Three days late - Memories, Monsters, and the Last Train

 My sister moves like a ballerina. She paces back and forth along the bare platform of the station. Careful not to trip over the weeds that have found their way to the light between the cobblestones, she takes a few steps en pointe and then returns with an arrière that, as far as I know, is executed with unforgivable sloppiness. She learned it when she was little, I recall, when Mom used to force her to attend three dance lessons a week. To do it, to bring a bit of healthy countryside vigor into the dusty, dismal dance halls buried nine floors below old buildings, she was willing to drive her into town in Dad’s battered hunter’s pickup truck. The train came only twice a day, with a smell of brakes that clung to your throat, and it was often late. Now Dad is gone, and so is Mom, but the pickup truck has survived a head-on collision with a manure tractor, ten mandatory inspections, an engine transplant, and a couple of paint jobs as rough as the anti-rust coating on a ship headed for decommissioning. It and its bald tires are parked under the sun at the entrance to the abandoned station, in front of a wall covered in spray-painted phalluses, profanities, and mold creeping up from the underworld. The only plane tree providing shade over the parking lot consumed its prefab block planter long before the national soccer team won its penultimate World Cup.

My sister stops with a bras bas, imperfect in the curvature of the wrists but harmonious otherwise. When she looks at me like that, instinct tells me to blow a raspberry. I hold back, mindful of my twenty years and her nineteen. I hold back at the thought of Mom, who would have slapped me, and Dad, always ready to send me out to the fields to cool my hot temper, with a hoe on my shoulder, an axe for chopping wood, and a flask of water meant to last all day.

“Today’s the last day. If the train doesn’t come, it means we’ll have to make do without our friends.”

The thought makes me sick. I haven’t seen Mirko since summer, when he came to stay at his country house to escape the scorching city nights. I remember Chiara and Gigi from the autumn party, with chestnuts roasting over the fire, new wine to accompany them, and an unseasonable warmth that dragged along July’s sticky sweat. Eliana showed up at the start of the season to show off her new convertible Mercedes E-Class, and then nothing. I don’t know what to say to my sister. Ever since she broke up with Gualtiero, she’s been more dangerous than an unexploded bomb with a faulty fuse.

Me? You’re really asking about me?

I’d better stay away from Valeria. My girlfriend has turned bitter, nasty, and always ready to bite my head off. If it were up to me, she could stay at my place, but only if tied hand and foot.

Paola insists. When my sister is in a bad mood, the blue of her eyes shifts to a pale azure, and her features transform her into the commander of a firing squad, ready to shoot on orders barked in German.

“What did Mirko say?”

I repeat like a broken record. “Two days ago, he told me they managed to catch the train and would arrive on time...”

“And yesterday?”

I nod like the little spring-figure man stuck to the pickup’s dashboard for the last ten years. “That they’d make it, come hell or high water, but they’d make it.”

She shifts from poised ballerina to blacksmith ready for a brawl. It’s that typical attitude of a country girl unaccustomed to rhetoric. “And instead, I think they stayed in the city, stepping on each other’s toes.”

I lean against the electric pole, stick my hands in my pockets, and think. “You’re right, Paola. If the train doesn’t come,” I check my wristwatch, “within, let’s say… let’s say half an hour, we’ll give up and call it a night. We’ll head back to the farmhouse and cobble something together for dinner.”

“What about Lidia?”

I think about the neighbor, as gossipy and intrusive as pellitory-of-the-wall in summer. “And Lidia will leave us alone, and if she doesn’t, we’ll just shoot her.”

Paola looks into the dark of the tunnel and stifles a laugh. Still, what a jerk Gigi is! He dumped Chiara to shack up with that one, the writer. The shouting writer, whose screams during their lovemaking would bring Gilberto out with a pitchfork, thinking the werewolves had come.

