Off Track

by Neil Bullock

  Lara glares at me, but she obviously doesn’t have an answer, and seems annoyed to have to confront that fact. “I don’t know.” She holds my gaze for a while, her expression slowly degenerating from horrified to devastated, but eventually goes back to staring at the ceiling above my bed.

  More time passes. We talk about Kyle, about the things we like about him, and the things that make us laugh. We talk about ways we might be able to help him. We come up with some options. Taking him off the train is number one, but if we can’t do that, we can restrain him. His room is the perfect place to do that, being a prison cell. We’d both feel bad doing that to him, but if we can keep him from harming us, and from harming himself, and figure out how to take Mitch and Rona out of play, maybe we can eventually come up with a way to undo what Mitch did to him.

  Yet more time passes. Lara asks if I can teach her some violin, but she gets frustrated too quickly and we give up. I play for her sometimes. We eat. We sleep. We don’t talk often, but when we do, we try to make sure it’s about things from our lives before the train.

  The bottle of Oxycodone – still present in my room after all – becomes a sort of talisman during this time. I cling to the idea of it like its mere existence can protect us when the most damage I can do with it in close quarters with Mitch is maybe to throw it at him and hope it hits him in the eye. I can’t very well force feed him the ten or twenty pills that might constitute a fatal overdose and then restrain him for an hour while he slowly dies.

  And then, one pseudo-morning, Lara wakes me by shaking my shoulder. “Eden, wake up. We’re slowing down.”

  twenty-five

  The Outside (2)

  Lara and I stand facing the door I used to board this awful contraption. Boarding is easily the worst decision I’ve ever made; I feel pretty sure of that now. If I’d downed the Oxy and checked out, I’d never have met Kyle or Lara, but maybe we’d all be better off.

  Kyle should be here. Instead, he’s off somewhere doing God knows what, feeling his mind unravel. I can’t even imagine. I don’t have any idea how we could even begin to reverse what Mitch did to him. Maybe it’s not possible. Maybe Mitch has finished the job by now. We’d never know.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” I ask. “We might leave Kyle behind.”

  She doesn’t look at all sure, but she says, “Time doesn’t work on board, who knows what else might be blocked from our minds? We need to have this conversation; I just wish Kyle were here to have it with us. Let’s not venture far from the train, okay?”

  I nod and the train finally pulls to a stop. Lara looks out of the window and something in her expression shifts.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  “I… there’s something familiar about this place.”

  “You think this is where you came from?”

  She hesitates. “I don’t know. I guess it doesn’t matter.”

  “Right,” I agree, then slap the illuminated Open button. The doors slide apart and Lara descends to the ground while I follow behind.

  When I jump down beside her, I find she’s tipped her head back and is grinning widely. “That’s some weird shit! I was standing in the train trying to think of my birthday, and I couldn’t. As soon as I get out here, it’s like a switch has flipped. I was born in 1977.” She pulls out some paper and a pencil from her back pocket and starts writing.

  I can’t help but return her grin. “1989 for me. I really feel like I shouldn’t be older than you. Emma said the train can’t time travel—”

  “She also said she didn’t know the full extent of the train’s abilities.”

  I nod. “That’s true.” I cast my gaze around, taking in these new surroundings. It’s clearly somewhere in America. The cars are familiar from old movies. We’re in a city somewhere, or the outskirts of one. There’s some angular brutalist architecture rendered in rough concrete in the near distance and some dilapidated apartment buildings off to one side. I glance at the colored line on the train and find that it’s a bright orange.

  “So, wait,” Lara says, interrupting my thoughts. “You’re how old?”

  “Thirty.”

  “That means you boarded the train in 2019?”

  “That’s right. How old are you?”

  “I’m seventeen.”

  I’m surprised; she’s older than I would have thought. “So, you boarded… when I was five years old.”

  “Agh! This hurts my head.” She rubs her forehead to illustrate her point, but it just makes me think of the way Kyle rubbed at his temples when trying to control whatever has invaded his mind.

  “If it’s not time travel, it has to be some kind of parallel universe situation. Doesn’t it? Unless time is so malleable on board that you were waiting twenty-five years before I arrived. Does it feel like that could be true?”

  “Eden, that isn’t helping!” Lara says with mock exasperation. I laugh, and she goes on, “Can you think of anything else the train might have concealed?”

  The door of a squat gray concrete building opens about a hundred yards away and a man wearing a brown suit steps out. I turn to Lara. “Nope. Nothing. I think it’s just—”

  “Lara Mae!” a voice calls. It’s the man. He’s standing maybe forty yards away now, having covered the rest of the distance quicker than seems possible.

  “Oh, fuck!” Lara gasps, her voice suddenly breathy and panicked. She starts to hyperventilate almost immediately, but I don’t need her to tell me who this man is. If we’d been thinking, and if we hadn’t been so desperate for something to happen, we could have predicted this. The train took me back to relive my grief about Alice. Why wouldn’t it bring us to see Lara’s father? I turn to face him.

  “Stop right there!” I shout, then I whisper to Lara, who is cowering behind me, “Get back on the train.” She doesn’t move. Maybe she can’t move. She might be paralyzed with fear, or rage, or both.

