At the End of the Day

KILOMETRE 23,866 —

She was moving. That much was certain.

Her body vibrated to the rhythm of the room and a hum was in her ears. She tried to push herself onto her elbows, then up onto her palms, but her waist felt like it was locked at its hinges. A thin, white sheet taped her body to the bed beneath her. She had to kick until it came free from under the mattress, her head throbbing as she sat up.

Across the room, a window had its blind drawn to almost close, letting in only a strip of the outside brightness. She twisted her bare feet to the carpeted floor, took the five steps to the window, and tugged on the blind’s drawstring.

It zapped up.

A symphony of sunlight and sound sizzled on her skin. She yelped in pure shock as her eyes struggled to find purchase, for the view outside was a blurry mess, pale blue at the top giving way to a layer of lime green melting into the arid hay brown of the bottom half. The colours blended so completely that they seemed to be at a standstill even though her brain was telling her that, for everything to look so fuzzy, she must have been travelling at a speed too fast to comprehend.

She scratched the blind back down, about to throw up.

A knock at the door stopped her. She hadn’t noticed it behind her.

The door slid open, letting in just enough light to clear away the dim of her room without making her feel sick once more, and a young woman paused at the threshold, incredibly tanned, tendrils of black hair falling loose from her bun and bracketing her heart-shaped face.

“Hi,” she said. “Eliot, right?”

Her voice was husky, dragging itself deliciously over Eliot’s entire body, limb to limb.

Eliot wasn’t sure if that was her name but she nodded before she could think about it.

“I’m Paloma. How are you feeling?”

“Confused,” she admitted, her own voice small.

Paloma smiled softly, then gestured to the bed. “May I?” But she didn’t wait for an answer, just crossed the room to perch on the edge of Eliot’s mattress with a sweep of her long skirt. Eliot let herself sit next to Paloma, the dip of the cushion pushing her closer than intended.

“Do you remember anything?” Paloma asked.

Considering she didn’t even know what she was referring to, Eliot slowly shook her head. Paloma frowned. Eliot had the intense urge to lie and change her answer in order to smooth out the wrinkles between Paloma’s delicate eyebrows.

“That’s a shame. We were hoping you would provide us with more information.”

“About what?” Eliot said, glancing, for the first time, down at her own body. Her shoulders stretched a soft white T-shirt, which was tucked into the waistband of a pair of wide-cut linen pants, the clean clothes a contrast to the dirt tarnishing her fingernails.

“Well, the outside, of course. Where we found you. It was horrifying, to tell you the truth.” Paloma tucked her fringe behind her ear. “We had to stop the train. A lot of people are angry about it.”

Eliot didn’t feel very good about that. The swirling in her stomach started again.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I wish I could be of more help. I don’t know why I can’t remember.”

“Don’t apologise, you’re lucky to be alive.”

Eliot looked at her, alarmed. Paloma held up her hands.

“I just mean—you must be so traumatised,” she said. “Did you spend the entire night out there? Alone?”

“I guess I did,” Eliot said softly. She suddenly disliked this conversation. Paloma was looking at her like a scientist looked down their microscope at a dangerously contagious virus, but she wasn’t sure where that image came from. There didn’t seem to be any scientists anymore. Only the train.

Paloma let out a gush of astonished breath. “Amazing. You have to meet the others.”

Before she could protest, Eliot was tugged to her feet and dragged out of the room. The firm carpet between her toes gave way to cold, slippery wood. Though the hallway smelled faintly of varnish, the cushions lining the sides of the carriage seemed older than her, blood red velvet faded to fleshy pink with time. All the windows displayed the same mosaic of scenery she had seen from her room, which she tried not to look at for too long in case it started to make her sick again. At the other end of the car, a ticker rapidly counted numbers above twenty-four thousand.

Four men playing cards at the table stopped their game to stare at her. One stood up and approached Paloma. His boots thudded on the floor, zippers on his jacket tinkling with each step. White stubble across his jaw opposed the dark, slicked back hair on his head, and wrinkles stamped the corners of his eyes.

“So?” he said, eyeing Eliot but addressing Paloma.

“She doesn’t remember anything.”

The man sighed. Another at the table threw down his cards.

“I told y’all it was a waste of time.” He got up. He was smaller and older than the first man, but the expression on his face was a lot more threatening.

“Neil,” the other man warned.

“No! We risked our lives for this shit. For nothing.”

“What does he mean?” Eliot whispered to Paloma.