Gilberto is Lidia’s bachelor cousin, and Paola, when she wants to, knows how to make me laugh. These are the moments when her personality wedges itself between SS officer and hard-to-handle troublemaker. “Yeah, poor Gilberto. In the end, Gigi got back with Chiara, and they all lived happily ever after.”

“Who, apparently, is as silent as a pharaoh’s mummy. You do her, on top, underneath, sideways, and she’s still silent. Not a word.”

“And how do you know?”

“Confidences among women…”

I look at her with watery eyes, but there’s still a trace of venom in her tone. “Because, you men? Did Mirko ever tell you that without...”

“No, listen, Paola, really. I don’t care about Mirko, the shouting writer, or that mute one!”

The danger is that she might blow up. I risk the worst every time I interrupt my sister when she’s talking. This time, I get away with it.

The tunnel is silent. We’ve been used to the sound of the train approaching since we were kids, the hole of old stones with the region’s emblem decorating the keystone. It starts to simmer like a pot of beans, amplifying creaks, groans, incomprehensible echoes that rebound horribly distorted off the blackened walls. It can go on for minutes, until the headlights of the locomotive appear in the dark. Each of those times has scared me.

I think of Eliana, her convertible flooding ten hectares of land around the tree-lined avenue leading to town with its new car smell. I think of her green, teardrop-shaped eyes. They match perfectly with her slender nose and lips painted like a watercolor. With her straight black hair that, when the wind from the mountains blows, loves to dance against her cheeks.

“I bet you’re thinking about Eliana...”

Again, my watery gaze, this time spiced with a row of wolf’s teeth. “How do you know?”

Her position is fifth. I don’t tell her, but her feet have grown too much to hold it properly. “Oh, I don’t know. Since things with Valeria went south, I think you’d do well playing the poodle on a leash for the city hottie. Plus, let’s be honest, she’d light a fire under you that you’d use entirely for chopping wood. After all, winter is coming...”

And so is the train. I hear it groan.

It advances with a heavy breath, and time seems to stop. Paola abandons the fifth position in favor of a gunslinger stance, and I wait. She chews on nothing and ends up spitting on the ground. She’s laconic. “What did Mirko say?”

“Yesterday? That they’d arrive...”

“And then?”

“That he’d call me back...”

The noises are the same as before, only louder. I feel the tension rising up my neck. Paola, apparently, is cold as ice.

“And did he call you back?”

“You know better than me. No...”

The tear shatters on the cobblestone as the train’s noises evoke a daytime shift at the steel mill. My sister has always been good at masking her feelings. She looks at me, and I understand. I glance into the pitch-black tunnel, cross the tracks carefully to avoid tripping, and then to the abandoned station.

I pass the ticket office. Inside the corridor with the terrazzo floor and two-tone paint, someone is furiously banging their head against the patched-up door, fitted with makeshift handles and lacquered gray like the old ones. At this rate, it will soon give way.

I walk into the square, hearing the gravel crunch under my shoes.

What we need is hidden under a blanket in the frosted bed of the pickup truck.

