It smells. Animals have clearly been in here. There’s a fug of urine and musk, and the dust on the linoleum floor of the aisle is disturbed and streaked in any number of unpleasant ways. He can imagine all kinds of foxes huddled under seats now, watching him with his torch, wondering what he’ll do.
What he does is look around, almost overwhelmed with memories. The sun is bright enough for a dim light through the filthy windows, many of which are scratched with unintelligible graffiti, but there’s enough to see the blue cross-hatch pattern on the cloth of the seats. He runs a hand down one, burring the fuzz with his fingertips.
The train. The train.
He hasn’t been on a train since he left England. Not once. Americans on the west coast didn’t take trains. They drove. Everywhere. This is literally the first time he’s set foot on board a train since they crossed the ocean.
And everything the train had meant when he was young! Trips up to London and all the city had to offer a boy of six and seven and eight. The zoo, the Wheel, the wax museum, the other museums that were less interesting because they had no wax. Or down the other way, too, to the coast, with its castles on hills and the great big white cliffs that his mum wouldn’t let him or Owen anywhere near. And the pebbly beaches. And the ferries to France.
Trains always went somewhere amazing when you were eight years old. They were a way out of the same houses and the same faces and the same shops. It seems embarrassing now, to have been so excited by a simple train journey that millions of people took every day, but Seth can feel a little smile spread across his face as he steps farther down the car, shining the torch on the overhead racks and the assorted blocks of seats, two here, three there, and at the back of the car, the little boxed door to the horrible train toilet that Owen, without fail, would need to use within five minutes of the train leaving the station in whatever direction.
Seth shakes his head. He’d almost forgotten trains existed. Looking at it now, he can’t believe how exotic they seemed to him as a little boy.
Still, though, he thinks. A train.
Which is when the door to the bathroom crashes open and a monster comes roaring up the aisles straight for him.
21
Seth yells in terror and runs back down the aisle, risking a quick look back –
A huge, black shape hurtles toward him –
Screeching and roaring in what sounds like rage –
Two eyes staring back at him in unmistakable malevolence –
Seth flies into the train driver’s compartment, slamming into the control panels, crying out at a pain in his hip. He scrambles over the driver’s seat, and there’s a terrible moment when the strap of his backpack gets caught, but gets loose as the shape comes smashing inside.
Seth leaps out the door of the train and takes off, tearing down the platform, dropping the torch and leaving it behind. He looks back again, just as the shape comes rocketing out of the compartment, sending the door swinging back and forth violently. The thing turns and comes after him.
Running a lot faster than Seth is.
“Shit!” he yells, pumping his arms and trying to remember his cross-country form, though that was for long distances, not for sprinting, and he’s still not even remotely fully recovered from –
There’s a squeal behind him.
(a squeal?)
As he turns up the steps to the bridge over to the other platform, he takes another look back.
The shape is the biggest, ugliest, dirtiest wild boar he’s ever seen.
A wild boar? he thinks, charging up the stairs. A wild BOAR is chasing me?
The boar rages down the platform and up the steps behind him, and Seth can see it’s got a pair of filthy, splintered-looking tusks that would happily tear the stomach right out of him.
“SHIT!” he screams again, running across the flat part of the bridge, but he’s so tired, so weak still, that he’s not going to outrun the boar. It’s going to catch him before he reaches the stairs that go down the other side.
I’m going to be killed, he thinks, by a PIG. In HELL.
And the thought is so stupidly outrageous, so insanely angry-making, that he almost misses the chance to save himself.
The bridge is a corridor above the tracks, covered on both sides by square panels of frosted glass, broken by a metal guardrail at waist height. Right near the stairs at the other end of the bridge, two of the upper panels have fallen out in succession.
Leaving a space just big enough for someone his size to climb through.
The boar squeals again, barely five feet behind him, and he’s not going to reach the windows, he’s not going to reach them, he’s not –
He leaps for them and can actually feel the boar slamming its head into the bottom of his feet as he jumps. The momentum nearly carries him all the way out, and there’s an impossible few seconds where it seems like he’s going to fall straight back down to tracks twenty feet below, but he catches the upright support between the windows, manages to get one foot on the metal strip, and – swinging his free arm and leg wildly into the air – keeps his balance by a whisker.
Just before he’s nearly knocked off it again by the boar slamming into the wall at his feet.
“ALL RIGHT! ALL RIGHT!” he shouts, and there’s nowhere to go but up. He grabs a gutter above him and pulls himself up to the roof of the bridge. The boar keeps slamming against the railing as Seth hooks a leg up and rolls himself, panting heavily, onto the roof, his backpack lurched uncomfortably beneath him.
He just lies there for a moment, desperately trying to catch his breath. The boar is still going at it, grunting and squealing and ramming its weight against the inside wall of the bridge, knocking out another glass panel, which tumbles to the tracks, smashing into a thousand pieces.
Seth leans back over the side and looks down at the boar, who snuffles angrily up to him. It’s enormous, so much bigger and taller and wider than any normal pig, it almost seems like a cartoon. It’s hairy, too, and blackened by a thick layer of dirt. It squeals loudly at him.
“What did I ever do to you?” Seth asks.
The boar squeals once more and starts re-attacking the bridge.
Seth rolls onto his back again, looking up into the sky above.
He thinks he can remember stories about them breaking free from boar farms and going feral, but he’d never thought they were actually real. Or even if he was remembering it right.
But, you know, once again, hell, he supposes.