Starless Night - The Ballad of Cassidy Kidd

CHAPTER II: I DON'T NEED FOREVER

… I PANICKED. Blood. Water. Lakewater. The last thing I needed seeping into my bloodstream right now. I didn’t have time to ponder how long I had before the cut got horribly infected. If the lakewater can kill a bird in minutes, it can kill me in hours, I thought. Especially since I just got it injected right into my circulatory system.
Thankfully, though, the bird had taken off. Clearly it wasn’t interested in sticking around.
My eyes stopped being fuzzy and started going static, like a TV screen someone left on the wrong channel. My feet kicked up mud and cattails, spinning like a boat motor, and it took me a good few seconds of practically sliding across the murky soil before I got any traction, let alone the physical or mental momentum I had before I got knocked into a pool of all-natural poison with an open wound. I tossed the dirty blonde hair from my face as I rushed through the now eerily silent woods.
The birds had stopped coming down. Or maybe my mind had gone numb, and I just couldn’t sense them hitting the ground anymore. I preferred the idea that they had some sense of pity for the girl who had just watched her life flash before her eyes.
The train was in sight now; a blur of corrugated red metal and an off-colour tin roof, with the separators between carts being barely visible through the thorny bushes. I kept moving. Or, more accurately, my feet kept moving. My mind was too busy pacing circles.
Thoughts raced through my head, like olympic sprint runners racing the hundred metre over and over around my brain. I thought about the birds, and where they’d gone, and I thought about Maria and how depending on how much sleep she got last night, she’d either be partying, crying, or sleeping right now. I thought about the massive gash on my arm that was already beginning to worsen.
I didn’t have time to think, though, because the train drew ever closer.
If I stopped there to time my jump, I wouldn’t have enough momentum to get onto the train without turning the bottom half of my body into a really nasty casserole on the train tracks. I kept moving. I might have closed my eyes. OK, yeah, I closed my eyes.
My legs wound up and threw me towards the moving train like a pair of springs. I felt the frigid wind open up, as I soared unceremoniously through the air for about half a second.
I clutched onto something metal, hoping it was the side of a train car and not a railroad spike that had just gotten lodged into my leg after a poorly-executed, incredibly reckless jump.
It was the former. Lucky me. Now I had to deal with whatever was to come instead of just going out peacefully in the woods.
My eyes were open now. Wide open. I looked up; no birds in sight, except for the geese, which admittedly might be just as dangerous as the robot ones. It took me a moment to realise I was holding onto the handle of the train car’s door. I made a pitiful attempt to open it by the handle, but it was sealed shut.
I fumbled around in my bag for a second, struggling to reach into it given that I only had one arm to work with, and pulled my pocket knife from it like it was Excalibur and not a cheap hunk of almost sharp metal Maria had gotten from a garage sale.
I thrusted the surprisingly hardy blade into the spot where the door met the car’s siding, and pried it open enough to get a finger in, then a hand. I gripped onto the corrugated metal of the train cart and took my other hand from the door handle, instead fitting it into the same gap I had stuck the first, and using both to start pushing the door open. The snow peppered my face like an oversized, astonishingly annoying salt shaker, which only chilled my already freezing body, which I had forgotten to cover with anything more than the clothes I had been wearing when I went out to haul water from the well.
And god, was it a door. A ridiculously heavy door. I had lugged the thing just enough so that I could barely squeeze in, and even that had nearly drained me. Sliding in, I then went through the rest of my stamina to close it, to avoid any suspiciously shiny birds or chilly Siberian wind from getting into the car. Then I recalled that I didn’t bring a flashlight.
The train car was totally pitch-black.

I felt my way around the pitch-black cabin, finding something that felt like a metal crate to my right. I dropped down in front of it, slumped, half-lying down.
I was entirely, completely, utterly exhausted. My lungs had only just started to return to a normal rhythm, and they still stung from the bitter air, and my legs continued to ache even after I rested them on the numbing floor of the train car. The adrenaline in my body started to run dry. I couldn’t see my arm, and I didn’t want to feel it, but I could sense the wound getting worse. The physical pain wasn’t horrible, given that I was quickly going into shock, but the mental pain was unbearable.