Neil scoffed. “Excellent. She don’t even know.” His eyes bolted to Eliot, a sharp canine tooth glinting in the sun as his upper lip flared towards his nostril. “Like a damn baby. Are you five metres old?”

Eliot didn’t even know what to say to that.

The first man held up a placating hand. “Easy, Neil. I’ll talk to her. Get.”

Surprisingly, Neil obeyed. He returned to the table to scoop up his cards, then scattered off into another carriage with the rest of his party, Eliot copping dirty scowls from all three of them as they left. Once the door slid into its jamb behind them, the same buzz Eliot had felt in her room could be heard once more.

“Eliot, is it?” The man turned to her. “My name is Morgan.”

Eliot looked down at his proffered hand, large and calloused.

“It won’t bite,” he promised. Only Paloma let out a short giggle. Morgan gestured to a booth, different to the one the men had been using for their card game, and herded the two girls forward. “Why don’t we all take a seat? I have some questions for you, if that’s all right.”

“Paloma already asked me everything,” Eliot muttered, though she followed the motion of Morgan’s hand and sat down, scooting next to the window. Even through her peripheral vision, the rushing landscape made her green. “I’m sorry. I don’t have any information that would be of use to you.”

“What information do you have?”

Eliot stayed quiet. Her eyes watched her hands turn in her lap.

Paloma reached a palm across the table and ducked her head to catch Eliot’s gaze. “It’s been miles and miles since anyone has survived the outside at night. We just want to know how you did it.”

“I said I don’t know!” Eliot’s fist smashed the glass of the window as she shot out of her seat. She ignored the throb of pain it sent up her elbow. “This isn’t how it was supposed to be. I was supposed to die.”

At first, the weight of those words felt nice lifting off her chest. However, as they instead settled into the nooks and crannies of Paloma and Morgan’s frowning faces, Eliot’s mistake dawned on her.

By some miracle, she didn’t have to race to find a lie. The sound of the sliding door interrupted her, breaking the silence, and another woman entered the carriage. She was almost as tall as Morgan, and with a frame just as sturdy, grey hair jutting to her chin and skin even darker and browner than Eliot’s.

“Morgan,” she said in a light voice, though her eyes tracked Eliot’s movements and her mouth twitched down at the corners, “I need to speak to you.”

Morgan remained seated, glancing at Eliot as well. “What is it?”

The woman let a moment pass to make sure what she said was allowed to be overhead. “We’re out of sync.”

What Eliot could only describe as a whimper came out of Paloma. Morgan’s expression darkened. He lowered his head in thought, then lifted it with a deep breath. “We knew we would be taking risks. What can be done?”

“I don’t know.”

Morgan stood up. Without glancing back, he followed the woman, both of them leaving through the door she had come from. Eliot sank back into her seat, her knees weak after almost revealing her secret. “What just happened?” she asked. When she turned around, Paloma’s face was pale as bone. Her words shook.

“The train is going to stop.”

KILOMETRE 31,330 —

Paloma had showed Eliot back to her room and then excused herself. Eliot had laid back down on the bed, staring at the frame on the wall she had somehow missed the first time around.

CARPE DIEM!

The words were splashed against a vivid illustration of a blazing sun. She focused on it for as long as she could, as if it would train her for the next time she drew back the blinds on her window.

In the quiet of however long she had been left alone, a lot of things had come back to her: sunset, the rumble of the train leaving in the distance, the hunting party.

What she had done to her partner.

But nothing from after that.

Until a screech had woken her up and a figure, backlit by the sun, asked for her name and she had pushed it out through her teeth before giving into sleep once more.

It must have been Paloma, she realised now. Paloma had saved her, it seemed, at great risk to her own community. Eliot dug the heels of her palms into her eyes. Blocking out the light had a contradictory effect on her now. Her body felt more at home in the dark, calming down from its constant state of rejection in the brightness of the train, yet the black made her think of home. Or what used to be her home.

There was a knock at the door.

Shaking away the déjà vu of earlier, Eliot watched as Paloma stepped inside, carrying a tray and a nervous smile. On it were several small bowls set around a plate and a glass of water that swayed as she approached Eliot’s bed.

“Dinner,” she supplied.

Eliot didn’t know what to make of the meal as it was set down on the side table. There were so many colours, options. Stubs that looked like miniature trees with pale green trunks. Lumps of creamy yellow and orange. Little slices of glistening punch red accompanied by bigger pieces of something with a deep purple skin. In the middle, a dish of multicoloured spirals covered in sauce.

