Last Stop

The last thing that Jimmy David remembered was trying to lose the cops in the Impala he'd jacked an hour earlier, with a loose wad of equally dirty cash thrown carelessly across the passenger's seat. With three cars gaining on him, he'd cut the wheel hard to the left by the railroad crossing and mashed the accelerator into the floor, betting that the local heat wouldn't even try to beat the oncoming train. A glance in the rearview mirror proved him right, as all three cars braked hard and slid to a stop at awkward angles. Jimmy took his only chance and pushed on, gritting his teeth against the approaching thunderous roar and gripping the wheel until his hands ached. He knew that the difference between success and failure was about to be measured in fractions of a second.

There was no tunnel, no white light with familiar voices calling to him, beckoning him onward with their soothing tones. There was nothing more than a blink of the eyes, and he opened them again to find himself riding in the passenger car of what he was sure was a different train. The interior was somewhat old-fashioned (or what he had always imagined the inside of an old-fashioned train would look like, anyway)—all dark oak with flowery patterns intricately carved into the edges of the seats, and deep crimson upholstery that matched the carpet runner in the aisle. The seats were wide, and arranged in facing pairs, where travelers on long trips could pass the time with conversation. But, while he was sure that there were other passengers on the train, Jimmy was currently alone in this particular car.

Outside, an unknown yet familiar countryside passed by; pretty, if unremarkable. Jimmy was reminded of paintings of fields and ponds with mountainous backdrops—the kind he felt sure he'd seen somewhere in every office and bank he'd ever set foot in. The only unusual feature of the landscape was how quickly time was passing over it, with the sun progressing far across the sky, shifting and elongating the shadowy mountain crevices, within only a few minutes.

Few people would have considered Jimmy David to be a smart man (himself included), but he held no illusions as to the outcome of his race against the train. He had basically bet his survival on a cosmic flip of the coin, and it had come up tails. Now he was here . . . whatever that meant, exactly.

Sometime after the realization that he was dead, and just as he was beginning to wonder if this was all that the afterlife held, the door at the far end of the car slid open. A tall figure entered, resembling a tall man with a gaunt face and pale complexion. The door politely waited until he was fully inside the car, then slid shut automatically behind him.

The newcomer appeared to glide down the aisle toward Jimmy, rather than walk, with any steps he might've taken disguised beneath his straight, black robe. Even from a distance, Jimmy would have recognized the features of the Honorable Judge Mark O'Brian (would've been harder to not recognize him, as many times as he'd been hauled in to appear before His Honor), but this clearly was not Judge O'Brian—it wasn't even anything that would've passed for human. O'Brian had steely blue eyes, almost gray, that made most petty thugs that landed before him think that he must be as hardened as they were, or more so; as the thing that wasn't O'Brian stopped and took the seat across from him, Jimmy found himself staring with something akin to wonder into twin cavernous hollows of nothingness where the eyes should have been. More than simply being empty sockets, he found the effect more like that of gazing up into the infinite vastness of a clear midnight sky.

Several times, Jimmy opened his mouth to speak, only to close it again when unable to fix on a single thought at a time. His visitor sat patiently, apparently watching him somehow with those voids while smiling enigmatically. With the skewed passage of time, Dusk had fallen outside before Jimmy finally found his voice.

“What are you?” he asked in a voice still more tinged by awe and confusion than fear.

“Isn't it obvious, Jimmy? I'm a judge.” The thing's smile grew wider, stretching into what must have been beyond human limits. “I'm your judge.”

“But why do you look like O'Brian? And . . .” Jimmy looked out the window long enough to watch the newly risen moon creep from one mountain peak to the next, tapped pointedly at the glass. “What is all this?”

“Would you prefer we just weighed your heart against a feather and be done with it?” The smile held, then finally faded with Jimmy's blank reaction, twisting into a sour look punctuated with a sigh. “You ask questions when you already, on some level, know the answers. This is how your mind chooses to see your current reality. Me, your surroundings, the journey itself; it's all as close to the true reality as an imagination as limited and literal as yours would allow.”

