by Darst, Matt
Besides, Rails’ story isn’t even plausible. After all, who stays home because of a bite, especially one from his teenage daughter?
Right there, Peter decides on his next crusade: combating chronic absenteeism.
Peter’s peers like to say Peter is “in the zone.” The reality: Peter is never outside the metaphoric zone. His mind is a constant hive of activity, and he lives with a constant, pulsating buzz that, despite its deafening silence, drowns out interpersonal stimuli.
Peter is trapped in the zone.
There is an otherness, an apartness that prohibits him from really engaging his fellow man. He lacks the ability to empathize.
That’s not to say Peter doesn’t have feelings. He can feel anger, happiness, and the full range of emotions. He just doesn’t feel them toward people.
But he’s a good faker. He’s faked it for nearly thirty years. He’s done everything people would expect, basically everything his father had done before him. He went to college, courted and married his wife, got a job, got a car, got a house. He goes to neighbor’s barbecues, holds Super Bowl parties, laughs at his boss’ horrible jokes. He takes up smoking with his co-workers even though he hates it. Years ago he even considered having an affair. Not because he was attracted to the woman, but because he thought it was the normal thing to do.
In short, Peter Sumner goes through the motions.
At least he used to.
Almost four years ago something changed. His son was born. As soon as Peter held Ian in his arms, looking upon his helpless face, he felt his icy heart break and warmth pass through him in waves. Peter learned what it was to love unconditionally.
The train approaches, gliding on three rails, the electrified third supplying power to the locomotive. Touch the third rail, and you cook. Signs warn of this in English and Spanish, alerting travelers and vagrants alike.
The train pulls into the stop, an automated yet polite voice alerting commuters who may have been confused, that this stop is, indeed, Addison. “This is a Red Line train to the Loop.”
One by one, the passenger cars noisily pass Peter, the rising sun reflecting off the windows. Despite the glare, he can tell that this morning, like most, the train is nearly full.
The train halts, and Peter makes his way to the door of the lead car. Before entering, he notices four or five people lying across seats, forcing fellow passengers to stand. Peter approaches the door, but stops in his tracks. He’s assaulted by a horrible smell clearly emanating from the car.
The homeless, he thinks, wincing.
He threads his way back through the throng, his briefcase angled to open a path before him. He makes his way back to the centerline of the platform, and jogs to the car directly aft. He squeezes on just as the doors slide shut.
“Excuse me,” he says, moving past the passengers blocking the doors. This is Peter’s pet peeve: ignorant passengers who fail to clear the car’s entrance, prohibiting others from coming and going, especially when there’s plenty of room in the center.
Peter starts towards the car’s front. “Pardon me,” he begs again, slipping between businessmen and students. He is awkward with his bag and his heavy jacket, and he breaks a sweat as he approaches the emergency door. Fortunately, the area is clear. Peter leans thankfully against the door, his lower back resting against the horizontal handle.
True to routine, he drops his briefcase to his feet and sinks both into his copy of the Tribune and anonymity.
“Next stop, Belmont,” a disembodied recording announces. “Doors open on the right in the direction of travel.”
Peter loosens his tie, the brown and gray stripes wrinkling. He runs his sleeve across his forehead. Since work began to repair the tracks and replace the train stations on the line, the commute has become even more unbearable.
At Belmont, passengers impede each other’s progress off and on the train.
An elderly woman presses against Peter apologetically, and he looks with disdain at a seated teen who fails to offer his chair. The teen does not make eye contact with her or Peter. He’s withdrawn into the world of his gaming system.
The future of America, Peter thinks gloomily. The train proceeds.
“I love that I can just, you know, veg out with him, you know?” a young woman brays into a cell phone. “It’s just so nice to not have to say anything. We can just be quiet and not have to think, you know? We don’t even have to talk. Hello? Can you hear me?”
Peter considers telling this twenty-something to use her “inside voice.” But his way is to avoid public attention. So he keeps to himself, knowing that the tunnel, the subway, will soon silence her phone. But not soon enough.
“Hello?” she bellows. “Oh my God, I thought I had lost you!”
“Fullerton,” the mechanized voice announces. “Change for the purple and brown line trains at Fullerton. Doors closing.”
Peter turns to page five, an article about a prison riot in Mississippi orchestrated by some nut job named Ira Ridge. The prisoners have control of a cell block. It’s day three, and negotiations have broken down. The warden and several guards are feared dead…
Then he hears it: something like a muffled scream over the clickity-clack din of the wheels grinding against ancient rails. He surveys the cabin.
No one returns his gaze. They are all like him, eyes down, their heads plugged with ear buds, totally ignorant of each other’s existence. No one stirs.
Perhaps, Peter thinks, a squeaky brake-pad. He starts to read his newspaper again.
A muted male voice cries again. “Help.” It’s unmistakable.
Peter snaps to attention, dropping the Trib to his side. Still the other passengers do not move.
Then the pounding starts…
…from behind him.
