Undying

by Amie Kaufman

  “Hang on.” Jules detaches my hand from his sleeve—when did I grab him?—and, before we can stop him, goes back inside the dining car. He’s only gone long enough for Neal and me to exchange horrified looks before the train decelerates with a lurch and a terrible screeching of brakes, and we both go slamming together against the wall of the car. There’s some kind of alarm blaring, and when Jules returns he’s a bit breathless.

  “Emergency stop,” he explains. “But they saw me pull it, we’ve got to jump.”

  “Hang on!” I echo Jules’s words with a tiny grin, and head the other direction, into the car behind ours. The place is already in chaos, with people reacting to the emergency alarm and the train’s rapid deceleration, so I have to shout at the top of my lungs to be heard.

  “Everyone, listen!” I cry, noting with satisfaction the heads turning toward me. “There’s a fire a few cars ahead and they’ve pulled the emergency stop—everybody get off the train!”

  And while the entire car abandons their seats, I duck back out. Now, when we do jump, half the train’s going to jump off right after us, giving us the cover we need to get away unnoticed.

  Neal’s got his face pressed to the glass of the dining car door, watching the officials make their way toward us. Jules nods at me, and I nod back, and for a moment we’re on the same team again. He reaches for my hand, tangling his warm fingers through mine and squeezing.

  The train’s still moving along at a pretty good pace, but at least I can actually see the gravel now—though damn, that does not make jumping any easier—and we’re out of time. In a moment, the occupants of the car behind us will come spilling out after us, and the officials from the dining car will have gotten here too.

  Neal turns away from the door and stops at the sight of us. “For the love of—stop making eyes at each other and just bloody jump already!”

  Jules twitches, glances at me—and as one, the three of us throw ourselves from the train.

  IN THE INSTANT THAT I LEAP, I TRY TO REMIND MYSELF TO ROLL when I hit the ground, because that’s what they do in movies. But the impact drives the breath from my lungs, sends a wave of pain through me, and then I’m rolling, rolling, with no idea where my limbs are, which way is up, which way is down, the sky flashing past me over and over as I tumble down the embankment.

  I only stop when I run out of momentum. I carefully blink my eyes open and look at the sky, my lungs aching as they try helplessly to drag in breath after breath. To one side I can hear a string of broken, breathless curses, so I know where Mia is, and that she’s alive.

  Finally I get enough air in my lungs to push myself up onto my elbows, and look around. Farther up the tracks the train has stopped, and passengers are pouring out onto the embankment—among them I see the officials we were trying so hard to avoid. Neal’s on all fours beside me, trying unsuccessfully to climb to his feet, and Mia’s already sitting up with a grimace. Deus, she’s unstoppable.

  That thought pulls me straight back to my disagreement with Mia, of course, but I suck in another breath and force myself to my feet, and Mia pulls Neal to his, despite being half his size. Then, wordlessly, the three of us turn to jog away from the tracks and toward the tree line, to get out of sight as quickly as we can.

  Pine needles crunch beneath my feet as we enter the forest, my nose filling with their clean, crisp scent. Straight-backed pines tower above us, and the air grows cooler in their shade.

  “What now?” Neal’s the first one to break the silence, and while I’m grateful for that, it still strikes something uncomfortable deep within me that he’s looking to us for a plan.

  “We obviously can’t take the train all the way to Prague,” Mia says, still brushing gravel off her clothes as she walks. “I saw a road from the train just beyond the trees. Maybe we can hitchhike through Germany and across the Czech border.”

  “And say what to whoever picks us up?” I ask. “Tell them we came from where, to hitch this lift?”

  “From the train,” Mia says beside me. “Where some crazy person screamed that a fire had broken out. Better yet, make it some armed fugitive. We did what any sensible person would do, and ran for it. No need to mess too much with a story when it’s already working.”

  Neal shoots me an impressed look over her head, with a healthy dose of you-better-not-mess-this-up and a side-serving of any-disagreement-you’re-having-is-probably-your-fault-because-she’s-amazing.

