One Headlight by Michael Rook

We’ve got 5,685 railroad crossings in Ohio. 5,000 miles of train tracks. For twenty years, I think maybe they’ve always been thrumming in my head—in the background, though, like arteries. Easy to tune out. At some point, you don’t even hear them.

But we are tattooed all over by trains in this state. We grow up with that.

So maybe that’s why we’ve got our ritual.

Know it?

When you drive over train tracks, you must lift your feet.

Otherwise, the people under the rails will pull you down.

If you don’t know, or forgot, that’s fine. Happens.

Sean’s Lincoln bumped onto my parent’s old property. He couldn’t see me, not with all the maples and blackberries and Mom’s maze of ATV trails, but I could see him, because I knew how to look. Bridgett—my best friend, my better-than-blood sister—had known too. We’d figured that out during a hundred summer nights as kids, nights when my Aunt Vicki had teased us with ghost stories.

Like about all the people killed by trains, those angry dead folks, and the ritual of the rails, which scared us and got stuck in our heads, like the background rumble of trains at night. Especially after Aunt Vicki drove in front of a Union Pacific engine that turned her car ‘to ash. But eventually it became arteries. At least for me.

Sean parked and strolled towards the dark barn where I was sitting inside Mom’s Gator SxS. I shuddered, fear and anticipation suddenly mixing, but kept still, except for a long leg I tossed over the ATV’s little half-door. I was pasty but had a lot of thigh. Sean always noticed. I shook a Mickey’s 40 oz. as he put his hands on the Gator’s roof and leaned in.

“Seriously?” he said. “Are we thirteen?”

But he took the bottle and swilled. I smiled and tossed the keys his way. He smirked, downed another blast of the malt liquor, and revved up the Gator. Soon after, he was spinning us through the branch-choked trails. Nearly 500 people have died thanks to trains since Sean, Bridgett, and I met in grade school. Those are only the reported deaths.

Sean wheeled us to the property’s south, where Mom had sculpted an offroad playground of mounds to jump right before our land gave way to the Mad River train tracks—which was also less than a mile far from where Bridgett had disappeared back in college, two decades ago. Near the rails, Sean brought the Gator to a pause.

“Move.” I tried to climb behind the wheel, pushing at him while slipping across the ATV’s middle.

Sean twisted fast, his wrestler’s shoulders, even past forty, whirling like an oiled machine. High-grade nervousness, the worry of being alone with a much bigger man, amped higher than my desire for a second. But I slugged a double swallow as Sean switched places.

“This is a perfect storm of stupid,” he said, frowning. “You know that?”

But he kissed me, more comfortable now than since we’d first reconnected after my parents’ death, when I’d moved back to handle their things. Which is me. I peel labels off bottles. I pay bills in advance. I work out more than I eat out. And it was that part of me that finally called him, I swear. That started the hooking up again. It wasn’t the part that always thought about Bridgett, if just a little.

“What’s this?” He lifted a machete from the console I’d inched over.

Another attack of nerves hit and I thought my shoulders quivered. But I pushed his chin towards some overgrowth, then urged the Mickey’s back to his mouth.

“For pruning.” I handed him my old iPod, which was plugged into the Gator’s radio, as he gazed at the tangled bushes. “And snakes. Find some music.”

I geared us forward and aimed at the first mound. Meanwhile, Sean fumbled with the MP3 player as I hopped a swell of clay and dirt and stringy weeds.

“Wallflowers?” he yelled, a little snark to his tone as we landed hard and I jerked towards the runway to the next jump.

Without reacting, I nodded at the song on the top of my list. A second later Jakob Dylan crooned through the Gator’s little speakers about a time long past, but not so far that he’d forgotten about losing his only friend. As the song ramped up, I zigzagged us deeper into the blackberry maze. Bridgett had told Sean about the ritual of the rails when we were in college. When they were in love.

Now, I sped us back to the property line, to where the bushes ended at the gravel of the Mad River tracks. As we came into the clearing, I swerved so we could run parallel to the iron lines. As we did, I caught Sean looking hard at something. Into something? Not the neighbor’s corn fields, tall and yearning to be plucked. The rails.

“I miss Bridgett,” he said, barely audible over the engine.

Muscles in my fingers tightened.

“Even while I was married, I missed her. That’s shitty, right?”

I throttled higher, increasing the gasoline stink from under the hood.

