Dark Waters

Chapter 2

Two

I looked down at the digital face of my watch. Two hours and thirty six minutes.

We had been down here for over two and a half hours, trapped in a steel bubble while the world outside drowned. The freezing water pooling around my boots had risen another half inch, leaking through a tiny, invisible seam in the door frame. My left shoulder was a dull, throbbing mess of pain, and a steady trickle of warm blood had finally dried down the side of my own neck.

A soft, ragged groan cut through the low hum of the backup battery.

On the floor, her eyelashes fluttered. The blonde girl slowly opened her eyes, blinking hard against the dim, bleeding neon red light of the ceiling strip. She looked completely lost, her gaze wandering over the metal walls before finally landing on me.

Are you okay? I muttered, my voice sounding raw and dry.

She did not answer right away. Her eyes tracked the dark smudge of blood on my collar, her expression freezing as she realized I was hurt too. She tried to sit up, fumbling blindly against the slick floorboards before her hand flew to her own forehead. When she pulled her fingers away, they were coated in sticky, half dried blood.

How, how long was I out? she whispered, her voice trembling.

About two hours and thirty six minutes, I said, checking the watch one more time just to be sure.

She managed to get to her feet, leaning heavily against the main server rack to keep from falling. Her expensive jacket was ruined, soaked through with dirty water. For a second, she just stood there, holding her head, trying to anchor herself.

Then, she looked out the front nose window.

The murky, dark ocean water was completely empty at first, just a vast, terrifying wall of nothingness. But then the current shifted. A shadow drifted into the faint beam of the train dying exterior light.

It was not debris.

It was a car, its windshield shattered, spinning lazily through the deep. And right behind it, suspended in the current like a ghost, was a human body. A person from the back car.

Oh my god, she choked out.

She completely broke. She slammed her hands over her mouth, her eyes wide with a look of pure, unadulterated horror. She spun away from the window, dropping back down to her knees as her chest heaved. I could not look at the window anymore either. I stared firmly at the floorboards, the sound of her sudden, violent crying filling the cramped space of the cabin. She was trembling so hard her teeth chattered.

I stood there, frozen.

My survival instincts told me to give her space, to let her process the fact that everyone we had been riding with a few hours ago was gone. But seeing her curled into a ball on the floor made something shift in my chest. I hesitated, my hand twitching slightly, debating whether to reach out and reassure her or just let her cry it out. In the end, I stayed where I was, a silent wall in the dark.

Slowly, agonizingly, the crying stopped.

She wiped her face with the back of her wet sleeve, her breathing shattering as she forced herself to sit up straight. I watched the fear in her eyes turn into something else, something rigid. She was pulling her walls back up.

The structural integrity of this cabin is holding, she said, her voice shaky but determined as she started thinking critically. The computer grid is automated. When the central authority maps the disaster zone, they will see a localized system failure on this sector track. A rescue team will be dispatched to these coordinates within twelve hours. We just need to sit tight and wait for the protocol to kick in.

I looked at her, entirely speechless. She was staring at death through the window and still trying to trust the system.

The system is underwater, I said flatly, leaning my head back against the wall. I am not thinking about rescue teams. I am thinking about the fact that we have zero food, no fresh water, and whatever air is trapped in this room is all we get. When that runs out, your protocol will not mean anything.

She opened her mouth to argue, but a sudden flash of light caught both of our eyes.

It was not coming from the front window. It was coming from above.

We both looked up. Positioned directly in the center of the ceiling was a heavy, circular emergency trap door. And through the thick, reinforced glass portal built into the hatch, we could see a faint, flickering shimmer of gray light.

It was not pitch black up there. It was daylight.

The train car had settled in a way that left the nose completely submerged, but the very top of the driver roof was breaking through the surface of the flood.

We looked at each other, the reality of the situation hitting us at the exact same time. It was safe to go out. If we could get onto the roof, we would not have to suffocate in a steel box. We could actually look for help.