Actual food.

“You look like you’ve never seen pasta before,” Paloma joked weakly.

Eliot picked up the silver utensil next to the plate and let it hover over the pasta. With Paloma watching, she kept a straight face as she pierced a spiral and put it in her mouth. Her teeth sank down and a fusion of flavours burst across her tongue.

It was wrong. The more she ate, the more it didn’t sit right with her. Each vegetable she bit into, each mouthful she swallowed, the sauce she had to lick from her lips. It was all wrong.

It took her half of the meal to realise what made her so uneasy. There was no meat.

Slowly, her intestines began to churn.

She tried to continue chewing but the whirlpool within her stomach was spinning faster and faster, creating waves up her oesophagus.

“Is something the matter?” Paloma asked, staring at Eliot’s strange expression with a strange expression of her own.

Eliot shook her head. A bad idea. The motion shook up the contents she had just eaten, threatening to spill. Bile was crawling up her throat. With a hand glued to her mouth, she raced to the receptacle under the desk across the room and threw her head over its opening. A rainbow of stomach acid gushed out of her. Behind her, Paloma gasped.

An excruciating kilometre went by, the room filled with the sound of Eliot’s guttural gagging, most likely the acrid smell of it too. Convulsions coursed down her spine as her body refused the taste of food she had never eaten in her life and the memories that came along with it.

Once she was done, Eliot stood over the vomit-filled bin. Her lips burned, her fingers shook. A cold sweat stabbed at the back of her neck.

“My god,” Paloma said. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Eliot croaked.

The buzz of the train droned on, morphing into wind breezing past dried leaves. With the blinds drawn over her window, she was almost shrouded in the familiar light of dusk once more. She remembered. She’d only had a limited amount of time. She had to find bodies. At least one. They had gone too long picking the bones of tiny, dead animals. They needed something more substantial, no matter how rotten it was.

They emerged from under the ground in a party of six as soon as they were sure the rumbling was well past them. They surveyed their surroundings, then broke off in pairs. Eliot and her partner, Zion, had been allocated the tree line that day.

Eliot was usually an efficient hunter. However, Zion had been in a foul mood and, with nary a corpse in sight and the sun sinking further and further into the horizon, an argument had erupted. Eliot’s eyes had flickered from Zion’s furious face to the winking light disappearing behind her. Back and forth. Back and forth. She hadn’t even been listening to Zion’s insults. She hadn’t thought. She just did.

She hit her.

The glass shard they all used to hunt—remnants from before the night terrors—was in her hand, then out of it. Eliot had blinked and found the knife sticking out of Zion’s neck.

The blood had turned from red to black as the last of the sunlight faded away, giving Eliot no choice but to drag Zion’s body back to the entrance hole. They would understand why she did it. They needed to eat and this was even better than what they were used to having. A fresh body, still warm, still pumping out blood. They would thank her.

But they hadn’t.

Footsteps padded up behind Eliot and fingers clamped down around her elbow. Her scream pierced even her own ears.

“Relax!” Paloma’s voice said.

Eliot looked down at her hands. Every time her eyes closed, she saw blood staining the lines of her palms and soil wedged under her nails from how hard she had fought while they dragged her to the surface under the stars.

Paloma was terrified. “Eliot, what is going on?”

“You should have left me to die.”

It was only when she heard her own words that Eliot realised she believed them.

“What are you talking about? You’re scaring me.”

“I deserve to be punished for what I did,” she said, tapering off into a whisper.

Paloma’s grip on her shoulders loosened. “What did you do?”

“I killed my hunting partner.”

The dust motes in the air seemed to freeze.

“Hunting partner?” Paloma echoed. She took a step away from Eliot, her arms slumping to her skirt. “What do you mean? There are others like you?”

Eliot blinked. “I …”

There was protocol amongst her people to avoid the trains. They listened for the thundering tracks and pressed their palms to the packed dirt of their tunnels until the vibrations ceased beneath their skin. Only then did they deem it safe to scurry out of their homes, and only when they needed to. By the time they were clear of the trains, the sky would be awash in fairytale colours, leaving little light to do much of anything before night would eat them alive.

But there was no protocol for being on the train. There was no protocol when you were no longer welcome. Everyone had made that clear when Zion’s pale body was dropped at their feet.

Eliot didn’t realise Paloma had been backing away until she had one foot out the door. Before she could tell her to wait, the dark-haired girl was gone, steps thumping on wood.

