Deep Breath Hold Tight: Stories About the End of Everything

by Gurley, Jason

  I looked up the line. The train engine was engulfed in that same black smoke, and deep inside that smoke I could see flickering orange light. As I watched, a man leaped out of the engine and tumbled down the gravel embankment beside the train. He got to his feet and ran, shouting something I couldn’t hear, but the other railway men apparently could, because a moment later seven or eight of them ran down the slope after him. They fled into the field, which was mushy and soft and rich with soil so black it was like the townspeople of Black Hole had been pouring their old cooking grease into the field for years.

  Another railway man jumped off of the train, and as I watched, he landed poorly and pitched down the hill head-first. He hit the ground hard and lay still, and when the first group of men saw this, they turned and ran towards the train again. None of them had an easy time of it. They slogged through the soft dirt as if it were swallowing them from beneath. Together, they lifted the injured man by his arms and legs, his head left to dangle at a peculiar angle, and they began to trot as quickly as they could, moving away from the train and back into the grease field.

  This concerned me. I didn’t want to give myself away, so I decided to stay on the train. Whatever was happening at the front of the train couldn’t bother me back here. There must have been forty cars between the engine and my own.

  Then the engine blew up.

  My boxcar bucked into the air, and the forward wall turned into splinters as the empty freight car ahead of mine punched through it. I jumped out of the car — fell out — and went down the gravel incline like the last of the railway men, at every wrong angle and none of the right ones. I was lucky enough to land flat on my back, and without breaking anything.

  A warped hunk of shrapnel sizzled through the red sky and thudded into the earth beside me, hissing and steaming.

  A railroad spike.

  Like everything else that afternoon, I was sucked into Black Hole, Kentucky.

  Despite the apocalypse happening around me, I didn’t particularly want to reveal myself to the railway men, so I ran away from the grease field, away from the engine car. The train was floating on a balloon of fire behind me. I came upon a white clapboard church with a perfect steeple, and I ducked behind it and covered my ears.

  A storm of noise and heat bombarded the building at my back, but it died away, and I counted to a thousand before I peeked around the corner.

  The train was destroyed. The engine was a twisted bloom of metal and flame, smoke rising up like a dozen black-gloved fists. The rest of the cars had broken free and were scattered around like shattered dinnerware. Flaming bits of wood and oily metal dotted the tracks and the land around it. The tracks themselves were ruined, bent and slung about like shoelaces.

  I remembered the book and my burlap sack and the few peanuts that had been left. Everything that I owned in the world, other than my clothes, was gone. I wasn’t sad about the peanuts, but I had hoped to figure out more about the book. I had decided that it was a logbook, or perhaps a code manual, for old train-hoppers just like me. Now I would never know for sure.

  And I would miss the burlap sack. I had come to like it.

  Several of the boxcars and two freight cars had been thrown clear of the tracks, and had landed in the grease field.

  They were sinking.

  I wasn’t the only one to notice. One of the railway men had gone out into the field again, and he was standing atop one of the cars, staring at the carnage around him, shaking his head. The man turned and yelled at his coworkers, who stood at the edge of the field farthest from the tracks, and then he pointed at the car beneath him.

  Yep. Definitely sinking. Slowly, but the grease field was dragging the entire boxcar down.

  “I’ve never seen you,” a voice behind me said.

  I almost jumped out of my shirt. I turned around, afraid I might see a railway man there. But instead I saw a small woman in a tidy green suit and a brown skirt. She wore a stylish felt hat with flowers in the brim. They looked fresh.

  “They’re real,” she said. “The flowers.”

  I didn’t know what to say, or how to say it.

  “You want to know where I got them,” she said. “I grow them.”

  She seemed comfortable with my silence. She looked me up and down with a nod, then said, “You were on the train.”

  “Don’t tell anyone,” I said.

  “Ah,” she answered. “A stowaway. Well, don’t let those other fellows see you.”

  I shook my head. “No, ma’am.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me, and then she smiled and they flew open wide.

  “Come to my house,” she exclaimed. “I’ll make you some lunch.”

  “Your house?” I asked.

  Her house was nothing like the others. It sat square in the center of a few acres of freshly-cut, bright green grass. A trim white fence held it all in place. The house was painted bright blue, accented by trellises covered with ivy. She opened the gate and led me up a cobblestone path. I could smell cinnamon and apples. I recognized the smell of cinnamon from the supermarket. One of the last items on the shelves had been a small yellow container full of it. I had sniffed it, and because it smelled nice, I tasted it. It wasn’t quite the same.

  “I’ll make some tea,” she said. I had never had tea.

  I followed her into the house with only a little trepidation. Her home was cool and warm at the same time, and bursting with daylight that wasn’t soaked in red. The carpet wasn’t ripped from the floor boards, the walls weren’t stained with blood or bruised with water damage. There wasn’t a dead body to be found, not anywhere, and I looked pretty hard.

  I watched her run water from the sink into a kettle.

  I stared.

  “You haven’t seen running water before, have you?” she asked.

