I initially submitted this story to the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in the winter 2024, for which I won a Silver Key. It’s loosely based on an episode of The Twilight Zone called “Five Characters in Search of an Exit”. There’s something fascinating about what happens when we discover we’re trapped somewhere, don’t you think?
Sapporo is a busy city, as always.
The subway door opens and most of the people on board walk off. Five people remain, and they are an odd five. The door closes again. The intercoms report the next stop.
The train departs its station on time, but it never arrives anywhere.
They all hear the sound at the same time. They all feel the train shake at the same time. Four of them instantly notice the power going out. This has never happened before, not to any of their knowledge, not in their dreams. They will never again feel the warmth of the sun.
They are a blind scientist, a Buddhist monk, a lawyer, an influencer, and an extremist. They are all as different as they can be, and yet quite similar indeed. For one, they are all trapped on this train together.
Nobody asks, “What was that?” because nobody else would have any way of knowing. The train has stopped; that is all the available information. Anything else is left to their imaginations, which they also do not express because they are afraid speaking them aloud will bring them into being. No matter how much they rationally convince themselves otherwise, they are still humans and are stuck with a superstitious brain. They sit in absolute silence, willing the train to keep moving but distinctly lacking the feeling of inertia they should be experiencing.
It is the lawyer who speaks first, not for any reason but to fill the void in the train. “The weather has been quite cold recently,” he says to the scientist sitting next to him. The scientist nods and then returns to contemplation. There is nothing for either of them to do. “Do you like baseball?” he asks again, trying to elicit some sort of response but receiving none. The scientist simply remains silent.
After a few minutes, the lawyer calls for emergency services. He receives none; his phone does not have any signal. Two of the others on the train have already independently discovered this fact, but he announces it anyway. He is concerned by everyone’s sheer calmness: shouldn’t they be doing something to try to save themselves?
The extremist (or, in everyone else’s eyes, the nondescript short young man) begins to cry. The monk stands up next to him and asks him what he is worried about, knowing that escaping the train would be impossible. There is nothing they can do, so his strife is unnecessary. The young man stops crying and turns to the monk. He leans over to whisper in his ear, then decides to tell everyone aloud instead.
“I am why we are here,” he says. “I was going to commit a suicide attack on this train just a few minutes ago, before most of those people got out. The police must have heard I had a bomb and stopped this train.”
“Why didn’t you complete the attack?” asks the lawyer.
“I looked the wrong way and saw a little boy and a little girl playing rock-paper-scissors with each other. They were so happy, they were laughing, they were having so much fun. They looked like me and my sister when we were younger. I thought about the time the two of us ran away from home, and how nervous and upset our parents got, and I just -“ he begins crying again – “I just couldn’t let those kids die just in the name of liberty. I guess my beliefs weren’t as strong as I, as I thought.”
With that, he sits down again and buries his face in his hands, sobbing profusely. The other people on the train do not comfort him, but simply let him be. After another minute, the lawyer gets up, whispers, “Thank you for saving everyone’s life. You made the right choice,” and sits back down. Then the train is quiet again.
The influencer has been drawing in a sketchbook for a long time. The lawyer peers over her shoulder to find a greyscale pencilled image of the five of them, each exactly as they appeared in real life, standing in a row like a police lineup. “You’re an amazing artist,” says the lawyer, impressed. “I’ve never seen something look so realistic.” The influencer – a young woman no more than eighteen with bubblegum-pink hair – nods, and then turns away from him.
The scientist asks the extremist if he still has the bombs he was going to use, and if they could be used to escape the train. The extremist responds that his weapons are too powerful, and would kill everyone on the train if they were detonated. The scientist considers engineering a way to focus the impact of the bombs, but decides against it. She’s a toxicologist, not an engineer. She has plans, but she can’t be certain they’ll work.
The lawyer bangs on the door several times pointlessly. After a few bangs, the extremist gets up and joins him. Then the scientist. Then the influencer. Eventually, even the monk is yelling and crying and kicking at the door, afraid to suffocate and afraid to see the others around him suffocate as well. After fifteen minutes of futility, the lawyer lets out one final scream and gives up, collapsing on the floor from terror and depression. The extremist helps him up, eventually whispering that they will be okay. His throat is dry from screaming. The influencer is breathing heavily, as though she were about to vomit.
