Page 111 of How (Not) To Raise The Dead

Surely, I can drive a glorified train.

I yank the lever back, but nothing happens.

“Ah. Perhaps the other way,” I correct myself, and shove the lever forward.

The engine roars to life and the entire cabin lurches to the left, throwing me against the dashboard and sending Chain-Chewer sliding into the footwell with a confused yelp.

“Minor calibration error!” I shout over the grinding noise, wrestling the steering yoke as the transport bucks like a dying horse.

The wheels howl, finding traction on the rails, and we’re moving with terrifying, neck-snapping velocity. The guards hanging onto the side of the cabin are peeled away by the wind, their shouts receding rapidly into the distance as we tear away.

Fucking yes.

The speedometer’s red-lining, the needle vibrating so hard it’s blurring, but I shove the throttle forward anyway. The machine groans in protest, but I don't care. If the engine explodes, I will simply outrun the blast radius.

Ahead, the track splits into a labyrinth of converging lines. A lumbering cargo tram is chugging along the main artery, directly in my path.

"Move," I snarl at the windshield, as if the driver can hear me over the roar of my own stupidity. "Move, you rusted heap of scrap!"

It doesn't move.

"Hold on!" I shout as I yank the steering yoke hard to the left. The transport tilts on two wheels, defying gravity and logic in equal measure, before slamming down onto the parallel track with a bone-shattering clang. We bypass the cargo tram with inches to spare, close enough that I can see the terrified widening of the other driver's eyes as we streak past in a blur of black steel and sparks.

Adrenaline floods my system, a wonderful chemical spike that usually makes me feel invincible. But today, it just tastes like ash. Because beneath the roar of the engine and the grinding of the rails, there is silence.

Absolute, suffocating silence.

Eden. My little summoner. My brave, foolish, mortal. She’s been ripped out of my orbit and spat back into a world that doesn’t deserve her. Alone.

It feels like I’ve had a limb torn off, and my brain is still frantically sending signals to a hand that isn’t there. I grit my teeth, knuckles turning white on the yoke as a wave of nausea rolls through me—not from the motion, but from the void.

I shove the throttle forward, demanding more speed, trying to outrun the quiet. If I go fast enough, maybe the roar of the wind will drown out the fact that she’s in another dimension without me.

For two hours, the landscape blurs—obsidian cliffs, rivers of slag, the infinite grey wasteland, then the neon districts all bleeding into a single streak of motion. Until we finally enter the smog-choked sprawl of the Central Hub.

It’s the rush hour of the damned. The sky’s clogged with ash, and the streets below are a teeming, writhing mass of demons shuffling to and from their shifts. And I am approaching it at the speed of a falling meteor.

“Brakes,” I mutter, scanning the console through the haze of smoke filling the cabin. “Where are the brakes?”

I see a red lever. It looks important. I yank it.

It’s not the brake. It is, apparently, the horn.

A deafening blast of noise erupts from the transport, scattering the few demons foolish enough to be walking near the tracks, but our velocity remains entirely unchanged. Ahead, the track ends in a tangled congestion of stationary trams and a very solid-looking concrete buffer.

“Hold on,” I command Chain-Chewer.

I abandon the controls, grab the beast by his rocky scruff, brace my boots against the dashboard, and wrap my body around his as best as I can to shield him from the incoming slam.

We hit the blockade.

Metal shrieks as it crumples. The world flips upside down, then sideways, then dissolves into a fractured kaleidoscope of shattering glass and steel. We plow through the rear car of a stationary cargo train, shearing it in half, before the transport finally, mercifully, grinds to a halt in a cloud of dust and steam.

The remnants of the cockpit door clatter onto the platform as I kick the door off its hinges. I stumble out, coughing as the smoke clears. My equilibrium’s shattered. My ears are ringing with a high-pitched whine. But I’m moving.

The Hellhound shakes himself free from a pile of twisted rebar, sneezing ash, and trots to my side, looking entirely unbothered.

Around us, the Central Hub has ground to a halt. Hundreds of demons—horned, scaled, and suited—are staring at me.