Southbound

Jacob wakes up with his face pressed against plush seats and his feet suspended in midair.

His stomach lurches as his body struggles to find equilibrium. He rubs the gunk from his eyes and blinks away the heavy sleep that tugs at his thoughts. His bare feet brush against a metal rack set into the wall close to the ceiling – no, the floor –

The room is upside down. Or Jacob is upside down. Or maybe the entire world has flipped, including the lily-white sun above (or below) the grassy meadows that stretch towards the horizon beyond the window. Jacob pushes off of the green cushioned bench by his head and rotates until he feels upright again.

The room is moving. The meadows race by at incredible speeds. In his bones Jacob feels the rhythmic ruh-tuh-tuh of metal wheels grinding on train tracks. When his foot touches the blood-red carpet, the floor hums with friction, a soothing pulse that invites him to return to sleep –

Jacob slaps himself in the face with one hand. Then the other. Sleep fades away.

The room is a train compartment straight out of the old high-color movies, with bright green benches mounted on dull brown walls and a thin ratty carpet between them. It occurs to Jacob that no one from those old movies ever floated in zero gravity, but here he is.

The meadows move on, never-ending.

Jacob tears his eyes away from the window to study the blank screen set into an adjacent wall. As he watches, the glass surface shimmers and fuzzes into the image of a static-smile woman in a burgundy porter’s uniform.

“Hello, passenger,” the woman says. Her black-rimmed cap sits slightly askew on blonde hair pulled back into a neat bun. “How may I help you?”

“Where am I?” Jacob asks. His throat feels ragged and raw.

“This is the SDC Express Line, train designation D2H31.”

Jacob grabs the luggage rack above his head with one hand to steady himself as he floats in midair. “How did I get here?” he asks.

The screen flickers, but the smile remains. “This is the SDC Express Line, train designation–”

“Where are we going?” Jacob asks.

“Southbound.” The woman’s calm voice drags at Jacob’s heartbeat and thickens his veins. Very reassuring. He should go back to sleep.

Instead, he tries the door handle, a brassy lever that belongs in the nineteenth century. It jiggles but remains closed. The woman on the screen stares straight ahead, beaming at the opposite wall.

“She’s not real,” Jacob whispers. He aligns his arm vertically against the door and shoves down on the handle. The lock snaps. The door swings out, and Jacob follows, floating into a wood-paneled hallway filled with a dozen identical doors on either side. He closes the door behind him, noting a tiny red blinking light set above the doorframe.

Jacob looks left. The wood paneling curves into a smooth alcove that marks the end of the hallway and the railcar itself. Even weightless, Jacob can feel the momentum of the train hurtling in that direction, faster than any train has a right to travel. That must be the front. Southbound.

With no way to access the conductors who must be driving this train, Jacob looks right. The hallway ends in a pair of frosted glass doors, one before the other, tastefully trimmed with faux mahogany.

A silhouette appears through the glass. It opens one door, then the other, floating into Jacob’s car. The porter’s outfit is identical to the one worn by the static-smiling face, except that this woman is real, and brunette. She regards Jacob with a practiced air of benign indifference, punctuated with a smile of her own.

“Ticket, please,” she says, holding out her hand.

Jacob pats down the pockets of his trousers, a pair of corduroys that certainly aren’t his.

“Where are we going?” he asks the porter.

“Southbound,” she answers. “Ticket, please?”

Jacob turns his pockets inside out. The woman’s eyes dart upward, to the red blinking light, then back to Jacob’s desperate hands.

“Sorry,” Jacob says, shrugging in apology. “I can’t seem to find mine.”

The blade nearly pierces the bridge of Jacob’s nose. He throws himself out of the way, his shoulder slamming painfully into the paneled wall before he realizes what happened. The porter whirls in midair; she is no longer smiling. An eight-inch blade protrudes from the right sleeve of her maroon jacket.

Jacob knows very little. He does not know where he came from, or how he found himself on the SDC Express Line, or his own last name. But he knows in this moment that motion means life, and stillness most certainly means death.