“Hey, not…” he said quickly. “Not when you and me are—”

Again, I tipped the Mickey’s to his lips. My hand shook, and not from the vibrating of the ATV. Bridgett had cried to me after telling Sean about the ritual of the rails sophomore year. By that point, I’d drifted away from believing in it. Kind of forgotten. But not Bridgett. And Sean had made fun of her for it. He said he wouldn’t stop until she stopped doing the ritual. For her own good. But Bridgett couldn’t stop. ‘Cause of Aunt Vicki. How the people under the rails had gotten her. Which Bridgett had told me about. But I’d… I’d simply never thought…

I snapped the Gator away from the rails and back to the offroad course, Sean and I rollicking to the side with the move. Through the speakers, Jakob went on about ugly mazes and how that friend’s death was surely killing him. I stopped us hard under one of the maples. With no warning, I leaned over and gave Sean a big, tongue-leading kiss. Then I unzipped my cutoffs with a chill, ‘cause I had nothing on beneath.

“C’mon,” I said, grabbing Sean’s hand. “While I drive.”

He did and I hammered us ahead, branches whipping metal. After Bridgett went missing, Sean told everyone he’d dropped her off safe. Until last month, us laying together, sweating, when he’d finally admitted he’d been there—at the crossing on Regiment Road where it intersects the Mad River tracks, not far from my parent’s property. Where he’d jammed one of Bridgett’s shoes to the floorboard while he gassed it over the railroad crossing that split the country road.

To help, he’d said.

Bridgett had screamed.

And vanished.

After his confession, I couldn’t take out the garbage. Or merge spreadsheets. Or RSVP to weddings. One last time, I halted the Gator. The Mad River tracks sat right ahead. Sean stopped touching me, and a moment later ended his kissing of my bare shoulder. He gave me a look that said he wanted sex, but it quickly drained ‘to something more puzzled when I didn’t fully meet his gaze. At last, he looked where I did, at the train tracks. While he did, I grabbed something from the console. When he caught what it was, he squirmed towards the Gator’s little door as I gassed the ATV with all the pedal I could.

When I rammed the machete through his thigh and into the plastic seat, he screamed. We hit the rails so fast my feet flew off the pedals. I’d have pulled them up anyways, like when I was a girl, but the jolt did it for me. Sean? I stabbed hard into his leg, holding him fixed, his calf and foot convulsing into a firm anchor on the rubber flooring. And what did he scream?

Help?

The second rail thudded by. Sean disappeared. Across the tracks, I braked fast and nasty. Then I unloaded a noise I couldn’t name. It was the sound you make when you finally know. The machete stood upright, slick with blood. There was a little red running over the edge of the seat too—but only so much, the first gush of a new wound. Not the amount that’d come from a body that had been there for very long.

The people under the rails were real. They’d taken Sean. And they’d taken Bridgett, because of him, all those years ago. Aunt Vicki too? Bridgett had been right to be afraid, even if believing had been what made her vulnerable to them? Visible to them? And had made Sean vulnerable, when he knew, and when I finally believed? I breathed hard. This was the after. I’d readied for it all—or had tried to. The guilt. The emptiness. The horror. If you seek revenge, dig two graves. I waited for doom.

For Hell.

If the ghosts under the tracks were there, why not damnation? But I didn’t feel it.

No.

Instead, I felt like I’d rolled onto the sand from a swim I wasn’t sure I was coming back from. Through the speakers, Jakob hoped—pleaded—for something better than being in the middle, being stuck. Who would know? No one. Me. And maybe Bridgett?

Was that enough?

Maybe there was an okay amount of revenge? Maybe the right dose could be not a hell sentence, but justice? There’d be things to dispose of, like the machete, Sean’s Lincoln, possibly his phone, but it wouldn’t be that hard. There was a deep quarry on the other side of town. A great lake to the north.

5,000 miles of train tracks. 5,685 crossings.

And after? I could move on. Straight forward. Maybe help others? Show them what I’d learned? On tracks somewhere—not the Mad River, further away—an engine blurted its horn as it neared a town, warning them about the hundred-ton load it dragged like a dead tail. I heard it from across the fields. Meanwhile, Jakob yearned to be headed home. Guided by one headlight. Like me.

Just like a train.

Michael Rook

Michael Rook is not cursed. Sure, he was named after a ghost, doesn’t sleep, and writes to release the thing in his head, but he definitely doesn’t blame his parents. Find his other stories in Penumbric Speculative Fiction Magazine, After Dinner Conversation, and the anthology Dark Corners of the Old Dominion, for which he also served as an editor. Or check out his Instagram (@michaelrook10) and website, www.michaelrookwrites.com, home to his occasionally interesting blog.