We All Live, or We All Die
The moment I hauled the steel door open, what lay in front of me was not a passenger car.
It was empty air.
The gangway joining car 6 to car 7 had failed under the shock of the buckle and been ripped away in a ragged ruin. Between the torn cars gaped open sky, and up through it the killing heat of the Jamsil Railway Bridge—iron baked to 60°C—came rolling in like a tsunami. Only one mass of steel, the lower coupler, still held the two cars together, and only just.
I slammed the door on instinct and stumbled back.
"Hah. Hah. Hah…"
A few seconds of outside air, and it felt as if my lungs were being torn open. This was not the world we had left when the train pulled out of Seongsu Station. The temperature belonged somewhere else entirely.
I groped with a hand crusted in dried blood and pulled the radio off my right shoulder.
"Central Control! 2001, respond."
Nothing came back but crackle. I crushed the radio hard enough to break it and shouted.
"Senior!"
"Senior! Senior! Park Cheolhun!"
A few seconds of silence stretched out like an eon. Then, faint through the gaps in the noise, my senior's voice threaded in.
"Senior!"
Through the radio, the shouting and the chaos in the control room came through intact.
"Five minutes? I'm still in car 6! The buckling shock tore the gangway out between cars 6 and 7!"
"It's still biting. Barely. The second I pull the master controller, it might snap!"
For an instant the heart that had been hammering in my chest stopped dead, as if the whole thing had been a lie.
"…Dump them?"
"Senior."
Click.
A one-sided disconnect tone, and the radio went dead.
Five minutes. In that time I would have to sprint at the empty air, clear it in a single jump, punch through the four cars still ahead of me, and boot the systems the moment I got there. Then I would have to run a 60°C rail that still carried the risk of buckling, all the way into Gangbyeon Station. And the train was broken in two.
Ten years. I could not honestly say I had ever much liked people. I had never once left them behind.
Just to spare someone a single late mark on the morning commute, I had taken aboard one more body throwing itself through a closing door, and then another—and for that, of all things, I had eaten a mark on my performance review and written an explanatory report.
It had already been past enduring, back on the platform at Konkuk University Station. And now they wanted me to cut away the hundreds at my back and go. Those desperate eyes I had walked through six cars to see.
How far, exactly, was I supposed to go?
It felt as if the whole universe had decided I would not be allowed to go on living as anything like a human being.
The hand on the radio shook. I stared blankly through the glass at the heat shimmer rising off the bridge.
Kim Jeyeon broke the silence.
"Driver."
Her low, level voice flew in and lodged itself in my good right ear.
"Are you going to abandon those people?"
In that moment the heat and the fear seemed to blow off all at once, and what rushed into the space they left was pure defiance. My head cleared as if someone had upended cold water over me.
Abandon them?
"You're asking if I'll abandon them?"
"It's an order from Control."
"I'm the driver."
Maybe it was for the best. They could board however they pleased. They could not step off until I opened the door.
The door had been open two seconds at most. In that scrap of time I slowly rewound everything that had burned itself into my eyes.
The lower coupler, biting into the bellies of both cars. Beneath it, two air hoses running past.
One hose was the brake pipe, the line that set the brakes. The other was the main reservoir pipe, the line that fed air into it.
The main reservoir pipe was intact. The cock on the brake-pipe side—the valve—had snapped. Air was being made just fine, full and hard, and hissing straight back out through the broken cock as fast as it was made.
And that was the problem, because a train's brakes work the opposite of a car's. A train needs air in the pipe to roll. Let the air out, and the brakes clamp on by themselves. If the cock was broken and the air was bleeding away, the brakes would lock across the whole train, and it would not move again.
I pulled the radio back out.
"Central Control. 2001. Separation impossible."
Park Cheolhun, who could recite an entire ten-car consist without looking at it. A veteran who had been at this longer than I had. He still was.
But the Park Cheolhun watching this from the far side of a monitor, and the man looking with his own eyes at people crying and dying while they begged to be saved, could not reach the same decision.
"The gap between the cars is too wide. And the cock on the car 6 side got chewed up by the bogie and sheared clean off. I can't close the valve."
"Yes. Most unfortunately, I cannot separate. Absolutely not."
"It's still alive."
I cut him off.
"I'm going to ride the grade."
"Gangbyeon to here is eight hundred meters. Uphill. The master controller was brutally heavy coming up. So the other way…"
One word, and he had it. My senior understood the insane calculation at once and shouted.
"I'm going to take it with no power."
Release the brakes on the downgrade and coast. Roll down the hill on gravity alone. Park Cheolhun's reaction was the only sane one in the conversation.
"You said the catenary dies in five minutes anyway. Once the power's gone, gravity's all that's left. If I feather the brakes from the front on the way down…"
"Yes. Inertia and load."
"I know. I'm moving to the rear cab now."
Park Cheolhun tried once more to stop me.