Jacob backpedals towards the glass doors, his movement agonizingly slow in the low gravity. He keeps his eyes on that blade and prays that the porter doesn’t have another one hidden up her left sleeve. He feels at the door with one hand, but he cannot find the latch. The woman approaches slowly. She knows that he’s trapped.

She springs forward at the exact moment that Jacob decides to duck. Her blade sings through the space where Jacob’s head was a millisecond before. Jacob pushes at the porter with outstretched hands. His fingers jab into her stomach, disrupting her balance as Jacob flies away towards the middle of the car.

The porter doesn’t pause for breath. She pushes off the wall, blade held high in the air, and Jacob watches for any sign that it might –

The porter’s left fist connects with Jacob’s jaw, sending him reeling against one of the closed doors. Jacob tastes blood and, strangely, hibiscus tea. He rolls to the side, narrowly avoiding the porter’s blade as it stabs into the paneling. She yanks the blade from the wall and slashes downward, clipping the front of Jacob’s white shirt and etching a razor-thin gash into his chest and abdomen as he tries to dodge. Jacob pushes backwards and bumps into the alcove at the front of the car. The porter charges again, her blade poised for a killing strike.

Jacob plants both hands on the surrounding walls and kicks out with his right foot. He connects with the woman’s chest and sends her tumbling backwards. The look she gives him as she spins through the hallway is pure venom. And…surprise?

He shouldn’t have been able to fight back.

The realization drives anger and adrenaline through Jacob’s veins. He launches himself at the porter, reaching for her wrist as she tries to lash out. Jacob’s momentum carries them past the door to his compartment, and he grabs the brass handle to stop himself. When he pulls, the door swings open, just in time to block the porter’s next attack as she pushes off the opposite wall.

Droplets of blood from Jacob’s chest wound float through the air. He swats them away from his face, then snatches the porter’s arm again as she spins upright. She pulls away, flailing, eyes wide with shock and fury, and Jacob lets her go. She flies through the open door into Jacob’s compartment and slams into the exterior window. It cracks.

Jacob grabs the top of the doorframe with both hands. The porter pushes off the window with both feet. Jacob brings his legs up. His kick connects with the porter’s shoulders as she winds back to swing the blade. The force carries her back to the window, which shatters, glass shards dancing around her as she flies into the meadows –

And straight through them. The porter’s body smashes a hole in the picturesque scene, revealing a glossy blackness sprinkled with dozens of points of light, howling as it sucks the air from the compartment. The porter tumbles into the dark. Her face twists in agony as metal shutters slide across the broken window, sealing the vacuum away.

Jacob pulls himself back into the hallway and closes the door. His whole body aches, and the shallow wound in his chest trails thin streams of blood in his wake. Around him, the doors remain closed, bulbs unblinking atop the doorframe. He tries two of the handles. Locked.

The glass door isn’t, though. It retracts into the wall when Jacob slides it open. Between the glass doors is only a narrow, dark room. He goes through the second glass door to find another train car identical to his, with more compartments and more unblinking bulbs. The next car holds the same.

The fourth car is different. The door is not glass, but titanium, with a retinal scanner built into the doorframe and the words Dining Car etched into a plastic placard. Jacob tries the handle. The door swings open without protest.

Jazz music. No, not exactly. Early Broadway. Cole Porter, if memory serves. Jacob doesn’t know how he remembers Cole’s last name and not his own, but the recognition is firmly planted in his mind. He floats into the dining car as Cole’s reedy vocals urge him to stop, to breathe, to rest.

Dozens of eyes turn to Jacob as he enters. Mustachioed men in silk shirts, pale-faced dames wearing elegant feathery hats and soft cotton dresses with puffed-up skirts, all strapped into leather seats with plastic belts across their waists as they gawk at the ill-fitting newcomer. Half-finished plates of synthetic roast lamb and potatoes and peas smothered in gravy stick to the magnetized tables.

You don’t belong here, their expressions say. Jacob agrees wholeheartedly, and he glides down the center aisle in silence. The only sound is the ruh-tuh-tuh of the train on the tracks. The porter behind the bar stares at the wound on Jacob’s chest. The man’s hand still moves in circles, polishing a glass hanging from the rack above his hovering figure.