  “Who do you think you are?” the man shouts. “Get away from my daughter!”

  “You’re funny, I was going to say the same thing.” Antagonizing him probably isn’t my best move, but I’m unable to resist. I take a step forward and Lara’s father does the same. He’s not what I expected. He looks respectable with his neat hair and cleanly shaven face, though I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by that. We’re all just people, that’s what makes it so hard to spot the bastards.

  “Give me my fucking daughter,” he growls.

  “Or what? From what I hear, you like beating up girls. How about it? You think you can take me?” He doesn’t look physically fit, but he’s also not obviously unfit either. He’s got a couple inches on me and I’m not sure who would win that fight. I took martial arts classes for a while when I was younger. I know how to defend myself if I need to, at least in theory, but it’s a big risk.

  “Lara,” he says, apparently trying to bypass any influence I might have, “come on, sweetie, we’re going home.”

  “She’s not going anywhere with you,” I say. He’s turning a dark shade of red and starting to shake. These are not good signs. I turn my head slightly to the right without taking my eyes from the man. “Lara, honey, get on the train now. We have to go.”

  “You think I’m going to let you take my daughter with you?”

  “You think I’m going to let you take her home so you can beat her up some more?” I hear Lara start to move behind me, shoes scrambling on concrete. She’s breathing hard, gasping almost, but she’s moving. Good.

  “I don’t know what she’s been telling you, but—”

  “Save it,” I take a careful step back.

  The man’s eyes bulge, and I hope that means Lara is back on the train. “Bitches like you need to know your place!” he snarls. “Lara, get down from there!”

  “Eden,” Lara’s voice comes from behind me, barely above a whisper. “Let’s go.”

  I take another quick step back. “I know my place, and more importantly, so does Lara. It’s
far away from you.” I spin around and start to run the few yards to the short ladder up into the train. Lara is standing just inside the door, ready to pull me up. I hear the scuff of shoes on gravel behind me as Lara’s father begins to give chase. I already know I’m not going to make it.

  A few steps later, Lara screams my name, putting so much force behind it it’s as if she’s experiencing the violence that I expect to be upon me in moments. In the split second I allow myself to glance up at her, I see she is bent at the knees and holding both palms out toward me, her entire face a portrait of desperate, frantic hope that I understand her meaning. Thankfully, it’s hard to mistake, and I stop abruptly, taking a quick sidestep to my left as I do.

  Lara’s father lands face first in a heap just to my right having evidently tried to leap on top of me. I almost laugh, but instead I make a surprised squawk when the man’s left arm reaches out and grabs my ankle. Pure instinct takes over and I stamp on his wrist with my free foot with enough force to break it. He roars with pain and profanity, but he lets go. Then he’s getting up almost at once. I run the rest of the way, then throw myself up into the train, barely touching the ladder, and Lara hits the close button just as her father starts to climb awkwardly, one hand held against his body. The doors slide shut.

  “Shit,” I breathe. “These doors open from the outside. Where’s your chair leg?”

  She doesn’t answer, but I spot it on the floor on the other side of the vestibule and bend to pick it up.

  Lara’s father is hammering on the door with his forehead, smashing it against the glass in an utterly blind rage, snarling and shouting profanity. He’s using his good arm to hold on to one of the handles that are affixed on either side of the outer doors while standing on the top rung of the ladder. Seems it hasn’t occurred to him to press the open button, but it’s only a matter of time.

  He shouts something, but the carriage is soundproof and I can’t make it out. His face is now beet red and blood trickles down his face. I can see spittle on the window.

  “Jesus,” I say as I watch him go to work again with his forehead. This might be the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Someone driven so utterly mad that they are practically beating themselves to death to get what they want. Lara is just staring, her expression making a clear statement: I do not know this person. I may never have truly known this person.

  I hold the chair leg ready to bludgeon, all the while hoping I won’t have to. He might not be fit to be her father, but watching him die would still fuck her up big time. I look around for a way to stop him doing what he’s doing, because watching this is almost as bad as watching him die.

  It’s then that I notice the lights by the door are no longer illuminated, and the train is starting to move.

  “Oh, no.”

  Lara’s father continues to pound his head against the glass, though more slowly and with less force now, but even if I wanted to, I couldn’t let him in. The doors are locked. The train begins to move faster. Lara’s father stops, looks around, then clings on for dear life as best he can, now using the hand of his bad arm to try to maintain his balance. His wide-eyed face swivels this way and that, trying to understand what’s happening to him.

  Lara whimpers and my eyes fill with tears. “Lara, don’t watch,” I say, but I’m not about to make her stop. It might be better for her not to see this, but I don’t get to dictate the last image she has of her father.

  When the train starts to rise into the sky, I’m disappointed that he manages to retain his grip on the handles. At least if he fell it would be over quickly from Lara’s perspective. When we enter back into what Lara calls the grayspace, I don’t know what’s going to happen.

