End of the Line
“Sorry to interrupt your shift, but there’s a killer on this train.”
The crossword clue mocked her: Seven letters, starts with D, means “tedium.” Lily Muncada tapped her pen against the conductor’s console as the Blue Line rattled through another tunnel. Doldrums. Had to be doldrums.
She scrawled it in, then checked her watch. 11:43 p.m. Three hours left on her shift, fourteen more years until her pension kicked in. If the CTA didn’t gut it first. Her daughter’s asthma medication had gone up again last month, too. Sixty bucks, even with the CTA’s insurance. Though without this job, it’d be three hundred.
Her cab radio crackled. Couldn’t be dispatch, they used digital talkgroups now. This was the old analog operations frequency, the one nobody was supposed to use anymore.
“Good evening, Lily.” A male voice. A young, male voice. “Sorry to interrupt your shift, but there’s a killer on this train.”
An amused, male voice.
“In exactly fifteen minutes, when we reach Belmont, someone will die. Unless you’re clever enough to stop the killer, that is.”
The pen slipped from Lily’s fingers. How the hell was this guy using the analog frequency? Only the old-timers even remembered it existed. She grabbed the main radio mic. “Control, this is Blue Line 447. I’ve got a situation—”
“Nature of situation?” Rodriguez from Control sounded bored. Rodriguez always sounded bored.
“Someone’s broadcasting on the old ops channel, claiming there’s a device on the train.”
A pause. “What channel? I’m not hearing anything.”
“Not the main talkgroup, the analog frequency—”
“Jesus, Muncada. You hearing ghosts now? Listen, we’ve had three false alarms this week, all of ‘em on the late shift. Keep rolling. We’ll have security do a sweep at Belmont if it makes you feel better.”
The line went dead. Lily stared at the radio, jaw clenched. Belmont was four stops away. Less than fifteen minutes if she kept schedule. Exactly what he’d said. And Belmont was one of the busier late-night stops. Plenty of bars nearby, plenty of side streets to vanish down.
The analog channel crackled again. “Rodriguez doesn’t believe me. Do you believe me, Lily?”
Her blood chilled. He knew her name, knew Rodriguez was on shift, knew her old frequency. This wasn’t random.
“Here’s a clue for you, since you like those. Four-letter word for death. I’m in it.”
Tomb? No. Doom? Maybe. Her mind raced through possibilities while her hands stayed steady on the controls. The train pulled into Jefferson Park. Passengers shuffled off, shuffled on. Nobody screaming. Nobody running. A few people glanced up from their phones, Friday night bar crowd heading home.
She slowed the train as it left the station. Just a little. Buying time.
“Getting warmer,” the voice said. “But you’re thinking too literally. Think sideways, Lily.”
Cars. Four letters. Cars. Her throat went dry. The train had eight of them tonight. Three hundred passengers, easy. Drunk kids from Wrigleyville, restaurant workers heading home, third-shifters heading in. She couldn’t search them all. Couldn’t leave her post without triggering an emergency stop that would bring Control down on her head. Her boss had already written her up twice this year for “protocol deviations.” Once for holding a door for an elderly woman, once for slowing down during a medical emergency.
“Tick tock,” he sang. “We’re approaching Montrose. Lots of dark corners there. Perfect for leaving presents. Then Irving Park. Then Addison. So many people getting on and off. Makes you wonder…which car has the surprise?”
Lily’s hands moved before her brain caught up. She pulled the brake, slowing to a crawl. Passengers would complain. Control would note it in her file. And if this was just a prank…
Think. Think like he thinks. He wanted to play. Wanted her to figure it out. Which meant there was something to figure out. The clues weren’t random, after all.
Four-letter word for death. In cars.
She grabbed the PA mic. “Attention passengers. We’re experiencing minor signal delays.” Her voice stayed steady, professional. “While we wait, here’s tonight’s transit trivia. Five-letter word for ‘warning sign.’ Starts with A. First person to shout it out gets…a prize.”
Silence. Then, from somewhere in the middle cars, an old man’s voice. “Alarm!”
“Close,” she said into the mic. “But I’m thinking of something more specific. Something you might see on a train.”
The train crawled toward Addison. She could see the platform lights ahead. Less than five minutes to Belmont now.
“Alert!” A woman’s voice, car four.
“Alert,” Lily repeated. “Yes. And here’s another. Six-letter word for ‘hollow threat.’ Starts with B."
His voice returned through the frequency, angry now. “This isn’t a game, Lily. Check the seventh row, car five. Right under the middle seat on the right. You’ll see I’m serious. This isn’t a bluff.”
Lily’s pulse quickened. Specific location. Too specific.
“Bluff isn’t six letters,” she said into the mic, talking directly to him. “Anyone?”
“Boring,” someone called out.
She pulled the emergency brake. The train shrieked to a halt fifty feet from Belmont platform. Passengers lurched forward, cursing. The emergency lights kicked on, harsh white replacing the yellowed fluorescents. She unclipped her portable from its charger and hooked it to her belt. If he comes back on the analog channel, I need to hear it no matter where I go.
