There Are No Humans in This Car
The moment I opened the door, blood washed over me from head to toe. The world in front of my eyes went red in an instant.
"...!"
The scarlet liquid tracking down my face was nothing like the lukewarm crawl of sweat. It was clammy enough to prickle the skin, and hot enough to turn the stomach.
I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them again, and wiped my lids with the back of my hand. Bright red blood smeared across my knuckles. Cutting through the nauseating reek of everything burning, a raw metallic tang of iron shoved its way up my nose.
"Fuck..."
There was no keeping a curse from coming out.
If sauna had been too kind a word for Car 3, then hell was too kind a word for Car 5.
A woman lay sprawled face-down in the aisle, her throat torn open, and over her stood a man in the shredded remains of a shirt, hauling in rough breaths. In his hand was a sharp metal pen that looked like a fountain pen. He flung it; it struck a steel pole in front of the seats with a harsh clang and spun off somewhere.
He paid it no mind. He rolled the fallen woman over and began ransacking her pockets in a frenzy. From her throat, bright red blood leapt in time with her heartbeat—spurt, spurt—like a fountain.
What came up in his hand was a crushed five-hundred-milliliter water bottle, the last of it sloshing at the bottom.
"Hah. Hah... You bitch. I told you to give me some water..."
Through the gaps in his shirt, his bare skin was scored with countless red diagonal lines that looked like fingernail marks.
Was that all it took to strip a person of their humanity—a few drops of lukewarm water? Faced with a reality I couldn't believe, I forgot why I had come and froze where I stood.
That was when Kim Jeyeon, pressed close at my side, leaned in and whispered into my right ear.
"The carotid's gone."
"..."
"With that volume of blood loss, hypovolemic shock within thirty seconds. Cardiac arrest within two minutes."
Even under the sickened look I gave her—has this woman lost her mind?—Kim Jeyeon didn't so much as blink before she went on.
"And that man has heatstroke. When heatstroke reaches its extreme, intracranial pressure rises and the central nervous system shuts down."
"What are you doing, calling the play?"
"Hallucinations and mania set in together, until nothing's left but the most primitive violence."
"..."
"He isn't even capable of recognizing what he's done. Mm. A lunatic whose brain has cooked, you might say."
Her words dumped cold water over the stunned mess of my thoughts.
"...!"
"He's nothing but an organism running on instinct. I'm telling you so you won't hesitate for a second when you deal with him."
It was the perfect pretext for throwing mercy and hesitation away. I pulled the flashlight I had kept in my back pocket, gripped it tight, and stepped onto the blood-slick floor.
The man was on his knees, tongue shoved into the crushed bottle, sucking at it. He licked up the last remaining drop, then hurled the bottle to the floor. And when he finally lifted his head, he would have seen me standing there with the flashlight in my hand.
He let out a howl.
"Aaaagh! Give me water—!"
His face plated in blood, he raked a rough look over me. Bloodshot eyes slid past the flashlight in my hand and fixed on Kim Jeyeon's shoulder—more precisely, on the damp shirt she had wrapped around herself.
"Waaater—!"
I tucked Kim Jeyeon behind my back and said, low, "Stay right on me."
In the same instant he kicked off the floor and launched himself, coming at us with blood-smeared hands outstretched, every bit as savage as when he had driven a fountain pen into a person's throat moments ago. I waited until he was nearly on me—until his foot caught on the fallen woman's body and he staggered.
I twisted and swung the fist clenched around the flashlight in a full-armed blow. There was a grinding crack as his nose and jaw caved in together. An industrial aluminum flashlight weighing a good kilogram had taken him square in the face, and he couldn't even get a scream out before he was flung backward. He collapsed, limp, across the body of the woman he had stabbed to death.
A perfect blow.
"Hah. Hah..."
I dragged in rough breaths and wiped the blood off my hand against the waist of my pants. Somewhere in my skull, adrenaline, dopamine, cortisol, and endorphins—names I had only ever picked up in passing—seemed to detonate all at once. But behind that explosive high, the strangeness of having crushed a man's face with a lump of metal came in like a wave. Both my legs began to shake.
"Let's go. Watch your step on the left."
Kim Jeyeon, pressed tight to my back, indicated the way in a flat voice. Trusting her, I stepped over the people strewn across the floor and crossed what remained of Car 5's aisle.
Was it the terror a single killer had manufactured, or had they simply already reached their limit? The remaining survivors in Car 5 did nothing but lie face-down, panting. No—they were too busy flinching away from me, soaked in blood, to delay us any further.
And at last, with a groan and a clack of metal, I shut the iron door and stepped into the gangway leading to Car 6. I put my back to the door and slid down until I was sitting on the floor. My breath tore out of me in broken gasps. My heart slammed as if it meant to leap out of my mouth. My whole face was slick, and I couldn't tell sweat from snot from tears from spit.
It had been a single blow, but the psychological wound ran deep, and wringing out every ounce of strength in that boiling heat had gutted what stamina I had left. Severe dehydration was burning the edges of my vision black.
"Lift your head. Chin up. We have to keep your airway open."
Kim Jeyeon was already kneeling at my right, and with a practiced hand she tipped my chin upward. Then she unwound the wet shirt from her shoulders and carefully wiped away the clots of blood stuck to my nape and face. The skin burned, but the little moisture left in the shirt evaporated and caught, if only slightly, the mind that had been slipping away.
