Superheated Hell
It may sound like a joke. For a man like me, though, a silence in which nothing at all can be heard is far more beautiful than any music people call great.
It had been that way ever since my left ear was ruined. Scraping sound together on half a hearing was exhausting work, and I was easier in myself buried inside a suffocating quiet.
Silence in a situation like this was another matter.
Living people make noise. Constantly, whatever the sound may be. I had never seen a human being who didn't. Which meant this place had already become a grave.
"...Khk."
I tried to draw a breath, coughed it back out, and dropped to the floor.
To call the cabin of Carriage 3 a sauna would have been generous. I clamped my sleeve over my nose and mouth with everything I had, and it did nothing. The plastic hand straps along the ceiling had melted into ugly drips, and a harsh chemical reek, cooked together with the heat, stabbed up into my nose.
Bags and shoes whose owners were gone lay scattered in a mess. They too had melted sticky against the floor, giving off the acrid stink of scorched rubber—and under that, the cloying, bloody reek of protein as it cooked. Breathing itself was torture. There was no other name for it. This was a superheated hell.
"Hah. Hah. Hah..."
My heart slammed wild, and the world in front of me began to spin. Sweat broke from my body, struck the floor, and hissed the instant it landed. Linger here even a little longer and I would be no different from the people sprawled across that floor.
Why the hell is it only this car?
I jerked my head up toward the ceiling. The air vent ran the length of the cabin's center, and the plastic-surgery flyer that ought to have been fluttering in front of it hung dead still, without so much as a twitch.
In that instant a line I had let slide that morning flashed back—the very line written in the remarks column of the operations log I had skimmed while taking over the train at Seongsu Station.
Carriage 3: cooling performance degraded. Light maintenance requested.
It was a common thing every summer. Maintenance was always backed up, and it wasn't going to be settled today, so I had signed it off as nothing worth noting. I had been passing notes like that along for ten years, and nothing serious had ever come of them.
So the air-conditioning runs a little weak. What does that matter?
And yet that was what had turned this car into a cemetery.
"Hah... hah..."
Cruelly, the puzzle in my head snapped together piece by piece.
The moment I had found the buckled rail and brought the train to a stop, the temperature outside had been pushing fifty degrees Celsius. Carriage 3, its cooling feeble from the start, would have begun to boil ahead of every other car.
I forced my head around and looked above the doors. The acrylic plate covering the emergency manual release was smashed, and the emergency cock valve had been cranked any way it pleased. Someone driven mad by the lack of air had broken it and turned the valve, trying to live, and outside air had flooded into Carriage 3 through the open door.
But the outside air they had expected would let them breathe had nowhere to go. It stayed trapped inside the train and only made breathing harder. The door opened in order to survive had become the door into hell.
The larger problem was that the passengers in the other nine cars might end up keeping them company on the road to the dead.
For the sake of the passengers, a train will not take power if even a single door circuit stands open. The system is built to throw an immediate emergency brake across the entire consist. So even if I somehow reached the cab in the rearmost car, so long as the door circuit on this Carriage 3—its emergency cock hanging open—was still live, the train could not move a single meter.
"Hah. Hk. Haahk..."
I seized my shaking thighs in both hands and hauled myself up by main force, then staggered toward the gray steel box mounted on the wall at the end of the car. To an ordinary passenger's eye it would have been nothing but wall. It was the distribution panel every circuit in this car passed through.
Beneath it, a man and a woman broiled red sat slumped, heads hanging.
"Move... hk."
The heat tore my throat open; I couldn't even get a full word out. I dragged in a rough breath, caught both of them by the nape, and flung them aside.
With a trembling hand I snatched the ring of keys from my belt. A driver has to carry, at all times, the keys that will open nearly every door on the train. I jammed one in, wrenched it hard, and threw the panel open. Under the acrid burn-stink and a thin veil of smoke lay a tangle of wires and switches.
There was no reason a driver should understand a circuit that complex. But I had something I had paid for with an ear: a stubborn habit of stripping everything bare with my eyes.
One day at Gunja Depot, a maintenance tech had been tearing down a door circuit throwing errors. I had stood beside him with a cigarette in my mouth and watched those precise hands without blinking, and the memory flared up now. I didn't know the exact principle. I could at least tell what to touch and what to leave alone.
Click. Click. Click.
I drove down the NFBs—the breakers—and the switches in a frenzy, forcibly cutting the door circuit the open emergency cock had left live and bypassing the interlock sensor.
Door Cutout. I had severed Carriage 3's door system completely from the train's communications network.
A thin whine rose from inside the panel that had been dead, and a faint vibration traveled out into my fingertips. The price was that this car's air handling and its cabin lights died with it. So what. What use were light and a breeze now?
"Hoo. Hooo. Hah. Haahk..."
My lungs felt ready to burst. I was long past the limit a body could survive, and the world in front of me began to fall away. I drove my shoulder into the steel box, burning hot, and shoved it shut. Then I ran for the next car so blindly I couldn't have said whether I went on two feet or four.
The film cut out.
I remembered throwing myself at the door of Carriage 4. I had no memory of my hand ever reaching the iron handle. The world was black, and muffled, as if I were under water.
"...sir! Can you hear me? ...Pull yourself together! ...Driver!"
Someone was scattering lukewarm water over my face and neck and slapping my cheek. From the feel of it, this was no fine mist from a spray bottle. They were flicking water off a wet hand, slap, slap.
"I asked if you can hear me!"
This time my eyelids were forced open. The unpleasantness of it dragged my mind back by degrees.
"...I can't hear."
"You can't hear me?"
