A Quiet Death (2 page)

‘Cruising the Chesapeake Bay in October is one of life's greatest pleasures. We don't have a sailboat,' I added, ‘but my sister-in-law does, and she's always looking for crew. I provide ballast,' I said with a grin.

‘How long is this heat supposed to last?' my seat-mate wanted to know.

I shrugged. ‘Couple of days? Wait a minute.' While he observed over my shoulder, I tapped the weather app on my iPhone. When the five-day display appeared, I turned the tiny screen in his direction. ‘Looks like we're back to normal on Friday.'

‘What's normal?' my seat-mate asked as he watched the Cheverly station roll by outside the window.

‘Low to mid-seventies,' I informed the back of his head, which was covered with a tangle of sandy curls.

‘Huh,' he replied.

The four o'clock Acela Express screamed past on its way north, sucking the air out of our car in one greedy, pneumatic gasp. My seat-mate jumped like he'd been shot, then settled back into his seat and continued staring silently out the window, our deeply intellectual conversation about the weather clearly over. I zoned out, mesmerized by the blur of passing scenery and the comforting
chubunk-chubunk-chubunk
of the wheels along the tracks.

As we pulled into the station at Landover, my seat-mate stood, tucked his package under his arm, and eased past my legs into the aisle. I thought he was preparing to get off, but when the train rolled out of the station again, he remained standing in the aisle near the door, grasping a metal pole with one hand and his Garfinkel's shopping bag with the other.

My iPhone peeped. A text message from my daughter, Emily, asking if I'd RUN C'PL TOM. I was mentally rearranging the next day's schedule so I could drive my grandchildren to school, when a voice from the front of the car screamed, ‘Oh, no!'

Startled, I looked up just in time to see my seat-mate vanish into a cloud of dust, glass, seats and carpeting that rolled up the aisle toward me in an undulating wave – ten feet, five feet, four, three – before sucking me into the undertow.

The squeal of metal against metal, a teeth-rattling jolt. The train rocked once, twice, before settling nose up and tilted to one side with a mournful, metallic groan. For a few moments, there was utter silence.

And then the chaos began.

TWO

W
hat had just happened?

Stunned, I lay on my side in a bed of debris and broken glass and tried to make sense out of it. The train must have hit something. Had we derailed?

Dust filled the air, thick as smoke. I coughed and tried to roll over. Why was I looking up into a cloudless blue sky?

When we left the Landover station there had been no more than a dozen passengers remaining in our car; New Carrollton was the end of the line. Now they all seemed to be crying out:

I eased myself into a crawling position and tried to move toward the nearest exit, but when I pressed my left palm against the carpet, a lightning bolt shot up my arm and across my shoulders, a pain so intense that I fell sideways against what remained of one of the seats, now lying bottom side up, blocking a pair of exit doors. I didn't have to look to know my left arm was broken, but I inspected it anyway, fearful I'd find bones sticking out through my skin. There was no blood, thank goodness, but my arm was bent in a way Mother Nature never intended: I appeared to have a second wrist midway up my forearm. ‘This can't be good,' I muttered, drawing the damaged arm closer to my body.

‘Do you need help, ma'am? I heard you scream.'

I was eye-to-eye with a pair of combat boots that I'd last seen jutting out into the aisle from the seat behind me. I looked up, way up, into the face of their owner, a lanky black man who appeared miraculously uninjured, save for a one-inch gash on his stubbly chin. Sweat glistened on his cheeks, beaded his forehead. He wore a green, tan and gray camouflage uniform, and the Velcro patch on his chest told me he was a staff sergeant. A second patch over his right pocket said: Boyer. I tried to answer, but dust seemed to be coating my vocal cords. ‘Broken arm,' I croaked.

‘Can you walk?'

‘I think so.'

Sergeant Boyer bent down, extended his arm. Using my good arm, I grasped his forearm tightly and held on while he stood, pulling me gently to my feet. ‘I'm Will,' he said. ‘Anybody with you?'

Struggling for balance, my fingers dug into his sleeve while I bent double, coughing until my lungs burned. The sergeant waited me out.

