Last Train

A faint droning noise pierced his dreams. Seconds later, his eyes opened.

The ceiling was elaborately decorated with spiralling patterns that reinvented themselves the closer you looked. He spent a solid minute staring at their languid movements. Then, someone screamed.

He frowned. This wasn’t the ceiling of his room. In fact, this wasn’t his room at all.

The ground juddered. He looked to the shutters, and pulled them open. The black canvas of space flew past, smeared with splashes of stardust and distant galaxies.

Screaming continued outside his new room. A headache needled at the core of his brain. The ground shook again.

He rose to his feet, reaching into his jacket for a headache tablet. His hand re-emerged with a piece of browning paper.

“You’ll thank me later,” he read. It wasn’t signed.

Terror stole through him. He slapped at his other pockets, but his wallet was gone. His papers and his pills were gone.

A new, terrifying thought came: Who am I?

The clacking of a knock at the cabin door made him flinch. “Enter!”

A man in the purple attire of an attendant slid the door open. He gave a queasy grin.

“We are apologising for the turbulence, Mr Emery. Is there anything you will be requiring?”

Mr Emery – which he supposed was his name, now you mention it – opened and closed his mouth a few times. All his questions seemed too stupid. He glanced to the cosmos drifting by outside his window.

He must be aboard the Universe Express. But he could never have afforded a ticket.

His hands sank into his pockets again, but there was no ticket to find. The sickly-faced attendant continued to beam in at him. Another scream filtered through the carriage. Beyond it, the droning of the engine.

“Just some turbulence.” The attendant’s right eye flickered. “We are apologising.”

Emery rubbed at his forehead, trying to conjure the memories of him getting on the train, getting anywhere near the train, even thinking about buying a ticket. The attendant loitered, smile perfectly timed to drop away after a few minutes.

“Where… Where exactly are we going?” asked Emery.

“Only the driver is knowing for sure,” said the attendant, and now its cheek twitched over silver teeth.

Emery kept a hold of his panic. More screaming emanated from the carriages behind his. He leant to the wall, and thought he heard a buzzing, grinding, ripping noise.

“I’d like to see the driver,” said Emery, mustering courage he hadn’t believed in.

The attendant grinned. “Very well of you. Please do be of the following us, sirs.” It blinked several times, then wheeled around.

Emery wandered out into the carriage. The transparent floors showed him the maw of a distant galaxy spread underneath his feet. He decided to keep his focus on the attendant.

The attendant bounded ahead, sometimes dropping to all fours before leap-frogging again, sometimes taking exaggerated strides. Once, it turned to smile at him, and he couldn’t smile back. How the hell he’d ended up on this train he still couldn’t work out. He tried not to think on it.

A jagged cry echoed behind him. He turned, but the carriage stretched for miles. Every cabin’s door was securely shut. He was tempted to press his ear to them, just to listen for the breathing of others aboard. If it was just him and the attendant…

“Hurry, please do be, sirs,” it called, its voice slightly distorting.

Emery did hurry. The attendant stood at the panel for the next carriage. It turned with half its smile drooping, the other half manically enthusiastic.

“Prepare.”

The door whisked open. Emery felt the hunger of space trying to tear him into the emptiness. In a split second, a canvas tube sheathed the narrow magnetic bridge between the carriages. Oxygen flooded his lungs, and he coughed.

The attendant sprang across the gap, then through the doors into the next carriage. Emery rushed after it, not trusting he wouldn’t be left trapped in the empty space if the door slid shut again. He staggered into the next carriage, wheezing. The attendant was already galloping ahead.

The cabins here were all shut as well. Emery hooked a finger through one of the handles, but the door didn’t budge.

“Where is everyone?” he asked.

The attendant turned with its horrible half-smile. “Most have not woken. The procedure has been has been has been mildly unsuccessful.” It blinked, and one eye stayed shut.

The procedure? Emery’s insides were ice, but he ambled after the attendant. Where else was there to go?

Another unsettling question: How long had he been on the train?