“Where are we going?” Jacob asks the porter.

The round-faced man swallows. “Um, southbound,” he says. “Sir.”

Jacob pushes off of an empty barstool toward the opposite end of the dining car.

“Ticket?” the porter calls after him.

“Go jump out the airlock,” Jacob says without looking back. He opens the titanium exit door and pulls himself through. The door swings shut behind him.

The next car holds only luggage. The suitcases are all chrome hardshells, tucked into wall cubbies with fingerprint locks. The sight of a room that belongs in the twenty-second century gives Jacob no small sense of relief.

In a steel wardrobe at the end of the car hangs a bulky spacesuit coated in thin silver plating. For Emergencies Only, the faded red label reads, beneath the words SDC Property. Jacob fiddles with the seals on the back until he can peel open the suit and slide his feet in. His skin feels hot and sticky the moment he reapplies the seals, but the suit’s auto-cooling system kicks in after he snaps the glass bubble helmet into place. He pushes off the floor, then the ceiling, testing his mobility. The suit is surprisingly light for its size.

The placard on the next titanium door says Caboose. Jacob rests a thick glove on the handle and pauses, listening to the ruh-tuh-tuh of the tracks. If they’re hurtling headlong through space, why do they need the sound of train tracks?

“One more car,” Jacob whispers to himself. He opens the first door, then the second.

A dozen porters in heavy protective vests hover inside the otherwise empty caboose. The faux light from the meadows glistens on the steel batons in their fists. They turn as one to face Jacob with expressionless eyes and tight rictus grins.

“Ticket?” one asks.

“Just passing through,” Jacob says as he hurls himself through the open doorway and soars through the center of the car. He makes it halfway across before the first porter moves to interfere. The baton smashes into Jacob’s arm, pulverizing hundreds of tiny silver panels.

The other porters start yelling, wordless phrases and guttural grunts as they push off the walls and windows toward their target. Jacob throws a punch at the one who swung first. His gloved fist slams into the man’s jaw. Jacob’s momentum carries him around in circles. He flails out with feet and fists, limbs connecting with bodies in every direction as they scramble to stop him.

One eager baton swing connects sickeningly with another porter’s bare fingers. Jacob pushes one of his assailants away, bowling over two others and sending the trio flying into a window with a dull crunch. The glass cracks but doesn’t shatter.

Jacob reaches the airlock and grabs the red-handled release lever. He tries to pull upward, but the low gravity robs him of any leverage.

A brute of a man wearing a porter’s uniform disentangles himself from the fray and wraps his enormous fingers around Jacob’s bicep. He kicks off the floor and drives Jacob into the ceiling. The impact knocks the air from Jacob’s lungs. The porter slams the heel of his hand into Jacob’s glass helmet, sending stars into his vision, then throws him to the floor.

Jacob shakes his head to clear the cobwebs from his brain. The porter draws in close enough for Jacob to read the words Stellar Debt Collection in tiny yellow print on the front of his vest.

“Go back to sleep,” the porter hisses through gritted teeth, and oh, how Jacob wants to obey. “We’re all just taking a trip southbound.”

“Speak for yourself,” Jacob says, and he kicks off from the adjacent wall with all of his strength. The porter keeps a grip on Jacob’s arm as they fly across the room, breaking through the crowd of porters, directly toward the cracked window.

This time, it shatters.

The air whistles as it leaves the caboose. The sunshine from above the meadows flickers and falters. Jacob and his assailant soar in the direction of that great big blue sky and then through it, ripping the outer shell like paper. The twinkling glass shards vanish, replaced by the expanse of empty space and the dots of distant suns. The porter’s grip slackens, and he fumbles for something, anything to save himself before the vacuum sucks the life from his body.

Jacob floats in the ether, alone, unmoving. He watches the train carry on its way, a great glass cylinder of projectors and solar panels latched onto the chassis of an ancient locomotive. There is no direction in space, but Jacob could swear that he looks down upon the train as it rockets into the unknown oblivion below. Heading southbound.

~

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed it, check out my other runner-up in the Runaway Train challenge, "Three Stops".