Now Departing...

In a matter of seconds the tone in the cafe car shifted. First, phones began to whine. Blatant. Obnoxious. Synchronous. Coming from each of the passengers in the car, the attendant behind the counter and the ticket taker resting in the half chair toward the back.

Twenty passengers, some alone, some traveling with others; their heads buried in their phones. Staring blankly as if the combination of words on they were seeing broke them.

Once the realization set in, they plastered their faces against the windows. Cheeks wiping the glass as if the window would dissolve to nothing if someone positioned their face in just the right way.

The train car, now some ten miles from it’s departure, was overtaken in rushing cloud of black ash.

The train plowed through.

Soon enough the cafe car, which was positioned near the center of the train became flooded with passengers from the ladder half of the train. Instinctively, they began fleeing. Car by car. As the stampeding aftermath of debris and radiation threatened to engulf the train.

Like I said, the passengers were acting on instinct. Its hard to gain experience with this sort of thing. Usually your burned up before you get to use it.

They did not realize that if one train car was absorbed, all of them would be. And that, at this particular moment, a fleeing train was perhaps the safest place they could be.

The train continued to chug along its predefined route. Ignorant of the follies that had befallen it’s creator. It was designed to do one job and by God, it was doing it.

The conductor, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, overrode any thought in his mind advising to stop the train. Although, being honest, he was more than likely too scared shitless to move. Let alone manipulate the handles and knobs required to bring the one thousand ton machine to a sudden stop.

The passenger at the front of the train, the first class car, were left unperturbed the longest. Consumed with rhythmic tapping of laptops, deafened by noise canceling headphones. Not until an all consuming darkness swallowed them did they observe their surroundings. Unfortunately by that time, there was few and far between to observe.

And the train continued on. Wheels turning. Engine humming. The one constant in a world that suddenly made no sense.

Once the train had outrun the seemingly endless cloud of smoke, the individuals of the cafe car suddenly heard the ping and pang and felt the vibrations as there phones reconnected to whatever telecommunications tower had survived.

Frantically, each and every one of them crawled back into their phones. Searching, hunting, for the contact card of the one person that jolts into your mind when faced with the possibility of death. Whether your own death, or theirs.

Some called spouses. Some called Mothers. Others called Fathers. Brothers, Sisters, Offspring. The list goes on endlessly. Each person uniquely deciding who may be the last person they talk to.

An elderly man however, stoic, in the furthest most booth, held nothing. Only observed. In fact, if he held anything, it was an appearance of someone completely nonplussed by the whole ordeal. I would come to learn later that he had already encountered death. And learned that in death, we are alone.

The adrenaline in the atmosphere began to evaporate. And with it the last grasp at normality.

Soon the train was overtaken once again. By a dissociative hysteria.

There was a raid on the cafe car. The attendant behind the counter pleading for rationality to prevail until she was forced out by the most panicked. Bags of barbecue potato chips and granola bars tossed recklessly overhead. Water bottles trickling to the carpeted floor as people with armfuls crawled over tables.

In the wake of the ad-hoc food distribution, isolation set back in. Accompanied by quietness.

Some passengers laid their heads, exhausted by either shock, or the brief chaos.

Others peered around train. Weighing the others. Who was biggest? Who coveted the most food? Who was also looking around the train?

Meanwhile, the ones up front, except for the conductor that is, paid no mind. Mr. Conductor remained the horses of a carriage that had no where to be.

The last thing money will ever buy is the sense of security. Up until that final moment, when it finally becomes worthless.

The train rattled on. Skipping stop after stop. It’s normal route suddenly feeling like food poisoning when you already have depression, different but certainly not better.

Mr. Conductor, studying the faces of Schenectidites, Uticans and Waterloo-ians, as he pressed on through them. Taking responsibility for their fates. Was he condemening them? Or saving them?

As the door into the Engine Room exploded open, he was sure that he had made the right decision.

It would be 21 hours until they reached their final destination and yet it took only four for a band of passengers to decide the controls of the train where too much for someone outside their camaraderie to possess.

The conductor gave up controls willingly enough. You only got three options, he thought, forwards, back or nowhere at all.

It was around this time when it was discovered that the old man who had sternly sat in the last booth of the cafe car., the one observing a commonality being established between himself and every other passenger, had suffered a heart attack and was deceased.

An air of compassion, with a hint of jealousy, waved over most of the passengers.

Which tends to happen when a white supremacist in a red hat hijacks the train your on.

Amtrak #448 departed New York Penn Station at 3:37 pm. The date was Tuesday, July 13th, 2027.

At 3:50 pm, the passengers of that train were alerted of a nuclear bomb striking downtown Manhattan.

By 4:15 pm, a riot broke out in the cafe car, when one passenger found another passenger hoarding diet cokes for the cafe refrigerator.

The train manifested into a distrustful playground within an hour. Alliances among race, politics, and personal bench press record begun to take shape. Until one group overhead a suggestion from another about recruiting the conductor. To control the means of operation.

Why recruit when you can just steal?

The train kept rolling for another 21 hours. Until it reached its destination in Union Station, Chicago, Illinois.

55 passengers fewer.