by Neil Bullock
“I got to carriage seven and didn’t see anyone,” he says. Lara is behind me in an instant and she steps forward to hug Kyle. He hugs her back, but his expression is one of bewilderment.
“Did you figure out how it works?”
“No. I found controls, but it’s not clear what they do. Or maybe it’s my head. The more I studied them, the less sense they seemed to make. But everything’s quiet. No sign of Mitch or Rona. Maybe we should take the opportunity and all head down to seven now and take a look, maybe grab your Oxy?”
I’m nodding before he’s finished speaking. “Yes. Yes, let’s go.”
Lara offers no resistance and we file out of the door after I unlock it again. I debate relocking it behind us, but decide against it when I imagine Mitch giving chase and all of us dying while I fumble with the key. Instead, I bring the lock and key with us. Maybe I’ll get to hit someone with it.
The journey to car seven is uneventful. Lara comments on the lavish decorations in the front half of the train, but those are the only words spoken by any of us.
When we get to our destination, the first thing I notice is that the cross on the floor and the colored line behind the metal grilles that cover the walls are yellow today. Kyle moves off to the side and opens a panel I must have missed the last time I was here, and I walk over to examine it, Lara by my side. Behind the panel is a screen like the noticeboards, images rendered half an inch above the surface. There are buttons with icons on them, but I can’t tell what any of them mean.
“Does it make any sense to you?” Kyle asks.
I shake my head. “Lara?”
“No… but, wait. Maybe we’re making a mistake. We’re expecting this to control the route, right? Maybe it’s for something else.”
I think about it. She could be right. “Like what?”
She makes a sound of deep concentration. Kyle and I stand silently behind her and watch. Eventually, she says, “I’m going to try something, okay? Stand back against the wall.”
“What do you expect to happen?” I ask as I position myself as suggested.
“Emma said the train could create matter, right?”
My eyebrows shoot up. “Lara, are you about to kill us all?”
She tears her gaze away from the panel for long enough to shoot me a please, what do you take me for? look. “Give me some credit, Eden. I think this is actually pretty intuitive. Watch.”
Lara presses a sequence of buttons while I hold my breath.
With no fanfare at all, a chair appears on the cross in the center of the room. One second it’s not there, the next it is. I feel like there should have been a popping sound or something, but it happened silently.
I blink, then look at Kyle to make sure I’m not hallucinating. He looks just as shocked as I feel. Lara, meanwhile, walks to the chair and drops herself down in it. It’s one of the red and gold upholstered armchairs from the passenger carriages.
“Pretty comfortable,” she says with a massive smile.
I can’t help but grin. “How did you know it’d do that?”
“The system is pretty self-explanatory. At least if you want to create something it already knows how to create. I don’t know how to make something from scratch, if that’s even possible.” We walk over to scrutinize the panel, and I have to admit, it is pretty logical, and I would never have guessed that something so unassuming would have the power this thing seems to have. It’s just a screen set into the wall, about 9 inches across. It’s positioned perfectly for Lara’s eyeline, so I guess it’s about five feet up the wall. Typically, the display is rendered half an inch above the surface. The entire interface is just four buttons across the bottom of the screen, two of them to scroll through the things the machine knows how to make, which appear in the top two-thirds of the display. Another button actually creates the object, and a final one that presumably destroys whatever happens to be on the cross. Immediately, I wonder if we could lure Mitch in here and use that. It’s another option, I guess. If only I’d found this earlier, I might have been able to create something to keep us all safe.
As if picking up on this thought, Kyle crosses to the brand-new chair, picks it up and smashes it against the wall until he has two splintered chair legs and a whole lot of mess. Lara retreats behind me while this is happening, but I think I know what he has in mind, and it’s not his brain going all screwy again. I hope.
When he’s done, he hands me a chair leg and holds out another to Lara who takes it hesitantly.
She blinks. “Thanks? What—”
“Weapons,” he says.
“What about you?”
“I could probably kill both of you with my bare hands, and my mind is not completely under my control. I don’t think you want me to be armed.”
Suddenly the yellow line and the cross on the floor fade to black and we all stop what we’re doing and look around nervously. “What’s going on?” Lara asks as the line and cross switch back on. They are no longer yellow.
A weight on my chest. I can’t breathe. All I can manage to say is, “White.”
“Isn’t that…” Kyle begins.
“Yes.” That’s what color it was when it came to pick me up. The color it was in my dream. If Kyle is right about the meaning of the colored line, that means the train might have brought me home. The one place I have no interest in going. Sure enough, as soon as I’ve had the thought, the train starts to slow down for the first time in what seems like it could be weeks.
My gaze flits between Kyle and Lara searching for help, for any way to stop this.
We head back to carriage nine to see what’s happening outside. We’re still high above the world. I look down, trying to spot landmarks that might tell me where I am. If I press my face to the window and look left, there’s ocean in the distance, but that’s the best I can do. Looking the other way, all I can see is forest covered hills.
“Do you recognize anything?” Kyle asks, looking worriedly at me.
“Too high.”
