Carla couldn’t shake the feeling
that something bad was about to happen. She looked up from her book, not
lifting her head so her hair still carefully hid her face. Three hours into the
train ride, and the passengers had settled down into the stillness of the
sub-Pacific trip. Even at 500mph, it was a good 15-hour trip. Even the kids had
gotten tired of looking out at the ocean once they left the sealife of the
Continental Shelf far enough behind. The creatures swimming past now were few
and far between.
Peering around, Carla relaxed as
she saw no sign of anyone watching her. She had been so very careful to hide
herself before she ever reached the port and bought the last-minute ticket as
they were calling final boarding. She missed the connectedness of her slate,
but it went both ways, and she needed to be completely off the grid for awhile.
It was kind of fun to hold an old book, thumb the pages. She had picked up a
deck of cards and a couple of old travel games at a novelty shop in Portland
before she headed down the coast to the Fresno Port.
It was still hard to think of
Fresno as the highlight of Southern California. She’d been in Los Angeles just
months before the fault blew in ’37. If only Andy had come with her to
Vancouver for that stupid movie. She pushed the thought away, and all the ones
that came with it.
She decided to stretch her legs.
It took almost an hour to walk the length of the train and back, so she locked
up her duffel in her seat storage and palmed some cash for the bar. As she
stood and stretched her arms up, ignoring the crackling pops along her back,
the train passed under a colony of nesting worms that lived on the tunnel. She
watched them wave overhead in the darkness. She imagined swimming out there in
the cold, still waters, resting on the heat of the train tunnel, seeing the
lights from an approaching train fill you vision and the rushing thrum of its
passage, until darkness swallowed it again.
Smiling at the idea, she started
the trek along the train. At the end of each cabin, you had to pull the iris
open to climb into the middle airlock, then close it, then open the next
cabin’s iris and climb through. The alarm was deafening if you did not securely
close each one. It wasn’t a mistake most passengers made more than once.
Fourteen cabins, and the most
notice Carla got was from any children still awake. The adult passengers
studiously avoided each other, sleeping or staring at their slates. No one
talked above a whisper, and the lights were dim. Each time she entered a cabin,
she paused at the back to study the passengers, but no one triggered her alarm
sensors. She still had that tickling feeling at the back of her neck, but she
was about ready to chalk it up to being over two miles underwater.
She walked down the cabin to the
front airlock and climbed in. As she pulled the iris shut, the other side
opened. She whirled around as someone climbed in and pulled it shut behind him.
She felt frozen in place. She knew that hair, those shoulders, that back, those
legs. Her eyes widened as he straightened and turned around. Her mouth opened a
couple of times ithout any words coming out. He stood calmly, watching her
struggle. “You? You can’t be here! How? What—”
“Hi Carla,” said Andy. He might
have said more, but her head filled with buzzing and she felt herself falling
into darkness.
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Dogs in house
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Houdini, Brindle
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Time writing:
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35 minutes
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September word
count:
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5,350
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