Snippet 2 of Hell Train:

“That shouldn’t have happened,” Hector Chavez growled as the group walked forward along the train cars. They were all more than a little deaf from the noise and the rushing of the wind, but with Hector’s prior hearing loss, Jack was pretty sure anyone in the general vicinity could overhear him. “I checked the lid on their latrine, it was latched open. Someone left it open!”

“I know,” Jack shouted back. The train had picked up speed again and he focused a lot more on his balance as the train cars swayed and the wind buffeted them. He ran a hand across his shaven scalp, still wet from being hosed down. He and his team had stood in the car while the cleanup guys had hosed it out. He wasn’t remotely clean, but at least his clothes were just wet, and not soaked in blood. Jack’s lean face went grim, “Odds are, whoever did it is dead too.”

“Stupid,” Hector snapped. “Not just stupid, lazy! It’s one of the first things we tell people, check to make sure the cover is latched down. Anyone who left it up doesn’t deserve to live!”

Jack couldn’t really argue with the man. Over the past six months, he’d seen all kinds of stupidity and death, often as a shared experience. He’d seen people try to reason with the undead and seen people fail to take even simple precautions that got them killed… He’d seen death on a scale that his mind shied away from.

This wasn’t a plague, it wasn’t a pestilence. It was death that led to more death, it was magic, it was supernatural… and Jack suspected that many of the “stupid” people just wanted to die, to be free of this living nightmare.

He didn’t say that, though, as he came off car one and dropped onto the back deck of Engine Two. It and Engine One provided the main propulsion for the train. They also had Engine Three hooked onto the back end of the train, but that one they only used when they had no other choice, most often to back out of a really bad situation like back in Cincinnati. He shuddered a bit as he remembered that. “Put everyone down to alert status,” Jack shouted up to Josh Wachope.

He stepped into the whisper cab and it was as if he’d stepped into another world. The crew compartment wasn’t big and he suspected he would have thought of it as loud before, but the sound-proofing reduced the constant roar of the engines to a distant rumble.

“How are we looking?” Robert Brockman looked up from the maps spread across the narrow table. He and Tim Kennedy shared the tight space and with the addition of Jack and his armor and weapons, it was suddenly much tighter.

“We lost fifteen adults, two kids,” Jack said as he took off his helmet. The latter number was the only part that really mattered to any of them. People came and went. Jack had seen men and women fall between the railroad cars, dragged down by possessed, and quite a few suicides. Death was a matter of life in their world. Kids though… Kids shouldn’t have to pay for the mistakes of adults.

“Shit, man, sorry,” Tim said. His face was serious, but Jack saw relief there, too. Tim and Robert’s families were both in car one. And if Jack had any family left, they’d be there, too. It was the best defended car besides the hospital car, which was car number two. There were perks to having essential skills to the survival of their group. Car three held the orphans, many of them babies, children found along the way who had no family to care for them. In dangerous times, Jack stationed his best people to protect those three train cars and the engines.

“How about our route?” Jack changed the subject. 

Tim, a former logistician, shifted the map around so Jack could see it, “We heard back from Team Three and Four,” Tim said. He pointed out red x-marks on the map. Jack recognized the two towns that they’d hoped to find crossings at. “The bridge at Hannibal is just gone, explosives or flood, no idea but the tracks just end in open air, they said.” He pointed at the town of Louisiana, Missouri, “The bridge there is some kind of turnstile thing, to allow barge traffic. But somebody left it swinging open. There’s no way across.”

“Power?” Jack asked.

Robert shook his head, “Um, no. There’s no lights on as far as they can see. All of Missouri is dark. Richard Cartwright volunteered to swim across, but Tom told him not to try it.”

Jack nodded at that. Rivers were dangerous. It wasn’t just that the undead didn’t need to breathe, so they’d drag swimmers down. No, there was other stuff in the rivers, too. That was how they’d lost so many people in Cincinnati. They’d moved some across in boats since they hadn’t trusted their makeshift repairs to the bridge.

