The train rolled and lurched, careening towards the horizon straight across the empty plains.
Marissa awoke in a haze, the heavy fug of raw moonshine lingering behind her eyes. The young girl hunched next to her, knees pulled to her chin, looked cold and hungry, and had been crying, saline residue streaked her begrimed cheeks.
Marissa reached with calloused railroad hands for the near empty bottle, swilled the dregs around and drained it, trying to filter the grit through her teeth. She savoured the burn in her throat, then spat a string of phlegm that caught in the wind and whipped away from the rumbling freight carriage. She heaved the bottle after it and never saw it shatter.
They had boarded the train in the darkest hours of the night, and were now riding into a grey dawn. She tried to get comfortable on the hard metal shelf, shifting her pack on their precarious perch just above the rushing rails. The girl spoke.
“How much longer until the sea?”
“A good while yet.”
“What’s it like, out there, on the waves?”
“A lot safer than here. You won’t be looking over your shoulder all the time.”
The girl looked doubtful. Her bloodshot eyes betrayed her nervousness at journeying into the unknown.
“Can you swim?” Marissa asked.
The girl nodded. “I learned back in school.”
“Hell, who knows, you might even enjoy it then.”
Marissa smiled at the girl, and felt motherly towards her.
“They'll teach you how to catch fresh fish, you won’t have to scavenge. Some days, you can even see the sunset. It catches on the waves which sparkle like diamonds. Its beautiful.”
“Then why did you leave? Why do you keep coming back to the land?”
“Just doing my bit for people like you,” Marissa said gruffly, and the girl looked hurt like a scolded child.
Marissa couldn’t help herself, and reached out to touch the young girl’s short curly hair.
“And someone in particular, someone I lost when this world broke down.”
“We all lost someone” said the girl quietly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”
“Its fine.”
The conversation dried up, and they watched the scenery hurtle past, underscored by the low and terrifying clatter of the train that sucked at their hearing. A blur of wizened stunted leafless trees and the occasional small frontier settlement, abandoned and ramshackle. This land had been full of amber waves of grain, but now there was only ashes. Marissa wished she had more alcohol. Numbness was about as good as it got these days. It was cold, the wind stung her eyes, and she shrunk deeper into the hood of her jacket and pulled the scarf tight around her mouth.
The train ground to a halt in the intermodal yard, an anguished squeal of brakes like feuding cats. Marissa threw her pack down first, then jumped off, crouched low, and made her way swiftly and unseen into the undergrowth at the edge of the yard. She let a minute elapse, then signalled for the girl to follow. The two of them twisted their way through one of the many small openings in the wire fence, and began walking down an empty road. In the distance they could hear the raucous shriek of gulls and the briny, wet smell of the ocean hung in the air. The young girl slipped her hand into Marissa’s and squeezed tight. Marissa couldn’t bring herself to shake it off, she sighed inaudibly, and in the gathering dusk they trudged wearily down the asphalt.
After some distance, they came across the sign for the city limits, with the legend ‘Welcome to Reality’ scrawled across it. It made her think of Strobe, one of the last people she might’ve called a friend. The way his luck had run out was cruel and stupid. His pack had gotten caught when he was climbing on a train, dragging him under right before her eyes. There was nothing she could do as he vanished beneath the wheels, a surprised and apologetic grin and then he was gone, just a stain on the line. He was the one who had showed her how to hop the trains, and accompanied her on countless miles, teaching her how to stay unseen, how to travel the country like a ghost. No one really bothered checking the freight cars anymore, and there was a network of outcasts who sustained each other.
She tried to push Strobe from her mind, another memory to be suppressed. The only reminder that he had ever held a place in this world were tags on a few random cars. Funnily enough, this last journey they had even ridden on a car with his mark - ‘Strobe Attack’. Marissa had waited until the girl was sleeping before adding her own tag next to his. She had even ringed it with a heart, a futile childish thing that nonetheless gave her a shred of pleasure. R.I.P.
The town was vacant and eerie. Everyone who could had moved to a settlement months ago. It was why the lifeboat came here for pickups; there was virtually no chance of being found. They didn’t have enough resources to patrol the coastline this far down. Even if they knew what was going on with the lifeboats, they probably turned a blind eye, as it was easier to let the outcasts try their luck at sea than round them up and internalise them.
Marissa led the girl into what had once been a hotel, now stripped bare and smashed, the walls covered in the laconic tags of outcasts, an indecipherable document to last days on dry land. They went to a top floor suite which still had the bed, a useless TV and sweeping views of the ocean. Periodically Marissa flashed the code out across the waves with a torch and shard of mirror.
On the beach at the edge of the surf, the girl looked up awkwardly at Marissa, then hugged her tight and clumsily. She was trying so hard to be brave.
“Its alright kid”, said Marissa, detaching her, and gently helping her into the small boat.
“I hope you find who your looking for,” the girl sniffed.
The skiff bounced across the choppy sepia sea and was quickly swallowed by the gloom, the girl now lost to Marissa. She thought about the Captain’s offer – ‘Come with us?’
Things would be easier, safer, even comfortable. She knew that. She took the picture from her pack, the one she had taken so much care to laminate and to only glance at infrequently, to remind herself why she trod the hard path.
I know your still out there. I’ll keep looking. For as long it takes, little girl.
She shouldered her pack, and walked off down the blacktop towards the railyard. Thunderheads were gathering, and she would need a place to wait out the coming storm before hopping the next freight inland.
Written for @Gmuxx 's Art Prompt Writing Contest no.7