"Jesi, what is it?" her mother asked.
"It's bad," Jesi said. "Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad." Her mother tried to shush her, but she couldn't stop. 

THE END

It was bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad bad, bad, bad. The whole year had been bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.
Her mother turned to her, opened one eye. Smelly cat breath leaked out of her mouth.

The train shouted and wouldn't stop. 
 She was in a pile of blankets with her mother and Tyler, but they were asleep, and she alone could hear a police siren now, and an ambulance or more police cars, and were they coming for them?
Could you sleep in the woods?

The train shone the brightest light upon him, miscarriage of a star, blared its furious scream. He wondered what Trajan had felt. And then he spit fire.

The train slowed but not by much, and it was at the 30 yard line, the 28. The brakes couldn't or wouldn't, just squealed. He let himself, just peed in his pants.

Charles held fast, remembered a man who jumped off a bridge to kill himself but somehow lived, and he was thereafter gratefully alive. The horn blinded him, the headlight rang his ears, a cowbell each. Charles was fine either way. Maybe 60-40, favoring death.

All he had to do was take a couple of steps to one side, either side. A screech of metal on glass erupted, but the train did not stop. The string of pain in his calf balled itself up. The horn blared, harmonized with the brakes' barren shriek.

The main headlight blazed, watching him, judging, and the two lower ones on the sides did not blink, eyes of fire. He was the deer. Who sat behind those windows, and did they even see?
He did not care who ran him down.

He stood right on the track, and the train was coming. It squealed. It blistered at him. The rumble of it wiggled up his legs from wood and the metal, the vibrations thrummed within his chest along with his flat, tired heart. It was coming.

He would let the man or the woman driving the train decide. Was it horrible to put that weight on them, an innocent person? How did train brakes even work? For a man who thought he knew so much, and he had, he had, Charles knew nothing. John was right about his bullshit.

The train screamed, and then the headlight, a horrible artificial sunrise, broke out from the darkness, like a deer on fire, and had that really happened? Had all this happened to him?

He could hear the furious chugging now, and then the whistle shrilled. He took a step, and he wobbled like a fucking Weeble, but he could fall down, and he would fall down, and he wouldn't go back. He had never owned a Weeble, just seen the ads on TV. He coudln't. He couldn't do it anymore.

His heart flashed horizontal inside him, he was all heartbeat, a web bursting in his chest. He was ready as he'd ever be, and the fact that he wasn't ready at all did not negate that. This was it, his last chance for something, for anything, to fly away.

He'd knew from the movies—you ran alongside it, and there was always a ladder or an open boxcar, something to grab on to.

Charles was moving. All that walking. His legs were the legs of a much younger man. The rest of him was old as shit, but he could move. He was out on the street, and the train mooed again, but it was still heading into town, he could not yet see it. He could do this.

One of the last of Trajan's plastic leis had found another resting place. They blew through the trees, the petroleum products, they would outlast them all, the thoughts of the dead, the dead thoughts.

He ducked under a bare tree branch, almost scraped his head against it, and what was he doing? He snapped on the flashlight. To his left, a gangly dirty neon-orange snake hung from a tree, and he almost laughed.

That's where the pinky-red-haired gal had made her escape. She had fled from Charles, from Trajan, smartest thing she'd maybe ever done. But what if he had missed them all? No, there was always another train barreling through the night.

God didn't live in The Hole, never even visited, except the little bit that was in people, the jokes or the extra taco someone wasn't going to eat or the way Frankie could sing, which she seldom did, even though she could. She should have sang all day. Charles should have asked her to.