  But it’s not that simple, of course. She’s right, and I’m right, and nobody’s right, and I’ve never been less sure of what to do in all my life. Back on the train, she looked into my eyes and told me that wherever we went, we’d go together. I want—I need—that promise to be true. Hearing her talk about going to Prague again—knowing she’ll go wherever she’s going with me—makes me feel like I’m taking my first deep breath of the day. I just wish I knew what Prague holds in store for us.

  I follow the others to the road that’s busy with traffic, perhaps thanks to the evacuation. Mia, the smallest and least intimidating of us—at least until you get to know her—only takes a few minutes to flag down a car holding a middle-aged German couple, who turn out to be called Gisela and Luisa.

  Mia’s breathless story about a man with a gun on the train does the trick. The Germans aren’t keen to hang about and ask for details when they have no way of knowing whether that imaginary man is still on the train or roaming the countryside.

  We all have English as a common language, and Luisa uses it as she pulls back out into traffic. I can see her face in the mirror, and after a moment her eyes flick up to meet mine. But while Gisela is all sympathy, there’s an edge in Luisa’s eyes—something darker, a suspicion, perhaps—that makes me uneasy.

  “We should take them to the police,” she tells her wife. “But I’m not sure where. The train has come from France, ja? The gunman will be French?”

  “The border is behind us,” says Gisela absently, while looking at something on a tablet. I can barely see over her shoulder from where the three of us are crammed in the backseat. The cramped quarters are giving me flashbacks to my time in orbit, only this time Neal is shoved in on the other side of Mia.

  “And we don’t want to go back to France,” Mia blurts quickly, her voice wavering. Her fear sounds real to me—I can see her white-knuckled grip on the edge of the seat and I’m not sure she’s pretending at all. “The train went through—through Lyon.”

  Gisela looks up from the tablet, eyebrows lifting. “I am just reading that they no longer evacuate Lyon,” she says quietly. “They quarantine the city.”

  “What?” Luisa nearly swerves into the next lane. “There are over a million people in Lyon!”

  “And now,” says Gisela, eyes on the screen, “that is where they will stay.” She twists around in her seat to look back at the three of us, perhaps taking in properly for the first time how dusty and dirty we are. “Was it bad, what you saw there?”

  “Yes,” I say, because there’s no point in lying.

  She must read something of the truth in my face, for hers grows more solemn, and she hesitates a long moment before nodding. “I am guessing all your luggage is on that train.” She glances across at Luisa, who has her eyes on the road, then continues. “I know you should go to the police, make a statement, but I don’t think this is a good area to be in for much longer. This illness in Lyon …”

  Luisa glances across at her for a moment, wary, switching to German, which she’s no doubt assuming none of us will understand. “Was machst du, Schatz?” What are you doing, darling?

  Gisela shoots her a quelling look, then continues in English: “We are driving across the country to our home, it is near Dresden, do you know it?”

  I can feel Mia hesitate at my side, and I’m quick to jump in. “That’s where we were going next, that’s where we were hoping to get a flight home.”

  “I think you should come with us. Usually it is about seven hours, it might be a little longer with this traffic. We
will take you to the station, or the airport, and you can arrange to go home.”

  Luisa shoots her another look, glances at me in the rearview mirror—clearly not sold on us—and then accelerates a little more aggressively into the next lane over.

  “Sie sind nur Kinder,” Gisela says, and though I certainly don’t feel like a kid, not after everything we’ve been through, I’ll take the excuse. No matter what we decide to do next, the fact that we’re “just kids” won’t help us if we end up back at the French border, talking to the police.

  I look sideways at Mia, and she nods a fraction. Neal does the same. “Thank you,” I say. “Today has been so frightening. We just want to go somewhere we can catch a plane back home to our parents. This was meant to be a safe holiday. We won’t be any trouble, you won’t even know we’re in the backseat.”

  Luisa softens for that, and shoots her wife a long-suffering look. Then she’s watching me again, suspicion warring with something familiar that I can’t quite place. “Of course,” she says finally—and once she says the words, she doesn’t examine me in the mirror again.

