[ DAMIAN ] The infected on my back weighed more than it should have.
That was the thought my brain produced while I was on my knees on the Redhill station platform with its hands in my jacket and its face somewhere near my neck. Not a useful thought. Not a tactical assessment. Just the specific absurdity of being surprised by how heavy a person is when they're on top of you and trying to kill you.
I got my hands under me and pushed up hard, using the momentum to roll, and the infected came with me and we went sideways together across the platform surface. I got my elbow into something that gave slightly and used the half second that bought me to get my knees under myself and push upright.
The first one .... the one I had kicked off Theo-3 ..... was already up and moving toward him.
I looked at Theo-3.
He was already looking at me. Then at the first infected closing on him. Then back at me, still pinned under the second.
Something moved in his amber eyes. A calculation finishing.
He reached for the device.
"Theo—"
He threw it. Clean arc toward the far end of the platform. The frequency hit immediately, ... that particular pressure that moved through surfaces rather than just air, ... and the first infected stopped mid-step. Head tilting. It turned toward the signal and walked away from Theo-3 without looking back.
The one on me didn't stop.
Its nanotech was locked onto something closer and louder than any device and it knew it. Both hands in my jacket now, weight fully on me, and I had maybe two seconds before its face reached my neck.
I reached into the supply pack.
The pistol came out clean. Safety off in the same motion, the way the body does things it has practiced until practice becomes reflex. I got it between us and fired once into its chest.
The infected went down.
The first one, ... the one walking toward the device, ... stopped. Turned. The gunshot had hit its nanotech like a flare going off and it oriented immediately, abandoning the device signal entirely, moving back toward me with that awful patient focus.
I fired again.
It went down.
The sound of the two shots left the station and went everywhere simultaneously, ... bouncing off the viaduct concrete, rolling out across the Redhill residential blocks below, travelling west toward Queenstown and east toward Tiong Bahru and in every direction that sound could find. Two gunshots on an elevated MRT station platform above a silent city.
Every infected within half a kilometer heard it.
I stood there with the pistol in my hand and looked at Theo-3.
Theo-3 stood there looking at the pistol in my hand.
Neither of us said anything for exactly two seconds.
Then Theo-3 said: "That is a service pistol."
"Yes."
"From the police officer at Outram Park station."
"Yes."
"You have been carrying it since Outram Park station."
"Yes."
His amber eyes moved from the pistol to my face and back to the pistol. Something working in them that I didn't have a clean name for. Not anger exactly. Something quieter than anger and more complicated.
"Sir—"
"You used a device," I said. "We agreed—"
"I used it to save your life."
"And I used this to save mine. Same logic Theo."
"It is not the same—"
Echo barked.
Not at us. At the staircase on the north end of the platform. One sharp sound that meant something specific and we both knew what it meant now.
I looked.
The first infected was already visible at the top of the north staircase, pulling itself onto the platform level, the particular determination of something that had found a signal and was closing on it. Behind it on the stairs, .... more. How many I couldn't tell from here but the sound coming up from below wasn't one set of footsteps.
And from the south staircase, the same sound beginning.
The gunshot had done what gunshots do in quiet places. It had told everything within range exactly where we were.
The argument stopped existing. Not resolved, .... just suspended. Put down like something we'd pick up later when later was an option.
"The trains," I said.
Theo-3 followed my eyes along the track westward.
Fifty meters from the platform, sitting on the track where it had stopped five months ago, a train. Six cars. Doors open. Sitting there like it had been waiting for someone to remember it existed.
And further west, maybe three hundred meters beyond it, the shape of another train on the same track heading the opposite direction. Also stopped. Also waiting.
"Sir," Theo-3 said.
"I know," I said. "Give me ninety seconds."
I ran.
[ NARRATOR ]
The driver's compartment of the MRT train was locked.
Damian used his elbow on the window. The safety glass spiderwebbed but held. He hit it again in the same spot and it gave inward and he reached through and found the interior handle and pulled the door open and climbed in.
