by Nick Cole
In time, we saw the light of the train weaving across the land from the east. At one point, it cast a long white light out over a dark bayou.
The storm had moved off and the sky directly overhead was clear. Clouds hung like glowing white billowy curtains across the night sky.
It was the sound of screeching metal that told us something wasn’t right.
We heard a loud BANG. Then the screeching got worse. When the train heaved around the long curve leading to the town, we could see an old pickup truck being pushed forward in front of the locomotive.
“Someone must’ve left a vehicle on the tracks. Idiots!” cursed Major Firestein.
We could hear the radio chatter from Major Firestein’s earpiece.
“They’re going to stop and try to push it off to the side. Specialist, help with the tow chain in back... turn on the headlights first.”
Then Firestein spoke into his mic.
“Command, do you see our light? Stop here and we’ll attach the tow chain from the Humvee and drag the truck away from the front of the train.”
More radio chatter.
“Be ready boys, they’re drawing lots of infected out from the swamp, due to the noise of the brakes and the pickup. This is going to be very close. Jason, when the train gets here, I want you to get out of the vehicle and head to the engine. Get on board quickly. I’ll cover you with the gun. You’ve done enough, son.”
I had that “this is going to pinch” feeling.
The squealing the train made grew louder. So loud, I felt it couldn’t get any louder, and still it got louder.
“Sir, they’re coming out of the buildings!” yelled an agitated McKnight.
We’d been so focused on the train, we didn’t notice that many of the dead were already shambling down the street toward us. Not many. Mostly singles. But it was something we didn’t need right now.
Major Firestein began to engage them with the machinegun, knocking down as many as he could. Still, they crawled forward or just got back up and continued toward us as more bullets smashed into them.
The train screeched to a halt in the center of the town.
“Move forward, Specialist, and pull alongside the pickup. Point the vehicle away from the train.”
We did, and once we were in place, I waited for the Major to tell me to go.
From the back of the train, tracer rounds and gunfire were zipping off into the woods surrounding the town, as a ragged wave of Infected emerged out of the night-misted bayous.
“Go, Jason! Get on the train now!”
I ran forward.
All I could hear was the THUMP THUMP THUMP of the machine gun as it ground out short bursts against the shuffling, groaning sick that closed in on us from every direction. Between bursts, I could hear McKnight swearing as he dragged the tow chain out of the rear hatch and attached it to the crumpled pick-up truck.
Infected were surging around the armored rear of the stopped train.
Grenades exploded.
Every gun cackled on full automatic, stitching wet thumps into the swarming corpses.
The engineer hoisted me up with one hand, and I heard the Humvee gun its engine.
I heard tearing metal.
I heard the engineer swear as he added power, causing the engines to spool up into an urgent doomsday hum.
At first we were barely moving. Then we slowly began picking up speed.
My heart nailed the wall of my chest like a jackhammer.
I saw the dead crash into the side of the Humvee, tearing and hissing. Major Firestein climbed out of the top hatch and dropped off the far side of the vehicle, away from them. A moment later, McKnight flung open the passenger door and pulled away from one of the things that had managed to crawl in after him. They were both running for the rear of the train. I could see McKnight clutching at a blood-spurting wrist.
And then the train seemed to pick up incredible speed all at once. I looked out the rear window of the engine and saw the last few cars falling behind. At first I thought it was an optical illusion. Then I saw the gap between the last cars and the main body of the train widening.
The engineer picked up the phone as a red light flashed urgently telling him he had a call. After a moment he hung up, pushing a long lever forward as the pounding noise of the engine increased and finally drowned out all other sound.
“General wants more speed. Alright buddy, more speed it is,” growled the engineer as if someone else was listening, but really, it was only to reassure himself.
The train crashed forward into the unknown night ahead.
I sat on the floor, my back against the vibrating wall of the engine.
We had left our own behind.
Major Firestein and Specialist McKnight among them.
Surrounded in the middle of the night, trapped in a train going nowhere.
Did they have enough ammo?
Since then, things have been weird.
It took me a day to stop shaking enough to be able to write this down. I feel hollow and angry all at once.
I wish there was a place where I could find Alex. A place I knew where to look and knew for sure I would find her. Like a long cross-country drive nearing its end, knowing as you cross those last vast miles, knowing in the deepest place of your heart, that when you arrive, there will be food and comfort and people who love you for no other reason than that they do.
But I don’t think there’s any place like that left in this world anymore.
November 9th
Yesterday, I thought Pettigrew was going to be a problem.
But in the middle of the night a group of soldiers stormed his office, shot him in the foot, and threw him off the train, somewhere in the darkness we’re now speeding through.
I don’t even know where we’re at.
I thought Pettigrew would be a problem.
Now the mutineers are the problem.
In fact, the entire train is now full of mutineers. If that’s what they’re called. Some Sergeant named Calloway tried to maintain order. He said we were going to continue the mission and see it through to Los Angeles. He said he couldn’t serve under Pettigrew anymore. Not after what happened to Major Firestein.
