To Witness Doctrines Derailed

How long has it been since Norah had played in a natural body of water? How long has it been since she, if ever, had beheld a waterfall so close? She hears it nearby, but a heavy sleep keeps her curled up on the dock, reluctant to open her eyes. She feels sticky and damp, and her arm is tingly from lying against the hard wood beneath her.

The dock rocks and shudders, a loud, metallic twang vibrating through Norah’s skull so hard she feels it in her teeth, making her sit up with a jerk, catching herself as she’s struck with a rush of vertigo. She blinks hard, recovering her bearings as the dock continues to rock under her, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand.

Something falls from around her wrists.

A metallic screech and violent pitch throws her left and back into reality.

She is not on a dock.

She is on a train.

Norah presses her back to the wall and her hands to the floor to ground herself. She’s in the caboose from what she can tell, and the train is travelling toward the sunrise, East. She forces herself to take some deep breaths, forcing the fog of what must have been a sedative clear from her mind so she can focus.

Her hair is damp and so is her skirt, and her clothes have dried to her skin. She runs her hands over her arms and legs, pulling cut twine off her skirt and away from her ankles where it was caught on her boot. There are red indents on the skin around her ankles and wrists from being bound.

Higher on her leg she feels something smooth and flat and hikes up her skirt to find a clear adhesive bandage over a freshly sutured wound.

With shaking hands, Norah presses her palms against her eyes, hard enough to see stars as she forces herself to take more deep slow breaths. Her memory is full of fog, only conjuring snapshots of her regular routine at the compound into her mind, but there is nothing concrete, nothing that locates her most recent memory before this moment, nothing that fills in any of the blanks about how she got here.

The train shudders again.

Hauling herself up, Norah staggers to the window, trying to make sense of what’s around her. It’s early, barely dawn, and the trees a few dozen meters out whip by so quickly they blur together into a dizzying wall of brown and green. She can barely make anything else out, pressing closer to the window to get an idea about the train.

Sparks fly from the tracks as it hits another curve and Norah grips the back of a seat to keep upright, she can’t tell if it’s morning mist against hot metal or whether there is smoke coming from under the train. There are nine more carriages ahead of this one, and Norah can only just see the shape of the locomotive.

She turns, looking around the caboose, realizing a bit belatedly that there is an arrow spray-painted on the floor, pointing toward the door. Norah follows the arrow, grunting as she leans her whole weight into the handle to release it. The door slides open heavily and she nearly loses her footing.

Wind roars into the caboose, and Norah shuts her eyes against the grit before everything adjusts. The cage-like metal gangway shifts with the train's movement, the four-foot high gate on either side doing little to reassure her. She surges forward, crossing the space in two long, unsteady strides, and lands hard against the next door. It opens much easier and she staggers inside, slamming it shut behind her.

This is a passenger car, possibly for families, with seats facing each other with small tables in between. This car is also empty, no sign of anyone or anything besides cables and Passenger Information Displays torn out of the wall and the arrows painted on the carpet leading to the next car.

“Hel—?” Norah chokes as she tries to cry out, coughing and clearing her throat before trying again. “Hello!?” she shouts, but her only companion is the roaring of the train around her.

A touch steadier, Norah finds an emergency panel at the end of the car. She presses the button and a weak sound between a bell and a buzz crackles from the speaker, and then dead air. She hits it again with the same result, her breathing starting to come in sharply and too quick. She presses and holds the button, hearing a different beep.

“Is anyone there? Hello?” she says, voice pitched with anxiety, a half sobbed whimper leaving her throat when the panel barks erroneously back at her.

Norah approaches the next door, feeling her heart hammering against her chest. But this time the gangway is contained with accordion-looking walls that remind Norah more of a breathing creature than a machine. She lets out a heavy breath and crosses through, quickly realizing that what lies ahead is an observation car.

Large windows make up the entire car, featuring seats and couches with small side tables facing outward at the forest and distant mountain view. Everything looks much more comfortable here, cleaner, brighter. On a clear night Norah would lose sleep marvelling at the sky through these windows and feel completely at peace.

A dark figure swoops over the train, blinding Norah with a light so bright she screams and drops to the floor, hiding her head with her arms against the heavy beating percussion of its wings.

Norah looks out with wide eyes at the machine outside, a helicopter, with a spotlight on it, scanning the train. She has never seen one so close, only ever from a great distance or on the news when she was younger. In the early morning light it is hard to make out the lettering on the side, and another sweep of the spotlight leaves blotches of colour in her vision.

