Afterward, the three of them stepped into the cab.
The train’s cab was somewhat roomier than they had expected.
The control console stretched across the very front, crowded with dials, levers, and switches.
Outside the windshield lay the train tracks and the pitch-black mountain woods.
The windshield wipers rested dead-center on the glass, beaded with water.
There was no one in the driver’s seat, but there were bloodstains on the chair and the control wheel.
The driver must have been infected as well and had left the cab.
Lincoln swept his gaze across the console.
Most of the needles pointed to zero, but a row of green indicator lights on the far right remained lit, labeled “STANDBY.”
Standby status.
The propulsion system wasn’t fully shut down.
He shifted his gaze to the center of the console, where the main control array was located.
There was a throttle lever, a brake handle, and a red flip-cover switch labeled “MASTER SWITCH.”
Lincoln had been in Umbrella’s ranks for years and had driven all sorts of vehicles, but he had never operated a train.
Still, the control logic of a diesel locomotive wasn’t much different from heavy-duty vehicles; he could make out the general layout.
“Do either of you know how to drive a train?” he asked, looking back.
Rebecca shook her head.
Billy did the same.
“Then let me give it a shot.”
Lincoln sat in the driver’s seat, flipped open the red cover, and pressed the master switch.
A large cluster of indicator lights flickered to life on the console, and the dial needles began to jump.
A low rumble vibrated through the floorboards—the sound of the diesel engine starting up.
The train could still run.
But Lincoln noticed a detail: of the system status lights on the left of the dashboard, the one labeled “BRAKE” was dark.
He tried pulling the brake handle; it felt loose, offering almost no resistance.
The braking system might have a problem.
Frowning, he tried over a dozen combinations, eventually finding that shifting the transmission into the lowest idle gear could control the speed.
It wasn’t the standard way to drive, but it would at least allow the train to move at a snail’s pace without spinning out of control.
He pushed the throttle lever to the lowest position.
The entire train shuddered, and the wheels began to slowly turn.
A sharp screech of friction scraped between the steel tracks and wheels as the train lurched forward slightly.
Rebecca grabbed the edge of the console to steady herself.
Billy leaned against the doorframe, subtly shifting his weight.
Before long, the train was in motion. This story is hosted at g.com.
Though slow, it was indeed chugging along the tracks up the mountain.
“It moves, but the brakes are shot,” Lincoln said.
“We can only crawl along at idle. We’ll have to find another way to stop when we reach the station.”
He cast a glance back at the carriage corridor.
The train swayed slightly as it moved, but the structure was stable enough.
“How long will it take to get there?” Rebecca asked.
“Hard to say. It depends on the track’s layout and incline. If we’re fast, maybe ten-odd minutes. Slow, maybe half an hour.”
Lincoln nudged the throttle lever forward a fraction.
The speed picked up slightly, and the shadowy silhouettes of trees outside the windows began to crawl backward.
He stared at the tracks ahead.
The flashlight’s beam couldn’t reach far, only showing where the rails curved a short distance ahead, vanishing into the darkness of the mountain woods.
Right then, a loud crash echoed from the carriages behind them.
It was heavy—the sound of metal being violently struck—and the entire carriage shuddered in response.
The three of them spun around in unison.
Billy already had his gun raised, and Rebecca was aiming her Beretta.
The loud crash came from the direction of the second or third car back, roughly two or three carriages away from the cab.
Immediately after came another slam, louder than the first and accompanied by the screech of twisting metal, as if something were violently forcing open the connecting door between the cars.
Then came a third crash.
This time, the sound was noticeably closer; they could feel the vibration rising through the soles of their feet.
Lincoln stood up from the driver’s seat.
“Who’s taking the wheel?”
“I will,” Rebecca said.
She hurried over to the seat and glanced at the console.
“Throttle forward to accelerate, and this next to it is the brake?”
“Yeah, but the brakes feel wrong. I barely got it to hold idle after several tries.”
“Just don’t touch anything else; keep it in this gear. Don’t stop or speed up before we reach the station.”
“Where are you going?”
Lincoln had already reached the cab door.
His right hand held the M1911, and his left unslung the shotgun from his shoulder.
“You heard that noise. I’m going to check it out.”
Billy gave him a look, said nothing, and followed him out.
The two men stepped into the equipment maintenance area, passed through the breached iron door, and entered the first passenger car.
The lights remained off, leaving only the faint moonlight that occasionally filtered through the windows.
But an anomaly quickly caught their attention.
In the middle of the aisle, the position of one of the corpses had changed.
Lincoln remembered clearly that the researcher in the white lab coat had been collapsed on the right side of the aisle, head pointing toward the rear of the train.
But now, it had shifted nearly a meter to the left, and the body had been flipped over, chest-up.
Its abdominal cavity had been hollowed out.
It wasn’t sliced or torn.
The edges of the wound were smooth, glistening with a wet, corrosive sheen, looking more like it had been dissolved by something before being scooped out.
Most of the organs inside the abdomen were gone.
Lincoln crouched down to examine it.
A large amount of viscous, translucent liquid coated the inner walls of the cavity, along with dense clusters of tiny, fine teeth marks.
These marks didn’t look like they were left by teeth; they resembled circular suction-cup prints left by some kind of clinging organ.
He stood up, his expression turning grim.
When he was clearing the train earlier, he had noticed drag marks in the second passenger car.
Something had been dragging the bodies in a particular direction.
At the time, he had assumed it was some behavior among the infected.
But now it appeared that whatever did this was no ordinary infected.
The behavioral pattern of normal infected was to chase living humans; they had little interest in dead corpses.
Something that could drag a body away, dissolve and hollow out its organs, and leave suction-cup teeth marks in its abdomen was entirely different from anything they had encountered so far.
The loud crashes from earlier must have been its doing.
Just as Lincoln realized this, a sound came from the vestibule connecting the carriages.
It was a wet, squelching dragging noise—heavy, accompanied by the sound of liquid being squeezed.
Billy heard it too.
He raised his P226, pointing the muzzle toward the rear of the carriage.
Their flashlight beams swept toward the source of the noise simultaneously.
On the transition platform between the carriages, something was squeezing through the doorway.
At first glance, Lincoln thought it was a human.
It had a human silhouette: two legs, two arms, and a head.
It stood just over two meters tall—significantly taller than an average person, but still on the edge of normal.
But the split second the flashlight hit it, Lincoln knew this thing had absolutely nothing to do with humanity.
Its “body” was not composed of muscle and bone, but was instead a tight, writhing mass of thousands of dark brown leeches.
Each leech was as thick as an adult’s thumb and ranged from ten to twenty centimeters in length.
They clung to, wound around, and squeezed against one another, forming a rough humanoid shape.
And every single one of those leeches was alive!