to the end of the line

When I was a child, I loved trains. Pretty typical little boy enchantment, I think; wooden tracks and tiny metal wheels, a hundred different configurations across my bedroom floor with the train-track pattern carpet. We lived in the countryside, and the trains only ran through the city, so seeing the real thing on a rare outing was like Christmas and birthdays combined. I remember even when I got older that my mother and I would stop at the side of the footpath to watch as they shot over the tracks. I never liked Thomas the tank engine, though. The faces creeped me out.

I’m mostly neutral about trains now, I think. Adulthood makes you neutral about the things that excited you in childhood, or they encourage you to act like you’re neutral about them. I started taking the train daily in my second year of university, and I guess it lost some of its shininess but I was never as miserable with the journey as some of my fellow commuters. If I had to sit for forty minutes either way, might as well spend it on a speed-smooth train watching the landscape shoot by like I’d imagined as a kid.

I can’t say there’s a lot of joy in it today, even if it seems a little fitting in some ways – beginning and end, you know. A child dreaming of trains and an adult booking it to the fastest one possible. I still push through to my usual car, the one with the most windows and the best views, opting to look our desecrated landscape in the eyes as we passed over it. The car is emptier than I thought it would be – are people not flocking to the trains, desperate for a seat, a chance to watch everything flying past? – and I settle where I can watch the landscape and the car around me from the same place.

I rode to the end of the line once, when I had first moved to the city and just wanted to quietly indulge that train-loving child still in my chest. I moved from seat to seat as the train emptied, getting the best views and just existing in the feeling. I think I was listening to Imagine Dragons, or something equally fitting for my youth, just watching everything fly past and trying not to think about grades and professors and facsimiles of friends. All of that stuff had seemed so important back then, like it was the whole world. Today I’ll make that same trip, the end of the line with my eyes on the horizon. No music, though. Today I’ll keep my focus sharp.

The car fills slowly, and brings with it more commotion than usual, groups of people talking in frantic pitches and hysterical sobs. Some are dark and grouchy, those pessimistic I told you so people, some are trying to project sunlight through their shaking hands, smiling and saying how much better things will be at the end of the line. All of them are afraid. I am, too. But I’m glad to be on the train.

The train seems to be faster than usual when it at last sets off. I suppose safety restrictions around speed don’t matter anymore. It’s still safer than off the train, and there’s less to worry about when nothing is coming in the other direction.

When we pass the motorway, everything is the same – all the cars heading north, nothing passing the other way, all the lanes filled up to the brim. Those are the people who couldn’t leave a thing behind, who filled their seats with books and family heirlooms and nice coats. A nice thought, but none of them will make it to the north. That’s what the men across the car are saying, shaking heads to hide their shaking hands.

We ride for maybe half an hour before someone spots them. It starts with gasps of horror among friends, pointing and screaming, then a child crying uncontrollably in one of the further cars. There are packs of them on the highway, stopping the cars and creating barricades to capture as many drivers as possible. A few of the trucks and four-wheel drives manage to push their way off the asphalt and rattle down onto the grass, careening wildly into any direction that is away, for any dwindling possibility of safety. Some of them make it, but even then, that’s only for now. We’ve seen enough now to know that the carnage will only grow. We all know that the north isn’t going to be safe for much longer, either. But trains are good for running. We can leave it behind for a little while.

They don’t go after the electric cars, someone pointed out a few weeks into the first attack – drawn to the noise of the gas-guzzlers, maybe, or the stink of the exhaust. Back then the attacks were still distant enough that you could brush that off as propaganda from parent to child, a myth to encourage quiet voices and regular bathing. But it went from an unreal kind of warning to a stark reality, with patrols in the streets and locked doors and halting economy. Then the conspiracy theorists reasoned it was government propaganda, some kind of leftist agenda to keep the gas cars off the streets. But then the patrols all got turned, and then nobody really felt safe enough to joke about it anymore.

They were saying this city would be the first to go. It looked like something out of a movie from 2014 that teenagers watched religiously, swearing up and down that it wasn’t just some dark fiction, but a prediction of the future, this was where we were heading. Kind of ironic, because everyone ignored them even though the main character of every movie was a teenager being ignored. I guess there were plenty of warnings. We were still all so late to pack up and leave.

I guess I felt like it was a weird thing to do alone – great timing, social anxiety in the midst of the apocalypse. But even now on the train, everyone’s in a group; those teenagers girls hyperventilating with their Stanley drink bottles by the windows, those elderly folks joining wrinkled hands and sharing memories they’re grateful for in the aisle seats, the grizzled old men trying to pretend they don’t care about each other when they’d waited for the others to leave, risked their lives in doing so. They’re always in groups in the movies, too, even if only so one of them can get infected and traumatise the rest of them.

Maybe I shouldn’t have moved so far away. I would at least have my mother then, probably disturbingly nonchalant about the whole deal, as infected numbers grew and showed in increasingly graphic fashion on the evening news.

“They won’t get us,” she would be saying, maybe doing some knitting or embroidery or something equally casual.

“They’re still people,” I would say. My train sets wouldn’t be out anymore, but I’d still have them, tucked into an old wooden chest. Maybe I’d be sitting on it, gravitating to them as I gravitated to everything from childhood.

And when it came to the north, when the screams were heard without turning on the tv – I wondered if she’d show fear then, or simply lock the door and light the fire. I probably could have unlocked the door with black in the whites of my eyes, crawling up my veins, sobbing hideous ichor as the infection twisted my brain, begged me to find a new vessel, begged me to become that which I’d been running from. She would be too stubborn to run then. I would tell her that it wanted me to kill, wanted me to submit and drag down whoever I could, and she would offer her chest and her veins and take the pain that way.

“It’s always been you and me, bug,” she’d say, without a trace of sadness or regret. “Bring me with you. We’ll see what comes next.”

They’re coming closer to the train now. Someone is praying, in a faltering fashion that suggests they might not have bothered in a long time. The conductor’s voice comes over the intercom – “stay calm, the tracks are clear and we’re making good time” – but it doesn’t do anything to calm anybody. We’re in the frontmost car, so they’ll reach us last, but we’ll also be the last to see them coming.

It would have been nice to travel in a group, but I’ve never been very good at groups. Nobody ever feels the same as you about everything, which means that everybody sucks at least a little bit. It’s still nice to imagine conversation, but the imagined conversation is much more between several variations of myself. The me in early college that’s listening to Imagine Dragons, watching the apocalypse and thinking about those homework due dates that we won’t live to see. The child me playing with wooden trains and cheering to pass them in the street, maybe once or twice a year.

For a moment, I consider sending a photo to my mother. Consider asking her if she would want to be infected if it was me, or if I should roam with the pack and see her later. We haven’t been talking much lately either. She sends me a link to Facebook sometimes and I send her a picture of the meal I doordashed sitting in a dirty pan. I don’t know how to segue into asking how she wants me to die.

There’s a fresh wave of screaming and sobbing, twice the finality of anything else, and it takes me a moment to realise it’s coming not from another car but from the very front, where the conductor sits. I brace myself before the impact, but it’s not any use.

The train flips over itself – something left on the tracks, probably, or the metal itself chewed and twisted away. Everyone is screaming, and we all tumble over each other as the car tumbles and glass smashes in all directions. Some people huddle further into the rubble as if they could ever stay hidden, some pick themselves out, bleeding and shattered, and try to run.

I’ve come to terms with the inevitable. I don’t think anyone can run or hide. I think this is it.

But I got to have one last ride on my way to the end.