She grabbed the PA. “Ladies and gentlemen, remain calm. We have a potential security threat in car five. By CTA emergency instruction, listen to me carefully. If you’re in cars one through three, move forward slowly. Cars six through eight, move back. Car four, stay put but move away from the car five door. Now.”
“You just killed your career,” the hijacker’s voice came through her portable, laughing. “Breaking protocol, causing panic, stopping between stations—”
“Seven-letter word for caught,” Lily said into the mic. “Starts with C.”
Silence.
She left the conductor’s booth, ignoring every rule she’d memorized in training. The connector between car three and four was packed with confused passengers. She pushed through them.
“Anyone seen someone with a radio? Handheld, probably. Anyone acting strange?”
A young guy, maybe twenty, pointed toward car five. “Guy in a Sox cap was messing with something under the seats. Had some kind of box and yeah, a radio. Then he went toward the back.”
Lily thumbed the transmit on her portable. “Control, I need police at Belmont. Now.”
“447, you are stopped between stations without authorization—”
“Suspicious device mid-car in Five, under-seat package. Manual inspection needed. Following emergency SOP for credible threats.”
She pushed into car five. Seventh row. Middle seat on the right. There it was, a metal box. The wires were visible, duct-taped under the seat. Her maintenance training kicked in. The wires weren’t connected to anything. No power source. No explosive material she could see. Just a tangle of electronics meant to look dangerous. So it was basically a prop. But real enough to cause a stampede if passengers see it.
Through the window to car six, she saw him—Sox cap, young face, maybe mid-twenties—no longer smiling. He was trying the emergency exit, but those only opened when the train was at a platform with the doors aligned. He’d trapped himself by moving too far back. The end doors between cars five and six were already latched, and passengers had crowded the vestibule, blocking him in. He was boxed between the locked doors and the dead interlock on the side exit.
“Cornered,” she announced into the radio. “Seven letters.”
The portable hissed one more time. “This isn’t over—”
She switched it off. Sirens wailed in the distance.
Lily walked back to her booth, legs shaking but steady. The main radio was going crazy with Rodriguez screaming about protocols, demanding explanations. She turned the volume down but left it on. Had to create a record.
Her crossword was still there, almost finished. One clue left, right at the bottom. Three-letter word for victory.
She picked up her pen. The sirens got louder. Through her window, she could see uniforms flooding the platform, passengers evacuating calmly now that real help had arrived. The guy in the Sox cap sat on the floor of car six, hands behind his head, waiting.
Rodriguez was still yelling through the radio. Something about suspensions and hearings and reviewing her entire record. And yeah, she’d probably get written up. Maybe suspended without pay. The union would fight it, but she’d have a mark on her record forever. Harder to get shifts. Harder to make rent. Harder to pay for medication.
But nobody died. Nobody even got hurt in a panic.
She wrote three letters in the crossword: W-I-N. Then she sat back and waited for the chaos to arrive.
Author’s Note
The fun (and terror) of writing a thriller is you get to be the god of dread for a few pages. You set the trap, wind the spring, and watch your character squirm. For me, this one started with a little late-night daydream a few years ago in Switzerland. I was sitting on a train, tired, looking around at my fellow riders, thinking, what if someone just started talking to me over the radio? That was the first domino.
From there, it was all about escalation. How to make things just a little worse for Lily, turn by turn, until there was only one possible choice left for her to make. And every beat should increase the pressure on your character, so if she was comfortable, I made her uncomfortable. If she had fifteen minutes, I made it five.
Because the setting is so specific—a late-night Chicago train —I knew I couldn’t fake it. That meant a lot of nerdy research: checking actual Blue Line station order, timing the ride between Jefferson Park and Belmont, making sure the radio chatter and emergency procedures were at least plausible. (A few CTA operators and transit nerds are probably itching to write a non-threatening complain notice.) Good thrillers live or die on plausibility, even if you don’t get all the details perfectly right. Because iff the reader doesn’t buy the setup, the tension never lands.
One of the later additions to the story was Lily’s crossword quirk, and it ended up becoming one of those happy accidents that tied everything together. I knew I wanted her to have something human and a little silly, something like a habit that shows how she keeps herself awake through the “doldrums” of the night shift. And once I found it, the climax wrote itself. There’s nothing better than when the solution to your thriller feels like it was sitting there in the character’s pocket the entire time.
Let’s talk style. I went for shorter sentences than usual, so that meant clipped exchanges, lots of white space, the sort of prose that speeds you along the tracks and leaves room for your brain to do its own worrying. (Lee Child is the master of this and one of my obvious inspirations.) So once we do get to that ending—her quietly finishing the crossword—it was important for me to let it slow down a little. After all, thrillers aren’t just about stopping the villain. They’re about what your character becomes in the process. Lily ends the story a little more awake, a little more dangerous to the system she works inside. She’s chosen action over inertia.
If you’re writing your own thriller, my best advice is this. Start with the moment that scares you, then research enough that no reader can call you out, then write the whole thing as if you’re driving a train a little too fast, and that means brakes squealing, sparks flying, but you're always heading toward that final, inevitable stop. And if you can end it with one last, satisfying “click” (like the last word in a crossword) you’ve probably done your job just fine.
Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more.
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