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Grand Central Station

The Unexpected Route

By Michelle Rose DiehlPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
2

“Where do you get off?”

“Grand Central Parkway.”

Tires screeched slightly as the bus came to a stop.

“Here you are, then,” said the driver.

Hannah peered through the dirt-clouded window. “Are you sure? This doesn’t look like Grand Central.” If the derelict shanty town beyond the murky glass could be called “grand” anything it could surely only be “dump.”

The driver twisted in his seat. “It’s not. This bus don’t go to Central. No bus goes to Central.”

“Why not?”

He looked Hannah up and down. She tucked in her blue purse and slid her blue suede pumps beneath her and lifted her eyes from underneath the rim of her blue hat to meet his gaze.

“Where’re you from, lady?” he asked.

Hannah studied the driver’s face. There was a shopworn, ruddy quality in his tired yet now inquisitive eyes and in the two-day stubble of his beard. She found it difficult to put an age to him. He had the beaten-down appearance associated with long years of hardship and rough living, yet his eyes, focused as they were currently, had the clarity and verve of a man only in his late or even mid-thirties.

“I’m not from around here,” Hannah answered, turning her head to regard the landscape outside the window again.

“That ain’t hay,” the driver said. “You must be from far out – outer limits! – if you don’t know about Grand Central.”

“What happened there?” Hannah asked.

The driver straightened in his seat, put his hands on the large wheel and faced the road ahead of them.

“Don’t know that you could say any one thing happened. Ain’t nothing like a nuclear bomb or plague or famine or nothing a stiff could point to and say, ‘That was it. That was the day Grand Central hit the skids.’ Naw, what happened to Central, it happened gradually ...”

He turned back to Hannah again, abruptly.

“Hey, you’re not one of those Anglers, are you? Trying to get me to say something that will get me in trouble?”

Hannah blinked. With the question, the focus in the driver’s eyes retreated slightly, bitter indifference ready in the wings to replace it if she answered wrong.

“No, I’m not trying to cause anyone trouble. I just ... haven’t been around ... in some time.”

“Musta been a heck of a long time if you don’t know what goes on ...” The driver trailed off, sighed, and put the bus into gear.

Hannah braced herself against the sudden jerk forward, putting a hand against the back of the driver’s seat.

“Where are you going?”

“Grand Central Parkway.”

Hannah gaped. “Why?”

“If you really don’t know, seeing will be better than any words I’ve got to explain. If you do know and you’re really an Angler fishing to fill the tanks ...” The driver shrugged. “At least I’ll get there on my own six wheels.”

“Don’t you have other places you need to go?”

The driver huffed a gruff laugh. “If any other passenger back there complains, you let me know, okay?”

Hannah looked around the bus. It was empty. Against all reason, against a sickly feeling of foreboding, she smiled.

“I’m Hannah,” she told him.

“Bogue. Henry Bogue.”

They drove in silence. Hannah toyed with the heart-shaped locket suspended below her throat, staring trancelike as dingy colors streaked across the window mile after mile.

“We’re here.”

Hannah squinted. Through the clouded pane, she could barely make out the parkway: three straight lanes of pitted and cracked concrete paralleled by an identical highway across a median overgrown with yellowed grass, reaching nearly as high as the bus windows.

Ahead, the driver’s vista displayed Grand Central Station. Even at a distance, the building dominated the horizon. It was an architectural throwback, a mind-warping juxtaposition of classic, Romanesque features made of modern, space-age materials. A five-story structure faced with enormous arched windows, rooved by a trio of triangular pediments, squatted at the foot of a massive hotel tower rising easily three times as high behind it. Thousands of windows looked down, unblinking, beneath an arcade topping the distance between its square turrets.

Bogue glanced at Hannah’s expression and took it for awe. “Yeah, it’s pretty spectacular. At this distance.”

As the bus approached, more unpleasant details began to show. A chainlink fence surrounded the entire station, plastered with plywood boards. Wind-shredded plastic bags and other litter caught in the links fluttered like sad pennants. The station’s surface was textured by decades of grime, and any sort of human elements among its sculptured decorations had had their faces smashed.

“Here you are, Grand Central Station.” As the bus hissed to a stop, Bogue surveyed the scene with a jaded eye. “Can’t hardly believe they used to launch folk into space from here.”

He pulled a knob and the doors hiccupped open. Hannah clutched her purse to her and stood.

“What is it you want here?” Bogue asked.

“I want to help.” Hannah smiled, realizing how that sounded. “I need to contact someone.”

“Help with what?” Bogue shook the sharpened edge in his eyes back to indifference. “Forget it. I don’t want to know.”

Chagrined, Hanna stepped off the bus. Her toe slipped on the rubble littering the webbed concrete beneath her blue pumps.

“Can you wait for me?” she asked Bogue.

“This ain’t a taxi, lady.” The driver sighed. “You’ve got five minutes. Then I take off, with or without you.”

People milled about among tents and lean-tos set along the length of the fence, bartering with each other for food and items displayed in boxes. Some inhabitants slept beneath papers and rags within the shelters. Hanna wandered the shanty metropolis, somewhere between a market and a camp. An omnidirectional stench permeated the air.

“Hey, missy. I’ll trade you that locket for three bunches of turnip greens here.”

An old woman held out a bundle of limp, blighted leaves. Her wrinkled arms were covered in a crinkled sleeve of tattoos. Hannah’s breath caught.

“May I see?” She indicated the ink flooding the woman’s right forearm, where galaxy colors swirled with stars and planets.

