The Last Girl on the Rails - Hitching the Second Car
The entire locomotive violently slammed sideways.
Tess was thrown three feet across the cabin, her shoulder crashing hard into the edge of the workbench before she caught the frame of the refining forge with her gloved hand. Her water tin bounced across the floorboards, spilling a dark puddle that sizzled instantly against the hot iron base of the stove.
From behind the rear bulkhead came a deafening, mechanical roar, a sound like two freight locomotives colliding head-on at sixty miles an hour, followed by the agonizing screech of industrial hydraulic clamps locking onto solid steel.
The whole carriage answered with one dead, muffled note, and the shudder came up through her boot soles into her teeth.
The train lurched forward, shuddering as an extra thirty tons of deadweight hooked onto the chassis.
Where the solid rear wall of The Rust Haven had been five seconds ago, a heavy, airtight steel bulkhead door had materialized, complete with a brass pressure-wheel latch and a thick double-glazed observation portal.
Tess got to her feet, rolling her sore shoulder until the joint popped. She pulled up the train status window on her terminal:
[Vessel: The Rust Haven (Mark II Modular Shelter)]
[Carriage Count: 2]
[Overall Durability: 600/600 (Steel Fortress)]
[Interior Comfort: 150/200 (Sparse Living Quarters)]
[Carriage 01: Core Operations / Workshop / Living Quarters]
[Carriage 02: Unassigned Empty Cargo Bay (40ft x 10ft)]
[Special Trait: [Sovereign Kin Protocol] — You may invite one non-player sentient companion to permanently reside aboard your train (Active Slots: 0/1).]
She gripped the brass pressure wheel on the new door, hauled it counterclockwise with a heavy grunt, and pushed the hatch open.
The air that rolled out of Carriage 02 was cold, smelling of fresh machine oil and primer paint.
It was massive. A full forty feet of uninterrupted rectangular floor space, lined with reinforced steel diamond-plate, high ceiling trusses, and six heavy, double-paned storm windows fitted with sliding armored shutters. Overhead, a strip of pale LED strip-lighting ran the length of the central beam, humming faintly.
“Empty canvas,” Tess murmured, walking the length of the car, her boots echoing hollowly against the bare floor.
She didn’t need a second bedroom. What she needed was self-sufficiency.
Relying on random platforms for wild berries and tubers was a fool’s game; if the train pulled into three desert stations in a row, she’d be back to buying overpriced potatoes from strangers on the public market.
Tess opened her spatial warehouse and began dumping the mountain of raw materials she had hoarded over the last week.
She used sixty units of heavy pine timber to frame out four long, two-foot-deep raised planting beds along the eastern and western walls of the new car. Then, using the spatial transfer hopper, she unloaded the soil bags she’d scavenged from Platform 01 and the black loam she’d bartered for in Sector-37, filling the wooden troughs with eighteen inches of rich, dark earth.
She took the small velvet pouch containing the twenty bags of crop seeds she’d opened from the Bronze Crate, wheat, spinach, radishes, and sweet root vegetables, and set them neatly on a timber shelf beside the hatch.
The mysterious botanical seed pod from the second Bronze Crate went into a small ceramic pot right beneath the central ceiling light, buried two inches deep in moist black dirt.
By the time she finished sweeping the stray dirt into the corner bin, her lower back was aching and her hands were covered in black compost.
She stepped back into Carriage 01, dragged the heavy cathode-ray television to the small table beside her cot, arranged the sleep mattress with the thermal quilt, and set the little bowl of glowing silver fish next to the bed.
A status ping flashed on the bulkhead:
[Interior Comfort rating increased: 200/200!]
Tess collapsed onto the mattress with a heavy groan, kicking her sore feet up onto the wooden frame.
Between the hum of the TV, the warmth of the refining forge, and the smell of moist soil drifting from the rear greenhouse car, the iron death-trap of a freight carriage was finally starting to feel like an actual home.
She closed her eyes, letting the steady, hypnotic click-clack of the rails rock her into a dreamless, heavy sleep.
A sound like an artillery shell detonating directly against the exterior armor plating ripped Tess out of her sleep.
She vaulted off the mattress before her eyes were even open, her hand clamping around the grip of The Crescent Cleaver resting against the nightstand.
The entire carriage was violently shuddering, shaking so hard that the ceramic fish bowl rattled across the table, nearly tipping over. Outside the observation slit, the black transit void had vanished, replaced by an oily, suffocating wall of thick gray fog that was pressing directly against the thick glass like wet cotton.
