The Operator

Each wheel of the railroad emits an iron screech. The wagons tackle one another back to front. She screwed the emergency halt procedure. She failed the exam. It was the nervousness, the sweaty hands, the cold crawling up her back. The fear of failure. “You are a coward, Gariel,” she tells herself, inside her head.

“What happened?” dad says, roaring. “We practiced for months and you just blew it?” She listens, hunched over the chair. “Why can’t you be like your sister? She passed this in her first try. Perfect score.” He makes a brief pause, then breaks it: “You have to make yourself indispensable, Gariel, how many times will I tell you?”

He is talking to her like she was dumb, like she didn’t get the seriousness of it. But she knows: she will be a drag for him for another year, she will remain as a loader at the platform, and in a place like the domed city of Oga, whomever isn’t specialized labor is nothing for the cartels but one more body without added value to prostitute or enslave.

“Gariel! Are you listening?” yells dad, “¡Ga—

—riel!” someone yells. “Are you awake, dear?”

She feels her body over something like a narrow bed. Noise of rolling iron fills her head before she opens her eyes and sees the woman sitting by her side. “Gariel, you are awake, you are…” she sighs with relief. “Do you know where you are?”

Her intuition tells her she’s on a train which travels way too fast, and her heart accelerates. “What is going on?” she wheezes.

The woman answers: “We are going to crash, Gariel. If you don’t remember the combination, the train will crash.”

Her head stings. She tries explaining to herself how she got there, but the hollowness in her memory impedes it. “I don’t remember anything. Why?” Her breathing accelerates. “I know nothing, and I’ve got no ticket, but I swear I didn’t mean to, I swear…”

“Calm down, dear, calm down. The ticket doesn’t matter. Tell me: What’s the last thing you do remember?”

“Huh, the exam… Failing it, again. Dad scolding me.”

The woman gasps, dropping her head. “You already passed the exam, about three years ago. You got your license. Dammit, you’re the enginewoman of this train. Don’t you remember?” She realizes despair is filtering through her voice. “Sorry, it’s just that we really, really need the combination.”

“Combination? The cab’s combination?”

She sees the woman nod in excitement, but her eyes close while the galloping noise of the train fades out. “What… What’s happening, wha…” she babbles before falling into the tunnel of her memory. She hears the woman yelling at her from an unfathomable distance: “No, don’t go! Please, we have no time for this, we have no—

—time for this. We need this now, Gariel. I do.”

It’s Sadri, her sister. She whispers like she wants no one else to hear them. “Will you help me or not?” She hands her something wrapped in a dirty piece of cloth. An old rage sips through her eyes. They are in the train, which is stopped and silent, in one of the secret compartments, barely lit by a lamp flickering in a corner.

“No, Sadri,” she answers, her arms crossed. She doesn’t take the package. “That thing is going to finish us all, it’s a lame idea.”

Sadri swallows her rage. “They killed mom, they made her…” She can’t finish the phrase. She turns her face away, trying to cover the painful grin which overtakes her. But that’s just for a second, and soon fixes her eyes on her again. “Don’t you want to hit those motherfuckers back?”

“No,” Gariel answers with a trembling voice, “I want to live in peace.”

Sadri explodes: “To live in peace? In this freaking hell where… Agh, we have to defend ourselves! We have to get our city back! They do whatever they want, with whomever they like, whenever they wish. You know how it is. Do you really don’t care?”

“I care. A lot,” she answers, trying to draw the conversation back to the safety of whispers. The idea of them being overheard tightens a knot in her guts. “But no, I told you: I don’t want your problems. Hiding your little toy is way too dangerous. It’s going to get me and my people killed.”

Sadri spits at her feet. “You fucking coward.”

Her breath hitches. Her sister’s right. She tells it to herself, inside her head, like she’s done so many times: “You are a coward, Gariel.”

Sadri says it again: “You fucking coward,” and that takes her back to childhood, back to that moment when she plays ball in the alley and sees the bad guys coming down the lane. She had time to run back home and warn mom and dad, but those huge men passing by with their big guns and their menacing pace turned her into a statue of dread. She witnessed everything: how they broke dad, how they pulled mom out by the hair, how she ragged her throat in yells, while everyone in the block acted like nothing happened.

