Having finished the preparations, the old Pretoria begins humming as it rises up from its magnetized tracks, departing from the dilapidated Retiro station. The night falls silent once again as they see the barren battlefield and smoky ruins slowly fade away in the distance. The sight of the burning Obelisco looking like an ancient lighthouse warning off sailors from unknown shores.
Shortly after, the debris and decaying metropolis was replaced by thick lush forests, and occasional expanses of abandoned farmland in the dead of night. Being more at ease, hunger quickly caught up to them as they proceeded to explore the rest of the train.
“Some chips would be bomb though.” Lindbergh sighed.
“We didn’t bring any potatoes, and even if we did… Would you peel them?” Cornelia cheekily asked.
“You’re supposed to be the chef around here, chicuela. C’mon, if I find some, would you make some? Pretty please?”
“If you help me with peeling them, sure.”
“Come to think of it, chips do sound overrated nowadays. Gotta stay fit, eat healthier.”
Chuckling at his laziness, Cornelia sees Adriana walking back from the restaurant carriage with a box of potatoes.
“Look what I found! We did bring some potatoes after all! They were under the toolboxes.”
“So that’s why the last crates we loaded up felt so heavy…” Cornelia mumbled.
“That’s so you work out them biceps, not everything in life is being pretty, eh.” Lindbergh cheekily teased.
“I was thinking about making those chips… Now I’m thinking, maybe you should make them yourself, ya jerk…”Cornelia replied, slightly flustered.
“I-I can make them for you, Lin… If you don’t mind.” Adriana shyly offered, her face fully blushed.
After a while, Adriana comes out from the kitchen with a large deep bowl filled to the brim with crispy golden chips that smelled incredible. Excited by their succulent appearance, Lindbergh took a large handful of chips, as he began to chew them, he started choking realizing how greasy, flaccid and insipid the fried potatoes were on the inside.
Adriana looks at him expectantly, waiting for his comment on the food as Lindbergh tried his best to retain his composure, looking for the best words that could hide his clear disgust of the ghastly meal.
“Adri… Dunno what you did to these chips, but… I’ve… I’ve never tasted anything quite like it.”
“So y-you liked them? You really liked them? I tried so hard to make them good enough for you…”
“Mhmm… But I think it would be awfully selfish of me to eat this huge bowl by myself, why don’t we call the gang over and have them try a bite or two? Especially chicuela over there, she seems to really want her fair share of these unbelievable chips.”
After trying Adriana’s famous chips, everyone sighed loudly thinking about the waste of over half of their potato reserves for the trip. Leaving their plates almost intact, they proceeded to talk idly about anything they could think of, while chugging down glass after glass of water, trying to wash away the awful taste of burnt oil and soggy potato from their mouths.
“S-so, what did you guys think?” Adriana shyly asked once more. “Aren’t you hungry? I mean, if you didn’t like them you can tell me, The Lord knows we can be honest with each other, especially when it comes to food…”
“It's just that… We’re waiting on the main dish, we don’t want to fill up only with this incredible side dish.” Maxi remarked, discreetly pushing away his plate.
Everyone added in unison.
“He’s right, let’s wait for the main dish.”
Another while passed, this time Cornelia stepped out of the kitchen with what appeared to be hamburgers, as she placed them on the table, the familiar fragrance of old-timey fast food joints and sunday grilled burgers made everyone’s mouth water expectantly, making even Hans reach out for a burger.
“Hans, can you even process that?”
“If I were an unmodded version of myself, no. Rick did install his prototype taste bud processors, testing out how they would work before installing him on his own body… I haven’t had anything to eat since those tests, I figured it would be nice to try it again.”
“Why didn’t you reach out to grab some chips earlier then, Hans? There’s plenty leftover, here, have some…” Adriana said as she served Hans a huge pile of chips onto his plate.
“I’m not fond of tubers…” he plainly replied.
Everyone froze after hearing his words, thinking to themselves: “Why didn’t I think of that earlier?”
