East at Dusk

Disclaimer: this story contains topics of sexual and physical violence as well as death and gore. Reader's discretion is advised.

That night there were hundreds of them. Some weeping. Some wailing. Some fighting and throwing themselves in resistance amidst gunfire and guards beating them to a lifeless pulp with their rods. But they were mourning in whatever way they deemed best. At least that’s what it looked like from the train window. That’s the vision it gave me every night. This train was a curse for many cities and their people. What horrors must have awaited them as they each drifted off into a nightmare with nothing but its whistle to constantly strike and restrike their souls as a hammer does a nail? I imagine it would have been that way for the ones that even attempted to sleep. Most of them probably couldn’t will themselves to crawl into a bed and shut their eyes. And I don’t blame them. This train and others like it quickly became the most chilling thing to behold for residents of the largest cities. Most of them, no, probably all of them desperately wished for a different home outside of the cramped streets filled with hopelessness and despair.

A young woman had once pulled me aside at a coffee shop inquiring as to how I could possibly allow myself to operate that locomotive every night. She was rather hot about it too. I get the feeling her sense of hatred for its coming each sunset boiled over and spilled onto her tongue because her words were like hisses from an agitated spider wanting to retreat back into darkness, and her jeers as a surgeon’s incision knife without the aid of numbing medication.

“How is that even slightly! I mean even minutely! Ah! None of any, and I mean ANY of this is justified! You’re a leech. You feed off of us. Off of our pain. Off of our never-ending strife! You profit while we rot! While we have this, this… this infection! And it keeps growing and spreading like a plague and you PROFIT! You grow RICH! Off of US! Hey what are you…!? Get your hands off me! H-hey wait!! No no no no please! Sto…!”

I didn’t attempt to stop those guards from putting that crater in her skull. They weren’t very quick about it either. They typically toyed with their victims before sending their souls to the darkness. In this woman’s case, they pinned her onto the floor and openly violated her amidst her screams. I noticed as they were in the middle of their degrading act she began to violently throw her forehead into the floor as an attempt on her own life, but one of them grabbed her by her lochs and caused her to neck to whip back, paralyzing her. Her shaking face, now an intermixing swamp of blood and tears could only let out a soft whimper as the one having his way with her finished his act with a mockingly loud sigh. That was when the others rolled her over on her back and took their bludgeons out to finish the job she began on herself. She didn’t even flinch, and she died with open eyes… looking at me.

She had a daughter, too. Probably was attacked or fell into a ditch running from them. Her name was on the list a few weeks after her mother’s. Apparently they go for the children when their parents are gone. Since they can’t work and often turn to thievery anyways, they just dispose of them. But not before gouging their eyes. They are a delicacy I’m told. Whether or not they kill them before or after is unclear to me...

The guards are hated more than I am though. Their job does entail the beating and torturing of a few… hundred a day? And apparently that’s because they think of the citizens as cattle that refuse to stay in line. They would likely reduce their daily hundreds to tens if they did stay in line, those tens being for the guards’ own personal enjoyment. But they do a nice job cleaning the intestines, organs and other… parts off the streets when they had finished their masquerades of defilement and death. I personally think that, despite their… flaws that they have done a relatively decent job of maintaining the peace. Especially in the face of a continent-wide plague. Considering this city alone has over twenty million residents. All quarantined. All unable to leave. All waiting to die.   

But back to the train itself… it isn’t anything special I suppose. To my knowledge it isn’t haunted. Although maybe they think I haunt it. As its conductor, I suppose that’s not entirely inaccurate. Aside from that, the train is rather boring to be quite frank. I do keep it clean for the guests, however. One would be surprised that at no point have there been bodily fluids or excrements lining any part of the cabins. I’m told that much of the common public transit lines have a nasty buildup of… well, “white children” to put it in some way. But not my train. I may be an object of righteous judgment from everyone, but I take what pride I can in this locomotive. I took to calling it “Nyx” after brushing up on my Greek mythology a few months back. I do have a lot of time to read in between stations after all. I make my runs at dusk, and I travel east. The umbral abyss has a character of its own. The earth’s aura of darkness begins to creep over the horizon as the sun makes its farewell.

That night was different though.