There are no windows. There is no way to leave this train to get to the next. There is only the silence from outside. After everyone sits down in their same seat, that same eerie silence hits the train. The influencer changes her drawing to one of a terrifying beast strangling the train. The scientist gets up and paces, trying to think of what to do. Eventually, she says what nobody wants to hear. They have two days before they will probably run out of air and water. The lawyer turns away and walks to a wall. He begins banging his head on it. The bangs are much louder and far more powerful than when he was using his fists. At first, nobody is alarmed. After a minute or two, the monk comes over and tells him he should be content with what time he has left, for there is nothing he can now do to extend his lifespan.
The lawyer turns around. His forehead is a bloody mess, his skull about two bangs from caving in. His eyes are wild and furious, and as his mouth opens to speak, blood is trickling down his neck. He tells the monk that there is no more purpose for him anymore, and that he is sacrificing himself so the others can live longer. The monk refuses to let him do this, telling him that his collaboration will get them all to safety if he lives, and he is more valuable alive than dead. In response, the lawyer, now crazy-eyed and half-smiling, struggling to breathe through the sticky mess around his nose, reaches out and clutches the monk’s throat. The influencer and the extremist immediately take notice. They run over to stop the altercation. The influencer pulls as hard as she can to dislodge the lawyer’s hand, while the extremist is trying to weaken the lawyer’s grip on the monk’s neck to let him breathe.
The monk’s face turns from pale to pink to red as he continues to suffocate. He starts to scream in terror, but cannot continue for long. The lawyer’s grip on his neck tightens, his short sharp fingernails clawing into the monk’s throat. The influencer is shouting for the lawyer to let him live, but the lawyer shows no sign of mercy. Finally, he speaks, still angrily choking the monk, fuming, “If we want to survive, we must make sacrifices. I was more than happy to do it until he volunteered himself.” The monk’s neck is bleeding from the lawyer’s sharp fingernails clawing through his skin. His hand clutches tighter and tighter, squeezing the air from the monk’s lungs. The train is filled with the noise of the lawyer’s barbaric cries, strangling the monk for his own survival. He watches in wrathful excitement as the monk’s eyes close into unconsciousness.
With a powerful tug – she’s quite strong, it turns out – the influencer finally pulls the lawyer’s arm away from the monk, knocking both of them away from each other and towards the ground. The extremist catches the monk, but nobody catches the lawyer. His skull makes a distinctive, terrible crack as it snaps against the floor.
The scientist hears this entire altercation, but does not intervene. Now, she carefully walks towards the scene of the fight. The monk’s orange robes have been stained red. The lawyer’s blue tie is now crimson. Neither of them is making any sound. After a few seconds, she leans towards the monk, checks his pulse, and is satisfied when she finds it. She asks the others to turn his unconscious body on its side so that the neck scar is facing up. Carefully, she mixes a makeshift ointment from items in her bag to prevent the wound from becoming infected, and applies it with a piece of cloth she tears off of her winter coat. She presses the cloth and ointment on the monk’s scar. “Any other wounds?” she asks, breaking the shocked silence that had befallen the train car.
“Don’t think so,” replies the extremist, carefully rotating the monk. “I can’t believe I helped him. If you told me this morning I was going to help save a monk’s life, I would have laughed at you. It’s nice to not have to feel so strongly about anything. Being trapped down here, I guess you realize nothing up there matters that much. You step away from the imaginary lives we lead and realize, deep down, we all just have to survive.”
“A powerful observation,” says the scientist, not sure how else to respond. The influencer just nods.
The lawyer’s body, now most certainly dead, is carefully placed in a corner. As the trio move the body – leaving a trail of blood on the train floor in the process – the influencer starts shaking visibly. “Are you okay?” asks the extremist. The influencer shakes her head and shivers even more obviously. Softly, she says, “I killed him. I know it was the right thing to do, but… I’m the only murderer on this train right now. I didn’t want him dead, I just wanted him to calm down!” In any other circumstance, the extremist would make a sarcastic joke about how he was certainly calm now. Instead, he places his hand on the influencer’s shoulder and tells her that it wasn’t her fault what happened, and that she can always grow from her past. He should know.
After they finish dragging the body, the people on the train choose to go to sleep on the floor of the subway car. The influencer and the extremist sleep side by side, blanketed by the lawyer’s bloodstained black jacket, taking turns crying and telling each other, It’s going to be okay.
It’s going to be okay.
Eventually.