Carclass="underline" Okay. Thanks. Be safe.
“Hey,” I said to Katia. “So why didn’t Hekla want that guy in the party with you and your friend? Was it because he was a man?”
“No,” Katia said. “He was a creep. I don’t think Hekla would care if a guy joined the group.”
“So it’s just a coincidence the daughters are all women? What if Donut and I wanted to join up, do you think she’d let us? Do you really think she’d let me join?”
Katia paused. I saw the tell-tale flash in her eyes. She’s talking to her right now.
“Do you want to join up with the daughters?”
“Maybe,” I lied.
“I think she’d want to talk to you first. Hekla thinks you’re a bit reckless. But she really likes Donut.”
“Okay,” I said. “We better get back before…” I paused as I saw the red dot on the map. It was on one of the colored line landings. The Puce line. “Hang on. Stay here. Get ready to run.”
I jogged over to the stairwell that led down to the landing. Shit. More red dots appeared. I peered down the stairs. As I suspected, it was the festering ghouls from the trainyard. It was just a few for now, but there would be more soon. I saw additional dots on the adjacent platform. They’d traveled from the trainyard all the way up to station 24. Station 12, I knew, was already filled with Jikininki janitor ghouls.
As I watched, however, it was clear they weren’t sticking around. Some of them clambered up onto the landing, but only for a few moments before jumping back onto the passageway. They continued on their way up the track.
I also noted that none of them appeared to be getting shocked by the third rail. From this angle I couldn’t really see what was going on. Either they knew about the rail and were avoiding it, they were immune to electricity, or the power was off. There was no way to know which of those three scenarios it was.
I tossed a pair of hob lobbers down the stairs just to kill a few, then I turned and fled for the trap door. We quickly descended the stairs and went on our way.
Stations 36 and 48 were identical to station 24. It was too soon for the ghouls to have walked this far. We’d check on them again after we ditched Madison. Zev sent us a message that we needed to find a saferoom soon because we were supposed to go onto that show in a few hours. I told her we were too busy, and she said she’d have us teleported away no matter what we were doing. I told her to go fuck herself, and she laughed as if I was joking.
I didn’t yet say anything to Donut about the coupons. I wanted to wait until we were up in the production trailer. I just knew that since Katia had voiced her suspicions out loud that they were going to make this a thing. I wanted to cut it off at the knees while nobody else was watching.
There was more to the story, too. Katia was having a hard time. It wasn’t just the coupons. She was struggling with something. I suspected maybe it was because I didn’t quite treat her like a member of the team. Yes, I’d spent money and resources on getting her bulked up. But I’d done that for myself and Donut just as much as I’d done it for her, and she knew that. We all knew she was eventually going to go back to Hekla. It was clear that was what she wanted.
The thing was, I liked Katia. I liked her a whole lot. She was painfully quiet. Even when she was bulked up, it was easy to forget she was there. But she was just so damn earnest. She was afraid and hesitant, but she never once ran. If she said she was going to do something, she did it. And she usually did it well. That was a rare quality. With just a bit more training and mastery of her race, she would be the ultimate tank. Still, with Odette’s warning about Hekla, I couldn’t stop from thinking maybe it would be better if we just cut her loose sooner rather than later. I didn’t want to do that, but maybe it was the safer bet in the long run. If we did go that route, I’d need to really up my own defenses first. Or we’d have to find another tank. Maybe we could hire Bomo and The Sledge from the Desperado Club. Mordecai had hinted that it might be possible to hire NPCs.
I hated this. Why does everything need to be so complicated? Can’t people just be loyal? I’d said that not too long ago as Bea and I were fighting about her decision to get rid of Donut. We’d been in the car, on our way to a Christmas party, and she’d casually mentioned one of her mom’s Persians—Sugar Bun, who was Donut’s aunt or cousin or something—was pregnant and was due soon. Once weaned, Bea would be taking two of the kittens and Donut would be returned to her parents who would try to sell her as a show-quality breeder.
You don’t even like her, Carl. Why do you care?
She’s your cat. She’s a living thing, and you took responsibility for her. I don’t understand how you can just give her up. I don’t care if you get another cat, but why do you have to give Donut away?
Do you know how much money she’s going to sell for, Carl? She’s a former international grand champion. She’s past her prime. I don’t understand what you’re not getting about this.
Goddamn bullshit. All of this.
In addition to the stops with the stairwells, we paused to examine stations 50, 58, and 59. With 50, I wanted to see if it was one of the Krakaren drug dens. It was not. The trap door lifted revealing a tiny room the size of a small house. A single ramp sectioned down, leading to nine different platforms. The small station had no mobs. It looked as it had never been visited by anything or anybody.
Next, we stopped at the ladder outside of station 58, which should’ve been a regular stop with a random nest of regular mobs, and it was equally empty and small. The next station after that was number 59, a prime number, and therefore supposedly a real transfer station. This one was as it should be. The place was set up just like any other transfer station we’d visited at the higher stops. There was a restaurant, a general store, and a small church leading to Club Vanquisher. The trap door popped up behind an alcove in the wall next to the general store. The only difference was it appeared there were a whopping 27 different platforms attached to this one station. It was usually only three.
After discussing it some with Madison, we learned stop number 60 was supposed to be a sprawling station filled with dozens of dormitories and apartments, along with restaurants and stores for the employees and their families to shop and eat. All colored trains would stop there, along with the Homeward Bound, the employee-only train that was supposed to be on this track. There would be a portal at the station platform which would work like the backroom entrance to the Desperado Club. It didn’t matter what train one used to get to station 60 nor what substation they started at. Once they stepped through the portal, they’d end up in the same place.
However, when we arrived at the employee-only platform for station 60, it was clear something was wrong. The platform—the only platform on this entire line—was old and decrepit, covered in cobwebs. We stopped to investigate. The stairwell led up into a tiny room just like with station 50. A single, additional stairwell led down to a confusing mess of stairs and platforms where one could catch multiple trains.
“Nice,” I said after we saw there was no settlement here.
“It’s a mistake,” Madison said, spinning in circles, as if that’d make the buildings magically appear. “I don’t understand. This is where our employees live. This is where their families live. What did you do?”
“Now you know why they made you give everyone mandatory overtime,” I said.
My suspicions had been correct. They never turned this into a real place. There were no families. No wives or children. No food boxes with a touch of fish. It was all made up. All false memories. That Homeward Bound train probably never even rode once. It would’ve been nice to have a large settlement here with saferooms and NPCs. Instead they were playing up the evil corporation angle, which I thought was pretty meta considering the source of all this bullshit.