Day 61, 00:00 Hours
The Cab of the Mack Titan
Five Miles South of the Rail Depot
The heater had died an hour ago.
The massive diesel engine of the Mack Titan was still roaring, generating incredible amounts of heat, but the blower motor in the cab had frozen solid. The heat was trapped under the hood, while inside the cab, the temperature was dropping past zero.
My breath was freezing on the inside of my visor. My joints, no longer protected by the ambient mana of the Silo's Core, ached with a deep, grinding pain. Being Rank 12 had felt like wearing a suit of armor under my skin. Being Rank 48 felt like being naked in a blizzard.
"Status," I croaked into the radio. My throat felt like it was filled with broken glass.
"We lost two more in the middle bus," Vanessa's voice came back, flat and devoid of emotion. Hypothermia had stripped the panic away, leaving only cold calculus. "Elderly. They just went to sleep. Jack, the ambient temp back here is minus twenty with the wind chill coming through the armor gaps. If we don't stop soon, we're going to start losing the children."
I gripped the steering wheel. My gloves were frozen to the leather wrap.
"Almost there," I lied. I couldn't see anything but the swirling white vortex of the headlights cutting through the snow.
My HUD flickered. The System was watching me freeze.
[TRAIT ACTIVE: THE SHEPHERD OF BONES.]
[EFFECT: EMOTIONAL DAMPENING INCREASED TO 75%. KEEP MOVING.]
The System was helping me ignore the fact that I was driving a hearse. I didn't feel sad about the deaths in the middle bus. I just felt the weight drag on the engine.
"Unit 1," I radioed to the roof. "Thermal check."
The Golem was crouched on the roof of the cab, a gargoyle of stone and violet fire. He was the only reason the engine block hadn't cracked yet; his heat aura was keeping the fuel lines fluid.
"MULTIPLE HEAT SIGNATURES DETECTED," the Golem rumbled. "BEARING 0-1-0. LARGE SCALE INDUSTRIAL OUTPUT."
I squinted through the frosty windshield.
Ahead of us, the darkness was turning a sickly yellow.
00:45 Hours
The Steam Fortress
We crested a final rise, and the Rail Depot came into view.
It was sensory overload. After hours in the silent, dead white of the wasteland, the Depot was a screaming oasis of industrial violence.
It was a massive rail yard surrounded by a hastily erected wall of stacked shipping containers. Sodium floodlights bathed the area in harsh yellow light that cut through the fog. But the dominant feature wasn't light; it was steam.
Massive plumes of white vapor vented from smokestacks, hissing angrily against the frozen air. The ground around the depot was black mud, melted by underground steam pipes.
And it was under siege.
The Hive was swarming the container walls. Thousands of grey bodies piled up against the metal. But the Merchant wasn't using bullets to hold them back.
"Look at the towers," Echo whispered from the passenger seat, pointing.
On top of the container walls, turret emplacements rotated. They weren't machine guns. They were brass cannons hooked up to thick, insulated hoses.
HSSSSSSSH!
A jet of superheated water and steam blasted from the nearest turret. It hit a cluster of Frost-Biters trying to scale the wall. The effect was gruesome. The steam didn't just burn; it flayed. The flesh sloughed right off their bones, and the extreme temperature shock shattered their frozen limbs.
It was efficient. It was horrific. It was Arthur Banks.
"He's holding," I said.
"Barely," Ronnie radioed from the rear bus. "Look at the South Gate. They're buckling the containers."
The main entrance—a gap in the container wall blocked by a heavy freight car—was being pushed inward by the sheer weight of the horde. The steam cannons near the gate were sputtering, their pressure failing.
"If that gate blows before we transfer the people, it's a slaughter," I said.
I looked at the "Iron Snake" in the rearview mirror. Three buses. My last command. It had gotten us here. It had served its purpose.
"Vanessa, Ronnie," I said into the comms. "Get everyone ready to bail out. On my mark, you open the doors and you run for the train. Don't look back."
"Jack, what are you doing?" Vanessa asked.
"I'm plugging the hole."
01:00 Hours
The Ram & The Barricade
I downshifted. The engine screamed.
"Unit 1, clear the path!"
The Golem stood up on the roof. He vented his heat cores to maximum. A wave of violet fire washed over the road ahead, melting the snow instantly.
I aimed the Mack Titan straight at the buckling South Gate. I wasn't trying to go through it. I was aiming for the horde pushing against it.
We hit the rear of the swarm at fifty miles an hour.
It felt like driving into a wall of wet sandbags. The truck shuddered violently, slowing down as it churned through hundreds of bodies. The plow threw corpses into the air.
We crashed through the gap, shoving the blockade freight car aside with a screech of tearing metal. We were inside the yard.
"NOW!" I screamed, slamming on the brakes and jerking the wheel hard to the left.
The truck skidded to a halt. The buses behind it didn't. Their momentum carried them forward, swinging around in a violent arc. They slammed into each other, accordioning into a solid wall of steel right across the breach we had just made.
CRASH-CRUNCH-SCREECH.
The Iron Snake died violently, becoming an instant metal barricade separating the yard from the horde outside.
"Abandon ship! GO! GO! GO!"
The bus doors flew open. Eight hundred freezing, terrified people poured out into the mud of the rail yard, running toward the massive dark shape sitting on the tracks.
I jumped down from the cab. The heat of the depot hit me—a humid, oily warmth that smelled of burning coal.
Zombies were already clawing at the windows of the abandoned buses, trying to climb over my final barricade.
"Hold them!" I ordered the Golem.
