“Probably,” I agreed. “The whole thing is designed to push the monsters toward the stairwells. We all have to work together to survive.”
“Why do we not go to station 24?” he asked. “That station also has stairs but no ghouls.”
“We don’t yet know what sort of monsters form once the creatures suffering from stage three die. But it looks like they’ll head to 24, and it’ll probably be something terrible. At least with station 36, we know what we’re facing.”
He nodded. “Okay. What will you be doing?”
“We have some more friends who are trapped all the way at the end of the line. We’re going to save them. Each and every one.”
25
Time to Level Collapse: 3 days, 3 hours
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“We’re saving those guys, too? Really?” Donut said after Li Jun left.
Katia emerged from the small apartment. “We need to slow down. I think I see station 75 coming up on my map.”
“Seriously, Carl,” Donut continued. “We just helped to save these guys. How are we going to help everyone at the end of the line?”
“I have no idea,” I said as I moved back to the train’s controls. “But I won’t try if you guys don’t think we should.”
Donut sighed. She whispered something to Katia. They both started laughing.
“What?” I asked. “What’s so funny?”
“You’re going to get us killed one way or the other, Carl. It might as well be for a good cause,” Donut said.
I grunted. “Well they do say I’m crazy.”
The ghouls streaming out of station 72 appeared to home in on the closest large gathering of crawlers. Before, they’d moved up toward the crawlers trapped at station 101, but after Li Jun led the 1,000 plus survivors to the stairwell platform at station 36, meeting up with the exhausted team Meadow Lark, the ghouls started flowing in that direction instead. That, added with the wrath ghouls traveling up from the trainyards, made it so they were besieged the moment they got off the train.
That was okay for now. The way the platforms funneled passengers to the stairwell stations created multiple, defensible chokepoints. It’d be tough, but the group should be able to keep the station clear. Since we’d discovered the secret escape hatch that led to the employee line, the defenders could keep themselves supplied and refreshed. We sent out mass messages to everyone who would listen of the plan. Last we heard, there were multiple groups set up in other instances of station 36 doing the same, plus another group that was going to try their luck at holding a station 24 and a few more teams who were going to attempt to kill the ghoul generators at 12 and 72. Everyone was avoiding the boss at station 48. I wished them all luck.
In addition to the people who’d managed to make it to the stairwells, there was a rising chorus of crawlers who found themselves trapped at the abyss. If they had those hats, they could just step through one of the thousand plus portals and teleport to a trainyard. But an increasing number were finding themselves at the edge of the pit with no way to escape.
Despite my earlier thoughts, I now suspected there was only a single abyss. I was starting to get a sense of how the entire railway looked. The whole thing was shaped like one of those spirograph drawings. The trainyards dotted the exterior edges of the pattern, spaced at regular intervals. The colored lines looped around, over, and under each other, but all led to a single point in the center, which was the pit.
Katia, who studied the map more than anyone, continued to insist there was something that we were missing. I didn’t care as long as we knew how to get from point A to point B.
There were currently about 500-600 people trapped there at the end of the line, with more appearing by the moment. Word was starting to spread that you needed the hat to utilize that escape, so those without were mostly braving the “ghoul coaster,” as Elle had dubbed it, back to the trainyards.
The crawlers had been desperately searching the interior walkways of the pit for the elusive, camouflaged exits that would lead to stop 436 where they could in turn get to the named-train switching stations. However, the lizard monsters appeared to be constantly generated, just like the ghouls, and that was making it difficult for them to search. A few battles later, and the interior gangways had started to collapse. That nixed my idea of going back to the trainyard and using the Nightmare to return to the abyss.
That left us with only one option. We had to take the battered and half-destroyed Vermillion car all the way to the end of the line and distribute as many of the hats as possible. The trip would take about a full day and would be fraught with danger. If the train broke down or the line was blocked or the power went out, we’d be fucked. Surely there would be monsters crawling all over the line, and we’d have to plow through them all. It was a terrible idea, and I knew Mordecai would have a coronary if he knew we were even thinking about this. Still, what else could we do? We all agreed that was the plan for now unless someone came up with something better.
We had about a day to find an alternative before it would be too late.
We used station 75 to quickly disengage the front engine and send Li Jun up to the other engine. A few ghouls were out on the lines, but we sent a group ahead of us to deal with it while we worked. I saw no sign of Eva. The remaining daughters held back, disappearing into the crowd. Brynhild’s Daughters truly was no more.
I couldn’t help but think that was for the best. Hekla had built the entire party around herself and that crossbow. They had too many healers and mages and not enough damage dealers and not a tank amongst them. The system had worked great early on, but I suspected the entire team would’ve fallen apart eventually. Maybe now they’d all find groups where they would be better utilized.
We decided to keep Katia hidden while we unhooked the train, lest someone’s emotions get the best of them. I traded fist bumps as I loudly exclaimed that I needed people’s hats and any keys they’d gathered along the way.
My fellow crawlers were standoffish at first considering what had happened with Hekla, plus Donut and I looked like extras from a Hellraiser movie. But once people learned about why I was collecting the hats, a chorus went out. I’d been expecting people to selfishly hold onto them just in case there was one last trick, or so they could sell them later, but that’s not what happened at all. People worked together. They coordinated. They spread the word. In twenty minutes, I had over 700 of the hats piled in front of me plus another fifteen colored-line keys that would also work for the portals. It was enough, for now. Hopefully it’d remain that way.
Yes, I thought. There is hope for us. Not a lot. But it’s there.
“Carl, we could sell these for over three million gold,” Donut whispered as I started pulling them into my inventory. Her eyes got huge. “Three and a half million! I bet I could sell them for even more. Carl, we’ll be rich!”
“Yeah, that’d play great on the show. We’d be like Bea’s cousin who pretended she had cancer and got all that money on Gofundme.”
“What if we figure out how to save the people without using the hats? Can I sell them, then?”
I laughed. “Absolutely,” I said.
After the train left, leaving the three of us alone with the battered subway car, we spent some time exploring the strange station 75. This was one of the last major parts of the railway we hadn’t yet investigated. I hoped we’d find something to help us. We set Mongo free, and the dinosaur squawked angrily at us for being cooped up for so long. He quickly got over it, instead getting distracted by the blood and gore covering our bodies. I had to smack his beak several times to keep him from licking me.