‘There was a guy sitting next to me,' I wheezed. ‘He was standing up when the train . . .' My voice trailed off as I took in the condition of the front end of our car. The impact had savagely twisted seats, doors and windows, compressing them into a mountain of wreckage that spanned the entire width of the car.

The dust was beginning to settle when another man staggered out of the debris field, dragging a young woman by the hand. Strands of hair had escaped her bun and hung lifelessly around her face which was bloody and pocked with glass. ‘Get me out of here, baby,' she wailed as she limped along behind him. One of her shoes had gone missing.

‘The side doors are jammed,' the man called Baby reported, waving vaguely. ‘And the windows won't pop out like they're supposed to. How about the rear door?'

‘I just tried,' Sergeant Boyer informed him. ‘No joy. You can see that the bulkhead's collapsed.'

The woman began to wail like a professional mourner. ‘Oh, God, baby, we're trapped!' She shook her hand free of his, staggered over to a twisted window and began pounding on the glass with both fists. ‘Help! Help! Get us out of here!'

Sergeant Boyer watched her performance for a second, then grabbed the hem of his uniform jacket and, in one swift move, pulled it off over his head. ‘I guess we'll have to make an exit, then.'

I watched in awe as he marched on the rear door in his olive green undershirt, solid and determined as a Sherman tank. As he moved, he wrapped the jacket around a tattoo on his forearm that said, in gothic script, Psalm XXIII. ‘Stand back,' he ordered.

Boyer cocked his padded arm and took a swing at the door. He cocked his arm and swung again. And again, and again. The door stood firm.

‘Sergeant! Stop! You're going to hurt yourself,' I yelled as Boyer hauled his arm back to take another swing.

‘Shut up, bitch!' someone behind me snarled. ‘Who else gonna get us outta this mess!' The potty mouth belonged to another survivor who had staggered up to join us, a twenty-something thug wearing a wife-beater tank and a pair of shredded, low-rider jeans. Earlier, he'd been sporting a ball cap worn backward and to one side, gangsta-style, but his cap had disappeared in all the confusion.

Boyer shot shrapnel out of his eyes. ‘Watch your language, asshole. You in such a hurry to get out of here, grab something and start pounding.'

I scanned the floor, looking for ammunition, and spotted a fire extinguisher next to a crumpled bulkhead, near what had once been my seat. ‘Sergeant Boyer! Use this!' I nudged the extinguisher toward him with my bare foot. Bare foot? Where the hell were my shoes?

Boyer picked up the extinguisher, flashing me a wan grin. Holding the extinguisher like a battering ram, he hammered the base of it hard against the glass. He brought his arm back and swung again.

A small crack appeared.

‘Go, go, go!' the man called Baby chanted, as Boyer continued hammering away on the door.

His girlfriend had abandoned her histrionics and rejoined our little group, yelling encouragement from the sidelines as the crack spread, creeping with snail-like speed up the glass. ‘You've got it! You've got it! Keep going! Keep going! You are the
man
!'

I found I was chanting, too – Go! Go! Go! – each time the base of the extinguisher made contact with the glass. The crack was gradually widening, expanding, spreading like a spider web.

Boyer delivered a final savage blow, and the glass popped out.

We all stood there for a moment, silent, not quite believing that we'd soon be free, leaving the devastation behind us. Still holding the extinguisher, Boyer fell back against the bulkhead, breathing heavily, trying to catch his breath. Sweat beaded on his forehead, ran down his cheeks, saturated his T-shirt, turning the underarms dark. ‘Out!' he ordered, then slowly uncurled his hand and let the extinguisher drop to the floor.

The man called Baby helped his girlfriend through the opening, then scampered quickly after her. The foul-mouthed thug was next in line, hopping from one foot to the other, raring to go, but Boyer grabbed his arm, held him back, taking the time to lean out the opening he had created in the door and yell to Baby's departing back, ‘For Christ's sake, tell someone to turn off the third rail before some idiot gets electrocuted!'

Then the thug, too, slipped away to join a steady stream of walking wounded, limping along the tracks outside, dragging their possessions behind them like zombies in a B-movie.