Jimmy had never been one to let an insult slide—had given and received plenty of black eyes and bloody noses as a result—and his fists clenched now in an involuntary response. He wasn't that stupid, though, and knew that taking a swing at whatever it was seated across from him could only end badly for Steve and Nora David's only child. Instead, he forced himself to relax, and watched the world outside go by beneath what was already a full midnight moon.

It was hard to gauge the passage of time when it refused to move at a proper pace, but soon the countryside began to move by more slowly, and Jimmy could see that they were approaching a massive city. Before he could wrap his mind around how jarringly the structures began in the middle of miles of empty countryside, they were within the great metropolis, surrounded by towering monuments of smooth marble that seemed to rise into the very clouds. A soft, blue-tinged light emanated from nowhere and everywhere at once, bathing the city in a soothing glow. It was exactly what he would have expected paradise to look like.

The train slowed to a gentle stop alongside a raised platform with little more than a low, hydraulic hiss. Jimmy could see groups of people from other cars exiting, and began to rise from his seat, although the side doors in his own car remained close. He stopped when the judge raised his hand, palm out in a halting gesture, and shook his head.

“This isn't your stop, Jimmy. Only one that might have been.”

Jimmy settled back in his seat sullenly, a scowl creasing his brow. “What's that supposed to mean? Where's my stop, then?”

A hint of the smile crept back into place. “Well, that's something we need to have a conversation about. You might say we need to discuss your past, and, consequently, your future. Get comfortable, Jimmy.”

Jimmy considered protesting with a retort about the judge's anatomy, and which parts of it he could stick into other parts of it, but settled back into his seat instead. The train soon began moving again with a barely noticeable lurch, gliding smoothly away from the station with less cargo than when it arrived.

The inviting glow of the city quickly receded behind them, eventually being lost entirely to the night. The moon seemed not to have moved at all while they were stopped, but now resumed its accelerated trek across the sky. Jimmy looked once more in the direction of the city, and wondered how quickly he was traveling along his journey.

A thoughtful sigh from the judge pulled Jimmy's attention back to the other occupant of the car, perhaps the only other occupant on the entire train now. At some point during his brief musings, a thick book bound in black leather had materialized and was now floating, opened near the beginning, at a comfortable reading height before the judge. The inclination and small movements of his head suggested that he was reading from the volume, despite lacking the necessary sensory organs for such a task. The pages turned rapidly under their own power, much as the door had closed itself earlier, stopping only when the judge turned his attention once again to Jimmy.

“Started down a bad road early, didn't you?” A few more pages fanned by, with the judge shaking his head solemnly and issuing a single disappointed grunt. “Armed robbery at only fourteen?”

Jimmy's eyes widened before he could control the reaction. He'd never told anyone about that robbery, before or after. He hadn't trusted anyone enough to help in the planning stages, and no way in hell was he going to mention it afterwards, not when such a simple job had gone ass-end-up so badly. At the time he'd just been relieved that he hadn't been caught. So much so that he'd even tried to reform himself . . . for a little while.

“No, you've got the wrong book or something. That wasn't me.” Jimmy was now shaking his head, just a little too emphatically to come off as sincere.

The corners of the judge's mouth curled upward into a mild smirk. “I don't think you quite understand your situation, Jimmy. This book is as much a creation of your mind as everything else that you're experiencing. It is, specifically, a collection of your memories.” The smirk widened, teeth bared in a bizarrely mirthful snarl. “We aren't here to debate whether these events happened. My only interest is in how you feel about them now—to see your true character. Do you understand?”

Jimmy nodded dumbly, his eyes taking in the cabin, searching for an escape he knew wouldn't be there.

“You grew up just down the block from Arnold Lancaster's market. Saw him almost every day, didn't you? A kindly old man, who even managed a smile for children like you.” The last word came out with a particularly sour emphasis. “I won't ask why you decided to rob someone, but why him?”

