The Valley

Crash and Burn

Light rushed in as she came to, flaring painfully in her eyes and causing her head to pound so hard she cried out and shut them against it. Slowly, her brain stopped rattling angrily inside her skull, instead just aching with a dull insistent twinge, and she opened her eyes again.

'Hello? Hel- oh, thank Christ, you're awake...' a voice mumbled, distorted like someone gargling or talking underwater.

A man was leaning over her. Behind him, white clouds rolled over each other, strangling and swallowing anything in their way. The sunlight could only prick through the ivory blanket in small pockets before the holes swelled up and blocked it once more, adding a strange uniform whiteness to the light that blazed around him.

'Are you hurt?' he asked, his voice clearing, as though just a few digits off the right FM channel.

Sam raised herself up to sitting with her hands. Her throat was sandpaper. She'd hit her head on a half-buried rock, thick with spongy moss, it seemed, but with a quick touch to the back of her head she found no blood or even a trace of a bump. 'Y-yeah. I mean, no. I'm fine.' The ache in her head almost felt like just heavy tiredness now. 'What the hell happened? Where are we?'

She looked past him to their surroundings before she'd finished asking. 'Oh Jesus...' She whispered.

They were on a sloping grassy hill; she'd been lying with her head lower than her feet, and only now did Sam taste the charred, acrid air she gulped in, and how on each exhale her lungs felt like a slowly smoked hunk of meat. The hill she lay on was lipped by train tracks, further up in front of her. Her mind flashed through fragments of boot zips and shattered glass. The train. Her eyes raked the tracks, running maybe twenty metres into the distance, and found it, just before the tunnel. It looked almost normal, as though just waiting for new passengers, except for the buckled window holes gaping like dark mouths open in anguish, with jagged shards of glass teeth grinning around the rims. The front carriage, nearest the tunnel, seemed to be intact too, until Sam saw that only one of the automatic doors was attached to what small piece of roof was left. The bottom of the train had been ripped away and the door was swinging outward and inward gently as if on a hinge.

She stood up slowly and turned. Her eyes followed the trail of debris down the hill, which she saw was one slope of a large valley. The rest of the front carriage had tumbled down the valley, shredding itself like train confetti as it went. A plume of black smoke was billowing out of its scorched shell which had come to rest in the basin of the valley.

'Jesus...is everyone okay?!' She fumbled into her coat pocket for her phone, which was miraculously still there.

'No signal on mine.' The man brought out his Nokia Lumia. Through its cracked screen, she could make out the crossed circle symbolising no signal. 'I tried it when you didn't wake up. No emergency calls either.'

Sam looked down at her own screen. Sure enough, no signal. She dialled the police and held it to her ear. No dial tone. 'Shit! Are there any others?' Sam took off in a half-run, half-slide, towards the wreckage. Her head was swimming.

'I don't know,' the man called as he followed suit, his face ashen. 'I was knocked out. When I woke up, I was nearest to you.'

They picked their steps, dodging twisted metal and smouldering grass that littered the ground, and Sam was soon upon the blackened front carriage. It had turned sideways and raked the earth as it fell down the slope. The fire had mostly burned out inside the carriage itself, with only a few flames licking the air from a train seat thrown in the crash and splattered in diesel. Sam looked inside the carriage, broken off at both ends so it was more a large metal tube, with its seats lining what would be the ceiling and floor now.