Once upon a train ride

Tickets are gonna get punched

"Yeah, it's a secret, but I'm gonna share it with you!" Lucus's smile was infectious as he leaned his head out of the tiny living cubby. He held his cupped hand in front of him and stepped fully into the shaking and rattling train corridor.

Charlie could not help smiling back at his brother. Lucus had the positively mutant skill of making everyone around him feel uplifted.

"Ok, what's the secret then?" Charlie leaned his massive frame against the painted over but rusting corridor wall. He gestured with his chin as he spoke. "What's in your hand?"

Lucus was still grinning as he held his hand up closer to his brother's face. He splayed the fingers as he did, showing a tiny plant shoot curling up out of a wrinkled little bean.

"Good grief!" Charlie peered at his brother's hand squinting at the unexpected sight. "Is that an actual plant?"

"It's a growing bean Charlie!" Lucus's smile was threatening to split his narrow brown skinned face. "I found it right under the heat lamp in bay twelve. It was growing! Actually growing!"

Charlie stooped down further, compressing his eight-foot frame to take in the tiny growth of plant.

"But that's impossible. Nothing grows here. The Chamber Lord has already decreed that. Mother would live and die again if she saw this!"

Lucus closed his palm and retracted his hand at that. He scowled as he did.

"Mother's not dead. Just gone. And Chamber is just an old tyrant cabal." Lucus's nose wrinkled as he spoke and he made to duck back into his little cabin.

"No brother, Chamber runs everything. We have to show him your seedling. He'll know what to do." Charlie was still stooping but had taken a knee. "You know a seedling find is beyond precious. We - no YOU will get double rations!"

"I don't - " Lucus began, but his reply was lost as the corridor bulkhead behind Charlie came apart in a roar and flash of explosion.

It was followed by the ugly clattering of weapons fire.

Charlie, turned around to face whatever was assaulting the train corridor. He moved with the oiled and preternatural speed of the combat enhanced. As he turned, he unlimbered the blast rifle that he carried crosswise on his back.

The thing was fat and stocky. A close in weapon, intended for use in the close quarters of the train.

He turned just in time to receive a drumbeat of heavy caliber rounds directly to his torso and head.

One of the rounds tore through an eye and exploded out the back of his head, showering Lucus in a spray of oddly green tinged blood and shockingly white bone.

Lucus for his part was entirely overwhelmed by the sudden and brutal assault. He found himself unable to move, staring with a slack jawed wonder at his brother as he was torn apart.

The seedling dropped from his palm unto the metal decking.

"Raise your hands, resource thief!" A menacingly uninflected voice sounded from the now exploded bulkhead and the brief appalling spill of violence quietened, replaced by the hungry screech of some rotary assault weapon.

"Down on the ground now! Theft of communal resources is a capital offense. Prepare for expiation."

The command emanated from a towering grotesque construct that stepped through the shattered mess of the bulkhead.

The thing was noseless, lipless and the eyes were sutured open. Its mouth was a vertically slitted gauze of flesh. It was a Chamber Guard. One of the elite bodyguards of the Chamber Lord themself. At eight feet tall it was the easy equal of Lucus' departed brother Charlie.
Only, where Charlie had been surely a living human, this thing was a mechanical monstrosity. In its bionic, skeletal hands it held a multi barreled assault cannon, the barrels still rotating with a blurred speed.

It stamped up to Lucus, its unshod but brutally metal feet stamping and squashing the seedling into paste as it did.

It slammed the weapon into Lucus's still paralyzed body, folding him in half. And then fired.

The rounds blitzed through and out of Lucus's unresisting form. Spine, tissue, organs. Everything was pulverized, mulched and splatted outwards, and his body hurled fully backwards into the frame of his cabin entrance.

"Terminated." the horror of enforcement leaned over its victim and judged that it had completed its duty.

It turned and stomped back through the broken entrance it had made.

As the monster exited, an annunciator clicked on overhead and a cool female voice buzzed in. "Cleanup in train car five. Custodian to car five please."