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Part 12: You Scream Until The End
Barton woke, still cradling her. The sun was high in the sky. For a sweet moment, he let himself imagine this was like any other late morning that he’d woken in this apartment. Maybe it would be yet. Still, he put off moving for a while. The hunger in his belly had developed a temper.
Eventually, he moved. When he did, she stirred too.
“Gabby?” he said.
Confusion and alarm greeted him, and she scuttled away. Barton saw, with dismay, those huge whites in her eyes. She made a low noise.
“Always on time, always on time,” he said.
It seemed to work for moment. She settled a bit, her shoulders relaxing. Then her head swiveled about, fixing on random spots in the room. It was getting worse, much worse.
He thought about going to out to get food but was terrified of leaving her alone. He had a notion that that wasn’t safe to do, so he ordered delivery. Barton drew a bath while he waited for the meals, constantly checking in on the bedroom. With the window shades drawn, she seemed content to just sit on the bed.
The food arrived, and he worked out how to let them up with her phone. The device also told him that she had a mass of missed calls and voicemails… parents included. If this didn’t get fixed soon, she’d be taken away and out of his life, probably forever.
He fed her, and she ate in even, uninterested bites. Then he bathed her, which was easier and less awkward than he thought it might be. It was like dealing with a doll. One that would walk where you led it and otherwise just sat there.
He tried turning on the radio once, and she started to hyperventilate, so that was a no go. He tried talking to her, but only got occasional inaudible mumblings.
The day rolled on, and he felt trapped. Trapped like those poor passengers. At least this building wasn’t burning down. His mind wandered to the scene, and he tried to picture what it must have been like. Dark, crowded. The train stops… the train that’s never supposed to be late. The conductor says everything is fine, maybe he sounds a little too chipper about it. You shrug, you’re on a little adventure, having a little fun. Then there’s a funny smell. Sweet, smoky. And it’s suddenly too hot. You realize much too late that you’re not going to be making it to your destination after all, because the door won’t open and it hurts now, it’s so hot. You scream. You scream as the fire strips away what’s human, louder as it gets into the animal of you.
You scream until the end.
Barton wrenched himself out of it and resisted the urge to be sick. After it passed, he kept the images out, but let the sorrow of it wash over him.
“They never made it,” he said. He looked at the thing that used to be Gabby. She was still beautiful, even now. “They weren’t on time. You weren’t… on time.”
She looked at him then. And suddenly, he had it.
He spent the evening working out the math. He knew her lock code pattern to her phone; he had seen the shape traced dozens of times before. The GPS app still had all the data in it.
Fifty-two miles between the stations. Average walking speed: three miles per hour. A seventeen hour trek, from station to station, if they didn’t stop. He thought about bikes, or a four-wheeler, but he somehow knew she was going to have to walk it. Good luck teaching a doll to ride.
The next piece he’d have to coax out of her. The answer was sometime between one and two AM. The schedule had to be kept. Had to.
“What time do we arrive?” he asked her, low and soft in her ear.
She stirred the first time, but made no noise. He asked again. And again. Ten times. Twenty. When he felt frustrating rising, he slipped his hand into hers and squeezed. The shampoo he’d massaged in her hair smelled of summer nights, and her natural curls touched his cheek as gingerly as they ever had.
Forty times. He could feel her struggling to speak. Wanting to. Failing.
Fifty. “What time do we arrive?”
Barton took a break sometime after he lost count north of two hundred. He had tried different phrasings, tried making it into a story, tried acting out a conversation. Every time, he felt something stir in her. But it was possible that she was too far gone. He’d have to guess.
Taking the speed of 15 miles per hour—which was the speed the Internet figured steam engines averaged back then—he divided it into 52 and came up with three and a half hours. If the train left at 10PM as Rudy suggested, that put its arrival at 1:30AM.
Close enough. Nice round number. He ordered a taxi online, pickup for 6AM. They’d need to set off by 8AM at the latest, if he had worked out the numbers right. It was going to be a long, long walk.
He did the math over and over, making sure of it, hoping it would help him sleep. It must’ve worked, because he was dreaming of whirring clocks when a hand grasped his wrist and woke him. He shot up, expecting the shadow man to be there, finally ready to move and maybe drench them in chemicals, maybe flick a match, maybe watch them burn and howl.
But he’d left all the lights on. It was only her, gripping his wrist. She was staring hard, or at least her eyes were straining to. They were all white now. Barton thought maybe she was about to die on him, but she sighed and fell back into the pillow, with a little smile.
“Now,” she whispered.
The clock on the nightstand read 1:20AM.
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