A government helicopter? Military?

Her stomach drops and she rolls onto her back, looking up at the pink dawn sky as she presses her hands into her belly. Hot tears well in her eyes, and she takes in broken heaving breaths.

This was planned. This is why they kept her in solitary for so long, why even when she was reintegrated into the community many of her privileges were withheld and why her contact with others was limited.

This is why they foiled her plan to leave (she knew too much she knew too much she knew too much). She’d heard about the months of secret meetings between the Professor and Fellows, the rumours of specially-chosen conscripts, the whispers about an honorary cleansing ritual.

This is why they didn’t let her see—

A strangled moan leaves Norah’s throat and she crawls to the end of the observation car, holding back sobs as she gets the door open and shakily rushes through the gangway.

First Class has clear interior doors to dampen sound, the car is dark, the windows are painted over from the outside.

Norah gasps and retches as she stumbles inside, moaning between sobs. The stench— like meat and sweat and refuse — makes her stomach clench and her legs buckle. She feels her heartbeat in her face, her stomach is empty, she can’t throw up, but she’s caught between sobbing and gagging and heaving in breaths.

Something slams into her side breaking her free of her panic. Norah screams, kicking and scrambling further into the car. A wet croaking fills her ears, a sound she’d heard before but only from a distance.

“No no no no no no no!” she cries, clutching her side where it had slammed into her. It moves on quivering legs, weak and covered in the gelatinized gore of its host.

Norah crawls away backward, sobbing as she sees that there are five others, hosts, slumped in the luxurious seats, eyes pale and unseeing, shallowly breathing, but worse than dead, mere marionettes to the puppeteer parasites inside of them.

Where one had already emerged, the rest would soon follow.

The train shudders and the creature crumples, retreating under a table with sharp croaks and chirps. Norah turns and crawls forward, only to stop just short of the door where her worst fears are confirmed.

Even after months of being separated, Norah knows Holly in her bones. She is a crumpled heap, emaciated, her beautiful brown irises greyed over, and with a wet gaping wound from throat to navel where the thing that wore her and fed from her recently tore its way out.

This is the girl Norah risked everything for.

This is why she’s here.

Norah crawls to the door, shutting it behind her once she’s through, and lays down in defeat, leaning her forehead against the cold hard floor.

The floor.

The hard floor.

Cold?

A metallic shudder reverberates through the train, through her skull and all the way into her teeth. Norah sits up with a gasp, pressing her hand to her leg where she’d found the bandaged wound.

Did she touch the right spot?

There is a red stain on her skirt, and she jerks it back up to check her leg.

The bandage has pulled away from her skin, two stitches are torn, and the wound is seeping blood. Norah holds her breath and whacks it.

A small sob leaves her throat.

She feels nothing.

Norah leans against the wall, drawing her knees up and pressing her hand against her sternum as she tries to breathe slowly and evenly against the deep-seated fear that has crawled into her chest.

They’re killing her twice, twisting the knife. They knew she’d have nothing to live for without Holly, that all her efforts had been to keep her from a conscript’s fate.

Norah failed her. They’d been apart for too long. The fellows finally got to Holly and indoctrinated her into their cause. As wounded as she was by The Displacement, as angry as she was by government inaction, she’d still be horrified by the acts of political protest enacted by radical Servitors of Eschatology. Norah knew it was a lie that those who self-immolated in public squares were acting independently, the Professor’s official statements were empty and meaningless. Holly bought it, Holly still believed in the Eschatologists and was naive enough to join anyway, and Norah had gone with her because she had nothing else left.

Had that all changed? Was Holly complicit or just a pawn?

Norah is wrenched between denial and conviction, believing desperately that Holly would never willingly partake in bioterrorism, that as angry as she was she wouldn’t seek to hurt others, that her political stance was one of passive resignation, not compelled oblivion.

Holly is dead, and Norah would soon follow.

This is where she’s going to die. The Professor made her complicit as a last sick joke.

Holly’s parasite hadn’t attacked her. It knew. They must have thrown her in the lake and infected her too, “cleansed her”, making her painless. That’s the only way she could’ve passed through the car.

Norah stands and makes her way through the next few unremarkable passenger cars, following the spray-painted arrows.

The helicopters make another pass, the spotlights coming in through the windows, but the day is brightening and she can see her surroundings much easier now.

