Abandoned Train, Washington State
He knew long before the others which way the wind was blowing. Could smell the blood about to be shed. They would never tolerate people who looked like him, spoke like him, read the books he did, ignored their God. He had no ties, not any more. He was free to do as he wished, and he wished to flee.
He continued the charade of a man in a suit at the office, writing VLOOKUP formulae and dragging it down the column until the entire worksheet was filled with the expenses that would be saved if the team at Petaluma were dismissed. He was old, canny, disliked and sharp. “You’ll be the last to go,” one if the CIOs commented to him, trying to laugh it off.
You’re wrong, he thought, I’ll be the first.
He burned up the company network watching detailed videos about scavenging, van life, off-grid solutions, tiny houses. He learned that a Kelly kettle can heat water without gas or electricity. That composting toilets don’t smell if shit and piss don’t mix. How you fix an inverter with solar panels. How to take a bike frame and plane down plywood to create a shell around it that could fit a bed and a 250-watt battery. He even did a dry run in his back garden, which was huge and sloped down to the river.
During those last months in the office, he did very little work, though he was careful to look busy. He learned that looking busy counted for more than getting stuff done. Besides, firing him would be awkward.
A week before the regime change, he packed everything up in the bike camper and left his neighbourhood at midnight, without a backward glance. Once he was out of suburbia, even with the LED lights on his bike, the nights were supremely dark. Bats swooped through the acacia woods and squeaked as they headed towards marshland. The swamp had a smell of salt and decaying weeds. There was no light but the small bulbs on the front and back of his camper, no sound other than the rush of the air, the ticking of the wheels going around. He could almost think himself in a world before humans had taken over.
He turned off the road and took a track into a pine forest.
He knew the backwoods well; back in the days when the other group still spoke to his, one of their number was his friends and they went hunting there together. He knew where to catch fish, and how to bang them with a stone and gut them. He knew the siding that used to travel to a mining town that had long run out of coal. Most of the railway line was now overgrown or reclaimed into roads and fields, but one forgotten section lay beyond the forest.
The track grew rougher and the bike bounced about, the camper frame knocking and creaking, but holding together. He pulled up at a wire fence and winched four small poles from each corner of the camper and turned a screw around for each one until they were well into the soft ground. Then he switched on the light inside the camper and set up a propane gas burner, striking a match to light it and setting a saucepan on top. He fried onions and added water, chopped tomatoes, paprika and frankfurters, eventually eating the whole stew with rice. It tasted good. Then he wiped the utensils and put them away, rolled out his mattress and slept.
He woke at six, before daylight had fully arrived, but there was light enough to see beyond the fence where there was an abandoned train carriage, originally painted deep blue but faded, covered in graffiti, meaningless characters in black with a pink edge. Once he had prayed and boiled up a surprisingly decent coffee, he lifted one leg, then the other, over the fence and walked up to it, stepping carefully on the rotting sleepers covered in grass.
One window was half open, and he was able to force the pane down far enough to climb in. He paced along the aisle, mentally splitting off the parts. This bit had been for luggage and wheelchairs, so he could make it into a kitchen. This bit with the seats, the foam spilling out of the headrest, the moquette long-faded and stained - this could be where people might dine. With the other seats he could take out the table and use its top board to join each row, making long makeshift beds. He assessed, considered, and then planned.
He knew that it would not be long before everyone else like him took his cue and ran from the militias that would be roaming up and down the countryside causing trouble. He was ready to prowl the forests in his bike camper to find as many of them as he could and bring them to shelter. A place where there would be warmth, food, and rest. A refuge.
Of course, it couldn’t last. Someone would bring children who would make too much noise, or someone else would rat them out. Eventually those thick-eyed lunatics with their rifles and vacant faces would seek them out. But hopefully by then he would have forewarned them. Oh, maybe this was only a delay to their fate. But this could be a home for them a brief while, and he knew he had done what he could.
This came from a prompt received during the Dublin Book Festival Fiction on the Rails event held on the Cork to Dublin train on Saturday November 9th. Also thanks to @IzzyKamikaze on twitter for enlightening me about the Kelly Kettle!