For just a moment, Jack wasn’t in the engine cab. He was perched on top of a stopped train car, covered in blood and listening to the screams of the children in the car below him as he hacked possessed down. Behind him, men screamed as something dragged them over the sides and into the cold black water below.

The moment passed and Jack wiped a hand across his shaved head. “Okay, so that’s not an option, further north?” That was the problem, Jack knew. He’d looked their maps over just as much as Tim and Robert. The junctions that went through Hannibal and Louisiana didn’t join up with any northern tracks after they crossed the Illinois River, not until after they crossed the Mississippi.

Tim shook his head, “Team Five couldn’t find a way across the Illinois River, not south of Chicago.”

Jack rubbed his face tiredly as he considered that. No one in their right mind wanted to go near any big city. The more people who’d died there, the more undead there would be. Worse, cities seemed to be focal points of whatever weird shit had happened. Things that shouldn’t have happened, like stories of monsters and blood raining from the sky.

Cincinnati, had a population of a few hundred thousand and it had been a nightmare. Chicago had a population in the millions. Jack was in charge, he knew that if he told them to go to Chicago, that his people would do it. And they’d all die if he gave that order… and then whoever survived would still have to cross the Mississippi.

“Okay,” Jack said after a long moment. “Alton or St Louis proper, then?”

“Yeah,” Tim cleared his throat. “Look, I know it’s the least bad of our options, but I can’t say I’m crazy about us going there.”

Jack gave him a level look, “You’re the one who pretty much told me we had no other options.

“Yeah,” Tim nodded. He looked down at the charts. “Yeah, I know. I just wonder if…”

He didn’t need to go on. There were plenty of people on the train who had, at one point or another, expressed a desire to stop, to settle down, fortify, maybe to start anew.

Jack didn’t look at Tim, he looked at Brockman, “How many people in St Louis, Robert?”

The former architect didn’t have to boot up his laptop, they’d already gone over it. “Around three million in the city proper.” They’d pulled every bit of census data, every bit of information they could get their hands on. His laptop and the other backups held that data, five terabytes of maps, encyclopedias, and detailed manuals on everything from sewing to blacksmithing.

“And in Chicago?” Jack asked.

“About ten million,” Robert said.

Jack gave Tim a nod, “There’s a few hundred thousand back in Springfield, I’d guess. We just went through a town, I dunno, twenty thousand I’d guess. That’s how many used to be alive, of course. There’s also the ones crawling out of the graves.”

That was something of an exaggeration. Most of those bodies were too decomposed to rise. But Tim blanched anyway as he thought about it. The undead were drawn to sound and light. Any place they holed up would have to be a fortress… and more and more of the undead would gather every day. They would pile themselves in to fill a moat, they’d pile bodies on top of one another until they scaled a wall. They’d beat on doors and windows until their bones shattered or the barriers did… and then they would kill every living thing they came across.

“We can’t stop here, Tim,” Jack said softly. “There’s too many of them. We’re headed to the only safety we’ll be able to find.”

“That’s assuming the Free States transmission isn’t a hoax or some nut,” Tim growled.

“Yeah,” Jack nodded, “But they’ve had a few other people on, so if they are nuts, there’s at least a few of them together.” The shortwave transmission came on in the evening, and the Free Western States claimed to be survivors who had banded together, a number of enclaves across Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho. They said that they held out, that any who came in peace were welcome.

Almost everyone had heard those transmissions and they were how Jack had been able to make the train work. Most survivors they’d come across were only too eager to join them on their journey. Not all, Jack thought as he remembered more than a few holdouts who’d sneered at the very idea. But the ones who had stayed in touch after the train had left, their transmissions had been ones of dwindling supplies, of growing desperation, reports of increasing numbers of undead… and most ended in silence.

Short-wave transmissions from across the east had been going quiet. A big enclave up in Maine had been holding out for months, but they’d gone silent only a few days ago. Jack pointed up at the map of the United States taped to the back wall of the cab. “We hear anything from Chattanooga?”

