So many passengers were dying of the virulent plague, which aged their bones and rotted their skin. They lay collapsed in their own blood, their eyes vanished. The very air grew miasmic and foul, the nightmarish scene sweetly reeking of contagion. It seemed obvious to him now that everyone on the train was dead except for himself and Isabella. There was nothing that could be done to save the others, but he wasn’t meant to; perhaps he was seeing them as they really were—how they would be after the train’s arrival at its final destination. How they were for every night apart from this one. Thomas pushed on along the corridors, searching for the woman he needed to confront. All those years in England, talking to families about facing up to evil and overcoming it, he thought, all those empty words when this—this is what I should have been doing, fighting real harm—pestilence, war, corruption, degradation, societies rotting from within, and in my safe little world I could not see the truth, for I was blinded from it.