A woman's voice. Calm, and distant where it tangled with the ringing in my ears.
"The left..."
"Your left ear? It could be temporary deafness from heatstroke shock. Stay still. I'm pouring water on your clothes."
There was no time to answer. Lukewarm water dumped across my chest, and my shirt soaked through in a thoroughly miserable way. Then came the wind of a hand fanning me. A clumsy breeze, but it skimmed the wet cloth and stripped the heat away through evaporation. My boiling temperature dropped hard, and my mind snapped clear.
The moment my eyes opened, the sound of the world poured into my right ear all at once.
A young woman, drenched through with sweat, was looking down at me.
"Ah. Hah..."
"Are you with me?"
"Hah... I must have passed out."
"Yes. You collapsed."
"How did you find me."
"I was right in front of this car's door. I heard a thud, looked through the window, and there you were, down in the gangway."
Pressing hard at my throbbing temple with one hand, I braced against the floor and barely managed to sit up.
"Thank you for saving me."
"Don't mention it. How is it—has the heat come down at all?"
"Yes. Thanks to you. If it hadn't been for you, I'd have croaked right there in that car."
"Yes. You really would have croaked."
The way she returned my rough wording without so much as a change of expression was strange. She found the pulse at my wrist as she spoke.
"Your pulse is coming back. You'll feel better soon."
"..."
"How's the ear. You said the left one doesn't hear."
"Ah. It was already gone. The left ear."
"..."
The fingers on my pulse paused for an instant, and she let out a small breath. Then she shifted and settled herself on my right.
"Open your mouth. Don't gulp it all down at once. Take it slowly."
She lifted a bottle of water and poured the lukewarm stuff into my mouth.
"Mmgh—are you—?"
"Swallow, then talk."
I swallowed and asked again.
"...I asked if you're a doctor."
"I'm a nurse."
Taking in that flat answer, I braced a hand on the wall and got to my feet. Only then did Carriage 4 come into view.
The crush was still suffocating, and yet there was a sense of order to it. Looking closer, I saw why.
"...The center of the aisle is clear."
The people still holding on to their wits were pressed tight against the windows and the doors to either side, crouched low. On the floor they had cleared down the middle, those who had lost consciousness or were gasping for breath lay in a single row. Every tie was loosened, every shirt torn open to the breastbone. Sleeves were shoved up to the shoulders and trouser cuffs rolled above the knees—but every one of them still had their shoes laced on tight. A few of the passengers against the walls were even flapping sheets of paper or outer layers, fanning the people on the floor.
A makeshift field hospital, built in the middle of chaos.
"...You did all of this alone?"
When I asked it in a hoarse voice, she answered while pressing down a breath that wanted to climb.
"All I did was loosen their clothes, wet them down, and ask people to fan them. Aside from pulling body heat off through evaporation, there's no treatment I can give in here."
"Why didn't you take the shoes off."
"They'll have to walk once we're off. The ground is hot."
"..."
I stopped at that answer and looked at her once.
Her voice was calm. Sweat, though, kept falling from the point of her chin without a pause. However composed she seemed, she was as close to collapse as anyone else.
"I'll ask one thing. Those people. How long do they last."
She started to answer, and stopped.
"...I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"In a hospital I'd take a core temperature, hang fluids, put them in ice water. How am I supposed to throw a number around in a place where I can't do any of that."
"Give me a rough one anyway."
At my relentless pressing, her brow drew in.
"...Twenty minutes, then. The golden window they can last without brain damage. Stretch it as far as it will go and it's still twenty minutes."
"Twenty minutes."
"Yes. Past that it's multiple organ failure, or hypovolemic shock and cardiac arrest. No. They die, or they live the rest of their lives with a disability."
I was on my feet at once, and the numbers started running in my head.
Twenty minutes granted. Once I reached the rear car, the physical running time to push the train through to Gangbyeon Station was only a matter of minutes. Factor in rebooting the system and working the bypass, and what remained was fifteen minutes at the outside. Six cars still to punch through ahead of me. That left two minutes and thirty seconds a car—tight, even if I did nothing but breathe and run.
"Look after the passengers."
Urgency had me already. I turned straight for the bulkhead of Carriage 5.
"I'm coming with you."
She caught my forearm hard. I scowled and looked back at her.
"...Do I look like I have time to spare?"
"You just passed out. Don't talk to me about spare time."
Without a heartbeat of hesitation, she stepped in close on my right.
"If you go down, Driver, this train is finished. What happens if you collapse again going alone."
"..."
"If I'm beside you, keeping your temperature down with wet cloth, you'll make it all the way. We're each other's lifeline. I want to live. That's why I'm getting you to the end."
There was nothing to argue.
And now that I thought of it, she had not stood on my left even once. Not when we stood side by side in the middle of a car full of groans, and not when she answered every hoarse thing I said. From the moment she understood my left ear was dead, she simply hadn't.
Inborn instinct, or an occupational disease worn into the bone. Either way, it didn't seem like something that would fail to help in this madness.
"...Then suit yourself. I won't be looking after you."
"All right."
As if it were nothing, she soaked her shirt through with what water was left in the bottle and wound it tight across her shoulders.
"Oh—my name is Kim Jeyeon. Jeyeon, not Jaeyeon."
"...Yoon Seowook."
We stood before the gangway leading into Carriage 5. From beyond the iron door, an ugly noise was faintly ringing.
I seized the handle and threw the door open in one motion.
Kreee—bang!
"AAAAAGH! Give it here, you crazy bitch!"
The moment the door opened, a bestial shriek burst out.
Splash.
Hot, sticky blood sheeted over me from head to foot.