Red warning runes began flashing across the center of her status terminal:
[ALERT! Dimensional Hazard Encounter: The Void Mist.]
[The train has intersected an aberrant entity drift-zone in the inter-station seam.]
[Exterior hull under kinetic assault! Chassis Durability: 599/600…]
[Chassis Durability: 572/600…]
[Chassis Durability: 500/600!]
Through the thick glass of the observation window, Tess saw it.
Clinging to the exterior flank of Carriage 01 was a massive, pale, multi-jointed monstrosity, a creature like an oversized, skinless centipede twenty feet long, its dozens of jagged chitinous legs gouging deep, screeching trenches into the three-inch steel hull plating as it tried to chew through the door seal with a pair of massive, dripping mandibles.
Tess raised the polearm, her knuckles white, her pulse hammering in her ears.
In the dream-cycle, void mist attacks happened during late-stage transit between Platforms 08 and 10.
Encountering a Class-III crawler this early meant the regional ironway was destabilizing faster than expected.
If that hull plate breached, the pressure differential would suck her into the void in under two seconds.
SCREEEEECH.
The locomotive’s front cowcatcher hit an automated track-switch, and the train banked hard into a high-speed dimensional curve.
The centrifugal force sheared the creature’s grip from the wet metal. The centipede gave a high, wet shriek, tore away from the hull with a shower of sparks, and tumbled into the churning black mist behind the rear coupling.
The warning sirens died down to a dull, rhythmic hum.
[Transit Hazard Cleared. Current Chassis Durability: 500/600.]
[Warning: Hull integrity compromised. Structural reinforcement strongly advised prior to Platform 07.]
Tess wiped a cold line of sweat from her forehead, leaning her forehead against the cool steel of the bulkhead.
A hundred durability points gone in sixty seconds.
“Need armor plating,” she muttered, checking her inventory. “Real, heavy-gauge defensive plating.”
She opened The Chucklebox terminal, pulled the rare Carrier Pigeon Token from her private stock, and listed it under an exclusive barter contract:
[Listed by: The Chucklebox] — Offering one Carrier Pigeon Message Token (Bypasses all regional blackouts to send a 50-word physical message to any survivor). Seeking strictly: Rare vehicle repair items, high-tier chassis reinforcement blueprints, or heavy structural tools. Submit direct offers.
While she waited for the listing to filter through the server, Tess didn’t sit idle.
She stripped down to her compression undershirt, laced her boots tight, grabbed The Crescent Cleaver, and stepped into the open central aisle of Carriage 02.
If the monsters in the void were getting stronger, she couldn’t rely on twenty-percent trigger chances.
She began running her Gale Blade forms down the forty-foot length of the car.
Step, pivot, snap the wrists. Step, drop the hips, whip the bevel.
Pop.
A two-foot crescent of compressed air ripped off the steel edge, slicing a clean half-inch nick into the pine timber of the raised garden bed twenty paces away.
She ran the drill two hundred times, her shoulders burning, her breath coming in ragged gasps, until the floorboards beneath her feet were slick with sweat and her forearms were shaking so hard she could barely hold the five-foot shaft level.
By the four-hundredth swing, the invisible air blades were flying with seventy-percent consistency, snapping off the wave-steel with the sharp, clean crack of a bullwhip.
She wiped her face with a dry towel, chugged a bottle of Silas’s cold glacial water, and walked back to Carriage 01 to check the stove.
She had flour, sugar, and five fresh eggs she’d bartered for earlier.
With the Pastry Chef’s Gloves equipped, she whipped up a batch of sweet sponge batter, poured it into cast-iron muffin tins, and slid them into the small baking oven built into the side of the forge.
Twenty minutes later, the entire carriage was filled with the rich, buttery, golden aroma of fresh baked vanilla cake. She pulled ninety-nine individual sponge cakes from the iron pans, stacking them in a single spatial storage slot where they would stay piping hot indefinitely.
A chime sounded from the bulkhead speaker:
“Attention, Passenger Chuckles. Approaching Platform 06: Terraced Slopes. Platform dwell duration:
48 Hours. Please prepare your harvest and defense implements.”
The train brakes engaged with a long, wet groan.
Through the observation window, the black void dissolved into a breathtaking, endless panorama of tiered emerald-green hills climbing toward the clouds.
Tess strapped her utility knife to her belt, hauled The Crescent Cleaver onto her shoulder, and walked to the carriage door.