. They seemed to be wrong in nearly every way but had to be right since they were there. Some were believable, while others tormented my mind to look at. Instead I watched one of our warriors standing atop a defeated Screamer, one foot on its throat and a gun point down at its face to finish it off. There was a moment of silence between the two, as one was a clear victor and wanted to simply enjoy his moment of triumph. It was followed not with a gun shot, but with a distortion in the air as the soldier's head was suddenly ripped from atop his head, alongside the tops of his shoulders and left his body still standing there. The Screamer pushed the body over and picked itself up slowly. I pointed my pistol and fired away, not knowing how far it really was or what I was aiming for. The bullet tore through the throat of the Screamer and it splayed its internal fluids across the ground. I gasped in shock of such a lucky shot and tucked the pistol away, careful not to stab myself with its knife.  

Fiona spoke to Roy for a bit while I was firing off my shot and Roy came over to pat me on the shoulder, being careful to keep it light enough to not knock me back down to my knees. "Fiona came in here to avoid that explosion. One of the mercenaries was secretly a little bit heavier armed than I first thought. She said that when the grenades were used there weren't that many left anyways so as far as we know its essentially over." He stuck his thumb over his shoulder to point at the survivors in the corner. "And those two are the only who surrendered to our forces. You're sure they surrendered correct?"  

Roy nearly winked at me and I nearly fell over. This break down of tension was something completely foreign to me. For me there were no victories or celebrations and I thought it was the same for Roy and the rest of the people living down here but this seemed to be a special exception. The Black Pueblo had never gone a day without not knowing what lay down at the end of its tunnels. While we still may not have a complete grasp on the subject, this situation was far better than anything before. Perhaps it was not a release of tension from a single battle, of one moment within one day coming to a boiling and then spilling, but instead it was the culmination of years of suffrage released in a single moment that caused spontaneity and giggles.

Fiona still seemed to be the same as when I had first met her. Her face was blank yet hardened, her expression lacking anything distinctive other than perseverance. I knew there was a little but more to her down under, but not too much. She liked to talk more than she led on but she also didn’t like to talk as much as she implied. She revealed whatever you asked but if you didn’t ask she wouldn’t revealed. She looked very much like that at the moment, showing that she would continue to fight until she died but not fighting if she wasn’t required to. The three of us walked out of the house together, with our captives in tow.

Amidst the rubble there were only a handful of mercenaries left on our side, enough to count on one hand, and all of them were scouring through everything they could find and looting whatever wasn’t nailed down, which was everything. Roy left them as they were and instead bent over to pull a mask off of a Screamer. He held it up in front of Fiona and myself, less like a trophy of war and more like a dark reminder of sacrifice and slaughter. “These things earn you a fortune in the marketplace. Now I can sell them for a dime a dozen. Does it make me happy or does it make me sick? I’m not sure right now. Right now I feel light-headed and faint and transparent and ethereal all in one moment and want to be joyous like I’ve never been before with this kind of a victory, and yet all I see in front of me is extinction and carnage. I’m sure these beings would have fought zombies as fast as we would and yet we had to kill each other instead. And look under the mask.” He pointed down at the Screamer corpse he had pulled the mask off of. Underneath was a very human face, not unlike mine. The skin was a little bit darker than my own but otherwise it was a normal human, un-mutated or deformed. “They are simply people too. Instead of fighting our common enemy and working together we fight to keep each other down so one can be more dominant of the other.” Roy stepped back a bit and held his forehead as his body began to rock back and forth. “I don’t feel happy anymore, but I certainly feel faint.”

Fiona wrapped herself around him to keep him upright and motioned for me to come close. “Roy is going through the backlash of all this tension releasing,” she whispered. “He doesn’t like killing people if he doesn’t really have to but at the same time he thinks he has to. You went through something similar when you talked about your parents. Right now he will break down as soon as he remembers that we are still in danger of a myriad of other things so I am going to start taking him back now. Bring the captives and find them a room in the Pueblo. Show them no violence. They are welcome to live with us since we destroyed their homes. We will get this place cleaned up later. Leave the others to do their petty thievery.”

As Fiona turned to go I thought of many things. I thought of the vaccine and the cause, and I thought of my parents and what they would have wanted. Did I do the right thing in cleansing the subways from these people? I felt no cleaner, as it would imply, and instead the tracks were now permanently scarred with blood. Had I really progressed the Black Pueblo into a new age of growth and prosperity? Or would the Pariahs come to take back what was theirs in the most brutal of ways, as they had done to our deceased zombie residents? And lastly, I thought of that little side tunnel, that hole in the wall that nobody seemed to mention. I had cleaned ourtunnel but had I cleaned the tunnel? Past the doorway at the end of these tracks, did we end up back outside in some massive rent in the earth or was there simply more railway?

I had no chance to express my thoughts and figured it would be best to keep them to myself for now anyways. I needed to decide what I was going to do about finding the cure and as for the hole in the wall, I had yet to find it again since that day. Perhaps it was simply a weary mind conjuring falsehoods. I signalled for the two Screamers to follow me and tried to communicate with them on the way back. I kept pointing at Fiona and pronouncing her name, then pointing at me and realizing I had no name to tell them so I would point at Roy and say his name, in the hopes of getting theirs. The smaller one seemed to catch on and took off its mask, pointing at the face of a small boy and saying “Jose?” in a very questioning tone. So I called him Jose, hoping it was his name and not just him thinking he was playing a random naming game.

The other, whom I assumed was his mother, or at least a female, would simply shake her head at me and look away, though she never put up a fight with coming with us. Perhaps the easiest way to recover was to get away from the cemetery of your loved ones. I know I had done the same but it hadn’t helped me ease through the pain.

With his name expressed the young Jose started to babble incessantly at an extremely rapid rate and the assumed female would chime in once in awhile to correct him or scold him before returning to her state of silence towards me. I simply watched the boys mouth move or would stare ahead into the abyss of darkness, nodding my head to some sort of beat. Every so often we would catch up to Fiona and Roy and I would back off and slow down in an effort to let them be alone so that Fiona could calm her old lover. Whenever we did though I found myself watching Fiona from behind and wondering why I was. I didn’t think anything was wrong with it, I just sort of did it, almost without realizing, and yet enjoying it at the same time. I had never done this before when I had come across attractive women up above. Perhaps down here with a battle over my body thought it was a safe moment and decided to get a little more leisurely? I wasn’t entirely sure why I wanted to stare at her like this but at the same time I knew why I was doing it without finding an explanation.

And still Jose babbled.