The diner's neon buzzed like a dying fly as Carmilla stared out the dirt
streaked window. The yellow glare from the fluorescent lights gave
her face an old, washed out look, and she squinted at her reflection in
the dark glass.
She rubbed her shoulder, tense from riding six, no, seven hours now.
If she hurried, she thought she could make Jacksonville, at least, make
the border and get out of Georgia.
She didn't like Georgia, where the people talked so slow that you began
to wonder if they were just affecting the accent, if perhaps they weren't
playing for the tourists like some kind of animals in a human zoo.
She shook her head violently, taking a deep breath and trying to drive
the thought away. The images would not be banished so easily though,
and barbed wire fences sprung up, unbidden, in her memory.
She made a small sound, like an animal clearing it's nose of an unpleasant
smell, and the waitress, who was sitting at the counter, looked over at
her. Carmilla made a show of wiping her nose with the napkin.
Best not to be remembered, and someone making strange noises in public
would stand out, even in an all-night anonymous chain restaurant two miles
off the highway.
The woman went back to her work, not even holding up the coffee pot in
silent question again. Carmilla had nursed the cup she had
for at least a half hour now, and planned to make it go another 15 minutes
before she got back on the bike and down the road again.
gotta remember not to get road fatigue again …
Carmilla had noticed the woman before, how her hair was going to gray under
the thick patina of black dye and hairspray, had seen the desperation wrinkles
around the woman's eyes as she smiled and made small talk. She noticed
how the woman was now leaning over the counter to help one of the truckers
with the crossword puzzle, 'accidentally' exposing more of her saggy breast
and pasty skin than the uniform already exposed anyway.
playing for time, thought Carmilla, and then, and aren't we
all?
Time for one more round on the carousel, one more candy apple in the fading
twilight, one more hoop rolled through autumn streets filled with fallen
leaves, time for a room of one's own and a hot shower and a full belly…
Time to be young. Time to measure one's life in milestone years,
like a highway.
Time to believe in immortality.
But that was so long ago.
and how you played to get those things, my pretty pet crept the
cold dark voice into her head.
That was easy enough to ignore. The voice had been her constant companion
for long and long, and she could just turn from it, and make it go away.
I've seen better days she thought sadly, and the country song on
the all night radio caught her ear and agreed. The sound of plates
clanking together came wafting out of the kitchen, silenced every few seconds
by the swinging of the door.
ca-chunk, ca-chunk, ca-chunk it went, sounding almost like a train.
Like a train….
And Carmilla stared out the window, into the darkness that now seemed suddenly
liquid, and the coffee she held in one hand slipped unremembered onto the
cheap vinyl seat.
Through the center of town, paralleling the dimly lit four lane main street
ran a set of railroad tracks. They probably carried freight during
the day: oranges and tomatoes from Florida, going north to markets in colder
climates. She'd bumped over them coming across town from I-95, and
had fought hard to suppress a chill that ran down her back and up again,
turning her mouth into dry chalk and leaving the metallic smell of fear
in her nose. She'd given them a cursory glance after parking the
bike, somehow assured by the fact that the entire width of the road lay
between them and her.
But now she saw she was not nearly far enough away.
The locomotive was one of the older models; newer, faster trains were in
demand at the front, to carry troops and ordinance, and anyway, these trains
didn't have to run on time.
Time was all we had, in the end…
The plume of black smoke it threw should have been visible for miles, but
in the dark it was concealed, along with the faces of the engineer and
brakemen. she could never remember a face in the front of any of
the trains, though she had seen many of them. Perhaps, she sometimes
thought, they had no faces…
And now, as it drew closer, she wondered how she could have mistaken the
sound of dishes for the sound this thing was making. It was loud,
almost pounding inside her head, and shrill, like an alarm in the night.
Like fire. or death. Or murder.
Yes, just like murder.
And then the crossing gates dropped down like a funeral pall, rushing down
so fast they stirred up dust eddies from the gravel and cinders in the
rail bed. The red light flashed menacingly, like the eyes of an angry
bull.
Carmilla sat, transfixed. she knew what was coming, always did, but
she could no more look away then she could grow wings and fly to the moon.
First passed the engine, long, sleek, black, eating coal and shitting fire
and cinders into the clean night air, then the tender, bulging and distended
like a tumor, or a drowned man's corpse.
Then came the cars.
They were the same rattletrap cars that had transported cattle and pigs
before the war, but now, they carried cargo of an entirely different nature.
The moon came out from a cloud just then, spilling cold white light across
the scene. The first car slid past, it's wheels sparking over the
rails, rocking gently back and forth on axles already overloaded and ready
to seize and scream at any second.
And she could see the outstretched arms, dangling from between the slats
that made up the sides of the car, the grasping hands and the beckoning
fingers, the coarse hands of the old laborer and the soft dainty ones of
the tailor's wife, the big brawny forearms of the ditch digger and the
thin black clad ones of the rabbi.
And she could see the myriad of tiny hands pushed out between them, the
short stubby fingers of children too young, too young for all this.
She trembled as she saw the chubby hand of a baby shake out from between
the splintered boards, and then made a small cry as that car was proceeded
by another, and another, and yet another, all the same, all bearing their
bulging cargo away, into the night.
Into the night, where she had once disappeared to herself.
But she'd come back. They hadn't. they still rode the rails,
or their souls did, trying to find the hotel terminus, the end of the line,
the siding where they, too could get off and stretch tired legs and backs
and arms.
But they would never find it, and she knew this…
Tears streamed down her eyes, and when she finally came to her senses,
she was sitting one the bike, idling, facing out from the parking lot,
her palms sweaty and red, and her eyes stinging and teary.
She shook her head and rocked back the throttle, sliding out onto the road
and whipping through the wind, trying to get away, as far away as she could.
Inside the restaurant, the waitress still stood by the door. Two
of the truckers had come up behind her when the girl had gone crazy and
ran out, knocking herself against the pane of glass in the door until she
had crashed through it and spilled out into the lot, landing in a tangle
of shattered safety glass and dark hair.
"I'm calling the po-lice," the waitress, Peggy, said. One of the
truckers, a long hauler of twenty years experience named Tom, nodded his
head in silence. He'd seen men thrown through glass windows before,
and not one of them had gotten up and walked, let alone run, away from
it with no injury at all. He knelt to look at the sidewalk, seeing
only a few drops of blood mixed in with the glass.
damn he thought, and then hot diggety damn, that's some shit
"What the hell was she yellin' about?" asked his co-driver, who had
been heading back to the booth from the bathroom, and who, in Tom's earnest
opinion didn't have the sense to pour piss out of a boot with the directions
written on the heel in Braille.
"Somethin' about the train," he said slowly, trying to remember just what
exactly she had said.
"Train? Whut train?" Joe asked, pulling a battered Swiss army
knife from his back pocket and picking at a hangnail with it.
"We-llll, I guess that'd be the train that runs on them tracks over there,"
he said, gesturing to the rails crossing the road.
"Musta been on dope or sumthin' then," Joe said with irritating slowness.
"Whut makes you say that?" Tom demanded.
Joe pointed with the pocket knife, slowly motioning to the crossing and
then to the grass on either side of it.
"Th' state took out them tracks a good ten, twelve years ago. they
didn't need em after the branch line opened up in Savannah. Ain't
been a train through here in, hell, must be about fifteen years now."
"Well," Tom looked up at the moon in the sky and thought about how some
people just went crazy from the full moon.
"Well," he said again, to no one in particular, "Don't that beat all."