By Mark Howard Jones.
The middle-of-the-night nuclear waste trains, that she wasn’t supposed to know anything about, rumbled secretly past Sarah’s house two or three times a week. They always woke her with a soft but insistent vibration that ran through the floor and up the legs of the bed.
And she always felt a strange tingle of excitement whenever it happened, unable to sleep for hours afterwards. Sarah welcomed the passing event, even though it meant she was exhausted the next day.
She knew she wasn’t the prettiest girl who ever lived, but then she wasn’t the stupidest either. Officially the trains did not exist but she knew they did — there were traces of them all over the internet and she’d often glimpsed them passing behind the trees that shielded the railway track from her house. Even though they were well disguised, she’d caught a glimpse of the tell-tale symbol on more than one occasion, where a carelessly-tied tarpaulin had slipped loose with the constant motion.
Everything showed up as shades of grey at that time of the morning but Sarah could see the secret colour of death lighting up the night train.
She didn’t mind the trains, quite the opposite. She wasn’t one of these mindless objectors; she knew that nuclear power was the future. The trains made her feel plugged into that future, made her feel modern and forward-looking, while everything else in her life seemed to belong to the past. The trains were on a journey to tomorrow.
One day, when she felt brave enough, she planned to wait among the trees and grab on to one of the slow-moving wagons; she burned to know where they went and what waited for them at the end of their journey. Probably more people like her; obsessive, carefully attuned individuals who had reached the end of the line.
Sarah finished typing her message to her friend in Harrisburg who similarly watched the toxic cargoes passing his house, sometimes in broad daylight. He felt the same way she did and she was glad about that.
She switched off her computer and wheeled herself over to the TV, grabbing the remote control from the table on the way. Flicking the set on, she fished the bottle of pills from her pocket and tipped two into her moist palm.
As the news announcer mumbled about casualty numbers from a train crash, Sarah stared at the little white pills and felt the tumour inside her — one of death’s babies — spread its tentacles a few more millimetres through her brittle body.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Howard Jones lives in Cardiff, the capital of Wales, stranded somewhere between England and Ireland. He has had dozens of stories published somewhere or other.
