Not again!

As I come around a bend, I see a blur, that same familiar blur I always see, and let go of the controls. The emergency brake kicks in with a hiss of escaping air but Newton is a harsh master.

Time dilates. My hammering heartbeat plays a funeral march and my mind flatly rejects the images streaming into it from merciless eyeballs. The wet thump against the front of the train proves my eyes right, however, as the idiot drunk is dragged under. It will take Maintenance a month to clean him out of the traction system…

I jolt awake, the smell of my own vomit fading as I gasp at dark air. It is the cold-dark of night, though, and not the hot-dark of my once-beloved tunnels.

The mourning has changed now. I no longer mourn the life wiped out on my watch. I mourn for myself, for the life I loved that was ripped away from me that night, for the friends I no longer meet, for the tunnels I can no longer bear to enter.