A short story written by Kip Manley.
Me and that Train
Yeah so here’s me, Jason, big man, saving the Sarge and getting him back to the island and gallantly offering to go get the one girl he managed to save, and I’m gonna die because of a busted door lock.
“Left my good truck for Liz back at the warehouse. Damn transmission in this one’s mushy as hell finding third,” he growled at me when I fished the keys out of his big green surplus coat. “So sometimes you just gotta run it up in second until you’re fast enough to skip over to fourth. Not that you’re gonna be going that fast in this snow. And the heater’s got two settings, off and blast furnace. And don’t go messin’ around with the glove box either. Held shut with a twist of coat-hanger wire. Nothin’ in there but the insurance card anyway and you ain’t gonna need that. My hold-out’s under the passenger side seat. An old .44 revolver. Kicks like a goddamn mule, but you need that, we’re well and truly fucked.”
All of that the garrulous old bastard told me and more but he never got around to mentioning how the passenger-side door can’t be fucking locked.
Yeah, it’s my own goddamn fault, some of it. I don’t know how a one-horse town like this with a one street “waterfront” makes it so fucking complicated to get down there. I could see the big old warehouse that had to be the fortification Sarge set up but damned if I could find a way over to it. Every street around kept petering out in these industrial loading zone parking lot things. Why the hell did they need so much hurricane fencing? Anyway, I’d stopped in one of the alleys that should have cut straight through, and the engine backfired—noise, but I figured I wasn’t going to be there long and anyway I hadn’t seen a damn thing moving since the old woman I’d run over by the burnt-out Carl’s Junior. I was looking at the map of the island I’d found on the floorboard trying to puzzle out where I was and which dead-end street would get me to the warehouse when I heard the door pop open.
Reflexes saved me right off the bat. Without even thinking about it I lunged over and grabbed the handle and yanked it shut, and whatever it was on the other side pulled again and damn it was strong. But reflexes also fucked me over. Without thinking, I’d lunged over to grab the handle with my left hand, the hand that wasn’t holding the map, which left me awkwardly sprawled across the bench seat holding off God knows what with my weak hand.
The rifles I’d brought were on the floorboard, along with one of the pistols. The other, safety on, was under my thigh. Theory was it would be easier to grab it there than from a holster and I didn’t want to have it in the small of my back while driving. And sure I could still grab it, but it was a 9 millimeter. Might shoot through the door. Might ricochet through the cab and hit me instead. Whatever it was wasn’t obliging enough to stick something vital up in the window where I could shoot it through glass.
It yanked on the door again. Christ it was strong. My hand was numb from the cold because I’d left the heater off for a bit and now it was getting a bit slippery on the vinyl handle. Maybe I should get closer to the door, better leverage? Get both hands on it? Or put myself in a position where I could reach a rifle and maybe do some damage?
I opted to hike up for a better look, first. Craning my head up and over from where I was sprawled across the bench seat I could just make out a corpse working the door handle for all the world like a frustrated salary-man who got out to the parking lot at five fifteen only to discover he’d locked his keys in the damn car. His head was all bloated and green and red and dangling off to the side as if half his neck was missing, which it was, which was why I couldn’t see anything to shoot through the glass. He kept twisting his whole torso around so he could peer dumbly at the handle and then throwing himself at trying to yank it out of my hands and damned if he wasn’t about to do it, too.
But the engine was still running.
So I went over in my head what I’d seen around me from my quick glimpse up and out. I was in an alley. Check. Up ahead it’s blocked by more fucking hurricane fence with straps woven through so I couldn’t see what’s on the other side. Loading dock on the building to the right. Couple of dumpsters against the big blank wall to the left. I could throw it in reverse, accelerate, hope to throw him off?
But no. This thing’s pissed me off. And I’m thinking about that train.
Last summer, the last fucking summer, I guess, my cousin Alvin’s down from Millinocket and he wants to go four-wheeling, so we haul out the ATVs and go for a run in the 120-acre lot behind my dad’s place that he never was gonna be able to get developed now.
