"You're taking us to Ephrata first," Sgt. Thompson instructed Devin in the cabin of engine 4197 as the other Guardsmen assisted in loading all of King Street Station's refugees onto the train. "A unit is coming to clear the town, and we're all gonna pitch in and set up a base there. Hopefully it's not overrun already."
"And if it is?" Devin inquired.
"The track is confirmed clear as far as Montana. So we'll just keep going until we find a place we can manage." Thompson paused. "They're gonna bomb Seattle. Higher-ups can't call it contained enough so they're sending jets to wipe it and the walkers off the face of the earth."
"Jesus…how long?"
"Was told an hour at most, and that was ten minutes ago. So the sooner, the better."
Devin nodded. "Well, this thing's ready to move, just tell me when."
"A few more minutes." With that, the sergeant left the engine cabin and walked along the platform next to the train. As he looked at the people boarding, a voice called out.
"Sarge?" Charlotte yelled out with a hint of somberness in her voice. As Thompson looked up, Quentin left her and Ryan and approached him. Thompson was struck by the shell-shocked look on his face, which he knew was a result of having put down his bitten friend.
"You alright?" Thompson asked comfortingly. "I know that couldn't've been easy."
Quentin just stared at the ground sadly, and wordlessly handed back Thompson's knife.
"You did the right thing man. No one deserves to become one of these things." Quentin nodded, and Ryan put his arm over his shoulder and led him to the train. Charlotte then stepped forward to the sergeant.
"I just wanted to say thank you," Charlotte said, "if you weren't in charge many more people would be dead."
Thompson frowned. "I honestly don't know. I keep thinking of things I could've done differently, but then I think about how maybe it wouldn't have mattered; that maybe it'd just be different people dead and alive."
"Everyone here trusts you. If they didn't, more people would be dead, maybe even all of us. Believe me, that matters."
Thompson smiled a little. "Thank you. Now please, get on the train. We're leaving ASAP." Charlotte nodded, and boarded.
The soldiers loaded the rear car of the train with their weapons and supplies while the civilians were generally led toward the front cars at first. Some cars were overflowing with people, but everyone in the station was able to board. After no one was no longer on the station platform, Thompson and another Guardsman headed back into the station to do a final once-over.
"I'll take the tower, you search every part of the ground floor," he ordered to the young soldier.
"Yes sir," he obliged as he ran off to make his ordered rounds.
Thompson headed upstairs, and lamented at the sight of the bodies in and around the tower door, some of which he was lamenting for a second time as they had risen from the dead. Despite being impressed by her deduction skills, the sergeant was still unnerved at the realization that Charlotte was right about how the dead return. He composed himself gradually as he climbed the tower. Ultimately, he found no one there, so he quickly ran back downstairs, skipping several steps as he took larger bounds. As he ran down, the young soldier called up to him.
"All clear down here, sir!"
"Good," Thompson replied as he descended. "Now get your ass on that train!" He peeked down and saw the Guardsman disappear through the door as instructed, and continued to run down. He leapt from the second-from-the-top step on the final staircase to the bottom level of the tower and made a beeline through the door and towards the train. He ran out onto the platform and saw Devin leaning out the window of the cabin of the engine car. "GET THIS TRAIN MOVING!"
Devin obliged and fired up the engine as Thompson climbed onto the engine car and ran down the walkway to the cabin. He entered the cabin just as the train began to move.
"Ephrata, right?" Devin asked.
"Yes," Thompson confirmed. "Here's hoping that unit gets there."
In the train's cars, the other survivors found themselves in tight quarters with each other. They nervously discussed the severity of their situation and pondered where they were heading. In the first car behind the engine, Gordon, Josh, Alice, Samantha, Chris, and Victor were crammed into a booth with a desk, normally meant for only four people, on the right side of the upper level of the double-decker car.
"It's gonna be alright," Gordon stated to try and reassure the people gathered around him. "This is just another disease outbreak; they're a problem and yeah, people die, but there's never been a permanent one ever, in all of history. They'll figure this out and we'll be okay."
