Runaway Life

“Man do I have a headache! Where am I?” This question goes unanswered, but he can tell he is not alone. He can see bodies sitting in chairs all around him. He then realizes that he himself is sitting in a chair. The room is dark with only a small amount of ambient light coming from outside. He looks out the widow and realizes that he must be on a train because he can see that they appear to be moving through a dimly lit tunnel. He has no memory of getting on a train…nor of who he is for that matter.

His confusion quickly turns to panic. He begins to call out to the other people on the train hoping that they may be able to help him remember who he is and what is going on. Unfortunately, no one answers. The man gets up and walks over to the row of seats next to him and nudges the man sitting there. Instead of waking up as the man had hoped, the other passenger simply falls over in his seat. Startled, the man jumps back. He shouts “sir, are you alright!?” However, in his heart he knew the other passenger was not alright. He slowly walks over to the slumped over man and can quickly confirm his fear. The other passenger is dead.

“Oh my God, oh my God!” The man then stumbles forward a couple of rows to where a lady and a child sit. The man grabs the lady and shakes her, screaming for her to wake up. The lady only slumps over as the man did, and with her, so does the child. If he was panicking before, now he is on the verge of a full-on heart attack. He starts running up and down the aisle, screaming, but no answers. Everyone in the train car seems to be dead.

After slumping over himself and focusing on his breathing, in an attempt to avoid hyperventilating, he decides his only option is to move to the next car. Maybe they will be alive! With this thought he runs towards the door to the next car. What he found in the next car was heartbreaking but for some reason not surprising. They were all dead as well. He had known he would find this, although he wasn’t sure how he knew. Now what?

He decided the next thing to do would be to try to make it to the engine. Someone is driving the train, right? Wait… SOMEONE IS DRIVING THE TRAIN, RIGHT!? The man goes flying from one car to the next desperately trying to reach the engine to find out just how bad his situation was. What he found was not only disappointing but also made absolutely no sense at all… there was no engine. Just one car after another, with the door on the last car just leading outside into the tunnel. “What in the world is going on here? Why am I here? Who are those people and why are they dead? And how is this train moving with no engine?”

The man decides that the next thing to do would be to check the other passengers to see if anyone had a phone so he could call for help. Yes! Why didn’t he think of that earlier? He rushes over to a gentlemen slumped over in his seat and reaches into his coat pocket. Luckily, he finds a phone, unluckily, it has no service. Somehow the man is not surprised. However, he notices something. Although the phone has no service there is a news article on the screen. It is a news article that reads “125 PEOPLE KILLED IN TERRORIST ATTACK ONBOARD AN AMTRACK HEADED FROM ASPEN, CO TO GRAND JUNCTION, CO.” The man just stares into the phone, more confused now than ever. This must be a coincidence. If these people were killed in a terrorist attack and the media knew about it, then that would mean the train had been stopped. This train, on the other hand, is still very much moving.

He decides to try someone else’s phone. To his shock the same news story is on the screen. He tries another phone, another one, and another one, all with the same story, and no cell service. For reasons he doesn’t quite understand, he is compelled to read the story. Perhaps because he simply doesn’t know what else to do. He reads of the lives that some of them lived and how their families were absolutely devastated. He reads of the children who had lost a parent and of the parents who had lost children. He reads about how one couple that was on the train was a newlywed couple headed home from their honeymoon. His eyes filled with tears as he read on and on about how so many had suffered such horrendous losses. “How could someone do this!? And is that what happened to the people on this train!? IS THIS STORY ABOUT THIS TRAIN!?”

“Yes”. Came a voice out of nowhere. The first voice the man had heard since waking.

“Who was that? Hello?”

“The people in the stories are the people on this train.”

“That doesn’t make any sense! Who are you? Why am I not dead?”

“I think you know who I am, and I think that you are beginning to understand, although you do not want to admit it. These people died at the hands of a suicide bomber who was motived by hate and an evil that was so strong that he was compelled to cause all of this death and destruction. You are that man. You killed these people.”