The Golem leaped onto the roof of the center bus, a stone sentinel guarding the retreat.
01:15 Hours
The Appraisal
I walked through the chaotic stream of refugees. I was covered in grease, blood, and road grime. My armor was dented. I looked like a warlord at the end of his rope.
A man was waiting for me by the tracks.
Arthur Banks, The Merchant, looked like he had just stepped out of a tailor's shop in 1920 London. He wore a heavy charcoal wool suit under a thick, fur-collared overcoat. His boots were polished leather, strangely free of mud. He wore a sleek, brass-fitted gas mask pushed up onto his forehead, revealing pale, calculating eyes.
He looked at me. He didn't offer a hand. He looked at the space above my head where "Rank 12" used to be.
"Rank Forty-Eight," Banks said. His voice was smooth, cultured, and utterly cold. "Gravity is a harsh mistress, Architect."
"Banks," I grunted. "Train's leaving."
"Is it?" Banks adjusted his cuffs. "I agreed to transport a Warlord and his retinue. I see a refugee and a mob."
He looked past me at the hundreds of people scrambling toward his train. His eyes flashed with a System skill. He wasn't looking at faces. He was looking at stats.
"Hmm," Banks murmured. "Laborer, Grade C. Mechanic, Grade B. Oh, a sickly Tailor, Grade F... that's dead weight."
"They're people," I said, stepping in front of his line of sight.
"They are calories," Banks corrected. "My train runs on coal and calories. You brought a lot of mouths, Jack. What did you bring to feed the engine?"
I reached to my belt and unhooked the heavy tow strap connected to the portable tanker trailer I had dragged all the way from the Silo's generator room. The tanker held five hundred gallons of diesel fuel. The lifeblood of the "Stay-Behinds" I had robbed in Chapter 77.
I shoved the strap into his chest.
"Liquid gold," I said. "High-grade diesel. Enough to run your auxiliary generators for a month."
Banks caught the strap. He sniffed the air. The smell of the fuel seemed to please him more than the sight of the people.
"A king's ransom in the new world," Banks smiled thinly. "Very well. The ticket is punch. Get your cattle aboard."
01:30 Hours
The Heart of the Locomotive
The train was a monster.
They called it the "Obsidian Express." A locomotive the size of a house, clad in overlapping plates of black iron armor. It pulled twenty massive cattle cars, retrofitted with firing ports and reinforced roofs. It was ugly, heavy, and radiated heat.
But it wasn't moving.
Steam vented lazily from the stack. The chug-chug of the pistons was slow, labored.
A man in soot-stained overalls leaned out of the engine cab, yelling at Banks.
"Pressure's too low, Mr. Banks! The coal is wet! We can't pull this load! If we try to move this much weight before the boiler is hot, we'll blow a gasket!"
The horde outside was pushing harder against the bus barricade. The windows of the middle bus shattered. The Golem was smashing them back, but he was being overwhelmed.
We were out of time.
"I have a spark plug," I said.
I keyed my radio. "Unit 1. Disengage. Get to the engine."
The Golem turned from the fight. He leaped from the roof of the bus, landing in the yard with a ground-shaking thud. He sprinted toward the locomotive.
The engineer screamed as the massive stone creature climbed up the ladder and squeezed into the engine cab.
"Unit 1," I ordered. "Become the coal."
The Golem reached out and gripped the sides of the massive iron firebox.
"INITIATING THERMAL DUMP," he rumbled.
The violet runes on his body flared blindingly bright. He emptied his entire heat reserve directly into the train's boiler. The iron turned cherry red, then white hot.
The water inside flash-boiled.
SHREEEEEEEEEEEEK!
The steam whistle screamed, a sound so loud it drowned out the horde. A massive plume of white steam erupted from the stack, shooting a hundred feet into the air. The pistons kicked with violence.
02:00 Hours
The Departure
"ALL ABOARD!" Banks shouted, his voice amplified by a brass megaphone. "MOVEMENT IN TEN SECONDS!"
The last few refugees scrambled into the cattle cars. Ronnie and Echo were the last ones in, pulling the heavy sliding doors shut.
The train lurched forward with a bone-jarring CLANG as the couplers took up the slack.
I didn't run for a passenger car.
I ran to the front.
I climbed the ladder onto the nose of the massive locomotive. I stood on the armored cow-catcher, a railed platform just above the tracks. The heat from the boiler room behind me was intense, a welcome change from the freezing cab of the truck.
The Golem, drained of color, his stone skin dull grey, climbed out of the engine cab and stood beside me, anchoring himself to the railing.
The train gathered speed. It plowed through the back gate of the depot, smashing through the chain-link fence.
I looked back one last time.
The depot was vanishing into the fog and steam. The Hive had overrun the yard. They were swarming over the "Iron Snake," burying the buses in a mound of grey flesh.
I had built walls. I had built a convoy. And I had left them all behind to be consumed.
I turned forward, facing the dark tracks ahead. I racked the charging handle of my rifle.
I wasn't the conductor. I wasn't the Warlord. I was just the guy on the front of the train, making sure the track was clear.
The Obsidian Express roared into the Long Night.
FOUNDRY PROTOCOL - DAY 61
SECTOR 1 (JACK MONROE) ██████████ Rank 48
STATUS: MIGRATION PHASE 2 (RAIL)
ASSETS: THE OBSIDIAN EXPRESS (Passenger) / WAR GOLEM (Drained)
POPULATION: 795 (Hypothermia Casualties)
NEXT EVENT: The Long Haul
END OF VOLUME 2