A screeching of metal prompts another shuddering of the train and Norah grabs the back of a seat for stability. There is no way this train is meant to be going as fast as it is, especially if helicopters can’t keep up.

No train on the Allied North American Railroad was meant to maintain speeds over 170 kilometres per hour, and this one has certainly been pulling more than that since Norah woke up.

And if the tracks ahead have too tight a curve the train would derail.

But that’s the point, isn’t it?

Norah continues onward, staggering as the train lurches and trembles until she finds one car where the Passenger Information Display still works. Some of the data is unavailable, but the route information comes up when Norah cycles through the menus. A map flickers to life with an icon of the train, blinking forward every few seconds from how fast it’s going.

She scans ahead, her breathing shallow, and finds a worse conclusion than what she’d suspected. The train wouldn’t crash into a station, the puppeteers wouldn’t be released into an urban center. They were headed for the hydroelectric reservoir and water treatment plant. The bridge that crosses it is long and curved, too curved. The train would plow right off the bridge, and if the puppeteers didn’t infect the water, the decontamination protocols would disrupt the lives of millions of people for months.

Norah tears away from the display, crossing through the final gangway and into the locomotive. Alarms claxon from the dashboard and it is clear the controls have been tampered with.

Some kind of tablet has been installed, connected by cables to the train's computer system, overriding the emergency protocols and forcing it to max out its speed. Norah approaches the displays and finds warnings on each. Brakes system malfunction, communications system offline, coolant failure - overheating warning.

Norah grabs the tablet, careful not to tug up any cables, and inspects the display.

She knows how these things work, suddenly grateful for the laws against planned obsolescence put into place at the start of the Green Age which made backward compatibility mandatory for ten years as new technological innovations were created. Nothing could be made obsolete, and repairability was required. Living in an isolated Eschatologist community hadn’t cost her much in terms of technological acuity.

Norah scans the menus and carefully navigates each until she finds an overview of all the systems. The mechanical jargon is lost on her, but it is clear that stopping the train would not work. The acceleration was jammed, and any attempt to disconnect the tablet from the system would be futile.

What she finds instead, by complete accident, is that the couplings between cars are being affected by the overheating wheel system. Whatever program had enslaved the train’s computers was not controlling the couplings. Norah can disengage them from the locomotive and separate the cars.

She wouldn’t have much time if this worked, with each lost car, the locomotive would get faster as it stopped hauling as much weight, which means they would arrive at the bridge much sooner.

Norah finds an intact display on the other side of the room, locating the menu within a minute. Each car is identified by its type, and Norah is able to execute the decoupling command. Loud thudding clicks sound, four times, until the cars are too far away to hear. A green light confirms the successful operation, and she starts at the caboose, executing the command to release the coupling from the rest of the train.

[Error.]

She tries again, from the next car.

[Error.]

[Error. Manual disengagement required.]

An information box pops up and Norah taps it, bringing her to a set of diagrams. The maintenance panel is located beside the inside doors preceding the gangway on the passenger cars, but the gangway needs to be released before manual decoupling is initiated.

Norah shudders at the idea of going back and releasing each car herself, gooseflesh rising on her skin at the thought of passing through the plague car again. But she can’t let the Professor harm others, he and his fellows had taken the principles of their cause too far.

Norah takes a deep breath and heads out of the locomotive. The cars between it and First Class are standard passenger cars, and she has no problems passing through them.

On the last gangway, the train shudders and Norah loses her footing, falling hard into the wall, as a helicopter roars by overhead.

She is stunned by how jarring it is, despite feeling no pain, and struggles to orient herself on the floor, crawling forward on her knees before reaching the door.

Once inside the passenger car, Norah finds her arm scraped and feels blood trickling down the side of her face, but there is no reflective surface nearby to see what is bleeding.

With a grunt, she heads through to the other end of the car in search of the access panel. She locates that, but cannot find the gangway release, even after taking a few deep breaths to calm her nerves and scanning the entire space.

With rocks in her stomach, Norah crosses to the First Class car to find the gangway release on that side.

Inside it’s as quiet as can be, and while she tries not to look inside the car through the clear inner doors, her gaze is drawn there anyway. Her eyes begin to well with tears and she blinks at them as figures shift behind the glass. She presses her hand to it, letting the tears drip down her cheeks.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you,” Norah chokes out wetly, sniffling as she blinks hard and turns away, finding the gangway release and a staff storage cupboard. She opens it on a whim and finds some towels and tablecloths, and uses one to dab at the side of her face.