Two piercings disappeared as the crone swallowed her lower lip in a chin-tugging frown. She extended her arm cautiously, obviously reluctant to scare away potential trade.

Hannah stroked a finger across the image on her wrist. “You were to be a Passenger to the Stars,” she breathed.

The tattooed woman her arm, cradling the limb, her eyes wide as though startled awake.

“How’d you know?”

“That little rocket ship, it was an inoculation stamp given to those preparing to take a colony shuttle,” Hannah said.

The crone gazed fondly at the rocket on her wrist. “It never faded. I got the other tats to disguise it.”

“Becki, you’re not s’pposed to talk about the star people,” a petulant voice from within her tent scolded.

Ignoring the sullen youngster, Becki reminisced, “Authority took over the program before my parents and I could go. Good thing. We would’ve ended up like everyone else shot into space, littering the stars with our corpses.”

“You think they died?”

“Otherwise why haven’t we heard from them all this time? They were gonna find us a place in the stars. Somewhere we could be free to speak our minds, to live our values.” The longing in Becki’s voice was heartbreaking. “To own ourselves. They were supposed to save us.”

“I’ve heard rumors,” Hannah ventured, “that the Passengers are thriving on a planet beyond Saturn’s rings. Their communications are being suppressed by Central Authority.”

A piercing shriek emerged from the young tent dweller.

“You’re in so much trouble. Where’s the Groupers? Hey-o, Groupers!”

The brat hailed a pair of Central Authority soldiers. One was a broad-shouldered woman, her pale hair a crewcut swathed with green, the other a slight man with curling black hair. He wore ice-blue contact lenses and fuchsia eyeliner.

Pink Blink approached the situation with a smirk. “What’s your problem?”

“I heard them criticizing Authority. They’s talking about the star people.” The youngster waggled a worm-like finger at Becki. “She’s one o’ them. Her tat proves it.”

Crewcut barked a humorless laugh. “That true? Is our old Beck a star person?”

Becki’s fearful simper turned her wrinkled eyes into those of a vulnerable child. Hannah’s own brow crease with worry.

Pink Blink’s lensed gaze held no trace of compassion. “Looks like we’ll have to give you residence inside Grand Central, where you can’t poison the community.”

“No!” Becki snatched up a pair of scissors from a crate of greens at her feet. “I was supposed to be a Passenger, yes, but I was just a kid. They left me behind. I’m glad, too!” Desperation filled the old lady’s watery eyes. “They was evil. I hope their bodies are rotting up there. If they ever came back, I’d tear their faces.”

With the point of the scissors, Becki furiously scraped at the skin marked by the inoculation stamp, scratching out the image of the rocket ship.

“See?” She raised a forearm. Blood dripped down and dropped off her elbow.

The Groupers exchanged smug smiles.

“She was talking about the star people, too,” the brat in the tent accused, pointing at Hannah.

Becki looked at Hannah with pitying eyes, but her shoulders slumped in relief as Pink Blink turned away from her.

“Is that right?”

Clasping her locket, Hannah stepped back, but Crewcut clamped onto her with a meaty fist. She held her arm in a pincer grip that Hannah could already feel bruising.

“You don’t look like you’re from around here,” Crewcut accused.

“I have family originally from this place,” Hannah told her. “I’m connecting with my roots.”

You’ve been denounced for speaking on a taboo subject and speaking against Authority” Pink Blink said. “Can you prove your loyalty like your friend Old Becki?”

Hannah’s pulse quickened. Despite what she had allowed Bogue to believe, she did have an idea of what went down at Central. If Hannah couldn’t convince them of her loyalty, they would surely lock her in one of Grand Central’s tower cells, at best to be forgotten until they ran out of space, at worst to be interrogated, tortured and brainwashed.

She couldn’t risk so much as a glance over her shoulder to see if the bus still waited. Surely more than five minutes had passed. Hannah didn’t expect Bogue would have waited, and certainly not if he’d seen the Groupers approach. Yet the sharpness the driver kept sheathed behind his eyes gave her reason to hope.

“I can’t prove what doesn’t exist,” Hannah told Central Authority’s agents.

“From her own lips,” Pink Blink crowed. “We’ve got a special tank for people like you. Bring her.”

Motioning his partner, he started toward Grand Central Station. Crewcut jerked Hannah forward.

Planting her feet, Hannah exhaled a bracing sigh. Then she willed her arm incorporeal and phased through the soldier’s hand.

As Crewcut staggered in a confused circle, Hannah spun. The bus was still there! Bogue gaped at her from the driver’s seat. Hannah dashed toward him.

Realizing her intention, Bogue reached for the door close button. His hand hovered for a moment, then snatched the throttle instead.

Hannah’s lunge landed her on the bus floor just as the transmission lurched into gear. In moments they were bumping at top speed down the parkway’s return.

“Thank you,” Hannah gasped.

“Lady, I don’t know what you are, but I hope you did what you needed, ‘cause this bus ain’t going back.”

His expression a snarl, his tone gruff and harried, but Bogue’s eyes betrayed him. They were alive, like windows of his soul had been washed.

Hannah thumbed open the clasp of her locket. Had she gotten close enough to Grand Central? Did the station’s tech still function?

“There’s no need. It worked.” Hannah’s rejoicing heartbeat resounded the pulse of the blue transmitter signal pumping from the locket. “The stars are coming. The stars are coming to us.”

Short Story
2

About the Creator

Michelle Rose Diehl

Profoundly silly.

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