Liam Drex was no stranger to death. In the scorched lands of a world that had fallen to ash and myth, he had seen more corpses than stars. Once, the skies had been blue and vast. Now, they glowed with a sickly hue—reddish-grey like infected wounds—and the sun bled instead of shined.
He crouched beneath the half-collapsed skeleton of an old overpass, hidden in the ruins of what was once a northern rail junction. Metal groaned above, barely holding together after decades of corrosion. His coat—a patchwork of synth leather, fireproof tarp, and scavenged armor—brushed against broken glass as he moved. The air tasted like copper and static.
A whisper of wind stirred the dust, and with it came a soft, rhythmic pulse beneath his feet. Not a quake. Not a machine.
Something older. Deeper.
He adjusted his respirator, the lenses on his goggles twitching to infrared mode. There was nothing visible. But the pulse—he could feel it in his bones.
"What the hell is that?" he whispered, standing slowly, fingers brushing the grip of the makeshift blade strapped to his thigh.
He had heard stories—everyone had. About cursed tunnels, silent tracks that still breathed. Stories about the Train that never died.
They were the kind of stories scavengers told drunk around fires.
Liam never believed them. Until now.
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