by Neil Bullock
“I guess I should be grateful for the one decent night I had last night,” Lara says. She’s taken her ponytail in both hands and is wringing the hair like she wants to strangle it. She notices me watching and stops, then looks away.
I watch over both her and Kyle for some time, though. None of us seem inclined to talk, even though we have so much to talk about. We’re all traumatized in one way or another. Kyle is likely reliving his near death at the hands of Mitch. Lara is perhaps conjuring revenge fantasies in her head. I can’t blame her. I had threatened to make Mitch scream after all. I even told him I’d enjoy it. If it came down to it, I would balk. I wouldn’t be able to do something like that, even to someone who deserved it. Lara, though… she’s had to live with the injustice of her father driving both her sisters out of their family home, then had to assume the role of her father’s punching bag. I can see how the feeling of helplessness might overwhelm her, how she might take any opportunity, however ill-advised, to exact revenge on Kyle’s behalf.
When I can’t stand the silence anymore, I say, “Guys, I know it seems hopeless, but we’re about as safe as we can be for the moment. Maybe we should—” I close my eyes, shake my head. I can’t think of anything that will alleviate this feeling. The only thing, the one thing that might tip the scales in our favor, is getting that bottle of Oxy, and I just want to wait until the constant feeling that one of us is going to die to stop for a minute so I can catch my breath before I venture out, maybe volunteering to be that person.
Lara shoots a look my way. When she speaks, it’s with a raised, desperate voice I haven’t heard before and don’t want to hear again. “Safe? You said it yourself. Mitch has keys. He’s incredibly strong. He can control the train. He could just make this carriage not exist, then we’d all be floating around in the grayspace.”
I don’t open my eyes. I don’t want to argue. I nod, then speak as gently as I can. “I know safe is a relative term. But Mitch doesn’t know we know that he might be able to control things. I’m betting he won’t tip his hand unless he has to. He’ll want to keep up the pretense for as long as possible.”
Kyle sits up straight and lets his head fall back, exhaling noisily. “Eden’s right. I think we have some time.”
Lara looks at me, then at Kyle, then back at me. She sighs. “Fine. So, we have time until he tries to kill Kyle again.” I wince. “What are we going to do with it?”
We spend the next few sleeps in relative boredom, but the good kind, at least as far as I’m concerned. The kind where nobody comes to kill your friends for no reason, and where our situation doesn’t get appreciably worse. I keep an eye on Lara, but she seems okay. My main worry now is Kyle, who seems sluggish and subdued. It’s like being dangled out of the train as if he were a toy held by a careless child has stolen some of what made him who he is.
We talked about plans, but everything we could come up with has problems. I have resisted going to get the Oxy because it seems like it risks our safety for a less than guaranteed gain. Lara offered to get the Oxy by herself, which I objected to strenuously.
Lara and I have taken to spending time in the passenger car behind her sleeper car. We’ve rearranged the chairs to make it more homey, and we’ve brought some of the stuff from Lara’s room as well. She and I are there one morning while Kyle is taking one of the frequent naps he now needs since his run-in with Mitch.
“I don’t know how much longer I can do this, Eden,” Lara tells me. Her voice is quiet, but I still hear every word against the backdrop of total silence. My heart sinks a little.
“What do you mean?”
“Languish back here and pretend everything is okay.”
“We’re regrouping,” I say, trying for humor. It sounds wrong, even to me. We stopped regrouping a few days ago, now we’re just waiting for something to happen. We’re waiting for me to do what I said I would. “Okay. What do you want to do instead? Do you want to confront Mitch?”
Lara shakes her head, then screws up her face and rubs at her forehead as if I’ve missed the point entirely. “No. I mean… there’s so much to think about. There’s Mitch, obviously, but we’re also on a train speeding through some shit we don’t understand. Where are we going? Why are we here? We had plans. We were going to wait until the train stopped so we could go outside and figure out when we’re all from. The train hasn’t stopped since we had that idea. It’s like it knows or something.”