The town in Tennessee had been a bastion. The combination of mountains and good organization had kept the town in a good state. Many survivors on the eastern coast had headed there and Jack had originally planned to head his train that way… but too many train tracks were out in the Appalachian Mountains. Their scouts hadn’t been able to find a route south through Kentucky, not short of backtracking all the way to Virginia at the least… which had meant he’d had to turn the train north and go through Cincinnati.

Tim looked away, “Nothing.”

“They said they were having some issues with their generator…” Robert started to say.

“That was a week ago. If they haven’t got a replacement and checked in by now…” Jack shrugged. “It doesn’t look good, does it?”

Their policy with their own scouts was that they gave them three days to check in. Anything after a week and they just assumed that they were dead. It didn’t pay to send people to search for them. The scouts had rail cars or trucks with rail wheels that could transit quickly, that should be able to outrun anything that they couldn’t fight.

A city didn’t have that.

“We keep moving,” Jack said. He pointed at the map, “So, tell me about St Louis.”

“Alton is north of the city,” Tim spoke. “Team Two said the bridge is still up, but it’s not a rail bridge, so we’d have to unload the train, move across, and try to find alternate transportation.”

Jack nodded. It wasn’t the best option, it would either leave them entirely on foot in close proximity to millions of undead, or if they got lucky they could put together some kind of convoy on the other side of the river.

“What else?”

“Merchant’s Bridge is up and so is MacArthur,” Robert said, pointing at the two railroad bridges they’d circled on the map. Both of them were at the center of town. “But Team One didn’t get close enough to look at them, not before…”

“Before they died,” Jack finished for him. Sam Robb had led Team One. He’d volunteered to lead his team into St Louis. He and his team had reported clear tracks and seeing both rail bridges still standing. They’d also reported growing numbers of undead… and then a last, panicked call from Sam had ended in screaming.

The train could bull through a few hundred bodies, but Jack didn’t know if it could push through thousands or tens of thousands. If enough bodies clogged the tracks, could they derail the train?

Three million undead, he thought to himself. Yet those three million possessed would come at the sound of the train, anyway. If they had to stop, to move the survivors on foot across the Alton Bridge…

“We need more information,” Jack said. He glanced at Tim, “Call Team Three and Four, have them head back this way. Is Team Two headed back?”

“Yeah,” Robert nodded.

“Have them see if they can get a better picture of things down there. We’re not going to push in, not yet, but we’re going to have to send someone back into St Louis.” Jack frowned and pointed at an antenna symbol drawn on the south side of St Louis, “There’s some survivors there?” He didn’t remember any transmissions from St Louis.

“Some nutjob,” Tim snorted, “Nadal Malik; he calls himself the Lord Regent. He claims he has an army of hundreds and he’ll protect anyone who recognizes his divine stature.”

“Raider?” Jack asked.

“I don’t think so,” Tim frowned. “Sounds more like the strictly delusional type. We’ve never heard anyone else on his radio and he’s pretty sporadic.”

“Doesn’t take much more than a high powered rifle to take someone down. Team One didn’t have time to tell us what went wrong…” Jack thought out loud. “He transmit anything around the time we lost Sam?”

“No,” Tim shook his head.

“Well, keep an ear out. If it was normal survivors, I’d be willing to see if we could get people over there, but…” Jack shrugged. He wasn’t about to risk fighting people they’d need to try to get to someone who sounded crazy and might be dangerous.

Though if I could get him to make some kind of disturbance on the right part of town, Jack thought to himself, and that would sure be convenient… At this point, it didn’t bother him to think of using someone else as a diversion for the undead, especially not when that person was probably already unhinged.

“Okay,” Jack nodded at the others, “I’ve got to go spread the news.” He turned to step out of the cab, but then froze as he saw the small chalk board on the door. The numbers 953 were written on it. He smudged out the last two numbers and corrected it: 936.

As he stepped outside, he told himself that the tears were from the wind stinging his eyes.

***

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