"Not to be a downer," Alice jumped in with her thick Scottish accent, "but there's never been one where people turn into sick bloodthirsty bastards after they die!"
"Freaking out won't help," Josh said. "We just gotta watch each other's backs and just deal with whatever comes."
"Exactly," Gordon agreed.
"Maybe it's easy for you," Chris chimed in, "but I have a wife and two kids that I can't even talk to right now, let alone go and see. As soon as we get wherever we're going, I'm gonna find a way to get home."
"Yeah," Victor added, "I gotta find my mom and my little sisters. Maybe we can help each other out finding them?"
Chris flashed a small, grateful smile. "Thanks man."
On the deck below their cramped booth, Thompson entered the train car. The train was moving at a fair amount of speed, but walking along the outside of the engine and hearing the deafening roar inside didn't faze the sergeant at all. Apart from two soldiers acting as overseers, the car was full of civilians. Charlotte, who had sat with Ryan and Quentin in the third row of the left side of the car, got up from her aisle seat and walked up to him.
"May I ask where we're going?" Charlotte inquired.
"Ephrata," he replied. "The plan is to establish a unit there and try and make it a safe area for survivors."
"Is there a place in the town where we can do that effectively?"
Thompson paused, unable to say that he didn't know what the specifics of the plan were, but his silence said it all to her.
"Oh…" She said, concernedly. Then she changed the course of her reaction. "Look, I trust you, okay? We'll figure it out. I got your back." She then gave him a smile, which he returned to her. He appreciated hearing her praise his efforts yet again, and began to hope she could be his asset in managing some of the inevitably panicked passengers.
He also hoped for maybe a little more.
They broke eye contact, both still smiling nervously, and Charlotte returned to her seat. "I think he likes you," Ryan said to her teasingly.
"Shut up," she said, trying not to blush. "Now is not the time for this stuff.
As Ryan tried to think of a clever comeback, Ben's voice yelled out from the back of the right side of the car. "HOLY SHIT!"
Everyone not already looking turned to the right and saw a large explosion in the distance. The sound finally reached the train and shook the windows.
"Part of me," Danny said to Ben, "is happy to see this shitty-ass city get destroyed." The man sitting next to them, who hadn't yet met them, could only roll his eyes at that comment, eyes which rolled immediately back to the outside of the train as another bomb struck slightly closer to the train.
From there, the bombs landed at a faster rate, some coming closer to the train than the passengers would have liked. Devin, having been warned of the impending bombing, had turned the headlight and taillights off so as not to give an overzealous and paranoid pilot an illuminated target to shoot at in the dark of pre-dawn. The passengers continued to watch helplessly as the larger structures of Seattle were lit up or levelled. The world-famous Space Needle crumbled tragically to the ground.
"My husband proposed to me at the top of the Needle," Danielle said to her seatmate, Dr. Vaughn, as the iconic landmark fell. A tear fell from her eye, but he merely continued watching the destruction of the city without offering any consolation. The rest of their car, the second passenger car, watched in horrified silence.
Devin just watched the tracks ahead, not wanting to watch his home city burn and collapse. As he thought about loved ones buried in the city before this situation arose, he saw blinking lights in the sky. He realized it was another wave of bomber planes, and he could only sigh at the further devastation they were gonna do to Seattle. As he glanced up at them, a quick burst of light appeared under one of the planes. He quickly figured it was a missile firing, but he found it strange that one would be fired so soon and before the others. Then another fired from one of the other planes, and one more from another plane still.
Seattle wasn't enough. They were trying to clear out the immediate area around the city as well.
And engine 4197 was barely past Seattle's town line.
Devin came to realize that these missiles were gonna land even closer to the train and possibly even hit the tracks. As more missiles fired from the planes, Devin sped the train up, hoping against hope to clear the area in time.
The train was now racing at over seventy miles per hour, the fastest speed Devin had ever logged while commandeering a locomotive by a twenty-MPH margin. Thompson was about to head back to the engineer's cabin when the second wave of bombs began landing in dangerously close proximity to the train. One landed so close that Thompson and the other two soldiers were all knocked to the floor by the impact.
