Emergency Disaster Alert: Extreme Heat Warning — Evacuate Indoors Immediately

Open the doors? In this?

The monitors in the control room would have the platform cameras up. They could see this living hell with their own eyes and still tell me to open the doors.

I didn't touch the switch. I took my hands off the console and yanked the microphone over.

"Central Control, this is 2001. Konkuk University platform."

I had hundreds of emergency manuals in my head. None of them taught me how to report a situation this insane. I just fired off what was in front of my eyes.

"Multiple passengers down! They're collapsing like dominoes! Sweat—they're not sweating. The people on the ground, I mean. Breathing fast, faces red! Severe heat illness, probable! Twenty of them—no..."

Counting was pointless. They kept dropping while I was still making the report.

I snapped my head up and glared into the CCTV camera mounted on the cab ceiling.

"...They just keep coming. You can see that."

A surface platform is sealed on both sides by screen doors, with a roof overhead. On any ordinary day that structure would have kept the weather off. Now it was a vast greenhouse, trapping the hot air where it stood.

The dispatcher's voice, thick with disbelief, was swallowed by the static. A moment later another channel crashed through in a tangle of crosstalk.

I stayed hunched over the mic and pressed my right ear flush to the speaker.

The chaos wasn't Konkuk's alone. Euljiro. City Hall. Screams from every direction dumped into the channel all at once.

One dispatcher was alone in that slaughterhouse, calling train numbers and reciting the manual. Hundreds of CCTV screens were throwing living hells at him, and there was no way to know which hell to take first. They couldn't judge it either.

The control room, and the cab of every train. Each of us was enduring a private hell from wherever we sat, and not one of us knew what this was.

An hour ago, rolling out of Gunja Depot, it hadn't been like this. The asphalt had looked ready to melt and go tacky, but it had still belonged to a heat wave. Only a heat wave.

I took the controls at Seongsu Station and ran a single stop to here, Konkuk University Station. In a little over three minutes, it had become a different world.

Why had the whole world gone mad at once?

I didn't know the reason. One thing was certain.

Open the doors, and people die.

"Control. This is 2001. I can't operate the doors."

"Outside heat gets in and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the cabin air-conditioning overloads. The inverter drops on the spot. The train dies. Every time."

I checked the load figure in the corner of the TCMS screen, the train's integrated control and monitoring system. Worked backward from the sensors, the people in the cabin came to about 930.

Open the doors and air at forty-eight degrees Celsius would flood in through the forty doors along one side. We were stopped, with no slipstream to help. If the cooling couldn't carry that load, the auxiliary power supply would cut its own feed. Lights and air-conditioning would be the first to die, and the air compressor that ran the brakes would stop with them. Bleed the pressure and the brakes would clamp on by force. The train would be dead where it stood.

Control knew that cold.

From the other side of the radio, there was only silence.

Then the group channel shared by every train went dead.

A beep. The direct line, patched one-to-one to our train, lit up.

It was Senior Park Cheolhun, in the control room.

He wasn't some rigid fool who didn't know a damn thing about the field. Park Cheolhun was a veteran himself—more than ten years in the cab before he crossed over to dispatch. That was exactly why he was a man of procedure. Why he clung to the manual.

The more uncontrollable a disaster became, the more you had to shut out hasty judgment on the ground and hang on the manual, or the whole system came apart. Let a single train set improvise and hundreds of trains would tangle after it, each one hooked to the next. For a dispatcher, that was the only right answer. It wasn't that I didn't know it. The field was a different conversation.

"...Senior. It's forty-eight degrees out there right now."

"The problem isn't the 930 people at my back getting steamed to death. The problem is this train dying on an elevated line or a bridge."

"If we stop, we stop underground. I open the doors by the book, turn this train into a steamer, and then we die on the surface—every mainline train behind us dies in a line. Tens of thousands of people, actually cooked. Look at the weather."

Senior Park Cheolhun's conviction, seen from far above: hold the whole system together. My judgment, from the middle of the hell: hold this train. From a distance or from up close, both of us were desperate enough to bleed for it.

And then a long sigh came down the direct line.

The channel clicked back over to the official group net, the one every train could hear, and his voice came through stiff.

Yes. This was right.

"...Train 2001. Departing Konkuk University platform."

I hauled the master controller over and got the train moving. Someone plastered to the screen door on the left was pounding the glass, face gone crimson, mouth working at words. They were on my dead side. Fortunately, I didn't hear a word.

"...Please see to the follow-up."

Please, I'd said.

I had thrown out a principle I'd kept for ten years. I was leaving people who were hanging on the glass, begging to live, and I was saying please. I knew exactly how empty it sounded in this hell. I said it anyway. I felt that if I didn't get the words out, I wouldn't still count as a human being.

