Free Degeneration by Mark Campbell Page B

have to wait since he couldn’t work up the nerve to even to uch another one. 
    He tried to calm himself and loo k around–
    It quickly became apparent that the bomb didn’t cause the damage. T he whole train car was laying upside-down . He looked up at the rows of seats above him. In some of the seats, people hung limp with their arms and legs dangling down, swaying side-to-side. They were still fastened against their seats by the seatbelts wrapped across their lap.
    Those who hadn’t worn their seatbelts lay scattered and twisted amongst the tossed luggage .
    Howell stood up and searched through the scattered luggage. He finally found his duffle underneath the mangle d corpse of man. He kicked the corpse aside and snatched the duffle greedily. Moving carefully , he waded through the mangled corpses and scattered suitcases towards the exit door .
    At the end of th e car, in front of the exit door, he saw the corpse of one of the Amtrak cops.
    Howell reached down and pulled the pistol out of the cop's holster. He slid the gun under his belt, tucked the duffle under his arm, and crawled up to the exit, using the corpse of the police officer as a stepstool.
    The officer’s spine cracked audibly as Howell’s bodyweight pressed down on it.
    Howell climbed up and tumbled over the top edge of the door. He landed outside of the car and rolled over onto his back, screaming in pain as the glass shards slid deeper into his lacerations. After lying still for a minute, withering in pain, he stood, spat blood, and took a look around.
    Wreckage lay strewn all around him. Train cars were scattered everywhere and multiple fires billowed black smoke into the air.
    Despite the chaotic scene of the derailment, Howell’s thoughts inevitably drifted back to his bomb. He unzipped his duffle and looked–
    “Shit,” he said faintly. The timer that he had activated when he thought that the Amtrak cops were going to arrest him was still counting down diligently by the microsecond. He only had eight hours until the bomb would detonate. Eight hours to get to New York? Normally, it wouldn’t be improbable, but he noticed that the day looked anything but normal.
    Army helicop ters hovered between the skyscrapers and smoke billowed out from the center of down town. Burglar alarms and sirens wailed everywhere. In the surrounding streets , he saw people running around aimlessly, many carrying boxes or armfuls of clothes with the tags still on. Shouts and gunfire echoed in the distance. H i s first thoug ht was that he was in the middle of a riot . But–
    H owell’s gaze slowly went back to the train accident itself.
    If a train crashe d in a major city, Howell expect ed to see all sorts of fir st responders . However, the only people at the scene were six people in hazmat suits checking corpses . One of the white-suits spotted him.
    The white-suit unslung the rifle from his shoulder and started to cross the street–
    A Humvee honked and caused the white-suit to stumble bac kwards onto the curb. A long convoy of Humvees sped past and weaved in-between the train wreckage that littered the street.
    The white-suit stared at the procession, momentarily forgetting about the man on the other side of the street. When the convoy finally passed , Howell was gone . The white-suit grumbled and figured that the man would get rounded up by another patrol, so it didn’t matter. He went back to work checking corpses.
    Howell staggered along the side of McDowell Street , heading deeper into downtown, gripping his bleeding left side . Abando ned vehicles, many loaded down with luggage, haphazardly clogged the roa d. He lurched along the glass-littered sidewalk past shops and cafes that had their windows shat tered and their contents looted out.
    The city looked empty.
    Howell trudged on as t he shouts and gunfire echoing in the distance started to ebb and the pedestrian traffic started to dissipate.
    As Howell passed a Starbucks , a man leapt out through the