  Gisela maintains the peace by switching the radio to a local music station, and that precludes any chance of further conversation for the next hour. The countryside flashes by, and I try to press myself against the window to give Mia a little room—she’s crammed between two lanky, long-legged water polo players like the meat in a very cramped sandwich.

  My back’s starting to really protest—funny how as soon as your life’s not in immediate danger, you find time to notice other things—when my daydreams are shattered by a violent bang from somewhere up ahead.

  Luisa abruptly yanks the wheel to the right, sending the car out onto the shoulder of the road with a scream of brakes and the crunch of gravel, dust and stones flying in every direction.

  My seat belt locks into place, sending a bolt of pain through my collarbone as it keeps me from crashing into the back of Gisela’s seat, and beside me I can hear Mia gasping for breath, wheezing helplessly as her lungs refuse to cooperate.

  Out on the road in front of us is a white minivan lying on its side, blocking both lanes, windows smashed, trails of glass strewn over the road. It’s as if someone just yanked the wheel to one side as the thing was going full speed.

  And oh, Deus, that’s a day care center’s logo on the door.

  Luisa’s already scrambling out of the car, and the rest of us are quick to follow—we practically fall out as the doors open, and I can feel my legs shaking as I get my feet underneath me and stumble toward the van. I’m dimly aware that other cars are pulling up behind us, a series of bangs telling me some aren’t managing to stop in time, but my focus is completely on the van, and the children I’m terrified are inside.

  Luisa and Neal were on the side closest to the accident, and they’re running with me on their heels—the underside of the van faces us, one of the wheels still spinning. The driver’s side door faces skyward, and a bloodied woman comes bursting through the shattered window, snarling and clawing at the air like a wild animal.

  I slam into Neal’s broad back as he stops, and Mia slams into mine as we pile up like the cars behind us, and the woman sniffs the air, then starts trying to climb through the window, growling her displeasure at the tight fit. She must have hit her head, because she—

  “Watch out!” Mia screams the warning behind me, and I whirl in time to see her grab Gisela, yanking her away from a pair of bloodied, blank-faced small children who have crawled out the broken back window of the minivan, and are stumbling toward her. One has blond hair in two long braids, the ends whipping back and forth as she staggers to one side.

  We’ve seen blank faces like this before. We’ve seen—

  “They’re from Lyon!” Neal snaps, grabbing at Luisa’s arm to keep her from stepping forward. “They’re infected!”

  His voice is loud enough that I immediately hear shouts from behind us, hear the news spread back down through the backed-up traffic, but I can’t take my eyes off the mindless stare of the woman trying to escape from the minivan’s window.

  “We have to go,” I hear myself say. “We have to go, we can’t catch this from them. We have to get away.”

  My heart’s breaking inside my chest, and my mind’s all too ready to imagine—this woman must have tried to get the children out when the flu started showing up, she must have … She’s a good person. She tried.

  But now she’s almost an animal, and so are they, and if this happens to us, then Earth loses the last people who know this is connected to the Undying. Who might be able to stop this thing from happening on a global scale.

  We have to go.

  And yet we all hesitate for one collective moment, desperately searching for something, anything, we can do. Then the woman snarls again, and as if a spell’s been broken, we’re freed from our paralysis, and we throw ourselves back into our own car.

  There are more children now, climbing out of the broken windows of the van, and Gisela’s sobbing as Luisa throws our car into reverse, the tires grinding against the gravel in her haste to get away. As she puts the car into drive I’m suddenly aware of the blast of horns behind us—of people who still have no idea what’s happening here—and then everything’s drowned out by the scream of metal as my side of the car drags along the safety barrier, and Luisa shoves us through the gap between the barriers and the back of the minivan.

  And then we’re accelerating, and nobody’s speaking, and I can still hear Gisela crying over the soft sound of the radio as she dials the emergency number and reports what happened. She doesn’t say anything about the three hitchhikers in her backseat.

