by Jeff Presto
Dead.
This single word was scrawled sloppily in thick black letters across a piece of cardboard being held by the passenger opposite Todd. The passenger rested awkwardly in his chair as his chin hung down past his collarbones and his dull expressionless face was angled sharply towards the floor. Whether the man holding the sign was asleep, unconscious, or truly dead was unclear, but he sat in place with mannequin-like stillness. Todd noted his appearance from the moment that he had boarded the subway car, but the man’s demeanor never changed. His eyes remained closed while his hands clung tightly to the cardboard sign that rest across his lap. The other passengers on board did their best to ignore the oddity, but Todd found himself unable to look away.
Leaning forward in his seat, Todd studied the man’s face and was met by a foul odor that wrinkled his nose. The man smelled as advertised. Sour and musty notes lingered in the air between them as Todd fanned his hand lightly in front of his face. It took everything in him not to gag as he stared across the aisle.
The aging process had not been kind to the man, made evident by his sunken cheekbones and patches of flakey skin across his forehead, but Todd reasoned that he couldn’t have been any older than fifty. His youth had abandoned him, and dead or not, the clothes he wore gave off the impression that he had just recently been pulled up from some deep hole in the ground. The man’s plain blue windbreaker glimmered in the cabin lights from beneath a thin layer of crust, and dried streaks of mud clung to bottoms of his frayed jeans. His appearance was in stark contrast to the business suits and collared shirts worn by the other men and women in the subway car, and Todd quickly surmised that the man must be homeless. He glanced around for a Styrofoam cup or anything else that the man might be using to panhandle with, but found nothing. Still, this was the only scenario that made any logical sense. The homeless regularly loitered around the subway cars during the day, but none of them ever struck Todd as anything more than beggars.
They also never carried around declarations of their own death.
After several long and uncomfortable seconds, the novelty of the situation quickly wore off. The man with the sign remained motionless rather than springing to life as Todd had expected. There was no payoff to the perceived gimmick, no collection cup to throw change into, and the notion that none of this was being done for neither show nor reward grew increasingly disturbing. Todd sat back in his chair and squinted suspiciously at the stranger across from him. Soon, even that became too much for him to handle.
An icy chill raised the skin along the back of Todd’s neck as he finally managed to look away. He found that focusing his mind on anything else was rapidly becoming more difficult. There were far more important things to be worried about this morning than some nutjob on the subway, but his brain struggled to identify any of them until he finally checked the time on his wristwatch.
The minute hand quivered.
In an hour, Todd would be reporting his quarterly analysis to the vice president of his department, and he began to mentally rehearse some of his major talking points. Speaking in front of others was never something that bothered Todd, but the thought of doing so provided him with a brief distraction from the man across the aisle. His eyes drifted over once more as he noted his surroundings. The empty seats on either side of the man, an unusual occurrence in and of itself on a subway, made it clear that the other riders were equally unamused by his antics.
Something wasn’t adding up.
The urge to change seats grew stronger as the subway began to slow down and approach the next terminal. There were still several more stops until Todd would reach the platform that he took to get to work, but that wait never felt longer than it did now. The subway car grew dim as the overhead lights began to flicker and a wave of commuters entered the cabin. A blur of shadows and sound surrounded Todd until the subway lurched forward to continue its route. When the lights finally stabilized, Todd glanced around and surveyed the car for empty seats. As he did, he became aware that a new passenger was now seated across from him. This man, unlike the one holding the sign, was staring directly back at him.
This sudden realization startled Todd as his eyes shifted quickly between the two passengers. For a moment, he felt unsure of which one unsettled him more. The man holding the sign remained slumped back in his chair in the same comatose state that Todd had found him in, but the man seated beside him was very much alive. This man wore a long black trench coat and had a shaggy mane of jet-black hair that flowed down past his shoulders. The long-haired man’s eyes, otherworldly and electric, teemed with energy as they focused in on Todd. The whites of his eyes were so piercing and distinct that they almost hurt to look at. Todd glanced away as the man in the trench coat began to smirk.
The weight of the man’s gaze still lingered on Todd as it ate away at his patience like a fly in need of swatting; completely impossible to ignore. When the awkward silence became too much for him to bear, Todd took it upon himself to clear the air between them.
“Sometimes I feel like that too in the morning,” Todd muttered sheepishly to the man in the trench coat, nodding to the passenger holding the sign. “Before I’ve had my morning coffee.”
The smirk remained on the man’s face, although he never laughed.
“I don’t think that’s what you actually wanted to say to me,” the man in the coat countered. The calm tone of his voice offset his bitter delivery.
“Excuse me?” Todd asked, stunned by the response.
“You heard me.”
“No. I guess not. I –”
“You want to know about him?” the man in the trench coat asked, smile widening, as he wrapped an arm around the homeless man’s shoulders. “You want to know if he’s really dead?”