Jimmy could feel the infinite emptiness gazing at him—gazing into him—and knew that lying would be pointless. He still might have tried, but he didn't know just how much of his memory that book spelled out.

“Like you said, he was old. I thought it would be easy.”

“And was it? What happened when you tried, Jimmy?”

“You know damned well what happened. It's right there in that book, isn't it?”

The judge leaned forward slightly, perhaps even a bit eagerly. “Yes, of course it is, but I want to hear you say it, Jimmy.”

Jimmy returned his attention to the world outside the train, where the dawn's first rays were painting the horizon in gold, then fading into a rosy pink before giving way to the purple-blue that stubbornly lingered higher up. He found himself suddenly very interested in looking at anything besides the judge, although he could still feel the stare boring into him. He remained silent until the sun fully crested over the mountains and reclaimed the day.

“I shot him,” he finally answered. “He went for a gun behind the counter, so I shot him. Put a hole through his left shoulder, he hit the floor, I ran like hell. Forgot to even grab the cash.”

“How did you know that he was reaching for a weapon?”

“I guess I didn't.” Jimmy watched a herd of wild horses running alongside the train for a while, coming to a stop when the tracks crossed a narrow stream. He'd always thought there would be horses in open country like this. Once they were out of sight, he shrugged. “Doesn't matter. I told him to not move.”

“It was his own fault, then?”

Jimmy responded with another shrug; said nothing. Dark clouds were now rising over the mountains so rapidly that they appeared to be consuming the sky rather than moving across it. The pages of the book fluttered like the wings of a giant hummingbird. Jimmy watched as distant bursts of lightning slashed at one another as if in combat.

“Certainly not your last youthful indiscretion,” a hint of mockery laced the scorn in the judge's voice. “But let's skip ahead a bit, shall we?” The fluttering stopped. Jimmy glanced over long enough to see that they were now about three-quarters of the way through the book. “Oh, now this one is interesting. Automobile theft, but—weren't you lucky!—still two months shy of adulthood. And you chose a clunker at that, so practically no value. Even less value after you ran it through that fence, I would assume. But no serious injuries, and no prison time for the young Jimmy David. Not yet, anyway.”

“Yeah, what about it? No one even got hurt then, so what's it matter?” The track was beginning a gradual curve toward the mountains, where the storm showed no sign of abating.

“Do you really think that there's only one way in which you can hurt people?” It was now a tone usually reserved for lecturing children. “Suffering can grow from a variety of sources. Say, stealing a single mother's only mode of transportation, for example? Wrecking it beyond repair, leading to a series of events in which she loses her job, her apartment, and eventually her child? You couldn't know for certain if any of that happened after your little joyride, but you knew that such things were possibilities.”

Silence filled the space between them, the heavy sort that saturates the body with tension and plays hell with the nerves. Jimmy jumped slightly within the confines of his seat as rain suddenly drummed down against the roof of the car. Another flash of lightning lit the sky and he saw, as an afterimage, that the mountains were closer than he'd thought.

“You waiting for me to say I feel bad about it?”

“No, Jimmy. I'm only waiting for the truth.”

“What can I say? Life's tough all over. Too many problems of my own to worry about anybody else.” He turned to face the judge again, forcing himself to maintain contact with the abyssal gaze. “That what you wanted to hear?”

“It's what I expected of you, yes.” There was an undisguised note of satisfaction in the statement, and then the pages of the book began turning again, fanning by more rapidly than before. It stopped at the final page. “But time grows short, so let's get to the point, shall we?”

“What is the point?” Jimmy could hear his own voice threatening to crack under the frustration.

“The end of your story, of course. Haven't you wondered why, with this encyclopedic listing of your bad behavior, I only referenced those two specific instances?” The judge paused while the idea sank in. “Tell me, how did you die, Jimmy? What events led up to that moment?”