Boyer offered me his hand. ‘Time to go.'

‘Is that all of us?' I choked. ‘Only five?'

Boyer sucked in his lips, looking grim. ‘I think we have to leave it to the paramedics now.'

I had started toward the opening in the door when somebody called out, ‘Hello? Can anybody hear me?'

Even though I'd had only a brief conversation with him, I recognized the voice: the guy who had been sitting next to me nursing the Garfinkel's bag.

‘Did you hear that, Sergeant?' Cradling my injured arm, grinding my teeth against the pain, I inched toward the front of the car and began a surreal climb through an alien landscape strewn with familiar objects, distorted, like in a Halloween funhouse mirror. ‘I'm here. Where are you?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Talk to me!' I yelled.

‘My legs are trapped.'

Thankfully, Sergeant Boyer had followed me forward and was standing just three feet away. ‘Sergeant! Can you get some help? Quickly! There's someone still alive up there! I'll see if I can find him.'

‘Keep talking,' I called out to my former seat-mate as Sergeant Boyer hurried off to do as I asked. Feeling increasingly desperate, I scanned the wreckage. And then I saw him: a head of curly hair, a shoulder and one arm. But his body from the chest down had disappeared. It took me a moment to figure out what had happened. As the floors heaved up, the seats had folded down, trapping his body in their cruel jaws.

With my good arm, I reached out to see if I could shift one of the seats holding the man captive, then thought better of it. He could have a spinal injury. If so, I would only make a bad situation worse.

‘I'm coming,' I called out as I scrabbled over shifting debris – shattered glass, scraps of advertising posters, the Life section of
USA Today
, a dusty Kindle, shoes. His Garfinkel's bag was in the way, so I moved it aside, sat down in the aisle, or what was left of it, so that I could look directly into his face, pale and etched with pain.

‘Hold on,' I told him. ‘Help is on the way. One of the passengers just busted through the door.'

His eyes were white with panic. ‘Don't leave me.'

‘I won't.'

‘Are those sirens?'

‘Yes. Help is coming.'

He closed his eyes. ‘I'm dying,' he whispered.

‘No, you're not. My name's Hannah. What's yours?'

‘They call me Skip.'

‘What's your last name, Skip?'

He moaned. ‘Sweet Jesus, I can't feel my legs.'

‘You're gonna be OK, Skip. Keep talking to me.'

Skip's eyes rolled back, his head lolled.

‘Skip?'

His head jerked up, he whimpered in pain. Then his eyes found mine, locked. ‘I've done a terrible thing.'

‘You have?'

A gurgling cough. ‘I think I killed somebody.'

I caught my breath, tried not to gasp. I wasn't trained in deathbed confessions, and wasn't sure I wanted to take on the responsibility for the disposition of this man's soul when it showed up in the afterlife. I glanced around the car, looking for support, but the sergeant hadn't returned. For all I knew, Skip and I were the only two people left alive in the car.

‘Do you want to tell me about it?' I asked quietly.

‘Are you Catholic?' His voice trembled.

‘No, but I'm Episcopalian. That's a Catholic of sorts.'

‘Rosary,' he sighed. ‘My pants pocket.'

I couldn't even see Skip's legs, so there was no way I could retrieve a rosary from his pants pocket. I broke this news to him as gently as I could. ‘But I'll be happy to recite the rosary with you.'

‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen,' he began, crossing himself.

Skip's voice remained strong through the Creed and the first Our Father, but by the time we got to the Hail Marys, it began to tremble, then falter. ‘Hail Mary full of grace,' he began, his voice barely audible.

‘The Lord is with thee,' I continued, inclining my head towards his and taking his hand. ‘Blessed are thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.'

‘Holy Mary . . .' A shuddering sigh, then silence.

‘Mother of God,' I prompted, but Skip's lips were no longer moving along with mine. ‘Mother of God. Skip? Stay with me, Skip!' I eased my hand up to his wrist, wrapped my fingers around it and felt for a pulse. It was there, slow and weak. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death,' I rushed on, then began the cycle again.