Anyway, we’re playing tag on these things and I’m it when there’s a big old blast on a train whistle. The lot’s bordered by the Rockland spur of the Maine Central. I was used to train whistles going by all the time, but up ahead Alvin’s perking up, and he peels off the dirt track we were running on and humps it full-speed across a rutted field for the rumbling oncoming freight.
The tracks ran on a steep little berm through there, just the one line, and I figured I knew what Alvin was gonna do, since we’d already played a game of hopping the tracks back and forth. It was just steep enough and not too tall so you could if you were going fast enough get airborne over the tracks and come down mostly on all four tires on the other side. He was gonna run for the tracks and jump ’em just in front of the train and leave me holding my ass on this side. And he was gonna make it, too.
And I’ve never been one for math, I mean algebra and trig and all that, it just makes my head spin, but we’ve all got something in our heads that does calculus like lightning fast when it wants to, which is how we can hit fastballs with a bat and shoot whiskey bottles out of the air. Not that I’ve ever shot a whiskey bottle out of the air. Anyway. Whatever it is that does that in your brain just took over for a split second without me even thinking about it and by the time I came back to myself I had opened up the throttle and was gunning it across the field after Alvin. Not directly after, though. At an angle to the left, same direction as the train was headed.
I mean fuck Alvin at this point. It was me and that train, now.
He cleared the tracks with plenty of room to spare and had enough time on the other side to turn around and see me coming, I guess, but I wasn’t paying any attention. I was maybe twenty yards behind him and that train was doing thirty-five? forty? I don’t know, but it was gonna eat up a lot of track by the time I got there. The part of my brain that’s an idiot genius at calculus had picked that spot right there for me to aim at, and I was, and I had the throttle open wide. Was it enough? Was I gonna make it?
I mean, the idiot genius never bothers to show its work. Not that I had any time to check it over or anything.
So I just—stopped. Stopped thinking, stopped worrying, stopped doing anything at all but being right there right then as my machine and that machine raced toward that spot on the track, and whoever was driving it I think noticed me at that point because it was hooting and clanging up a storm.
Me and that train.
Alvin swore up and down the rest of the summer that the locomotive brushed my fender as I sailed through the air in front of it. I figure no way, it would have done some actual damage, and I only went sprawling because I bobbled the landing. Nerves. Adrenaline. You know.
But still. God damn.
So I stopped. Stopped trying to figure out leverage and ballistics. Stopped worrying about my grip on the door. Stopped even my irrational hard-on of hate against this poor dumb sonofabitch who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time like almost everybody else on the planet.
I just reached under my outstretched left arm, jammed the gearshift into first, let out the clutch, and floored it, grabbing the whipping wheel when I could and hauling it in a direction I was pretty sure from my quick look-see wouldn’t splat me head-on into a wall.
The door was almost yanked out of my hand but I hauled it back. He was holding on, I’ll give him that—and then there was a meaty thwack and a squawl of scraping metal and the horrible pressure on the door was gone.
I sat up. The fence was dead ahead. No time to stop, but I jammed on the brakes anyway, praying there wasn’t a drift piled up just on the other side.
There wasn’t. There was a giant damn warehouse across a stretch of empty parking lot, with a couple of corpses lying here and there in the thin snow.
I sat there for a good ten minutes with the engine off laughing and laughing and laughing before I gathered up the guns and went inside to look for Liz. The rest you know.
But damn, man. Every now and then? Me and that fucking train.
Hoo!
Kip Manley’s own fantastic work can be found here:
–http://www.thecityofroses.com/
–http://www.longstoryshortpier.com/
He was kind enough to write this April Fool’s post for me as part of a webfiction author exchange!
I wrote a little piece for Alexander Hollins’ story , Phoenix 2125
You can see all of the authors involved, and who they wrote for, HERE