“I mean, I doubt that he’s –”
The man in the trench coat didn’t hesitate as he placed his hands along the top of the unresponsive passenger’s head, gingerly leaned him forward, and whipped the man’s head backwards into the glass window behind him. A loud thud echoed through the cabin as Todd recoiled back into his seat with a horrified look on his face. The other passengers on the subway flinched at the sound, but none of them dared to look over at what was taking place. They refused. The force of the blow caused the homeless man’s wobble around like a broken toy, but he never once opened his eyes; not even as a thin stream of blood trickled down the back of his neck. The man in the trench coat ran his fingers along the back of the bleeding passenger’s head and waved a set of red digits mockingly back at Todd.
“You know, it’s weird that he hasn’t woken up yet,” the man in the trench coat remarked as he began to lick the blood from his fingers. “I’m starting to think that this isn’t an act.”
Todd said nothing. He was too stunned to move.
“If I were you, I would start asking myself some different questions,” the man sneered, leaning forward. “I would waste less time asking myself whether the dead man in front of me was truly dead, and more time worrying about the people who left him here to hold that sign.”
A sudden urgency swept through Todd as the man’s statement began to sink in. He could feel the color rapidly draining from his face as he sprang to his feet. The man in the trench coat, now roaring with laughter, remained seated next to the bleeding passenger and wore a serrated smile that matched the splintered glass behind him.
Todd felt his mind spiraling as it raced frantically from one thought to the next. Whether the man in the coat was acting alone or if there were others like him on board was anyone’s guess, but it felt as if dozens of invisible eyes were now staring at him from all directions. Todd glanced around the cabin, but the surrounding passengers continued to ignore him as if nothing were happening. Their blank and apathetic faces haunted him as he realized that no help or assistance was on the way. Todd’s head swiveled at the sound of a deep wet gurgle, but by the time he looked back across the aisle at the man with the coat, he was too late to react.
The man in the coat raised his arm and flicked his wrist at Todd as his laughter grew louder and more intense. Flecks of the homeless man’s blood dotted Todd’s face and shirt collar. The man cackled wildly as he pointed at the blood marks and the look of fright on Todd’s face. His finger poked through the air with exaggerated excitement as Todd turned and ran.
The man did not give chase, but Todd didn’t dare look back as he sprinted away to the subway doors on the opposite end of the train car. Coherent thought had all but dissolved when the blood splashed onto his face. The moment that the train came to a stop, Todd had planned to jump out onto the next platform and scramble up the stairway to the streets above. It didn’t matter how far away from his office building he was, anywhere with open space would be better than here. Todd cowered behind a standing rail and several other passengers as he kept his eyes locked on the cabin doors. Each passing second seemed longer than the last as Todd listened to the man scream out from his seat. His voice boomed with twisted pleasure.
“We are in every town,” the man in the coat ranted. “We know who you are, and we know where you live. When the time is right, and that day finally comes, we will come for you too. Make no mistake. We will come for you!”
The train gradually came to a stop and the heavy metal doors slid open. Todd burst through the entryway and shouldered his way past dozens of boarding commuters. They cursed angrily at him as he slammed into them, even knocking a few of them to the ground, but none of that mattered to Todd. The only thing on his mind was survival. He had to put some distance between himself and the man in the coat. He could still hear him shouting from inside the subway car as he traversed the platform and clamored up the station’s concrete steps. By the time he was halfway up the stairway, Todd was bounding up the steps two at a time. The morning sun slowly crept into view and safety was only a stone’s throw away.
Todd shot out onto the street and sprinted to make the crosswalk ahead. To many of the people that he passed, Todd imagined that he must look like a complete maniac. His pale blue button-down shirt was flecked with blood, his face had turned from sheet-paper white to red, and his tie flapped loosely over his shoulder in the wind. Todd’s lungs burned as he zigzagged between at least a dozen people in the intersection to reach the other side of the street. Once there, he turned around and stared back at the entranceway leading back down to the subway tunnels. Much to his relief, the man in the trench coat was nowhere to be seen. No one was charging their way up the steps after him, but Todd’s nerves still rang with fright. The man’s burning eyes still haunted him.
He was still out there.
The idea of running into the man again was not something that Todd was ready to face. If they met again, the man would likely do more to him than just stare. The mere thought of looking across the subway aisle and seeing the long-haired man’s pale white face emerge from the shadows was enough to turn his blood cold. Something had to be done. Otherwise, it was all too easy for him to envision himself as another victim propped up on a seating bench and holding a carboard sign of his own.
Todd stuffed his hands inside of his coat pockets as he debated reporting the incident to the police. There wouldn’t be much information for them to act on with no witnesses after the fact, but he was unsure of what else could be done. A soft crinkle rustled at his side as his right hand grazed against something small and thin. His eyebrows raised in confusion as he looked down and removed a folded piece of paper from his pocket. Written on it, in a handwriting that differed from his own, was a single word that made him gasp as he read it aloud:
Soon.
Jeff Presto is an author from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is a fan of all things horror and enjoys mountain biking in his spare time. His favorite authors include Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, and Ray Bradbury. Follow him on Twitter @signedinpen, & Insta @signedinpen.
