Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

finally looking sleepy. “I hope it will,” he whispered, and I watched him in silence as his eyes closed and he drifted off to sleep.

I woke because I heard the engine start. My eyes flickered open to that cold, gray first-morning light, and once again I was alone. I rolled over, rubbing a crick out of my neck, and walked through the house looking for Kieren. I suppose I knew, however, that I wouldn’t find him.

I looked out of the front window in time to see him driving off in Scott’s car, and my gut twisted up inside of me. Somehow I knew immediately where he was going.

I grabbed my bike from the garage and pedaled standing up, going as fast as I possibly could.

My legs woke up quickly as they pedaled, and the early-morning air was like a splash of cold water to my face. My mind was racing, replaying last night’s conversation and hoping, despite myself, that Kieren wasn’t doing what I thought he was doing.

But when I pulled into the parking lot at the train station, I saw the car. I pedaled to the building and threw the bike down onto the sidewalk. Running up to the platform, I flicked my head from left to right, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. He wasn’t there, or inside the station either. Before my mind caught up with my feet, I was running down the bike path towards the place where he had made me the penny.

I made out his figure on the track just around a slight bend, and I became aware of the rumbling from the train at the same time. It was only a few hundred feet away, and Kieren was standing to meet it, dead center on the tracks.

“Kieren!” I screamed, the shrill voice escaping from deep within me with such intensity that I almost didn’t recognize it.

He was facing the train, and he didn’t turn to look at me. “Go home, M!” he shouted.

I ran up beside him, waves of fear pulsing through my legs and almost making me trip. The train horn wailed so loudly that I couldn’t hear myself think. I tried to shout his name again, but everything was drowned out by that desperate shriek from the train.

Kieren continued to look straight ahead as I stood by the side of the track, and I knew that it was too late to simply walk up and pull him out of danger. The train was almost upon us.

I heard, somewhere deep inside me, a voice screaming, “No, no, no,” and I wasn’t sure if it was actually coming out of my body or if it was just the echo of my mind. But nothing could make it stop as the train grew closer and closer.

I didn’t think. I didn’t decide. I didn’t even breathe. My legs leaped on their own, onto the track, towards Kieren, and I remember using all my might to push him out of the way. The train came.

And the last thing I heard was the silence as my own screaming came to an end.

PART THREE

CHAPTER 17

I didn’t notice the flash of light, though I’m sure it must have happened. All I noticed was the blackness. And the quiet. And slowly, very slowly, the rumbling. It was the train, humming its way down the track.

When I stood up, I saw that I was indeed on a train, but not the one I had taken west with Brady. The floor of the car I stood in was patched up and well worn, in some places nothing more than a few wooden boards hammered together haphazardly, the passing track visible below. Several of the windows were broken, or missing altogether, and the wind that blew in through them as the train rambled along stirred the few things that still existed inside—papers dancing in circles over the ripped-up seats; old train ticket stubs flipping over on their sides before eventually finding their way through the slits in the wood and disappearing onto the track.

It was a train car out of time and out of place, and for more than a moment, I was sure that I was dead. It made perfect sense to me, I suppose, that this would be my purgatory. A train. An empty train that I would inevitably ride forever.

But out the window, I recognized a few landmarks that told me perhaps I wasn’t as far away as that. We weren’t in my town, but the curve of the land, the feel of the trees, the architecture of the small passing houses, all conspired to assure me that we were close. It might just be that whatever dimension I had landed in wasn’t too different from my own.

I walked the length of the car, and I reached for the door at the far end of it. I was relieved to see that it opened with very little effort, making a bit of a whooshing sound as the chilled air rushed in through the newly formed void. I stepped gingerly over the small platforms that connected this car to the next, completely exposed to the outside and with only a chain dangling along the sides to keep me from falling. Maybe this dimension wasn’t so similar to my own, after all. I couldn’t imagine a train in our world that would still let people cross from car to car by actually stepping outside while in motion.

The door to the next car opened easily as well, but I was disappointed to find that the car itself looked just like that last one. Was this whole train abandoned? Where was it going? And when would it stop?

The third car offered up some signs of life, at least. It was a sleeping car, with bunks lined up against both sides. It didn’t look like anyone had slept in them for a while, but at least the mattresses and turned-down sheets gave the appearance that