Thump. Drag. Thump. Drag.

  The sound came from the corridor—not the rhythm of human footsteps but something heavier and wetter, as if a body with shattered legs was pulling itself forward using only the friction of its own disintegrating flesh.

  Accompanying the footsteps: the unmistakable sound of eating. Not chewing, exactly. More like the sound of a dog working on a rawhide bone—the crunch of cartilage, the wet tear of connective tissue, the rhythmic grind of teeth on something dense and reluctant to separate.

  Rule 2: New passengers will board. Be polite. No matter what food they are carrying and eating, do not stare. Do not show disgust.

  The cabin door slid open.

  The smell hit first. Blood—not the iron tang of fresh blood, but the sweet, cloying thickness of blood that had been sitting in a warm space for hours. Under that, the unmistakable baseline of advanced decomposition: the smell of proteins breaking down into their component amino acids, releasing gases that the human olfactory system had evolved, over millions of years, to find deeply and specifically repulsive.

  David didn’t flinch. He catalogued the smell the way he’d catalogue any sensory input: data point received, filed, assessed for threat level.

  The entity in the doorway was wearing what had once been a business suit. The fabric was torn and stained with mold so black it looked like it had been grown rather than accumulated. Where its eyes should have been: two holes. Not empty sockets—holes, as if someone had taken a bore drill to the skull and removed everything behind the orbital bone.

  In its right hand, it held a human thigh. The flesh was raw, the muscle fibers visible and glistening. The entity was eating it the way a commuter eats a sandwich—absently, mechanically, tearing strips of tissue with teeth that were too numerous and too sharp for a human jaw.

  It surveyed the cabin. Its eyeless gaze—David could feel it, a pressure against his consciousness, like standing too close to a bass speaker—swept across the trembling teenager, paused on Razor, and then fixed on the empty upper bunk above David.

  "Can I... sleep here?" it asked. The voice leaked from multiple points simultaneously—its mouth, the holes in its face, a seam in its neck that hadn’t been there a moment ago. A droplet of black fluid, thick with suspended particles of masticated flesh, fell from its chin and landed on the bed rail two centimeters from David’s hand.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Rule 2 was explicit: be polite. David’s True Sight confirmed the rule was unpolluted—original code, legitimate instruction.

  "Of course," David said. His voice was steady, conversational, carrying exactly the tone of a man who had been asked a perfectly normal question about seating arrangements. "The bunk’s yours."

  The entity climbed up. The bed frame groaned under weight that exceeded what its visible mass should have produced. Directly above David’s head, the sound of chewing resumed—intimate, close, each wet crunch transmitted through the metal frame and into the thin mattress beneath him.

  Across the cabin, the teenager was crying silently, his whole body rigid with the effort of not making noise. Razor, on the upper left, had his combat knife in a white-knuckle grip, his scarred face locked in a rictus of controlled terror.

  David lay on his back, staring at the bottom of the bunk above him—at the dark stains seeping through the mattress—and made himself think about data structures.

  Not as a coping mechanism. As analysis.

  This dungeon was a directed graph. Each car was a node. The corridor was an edge connecting them. The bathroom, the stations, and the hypothetical "Car 13" were special-case nodes with their own rule sets. The entities were processes running on the graph, each with defined behaviors and triggers. The rules were the API documentation.

  And somewhere in this graph, there was an admin endpoint. A vulnerability. A way to escalate privileges from "passenger" to something with more authority.

  The Conductor’s Master Key, mentioned obliquely in Rule 8’s emphasis on ticket management, was the most likely candidate. The conductor was a system process with elevated access. Kill the process, inherit the key.

  But first, he needed the bathroom. Not for biological reasons—for strategic ones. Enclosed spaces in horror dungeons consistently functioned as isolated rule domains with their own clue caches. The haunted house’s bathroom had hidden a logic deadlock and a survival exploit. This train’s bathroom, with its suspicious mirror rule and its red/green signal system, was almost certainly hiding something equally critical.

  The problem was the indicator. Currently red. Red meant occupied, and occupied meant lethal.

  He needed the light to turn green. And he needed it before hunger and sleep deprivation began degrading the other players’ mental states to the point where they started doing something stupid.

  As if on cue, the teenager on the lower left bunk let out a small, agonized whimper.

  "I need... I need the bathroom..."

  David closed his eyes. He already knew how this was going to go.