Free Defy the Dark by Saundra Mitchell

the skyscrapers. A woman sat inside at a vanity applying mascara to the third eye in her forehead. That third eye winked at Cado just before the trolley plunged into freefall. Into darkness.
    The track leveled off seconds later, and after Cado’s stomach had settled back into place, he realized the trolley lights had shorted out, maybe damaged by the rapid descent. Outside, however, glowing pink corkscrews of light spiraled down in the dark like fancy New Year’s Eve confetti.
    After a few moments, it began to get lighter inside the trolley, not the same feverlight as before, but bluish and intense. Cado could see again, the motorman hunched at the front, the hand straps hanging like nooses, the ads. The nerve-food woman was still holding her head, but now she was laughing. Even though her body was peppered with almost comically large bite marks.
    Cado tittered nervously and turned away, but the strange light had destroyed the exterior view. He could only see his own reflection, half asleep like a boy daydreaming in class. Or nightmaring. Waiting for a rap on the knuckles to snap him out of it. But there was only the motorman who had stabbed his brain and robbed him of his fear, which was fortunate because Cado realized he could see inside his own head.
    The blue light shone through him like radiation, his brain barely visible, obscured by a thick whitish soup. Like whatever the motorman had shot into his head had turned it into a giant zit. Without thinking, Cado put his hands over his ears and squeezed. Patricia would have done it if he had allowed her to come. He could no longer remember why he’d been so against it.
    Fluid gushed out of the hole at the base of his skull and splatted against the back window. He could see his brain now, clean and clear. Everything was clear. And so bright. Not just in the trolley. He could see past his own reflection to a moon as big as the Himalayas crowding the horizon so closely, Cado could see its pockmarked texture. The light it cast fell on him like a weight and killed even the possibility of shadows.
    The gleaming stretch of track skated over swirls of rock, valleys of ice, but his view of the terrain was eclipsed by a horde of creatures that mobbed the trolley, scuttling alongside like fans chasing a pop star’s limo. But these fans, like the motorman, weren’t human.
    The creatures were small. Half Cado’s size. Children, really, from the waist up, but from the waist down they had too many legs. Too many to count. So many they were able to easily keep up with the trolley, which had begun to slow down.
    They peered at Cado, their gummy eyelids smack-smack-smacking at him. Interested in him. Waiting for him.
    After the trolley came to a complete stop, the motorman unfolded from his seat and faced Cado. The sick moonlight shone through him, revealing an unfamiliar grouping of organs, a swish of pale blood, and the motorman’s legs—his real ones—unfurling wetly up the walls to make room.
    Cado, without realizing it, had begun whistling “Tango Etude No. 5” to give himself something nice to listen to instead of the motorman’s scabrous approach. He wished the poison in his head was back. There had been no room for fear then—now fear was the only thing he had. That and his flute case.
    He reached for it, careful not to look down and see his own quivering guts, his frozen blood. He still couldn’t feel his fingers, but he saw them snatching open the latches, saw through them without meaning to, his own blood not frozen but red and frantic when he grabbed the hunting knife from the case, the one he’d killed the cackler with. It was a foot long at least, bone handled, and sharp enough to decapitate a wild hog.
    Cado’s arm whipped at the motorman, at those endless legs, at the chest, at the face with its gummy eyes shocked to see prey fighting back. Cado let his seemingly demonic arm do all the work as the rest of him