The screen doors opened first, followed by the train doors, and zombified humans trickled out onto the platform. Then the two separate streams of commuters waiting to board merged into one anonymous mass of meat inside the carriage.

Amidst it all, Camelia stood squashed between a backpack and a handbag, grinding on some random stranger against her will and rubbing knees with another one sat in front of her. The train lurched into motion while a warning to watch out for pickpockets floated through the overhead speakers in five or six different languages.

Camelia held her tote bag closer to her chest. The knuckles of her other hand whitened as she gripped the pole harder. A sweaty fist above hers kept sliding down and she briefly imagined chopping it off at the wrist and throwing the severed appendage out the window. Saw blood spraying the passengers, heard the mutilated victim scream out its agony at the top of its lungs.

Blinked and reality re-emerged, quiet save for the mechanical whirrings of the moving machine which carried them in its bowels.

The train stopped. Bodies shuffled. Camelia felt like the air got off at this station, too, escaped like Houdini from heavy-duty chains and evaporated out of sight. The atmosphere became hot and stifling. The passenger from the seat in front of her stood up, pushing Camelia into the wall of slimy, smelly sardines behind her, elbowing her gut in the process.

Camelia growled to herself. Took half a step to occupy the newly vacated seat but an oversized woman overtook her. She plopped down between two unsuspecting passengers, restraining their movements. Her bare legs, like two miniature snoutless pigs, poked at Camelia's thighs, significantly breaching into her personal space.

She pictured slaughtering the piglets, amputating them straight off the woman's body. Watched with her mind's eye as she shrieked like a skilled soprano, with two raw, red stumps for legs, blood oozing along the protruding bones, pooling around her butchered calves on the floor, where her feet should have been.

Something lodged herself in Camelia's back and she glared over her shoulder at the oblivious culprit. Some braindead youth flashing his teeth at his equally empty-eyed friend, mumbling some unintelligible slang.

In an alternate universe, Camelia was gouging his eyes out of their orbits with the spoon she kept in her bag. Sticking it under his eyelid, slitting the nerves as she shoved it behind his eyeball and scooping it out, hurling it like a golf ball across the carriage.

One eye, and then the other, leaving him blind, with two gaping holes in his skull, wide and round like his mouth shouting incessant abuse, until his vocals cords went sore. Crimson tears stained his cheeks. His arms flailed aimless, struggling to regain balance in the blanketing darkness.

Her teeth clenched, Camelia sighed and flexed her jaw. Remembered the knife at the bottom of the bag, which she ferried to her office almost every day, to use instead of the plastic rubbish available in the communal kitchens. It was a blunt knife, but she fantasised that its blade would be sharp enough to slice through layers of skin and fat, eviscerating unaware wayfarers.

With their guts spilled, dangling and dripping, stomachs capsized, they toppled to their knees, bloodied fingers useless in keeping their insides... well, inside. Ululating howls of unimaginable pain, filling the train like smoke from a wildfire. Gore coating the floor, agglutinated in sticky clumps, regurgitations of a man-eating giant.

Camelia no longer stood squashed between bodies. Instead, she stood above them, her pale mauve dress coloured like a Pollock painting in various shades of ruby streaks. Bloodshot rage in her eyes, knife tightly clasped in one fist, muted horror screech traveling at the speed of light across the corpse-littered train.

The carriage came to an abrupt halt, momentarily throwing her off her axis. The muscles in her arm that held onto the steel pole strained to keep her upright. Her fellow passengers didn't bother with as much consideration. They bumped into her from all sides and she, in return, was forced to brush against the overweight woman's moist legs.

Camelia gulped. Swallowed her incipient madness. Her heartbeat fluttered, made her blood run hotter, beads of sweat slid down her nape, along the arch of her spine. Her nostrils flared with laborious breaths. She'd become a slimy sardine herself, her skin crawling with the urge to decapitate the sacks of flesh stealing her oxygen.

An unreachable, unscratchable itch surged just below her epidermis, embedding itself deeper and deeper, tugging at her tendons. Her nails suddenly looked longer and sharper than she remembered them to be. Tar-dipped claws of a cannibalistic witch.

Her torso twisted and contorted, as if her bones struggled to break out. Spiked fangs sprouted from her gums, her eyes went pitch black, her mouth opened wide like an aligator's and she bit the head off the nearest body, turning its throat into a spring fountain.

Her claws then tore at another's chest, slicing his ribcage open in four different parallel gashes. Somebody's face became her next target, eyes, nose, lips obliterated in one swift slash. Hair got ripped off scalps, with bits of red leathery skin attached. Hands and feet got hacked off and blood flowed on the floor like a river of wine.

Severed sinews splattered the windows, eyeballs rolled listlessly about, fingertips dropped onto the ground, mixed with toes and slit tongues. With inhuman speed, demonic Camelia barrelled through the carriages, from one end of the unmanned train to the other, wreaking havoc in her wake.

Clutters of carcasses gathered on and under the rows of seats. Bits and pieces of what used to be humans muddied the path Camelia cleared on her way to the front of the train. She kicked at the unattached limbs, stepped on springy organs, huffed and puffed and groaned with the effort.

Stopped to stare out into the dimly lit tunnel, watched how the railroad machine advanced into the darkness, saw the carnage she'd caused reflected in the windscreen. Every few meters, bars of white neon glowed on each side of the arched ceiling, illuminating the train tracks below.

Camelia's mirror twin was there and gone, over and over again, alternating between existence and invisibility according to the fluctuating light. Until the train pulled up in the station and brightness flooded her senses.

Her vision flickered and she now stood loosely surrounded by suburbanites.

As the carriage doors parted, the horde exited as one and she got caught in the swirl of the current.

Spilling onto the platform...

...scrambling up the stairs...

...sliding through the turnstiles...

...squeezing against the wall up the final narrow staircase to the surface –

Sucking in the fumes of the city and striding along the jam-packed street.

Liberation tasted bittersweet.