Jamsil Railway Bridge
Any trace of amusement vanished in an instant. I hauled the microphone in close.
"Central Control, 2001. Train stopped on the outer track, Jamsil Railway Bridge. Rail buckling confirmed ahead. Unable to proceed."
"Confirmed by eye. Twenty meters ahead, the right-hand rail has shifted left and the gauge has opened. We derail if we enter it."
I leaned down beneath the sun visor, staring at track warped like pulled taffy, and added the rest.
"I'll move to the rear cab and reverse to Gangbyeon Station. Requesting approval."
"You think the rail beside us is running any cooler than this one?"
Jamsil Railway Bridge is double-tracked. Inner and outer lines lie side by side, under the same sun at the same hour. If the steel on this side had bent like taffy, the other side would be no different.
Silence, exactly as I'd expected. Of course there was no answer.
A reverse move on the Line 2 main line. Not an overrun of a few meters past a stop marker. In ten years, the only times I had ever done it were a couple of emergency drills in the simulator, scenarios built around a fire or a terror attack. And even those had been on an empty train.
A sharp beep.
A moment later the direct one-to-one channel lit.
Senior Park Cheolhun.
"..."
"Copy."
He let out a long breath.
"The power system's gone to hell. Substations are dropping one by one. One on the Gangnam side just went out. Power control keeps hammering us that Seongsu's in danger too. No telling when the catenary voltage cuts."
I lifted my head and glanced up at the overhead wire. Traction or cooling, an electric train draws all of it from that thin copper line.
"While you can still move, get clear. No exceptions. Fast."
"Understood."
"Yes."
The direct line cut with a dull click.
A man who had spent more than ten years between the field and the control room, and had seen every kind of ugliness the job could offer. Today was the first time he had ever told me to be careful. That single sentence woke me to the reality more clearly than any gauge on the console.
The clock read 10:24.
When noon arrived, the sun would climb higher than it stood now. Whether that was luck or the opposite, I couldn't say. It meant only that this moment was not yet the worst of it.
I started the arithmetic. Eight hundred meters, the distance I had pushed in from Gangbyeon Station. At fifteen kilometers an hour, that was fifteen thousand meters an hour. Two hundred and fifty meters a minute. Three minutes and twelve seconds.
The reverse itself would be over in three minutes. The trouble was that the reverse was not the trouble.
This was a ten-car train with a cab at each end, and I was at the very front of Car 1, facing Jamsil. To back toward Gangbyeon I had to cross all ten cars and take the master controller in the rearmost cab. Reversing from where I sat was possible, technically, but backing up without seeing what lay behind was no different from firing a gun with my eyes shut. I had no idea where the rail might have warped again.
So I had to open that door and go out.
One car runs about twenty meters. Ten cars, roughly two hundred. Nine hundred and thirty passengers were sealed inside that two-hundred-meter sweatbox, and I was supposed to force a path through people thrown across the floor by the emergency brake I had thrown four minutes ago. A lunatic driver who had blown past three stations without stopping.
"Ha. Fuck."
I felt like a man being led into a slaughterhouse. Open this iron door with no warning, and the terrified crowd would tear me apart alive. Or trample me to death.
I seized the microphone the way a man grabs a shield and flipped the in-car announcement switch.
"An announcement for all passengers. This is the driver."
My voice came out cracked.
"The track ahead has deformed in the heat. We cannot go forward. From this point the train will run in reverse and return to Gangbyeon Station."
Through the cab bulkhead I felt the murmur swell, a vibration rising against the wall.
"To operate from the rear, I have to move to the cab at the very back of the train. I will be passing through the cars."
I steadied my breath. The emergency manual ended here. From this point on, it was mine.
"...I have three requests."
One hand on the microphone, the other crushing the edge of the console hard enough to break it, I stood rigid.
"First. Do not open the doors. Under any circumstances. The temperature outside is above fifty degrees Celsius. The moment a door opens, the cooling system shuts down completely. The train dies, and we will not be able to go back. Second. Clear the aisle. If I don't reach the last car, this train does not move from here. Remember that we are over the Han River, and there is no shade. Third."
The howling beyond the bulkhead had already thinned.
Click.
The sound of the announcement switch dropping was unnaturally loud. Loud enough that I wondered whether the cab had always been this silent.
For ten years I had lived with a single door between the world and me. Lock it with a clank, and the noise and the heat outside disappeared—a cell two meters by two. No dealing with people. No forced conversation. Just a fixed track, run over and over. That was why I had made this my trade.
And already, at the mere thought of leaving the cab, my breath was catching hard in my throat.
I pulled open the drawer under the console. A few antacid tablets that always rattled around in there, a half-finished bottle of lukewarm water, an old flashlight. I don't know why, but I took the flashlight and shoved it into my back pocket. Maybe because I felt like a man walking onto a battlefield empty-handed. I needed something—anything—to hold.