I had the same thought when it appeared to wait just long enough for us to get to carriage eleven before taking off again. I’m grateful Lara is thinking about this rather than about more immediate problems.
When I don’t say anything, she goes on. “I just want to do something. Doing nothing all day is stressing me the fuck out. Don’t get me wrong, I think you and Kyle are great, but is this enough for you? Is this what we’re planning to do for the rest of eternity? That’s what Emma said, right? We don’t age while we’re on board. Time doesn’t exist. I don’t think I can just sit around until the end of the universe, waiting for Mitch to kill us.”
“We won’t,” I say, though our only workable plan is still the Oxycodone. As much as it pains me to admit it, Lara is right. We’re drifting. We don’t have any good plans and I’m scared of the fragment of plan we do have. She is looking at me expectantly. I sigh, “I think when I stopped believing I could see my family again is when I… well, I didn’t exactly stop caring, but I checked out a little. You’re right, we’re just coasting. But I don’t know what to do. Kyle seems…wrong somehow? You seem angry. I haven’t stopped being scared since Mitch... you know.”
She gets up and comes over, sits down next to me and puts her arm around me. I let my head fall to the side, resting on her shoulder. “It seems we’re in the same boat, you and I. I can’t stop being angry at the universe, you can’t stop being scared by it. Neither one accomplishes anything.”
“You’re remarkably insightful for however old you are.”
She laughs at that. “We need a real plan; one we can actually put into action. I don’t want to spend the rest of eternity on this fucking train. I want to go home. I want to have a boyfriend. I want to have sex, Eden. Maybe I want kids. I still have a life…” she slaps her hand over her mouth. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry!”
I lift my head from her shoulder. Her eyes are bulging. “It’s okay. You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. You do have a life back home. You’d be better off without your asshole dad, but aside from that I can see how you’d want to go back.”
“I just… you don’t have anything. Anyone. I can’t imagine…”
“You don’t have to. That’s for me to figure out.”
Lara frowns. “No, Eden, that’s not how it’s going to work. I’m starting to think I—” she hesitates, “— we’re becoming close, right? If you have nothing to go back to, then you come back with me. Maybe we can all get an apartment together or something. We already know Kyle can’t go back to his life. He’ll be arrested and executed.”
“What if we find somewhere new?”
Lara’s face registers surprise. “Somewhere new?”
“Yeah. I’ve been thinking about what Emma said. What if the train stops somewhere and it’s beautiful, and there are people and we think we could be happy there? Maybe we can even figure out a way to control the train and make it go somewhere specific.”
She thinks about it. Her head nods almost imperceptibly a few times like she’s making a list of pros and cons. “Yeah. I’d be happy with that. It’s not my specific life I have to go back to. There are things there I’d happily never see again. I’d miss a few people – Paige and Sam mainly, - but when we do see each other, it’s often too painful to bear anyway. And none of that is anything compared to your loss. Starting over appeals. It’s the experiences I’d miss out on by being on board that are what I want.”
I nod and feel a warmth blooming in my stomach. I feel the beginnings of something that’s m
aybe stronger than my terror. Is this hope? “Okay. So, let’s see what we can do about getting ourselves off this damn contraption.”
twenty
The Argument
I’m amazed at how quickly I’ve taken our relative safety for granted. It’s been a few sleeps, and while I was nervous about Kyle being somewhere on his own at first, I’m okay with it now. Mitch hasn’t broken through the locked door into carriage twelve and Kyle hasn’t been abducted or murdered. We find him in Lara’s room. He’s awake, laid on his stack of blankets the opposite way to usual, facing the window. The blind is rolled all the way up, revealing the shapeshifting horror outside.
“What are you doing?” I ask as we enter.
He starts, then cranes his neck around, looking a little pissed. “Nothing,” he says, then turns back.