Interrupting their baffled expressions, Titus asked Cornelia:
“I don’t remember us bringing any meat onboard with us. Where did you find it?”
“There’s an old storage freezer that was still working in the back of the kitchen, its pre-war meat, but I think it’s still good.”
“Even if it's a few years old, it still tastes incredible, are there any more burgers on the way?” Lindbergh asked while wolfing down his plate.
“There’s a bunch of chips left, Lin… Don’t you want any?” Adriana asked with a smile.
“Oh my bad, Adri… I think I might’ve actually overeaten… Excuse me, I have to go to the restroom.”
“Don’t worry, I think if we store them in the freezer Cornie found, they should keep for a good long time.”
“Yeah, sounds good… That way we can reheat them if we don’t wanna cook one of these days.”
Later that night, they began setting up their rooms in the sleeper carriage. When Cornelia was looking for a room of her own, she saw that they were all taken so far, so she decided to head onto the next carriage when suddenly she was grabbed by a large man heavily panting whilst muffling her screams. Looking up she sees General Lint’s bloodied face while aiming at her ribcage with his pistol.
In a moment of quick reflexes, Cornelia kicks the carriage door as hard as she could, struggling against Lint’s strong grip muffling her cries for help. In an attempt to pacify her, Lint hits her face with the grip of his gun making her spit out blood as she says in a disdainful tone:
“You again… You miserable monster… How did you get onboard without us seeing you?”
“Shut up, you insolent brat! I’ve planned to use this train for months, way before you and your band of misfits came along and almost got me killed… Rebuilding has its risks… This train was my insurance in case things went wrong, and they did…”
“It’s kinda sad when you put it that way… Setting yourself up for failure.”
“I told you to shut up! I survived what that fat prick did to me… I’m not about to tolerate some lowly teenager insulting my intelligence with her pseudo-intellectual remarks. This is the end of the line for you and your friends…”
“Leave the girl out of this, Lint…” Reyes’s voice filled the carriage, heavily panting. “This is between you, and me… Oh! Hi there, Cornelia…”
“Reyes?! What the hell are you doing here?”
“Long story… They deceived me into following them, fighting for a lost cause, they almost made me kill a friend of mine…”
“Friend? You’re pathetic, brother… You can’t even save yourself in the end of the world. You have no right to be alive now.”
“Lint, just let her go, man… It’s not her fault this happened.”
Four shots resonated through the steel walls of the carriage, Reyes’s body began to bleed from the bullets piercing his body as he fell down to his knees. In that moment, Lindbergh rushed through the door with his axe at the ready.
“Let her go, you sadist fuck! If you hurt her, I swear I’ll make picadillo out of you…”
“Are you stupid or something, kid? You come with an axe against a firearm? Did your mother drop you on your head or something?”
“Hey! Leave mami out of this, asshole! You need to let her go, before this gets any more worse than it needs to be…”
“I’d hate to be you right now, seeing the girl die…”
“Oh look, it’s the typical endgame villain speech. Does it make you feel like a big man, threatening someone like that? You’re alone, dude… Everyone has left you, I bet you anything that gun isn’t even loaded anymore. So just let her go…”
“You’re that sure huh? Let’s see if reality is as good as your faith…”
After several clicks pulling the trigger, Lint looks at his gun in disbelief as he muttered:
“N-no, impossible…”
All of a sudden, Reyes wraps his arms around Lint in a last attempt to reign him in, as he loosened his grip, Cornelia took the opportunity to pull out her knife and stab him in the gut. His eyes widened by the surprise attack as he finally let go. Lindbergh opened the door that led off the train onto the speeding forest they were passing through, Reyes smiled without saying a word as he threw himself with Lint into the dense jungle that surrounded them.
“I don’t think either of them can survive that… No matter how tough those geezers are.”
“Yeah well… I think I’ve learned my lesson. Next time, I’ll just sleep with Adri, even if she does kick a lot throughout the night.”
“I still don’t understand what that guy’s obsession with us… Did you do something to them when we weren’t looking?”