To be clear, I had seen the guards’ heinous acts to the people of the city. And despite my own inner qualms with them, I kept quiet as there was a kind of delicate balance that was maintained amongst them and the citizens. The people in the cities didn’t have weapons. But despite all of this, I had no idea what the Freedom Party did to profit off of any of their suffering or how they were able to fund such a large force across many cities. That included my trade as well. I don’t work as a conductor for free. And although they paid me well, I needed much more if I wanted to live a thriving life outside the stench of the city. Even though I was free to leave the city limits at night, I couldn’t realistically move to any of the government-operated facilities without some inside knowledge and a lot of wealth. Much more wealth than I had at the time. 

But this night was truly when the dynamic of all of it changed for me, and when I learned their dark secrets. Up until that point all that I knew was that my guests, whom I transported from the city eastward to the government facility were, and still are for that matter, people.

Dead people.

Corpses. Kept in frozen chambers. Hundreds upon hundreds stacked neatly on top of each other in the cabins of the train cars. All of whom had died from either the plague or by the hands of the guards. There was the occasional homicide that took place, but the lists I was given each night only accounted for them as making up maybe a fraction of a percent of the total dead who were loaded into the frozen chambers. And that’s why I am loathed as much as I am. I take husbands away from wives, mothers away from daughters and children away from parents. None of them have a choice. Soon after the plague started, trackers were implanted in all the citizens. Not only are they capable of sending GPS data, but they also track heart rates. If someone drops dead, the Freedom Party and guards know about it. Everyone who dies is immediately taken away from their families and is housed on the train. Any who resist the guards taking them away are killed too.

It was hard for me at times to watch this unfold, but at one point, I had begun to question the methods of population control being employed. Twenty million people lived in the city, yes. But hundreds died daily. And I had done this for eight years. Over that time the city should have been reduced to a quarter of the population.

Fifteen million had died since I started.

But the population had somehow not decreased. The census each year showed a constant twenty million some-odd people living in the borders of the city. I could not for the longest time rationalize how that could be. It didn’t make logical sense no matter how many hours I poured into mulling it over on the tracks. And I dared not start asking questions lest my body be shoved into one of the ice coffins I hulled each night. But I found something one day as I was avoiding a street riot the guards were trying breaking up. I had to take a different route from my house to the train station because of it and ended up on the edge of the city near the water reservoir. Nobody ever came down there, since it was technically off limits, but because the guards were busy and I possessed no other realistic options, I made my way down to the city limit. The stench alone from waste and garbage was enough of a natural deterrent, but I kept going and while I went noticed, as I was rounding the weathered bricks holding together the remnants of part of the city wall, that there were tracks that ended just before the bend of the wall. And sitting on them…

Another train.

Fear doesn’t even begin to describe the emotion I felt rising within me. This train was not only operational, but it was in better condition than the one I used. My pace suddenly turned brisk as I made my way around the back ends of the city to the train station in hopes that I would outmaneuver any guards along the way. Luckily the riot seemed to be the perfect diversion though as I went through unspotted by anyone.

But the train had now seeped into my mind. I couldn’t overlook its devilish presence. I had thought I operated the only train within the city limits, but apparently the Freedom Party was playing at something more sinister than even what I was involved with. Perhaps it was the key to the population’s size not changing, even with the death of millions each year from plague and brutality.

I ended up finding out why though.

That evening was like any other: the icy containers filled with bodies lined the train cars. There were probably seven hundred or so that night. The journey from the city station to the government facility takes 3 and a half hours. Once there I began my normal cordial greeting of the officers and started the census. But this time a large man with a light grey suit stood back just shy of the floodlight’s edge with his hands in his trench coat pockets; he stood there like a mannequin. But his gaze seemed fixated on the train and me. I brushed it off and resumed my duties with the station officers and medical professionals in lab coats. I had assumed they existed as a research branch of the government to study the effects of the plague on the corpses. It turns out they were politicians themselves, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

An hour later, once the count was verified and the bodies moved to their indoor units, the man in the grey suit, still holding his statue-like posture, began to approach me. He gave me a faint smile once he’d finished his steady strides and gestured me into the facility with a simple “Good evening, could you follow me?”

