The Night Trains were always the worst. They came at the unholiest hours of night, leaving them so few and far between that they were able to go at unimaginable speeds, flashing by so fast that by the time you saw anything besides the faded glow of the headlights in the distance, it was too late. And they didn’t have a whistle, either, so it just whizzed on by, leaving behind a trail of slaughtered children, the more oblivious of the fifty left lying behind in bloody, mangled masses.
That’s not to say the Day Trains were any better, and the Express Trains were, essentially, the same thing as the Night Trains, only they provided a mournful whistle as they mowed over hoards of unsuspecting children. All of them left bloodshed in their wake, killing children by the dozens – effectively and efficiently obliterating the undesirables of the community. The misfits, the nonconforming, the disabled. And they sent fifty of them, all children, into the Tunnel, stretching many miles, connecting the north and the south of Sharpesville. Fifty kids selected, sent to wander the dark, dingy Tunnel. It was wet and cold and dark. If you wanted water to drink, you’d have to settle for what dripped down from the roof, and dirt was all available to drink during the five day trek. Five days, really, was how long it should take. After that, everyone’s declared dead.
It all worked out pretty simple – make it to the other side of the Tunnel, and you were allowed to return to society, to live, despite standing out. If not – well, you died in that Tunnel, your unanswered cries echoing off the walls, an eerie reminder to the others of what was almost inevitably to come for them. Whether the hardly recognizable corpses were ever fished out of the Tunnel depended solely on the survivors, if there were any. They were granted permission to return to the Tunnel with adequate safety gear to retrieve the carcasses, or at least get a body count. But consistently, they denied, no matter who might’ve been sprawled across the ground in there, because they were traumatized, vowing to never again ride a train.
It was terribly dark in that Tunnel. The darkness was penetrating and thick and deep and everlasting – save for the ‘light at the end of the Tunnel,’ both metaphorical and literal. You could practically touch it, feel it weighing down all around you. It was always that dark. The Day Trains and Night Trains were the only indicators of time. If you were lucky, you saw or heard of maybe even felt the train coming, and you had time. Lie down on the tracks, good and flat, squished in the middle so the wheels wouldn’t run right over you, but rather next to you. Or press up against a wall, let the train head by inches from your nose. Or you could always go to the opposite tracks, the one right parallel. But more times than not, a train would start down those tracks before the other one was gone, leaving you wobbling haphazardly on the patch of rocks between.
Not every train brought casualties, but every night, at least one train proved fatal, death’s cold hands sweeping in and snatching up a kid, or two, or ten. Sometimes kids tried to sleep at night, and they were consistently the first to be offed, dispatched with the fury of a speeding train, their frantic screams sending a chill down the spines of survivors and haunting them forever. We couldn’t help them, and even if we could, it would’ve been worthless. And the reward wasn’t worth the risk. So those who weren’t immediately killed were simply left on those tracks to bleed to death in agony, all alone.
They’ve been doing this once a year for the past twelve. Years one through seven had a pretty decent survival rate of five to eight. And then, just before the eighth batch, my batch, they extended the Tunnel in time to thrust us in. Aside from Tina McCann, who stumbled out and then promptly collapsed from her injuries and died, and Jerry Turner – me – who staggered into the world shortly thereafter, all alone, the sole survivor, and sat on those tracks and waited for the next train, there were no survivors. But I died a good death, let me tell you, and it didn’t hurt. In fact, it released all that pain that’d built up in that Tunnel, and sitting there on those tracks, anticipating the next train, waiting to die – that was the best decision of my life. Like I said. I died a good death.