"Hah. Hoo..."
I forced out breaths that refused to settle and lifted a trembling wrist to check my watch.
"Ah."
All I had done was force a single car—Car 5—and four minutes had already evaporated. Eleven minutes at most remained. And there were still five cars left.
"Are you settling?"
"I don't think I can afford to settle. Eleven minutes left. We could run like dogs and still come up short."
"Even so, don't run. If your heart rate climbs, your core temperature climbs faster."
"..."
Sound advice or not, the road ahead was endless. I forced strength into my legs and stood, then seized the sticky handle of the iron door into Car 6 without delay. I wrenched it down and around with everything I had.
"...!"
Clank. Clank. No matter how I threw my weight into twisting and hauling, the door would not open. Something huge and heavy seemed to be standing right against the inside of it. I could feel the dead weight of the resistance.
I wiped the blood and dust from the window and looked in—and my breath caught all over again. Beyond the door, dozens of large suitcases and backpacks, and even priority-seat cushions ripped out by force, were piled like a mountain. It looked like a barricade. And in the gaps, shards of acrylic from an emergency fire-extinguisher cabinet had been jammed in at jagged angles, their edges honed to a cold gleam, as if to stab anyone who tried to come through.
"What... is this..."
From behind me, checking the view through the glass, Kim Jeyeon's voice trembled thin for the first time. Even she, unshaken before a storm of blood, seemed to lose her words in front of this merciless scene built out of selfishness.
Then, from inside the barricade, a man in thick horn-rimmed glasses thrust his face out. When his eyes met mine through the window, he waved me off.
"Go! Get away from here!"
I couldn't hear him, but his mouth shaped the words. For a man under a heat wave, his color was comparatively intact. Looking closely into Car 6, I could tell it wasn't the suffocating, seething steamer the cars we had passed through had been. The air-conditioning probably hadn't fully died; they were squeezing the last of the power to push out some feeble cold. And to protect that thin thread of cool air, they had thrown up a barricade on a door where lives were coming and going.
At that, the string of my patience snapped.
"Open it."
I growled it against the glass. Of course he couldn't hear me. The man in the glasses kept waving, miming for me to get lost. Behind him, people who looked fairly intact held their breath and watched this way with uneasy eyes.
"Open the door, you son of a bitch."
I shifted my grip on the flashlight and shouted.
"Go—! I said go! I'm not opening it."
"Open it!"
"No. No, I said. Don't want to. Not happening. X."
"Ha."
I had no room left to bicker with a maggot. I reversed my grip on the flashlight and brought it down on the iron door's window.
The man in the thick horn-rims startled and scrambled back, but the double-layered blast-resistant glass only went white with a crack. One blow would not break it.
"Engineer, please calm down. You can't afford to spend your strength here."
"Move."
I ignored Kim Jeyeon's attempt to stop me and took a step back. This time I dropped my full weight straight into the center of the glass. Twice. Three times. On the fourth, the thick blast-resistant glass finally shattered. Sharp fragments skimmed my face and forearm and sprayed in every direction.
"Aaaagh! You maniac! What the hell are you doing! Hrk!"
The man in the glasses jumped in panic, then, startled by the heat pouring through the broken gap, hastily yanked up his shirttail to cover his nose and mouth. From our side, Car 6's lukewarm cool air spilled out through the hole where the glass had been. I swung the flashlight and knocked away the shards still clinging to the frame, then reached deep through the open window and undid the cords and latches holding the door shut.
"Eeeek! Stop him! We can't let him in!"
The man in the horn-rims didn't dare come close. He only stood well back, shaking, and shrieked. I leaned farther in, worked half my torso through, and shoved the wall of suitcases back one after another. Then I pulled free and kicked the iron door. The rest of the junk went with it, and the door opened.
"Hah. Hah..."
We were in Car 6. The cold was faint and lukewarm, but next to Car 5 it might as well have been heaven. The people there had folded themselves neatly onto the seats and under the racks, and they flicked wary glances at us.
What a deformed kind of order this was.
There were people sprawled on the floor here too, but most of them looked all right, and—maybe a tour group had boarded—large suitcases crowded the car, so there hadn't been many passengers to begin with. This small number was monopolizing the cold, thrashing desperately to preserve a single degree of their own body temperature.
"Hah. Honestly... you don't need to look any further for devils."
Kim Jeyeon, pressed tight behind me, didn't bother hiding her disgust. I checked the watch in silence. Eight minutes left. Four cars still to break through.
I adjusted my grip on the flashlight and started toward Car 7, past the people of Car 6, who had parted like the Red Sea. Fortunately no one blocked us, and we arrived in a single stretch.
"Car 6 was surprisingly tame. Whew."
Kim Jeyeon wiped the sweat beading at her chin as she said it. I nodded once, in agreement. At this pace, we could reach the rearmost car with time to spare. I was holding that hope when I seized the handle of Car 7's iron door.
"...?"
An unpleasant vibration traveled up my palm—an ominous shudder, as if iron were twisting against iron.
"Engineer. What is that...?"
And the moment I threw the iron door open, what lay before my eyes was not a passenger car.
It was empty air.
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