When I gripped the door handle, my hand slipped uselessly off it. I wiped my palm on my pant leg, and the clammy damp would not leave. I stepped back and drew one deep breath. What was left of the water went down in a single pull, and a thin thread of strength came back. I cinched the strap of the radio slung over my shoulder one notch tighter.
Then I forced strength into a grip that wanted to slide, and flung the thick iron door wide.
What hit me the moment the door opened was not the heat. It was a vicious stench. The smell of a space where nine hundred and thirty people had been sealed in—vomit someone had brought up, sour sweat, and the stale reek of sweat that could not dry. Wound through all of it, the nauseating smell of door seals scorching.
I held my breath on instinct and pulled the cab door shut behind me, locking it fast. If anyone laid a careless hand on that console, everything was finished.
The moment I turned back, the true sound of hell reached my right ear. Weeping. Shouting. Screaming. Curses. Groans like animals. Fists beating on walls, the sharp crack of blast-resistant glass being smashed, the dull thud of doors being hammered.
I lost my bearings and froze where I stood. For a man deaf in one ear, a place like this is hell. With the roar coming from every side, I didn't know where to look first, and only my head kept turning.
The car was beyond wretched. In a single carriage barely twenty meters long, nearly a hundred people were piled so thick the floor had vanished. Some were already convulsing, eyes rolled white, foam at the mouth. Others, soaked through with sweat, sagged against the walls and gasped.
"The driver's here!"
At someone's shout, dozens of eyes swung toward me at once. The announcement had meant nothing. Worse—I had advertised that I was about to appear. Raise a hand if you're sick. What a naive thought. It would hardly be an exaggeration to call all nine hundred and thirty of them patients.
The terrified crowd ignored every word of my plea. Then, like a pack of zombies, they came at me.
"Out of the way! Please, move!"
I screamed and drove my shoulder hard into the mass, clawing a path down the aisle with everything I had.
"Open the door! Open the fucking door, you son of a bitch!"
"I—I can't breathe..."
"Driver! Turn the air-conditioning on!"
"Our kid collapsed! Hey! You!"
Countless hands hauled at my uniform without mercy. The weight of dozens of people bore down on me at once. If I went to the floor, I would be crushed to death where I fell. Extreme terror had paralyzed everything in them. There was no reason left to reach, and no time to make them understand with words. I beat away the dozens of hands clinging to me and dragged my feet forward in desperation.
Then a man blocked my path and seized the front of my uniform. His tie hung half-loosened around his neck, and his blue shirt was plastered to him, soaked through as if he had been dragged out of the water.
"Let go."
"Turn the AC on and then go!"
I twisted his wrist free by force and, with my other hand, shoved his chest hard enough to land with a solid thump.
"Don't block me. Not if you don't want all of us dead."
While the man in the blue shirt faltered at the cold warning, I bounced him aside with my shoulder and went on without a backward glance. By the time he came to his senses in this chaos and turned around, I would already be gone beyond the crowd.
Avoiding every body sprawled on the floor had been impossible from the start. Stepping on things I could not tell were arms or legs, I barely reached the passage door at the end of Car 1.
Bang!
Without hesitation I shoved the heavy iron door and crossed into Car 2. The moment I entered, my feet were caught. An old man collapsed across the threshold had latched onto my pant leg and was hanging his full weight from it.
"Let go."
"Why didn't you stop... people are dying! Gangbyeon Station... Guui Station... everyone there was still alive...!"
The palm against my ankle was hot as something pulled from a furnace. I stopped and looked closely down at his face. Skin flushed red with the heat, and yet not a drop of sweat. Dry.
"..."
This old man is about to die.
Something hot surged up inside me. But I still had eight more cars of hell to force through, so I dragged my heavy leg forward with him still clinging to it. Gaunt, nothing but bone, he held my pant cuff in a thin wrist and would not let go. With every step he was hauled along, sweeping the floor.
"...You bastard... you locked us... in this hell of fire..."
He muttered it like a curse.
Because it was true.
Gripping the iron handle of the door into Car 3, I looked from the old man at my feet to the passengers sprawled around us and shouted.
"And that's why I'm trying to haul you back out! So please—just let me through!"
Maybe that desperate cry did it. The strength slipped out of the old man's wasted hand. My pant leg light again, I didn't look back. I shoved myself into the next car like a man running.
Bang.
The moment I shut the iron door and stepped into Car 3, I froze as if nailed to the floor.
Unlike the pandemonium of Car 1 and Car 2, Car 3 was quiet enough to raise the hair on my neck. Not even the sound of breathing. A perfect tomb.
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