The moment the platform slid out of sight, I caught the microphone and threw the switch for the cabin announcement.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

"Attention, passengers. Due to a sharp rise in temperature on the surface sections, this train will run nonstop. We will not stop until Jamsil Station, and the doors will not open."

Sweat tracked down my temple and fell, drop by drop, off my jaw. I wiped my face with the back of my hand and added a line that existed in no manual.

The instant I cut the announcement, a murmur came through the cab wall. Panic, starting. Beyond trusting those doors to stay shut, there was nothing else I could do.

For a heartbeat, an empty place came to mind. Sinseol-dong. The third basement level. I'd meant to boil a pack of ramyeon down there once the shift was over. What, exactly, had gone wrong?

The radio on my right shoulder cut through the thought and gave me a number.

When the relief had handed the train over at Seongsu, it had been fifty-five. Up seven degrees already?

I tightened my grip on the master controller and stared straight ahead.

Beeeep—!

The phone in my pocket had news of its own.

In the same moment, 930 disaster alarms went off in the cabin at my back and smeared together into one crushed blare.

"..."

I jammed the phone back into my pocket, and the instant I fixed my eyes forward, the platform at Guui Station came into view. I held my speed and ran in without braking. Nonstop.

Guui was worse than Konkuk. People hung limp against the screen-door glass, every face crimson, as if something had a hand around the throat, staring blankly at the train rolling into the platform. They believed I was going to stop. In ten years I had never once passed that place by.

The train went straight through. I didn't bother with the mirror, or with the people streaming backward out of it.

Next was Gangbyeon Station. There weren't even screams. Even in the blur of the pass I could see it clearly: blisters swelling along the forearms and the napes of the people sprawled on the floor. The flesh was cooking.

This lethal heat was spreading much faster than I was running.

I shut my eyes hard and shook off the afterimage of bodies cooking. When I opened them, I drove the train harder still.

Clear of Gangbyeon, we finally ran up onto Jamsil Railway Bridge, open to the sky on every side. Nothing over the Han River to cut the sun. Not a handspan of shade. Direct light slammed in through the windshield. I had the visor down as far as it would go and sunglasses on, and my eyes still felt as if they were burning out of my skull. Sweat kept finding its way in and stinging.

Then the orange ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠warning lamp in the corner of the panel started to blink.

With the world boiling like that outside, the cooler had no chance of throwing the heat out. What it couldn't exhaust would pack itself into the machine, layer on layer, until the unit gave up and shut its own power down. I had to be underground before that happened.

One bridge. Just Jamsil Railway Bridge. The next station was Jamsillaru. Then Jamsil—and underground.

I checked the TCMS monitor on the right side of the console.

"...Fifty-three degrees?!"

In the short moment I was staring, the digits flickered and went red.

I had not seen those letters once in ten years.

At the same time a sickening stench drove in at me. The rubber gaskets sealing the door frames were melting, going tacky. If the rubber melted, the seal failed. If the seal failed, the cooling was finished for good. The fact tore around inside my head.

I forced my eyes wide and locked them on the rail ahead. Heat shimmer was wavering over it like snakes.

"It's normal. It's normal."

I said it out loud on purpose.

"Air that doesn't shiver over steel cooked past sixty degrees—that would be the strange thing."

Two hundred meters ahead, the shimmer hadn't lifted.

A hundred meters. Still there.

Wrong. Heat shimmer is supposed to break apart as you close the distance. That's what normal looks like.

Seventy meters. It wasn't the air that was wavering.

"...!"

My heart dropped. I felt it slam into the floor under my feet.

"Buckling?"

Steel that couldn't take the climb in temperature had bent like a stick of taffy. Go over that and we derailed. One hundred percent. And then the Han River.

My hand shot out on its own and I slammed the emergency brake.

Kreeee—!

The whole cab pitched forward under the sudden deceleration. Behind me, dull impacts—passengers thrown down—and screams.

"Hah—hk..."

A fraction before my ribs would have smashed into the console, I caught myself on both arms, dragged in a ragged breath, and hurried to check what was ahead. Less than twenty meters left to the buckle. It was a mercy I'd already been down to forty kilometers an hour. Come through at the usual sixty or seventy and the train would already have been in the river.

I scrubbed my soaked palms dry against ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠my knees and looked around. Surface track. Blazing sun. Not a scrap of shade. The middle of Jamsil Railway Bridge.

The radio on my right shoulder crackled.

Evacuate to the nearest underground?

I was on the Han River.

I looked at the buckle in front of me, and a hollow laugh broke loose before I could stop it.