While herding everyone forward, Bella also had to gesture her way through English with the female attendant.
When English failed she switched to Chinese; when Chinese failed, Japanese; then French, Spanish, and Russian. Bella cycled through six or seven languages in a row, and the rather pretty attendant was left utterly dazed—by this point she could manage nothing but blank little nods.
The attendant's tears and snot and drool had all run together; she looked especially pitiful.
In fairness, Bella had wronged her. The young woman could speak English—she'd studied it in school—she was simply terrified out of her senses, and with Bella talking so fast and so urgently, she couldn't catch it for the moment.
Fund manager Seok-woo, having to carry his daughter, had been shoved to the very back by the crowd. He was quick to read the room and rushed over to act as interpreter, relaying Bella's words to the attendant, who then reported them to the train captain.
"This... this FBI officer says to drop the cars at the rear, and also wants to know—um—whether the station up ahead is safe," the fund manager said, sharp-eyed about the moment, straining to prove how useful he could be.
The attendant shot him a sidelong glance. Watching the sci-fi pulse pistol in Bella's hand, she gradually grew less afraid; her wits came back online, and the English she'd once learned resurfaced in her mind—though she was still no match for the fund manager's fluency.
Brow furrowed now, the attendant used her walkie-talkie to reach the captain and the attendants in the forward cars.
At first the captain flatly refused to believe it; sealed inside the locomotive, he couldn't hear the gunfire from the back either.
The young woman explained into the walkie-talkie for a while.
Bella kept up a steady stream of prompting: "Tell him to drop every car from 13 back, mark them, and notify your superiors to deal with it. Is this really so hard to get across?"
In her perception, the life signs in the several rear cars were all frenzied; she could no longer pick out anyone normal. Barring surprises, the cars behind should be packed with zombies by now.
Figuring forty or fifty passengers a car, eighteen cars in all—and allowing for the fact that they weren't full—the zombies crammed into Cars 13 through 18 now came to at least a hundred or two.
If that flesh monster devoured every one of them, the thing would surely climb another two levels.
They ought to use what little time they had to drop all the rear cars, then bring in the military to ring the place. Modern weaponry beat magic against a giant monster like that.
Under her urging, the mass of passengers hurried forward. The relentless gunfire had panicked the crowd to the breaking point; many passengers, seeing others run, started running too on pure reflex, without the faintest idea what had happened.
The passengers in Car 12 swept along with the crowd, pelting toward Car 11 like so many headless flies.
More and more people, with no one to guide them in any order, made the whole movement agonizingly slow.
After another burst of "seumnida" into her walkie-talkie, the round-faced attendant finally relayed the captain's answer through the fund manager at her side.
The captain was thunderstruck. From more than a dozen cars away, he could only faintly glimpse the 'big tree' sprouting in the rear. Under the desperate pleading of the attendant and the fund manager, he agreed to sever the electromagnetic coupling between Car 11 and Car 12—but the coupler itself, they'd have to detach by hand.
Bella had no wish to go to Car 13 either. That flesh monster filled an entire car; even for her, crossing over would be extraordinarily dangerous, never mind for ordinary people. Uncoupling at the gap between Car 11 and Car 12 was exactly right.
Once the captain had cut the electromagnetic coupling, Bella—following the attendant's directions—pried away the car's steel floor plate, baring the coupling hook beneath.
The captain's notion was to stop the train and gather people to detach the hook together. She refused the idea outright. There was no time! In her perception, that flesh monster could rouse at any second.
But she couldn't detach the coupler of a moving train herself—Kong could, no trouble at all, but she didn't have that kind of strength.
"Hold these for me." She handed both the pulse pistol and the Glock 17 to the round-faced attendant.
Bella stretched out flat on the steel plate, a canister of liquid nitrogen in hand, and kept spraying it over the coupler below.
Just as she took up the emergency hammer, ready to smash the coupler apart, a tentacle abruptly shot out from Car 13 like a bolt of lightning, driving straight at her face.
At the critical instant Bella twisted aside to dodge, and yanked the attendant behind her clear as well.
The tentacle's strike came up empty, but it didn't withdraw—instead it clamped fast onto the edge of Car 11, and with a soft "creak, creak," the flesh monster began dragging its own bulk, squirming its way over.
"Son of a—!" Without a word Bella flung down the emergency hammer, snatched up the fire axe beside her, and hacked with both arms at the tentacle gripping the car's edge, all while directing the attendant: "Quick! Take the hammer and break the coupler! Hurry!"
The tentacle was fiendishly tough. Bella chopped three or four times and cut through only a third of it, so for now she could only shout instructions to the attendant.
The attendant's English was improving fast under the goad of life and death; now she understood completely, and hurriedly grabbed the emergency hammer to strike at the coupler.
But her strength was too slight, her angle off, and—more afraid of flinging herself off the train than anything—she went wide swing after swing.
"Let me!" The fund manager set his daughter down to one side and reached out to take the hammer from the attendant.
He was a man, stronger than the attendant, but he'd never done a lick of heavy labor either; his skill with an axe or hammer was near zero. Two swings in three went astray. The coupler's surface was cracked in several places, but full separation was still a way off.
"Useless. Out of the way—let me!" A rough, booming voice rang out. The burly man Bella had seen earlier outside the restroom came striding over, his pregnant wife following close behind.
For love of one, love of everything tied to them—Bella had a special soft spot for every pregnant woman now. Seeing the burly man's wife instinctively edge forward, she quickly threw out a hand to stop her.
"Get back! It's extremely dangerous here!"
"Sang-hwa, be careful!" The wife fretted over her husband; knowing she could be no help, all she could do was tell him to take care.
The burly man waved the fund manager off to the rear. He was stronger than either of the others, and crucially, he knew how to put his strength where it counted.
Hoisting the emergency hammer, he lined it up on the coupler's fracture and brought it crashing down.
One, two, three! The colossal impact split the frozen coupler wide open. With a crisp "crack," it snapped, and Car 12 broke fully free of the train.
Yet inertia still had its say. The flesh monster, one tentacle already lopped off by Bella, fired out two more in quick succession.
"You take the right one!" Bella shouted. Without a word the burly man grabbed a second fire axe and hacked savagely at the tentacle on his side.
Bella and the burly man each hewed at a tentacle. Car 12's momentum was bleeding away now—and only these two tentacles still clung, with a death grip, to the Car 11 that carried them.