The driver would know. The driver had to know. Emery sensed he was teetering on the verge of insanity. A glance down at the yawning blackness of space beneath him, all around him in truth, made him stumble.

“Please do not to do not be do be scared,” said the attendant. “All is proceeded as is proceeded. Here is the driver’s cabin.”

“Right.”

The attendant stared back with one blank eye. Its half-smile was fixed in place, showing corrosion setting into those silver teeth.

Emery pressed the pad. His finger punched in the code. He stepped back, and reasoned he must’ve remembered it from seeing the attendant do it last time. He took the note from his pocket. The canvas tube whickered into place.

Emery hesitated a moment, then jumped through into the driver’s cabin. The door slid shut with an inelegant hiss. He hadn’t heard the screaming in some time now, which, he supposed, meant it’d been nothing serious. Someone spilt their drink or something.

Ahead of him, a vast windshield showed the constellations burning, watching, waiting. He traipsed to the window, pressing his hands against the cool glass.

The driver’s chair towered above him, a ladder leading up to it. He seized the first rung, and began to hoist his body up.

No noise. Nothing.

Emery paused, looking down at the floor. He should’ve been able to hear the driver’s breathing.

He could hang off this ladder forever. He didn’t really need to see the driver. Yes?

No. He was being stupid. He reached the last rung, and pulled himself onto the platform.

The driver’s chair was empty. The controls blinked dully through a sheet of grey dust. One of the screens flared a warning in blocky red letters. Emery drifted to it. His hands left imprints in the dust as he leant against the panel, and his breath hitched.

OFF COURSE.

Those two words stirred up fresh terror in Emery. He felt as if he was trying to pull away from the controls, from the train, but his body kept him here, leaning like a drunk against the panel.

There was a clanking from behind him. Emery whipped around, and the attendant lurched up from the ladder. It collapsed into a mangled heap, using one frozen arm to prop itself up.

“It was procedure gone wrong it was wrong it has not been working we failed.” It babbled with a machine’s toneless calm.

Emery stepped back, bumping his hand against the panel. The attendant’s remaining eye flickered.

“Try try try try try try…” It repeated the word endlessly. Each time, the word stabbed deeper into Emery’s skull, like a hammer pounding against his migraine.

“Where is the driver?” he asked.

“Did not making it. Procedure not successful. Try…”

“What happened?” demanded Emery. “Who put me on this train?”

“You will thank me later you will thank me later you will thank…”

Emery slammed his fist against the panel. The entire console trembled, and new lights winked on, only to die. A screen briefly showed two of the back carriages being torn away by an asteroid. The attendant continued its broken chant.

“We are off course,” it said suddenly. “The others will not make the choice. It falls to you, Mr Emery. The procedure did not affect you as it did the others.”

Emery rubbed at his head. The procedure? He remembered no procedure. He just wanted… He didn’t even know what he wanted, except to get off this damn train.

“If the course is not corrected, it will mean extinction. You are the final cohort. The cradle is fallen. If the course corrected not extinction cradle final corrected…” The attendant snapped its jaws shut.

“You weren’t supposed to tell me that,” said Emery, and a weight settled on him.

“The new cradle is found. Orders were to wipe all memory of the old cradle. A restart. If the train does not arrive: failure.”

The droning noise grew around them. Emery clasped his head, stopping a groan in his throat.

“I can’t do this.”

“There is no one else.” The attendant let out each word slowly.

Emery swallowed the taste of bile, and clambered into the driver’s seat. Flashes of memory occurred to him, but he pushed them away. He couldn’t afford distraction now.

The controls suddenly changed from bizarre hieroglyphics to clear instructions. His heart lifted slightly. He could remember, but not too much. Just enough to drive the train.

“Thank you, Mr Emery,” said the attendant, before the light in its eye blinked out again.

Emery faced the unforgiving, hungry cosmos before him. There was no room for thinking on the before; only on what was to come. And there would be a future, he decided.

He didn’t know what was going on throughout the train’s many carriages. He didn’t know how many more survived. He just knew humanity had one chance at avoiding extinction, and that was him.

They could thank him later.