Lara is staring out of the window. She turns to look at me, and her expression is all wide-eyed excitement. “Are we going to get off?” To her credit, she manages not to sound excited, at least.
The immediate answer that springs to mind is absolutely not. We agreed to leave the train, but there’s no point getting off here. This is a dead place filled with ghosts, the kind that don’t dance for you. Still, maybe we should get off so we can think about time again. Who knows, maybe Kyle’s issues will disappear once he’s off the train. “I don’t know.”
We’re silent for some time, watching as the world flies by. We gradually dip lower and I start to think I can make out landmarks.
“I think this is Oregon.” I pace up and down the car wondering if it’s possible to tell from up here. “Is this Mitch? Is this the kind of sick fuck he is, bringing me back to this hell?”
Kyle puts his hand on my shoulder. “I don’t know, Eden. As usual, we don’t know anything. Maybe the train is just following a giant loop. Mitch controlling the route is only a theory.”
“A pretty convincing one,” Lara adds.
Kyle nods sadly. “Agreed. But let’s wait and see what we see, okay?”
My shoulders are tense and I want to scream, but I try to force myself to feel nothing. “Okay.”
We wait and we watch out of the windows until we’re low enough to make out buildings. The train moves gradually lower and slows down further. I shuffle unnoticed away from the others when it becomes apparent where the train is taking me. It couldn’t have picked a worse place. No, wait. He couldn’t have picked a worse place. Mitch couldn’t.
The view is different from above, but the tennis court and swimming pool render it unmistakable.
“Eden?” Lara asks. “Are you okay? Do you know what this place is?”
I can’t bring myself to speak, so I turn to her and shake my head in answer to the first question, not the second. I don’t think she get
s it, because she turns back to the window as if she might be able to identify the building given more time.
“Oh,” Kyle says finally, then quietly to Lara, he adds, “The swimming pool, the tennis court. Look at the front door. It’s wide open.”
I didn’t remember if I’d told them all the details about what happened here, but I guess I must have. Greg’s still here, somewhere in that building. Worse, Alice is still where I left her on that bed. The bed she and I should have shared. Where I could have told her that everything was going to be okay, even though we both knew it wasn’t. I think I can almost feel her presence.
“Oh, God,” Lara says, but as soon as her wide-eyed empathy turns my way and she starts taking hesitant steps in my direction, my sadness is overwhelmed by anger. She stops in her tracks.
“I’m going to kill him,” I say, my tone completely calm because I absolutely mean it. I head for the door before either of them has time to reach me, and each step increases the rage I feel. I hurry out of the vestibule and into carriage eight on my way to Mitch’s room. I’m serious, I’m going to fucking kill him. I’ve had enough of this. Either he’ll tell me what he knows, or he won’t. But one way or another, he’s dead.
“Eden, wait!” Lara calls.
“Eden!” Kyle shouts.
I ignore them.
twenty-four
The Realization
“Mitch!” I shout, hammering on his door with the splintered chair leg Kyle gave me in carriage seven. I pause long enough to listen, but I don’t hear anything from within, so I start pounding again. “Mitch! Get out here right the fuck now!”
My uncontrollable rage has propelled me around the train like a mad woman with Lara and Kyle in tow. They tried to talk me down. At one point Kyle looked like he was going to physically restrain me. Maybe he’d have been able to or maybe he wouldn’t, but I’m pretty sure in that moment that he was regretting having armed me. So here we are. I push the handle down and give the door a shove, but it’s locked. Frustration overwhelms me for a second and I drop the chair leg and throw myself at the door shoulder first, grunting as I make contact. It doesn’t open.
“Fuck,” I spit, and slam my open palm against it.
My heart is racing and I’m struggling to get enough air into my lungs, but that doesn’t stop me from turning to head to Rona’s carriage, hoping I might find Mitch there. Lara steps in front of me. She’s a couple of inches shorter than I am and a lot thinner, but she stands there with her arms crossed, daring me to try to get past her. It’s enough to begin to calm me down.
I close my eyes and turn my back to Mitch’s door, lean back against it then slump to the ground with a colossal sigh. “I hate this fucking train.”
“You’re in good company, then,” Lara says.
I look up at her and sigh again.
She grins down at me and uncrosses her arms. I can’t help but smile back. I look around and find I have no recollection of getting to this carriage. I was on rage-fueled autopilot. Then I notice Kyle sitting against the wall further down the corridor, head in his hands. “You okay, big guy?”
He starts to rock back and forth as if my words are pummeling him. “Get…” he says, his voice strained. “You have to… get… away from me.”
“Kyle? What’s wrong?” Lara asks as she starts to approach him. Kyle’s hands are balled up in fists which he’s using to rub at his temples. Lara has to know the answer to her question, but her desire to help overrides her caution.
I get to my feet. “Lara, stop,” I say, my voice taking on the loud and clear tone of command. She stops and glances over her shoulder at me. “Come to me, honey.”
She looks conflicted. She wants to go to Kyle and help him. She looks like she might be about to turn and do just that when Kyle roars, “Go!”
She whips her head back around to look at him in shock, stands frozen for a second, then finally runs to my side. “What’s happening?”