Peter whips about and stares out the rectangular window of the emergency exit. About two feet separate his car from the lead. A narrow catwalk guarded by ropes of thick chain forms a causeway. During a crisis, passengers should use the emergency doors to move forward from car to car until able to safely disembark.
The sun’s shimmer on the window bounces his image back. He looks intently for several seconds, trying to identify the source of the noise. A flicker of a shadow skips across the window as the train passes a tree, briefly allowing Peter to peer into the illuminated cabin.
There is movement.
Lots of movement.
Peter’s face moves in, closer to the window. He cups a hand over his brow, almost presses his nose against the glass.
Again, just his mirror image, perhaps a shadow on the other side of the reflective pane.
Then, another flicker, silhouettes of a number of people, bodies all seemingly crowding into the rear of the passenger car. They are trying to push past each other toward the exit, toward Peter.
The scene is wiped away by the sun again. The effect is like a strobe light, the view outside Peter’s window rapidly alternating between a stark reflection and a panorama of commuters. They seem to move in slow motion as they struggle.
Peter feels G-forces press him against the door. The train starts a gradual dive, a twenty-degree descent that takes it into the subway’s mouth.
The stifled screaming of one voice becomes several, the pounding of fists more intense.
As the train dips into the darkness, the light of day disappears.
“What the…” Peter mouths as he peers into the forward car.
The forward cabin is fully illuminated, but his view is obscured by hands and faces pushed against the window.
They’re trying to get out, Peter realizes.
He sees their desperation. They can’t escape because they are pressed against the door and the door opens in. Is there a fire? They are either going to die under their own weight or burn to death!
And then the blood.
Not a trickle.
Not a smatter.
A shower…a fountain.
The window goes red, opaque, except for the streaks of
fists pounding on the glass.
He thinks he sees someone—one of the homeless?—biting…
Peter gulps hard.
...biting into the face of a middle-aged man. The man flails his arms and screams, his hands striking the window casing. The homeless man pulls him down to the floor.
Peter’s mouth goes agape, his eyes wide. There’s no fire. This is something worse.
He spins, finds his fellow passengers sedate. They don’t know, so he tells them, “There’s a problem in the next car!”
Seated and standing alike, the passengers stare at him with contempt. How dare this lunatic interrupt the isolation of their morning commute?
The intercom breaks in. It is not the pleasant sounding recording. It is the voice of the conductor, full of desperation. “Passengers, there’s trouble in the front car!” He breathes heavily over the intercom as if he’s winded.
Now the passengers in Peter’s car start to look worried, and they all try to look past him trying to determine just what he knows.
A man with dark, slicked-back hair removes an ear bud. “What did he say?”
Peter does not have time to answer. The conductor’s plaintive shriek cracks over the intercom, and the train lurches forward. The passengers yelp as they’re tossed backwards. Peter bounces like popcorn, goes to his hands and knees. He’s lucky. The man with the slick hair catapults deep into the car. He lands somewhere twenty feet or more back, legs kicking in the air. Others are knocked out of their seats or into the laps of fellow passengers. They are a jar of shaken beetles, appendages tangled, wrestling with one another to get free.
The train whirs. It is speeding up, building momentum. As it races forward, it rocks to and fro violently. The lights flash, the train losing and then gaining contact with the electrified third rail.
Train stations fly past. North Avenue. Clark and Division.
We are going to crash, Peter thinks.
He crawls back toward the front of the car and pulls himself halfway under a seat. He wraps his arm at the elbow around the supports.
Grand Street Station. “This is Grand,” the automated voice coos. Really?
And a moment later, the locomotive does just what Peter predicted. It strikes the caboose of the train just leaving Grand Street Station.
The collision lasts less than a full second. But to those there, it happens in slow motion, edited like an action sequence in a Will Smith movie. The events could be dissected, specifically:
The front of the train implodes, aluminum flowering at the impact site;
In a chain reaction, the second car, Peter’s car, collides with the first, the former popping off the rails to the left and striking a subterranean wall, windows exploding;
The rear of the second car spins to the right, angling upward, the third car slamming it, pushing it over the platform’s edge, throwing sparks, and scattering commuters like dandelion seeds in a strong wind;
The third car burrows beneath the second, driving the latter into the ceiling, mortar and rebar raining down; and
The fourth, fifth, and sixth cars pancake, bending and twisting like molten toothpaste, sealing off the northern portion of the tube.
**
Peter slowly comes to. He sits up against the end of the car, shards of glass rolling down the front of his shirt. His ears ring, just as they had done when he was a teen shooting his twenty-gauge on his grandfather’s farm in Kentucky. He smells the ozone of an electrical fire, and he struggles to see through the midst of smoke that quickly fills the car.
The car sits on a 35-degree angle. No one moves. Despite some distant crying and weak groans for help, no one really makes a sound. A small fire erupts in the rear.
Peter tries to stand, falters, catches himself. He winces and raises a hand to his crown. It feels wet, stings at his touch. Subdural hematoma, he thinks.
