Still feeling weak, I fell onto the floor of the hallway, as John desperately tried to get free from the rapidly enveloping tendrils around his leg.
As their grip tightened, his service weapon, still in its holster, fell to the ground, out of reach from him.
“What are you waiting for, get the fuck out here!” he yelled.
Refusing his orders, I dove to the floor and grabbed his gun. With the absolute minimal amount of firearms knowledge I possessed, I picked up the weapon and started firing at the center of the creature. Frantically pulling the trigger, and I didn't stop until the excessively loud shots were replaced by silent clicks.
Though the rounds barely fazed the creature, it loosened its grip on John just enough for him to crawl away from certain death.
I helped him to his bleeding feet, and together we rushed through into the next train car, where we pulled loose some chairs and used them as a poorly constructed blockade to slow down the creature.
We continued through the car, repeatedly tripping over the dozens of corpses littering the floor. I took a peak back at the barricade to see the creature slowly seeping through like a black fog, before reforming itself on the other side.
“Hurry up!” John yelled at me.
The creature had almost fully formed by the time we got through the next car. Unable to grab us, it quickly realized we were out of reach, and in response, it split open its body down the middle, revealing rows of black teeth and multiple tendrils that resembled tongues. It let out a horrific, high pitched shriek that shook the entire train, almost destroying my eardrums.
The sound itself awakened the dead people strewn across the hallway. They lifted their heads and looked around until they fixated their eyes on us, which alerted the creature to our presence.
It moved quickly, all the while its tendrils stretched impossibly far towards us in a hungry attempt at catching us. We were almost at the dining car, when I fell back to the ground. A tendril had wrapped around my shoe, and John quickly grabbed my arms as I was pulled away.
I screamed, and the door to the dining car shot open. Two men and a woman ran over and helped John pull me free from the tendrils' grip. One of my shoes slid off in the process, allowing me to get away.
We ran through the door and shut it behind us, while one of them men pulled a large metal rod through a makeshift lock. Both John and I lay wheezing on the floor from exhaustion as I tried to look around, observing my new surroundings.
The car was full of booths with a small bar all the way up front. Covered in canned foods and bottled water. In the corner I saw a few bags full of waste and empty food wrappings. The entire car was dimly lit up by a couple of rows of emergency lights on the ceiling, and it was clear they'd survived there for a couple of weeks already, though if the four of them were all that remained, I didn't know.
“What the hell happened to you, John?” A man in his fifties asked.
“They- they must have seen me coming, I don't know how,” John said, still out of breath.
They kept looking at him in shock, not satisfied by his answer, so he continued.
“I didn't even use the flashlight until I saw Thomas here, and by then they'd already awoken.”
“So you waited until they went back to sleep?” The woman asked.
“No, they'd already seen us, we had to make a run for it. I came back as quickly as I could.”
His last sentences shut everyone up, and John started confused at them.
“John, you were gone for two days,” she finally said.
“Don't be ridiculous, I was gone for a couple of hours at the most.”
She pulled out a digital watch and showed John the time and date. “It's December 1st,” she said quietly.
“That's...” John trailed off, speechless by the realization.
“How did they see you anyway, they're not exactly observant unless someone disturbs them?” one of the men said in a condescending tone.
“I don't know, Frank, do you think I did it on purpose?”
I thought back to the old lady I'd seen in the first compartment, and realized John hadn't been discovered at all, I was the one that got caught.
“Officer I-” I tried to say before John interrupted me.
“John,” he corrected me, “we're in another fucking dimension or some shit, no need for ranks or titles.”
I tried to confess again, but the woman noticed John's bleeding leg and rushed over to him.
“You're bleeding,” she said.
“It's nothing, the Sentinel got a hold of my leg. Don't worry, I'm fine.”
“Just sit down, let me have a look anyway.”
John sat down and the woman rolled up his trouser leg to reveal deep gashes in his calf.
“You'll need stitches. Get me the med kit, will you?” she said as she pointed to Frank.
While she did her best to fix up John's leg I got a better look at the door. They'd reinforced it with pieces of metal around the edges, also covering the window, preventing the creature from seeping through the cracks, and its surveyors from seeing through it.
On the wall beside the door, someone had etched lines, marking each passed day. Nineteen lines for nineteen days passed on a train that never stops.
The oldest man, Frank, came over to me, looking as suspicious as ever.
“Who are you?” he asked firmly.
“Thomas,” I responded.
“You wanna tell us how the hell you survived 19 days all on your own, without food or water?”