“You’re such a failure,” says her sister, ripping her out of memory, “You know why? You’re always scared about doing what you must, just like when they took mom away.”

She rubs it in her face again, like she’s done since kids. And it hurts, like always.

“You just can’t take no for an answer,” is all she gets to say, because she’s choking with guilt.

“You will regret this, you hear me? You will, when we finish those assholes off we will run the city and nobody will like an operator who didn’t back us up, you hear me Gariel? You—

—hear me?”

Her eyes open: it’s the woman. She is back on the litter, surrounded by the noise of the rolling train. Her intuition tells her the same as before: they’re going faster than they should. Something is about to blow.

To blow. That brings back to her images of what happened before the litter, before the train. “She did it, right? My sister? The guerrilla? They blew a hole in the dome?”

The woman nods. “But it came down wrong, because someone snitched on them. When they detonated the explosion, there was no one for it to kill.”

She doesn’t answer, because the void in her mind is being filled with glints of what happened: the explosion echoing through the tunnels, depressurization taking over the dome, fire crawling the underground streets. The red lights and the emergency alarm soon saturated the atmosphere with fear. Then came the shooting between the cartel and the guerrilla over the train station, the flooding crowd taking over the boarding platform in despair, looking for a way out of death.

“But that no longer matters,” says the woman, “Right now we need to slow this train down.”

She feels the litter vanishing. Her eyelids get heavy. The roaring of the locomotive, of the wheels sliding over the rails, fades out. The woman’s voice hollows: “No! Not again! The combination, Gariel! Don’t you leave us! Don’t you—

—turn on us, Gariel,” says the cartel thug.

She’s again in a past moment of her life, before the train, before the tragedy, in a dark corner of the boarding platform. It’s way past curfew. She’s been talking to that man for a handful of minutes and her legs haven’t stopped shaking.

“Some say you move other stuff besides ours, that you smuggle out of the dome people who owe us. If I find out it’s true…”

“You kill me?” She draws courage from who knows where. “Good luck moving your merchandise on foot through the grottoes,” she says, wondering if she crossed the line and the thug will shoot her on the spot.

He continues his threat: “If I find out you're moving people for your sister’s guerrilla…”

She spits on the floor. “Everyone knows I have no love for that bitch.”

One of his thugs yells that the train is clean. He grins, mockingly. “You better behave, Gariel. We could bring an engine driver from Larisa, or Hornos, you know? And the combination… Well, we know many ways to make you throw it up, just like we did with your mom, remember?” He then leaves with his men.

She’s sweating ice and her heart races, but it is over. They checked the wagons and didn’t find the three families she was about to smuggle. One of her crew approaches. It’s the woman, the train doctor. She’s her friend and her name is Tani. “All ready to go,” she whispers.

But Gariel doesn’t move. She remains still, trying to swallow her fear.

“Hey,” the doctor insists, “Let’s go befo—

—re it is too late.”

Her eyes open: she’s back in the infirmary wagon, enveloped by the rattle of the train. The doctor just slapped her cheek. She now recognizes her and calls her by name. “Yes, darling, it’s me, Tani.”

“I rated her out, didn’t I?” asks Gariel, “I gave her away to the cartel?”

“No, no, no. It wasn’t you. You never snitched a word.”

She doesn’t believe her, and none of them speaks for a couple of seconds.

“I’m a coward, like she always said.”

“No, she was wrong. You’ve saved lots of people, but not her way,” Tani insists, looking her in the eyes, holding her hands. “You didn’t have to, because you were their only way to move stuff out of the city.”

“The door lock… I made myself indispensable.”

Tani nods and they hush for a moment. She hears the train accelerating. “We have to stop it,” she babbles, “We have… We…” The lights, the roaring noise, the feeling of the litter supporting her back vanishes. She struggles to keep her eyes open but a sickened tiredness beats her. Tani sobs far away: “Yes, you must stop it, you—

—must do it!”

She’s back in a memory again, before escaping Oga’s collapse, before the infirmary, before the train gets moving. Sadri is in front of her, leaning against the wall. In her trunk, blood drips from two bullet wounds. The howling of the crowd comes in from outside the locomotive wagon.

“No,” she tells her sister, “I have to get as many people as I can out of here.”