He reaches forward for a handgrip, white-hot pain shooting up the inside of his left arm. His teeth clench. Muscle tear, he reasons. He squeezes his arm at his elbow, pulling it to his waist.
He hobbles toward the center of the cabin, the main entry, until—
He remembers the face of a man…before it was ripped from his skull.
Peter stops dead in his tracks and glances over his shoulder toward the emergency exit.
There’s a fire inside that car, too, yet larger, and growing out of control. Dark shadows bounce in the red and orange light, lurching across a canvas of sprayed blood and fractured glass. Their heads move in violent nodding motions, their hands jerking wildly about their faces.
Peter freezes.
My God. They are eating, tugging, and pulling at…each other.
He takes a step back, bile rising in his throat.
That’s when one of them hesitates. He diverts his attention to Peter, focusing on him, turning his head slightly like a dog in thought. Then he growls and rushes the emergency exit.
“Fuck!” Peter exclaims, the crazed man banging on the exit.
The man hits the door with force, pressing his face against the window and twisting from side to side for a better view of Peter. The man snarls, blood flowing from his lips, and he charges the glass of the exit with his shoulder.
Spider web cracks appear, expanding as the man hurtles at it again and again. That psycho is going to break his skull wide open!
Peter sets off towards the main exit again and hesitates. There are more of them, more of them feeding on the commuters. If he runs from the car, they’ll be on the platform—and him—in seconds.
So he races the other direction, quickly diving to his left and out a broken window.
Chapter Eleven: A Bottled Message
The page runs up the stairs, tripping over his billowing robe as he goes. He slips down three stairs and bangs his shin. He cringes as the pain shoots up his leg. He crumbles the paper in his hand and finds the strength to lift himself. Then he’s running again. He has news, and his news has too much weight for him to give in to the throbbing.
He knows, too, that this pain is nothing compared to the hurt Statten will inflict if he fails to deliver this message in a timely manner.
He takes the stairs two at a time.
When he gets to the top of the flight, he’s nearly out of breath. He knocks on the large oak doors, holds his knees, and waits for an invitation.
“Come in,” an annoyed voice moans.
The door creaks as the page enters, echoing Statten’s groan. The page breathes hard. He can’t yet bring himself to speak.
Statten doesn’t look up. He is signing documents, passing them left to right. He adjusts his glasses as he reads another parchment. He blows, annoyed. “What? Out with it already.”
“We’ve lost a plane,” the page says. “Flight 183 to Padre Island.”
Statten holds his petite hand out. “Let me see the manifest,” he snaps. “Now!”
The page watches Statten read the creased sheet. Statten glowers as he draws a finger down the registry. Mostly nobodies. Except there, Richard King. Richard King will be missed. He was good at providing information about the comings and goings of the flock.
And there, Doctor Heston. His mouth twists. The people, more than Statten, will miss Heston. There was just something about him, though, that Statten didn’t trust. Perhaps too much free will.
He continues through the manifest until…his finger stops on a name.
Statten’s eyes thin, then widen, a glow rising in them slowly like a newly lit candle. His cheeks plump as the edges of his mouth turn up, revealing a ravenous-looking set of teeth.
The page thinks Statten looks like some villain from an old black and white film. All Statten needs to do is twist an imaginary mustache or ring his hands maniacally to complete the picture.
But this film isn’t so silent. Statten laughs. No, he actually cackles as he jabs the sheet with a single gaunt finger. His finger punches one name again and again and again.
Van Gerome. Van Gerome. Van Gerome.
�
�Should we contact his father?” the page asks.
Statten looks up, startled. He realizes with horror he’s been saying Van’s name aloud. Over and over and over. All he can muster is a stunned, “What?”
“Should I contact the bishop in Cincinnati? Should we send a team out to locate Roger Gerome?”
“No, no, no, no, no…” Statten tut-tuts. The bishop is too busy blessing the new recruits. He’s likely on the front. And there’s definitely no reason to bother Roger Gerome. He’s in the field doing God’s work. What could be more important? Nothing.
Not even Roger Gerome’s son. Especially not his son.
**
Roger Gerome’s team moves north quietly. They do not drive tanks, or troop carriers or humvees. They use none of the heavy equipment from Fort Knox. Those machines are best suited to the front.
Instead, they bike.
Bicycles give Gerome the element of surprise. They cover miles in near silence. Plus, there are no guarantees of fuel, let alone tools and parts, should a truck break down on the road. Vehicles would require drivers and mechanics, and Gerome wants to drag as few personnel as possible into the wilderness.
The same rules don’t apply once they’ve completed their mission and are ready to return home. Then, fully loaded with their booty, they hotwire an old UPS or Fed Ex truck, hightailing it back.
They spend nine months of the year on the move like this. The other three months they spend training. It is arduous work. It is unrewarding work. But it is work beyond the prying eyes of the church. That’s good enough for Gerome.
North.
They find mostly death on the road north.