I stride over to the blinds and pull them down, then turn to look at him. “Good nap?” I ask, trying to sound neutral. I’m unnerved though, and I can see Lara is too. Neither of us can stand looking out into that horrible gray infinity for long. Kyle was lying here staring at it for, well, hours, probably. He said it himself; he hasn’t felt right since he was exposed to the outside. If that stuff is capable of infecting, or possessing, or whatever… well, I’m trying not to think about it.
Even more reason to get ourselves off this damn train once and for all, and I’m starting to think that it doesn’t really matter where we go. Perhaps the next time the train stops, we should simply get off and not get back on. The important thing is that we’re together.
“Fine,” Kyle says, but he doesn’t meet my gaze. He’s staring at the blinds covering the window.
“Good. Lara and I have been thinking about a plan again,” I say, and he finally looks at me. “We need to get off the train, right?”
“Mmm,” Kyle intones. “I don’t see how. Unless we can make it stop.”
“Well, that’s a start. We need to figure out how to access the controls,” I say.
Kyle hauls himself to his feet with an effort. The sluggishness I’ve noticed in him since his exposure to the outside worries me. The experience he had at Mitch’s hands was probably traumatic and exhausting, but shouldn’t he have recovered by now? Unless he hasn’t been taking naps when he says he is. Maybe he’s not sleeping at all. Maybe he’s still traumatized. Or maybe he spends all his time staring at the shapes outside. Do they dance for him the way they danced for me? Maybe they no longer need to.
“The controls are going to be in the locomotive,” Kyle says. “And you can’t even face a trip back to your room. How do you expect to get to the controls?”
I glance at Lara whose expression mirrors how I feel: hurt. I try not to let it show.
“They may not be,” Lara says, and Kyle turns to face her. She recoils a little when their eyes meet. She’s standing over by her bed and it seems like she’s trying to keep some distance between herself and Kyle. “There’s at least one car behind seventeen. Maybe there are more.”
“Whoever heard of a train you drive from the back?” Kyle asks with a derisive laugh, and Lara frowns. This time, she doesn’t look hurt, she looks pissed.
“Wherever the controls are,” I blurt, jumping in before Lara can say something she’ll regret, “it makes sense to check out the back of the train first. There’s nobody back here to stop us, and it’s closer.”
Lara nods, but only I can see it. Kyle has turned back to me. Mockingly, he says, “And poor Eden doesn’t have to do anything scary.”
I watch Lara bite her lip. I’m confused. I don’t understand what’s going on, but seeing Lara’s anger ignites my own. “What the fuck is your problem, Kyle?”
“I’m not the one with the problem.”
I take a step closer to him, getting in his face. I don’t want to feel this way, but he’s seriously pushing my buttons. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He steps forward so I have to look nearly straight up to meet his gaze. His arms stay rigidly by his side as he speaks, as if he’s having to fight to keep them still. “You’ve got us trapped at the back of the train when everyone who knows anything about it, about how we might get off, about how to control it, and even where the controls are, is at the front. We shouldn’t be cowering here like trapped rats, we should have grabbed anything we could use as a weapon and we should have beaten all the information we need out of that fucker and his friend, and then we should have killed them and thrown them outside!” I flinch when he steps back and punches the wall to punctuate his point, leaving a crater behind. “We’d be home already if not for you.”
I blink rapidly at the violence in this suggestion, my eyes flitting between him and the hole in the wall. “I didn’t hear you complaining when we all agreed to lock the door.”
“Like you’d listen if I had.”
Lara is watching, wide-eyed. Occasionally her gaze darts to the door. She’s checking her escape route. I realize we’re scaring the shit out of her and my anger deflates. We must have looked like we were about to start getting violent with each other, and I take two quick steps back from Kyle and hurry around him to Lara. Her eyes are filled with tears as she steps backwards and sits down hard on the bed. I reach her and sit down, putting my arm around her.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper. “It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Kyle watches us without an ounce of empathy in his eyes.
