Chapter 3: Incident Report 74-EE

Chapter 3: Incident Report 74-EE

"Step away."

The words echoed in the oppressive silence of Leo’s apartment, a phantom command that had followed him home from the tunnels. He hadn't just stepped away; he’d fled. When his shift ended, he’d practically sprinted out of the control room, not looking back, gulping down the grimy dawn air of the city like a drowning man.

But distance offered no escape. The image of the phantom carriage was seared onto the back of his eyelids: its impossible cleanliness, its brightly lit, empty interior, its silent, waiting doors. It was a memory that defied all logic, a piece of a puzzle he didn't know he was solving. The warning hadn't scared him off. It had hooked him. It transformed his terror into a gnawing, obsessive need to understand. Stepping away was no longer an option. He had to lean in, no matter what he found in the dark.

Back at work, the control room felt different. The fear was still there, a cold knot in his stomach, but now it was sharpened by a sense of purpose. He ignored the main board, letting the city’s living trains run their course. His focus was singular, aimed like a weapon at the MTA’s vast, archaic digital archives. It was a digital catacomb, a labyrinth of poorly scanned documents, corrupted files, and decades of bureaucratic neglect. He was looking for a ghost in a graveyard of data.

He started with the logical keywords. "Track EE-7," "phantom signal," "unauthorized access," "equipment malfunction." The system returned hundreds of mundane maintenance logs, power routing schematics from the 80s, and memos about asbestos abatement. Nothing. It was a digital wall as solid as the concrete one he’d seen on the camera.

Frustration mounted. He thought back to the train itself. An R32, he was almost sure of it. The "Brightliner" model, all gleaming stainless steel. He typed in a new search: "R32 incident EE-7."

ZERO RESULTS FOUND.

He tried again, broadening the search. "R32 major incident 1980-1990." A few results popped up—a derailment in Queens, a fire near Times Square—but nothing connected to his phantom track. It was another dead end. His memory of the sleek, silver train felt so real, so solid. Was it possible the system was hiding something even from itself? Or worse, was his mind, frayed from exhaustion and fear, inventing details?

He slumped back in his chair, rubbing his tired eyes. He was going about this all wrong. He was searching for a what. He needed to search for a why. Why was that section sealed? The concrete wall was the key. He refocused his search, typing in the broadest possible terms, hoping to snag a forgotten thread. "EE-7 spur line decommissioning."

The search churned for a full minute, the progress bar crawling across the screen. Finally, a short list of engineering proposals and budget approvals from the mid-70s appeared. He clicked through them, his eyes scanning the dense, technical jargon. Most of it was meaningless, but buried in a project overview for the Canal Street station expansion was a single, hyperlinked reference number. It wasn't a document title, just a string of characters: INC.REP.74-EE-0117.

His breath caught. 74-EE. The year and the track designation. It was a hunch, a spark of intuition in the digital darkness. His hand trembled slightly as he clicked the link.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then a security prompt appeared on his screen: ACCESS TO THIS FILE IS RESTRICTED. ARCHIVAL CLEARANCE LEVEL 4 REQUIRED.

His heart sank. Level 4 was for senior management, for the MTA’s inner circle. He was a Level 2 operator. He should have stopped there, logged it as a dead end. But the warning—Step away—flashed in his mind, and a surge of defiant recklessness took over. He opened a command line interface, a tool he was only supposed to use for network diagnostics. He began trying to bypass the security flag, using an old back-door command a cynical, retiring operator had taught him years ago. "Sometimes," the old man had rasped, "the only way to find out why the damn thing is broken is to break it a little more."

He typed the command. Hit enter.

ACCESS DENIED.

He tried a variation.

ACCESS DENIED.

On the third try, tweaking a single variable, the screen flickered. BYPASS ACCEPTED. DISPLAYING DOCUMENT.

The file that loaded looked ancient. It was a scanned copy of a typewritten report, the letters slightly blurred, the pages yellowed at the edges. A stark, black heading sat at the top of the first page.

MTA TRANSIT AUTHORITY - INTERNAL INCIDENT REPORT CLASSIFIED - EYES ONLY

FILE REF: 74-EE-0117 DATE: October 27, 1974 SUBJECT: Complete and Unexplained Disappearance of Southbound Train, Rolling Stock R16.

Leo’s blood ran cold. R16. Not an R32. An older model, boxier, from the 60s. He had been wrong. The grainy camera feed, the shock—he must have misidentified it.

He scrolled down, his eyes devouring the text. Much of it was dry, procedural. But then came the details, made all the more horrifying by their dispassionate, bureaucratic tone.

At 03:17 AM, control lost all contact with Southbound Local Train 622, operating with R16 rolling stock. Last known position was Track EE-7, approaching the terminus for nighttime storage.

3:17 AM. The exact time. His time.

Last communication from operator [█████████████] was logged at 03:16 AM. Transmission was unintelligible, consisting of heavy static and what was transcribed by the receiving agent as 'a garbled public announcement.' No distress signal was sent.

The voice on the dead radio. Last stop. All out. Leo felt a wave of nausea.

He kept reading. Search teams were dispatched. They found nothing. The tunnel was empty. The track simply ended. There was no sign of a crash, no debris, no wreckage. The train, a three-hundred-ton behemoth of steel, had entered the EE-7 spur and had, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist.

The next page was a personnel manifest.

PERSONNEL ONBOARD: Operator: [███████████████████] Conductor: [██████████████]

REGISTERED PASSENGERS: 6 [██████████] [████████████████] [██████████] [████████] [██████████████] [████████████]

The long black bars of the redaction felt like gravestones. An operator, a conductor, and six passengers. Wiped from the record.

The final page was the investigation’s conclusion, and it was almost entirely blacked out. Only a few haunting phrases remained visible between the thick lines of censorship.

…no evidence of mechanical failure… no rational explanation… recommend immediate and permanent sealing of Track EE-7… to prevent [█████████████████████████████████]… further investigation is deemed [███████████]… all assets and personnel declared lost.

Lost. Not deceased. Not presumed dead. Just… lost.

Leo pushed himself back from the console, a profound, bone-deep chill settling over him that had nothing to do with the room's air conditioning. The ghost on his screen now had a history. It was Incident 74-EE. It was an R16 train that had vanished into thin air with eight souls aboard. The concrete wall he saw on the camera every night wasn't just part of a station expansion. It was a seal. It was the door to a tomb.

He looked at the clock. It was almost 1 AM. In two hours, the ghost of that lost train would run again. The warning to "step away" was no longer just a cryptic threat. It was the last piece of advice given to anyone who got too close to Incident 74-EE. And tonight, armed with the horrifying truth, Leo had no intention of listening. He had to watch.