Apparently Pettigrew had been acting peculiar all along. But we didn’t get much of a chance to notice that back in the laundry. The straw that broke the camel’s back was stranding Major Firestein and the other soldiers in the caboose. Pettigrew, getting reports that the rear cars were being overrun with infected, had ordered his men to detach the rearmost train cars, stranding their comrades.
They did it, but found they couldn’t live with it.
By the next evening, they’d recovered from the shock of what they’d been ordered to do. They simmered long enough to decide they’d need to administer the justice Pettigrew deserved.
Now he’s out there. Among them. Running and hiding with a bullet in his foot. So, limping and hiding is more like it. The mutineers effectively sentenced him to death. Or something worse.
If they knew what I’d done back in the Tower to save my own skin, would they throw me off the train too?
Probably.
Do I deserve it?
Yes.
And no.
I deserve it because if I write it down here and let you read it, whoever you are, you’ll tell me I deserve it. See, right now, no one knows what I did. No one knows what it took to survive, climbing upward every day, leaving barricades, clearing floors, scavenging. Again and again. Over and over. Ignoring the groans and roars and constant banging of rotten flesh on hollow stairwell doors below you. At times, they seemed so intent at getting to us. Other times they remained quiet. Then, just one of them would start bashing into an object repeatedly, keeping time like some clock in the hall. Like some clock in hell.
Then they’d come after us again.
And I did whatever it took to survive. Even if that meant someone else might not make it.
That’s the question. Do I deserve death
or worse for making it?
I survived.
I survived long enough to make it to the roof.
To make it to the helicopter.
Through all those floors.
And friends.
The smoke and the wind at the top of the Tower on the day they rescued me felt like just punishment. It felt like Hell’s front door. Like being embraced by judgement for the first time, and for all time. And then the Army pulled me off the roof with all of the dead below, clambering up through our barricades. My barricades.
I’d cheated them. The Dead. And judgement.
November 10th
Calloway has lost control. Most of the soldiers are drunk. I went forward to the engineer’s compartment to see why we were going so fast. They’ve forced him to keep the train at speed during the day. We’re roaring into Texas now, headed for San Antonio.
No one knows what’s supposed to happen in San Antonio.
There was a plan. Maybe another Special Forces refuel mission. But that went out the door with Pettigrew, and Calloway won’t let anyone call back to Manhattan on the Sat Phone.
So the plan is just to get to Los Angeles, fast.
I went back to the laundry. No one was working. People are still turning in their sheets though. So I got the machines going and worked for a while. At first I hoped everyone would sober up and go back to work. Stop drinking, playing cards, fighting, and shooting out the window every time we pass a great migrating wave of the sick.
But no one did and the immensity of the task overwhelmed me.
Finally I just turned on the steam press and pressed one set of sheets over and over. Again and again.
I like steam.
I like drinking cold water while I steam press.
I shared a smoke with Kyle in the breezeway. He hasn’t left his post. I guess Atterly was in one of the cars that got left behind with Major Firestein.
I’ve been thinking all day about what I need to do next.
Which is kind of funny, being on a train full of people suffering from some form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Or even just being on a train. Because there’s not much you can do on a train. Your choice is pretty much made for you. All you can do is wait until it stops.
But I’ve found something I can do.
I can write it all down. Write down what it took to survive. Then, whoever reads it can judge me.
Maybe I’ll just find a stranger in LA. Just walk up to him or her, and say, “Could you read this and tell me if I deserve to die? If I’ve somehow done the un-doable thing that we won’t be able to live with. Please let me know so I can turn in my human card.”
Or maybe I’ll find Alex and she’ll read what I’ve done.
And then she can judge me.
November 11th
It’s just after three in the morning. I didn’t finish the other entry too long ago, but I can’t sleep and someone’s playing a Neil Diamond’s greatest hits CD in the forward compartment. It sounds like there’s a party in there.
But that’s not why I can’t sleep.
I can do it in batches. I can tell you about my four shames in batches. And the truth of the matter is, I’ve already told you one of them. The shame of running when there was nothing I could do but run.
When it all started, I ran.
And then there is my second shame.
The shame of Derek.
Derek is the guy you never really know when you’re a broker. He’s the guy who keeps your computer running. But I thought I knew Derek. I always hooked Derek up with a bottle of top-shelf Scotch during the holidays. Well, I did once. We only had one Christmas before things went bad. It wasn’t until later, when it was just the four of us in the Tower, that Derek told us he didn’t drink. We’d found someone’s vodka. It had been a week since everything went sour. A week of going floor to floor, barricading the floor we were leaving, both stairwells with all the desks, cabinets, and shelves we could fling down into the darkness. Knowing that if help didn’t come, we’d have to go through the ceiling again in a few hours, or maybe a day or so.
Derek showed us how to get through the ceilings because the dead were filling the stairwells and the floors below. As an IT guy, he knew all about ceilings.