The compartment was small and dark and smelled of five months of closed space. The control panel was dead. Main power long gone, the train sitting on whatever residual charge remained in its emergency systems. Damian found the manual release for the handbrake first. Then the emergency drive control, a simplified override system all MRT trains carried for exactly the situation of needing to move a train without full power.
His hands moved across the panel with the focused efficiency of someone who had learned to operate unfamiliar equipment in bad situations many times before. Aerospace engineering diploma. Seven years of military adaptation. The knowledge was there even if it was dusty.
The emergency system responded.
Slowly. A low hum building in the train's frame as whatever charge remained in the traction batteries engaged. Not full power. Not close to full power. But enough. Enough to move the train on a level track toward another train three hundred meters away.
He set the speed to maximum available.
Then he looked at the distance between the moving train and the platform where Theo-3 was holding the staircases with nothing but his presence and the infected were coming up both ends.
He had about fifteen seconds before the train was too far from the platform to jump back onto it.
He climbed out of the driver's window.
The train was moving at walking pace, accelerating slowly, the hum in its frame building. He moved along the exterior of the first car, hands on the door frame, feet on the narrow ledge that maintenance workers used, the ground below the viaduct a long way down. The platform edge was getting further. Ten meters. Twelve.
He jumped.
The distance was wrong. He knew it was wrong the moment he left the train. Too far, too much lateral momentum carrying him at an angle, the platform edge coming up but not where he needed it. He hit the platform on his forearms and chest, not his feet, the impact rattling through his shoulders and up his neck, and slid forward on the smooth surface before his hands found purchase and stopped him with his legs hanging over the edge.
Theo-3 had him before he finished sliding. Both hands on his jacket, pulling him fully onto the platform in one clean motion.
"Ninety three seconds," Theo-3 said.
"Close enough," Damian said.
Behind them on the track the train was moving at jogging pace now. Accelerating. Finding its momentum on the flat elevated track, the emergency system giving it everything it had left.
Three hundred meters away the other train sat waiting on the same track.
They had maybe forty seconds.
"Maintenance ladder," Theo-3 said. "South end of the platform. Now sir."
They ran.
Echo already in the backpack, already moving with Theo-3's stride. Damian behind them, left leg complaining and ignored, the infected from the north staircase fully on the platform now and orienting. The south staircase still clear. Theo-3 had read it correctly, the device at the far end of the platform still drawing enough attention to keep the south approach open for exactly this long.
The maintenance ladder was where Theo-3 said it was. Steel rungs set into the viaduct structure, descending to a maintenance platform at mid-height, then continuing to ground level. Not wide. Not comfortable. Not designed for speed.
Theo-3 went first, moving down the ladder with his precise mechanical grip, each rung taken deliberately, Echo in the backpack balanced and still. Damian followed immediately, not waiting for Theo-3 to clear, just moving, hands and feet finding rungs, the infected sounds above them on the platform getting closer.
They heard it before they felt it.
A sound that started as a metallic shriek, two trains finding each other on a track at combined speed, the physics of it immediate and total, and then became something larger. The impact traveling through the viaduct structure itself, through the concrete and steel, through the ladder they were clinging to, a vibration that moved up through their hands and feet simultaneously.
Then the actual sound arrived.
The collision. Deep and massive and echoing across Redhill and Alexandra and everything within a kilometer in every direction. Car after car telescoping into the one ahead. Metal doing what metal does when it meets metal at speed with nothing to absorb the energy except itself.
The infected on the platform above them stopped.
Every infected within range stopped.
Then they all turned toward the sound.
Damian and Theo-3 reached ground level and kept moving.
[ DAMIAN ]
The streets around Redhill station were what I expected and worse.
Stopped EVs on every road, doors open, the personal contents of five months ago still inside them. Overgrown verges. A bus stop with its digital display somehow still cycling through routes that no longer ran. The residential blocks on both sides quiet and dark above us.