I couldn't answer his question, to me, only a few hours had passed, and though I felt thirsty from fleeing, I wasn't even close to parched.
“I-I don't know,” I stuttered.
“What do you mean, you don't know? How can you not know?” Frank said, getting agitated.
“Give him a break, Frank, if you hadn't left your bag behind, I wouldn't even have had to go out and risk my life,” John interjected.
It was enough to shut Frank up, though an asshole, he knew his place in the group. The other, younger guy came up to me and reached out his hand.
“I'm Phillip, and that's Mia,” he said as he pointed to the woman fixing up John. “And, lastly, that's Frank, don't pay him any attention, he's a pain in the ass ninety percent of the time.”
“Whatever,” Frank interrupted. “Did you get the batteries at least?”
“Of course I did, you twat, they're in the bag,” John said.
I just stood there trying to get a grasp on the situation, barely responding to the other's questions.
“Don't worry about it, Thomas,” Mia said as she noticed the absolutely baffled expression on my face.
“Huh?”
“None of us remember what happened, we all just woke up at different times on the train, and had the idea to make our way here. It's safe, mostly, and the Sentinels keep us from going out very often. You're lucky John found you.”
“Sentinels?”
“The thing that chased us,” John explained.
A bright light penetrated the otherwise gloomy car, as Frank booted up his phone, using one of the battery packs. Without hesitation, he attempted to dial a number.
“Put it on speaker if you're trying to call someone,” John said, still waiting for Mia to finish bandaging his leg.
No one responded on the other end, but no sooner had Frank lowered to phone to input another number, before it started ringing; Blocked called ID.
For a few moments, he just held the phone in shock, before he regained his senses and answered.
“Hello?”
No response.
“Hello, can anyone hear us?” Frank he asked again.
We listened intently to the emptiness on the other side of the line, and a minute passed without anyone speaking.
“There's no one there,” Mia said.
Before any of us could respond, the phone started emitting repetitive beeping sounds. They continued for almost a full minute, none of us daring to speak up while we listened. Once it was finished, the call ended on its own, and Frank looked around at us, wearing a confused expression.
“What the hell was that?” John asked.
“No clue, it was just a bunch of beeps.”
“Designation: Gehenna, 108 hours, do not get off the train,” I said.
“What?”
“It was Morse code, learned it as a kid to secretly communicate in class. I know, it's dumb, I was a geek, but I'm absolutely sure that's what the message said.”
They looked at each other for a moment, still visibly confused, then back at me.
“Gehenna, what does it mean?” Mia asked.
“Forget that, Frank interjected, “why are they telling us to stay on this fucking train?”
We fell silent again as Frank attempted to dial another number, to no avail.
“108 hours, just over four days before we reach our next station? We can do that, just gotta stay here. We have enough provisions for at least two weeks,” John said.
“So that's it, we just sit here in the dark for another four days?” Frank asked.
A small argument ensued, and while they discussed what we'd do at the train station, I took a moment to look out the window.
The vast emptiness was horrifying on its own. I wondered how far the darkness reached, if it had an end, or if anything lived in the void. A part of me felt dead as I pondered these questions I felt dead, as if the train was nothing more than a mere figment of my decaying mind, but the pain was ever too real, the tiredness felt too overwhelming for the world to be fake.
I took my dead phone, grabbed one of the battery packs and plugged it in. The others were too busy discussing to notice me wasting power, but I just needed to write down some of my thoughts over text, ready to send if we happened to get a signal. I sent it to my dad, hoping he'd share the story should I not make it back.
While I patiently waited for the text to go through, I kept staring into the dark. Some parts were blacker than their surroundings, and I then noticed they weren't just patches that contrasted with the rest of the environment, but moving things, almost vantablack, like a shadow moving through the night.
It glided in the air alongside the train, quietly looming by with its eyeless body.
It was a Sentinel...
“Guys...?” I said quietly.
They kept on arguing.
“Guys, there's a sentinel outside!” I said much louder.
John broke off from the argument and everyone fell silent as we watched the creature fly beside the train. Then we noticed another, and a third, and a fourth, and before long, we could make out hundreds, if not thousands of Sentinels following the train.
“Don't worry, they shouldn't be able to see or hear us without their surveyors,” Phillip said.
We all kept staring at the shadowy things in the void, and though Phillip was right, they couldn't possible see us without their aides, there was one undeniable fact about them that just didn't make sense.
They were getting closer...
---
Credits
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