The train bursts through the black wall of darkness and slows down, screeching as it reaches the platform. It wheezes, expelling compressed air from its tanks and kicking up dust, settling heavily on the old tracks. Paola takes the opportunity to try an arabesque, but the weeds between the paving stones coil around the tip of her foot.
The doors of the carriage open with a hiss, as slow as a curtain rising at the start of a scene.
Eliana is the first to step out.
She’s wearing tight jeans that do justice to her straight legs, a white t-shirt with the print of a large red heart at the end of a line resembling an electrocardiogram. As usual, she isn’t wearing a bra. By the time Mirko and Chiara descend the steps, she’s already a few paces ahead. Gigi is still at the window.
Paola looks down at the ground. As agreed, the choice is mine.
I bow and grip the axe my father used to entrust me with for woodcutting expeditions. What we hadn’t discussed was who would deal with Eliana. She’s dangerously close now.
When I see the flash of satisfaction in my sister’s eyes, I realize she will take care of it. She bends down gracefully, lifts Dad’s hunting rifle, rests the stock against her slender shoulder, takes aim, and fires a single shot. The echo from the tunnel mouth amplifies it into a cannon blast.
That’s when Eliana’s skull cap flies off, accompanied by a burst of bone fragments and hair. The red heart on her shirt blends with the fresh blood. She takes another two steps, collapses to her knees, struggles for a couple of seconds, and then slams face-first onto the platform. The sound of her nose breaking is like a snail shell being crushed underfoot.
“What did I tell you?”
While Paola reloads the rifle, I grip the axe handle so tightly I can feel the bones in my fingers creak. My voice is strained with anger. “What did you tell me? Refresh my memory.”
“I told you our friends wouldn’t make it. Too soft, too used to comfort. Too blatantly radical chic.”
She would have gone on, but I don’t have time to listen. I take a running start, raise my arm, and bring down the axe. Years of chopping wood paid off, and Mirko’s zombie career ends shortly after it begins. The bullet that takes down Chiara whistles past my ear. The fleeting red stain that appears above her lifeless eyes stays with me as she rolls under the train. Gigi is still behind the window, drooling on the glass and clawing aimlessly at the mixture of spit and grime.
“End it. Shoot!”
Paola doesn’t comply. She points out another undead. He’s stumbling off the last carriage, limping in our direction. My sister doesn’t worry, and she’s right. The strap of the bag slung over his shoulder gets caught around his legs, causing him to fall. It was the conductor. We watch him flail and try to get up but fail, the situation suggesting he’ll soon roll into the weeds at the base of the platform.
The train is about to leave.
In Mirko’s last desperate phone call—drowned out by the terrified screams of passengers being chased by the dead—he confessed that the driver, locked in his cabin and already dead, was still operating the train, stopping at every station.
It must have been some sort of automatic memory, honed over years of routine. What his lifeless brain failed to register was that at the second stop, he waited two days instead of five minutes. Most likely, in that time, the dead got the upper hand and managed to bite anyone trying in vain to force the locked doors.
We’re tired. We look around. From the other carriages come indistinct noises, but no one disembarks.
If Gigi keeps banging his head against the window like that, he’ll end up breaking it.
We’re tired, and we still haven’t buried Dad and Mom. We need to take care of the neighbor before she bites us, and then there’s Valeria—my girlfriend—who Paola and I tied to the bull hook, waiting to decide her fate. My sister delivered the verdict:
“She’s your problem, big brother. Put a bullet in her head and send her to her maker.”
The train resumes its journey, with Gigi, now toothless, leaving streaks of blood running down the window. Paola hasn’t forgiven her for that fling with the screaming writer. Her vacant gaze doesn’t meet mine, and the train departs, taking its sadness to the next station—assuming the dead driver remembers to stop.
What a shame. With friends to keep us company and lend a hand, we could have faced the apocalypse with a different spirit.
The gritty corridor leading past the grey enamel door of the ticket office is worn down by the footsteps of thousands of people who were once alive.
Now it smells of memories, like everything else around here: the old platform, the parking lot, the lone plane tree still striving to grow.
I don’t know if my sister and I will ever find someone to talk to or share our despair with. We’re alive only because we stayed far from most of the things everyone else loves, had a rifle, and knew how to handle blades.
It feels like this dry, warm spring is mocking us, but what can I say? We’ll get used to it soon enough.
Paola’s eyes are less icy than before. Wet with tears, they seem larger and kinder. To tell the truth, that boar rifle looks taller than she is.
I ask her to do what I can’t, and she obliges.
She loads a bullet, steps back into the corridor, and takes down the ticket clerk by sticking the barrel through the window where he used to hand out change. She returns with a pirouette.
This time, thanks to the worn floor, she executes it perfectly—better than I’ve ever seen her do before.

---

© All rights reserved