I don’t remember when I grew tired of the music and dancing. I don’t remember coming to bed at all, but here she was and all felt okay, cozy even, with the sound being diagnosed as thunder. The day after the day of was still hours away.
I turned onto my side to watch Kodie sleep for a minute, her silhouette silvery against the moon-cast window, and then put my arm over her and closed my eyes.
It’s only me, brother. No other.
Johnny’s voice.
The thunder still sounded and soothed me and sleep snatched me down. Just before I succumbed, my drifting brain mined the subconscious and put together facts reminding me that thunder comes, crescendos, and then trails off.
This rumbling wasn’t trailing off. A low note came along on top of it. It built, its source coming closer.
My eyes flew open. I knew this sound but my mind couldn’t yet identify it because it was a sound so part of the fabric of my everyday life. Now that the new world had torn through that fabric, this noise stood out.
Kodie propped herself up on her elbows. “What are you doing?”
I stood in the middle of my room with my arms out and palms flared, listening. “Sshhh. You hear that rumbling?”
Kodie looked at the ceiling. “Thunder?”
“That’s what I thought. MoPac.”
“There’re no cars, Kevin.” She started to lie back down, but then she shot up. “Ohhh, the train. Now I hear it.”
“Right. But… who’s driving it?”
“Maybe it’s been running all day. Maybe the engineer wasn’t able to stop it before he—”
“Sounds like it’s rolling really slow. You think it’s pulling anything hazardous? I’ve been hearing that thing all my life. Never paid it any attention.” My mind reeled at the insanity of a runaway ghost train coming our way.
“I don’t know. Maybe. At some point it’ll come to a stop.”
“I think I should go see what’s what. Just in case there’s an adult running it.”
“You don’t think kids can run a train, do you?”
I stood there swaying in that space between drunk and hungover. How often we’d have to question things. Nothing would be assumed for a long time. Just how much we had ahead of us made the SATs and college and career and that life track in the urban information age seem petty and small. The learning curve ramping onto this new life felt too steep.
“I’m going to drive over to the tracks and see. I’m sure Johnny would want to see this.” Was this what being a dad felt like? That’s a parent’s inclination, to consider including the child in an activity for the sake of pedagogy.
How quick nature is. The roles it assigns when change comes, how nature doesn’t consider it to be change. Change is just… something else. I thought how nature isn’t conscious. It just is. Understanding? That’s man’s angst. Well, it was. Was it mine? Did I burn to understand what had happened?
Then, I did. But now, no. I just want to live. And the only way to do that is to connect with them.
Johnny’s room stood empty and cool for the hole in the glass. The plastic trash bag Bass and I had taped over it billowed inside and sucked back out, a palpitating sac belonging to a breathing thing.
Mom and Martin’s pitch-dark room smelled of stale, sweet breath. I turned on the bathroom light so as to awaken Bastian. Then I remembered Johnny had passed out in the reading nook.
No Rebecca in the bedrooms. I walked with alacrity to the main part of the house and started flipping on lights. The living room was empty, as was the nook.
No Rebecca, no Johnny.
I hadn’t put on the alarm. I dashed to the front door. The bolt was in place.
The back door off the dining room was bolted as well. I jogged to the laundry room, stepped down into the mud room. That door was cracked an inch.
The kids were outside.
Johnny was more than just outside. He was gone.
Kodie begged me not to go, said that it served no purpose chasing it.
When I told her Johnny and Rebecca weren’t here, she put her fingers to her lips. I told her Johnny once mentioned he thought hopping a train would be cool. Apparently, Martin did it once when he was young. Great parenting, planting that idea into your son’s head.
One sleepwalking night, Johnny’s in my room, standing in the dark, the train trundling. “Hear that, Kev? That’s the future. Close, close, close.”
Johnny was among the networks of the new world’s children who didn’t want us here, who have come to believe so by intuition afforded them when those sounds boomed over the world that dawn. It’s their world now. We’re the remnants, the revenants of the old world.
The Train Chasers. The Late Bloomers.
They wait.
They’ve got time.
Is sublime patience the reason why they don’t just amass around us and kill us? Why don’t a few of the older ones come find us with the guns of their fathers in their hands and just take us out?
Are we misunderstanding them? I asked myself.
Why didn’t they? Because they didn’t need to. Because, as the phrase goes, they have all the time in the world. They own time. They can remake it and reshape it and mark it however they want.
They’re afraid and confused. I think they are between worlds, being tugged between antipodes.
It became clear to me then: They don’t just attack us wholesale, assuming they want us gone, because that would be the way of the old world, to confront and eliminate your enemies with weapons, with machines. They probably don’t see us as enemies in the literal sense.
Things are the way they are.
I thought about what that Simon kid had said, and then shuddered as if a blast of cold air had riffled up my shirt and grabbed my heart—Keep Johnny with you.
I know the trilling screams I heard as Bass and I drove off were his. That terrified little boy was willing tell me that. That and something else he couldn’t let loose from his mouth. I saw his flushed face again, the freckles popping from his high cheeks, peering through the green, and I saw the bag with the rock as I lifted it up.
I ran out the side door, flung open the trash can in which I’d tossed it.
The rock was gone.
A knight errant, I sped off after a runaway train hoping my brother rode it. It had stopped raining and the air and the road smelled anew. Not a full day later and the air… my God. Soon that freshness would turn into a worldwide deathreek.
The train headed south. Johnny riding it… I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess that’s why I’m telling you, dear reader. Trying to figure out what I was thinking, hindsight offering a bit of perspective if not clarity.
Three tire-screaming turns later, without hardly touching the brakes, and I sped along the MoPac expressway through the pools of the arc lights at four in the morning, the new dawn not yet fathomed. Hundreds of cars sat on the shoulders. Some had veered and come to a stop at the median along which the train tracks ran. All of the doors to those cars had been flung open, their occupants gone.
Where were they? No stone cairns, no bodies. Just empty cars up and down MoPac, doors open, blinkers punctuating the dark.
The long freight train flagged aimless. It might quit right here. My speedometer clocked me at seven once I cruised alongside. At this crawl and by the lights I was able to make out some of the graffiti, glorious confections of color, shape, and menace.
It’s not like I really chased Johnny. But I did give desperate panting chase like a dog without a clue what to do now that I’d caught it. I just needed to come see it, I think, a relic of the old world, like me, something, anything, still rolling along out of the past. I felt a stupid kinship to this train.