Swarm on the Silver Line
The Silver Line’s last departure at 12:45 AM was always half-empty twisted late-night souls who preferred the hum of electric rails to the empty city streets. Tonight, it felt different. As the train plunged into darkness, a low hum vibrated under every carriage. Carmen Diaz, the line’s veteran operator, peered through the glass bulkhead. Ahead, the tunnel walls glistened where her headlights shone like tiny gold flecks scattered across obsidian.
Dr. Felix Chan, a graduate student in urban entomology, boarded at the Georgetown stop with a battered field notebook. He’d been chasing tales of impossible insects in the subway. When the doors closed behind him, he felt a shiver: the usual echoes were replaced by soft skitters, a metallic clicking that seemed to crawl up his spine. He forced calm, flipped on his phone’s flashlight, and scanned the car empty seats, a sleeping drunk, and faint gold smears on the floor.
The train lurched forward. In the next tunnel segment, the walls erupted in movement: hundreds of tiny golden beetles, their backs etched in black lines, scuttled in cascades. Felix’s heart pounded. They spilled onto the ledge between tracks and vanished down a grate. But where they’d been, golden tracery bloomed: a dragonfly mid-flight, a ladybug frozen in dot-patterned glory. Behind him, the OK light on Carmen’s dashboard winked off. The PA crackled: “Emergency lighting engaged.” The ambient hum dropped to a deathly silence.
Carmen radioed the control center. “Track power’s gone. I need backup.” Static, then: “You’re on your own until power’s restored.” She swallowed. Across the car, Felix whispered, “Did you see that?” Carmen nodded. “Silver Line’s got problems tunnel fires, flickering lights but never this.” Felix touched one gold dragonfly on the wall. It felt like thin metal, cold and smooth. As he drew back, a shadow yawned out of a corner an inky obelisk crowned with a gold beetle crest. The Hive Wraith.
The creature moved without feet its cloak flowing like liquid night. Wherever it drifted, golden insects streamed from its hem and clung to the walls. Passengers screamed as the insects clicked and the shadows lengthened. Carmen snapped off the main lights; emergency reds flared. But the Wraith’s aura swallowed even that. In the darkness, Felix glimpsed faces vanish first the drunk in the corner, then another commuter whose scream cut short. Their shimmer turned to dust and drifted like pollen.
Carmen slammed the train to a halt. She and Felix stumbled into the next carriage, only to find the insects forming a chain along the inter-car connector one living bridge to the next abyss. Felix realized: each insect was a sentinel guiding the Wraith’s advance. “We need to break the chain,” he panted. Carmen nodded, yanking open the emergency intercom and shouting to clear the cars. The few survivors backed away as Felix unscrewed his canteen’s lid, dumping its faintly sparkling water onto the tracks water drawn from the Potomac, mineral-rich. The insects sizzled and recoiled.
That buy them seconds. Carmen radioed for an emergency stop and manual doors. “Next station Emerald Junction. Fast.” The train lurched forward again, power sputtering. Golden insects scuttled ahead, leading the Wraith closer. Felix grabbed Carmen’s arm. “You can’t outrun it forever. We need its hive.” Carmen’s jaw clenched: “The old maintenance shaft, near the decommissioned platform. That’s the only place power’s never been cut.” She flipped the switch, and the train groaned onto the stub platform.
They raced up rust-eaten stairs into a vaulted room lit by moonlight leaking through girders. The walls were plastered with glittering gold insects hundreds of them each poised as if ready to take wing. In the center, a rusted maintenance scaffold led to a hatch marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Carmen kicked it open. Beyond lay a narrow shaft lined with pipes humming faintly. Felix shone his light on the walls: centuries-old soot overlays and fresh gold scars. “This is it,” he whispered. “The nest.”
Crouching, Carmen looped her jacket around her hand and dropped it in. The jacket caught dozens of golden insects that streamed upward, pulled by static. The Wraith emerged at the shaft’s mouth, its black cloak rippling. It held out a hand encrusted with a massive scarab. Felix stepped forward, voice trembling: “This was your home once the earth, in the golden veins of the city. You awakened, and they followed you. But your hive is dying. The city forgot you.” The Wraith tilted its head. Its insect crest shimmered.
Carmen raised a flare from her console; its red light spilled over the chamber. The Wraith recoiled as Felix advanced, tossing his notebook filled with insect data into the shaft. The pages burst into golden motes that drifted like pollen. The Wraith’s gold emblems flickered, then fused together, forming a single tunnel of light. It reached into the shaft, drawing the motes and the swarm back into its cloak. The red flare sputtered out. Silence, deeper than any tunnel, pressed in.
When the backup power kicked in, the shaft’s lamps flickered on. The platform was empty no insects, no Wraith. Felix and Carmen climbed back onto the train just as the doors slid shut. As the train pulled away, wartime graffiti on the tunnel walls glinted gold in their headlights: a single insect sigil samurai beetle sprayed long ago, untouched by time. Felix exhaled. “It’s gone…for now.” Carmen’s eyes stayed on the walls. “Or waiting.”
Weeks later, the Silver Line operated as if nothing had happened. But riders still whisper of fights with golden bugs on the platform. Felix published a paper on “urban entomological anomalies” that no one reads. Carmen watches her track monitors, always scanning for flickers. And deep beneath the city, in tunnels forgotten by blueprints, Hive Wraith waits, gathering its gilded swarm ready for the next midnight run.