  After that, we’re quiet. I don’t doubt each of the others is doing exactly the same thing as me, replaying the crash over and over in their minds, wondering if there’s anything we could have done for that woman, those children.

  It’s about half an hour later when Luisa speaks in a shaky voice. “That was what you saw in Lyon? Their minds gone?”

  “Yes,” Mia says quietly.

  “The whole city?”

  “We don’t know,” Mia admits. “But if they’ve quarantined them, then maybe. Soon, if not now.”

  Luisa slowly shakes her head. “By tomorrow, that city will be chaos,” she murmurs. “I am … an electrician, you would say in English. Lyon’s power comes from their solar array, their power plant. Do you know what happens if the workers are too sick to run the plant? There is no power, almost immediately. This means no lights, no TV, no internet. No news, once the phone batteries run out. Electricity is needed to pump water, so nobody can drink. No traffic lights, so the town is in gridlock, and nobody can communicate to fix it. There is no way to process payment without electricity, so looting begins. If you take away power and then quarantine a city, whoever has not lost their minds inside it …”

  “We must hope the government works quickly, finds the cure,” Gisela says, reaching across to squeeze her wife’s hand, voice still thick with tears.

  Neal, Mia, and I exchange a long look, filled with all our exhaustion, and all our fear. Because the government doesn’t know what they’re up against, and they don’t stand a chance.

  Not long after, Luisa turns the wheel to the right, pulling off the road and into a service lane. My body’s instantly back on high alert, and I feel Mia tense beside me, but a moment later, we’re both breathing out. Up ahead is a service station—fuel, food, other conveniences all clustered together, with tired holidaymakers filling up the parking lot and hurrying in to restock before they continue their journeys. Oblivious to the disaster behind them.

  “We must eat—time for lunch, I think,” Luisa says, as she gives up on finding a proper parking space, and simply drives up onto a mostly dead, rather sad little grassy area. “We will return here in half an hour, ja? Do you Kinder have money?”

  We mumble yes and thank you as we tumble out of the car and stretch our legs, and look around to get our bearings. All down the side of the car
the doors are scratched and gouged from where Luisa forced us past the safety barrier.

  I halfway wonder if Mia would’ve rather us pretend we didn’t have money, in the hope of preserving our meager stash—but one look at her face tells me she has no more desire to bilk these people than I do. Not after what’s just happened to all of us.

  “Not to sound mistrustful,” Neal says as we scan our surroundings, “but let’s eat somewhere we can see the car, so we can conveniently turn up if it looks like they’re going to change their minds and bolt. And somewhere cheap, this cash isn’t going to last forever.”

  And so we end up in a little diner that has a booth against the glass wall between it and the parking lot, keeping one eye on our ride out of here while we do our best to find something edible on the menu. Which still seems an easier task than speaking freely, now we’re alone.

  I glance at Neal, hoping to signal him to break the silence, because I have no idea what to say myself. But his eyes are glued to his phone, giving me a flicker of indignation—the SIM card he brought me doesn’t have any data left, so I can’t use my watch to get to the internet without Wi-Fi. Which, judging from the state of this diner, is not something they’ve got on offer.

  So instead, I mumble something about going up to place our order, and head up to the counter. German isn’t my best language—I can understand and speak it fine, but I can never get the accent exactly right. The lady behind the counter, a stout, middle-aged waitress with deeply etched frown lines and her hair in a severe bun, nevertheless smiles a warm, friendly smile when I order our sandwiches in my accented German. She bustles off to deliver the order to the kitchen, leaving me alone at the counter.

  My whole body tingles, torn between ravenous hunger at the smell of food, and horror still singing through me from the crash and its aftermath. But we have to eat, as Luisa pointed out.

  I linger as long as I can, making a show of inspecting the case of desserts while I pull myself together. It’d be foolish to waste our money on junk, especially after living off of vending machine snacks for the last day, but I can’t help but gaze longingly at the Käsekuchen and Bienenstich. The latter has the perfect layer of caramelized nuts on top, and I can just imagine the way the custard and almond cake taste.