The Cop in the Tomb
The first thing that struck James, even through the numb blanket of his own personal hell, was the smell. Or rather, the lack of it. The train's air wasn't just cool; it was utterly scentless. It was the air of a clean room, a space station, a place where nothing living had ever been. It was the antithesis of the world he knew—the world of sweat, cheap perfume, spilled beer, and the coppery tang of blood on rain-slicked asphalt.
He'd kept his head down, his posture closed, trying to be a ghost in the machine. He'd watched the other passengers board with the detached, automatic cataloging he couldn't switch off. The family—loud, normal, achingly vulnerable. The artist kid—nervous energy, all eyes and ink. The professor—a fortress of composure. They were just people. Their problems were mundane, solvable. Their worlds hadn't ended in a single, stupid second in a back alley.
Then the world outside actually started to end.
He'd seen it. While the kids were squabbling and the professor was reading, he'd been staring out the window, watching his past life burn away. He'd seen the sky turn the color of a fresh bruise. He'd seen the distant, impossible pillars of black smoke. And he'd seen, for one heart-stopping moment, the wall of fire. It wasn't a wildfire. It was an extinction event.
And his cop brain, the part of him he'd tried to bury with shame and whiskey, had immediately started calculating. Wind direction. Fuel source. Evacuation routes. The calculations were useless, the scale so vast it short-circuited logic, but the instinct was still there, humming under the fear.
When the windows had opaqued with that soft, final series of clicks, a cold dread, different from the hot shame he carried, had settled in his bones. This wasn't a safety protocol. This was a lockdown. They were being sealed in.
The panic that rippled through the car was quiet, suppressed, all the more terrifying for its silence. He watched it play out like a grim drama. The angry businessman seeking someone to blame. The conductor, Evans, whose face was a road map of sheer, undisguised terror. The professor, trying to use logic as a life raft in a tsunami. The artist, retreating into his art like a bomb shelter.
James stayed in his seat, his hands clenched on his knees. This wasn't his fight. He wasn't a cop anymore. He was a disgraced man running away. Let someone else be the hero.
But the training was deeper than the badge. He noted the exits. He assessed the threats—not the fire outside, but the fear inside. Fear made people unpredictable, dangerous. The businessman was a potential loose cannon. The artist was on the edge of hysterics. The family man was trying to hold it together for his kids, a pressure cooker waiting to blow.
Then the lights had flickered. The screen had gone dead. The music had cut out.
The Voice's technical jargon—*thermal loading, Beta-1, non-essential systems*—was the most terrifying thing he'd heard yet. It was the sound of the machine starting to lose the fight. They were on a spaceship whose hull was beginning to glow red.
He saw the family across the aisle. The mother, Sarah, rocking her little girl, her face a mask of controlled terror. The father, Tom, holding his son's hand, trying to project a strength he clearly didn't feel. The boy, Jake, trying to be brave. They were good people. The kind of people he'd once sworn to protect.
A fresh wave of shame washed over him, hotter than the phantom heat from the windows. He'd failed to protect a kid. He'd taken a son from a family. The memory of Marcus Johnson's face, so scared, so young, superimposed itself over the face of the boy across the aisle.
I'm sorry, he thought, the words a meaningless mantra in his head. I'm so sorry.
He was so lost in his own private hell that the new sound, when it came, seemed at first like a product of his imagination.
It was a scream. A short, sharp, female sound from the next car up. It was cut off with a brutal suddenness that was more alarming than the scream itself.
Every nerve ending in James's body, every dormant cop instinct, snapped to attention. His head came up, his eyes sharp, scanning the car. He saw the same reaction in the others. The businessman stopped his muttering. The artist's pencil froze mid-stroke. The professor's head tilted, her eyes narrowed. The family man held his son's hand tighter.
For a second, there was perfect silence, broken only by the train's strained hum.
Then the businessman broke it. "What was that?" he barked, looking around as if demanding an answer from the other passengers.
"Sounded like someone got a scare," Leo the artist said, his voice too high, too nervous.
"It didn't sound like a scare," Christina Garcia countered, her voice low and precise. "It sounded… cut short."
James was on his feet before he'd even made the conscious decision to move. The movement was automatic, the ghost of muscle memory from a thousand calls. His heart was hammering, but it was a different rhythm now. Not the frantic beat of a guilty man, but the steady, thick thump of a responder.
"Hey, where are you going?" Tom Miller asked, his voice edged with concern.
James didn't answer. He was already moving down the aisle, his body angled slightly, his senses on high alert. He was no longer James Liam Jr., the disgraced exile. In this moment of fresh crisis, he was something else, something older and more deeply ingrained. He was a cop.
He reached the end of the car, his hand hovering over the button to open the door to the vestibule and the next carriage. He paused, listening. Nothing but the hum of the train and the muffled, tense silence of the car behind him.
He pressed the button. The door hissed open, revealing the small, sterile space between cars. The door to the next car, Car B, was closed.
He stepped through. The vestibule was slightly louder, the clatter of the wheels on the track more pronounced here. He put his hand against the cold metal of the next door, took a deep breath of the dead, scentless air, and pushed the button.
The door slid open.
The scene in Car B was a mirror image of his own, yet completely different. The lights were dimmed. The windows were blacked out, pulsing with the same hellish orange rhythm.
But the people were different. They were all standing. A small group was clustered around something on the floor about halfway down the aisle. A woman was sobbing, a low, hopeless sound. A man was repeating, "Oh my god, oh my god," like a stuck record.
And then James saw the conductor, Evans. He was kneeling on the floor, his back to James. His shoulders were slumped. As James approached, the small group of passengers parted slightly, their faces pale and shocked.
On the floor, between the rows of seats, lay a woman in a crimson business suit. It was the same woman he'd seen laughing on the platform at Cedar Falls, the sound so bright and unburdened it had grated on him.
She wasn't laughing now. Her eyes were wide open, staring at the ceiling lights with a fixed, terminal surprise. Her mouth was agape, as if the scream had been stolen right out of her. And neatly, almost delicately, plunged into the center of her chest was a long, sharpened piece of metal—a shank that looked like it had been fashioned from a broken piece of luggage handle.
James's world narrowed to the body on the floor. The training took over completely, shoving the apocalypse outside, his personal guilt, everything else into a distant background hum.
Don't touch anything. Secure the scene. Identify witnesses.
His eyes flicked from the body to the faces of the stunned passengers around him. Shock. Fear. Revulsion.
And then his gaze met that of Conductor Evans, who had looked up at his approach. The man's face was ashen, his eyes wide with a new, more intimate kind of terror.
"She's… she's…" Evans stammered.
"I know," James said, his voice low, calm, and terrifyingly professional. He looked from the dead woman to the sealed, opaqued windows, to the shocked faces of the survivors.
The world was burning outside.
And now, they had a murderer on board.