Quiet because everything that had been in them was currently moving toward the sound of two trains destroying each other on the elevated track above.
We moved fast. Not running yet, ... fast walking, the kind that doesn't look like panic from a distance but covers ground. Theo-3 had mentioned Bukit Merah Secondary School before the collision. 550 meters, four minutes at our pace, a defensible building with multiple entry points he could assess and secure.
I was calculating routes when Echo went still in the backpack.
Not the gradual stilling she did when she was reading the air carefully. The immediate full-stop that meant she had already read it and the answer was bad.
Theo-3 and I both stopped.
I looked at Echo. She was looking left. Not toward the collision sound. Left and slightly behind us. Her ears fully forward, body tense in the way it got when distance was closing rather than holding.
"How many," I said quietly.
"I am reading multiple signals," Theo-3 said. "They were moving toward the collision. They caught your residual trace as we passed within range." A pause. "Approximately twenty. They are not close yet. But they are moving toward us specifically not toward the collision."
Twenty.
Twenty while Damian still had a left leg that protested stairs and a body that had been in a coma five months ago and a dog with a healing leg in a backpack.
"The school," I said.
"Five hundred and fifty meters. Four minutes at current pace. Possibly less if—"
Echo barked again.
But not behind us this time. Not at the infected closing from the left.
She was looking up.
I followed her eyeline automatically, the way you follow a dog's attention when you have learned that her attention is worth following.
The sky above the Redhill residential blocks was grey and heavy with late afternoon cloud. Buildings against it. The dark shapes of the Henderson blocks to the east, the Alexandra corridor to the west.
And cutting through the grey from somewhere in that western direction. A streak of red light arcing upward and fading. There and gone in three seconds. But unmistakable.
A flare.
"Someone fired that," Theo-3 said.
"Yes," I said.
"It came from approximately—" He calculated. "The Alexandra Road corridor. One point two kilometers roughly. There are several large structures in that direction. A hotel complex among them."
I looked at the flare's fading trail in the sky. Looked behind us where twenty infected were closing on a signal they had locked onto and would not lose. Looked at the school in the other direction, solid and defensible and empty.
"Could be survivors trying to signal," I said. "Could be someone trying to draw people in for other reasons."
"Yes," Theo-3 said. "Both are possible."
"We go toward it."
"Sir the infected behind us—"
"Are going to follow us either way," I said. "At least this direction has a reason."
I looked at Echo. She was still looking at the fading flare trail in the sky with her ears forward and her nose working and her tail doing that single uncertain movement it did when something was new and she hadn't decided what to make of it yet.
"Okay," I said.
And I ran toward it.
[ THEO-3 ]
Personal Log. Day 154. 16:09 hours.
We are running toward an unknown signal fired by an unknown person from an unknown location approximately one point two kilometers west of our current position.
Behind us approximately twenty infected are tracking Damian's residual nanotech signal.
I have two frequency devices remaining.
I have not used them.
I want to note for the record that the train collision was Damian's idea and it was, objectively, one of the most effective solutions to an impossible situation I have witnessed. I did not tell him this. The timing did not seem right. I will tell him when the timing is right.
I also want to note that he has been carrying a service pistol since Outram Park station without telling me.
I am processing this.
I am also running at the same time which is affecting the quality of my processing somewhat.
The gun. The device I used at Redhill. Both of us crossing lines we said we wouldn't. Both of us doing it to keep the other alive. I am not certain what to do with this information yet. I have filed it under things to return to when we are not being chased.
The flare concerns me less than Damian thinks it does. My assessment is that anyone who has survived five months in Singapore and has access to a flare gun is either organized enough to be trustworthy or dangerous enough that we would have found them eventually anyway.
Either way we are running toward them.
Echo's tail is moving.
I am choosing to take this as a positive sign.
End log.
End of Chapter 11