In clinical triage, the first thing a trauma charge nurse looked for in a fire was soot in the patient’s teeth.
Elena Rostov kept two fingers pressed against the carotid artery of Clara Vance’s throat. The four-car Budd R-Zero consist was rocketing through the darkness of the 1996 Spur at forty-five miles per hour, its steel wheels clicking across the rail joints in a frantic, syncopated rhythm. Outside the windows, the soot-stained granite bore rushed past in a blur of oily black rock, punctuated by the ghostly blue glow of phosphorus silt.
Then the ceiling diffusers hissed.
PFFFFFT.
It wasn’t the clean, pneumatic sigh of the train-line air brakes. It was a greasy, chemical rasp that sounded like aerosolized embalming fluid forced through an uncalibrated nozzle.
From the rectangular perforated ventilation grills running along the center of the curved ceiling, thick, billowing plumes of yellow-white vapor poured down into Car #3.
Within five seconds, the interior of the passenger coach was engulfed in a swirling, choking fog.
The smell hit Elena’s nostrils with the force of an open bottle of concentrated glacial acetic acid. It reeked of scorched thermal register paper, raw formaldehyde from an unwashed morgue drain, and the sulfurous stench of boiling river silt.
