He was in no hurry to get home.
When Halley reached the street corner he stopped. One road would take him directly home. The other...he wasn't entirely sure where it led.
The longer he was away from home, the better. So, he turned down the unfamiliar street and walked.
He was completely soaked through by now, but the rain had turned only into a sprinkle. The only thing he wanted to do was crawl into a hole and go to sleep for a really long time. Going home guaranteed ire from his parents. Maybe he'd lie and tell them he got the job and had training this weekend. And then...he wasn't sure how he'd keep it up. He was a bad liar anyway.
Tuesday.
It was only Tuesday and it had been a long week. At least now he had time to himself without his parents relentlessly beating down his door reminding him of how he was a lazy bum that did nothing with his life.
Maybe they were right. He dropped out of college because he wasn't smart enough to do anything. Why the Hell did he pick astrophysics? What job would he even land with a degree like that?
As he walked, he kicked a stone down the cracked sidewalk, until he reached the railroad crossing. The stone landed between the rails and blended in with the rest of the track ballast.
Even a rock had somewhere to be. He didn't belong anywhere.
Just as he was about to cross the tracks, the crossing guards began to sound their bells and come down. He stepped back away from the tracks and heard a train whistle in the near distance.
He waited.
The crossing guards didn't stop, but...there was no train. Thinking there might just have been a malfunction, he took a step forward, but as soon as he did, almost out of thin air a steam engine rocketed past the crossing fast enough to nearly knock him off his feet. Its cars had the same odd purple and black livery as the locomotive, and the entire train was going faster than anything he'd ever seen in person.
Steam hissed from its funnel and sparks flew from its wheels despite the brakes not being applied. Wherever it had driven, the rails had turned a bright glowing blue, and just as soon as it had appeared, it was gone.
Halley just stood there unable to make sense of it. A steam engine? A purple and black steam engine? One that just...appeared out of nowhere?
Maybe he was finally going crazy. Maybe he was just seeing things.
After a moment, the crossing guards turned off and came back up as if the train was never there in the first place. Best not to dwell.
Halley put his hands back into his pockets and crossed the train tracks, which had faded from their glowing blue to their boring old silver iron. It was a huge engine, too! It easily dwarfed a lot of the modern diesel engines that usually ruled the tracks, but it seemed just as powerful, if not more.
And, of course, the whole magical train with golden wheels thing.
Something about it was odd.
"Where have you been?" Halley's mother snapped. "And why are you soaked? Did your stupid ass get lost again or something?"
Halley didn't even flinch.
"No." he answered flatly. His mother put her hands on her hips.
"Well? Did you finally get a job or what?"
What was he supposed to say? This had to be the millionth interview he somehow botched and he wasn't sure if he could handle being berated by both of his parents. Hearing the dreaded "wait until your father gets home" meant he wasn't going to bed unscathed.
"...Yes." Halley said. "Uh, yeah. I did."
His mother seemed surprised and even a bit taken aback. She seemed to be looking for the right words to say, but couldn't find them.
"Really?"
"Yeah. Training starts this weekend." Halley said, then immediately walked past her into his room. He closed the door behind himself and sat down at his desk.
Now he had to figure out how to keep the lie up. At least he had some time, at least two weeks until the first paycheck hit, so he wasn't completely screwed right off the bat. He didn't want to think about what would happen to him if they ever found out.
But aside from that, he couldn't stop thinking about the train. There wasn't a railroad around that had livery like that, at least not as he knew, and not where he lived. He turned on the computer in front of him and decided to look it up. It was 2009, after all. The Internet knew everything.
Looking for purple trains didn't bring anything up. Nor did blue rails or trains with gold wheels or anything. How did someone even search for something like that?
Just as he was about to give up, he found some forum in a far corner of the net.
A dream discussion board. One of the threads was about a train. He clicked on it, and read the first post.
I had a dream last night about a purple train. I saw it stopped somewhere in a siding and when I approached, someone holding a lantern came out. That was all I remembered before I woke up.
As Halley scrolled down, he could see other posts from other users about dreaming the same thing. All of their descriptions matched what he saw, and he sat back in his chair.
What he saw wasn't a dream. It couldn't have been. He had to go back and see if he had missed something. That train was real.
Halley stood up and looked at his bookshelf, taking one of his railroad history books and flipping through it. Surely that locomotive was real somewhere, right? He tried to remember what it looked like.
Two sets of eight driving wheels, he thought. The thing was massive.
He paced back and forth as he looked through the book.
Then he found it.
He set the book on the desk.
There, on the page, was the Union Pacific "Big Boy." Twenty-five were made, seventeen had been scrapped. But none of them had livery like the one he saw. He was one step closer, he guessed.
He'd get to the bottom of it.