Rain streaked across the windows at a severe angle, twisting Jimmy's reflected features into something inhuman. Lightning flashed in regular, strobing bursts, revealing a dead, barren land in place of the verdant countryside from earlier.

“No.” It was a harsh whisper, barely more than an angry breath.

“You didn't even consider the similarities before now, did you?” A single, bony finger tapped at the hovering book. “Those were convenient examples, but your entire life was full of reckless patterns of behavior; getting lucky, but never learning from your mistakes. Messing up your own life over and over was your prerogative, but did you never develop even a shred of empathy for others? No, of course not. If you had, that final day would've played out much differently.”

Jimmy stared at the nightmarish copy of O'Brian for several seconds. “I didn't mean to. It was an accident.”

“You didn't intend to shoot him; only to rob him. But things went wrong, just like before. Only, this time, your aim was a little more lethal.”

“I couldn't know that!”

“A lie you told yourself in the moment, perhaps. Maybe you even pretended to believe it. But you certainly knew that few people would survive losing that much of their head. You knew as much even as you were grabbing handfuls of money off the floor—money already stained with the dead clerk's blood.”

Jimmy took several nervous breaths before replying. “Fine. I knew. Want me to say I'm sorry it happened?”

“No, because you aren't. You're only sorry that there are consequences for your actions; not for the actions themselves.”

“What do you want from me, then?” Jimmy could hear the childish petulance, almost a whine, rising in his own voice. It only served to make him angrier. “Stop with the games, and get to the damned point!”

The judge steepled his fingers, obviously considering the situation, then plucked the book from the air, leaned forward, and deposited it on Jimmy's lap. “I want you to recognize that a collection of memories as vile as these should weigh upon one's soul a bit more heavily in the end.”

Jimmy opened his mouth, intending to ask what exactly that meant, but instead cried out in agony as the tome exerted a crushing force against his legs. He tried desperately to push it away, but he might as well have been trying to push a house, for all the good it was doing.

Multiple lightning strikes drove into the ground as the they sped by, spraying the train with a storm of debris. Jimmy thrashed in his seat, almost beyond noticing when the windows in the car all simultaneously exploded outward. The judge calmly rose from his seat, straightened his robes, and began to walk down the aisle toward the rear exit.

“Wait!” Jimmy grabbed at the sleeve of the robe, missing greatly, but the judge stopped anyway. “I'll say what you want! I was a monster! I hurt people my whole life!”

“Absolutely true.” The judge spoke calmly over the wind screaming through the ruined windows. “And?”

“I admitted it! It's what you wanted! Now stop all this!”

“Why would I do such a thing? I never promised any such outcome.”

“Then why do this?”

The judge leaned forward until he was eye level with Jimmy. Shadows danced across his face with each burst of lightning, causing him to take on a more cadaverous appearance than the real O'Brian ever had.

“In my field of work, over the ages, I've met scores of vermin like you. Those who take from life, spreading misery, and never caring about whatever pain they leave in their wakes. And yet, they always have the nerve, when they see what their eternity holds, to ask me 'why?' I've found that it's much easier to have them admit what they are, rather than argue the point.” He straightened himself and began down the aisle again. “Goodbye, Jimmy. I won't be joining you for the remainder of your trip.”

“YOU BASTARD!”

The cold realization that the train only made two stops—was only ever going to make those two stops—hit Jimmy as a sick punch to the gut. The mountains rushed forward, and then he was swallowed by darkness.

There was no longer a train, no protection of any sort to stop the razored talons tearing at his flesh, but there was a tunnel after all. He could even see the light at the end—though it wasn't pure white, but tinged with a brilliant red around the edges. He didn't recognize the voices that called out to him from somewhere within the howling void, but he could hear his name being repeated, working its way into his mind where those same voices eventually scratched and crawled at his thoughts. He continued hurtling toward the light until he was engulfed by it. His last fully-conscious thought was that it was very, very hot.

Jimmy David had reached his stop. It was exactly how he'd always imagined it would be.