On the night we found the vodka, we’d just made it to the twenty-seventh floor I think. It always felt like a new start each time we burrowed our way through the ceiling and sliced open the corporate carpet with a box cutter, or banged out a wall panel as we crawled up through a telecom bundle. It always felt like starting over as we reached a pristine, almost untouched new floor.
We started drinking after we set the barricades at each stairwell. We found the big offices, searched the desks, pulled the couches together, and stretched out to listen to music on our IPhones. The city, or at least our building, still had power, so we could charge our phones.
In fact, when you looked out the windows at night, the buildings that weren’t burning still had their lights on. You could see other people beyond the windows. Other survivors.
There were some people in another building we waved at every night. Their building was opposite ours across an intersection. They couldn’t figure out how to get up through the floors like we did. We kept going up and they kept waving at us from below.
Then one night, the survivors in the other building were gone. They didn’t come to the window to wave. But there was still movement on their floor. Shadows lumbering aimlessly down the hallways. I thought back over our day. However we’d spent it, it had probably been their last.
That night, we found the vodka and drank it. Each of us laying on our backs, listening to something mellow, we passed the bottle one to the next. Then I realized Derek wasn’t drinking. Hadn’t been drinking. He’d just hold the bottle for a moment, then pass it on. Carmichael next, I think. Kathy, Derek, Carmichael, then me. Repeat.
I asked Derek why he didn’t drink. He said he just didn’t. He said drinking was his apocalypse. In college he’d had a problem. He’d quit. Gone to AA. But in the back of his mind, he’d always had what he called an “Apocalypse.” A dark fantasy that took place if life went completely sideways on him someday. Then he’d drink again.
I asked him what “sideways” meant. As in, what are the terms of the deal in which one finally announces things have gone officially “sideways”.
He was quiet. “Don’t know,” he said. “I’ll know when it happens.” Then he added, “Family dying stuff. My wife getting killed in a subway accident. That’s sideways.”
Yeah. I know. It’s obvious. If anything was ever going to be considered “sideways”, our present circumstances in the Tower would definitely qualify. I didn’t even know he had a wife. I couldn’t imagine she was still alive out there somewhere. I couldn’t imagine anyone was still alive besides the four of us.
Sideways.
Three days later, two floors above, Derek opens an office door and one of them comes straight for him. All of us were checking offices in the same hall.
We always found booze.
Derek pushes it back into the office and closes the door.
Then Carmichael goes in after it with his Monday morning meeting bat.
He’s screaming at it. Working up all the Alpha Male stockbroker rage he needs to bash another one into...
I look at Derek.
He’s bleeding.
At that moment, I’m thinking something I never thought I’d ever think.
I am not thinking, “How can we save Derek?”
I’m thinking, “How can we get rid of Derek?”
We are going up to the next floor, Derek. You can’t come.
But I don’t say anything at just that moment.
Kathy doesn’t say anything either. She just looks away as if Derek no longer exists.
Carmichael coming out of the room, heaving, looks at Derek and says, “Walk it off, bro.”
Like Derek just got beaned by a stray pitch in the Big Game.
Not bitten by
a rabid human corpse.
Later that night, when Derek helps us move up to the next floor, as Kathy is handing things we’ve collected up to Carmichael, Derek says, “the truth is, I don’t have an apocalypse.”
Then, as if I hadn’t heard him, Derek says again, “I don’t have an apocalypse, Jason.”
I stare at him. Because though no one has said it, no one has actually articulated it, we are leaving him down here. It was his idea to move on to the next floor up. Except he’s not going, and he knows it.
“My sponsor,” he says, still talking, hoping we’re listening, “is this old guy. So old they call him the Crocodile. He said to me one time, don’t ever have one. Don’t ever have an Apocalypse. He said that to me when we weren’t even talking about anything in particular. We were just sitting together at a diner over on 54th. Having coffee, taking inventory. I was good, so there wasn’t much inventory. I was watching the traffic while I told him about something I occasionally thought of and felt bad about. I told him that if Monica, my wife, ever got killed, like pushed onto the subway tracks, then I’d get all the tequila in the world and I’d just drink it. Right there in that coffee shop, I... I fantasized about what it would be like. If my wife was dead and I could drink as much as I wanted to again. And this wasn’t a long fantasy. It was real short. Like, in the time it takes you to blink your eye, you see the whole dark picture. My sponsor just says, he’s staring out the window too, watching the traffic, he just says, “Don’t ever have one.”
“One what,” I say.
“An apocalypse. Don’t ever have an end of the world just so you can start drinking again. Because chances are, kid, you’ll live long enough and you’ll get your apocalypse, and the last thing you’ll need to do is start drinking again.”
We didn’t say anything. But Derek knew we were listening to him. To his last words.
“This guy was so good at being a sponsor to human wrecks trying to put their lives back together,” continued Derek. “He knew every trick in the book, and I didn’t even need to ask him why. I just said to myself, “Okay, I won’t have an apocalypse.”