“N-no… I don’t know if it has something to do with those cultists, or the projects Titus and Rick told us about…”
“Could be… Let’s just hope Brazil is a bit less intense than what we’ve seen so far, yeah?”
“Y-yeah… Hey, Lin?”
“Chicuela?”
“Thanks for coming all this way with me.”
“Anytime. I told you from the beginning, you won’t be alone.”
As those words left Lindbergh’s mouth, everyone burst in through the door armed and ready to fight. Seeing Cornelia’s bruised face made Adriana fall into a sob while she hugged her tightly.
“Cornie! Are you okay? We heard gunshots…”
With a chuckle, Cornelia cheerfully replied:
“Don’t worry about it, Adri… Everything’s fine now.”
Seeing the large pool of blood on the floor, Maxi inquired in concerned tone:
“Are you sure you guys are okay? That’s an awful amount of blood for you to be feeling so carefree about.”
“According to my analysis, they’re both indeed fine. The blood is not theirs, Cornelia could use a bit of a desinflamatory ointment on her bruises, but beyond that, everything seems in order.”
“Hans, could you check the rest of the carriages, just in case? I think nobody wants any more surprises on this trip.”
Nodding to Adriana’s orders, Hans proceeds to sweep through the rest of the train.
“Guys, you need to see this…”
Everyone huddled around the window Titus was looking out from, the first rays of sunlight blinding them briefly as their eyes widened in horror as they saw a huge crater carved in the forest, surrounded by small collapsed ruins on its very edge, fading in the distance.
“Where’s that supposed to be?” Lindbergh asked.
“According to my calculations, we’ve just passed the ruins of Sao Paulo…” Hans replied, returning from his security sweep.
“It can’t be… There’s no city there… May Dios have mercy on their souls.”
“They told us that the bombs didn’t fall in any of the major cities… Looks like they were just talking about Argentina, not the rest of the Federation.”
After calming down from the horrific scene, everyone managed to sleep for a bit before Hans came in to wake them up. Showing them that they would be arriving shortly to Brasilia. They all head up to the locomotive carriage to see the city skyline forming in the horizon, making everyone let out a sigh of relief knowing that the city was relatively intact.
“Finally… A step closer to home.” Cornelia happily remarked.
“I knew we could make it! I reckon in a few days’ time we’ll be back in your homeland and we can all get our tan on, Lord knows you need it, chicuela.” Lindbergh teased with a smirk.
“I-I hope the water over there is still just as warm and crystal-clear as you told me. I wanna see those white sand beaches surrounded by turquoise water and palm trees.” Adriana fantasized with a hopeful sigh.
“We’ll get there, Adri. We deserve a little beach day after all we’ve been through.”
A small beeping sound from the train’s main terminal catches everyone’s attention, it slowly increases its beeping frequency as they approach the city, making Lindbergh rush over to Hans, asking what was going on:
“It must be some random debris that fell onto the tracks, I don’t think it’s anything we should concern ourselves with. The magnetic field that the train has can push virtually anything out of its way. It would take an immovable steel mountain to derail a train like this.”
Being at about 10 kilometers away from reaching the city, the beeping sound was louder and faster than before. The various monitors around the control room were continuously sending out warnings about imminent collision.
As the train came past a prominent curve amongst the dense jungle, a small blue mountain seemed to be piled onto the tracks, everyone dismissed it thinking it was just a stack of trash and plastic that was blown onto the tracks by a small wind. Returning to their breakfast back in the restaurant carriage at the middle of the train, they began feeling bumps along the way.
Time appeared to freeze for a moment while their breakfast plates, their bags, and their feet were lifted from the floor, food hitting the walls, shattering plates and grunts of pain were suddenly left as they felt gravity hitting them back onto their rough arrival as the train began contorting and bending itself until it finally went off the tracks and into the jungle on the side.
Recovering consciousness from the abrupt accident, they try to focus their vision around them, but they can’t see anything other than different shades of blurry green and brown around them as a loud buzzing and chirping sound seemed to envelop them from all directions.