I was jolted back to consciousness by a violent coughing fit caused by the unnaturally dry air around me. Drops of sweat had piled up, and started trickling down my forehead. It was dark, not a singly ray of light to even make out my closest surroundings.
My memory served little help in recognizing my whereabouts, but upon fumbling around with my weak hands, I noticed I was sitting a fabric coated chair in a room that seemed to vibrate ever so slightly.
As my eyes started to adapt to the overwhelming darkness, I could start to make out the vague shape of my room. There were three seats facing each other with windows on the right hand side, though they revealed nothing more than an empty void on the other side. On the other side was a door with a small window, which lead out into a hallway, and it then dawned on me where I had woken up.
It was a train compartment, and the train was still moving, though seemingly rid of any other people. I tried to get up, but my legs refused to properly cooperate. They were too weak, as if they hadn't been used for days.
Then some of my memories returned. I was traveling, I remembered getting on the train, though I hadn't the faintest idea what my destination should have been. My memory simply cut short after stepping inside my empty compartment, that had been November 12th.
I checked my pockets to look for clues. I found my phone, which had long since ran out of power, and my wallet, though it contained a ticket, in the dark it just looked like weird scribbles on a piece of paper.
With an incredible amount of effort, I finally managed to get my legs working enough to stand up. Though I had to use the wall as support, it was enough to move around, and I soon stumbled into the hallway of my train car.
I took a moment to look through the windows in the hallway, and the world outside was empty. It both looked and felt as if nothing existed outside the boundaries of the train.
The darkness made it hard to navigate without falling to the ground. I tried to look for a light switch, or at the very least another person to help me out, but none where in sight.
I peeked in through the window into the next compartment, and I could see the vague shape of people sitting still in their seats, but upon trying to enter, I realized that the door was locked. I tried to knock, but the people on the other side didn't even flinch.
When I tried to call out for them, I realized my voice had almost completely vanished, replaced by just a whisper.
I made my way from compartment to compartment, and while they all seemed to be occupied, none would open, and not a single person responded to my increasingly frantic knocks.
As I reach the last compartment of the car, the train turned ever so slightly on its tracks, enough to knock me to the ground. While I lay there I tried to call out for help with my barely audible voice, but no one could hear me.
I got to my feet while the train still turned, and noticed the door to the last compartment slowly glide open from the turn.
“Hello, can anyone hear me?” I called out with a trembling voice as I approached the open door.
No response, either because the compartment was empty, or because my voice hadn't been used for so long that barely functioned.
I slowly peeked my head around the corner to see the compartment fully occupied by dark figures. All of them sitting perfectly still in their seats.
“Hello?” I said again.
I took a step inside. My eyes had started to fully adjust to my dark surroundings, and I quickly realized that not only were the people sitting perfectly still, but they weren't even breathing.
The horrible thought of them being dead struck me like a hammer, but I had to make sure. I bent down on my knees next to the closest man and shook him gently. Still, he didn't respond. I then checked for a pulse, and though I'm not a doctor, I couldn't find any signs of life.
I heard a small beep that shot me to my feet, and looked down to see the man wearing a digital watch that alerted him that an hour had passed. I looked at the watch and noticed the date was also written in the center.
29th of November... It had been seventeen days since I boarded the train.
With a trembling hand, I checked the rest of the people for signs of life. All of them were beyond a shadow of a doubt, dead.
Panic arose in my body, both from the presence of dead people and from the realization that I'd been asleep on a moving train for more than two weeks.
I collapsed to the ground in front of one of the dead passengers. She was an elderly woman, dressed elegantly with wide open, piercing blue eyes. I didn't want to stay in the compartment with them, but I was paralyzed by the lack of a plan.
There I sat, surrounded by six dead people, trying to contemplate my next step. The train was still moving, which clearly meant that someone had to be in control of it, a conductor or at least someone with an idea as to what the hell was going on. So, I decided that my best bet would be to make my way to the locomotive, and pray that not everyone had died on the train.
All the while these thoughts ran through my head, I couldn't take my eyes of the elderly lady. Something just felt off by their presence. Firstly, there wasn't any smell, meaning they hadn't started to decompose, and secondly, all of them had their eyes open wider than I thought possible.
Before I could consider the bizarre situation any further, the woman suddenly blinked.
I shot to my feet in horror, as she blinked again. I double checked her pulse, still nothing. Yet, her eyes kept blinking without any other signs of life. In shock, I looked around to find that the other five, dead passengers were also blinking rapidly.
Without checking them for life, I jumped out from the compartment and shot the door. I noticed a chunk of wood missing from it, as if someone had kicked it in, leaving it unable to properly close.