  I just shook my head.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “Black Hole,” she answered. “Oh, don’t worry. You’ll understand. Besides, it won’t last long.”

  I didn’t know what she meant by that.

  She smiled at me while she waited for something, and when the tea kettle sang at her, I jumped. She laughed kindly, and poured hot water into two cups. It steamed like the wreckage of the train. I watched her dip two tiny, pretty bags of what looked like dead things into the water, and wrinkled my nose.

  “Smell,” she said. She held one of the unused bags up to my nose, and I tentatively sniffed it. It was beautiful. It smelled alive. It smelled like the world that once was, the world I would never ever know.

  “Nice, isn’t it?” she asked.

  I had heard of a place where people went when they died. A boy had told me about it, before things got really bad.

  “Is this the heaven?” I asked her.

  She only smiled at me.

  We sat on her porch, she in a rocking chair, and me on a swing. There were cushions beneath me, soft and fat, and I felt a little like a prince. I sipped the tea carefully. It burned my lips. I tried to hold the cup the way she did, with the saucer cradled beneath it. I felt awkward and mechanical.

  Over the porch rail, across her yard, beyond the fence, I could see the grease field. To the left and right the town unfolded simply, little pleasant houses and shops as well-kept as her own. More than that, there were people everywhere. Not many, but more than I had seen in one place since I was a boy. The railway men were gathered at the edge of the field, hands on their hips, staring at the remains of the train. A woman passed by, holding the hand of a little girl in a bright pink dress. A man flew by on a bicycle.

  “I bet you’ve never seen one of those,” the woman said from the rocking chair.

  I looked at her. “Not like that.”

  And it was true. I had seen plenty of bicycles — but they were usually rusted or abandoned, their crumpled metal skeletons wheel-less and forgotten.

  “My name is Josie,” the woman said. “I’ve lived here for a few days. What’s yours?”

  I blinked at her
. “A few days?”

  She nodded. “We’ll get to that. What do I call you?”

  I had to think about it. “I can’t remember,” I said, finally.

  “Well, it only seems rude not to call you by a name,” she said. “Should we come up with one for you?”

  I had never thought about a name. I let her pick. She chose Henry.

  “It’s my favorite of the names,” she said.

  “Henry,” I repeated.

  “It means ruler of the house.”

  “But I don’t have a house,” I said.

  “Ah,” Josie answered. “Well, we’ll talk about that, too.”

  “It’s starting,” she said.

  I didn’t know what she meant, but she nodded at the field, where the boxcars had been sinking slowly since the crash.

  “They’re sinking,” I said. “I saw earlier.”

  “Yes, but did you wonder why?”

  I shrugged. I looked down and saw that I had finished the tea, and looked around for a place to put the cup and saucer down.

  “Let me,” Josie said. She took them from me with one hand, and disappeared into the house. The screen door banged shut behind her. From inside the house, I could hear her still talking. “After all,” she went on, “have you ever seen a tilled field that soft?”

  “I didn’t know how soft it was,” I said, confused.

  The door creaked, then banged shut again as she came back onto the porch.

  “It’s soft as sand, though it doesn’t look it,” she said, handing me a cellophane-wrapped white and red disc. “Here. A peppermint.”

  I looked at it blankly.

  “So many new things,” she said.

  I struggled with the wrapper and she said, “The field looks more substantial than it really is.”

  We watched as one of the railway men slapped another man on the back, and then the first man jogged out into the field, pointing himself in the direction of the nearest boxcar. The car was more than half-embedded in the soil now, and appeared to be sinking faster than before. It was still slow going, but I could see it happening more clearly than before.

  “He probably shouldn’t have done that,” Josie said.

  “Why not? I saw him out there before.”

  “Well, he won’t make it back,” she answered. “See? It’s going more quickly now.”

  She was right. Even in the few seconds since the man had climbed onto the roof of the car, things had started sinking faster. The men at the edge of the field noticed, too, and began shouting and waving their arms. I could hear them: Come back, come back.

  But the first man ignored them, and went into the boxcar through its open door. He leaned out again a moment later, holding a folder stuffed with papers. He pointed at it and raised his shoulders questioningly.

  The men at the edge of the field became agitated and leaped up and down, but the first man didn’t seem to understand. He climbed a short ladder up the boxcar to its roof, and as he did, the car must have found an air pocket somewhere beneath the field, because it lurched and just dropped. I saw the man’s eyebrows, tiny fuzzy worms, lift in astonishment, and then he and the car were gone, swallowed up entirely by the field.

  The men at the edge of the field shouted and ran around in small circles, throwing their arms around.

  “They don’t understand,” Josie said.

  I looked at her. “I don’t either.”

  She leaned forward and patted my knee. “It’s okay. In time.”

  We watched as the rest of the cars disappeared beneath the soil, and for a time things were quiet. The railway men sank to the ground and held their knees to their chests and just stared at the field, and the smoldering train and ripped tracks beyond.

  “How come your town looks —“

  “Alive?” Josie finished. “Kept-up?”