“It’s whatever happened earlier coming back, I think. We have to leave him alone for a little bit. He’ll be okay.”
My chair leg is closer to Kyle than I’d like, and he’s now between us and our ability to make other weapons. Regretfully, I leave the weapon behind. Lara’s will have to be enough. I lead her in the only direction we can go, toward the front of the train.
I take Lara to my room because it’s the only place that exists which offers anything approaching safety. Once we’re both inside, I lock the door and cross the room to sit on the bed next to Lara who has already made herself comfortable.
“This is a nice room,” she says, but her voice is flat.
“It’s not bad,” I admit. “Shame it’s on this fucking train.”
She grimaces and closes her eyes.
“Can you—” I start, then falter. “Would you mind looking outside? Have we moved at all?”
“Sure.” She hops nimbly off the bed then pokes her head behind the blinds. “We’ve moved. It looks like we’re over water now.”
I breathe a sigh of relief. “Thank fuck for that. I can’t believe that of all the places we could have revisited, it took me back there.”
“It does seem a bit on the nose,” Lara agrees. “Do you really think Mitch did it?”
“Maybe. If the train is just on one big loop, it wouldn’t make sense for it to stop somewhere other than where it picked me up.”
“Why would he, though?”
“To fuck with me? I threatened him with violence, I don’t imagine he likes me very much.” I exhale, shaking my head. “I don’t know if someone like Mitch needs a reason. He could have been fucking with us in all sorts of tiny ways ever since we got on. I just wish I could figure out how and why he’s doing it. If we can’t control the route from carriage seven, we need to figure out where…"
“Eden, shut up,” Lara says, one hand in the air.
My earlier fear about her being infected by the gray stuff outside the train comes back to haunt me for a second before I see she’s deep in thought. I snap my mouth shut.
Eventually, she says, “You said Mitch could have been fucking with us ever since we got on, right?”
“I did.”
“What would he do if that didn’t work?”
“If what didn’t work?” I’m not sure what she’s getting at.
“If fucking with you wasn’t having the desired effect?”
I think about it, but after a moment I say, “I don’t think I understand what you’re asking.”
“Think about it. There are three passengers on this train except for Mitch and Rona. You and me and Kyle. What do you and I have in common?”
“Well, quite a lot, I think.”
She gives me a tiny smile that’s gone as soon as it appears. “Yeah, but there’s one big thing we have in common.”
“Still not getting it. We’re both female?”
Lara smiles. “Well, maybe that’s part of it. No. I’m talking about our shitty fathers.”
“Oh,” I say.
“And how does Kyle fit in?” she asks, and my spine begins to tingle.
“He was convicted of killing his wife and… oh… his daughter.” I’m catching on now, and the implications of what Lara is saying are almost too horrible to contemplate. I take over her train of thought. “If Mitch can control the route, perhaps he can control who he picks up somehow. So, he chooses two girls with daddy issues and a father who is supposed to have killed his daughter. He has been fucking with us all along!”
The more I think about this, the more the idea runs away with itself. Lara shakes her head as if she can’t believe any of this and continues, “And either Mitch didn’t realize Kyle was innocent, or he didn’t expect us to believe he was innocent. He didn’t expect us all to become friends.”
“Oh, shit,” I gasp. Lara is still a step ahead of me, but I reach the punchline just as she says it.
“And so, he does something he knows will turn Kyle into the monster
Mitch already assumed he was: he exposes him to the grayspace.”
“Fuck,” I mutter. “I mean… fuck!”
“I know.”
“But… if Kyle keeps getting worse, he’s going to kill one or both of us. Is that the point? Are we just sport? Jesus.” I rub my temples and Lara just shakes her head. I’m out of words now. Is this just one big game for that fucking psycho?
The train suddenly accelerates, and Lara pokes her head behind the blind again. “We’re back in grayspace.”
I nod slowly.
Time passes. Obviously, I don’t know how much. We stay in my room. I venture out to the dining car twice and return with stacks of junk food. I make a point of thanking whoever in the crew prepared and delivered it, but of course, I don’t know if they heard me. We survive in this way for several sleeps.
“I thought Kyle would be better by now,” Lara says. I have spent a lot of time convincing Lara that leaving him alone is our best course of action. If her theory about Mitch is right, the damage is already done, and Mitch is unlikely to try anything else. The best thing to do is to let events run their course and hope for the best at this point. I don’t have the heart to tell Lara that Kyle might not get better. Maybe whatever his affliction is comes in waves at the beginning, but after a while, perhaps it’s permanent. “Me, too.”
“Or I thought Mitch might have come to visit. You know, to kill us.”
“Those are some dark thoughts, little lady.” Mine are no better, though.
“I can’t help it. It’s this fucking train.”
I can do nothing but nod my agreement. I know how she feels because I feel the same way. As much as I’m all for letting events progress naturally, something needs to happen soon or we’ll both go insane. We’re waiting for Kyle to come back before we enact our plan to try to alter the course of the train, but maybe we shouldn’t be. We don’t know if he’s coming back.
I’m almost afraid to ask the question that comes to mind, but it needs asking. “How long do we wait for him?”