I call it a facility, but it’s more like an ecosystem. A collection of massive buildings with lights that illuminate it from distances much farther than it deserves. Steel and concrete. A grey jungle that’s cold and calculated. That’s the facility in question.

The man led me into a building large enough to be an air hangar or convention center. Ten open garage doors stretching at least eighty feet high and a hundred across lined the side we entered. All the lights were on, and even though it was past midnight the staircases, balconies, offices, meeting places, shops, and restaurants inhabited thousands upon thousands of people. This may as well have been a city itself, one at this point I had never bothered to enter. Not that I ever really could; it was all fenced off and heavily guarded.

We paced through the crowd, took an elevator to the seventieth floor, and strode into a massive office space where the man took to a throne behind an ornate desk lined with gold and granite. The rest of his office boasted similar dearest valued furnishings all mocking my unkempt outfit I operated the train with. “You do realize you have a tracker, right?” the man began.

I swallowed.

“You’ve been at this job for eight years, two months, and thirteen days now. I honestly thought you might’ve starting asking questions by now. Yet you’ve kept quiet. We never doubted your loyalty though, so we didn’t think anything about it. But now… you’ve seen the other train haven’t you?” My gaze dropped to the edge of his desk and my head began to nod faintly. “Uh huh” he said in acknowledgement. “Look kid, I’m gonna be honest with you. I have six military-grade fifty calibers inside this desk alone, and I wouldn’t hesitate to blow someone’s brain out of their skull right here if they crossed me. The Freedom Party’s business is a delicate balance of power. But your work on the rails over these years has given me a liking for you. I see ambition in you. A drive to progress out of your current situation. So I’m not going to unload a round into your head. At least not until you heard my proposal. You see, population control is a rather challenging process. It’s even harder to do when you have to keep masses of people from erupting into riots and revolutions, and I’m not talking about people in the largest cities. They can do as they please, and the guards will take care of it. No, it’s the people who have access to media, internet, and freedom. At least, well freedom in their minds. You see the media is funneled, the online sites are sanctioned, and people’s sense of liberty is fabricated. Everyone gets to live in the lie we’ve built, but they get to keep their comfortable way of life. Well, almost everybody. You see this plague was a nasty business when it first began in the cities, but we luckily had enough resources and ethos among the people to persuade them into quarantine. We did eventually have to use force, however. But keeping the people in check exacted a massive strain on our resources. Guards aren’t cheap, you know. Especially when we had to station enough to control twenty million people in your city alone. So we had to make enough of a profit to pay the guards as well as keep the media from starting a firestorm of panic to the masses. What we didn’t expect though was how lucrative this plague would end up being. An increase in cash flow seemed promising when our medical experts found that the organs of those killed by the plague carried antibodies. Apparently, this virus exists only in a hyper state where it needs an immediate host for survival. It intermingles with the DNA of the host and consumes them until host and virus are the same. Once the host dies, the virus that existed in it can be used as a kind of vaccine that will prevent infection when consumed. Once we found that out, your line of work began, and we immediately began transporting bodies so we could stop the infection from spreading anywhere else.”

“How does that explain your financial gain and the cities’ populations not changing? Hundreds have been dying daily for years! Also shouldn’t the plague have stopped by now anyways? Or at least slowed down? Why does it seem like it’s even worse now than it was when I began doing this?”

“We can breed embryos using the DNA from the corpses you bring back since they’re frozen. We also store samples of the virus in controlled environments so they won’t die. The other train is used as a transport to bring hundreds of new bodies into the cities each day with some that we infect with the virus so as to keep the plague alive. These people grow up in controlled facilities with similar environments to the city you live in so that they won’t know what a good life is. The corpses you bring back all have valuable antibodies in their organs that can be sold for high prices in black markets. Thousands of bodies from all the cities results in billions of dollars each day that we can pay who we need to keep the peace and also thrive ourselves.”

“…How have I not been infected if I live in the city and transport bodies each night?”

“Their guts are in the food you eat, son.”

My heart dropped, and I almost fainted, but his next gesture is what changed the dynamic of everything he told me.

“What’s say… ten times your nightly pay and free access to this government facility to keep you quiet?”

I looked across the desk as his hands slid over a check in my direction.

$7500… “Per night?”