  I nodded.

  “Have you ever seen anything like it before?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Just ruins.”

  “You’re still young,” she said. “Do you know anything about the world before?”

  “Only a little,” I said. “What I learn from looking at the mess left behind. My mother told me some things, but I was little.”

  “Where is she now?”

  I shrugged.

  “She probably would have had the sickness,” Josie said. “Almost all of them did. How old were you when she went away?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You look about nineteen to me,” Josie said. “Maybe old for your age, so you fool people into thinking you’re twenty-five or so. But I think you’re just a kid still.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “World before was like this,” Josie said, waving her hands at the houses. “Not all of it. Not even most of it. But there were people, and most of the buildings were standing upright, and there wasn’t the sickness making them ill or crazy or just worn-down. Cars on the roads, planes in the sky. You ever see a plane before?”

  “I saw one upside down on a house once,” I said. “But when I was really little, I think I remember seeing one or two in the air. Rumor was that’s where all the people went, to a town up there that just flies around. I heard someone say once they saw it. I never did.”

  “That’s an interesting rumor,” Josie said. “But you know where all the people went. You’ve seen them, here and there.”

  “Dead.”

  “Almost all of them. The ones that are left either work the railroad, or they’re like you — drifting, shell-shocked.”

  “I’m not shell… shell…”

  “Shocked,” she finished. “I think you are. Why do you ride the trains?”

  I thought about it, then looked down. “I don’t know what else to do.”

  “There you have it,” Josie said. “Everybody who isn’t dead yet feels like that. Purposeless.”

  “Maybe the trains are going somewhere good,” I said, hopefully.

  “Maybe,” Josie said. “But I think they just run from one side of the coast to the other. I think they’re purposeless, too. Have you ever seen any cargo on them? Food, or cattle, or anything?”

  I shook my head. “I found a book. A few days ago.”

  “What was it about?” She studied my face. “Oh. You couldn’t read it.”

  “No,” I confessed. “There were some drawings.”

  “What kind?”

  “Like someone drew them. I recognized some, like a campfire. Food.”

  “So it was a journal.”

  “What’s a journal?”

  She thought about it. “It’s a book that someone makes and puts their own words into, instead of a book that has words already printed in it.”

  “It was a journal,” I agreed. “I thought maybe it belonged to someone like me. Someone who rode the trains.”

  “Might have,” she said. She nodded. “It really might have. There was a lot of that before things got bad. People hopping the trains like they did in the old, old days. Ride them as far as they’ll take you, and maybe you’ll get away from the sickness, from the problems. Except the problems were everywhere. They weren’t local problems. They were — species problems.”

  A terrible, wrenching sound interrupted her. Josie clapped her hands and leaned forward.

  “Oh, it’s starting now,” she cried happily. “It’s starting!”

  I didn’t see what she meant, so she pointed. It took a moment, but then I saw it clearly: on one of the houses on the west side of the field, a single board quivered. It was leaning away from the house, one end of it pulled free by some invisible hand. It trembled and shook and creaked loudly, and I could hear a twanging sound that I’d never heard before.

  “The nails,” Josie said. “Happens when they pop free.”

  The railway men stood up and pointed. One of them clapped his hands to his head in disbelief. Around them, the people on the streets hurried back into their homes, mothers tugging their children along. The man with the bicycle passed again, battling the
pedals as if pushing into a stiff wind. And that’s when I noticed that the board on the side of the blue house wasn’t the only thing being pulled at. Everything was being pulled. The trees that I could see, rich with leaves like I’d never seen, were bending towards the grease field. Their leaves went first, plucked away by a force I couldn’t name if I tried. Then they all went, and a storm of beautiful green and golden leaves swirled through the air, toward the field.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “Look,” Josie said.

  The leaves swooped like a flock of swallows, twisting and coming together and separating again, and then with tremendous force they bolted for the field. The sound that a million leaves make when they hit the ground at the same time is the same as a building collapsing. The field was immediately blanketed with them, and the force of their landing almost knocked the railway men over.

  “There they go,” Josie said, pointing.

  The field swallowed them in great clumps, drawing them down beneath the soil quickly and with a sucking sound. I could feel the ground beneath us vibrate at that sound, feel the chains in the porch swing hum with electricity.

  And then the leaves were gone, as if they’d never been there at all. The trees still leaned toward the field, tilting at impossible angles, heaving and cracking, roots tearing up from the earth, but they did so bare, their branches like knobby finger bones casting a spell on the field.

  “What is happening?”

  Josie didn’t seem to hear me. “It happens fast, once it starts.”

  She was right. The largest of the trees resisted, for a while, but the smaller ones were torn from the ground easily, and I watched in disbelief as they slid along the grass and dirt towards the field, their branches seeming to claw for purchase, anything to hold on to. They slid past the railway men — who I noticed were beginning to lean backwards, even if they hadn’t noticed it yet — and then the field grasped a branch and just pulled the trees right into it. They sank and disappeared, and then there were raw dirty wounds all over the town where trees once stood.