After taking some more deep breaths, Norah takes a tablecloth and hits the switch to retract the gangway, rushing back the way she’d come as a metallic whine begins and the wind whips up around her. From inside the next car she watches until the gangway is fully retracted, and opens the panel to release the coupling.

Norah pulls the lever and watches as the couplings come apart. For a few painfully long seconds the previous cars keep pace with the ones ahead of them, but soon enough the locomotive pulls away and the meters stretch out between them.

A helicopter follows the disconnected part of the train, able to keep pace with it as it begins to slow down.

In the following cars, both the gangway controls and the decoupling release are on the same side and she’s able to do them both one after the other, using the tablecloth like a scarf to cover her face against the rushing wind.

The claxon of alarms in the locomotive is louder when she returns, speeds already having picked up since being liberated of its load.

Smoke spills out from the dashboard, making Norah cough. She rushes for the middle door, wrenching it open to clear the car.

Holding her breath, Norah blinks through watering eyes, checking the tablet again, and looking between it and the landscape ahead. The bridge is coming up and at this pace, the locomotive would fly off the bridge like a projectile.

The alarms suddenly cut off, flames leaping from the dash, pulling a scream from Norah’s throat. She staggers back, tugging the white tablecloth from her head and clutching it around her shoulders.

She wanted to use it as a funeral shroud, her last rite before she would be crushed or drowned or burned to death in the train. Fire was the fate of conscripts, and she’d done as much as she could to prevent that fate for herself and Holly. Was self-immolation worse than what Holly had become, was she afraid of her fate like Norah is now?

It had always scared her, the courage that painlessness instilled in conscripts, knowing their life was already forfeit, that the parasite growing inside them would spare them from feeling anything when they doused themselves in gas and struck a match.

To painlessly witness oneself be consumed by flames is somehow worse than the alternative. No one was meant to experience prolonged awareness of their own destruction that way.

Pain is what makes people human, it’s what limits cruelty and breeds compassion.

The doctrines belonging to the Servitors of Eschatology are rooted in acceptance, the most basic belief being that it was arrogant to intervene in the natural order of human demise, and that living simply and comfortably with what remained was better than causing more pain for the sake of human perpetuity.

Their way of life was meant to be an example. It meant nothing to coerce and force others into it.

Norah coughs, clutching the tablecloth in her fist like a shield, crying as her worst fears approach faster than the train’s derailment.

Sparks sputter and something pops loudly on the dashboard, spraying burning debris across the car. Norah screams, watching her skirt be singed and red welts appear on her legs and arms.

There is no pain, only the feeling of her heart hammering in her chest.

Norah hauls herself up, staggering out the side door onto the slim platform and into the roaring wind. Her skirt whips against her legs and she has to grab the metal railing to keep herself upright.

She would not be taken by flame.

She would not give them the convenience of her death on this train.

Smoke billows from underneath the locomotive, and she can see the growing fire through the windows. Norah works her way forward, closer to the small set of stairs ahead and to her left.

Time is short and time is precious.

A rush of blue opens around her, the curved bridge visible ahead.

It won’t hurt.

Sparks and smoke spurt from below her feet.

It won’t hurt.

Tears stream down Norah's cheeks as she braces herself against the stairs.

It won’t hurt.

If she has a year to live before the parasite inside her takes her senses and gelatinizes her organs she would spend every moment making the Professor regret ever putting her on this train. She doesn’t care if that means she’ll be detained until she dies. She would make them all pay.

Norah takes a deep breath, the white tablecloth whipping around her shoulders like wings.

She jumps.

It’s a long fall.

She hits the water like a dart.

Everything goes quiet.

It didn’t hurt.

A sound like rumbling thunder reaches her ears, she kicks her legs and pushes with her arms, up up up.

Norah breaks the surface and hauls in a deep breath.

A helicopter hovers overhead, the heavy thrumming of its rotors becoming indistinguishable from her heartbeat.

She feels sick and dizzy and hot, her ears are ringing, and with a jolt of anxiety, Norah positions herself into a float.

Smoke billows from where the locomotive derailed and crashed into the service building and she tries to look away but she is —

Cold

Norah is cold.

Cold to the bone.

Thank you so much for reading! It is a privilege to share my work this way, and I am always curious which details leave impressions on my readers. Please feel free to leave a comment. If you enjoyed this piece, and would like to support me, please consider leaving a tip.

— Rooney