Eliot’s breaths quickened and shallowed. She had ruined everything now. The safety of her people, her own safety. Surely, no one would want her on the train, knowing her hands had blood on them. They were going to dump her on the ground like she had done to Zion and she would have nowhere else to go but finally look the night sky in the eye and face what had demolished humanity so long ago.

The thought plunged her body into ice water.

She stumbled to the window and clawed at the drawstring, flinging up the blind. Outside, the sky had gone from atomic blue to a hazier, muddier grey. What was once a single brush stroke of green now showed up as dotted trees. Individual blades of dry, yellow grass shook on the ground. They were moving slower and sunset was catching up, almost licking their feet.

“This is your fault.”

What scared Eliot the most as she turned around was that it wasn’t Paloma who had spoken.

Neil held onto the doorjamb with one red, meaty hand, all his facial features drawn tight towards his nose to create one puckered expression. His chest heaved, his shirt bursting against it.

“Please,” Eliot found herself mumbling, though she didn’t know what she was pleading for.

“We ain’t got enough sun to power the train no more. The slower we go, the less power we get. I knew you weren’t worth it. We’re gonna die here. Because of you.”

His voice dimpled under the weight of his rage and he stepped over the carpet, now in her room. Eliot pressed her back to the freezing glass. Her stomach dropped as she watched him close the door behind him.

“I’m from the outside. I’ll tell you whatever you want,” she said. That familiar tickle started in her throat. She clenched her teeth together, willing her eyes to stay dry. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry. She deserved to die, yes, but she didn’t want it to be at the hands of this brute.

“That don’t work for me no more.”

“Stop,” Eliot yelled as the distance between them shrank to centimetres.

Neil didn’t say anything else. He stopped in front of her. His lips sucked into his mouth so that they disappeared from view. Then his hands were upon her, clamping her windpipe. He had moved slow enough for Eliot to try and fight back but, for some reason, her body hadn’t reacted and the immediate strength with which he squeezed the oxygen from her lungs surprised her.

Quickly, she was choking.

She dug her nails into his wrists, to no effect. His hold on her remained tight as a vice. With his face still twisted into its ugly, wretched expression, his watery blue eyes pierced into her own and she could see her last moments in them.

Maybe the punishment didn’t lie in the death itself but in how it happened. Maybe she deserved this. Maybe she didn’t get to choose.

Darkness crept into the corners of her eyes. Her nails lost purchase, hands flopping back to her sides. Her knees buckled.

“Let go!”

Neil ripped away from her.

The air that raced into her lungs was almost too much. She crashed to the floor, feeling the vibrations in her throat as she coughed up blood.

Morgan threw a fist through Neil’s teeth as Paloma knelt beside Eliot, saying words she wasn’t in the mind frame to process. Eliot swiped a hand over her mouth, painting her skin red, and shouldered Paloma off of her so she could stumble to her feet. There were shapes of more than just Morgan, Paloma and Neil in the room, faces she had never seen before, but she pushed past all of them.

“Eliot, where are you going?”

It was clearer once she was out of the room.

The hum in her ears was gone. There was no longer a turning in her gut. When she looked out the window, she couldn’t see much but it didn’t make her sick. A dark blanket had been thrown over the world, tiny holes pinpricked along its reach.

The train had stopped.

There was a door at the very end of the hallway with a glowing sign above it. Eliot took one step toward it, then another, her resolve strengthening each time her bare foot touched the shiny floorboards beneath. As she got closer, it was almost as if a film of oil had seeped into her surroundings. She was crying. She couldn’t tell where one window ended and another began, where the wall was and where the ground was. The only thing guiding her now was the cloudy light at the end of the corridor, haloed with its own reflection.

It was the right thing to do.

Eliot reached out her arm, groping for the door handle. White light washed over her vision and she was forced to let her feet move her forward until her fingers found metal.

“STOP!”

Despite the urgent tremor in his tone, Morgan was a cautionary few paces behind her. The others crowded at his back, Paloma amongst them with her fingernails in her mouth and her eyebrows knitted together.

“Eliot,” Morgan said with as steady a voice as he could muster, “what are you doing?”

Eliot’s thumb stroked back and forth over the exit latch. Like a magnet, she couldn’t let go now. She looked down.

“The only thing I can do.”

As the people’s voices shattered into screams, Eliot twisted the handle. The door’s hinges creaked open. She closed her eyes. Night air kissed her face.

KILOMETRE 39,772.