Devin continued pushing the engine near its limits as hell rained down nearby. He could also see explosions pluming up further ahead, furthering his fears of the track being destroyed. As a precaution, he started slowing the train slightly and turned the headlight back on to see what lay ahead.
His fears were warranted.
He turned a bend and saw a large, still-smoldering crater next to the tracks which had caused the rail on Devin's right to bend in slightly. And that slight buckle was all that was necessary to cause Devin to hit every brake the train had.
All in vain.
The train hit the buckled rail at forty-five miles an hour. The first few wheels to hit the rail's buckle either bent in or ripped off completely, and then the whole train listed to the right and derailed entirely. It didn't go all the way over however, and continued to roll along the rocks surrounding the rails and then cut smoothly into the loose dirt and soil.
The passengers all panicked at the large screech of the wheels hitting the buckle, and the panic grew when the train veered off the tracks yet continued to roll along. In the first passenger car, Gordon and the other five people crammed into the booth frantically squeezed under the table. Ben and Danny aggressively climbed over the man in the aisle seat next to them and clung to a metal bar attached to a baggage rack over the other row of seats. Ryan and Quentin held themselves up with their strength as their row lifted up, while Charlotte held onto Ryan's upper arm at his urging. In the second car, Danielle and Dr. Vaughn clung to the bar on the seat in front of them while Greta and Elaine hugged each other tightly.
The careening train then went over a steep embankment. The locomotive almost fully righted itself and the front two passenger cars with it, leaving the three cars at about a five-degree list, but the rest of the train fell over entirely and detached from the upright cars. The rear seven cars of the train, containing nearly 400 civilians and soldiers, proceeded to spin end over end. With the rear gaining more speed than the upright front portion of the train, the spared passengers were able to watch in horror as bodies and debris were violently thrown from the spiraling wreckage. The caboose of the train, containing almost all of the other soldiers, slammed into a solid oak tree and shattered, not budging the tree an inch but killing all of the people aboard.
The front continued to veer uncontrollably down the hill. As the slope of the hill sharpened, the three still-moving cars began listing further to the right again. Devin, having exhausted all his options, clutched the driver's seat tightly. He was strapped in, but knew the others onboard would receive no safety measures from the train. He was concerned about being the only survivor of the crash, if he survived at all.
Meanwhile, Thompson had staggered back to his feet and was standing between the first row of passengers on the right of the train and a large protruding closet. He was telling everyone to hold on to whatever they could find, when the train finally rolled over onto its right side. He was thrown off-balance again as the windows were torn away, and the passengers still on that side of the train were sucked under the train and crushed between it and the pavement of the road they had finally reached, causing a huge explosion of blood and guts that horrified the other passengers. Danny lost his grip and held onto Ben's leg. The passengers on the left side of the train, now the top, desperately clung onto whatever they could hold to prevent from falling to the ground and being pulled under the train.
"Pull me up man!" Danny begged Ben. But Ben could feel his grip loosening from the added weight.
"You're pulling me down!" Ben snapped. Then he grunted. "I'm sorry." With one kick to the face, Danny fell and hit the ground outside the train, and before he knew what had happened he went under the train causing another huge red explosion. Most saw the bloody burst, but only Charlotte saw the kick. She could only look in the other direction, where she saw Thompson walking along the wall above the baggage rack, which was now the primary solid floor of the train, and trying to help dangling people down into the relative safety of where he was standing. He got to her and grabbed her, carrying her down into the baggage area. Unbeknownst to them, the train was on a direct collision course with a large concrete building. Devin could only watch hopelessly and cling to his seat, praying the train had slowed enough to not explode on impact.
"Thank you," Charlotte said quickly, not wanting to delay the sergeant from helping more. As he was about to let go of her, the lead engine struck the concrete building. The locomotive did not explode, but the stop was still abrupt enough to break the grip of the other passengers and send Thompson and Charlotte flying. She was thrown over the protruding closet, but Thompson slammed the top of his skull right into it.
He was killed instantly.
The rear car was swung around and broken free of the front two cars and scraped along the ground until it was beside the engine.
One bent-in piece of track, and engine 4197 was no more.