As I slowly backed away from the compartment, I glimpsed out through the windows, into the empty void beyond. I humored the thought that we might be driving through a tunnel, but if so, how long could it possibly be?
I stepped into the next train-car. Unlike the previous one, it wasn't divided into compartments, but rather filled with rows of seats, split in the middle by a central passage. But, like the compartments, each seat was occupied by a dead passenger, each blinking in response as I quickly passed in panic.
I walked through about fifteen such cars, each alternating by rows of seats and compartments. It felt like hours passed as I made my way towards the locomotive, and just as I was about to enter through a door marked “First Class,” I was shoved to the floor by someone holding a bright light to my face.
“Stay the fuck down!” a deep voice shouted at me.
Speechless, I could do nothing but comply with the man in front of me.
“Wait, you're not dead?” the man asked.
As he realized I was basically just a kid, barely in my twenties, he moved the light away from me and reached out a hand to help me up.
“I'm sorry, I just heard someone moving and though you were one of them,” he said as he pointed to the lifeless people sitting idly by in their seats.
“What's your name?” he asked.
“I-I I'm- Thomas,” I stuttered.
As the shock from the bright light faded, I saw that the man was dressed in a police uniform, well built and bald.
“The name's John Hendricks,” he said. “And we better get out of there before these bastards wake up again.”
“They're not dead?” I asked.
“Yeah, well, not exactly, it's like they're in hibernation.”
I looked at him in confusion.
“People in hibernation?”
“They ain't people, kid, not anymore.”
As he spoke those words, he seemed surprised by something behind me.
“Fuck, I was too slow,” he said, oddly calm.
I turned around to see the people moving their heads around, all of them staring directly at us, their eyes now fixed and unblinking.
“We need to get out of here,” John said as he pulled my arm and dragged me in through the door to another compartment-car, though far nicer than the one I'd awoken in. All the doors had opened, and people were slowly piling out from each compartment into the hallway, staring at us with their wide open eyes.
We dove into the first available compartment, and the officer pushed one of the people out from it, and locked the door.
He sighed, “we'll be safe here for a bit, hopefully they're just scouting.”
“What the hell is-” I started saying before the cop put his hand over my mouth, gesturing for me to keep quiet.
“Keep it down, would ya?” he said quietly, clearly agitated by my idiocy.
“What's happening?” I whispered.
“We've got to hold up here until they go back to sleep.”
He stood up and peeked out the widow into the hallway, before pulling down quickly back behind cover.
“The other passengers, what happened to them?” I asked.
“Dead, most of them anyways, got a few survivors camped up in the dining car. I just came out to look for batteries, hoping we could get a phone working and get help. How the hell did you survive here all on your own?”
“I- I don't know, I just woke up an hour ago,” I said.
I took out the ticket from my pocked and tried to read it. Officer Hendricks took his flashlight and set it to its lowest setting to help me read. The text on the ticket was a language I didn't recognize, just jumbled symbols and a date.
“Yeah, it's the same with all of our tickets as well, none of this makes any damn sense.”
“Do you remember where the train is going?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“The people out there seem fairly docile, can't we just push our way through, they don't seem to be moving?” I asked.
He sighed again, “I'm not afraid of the things out there, it's what comes next that terrifies me.”
“What is it?”
“Hell, I don't even know what it really looks like. It's massive and dark. It just uses those things to look around for survivors, we call them-”
As tried to finish the sentence, a large thud could be heard on the other side of the door. I carefully peeked out through the window to see that all the people had collapsed back to the ground, and that the door leading to the car behind us had opened up.
A tall, obsidian black created pulled its way inside using large tendril like appendages. It had thin stumps that resembled legs, and multiple more tendrils that slithered on along the walls, seeming to sense its surroundings. Though it was vaguely humanoid in nature, it didn't have a head, nor any eyes.
John lifted a finger to his lip and signaled for me to keep absolutely silent.
I noticed then he had a gun holstered, attached to his belt. I pointed to it without saying a word, but he just shook his head in response.
The creature moved closer, and before long it was standing just outside the door. Its arms spread out, flattening out and covering the window. It started to form small cracks in the glass pane, allowing small tendrils to seep trough.
“God dammit,” John whispered as sweat poured down his face.
Suddenly, he stood up and kicked the door, breaking it straight off its hinges. It barely fazed the creature, but it allowed us for enough wriggle room to bolt past it.
He grabbed me and pushed me through the gap between the wall and the creature, getting caught up in its tendrils as he did, they latched onto him and buried into his leg.
“Run!” he yelled in agony as he tried to fight off the tendrils wrapping around him.
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