Sadri gasps. “No! You will get us out of here as soon as possible! You owe it to us, after snitching on our plan!”

“I owe you nothing,” she answers coldly, then turns toward the engine to start it. “I told you that bomb was going to end us all, that it would tear down the dome, but you insisted on risking it and now that it went wrong you want to run away, on my train,” shes says, pressing keys in the engine terminal. “Me and my crew, we’ll get as many people as we can aboard and you and your damn guerrilleros, who started this mess in the first place, will help us.” She spins the start switch and the locomotive bellows. “And I didn't do it, Sadri. It wasn’t me. Now go to the infirmary and get Tani to patch you up, you’re dying.” She tries the switch again and the engine starts working.

A gun clicks.

“No,” Sadri says, “You tell me the combination and I go straight to the cab.”

“Wait, sister…”

“Oh, now I am your sister!” Sadri drags herself forward and sticks the cannon hole to her forehead, “The combination! Now!”

Gariel raises her arms. A shudder drops through her spine. She’s been pointed at before, but this is Sadri and her eyes are an omen of death. “All right,” she says, swallowing, trying to buy some time, “Put the gun down, and…”

“The combination!”

Their ragged breaths, their trembling bodies, the sound of the locomotive's pistons already working, the gale of desperate screams over the platform, is all there is for a second.

“It’s mom’s birthday, the date.” Impotence takes her over, along with fear. She’s letting Tani, her crew, everyone out there down and it makes her sick.

“See? A fucking coward,” Sadri says, lowering the gun.

She exhales and is as if her soul rushed through her mouth. She drops her arms, fixes her gaze over the floor, and leans sideways against the railing. She feels like throwing up, but must think how to get rid of her sister, how to buy time to get on board as many as possible, before it's too late. “The engine brake,” she thinks, “I could program it from here when Sadri goes into the driver’s cab.” Now she knows what to do. The seconds grow long. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. “As soon as she closes the cab’s door I…”

A detonation. The pain in her belly forces her eyes shut. Her body rolls over the floor. Sadri’s voice reaches through the rattle: “A fucking coward, as always.” Then the sound of dragging feet, the cab’s door being open and closed.

Pain turns into fear and her breathing races. She stretches an arm and finds the railing, then looks up at the radio embedded in the wall. “Tani, please,” she thinks, trying to reach it. But she stops, because saving herself would be handing the train over to her sister, leaving everyone out there in the face of destruction. “Not this time. Not a coward this time, Gariel.” She pulls herself up to the engine terminal, estimates the time the fire, the decompression will both take to reach the station, and programs a timed motor brake her sister wouldn’t override. She hits the emergency button before falling down. Her eyes shut. The screams, the engine, the noise embrace her. Someone enters the wagon and Tani’s voice sounds in the distance: “Gariel! What happened! Ga—

—riel!”

Tani is yelling her name. She wakes up bending over the litter, inhaling in a rush. The speed: they travel even faster than before. “She shot me. Sadri shot…” But she cuts it up, because it no longer matters. “The door's combination, I got it!”

Tani pushes the cab’s door and the darkness of the tunnel beyond the windshield takes their sight over. Sadri’s corpse lies face down over the control board her blood soaks. Her arm is still extended, pushing the speed handle all the way to the maximum. She tried to run away as soon as possible, but the motor brake Gariel managed to program didn’t let her.

A desperate voice insists over the radio: “Larisa Station to The Ogaian, do you copy? You are on a collision course, reduce your speed immediately! I repeat: reduce your speed immediately, over!”

“Take her off the board,” she sighs, and Tani pulls the body over and drops it on the floor.

“She bled out,” the doctor points out, but Gariel ignores her and takes her seat. She pulls the motor brake towards her with her left and the speed handle with the other. She softly steps on the hydraulic brake pedal. The numbers drop in the speedometer. So does the mileage separating them from Larisa Station: it isn’t long enough. They’re bound to crash.

“The Ogaian here,” she calls over the radio, “Beginning emergency halt. Clear the hangar for arrival. I repeat: this is an emergency arrival, over.”

Her sister’s corpse looms out of the corner of her eye. “You coward,” she whispers, then pushes the brake pedal to the bottom and pulls the handles closer to her body. Each wheel of the railroad emits an iron screech.