"Then is there another way?"
"I'll just write the report."
"We die."
Silence held for a moment.
Click.
The disconnect tone sounded, and I hung the radio back on my shoulder and moved, without looking back.
One objective. Sit in that rearward cab and ease these four hundred tons safely into Gangbyeon Station.
Five minutes left. Four cars left. Everything else was only an obstacle in the way. Remove it.
The decision settled, I pointed at the big suitcase sitting abandoned in the aisle of car 6.
"You. The passenger in the horn-rimmed glasses."
The man with the glasses, crouched on a seat and panting, sneaking glances at me, flinched.
"W-why, why, why, why? Why? What? What did I do wrong?"
"…The suitcase tie-downs. The backpack straps. Undo every one you've got and toss them over here."
"…What? Why, why? Why are you demanding someone else's things!"
I jerked a thumb at the steel door behind me.
"Want me to air this car out for you?"
Had it even taken thirty seconds? That was how long it took for the nylon straps to pile at my feet.
I overlapped three strands and joined them, then wound one end round and round the steel stanchion of the last seat in car 6. I meant to use the line as a lifeline and cross into car 7.
The hands tying the knot shook, but the work itself didn't falter. Railroaders use a particular hard knot so the radio on a shoulder strap won't fall even inside a rocking train. Ten years of tying and cinching a line twenty times a day were paying off.
"Passengers. Just four of you. Hold this, please. Sit on it and brace with your hips, or I don't cross in one piece."
No one moved.
"…So you heard there's five minutes left. And you're all getting ready to die together, is that it?"
Only then did four hands take hold.
Why was it that people could never understand a thing the first time it was said? Even walking around with an ear on each side of their heads.
I took the strap, walked to the steel door, and opened it. Heat like a club across the face slammed into me. I could feel the moisture cooking off my eyeballs in real time.
I slung the strap and took one step out into the blast.
In that instant a distant, fainting drop opened under me, and the urge to throw away the strap and everything else and lie down under a blessed air conditioner flared past longing into something closer to lust. My vision strobed red.
"Hah. Hah. Hah. Fuck…"
The last outside temperature I had checked was 48.2°C. Closer to noon now, it would only have climbed.
Standing under that insane heat, a rage rose in me that wanted to kill every last one of them. And under the rage, resentment. Why the hell was I doing this for people who wouldn't even know enough to be grateful? Worthless bastards who complained every chance they got. It would be easier to let the trailing cars snap off or not, climb into the cab, and survive alone—so why was I—
"Hah. Pull yourself together, Driver."
Kim Jeyeon, who had followed me out past the steel door at some point, threw a wet shirt at me as she spoke.
I caught it by a thread, and she gestured sharply for me to put it on my head.
The moment the wet shirt went over me, the smell of water hit, and the reason that had run away from home barely made it back. For the first time I felt as if I might live, and my brain began to cool in a steady descent.
I gathered myself and looked at what was actually in front of me.
The gap was two and a half strides. Too far to jump. And there was nothing under my feet. Between the sparsely laid ties, the Han River gleamed.
Miss a step and I wouldn't burn. I would drop into the boiling river and die that way.
I looped the strap under my arms and crossed the ties slowly.
One step. Two.
The heat-loosened ties creaked—a long, strained kree—every time they took my weight, but they held.
"Hah. Hah. Made it. Hah."
The grab handle of car 7 met my palm. I hung half my body in the door gap and reached back. Kim Jeyeon, waiting, caught the taut strap running from car 6 and my forearm, and came across.
The instant both her feet were about to touch down on car 7, a black shape jerked on my left.
Horn-rims.
There would have been footsteps. It happened on the left, so of course I hadn't heard them.
All at once the bastard in the horn-rims shot an arm toward me, planted a hand on Kim Jeyeon's back as she crossed ahead of him, and launched himself. Shoved by the impact, one of her feet missed car 7 and slid straight down through the gap.
I locked my strength into the hand on car 7's doorframe and seized the strap with the other. Pain flared through my palm as if it were burning, the line bit through skin, and the strap drew drum-tight.
From that one strap, gripped in a hand dripping blood, two people hung.
Like this, all three of us were diving into boiling water.
Why had he jumped? Afraid I might abandon car 6 and leave him?
"Hah. Huff. Passenger. Go back to car 6. Hah."
"Hah, hah… N-no! Take me, take me too!"
"Huff. Huff. I can't… hold any longer. Get back. Now."
"N-no. I won't. Take me! Hah. Hah…"
In that instant, as if some unseen person had lifted one of my legs, shifted it aside, and set it down again, my foot slid neatly out.
The taut strap went slack for a heartbeat.
Horn-rims, clinging awkwardly to the middle of it, dropped straight down—and vanished from sight.
At the same moment a scream came in from the left, mashed and muffled. I did not look down.
© Sediva#1dn3e