  Luckily, or not, it’s not long before we find out. Lara has sunk to the ground, her back against the opposite door. She doesn’t cry, but her face morphs from expression to expression almost too fast to follow. Occasionally she whines or makes an involuntary squeaking sound, or something that could be a sob if not for the utter terror that’s all I can hear. I assume she must be imagining every possible way this can end and that’s what she’s reacting to. There is no good way for this to end. I go over and sit next to her, wrap my arm around her, and we watch. It’s awful, but we can’t do anything else. I can’t leave her here, and she’s not going to leave her dad.

  When we break out into the grayspace, the tendrils start to work their way over his body almost immediately, touching him, tasting him, deciding if he’s worth taking. The train is, thankfully, soundproof enough that we can’t hear what are obviously screams as he succumbs to his fate. Lara buries her head in my shoulder, and I bring my other arm around to shield her from the sight of her father being plucked from the ladder by the gray shapes outside. Finally, blessedly, he passes out of sight.

  part four

  twenty-six

  The Discovery

  Lara doesn’t cry at all, she just rests against me with her head on my shoulder. We sit that way for a long time while I think. We’re no closer to getting off the train. Indeed, we just tried and were confronted with Lara’s father. What happens next time? Are we going to encounter mine? If Mitch is controlling the train’s route, he could ensure that we never get off simply by taking us to places too horrible for us to want to. Or he could just never stop the train. Maybe the food would run out if he did that? Emma said the train can produce matter, but also that it takes on supplies.

  Lara’s father is now dead, consumed by the ghosts outside the train. I try to imagine what she’s going through, but I’m not sure that I can. I once remember wishing my dad dead because my life would just be so much easier that way. I felt horrible about it for days afterwards. Words are cheap, but watching your father die? I wouldn’t want that. I watched Lara’s die and that was bad enough.

  I’m glad he’s dead because now he can never hurt her again, but I can only imagine the conflict going on in her head right now. When she thought he was dead before, back when I told her that the world had ended, she made her peace with it quickly, but that was abstract, not something she actually saw.

  I don’t want to break the silence. I want her to take all the time she needs. I assume she’ll tell me when she’s ready to stop sitting here. Until then, I am simply planning to be here for her. And so, my mind moves on to other things.

  We’re unsafe out here, sitting in the vestibule of carriage one. All I have is a chair leg to defend myself. Mitch could find us here and we’d be more trapped than we usually are. Kyle could find us here. Maybe he’d have recovered from this latest bout of mania and maybe he wouldn’t. I’d rather have a way of escaping before I find out, and all I have is hope that they leave us alone.

  I think back to when we caught Mitch about to kill Kyle, or so we assumed. I was the one who stayed behind to talk to Mitch afterward. I was the one who threatened him. Assuming we’re right about Mitch controlling the route, why did he take Lara back to her father? Why is Mitch taking out his frustrations on her rather than on me? Maybe he deduced, correctly, that hurting her will cut me much deeper than simply targeting me directly. Still, I would expect him to be planning something more for me. I need to keep my wits about me, and I need to keep Lara close. I’m not going to lose her to that sick bastard. I don’t want to lose Kyle either, but I don’t know what I could do for him. I don’t know if his episodes will get better or worse. It’s the same problem I’ve had ever since I boarded: I don’t know enough. Even the things I’ve learned aren’t helpful in any real way.

  Lara’s breathing slows and I think she falls asleep. I wonder if I could lift her, and if I could, would she stay that way? Maybe I could get us back to the relative safety of my room. I decide against it. I’d be incredibly vulnerable with Lara in my arms, and Mitch would probably choose that moment to make his move.

  Think, dammit! I must know something I can use. There must be something I’ve discovered on this fucked up train ride that can help. What is it?

  My mind is blank a
nd I want to cry out in frustration.

  I wonder where Mitch is. He could be in his room. He’d have heard me hammering at his door, trying to break it down, but he might have simply ignored me. Maybe he’s in the carriages at the back of the train, where Emma said some of the controls are. I have to assume that no areas of the train are off limits to him.

  I shift my weight slightly, slowly so as not to wake Lara, and I feel something under me. I poke at it through the carpet with my free hand. It feels like a shallow hole with something circular inside it, right at the edge of the carriage floor. It’s probably nothing, but… I remember when I boarded, noticing that the carpet in here had much more wear than the carpet in the main passenger area. Kyle justified taking the train apart with a screwdriver as “being thorough.” We didn’t think to look down, though.

  “Lara, honey?” I whisper.

  She stirs. “What is it?”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, but there’s something under the carpet here.”

  She shifts away from me slowly and watches disinterestedly as I get my fingertips under the carpet and start pulling. It’s fastened down well, and it takes a lot of energy to get even an inch of it to come away. Lara sees my struggles and comes to help. Between us, we pull enough carpet back to reveal a black metal ring set into shallow square recess in the floor. A handle, and it seems attached to some sort of movable panel.

  We continue working on the carpet, and once we have a mostly bare floor, I pull on the handle and a large section of the floor, almost the entire front half of the vestibule, comes out. I prop it up against the left door.

  “What’s down there?” Lara asks.

  There’s not a lot. It seems like it’s basically just a step down, and I can’t figure out why it would exist until I see there are three small buttons against the front wall of the car. I step down into the new space and crouch to get a closer look. “There are some buttons over here.”