“What color is Mindaro, anyway?” Donut asked as I pushed the throttle forward. We had to remain in the small, raised cockpit with the windshield, otherwise Donut would get blown clear off the train. We were going insanely fast. The cart moved smoothly over the track, making very little noise. We kept the portal tuned to the abyss in case more mobs came at us. The line’s power was out, so we had to run on batteries.
“I have no idea,” I said. “I don’t know what any of these colors are. Ask the art professor.”
Katia shrugged. “I think it might be a shade of chartreuse.”
“What the hell color is chartreuse?” I asked.
“It’s between yellow and green. It’s named after a French liqueur. Actually, there’s some controversy on what the exact shade should be. It’s very interesting.”
“I’m sure it’s riveting,” I said.
Katia stuck her tongue out at me. And then her tongue formed into a little hand with a tiny middle finger pointing up.
I laughed. “Holy shit, that’s weird. You’re getting fast at that.”
“It still hurts to make big changes, but little stuff like that I can now do with very little effort.”
The cart plan had worked as intended for the other two lines. For the Sinopia and Grullo line, the abyss cart appeared, still blasting its music (“Mack the Knife” for the Grullo line), and the trainyard cart appeared soon thereafter. In both cases, the portal-to-the-trainyard carts arrived just minutes after the first, which suggested that the carts sometimes slowed down if they hit something big, allowing the second trains to catch up.
Which, we realized, was what had probably happened with the Mindaro line. It was a stupid mistake. If the second cart had caught up with the first, the portal in the front would have tossed the whole abyss cart back to the train station. So when Bautista’s crew only saw one cart—this one playing “Rock of Ages” by Def Leppard—it was actually the cart they needed to jump in front of, but they had no way of knowing that.
I shouldn’t have put delays on those alarm traps. I should have known what song went with what cart. It would have saved us this trip.
That cart had been tuned to trainyard Q. I warned my contact there that we may have accidentally hurled a bunch of monsters in their direction. That plus a cart with a dangerous portal attached to it.
When the carts hit the portals at the edge of the abyss, they didn’t plummet over the edge like I’d been expecting. Instead, they worked like engine cars and punched right through back to the trainyards.
Since the abyss gate at the end of the Sinopia and Grullo line did not line up with the associated trainyard track of the rapid-response carts, those who got transported through never saw the carts again. Instead they joined up with the defenders at the closest nearby station 36. It was 800 people between the two groups, and we had gotten them all to a stairwell station. That was the best I could do for them.
At first I worried that the rogue carts would now start looping up and down the tracks. But a group happened to be grinding their way through yard M when the first cart—the same one playing “Physical” by Olivia Newton John—appeared. Because of the way the switching stations worked, the cart was automatically routed into a dead-end parking space intended as a holding area for the train engines. The cart reached the end of the track and flipped. It caused the entire awning system to be sent into the abyss. But the portal automatically shut itself off a moment later. The cart remained on its side, wheels still spinning.
A few minutes after that, the second cart showed up and also flipped over.
That group at yard M then managed to get enough people together and physically flip one of the two carts back over and then bring it to a track. They managed to get the thing turned back on, giving them a new weapon to keep at least one of the nearby tracks clear.
The tunnels were eerily quiet and empty as we rode up toward Bautista. I kept the portal on in case something else was on the track. I tuned it to the abyss, but I kept an eye out for the tell-tale blue dot of crawlers on the track. I could switch it back to station E, but we had to be careful. It took the portal a good ten seconds to make the switch, during which time it wasn’t on at all, making the cart vulnerable.
Katia’s fan box became available while we rode down the line, but we didn’t dare stop. We now had less than two days left, and every second counted. Seven hours in, and we still saw nothing on the tracks except the occasional exploded corpse of a post stage-three monster. The baby krakarens were nowhere to be seen.
Back at the front of the line, Elle’s away team, with the help of Tizquick the dwarf, found the correct colored line, making their way to the exploded station 72. Loads of other crawlers had the same idea, and she found a group of people waiting there. The ceiling had caved in, but the circle of stairwells remained, and people had cleared the rubble. We sent out word that it was a place to descend without fighting, and people were now flocking to the area. The crawlers who’d died blowing the soul crystal had, at the very least, not died in vain.
Others, like Imani and Li Jun, thought it was best to remain put. The monsters approaching station 36 were trickling to a stop, and the crawlers had built a solid, defensible position. So far the Krakaren babies were staying put at all the station 24s. The wrath ghouls, it turned out, formed a similar boss to the one parked at stop 48 if they were allowed to congregate. This one was also a province boss.
Our plan was to get Bautista’s crew, get everyone to trainyard E, and then work our way to station 60. From there people could decide to go wherever they wanted, either to one of the many heavily-defended station 36 stairwells or to the free station 72. A few people were also putting together raiding teams to take on the station 48 boss. Nobody else was braving station 12, 24, or the other occupied station 72s.
As for us, we’d decide what we were going to do when the time came.
“People on the track!” Katia suddenly yelled just as we passed station 432.
“Shit,” I said, flipping the switch to change the portal. The cart was like a boat and didn’t have brakes. I cut the throttle just as the blue dots appeared. The train slowed. I mentally calculated our trajectory, and I saw we’d make the switch in plenty of time. The dots were moving fast, probably running away from us once they saw our light. Poor guys. They had to be terrified.
“Get ready,” I said. “If they don’t know who we are, they might shoot at us.”
Sure enough, the crawlers appeared a moment later. They were a group of five people running full speed down the track and away from the cart, and one of them had presence of mind to shoot an ice bolt directly at us. It hit the portal and disappeared. I didn’t know if the bolt went through or what, but the poor guys didn’t have a chance. We plowed right through them, teleporting them to train yard E, which had to be a serious shock. They all probably thought they were about to die.
“Sorry,” I called back over my shoulder as we continued down the track, approaching station 433, which appeared much more quickly than I anticipated. This was where the mimic lived. As far as I was aware, nobody had killed one of these things yet. Dozens of Xs appeared on my map, all of them on the platform where the previous portal cart hadn’t been able to scoop them up.
God, so many dead. Every time I saw something like this, I felt the anger start to rise in my chest.
“What is that?” Katia asked, pointing ahead. There was something on the tracks right outside the platform to station 433. Whatever it was, it didn’t appear on my map.
A red and white wooden crossbeam appeared to be sitting across the tracks, blinking. It had a stop sign attached to it. What the hell? This was like a regular railroad crossing, though usually these things went across the road, not the tracks. I just stared at it, confused for a good two seconds, not sure what to make of it. The track beyond the barrier appeared to be fine. There was no cross traffic. Where had it come from?