“I think you should take a walk and cool down,” I say to him, then turn my attention back to Lara.
“Whatever,” Kyle says as he leaves the room.
Lara cries for a short time, each one of her hitching sobs breaking my heart a little. I stroke her hair and mutter words of comfort. When she’s finished, she looks at me with those earnest eyes of hers. “It isn’t him anymore.”
I weigh up her words, but whatever way I choose to look at it, I know she isn’t wrong. Slowly, I shake my head. “No, it isn’t.”
I feel as if Mitch won. He took Kyle from us without ever having to throw him off the train.
“What are we going to do?” she asks. She sounds like she’s on the edge of giving up, but if she can survive her father, she can survive anything. I’m not going to let her give up, but I still can’t think of anything to say in answer to her question.
“I don’t know, honey.” I wish I did. We don’t know Kyle is done changing or if he’s going to get worse, but it already seems like he’s no longer exactly on our side. I could still go and get the Oxy, but I can see several possibilities. First is that I’ll encounter Mitch on the way, and that doesn’t end well for me. Mitch once said that it was remarkable what you can see if you know where to look, and I think it’s quite likely that the Oxy simply wouldn’t be in my room anymore. If he or Rona saw me board, they would have seen what I was carrying. Maybe they can read minds too.
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” she says. She sounds on the verge of tears, but she looks determined.
“Same.” But, as she observed the last time we had this conversation, we have nowhere to go. Selfishly, I worry that Lara’s view will change from us all being in this together to one where she simply aims for the easiest exit available and to hell with me and Kyle. I wouldn’t necessarily blame her, but it would hurt. I’m rapidly coming to understand that the thing stronger than terror, the thing that got me moving again, isn’t hope. It’s something else.
I wonder where Kyle is, and what he’s doing. I’m assuming he’ll be in the dining car or in one of the two passenger cars we have access to now that the door to eleven is locked. Those are the places he spends most of his time, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he started sleeping in one of the passenger cars if he hasn’t already.
I spend some time trying to organize my thoughts, considering everything I know. I mentally link them to other things. It’s therapeutic. As I’m doing this, my mind makes a leap it hasn’t made before. “Do you think the gray stuff is what made Kyle start acting differently?”
Lara nods immediately. “Pretty certain.”
“What if…” I pause, not sure how to put it into words. My brain is running faster than my mouth and finally I just blurt, “What if that was the point?”
“What do you mean?” Lara asks, shuffling back so she can look at me properly.
“I don’t know exactly,” I say, trying to figure out what I’m getting at. “What if the plan were never to kill Kyle? What if Mitch’s plan were to just expose him to the gray stuff all along?”
Lara considers this, sucking one cheek in as she does. “And we came along, and he had to make it seem like something else?”
“Maybe, yeah. Throw us off the trail.” I’m starting to get animated now. We have no evidence, but this is feeling more and more like it might be right.
“What would be the point, though?” she asks.
“I guess it depends on what the gray stuff is supposed to do.”
Lara sighs. “Well, it made Kyle mean.”
“It did. But that also explains why Mitch apologized so quickly, doesn’t it? And why he didn’t simply kill me when I was alone with him? If the guy could overpower Kyle, I don’t stand much of a chance if he wanted to hurt me.”
“Maybe. I don’t know anymore. I don’t have any idea what’s happening.” She sounds dejected rather than excited that we might have a new angle to consider.
I can understand how she feels though. I feel the same way. It’s not like anything on this stupid train has ever made any sense. Resignedly, I say, “Yeah. Whether it’s true or not, it doesn’t bring us any closer to understanding anything.”
“Do you think the crew might know anything about the outside?”
Maybe they do and maybe they don’t. The real question is whether a fifty-fifty chance on something that might not lead in the right direction is worth wasting the last of our water. But what else do we have?