The robo-voice did not stop. I yanked down the heavy metal handle of my compartment door, and used all my strength to slide it open. The corridors were full of disheveled and bathrobed passengers, forced to march single file down the narrow space of the sleeper car hallway. They were all going the same direction, to my right.
“Anyone know anything?” I asked the passing group in general. The alarm interrupted my every word. “Is this a real—?”
“Ma’am?” A tall woman in a navy blue uniform and billed cap motioned me out of my room. “Right now, please, there’s a fire alarm. We must exit the train right now. Ma’am?”
She must have seen my reluctant expression, and my motion to go back in to get my stuff.
“No time for that,” she yelled over the still-demanding alarm.
I looked both ways as roomette doors slid open and more people filled the corridor. The passengers must have been coming from other cars, too, since there were way more people than the sleepers could have accommodated.
“Okay,” I yelled in reply, pretending acquiescence but turning back into my room. I still didn’t smell smoke. “But I have to get my—”
“Now, ma’am,” the woman ordered, and eased me out the door. As I took two steps down the hall, she vanished, probably to roust any other reluctant occupants.
To my right, an open door. Cruella’s door. The roomette was empty. It crossed my mind to go in, like, really fast, look around, see what I could see, and go. Maybe — take her phone? But the pulsing clamor of the passengers behind me propelled me away from answers (and burglary) and down the corridor. Another porter was stationed at the open door of the train, helping bewildered and annoyed passengers clamber down the pull-out metal steps to the gravel below.
“What’s the—”
“Please keep moving, ma’am,” he said, as he released my elbow. “Please continue walking across the grass and over at least as far as the trees over there.”
Lights from the train — emergency lights, I guessed — illuminated the way in front of us, and somehow someone had made a path of blue train blankets across the grass. Good thing. Even though the summer night was mild, starlit, and with only the softest of summer breezes, many of the people I saw had bare feet, or like lucky me, only socks.
I needed my phone. I needed my phone. If that train burned up and my phone was on it I would be so mad. Silly, but that’s what I thought.
We all padded toward the stand of trees, looming dark and fairytale-like ahead of us. Two little kids, both in white terry bathrobes and slippers that made their feet look enormous, clung to the hands of a woman in what looked like a knee-length sweatshirt. Men in shorts and tank tops, a few in jeans and unbuttoned shirts, stood in clumps, arms crossed in front of them. Everyone stared at the train. We could see the engine, and a few cars, but the rest of the train was hidden in darkness down the tracks.
No smoke, no fire, no anything. I took a deep breath, smelling pine, and the loamy softness of a summer night in the woods. I was grateful for the blankets on the ground, imagining all kinds of mud and bugs and creepy things underfoot. Woods were not my favorite. But, I figured, I’d have a good story to tell, and as long as the train didn’t explode or go up in flames, and as long as we got back onto the train, and as long as we got back to Boston, it would just be part of my impetuous adventure.
“Where are we, anyway?” I asked a twenty-something guy wearing sweatpants and a backwards UMass ballcap.
“Lake Erie over there,” he said, pointing. “See down there, just past the front of the locomotive? On the same side of the tracks as us, not too far away. And I know we already passed Erie, the city, and Buffalo is next, so, we’re like somewhere between there. Middle-a-nowhere.”
“Lovely,” I said.
“You think there’s a fire? Million bucks says no.” He cocked his head toward the darkened train. All we could see was the open doors, and inside, bobbing lights — maybe people with flashlights? — moving across the windows.
“Hope you’re right,” I said. “Looks like there’s not much activity. Or any flames.”
“Or phone servers,” he held up his cell. “My phone’s a brick. Looks like everyone else’s, too. Can’t even tweet.”
Many of the passengers, I could see by the emergency lights flicking shadows over their faces, were realizing they were cut off from civilization. Some people wandered farther away, holding their cells high in the air, as if somehow a signal would drop from the wispy clouds streaking the night sky above. Maybe they’d gone down to look at the lake. Chittering sounds came from the woods behind me, squirrels maybe, or birds, or some predatory creatures I’d rather not imagine. Looking at stranded us, and thinking: dinner.
“Excuse me.”
I’d know that voice anywhere. But Cruella was not talking to me.
“Do you have service?” She gestured her phone toward ballcap guy. It was the woman with the steely hair, now pulled back in a ponytail, her face difficult to describe in the mottled light, but she looked super thin, especially in black yoga pants, a black tank top and flipflops. Ninja bitch, the unworthy thought went through my mind. Not exactly Bette Davis-looking, but who knows what the modern Bette would wear? She didn’t acknowledge phoneless me. Clearly I knew nothing and could not help her.
“No bars,” the guy said. “You?”
“This is unacceptable,” she said. As if the universe cared what she thought or wanted. “I’m going to—” She paused, conjuring. “Ask for my money back.”
Conversation starter. “Yes,” I said, and then added, to show how much I admired her, “That’s brilliant.”
She eyed me up then down, assessing, dismissing, then defeated. “All my belongings are inside. Can you imagine? Our doors are open? What if there’s a... a... someone. Who robs us? Maybe this is a planned robbery, there’s no real fire, and it’s all a set-up to get us out here, in the middle of hellish nowhere, and distract us, and all the while, inside, they’re going through everything that...”
Good story, I had to admit. “I’m sure it’s fine,” I said. “You have a vivid imagination. But it seems a bit — elaborate, doesn’t it?”
“How would they get away?” Ballcap had been listening to this with some interest. Then shook his head, deciding. “Nope. Probably some jerk smoking dope in the bathroom. Probably dumped his doobie in the trash, forgot to put it all the way out. Smoke alarm goes off, everyone goes nuts.”
“Probably,” I said. Wondering if Ballcap was “some guy.” His eyes were red, and he did smell kind of like pot. But maybe there was a skunk back in the woods. And none of my business, anyway. “At least it’s not raining or snowing. Right? And we’ll be all aboard and underway soon.”
“I’m gonna check out the woods,” the guy said. And he ambled off into the trees.
“Are you from Boston?” I asked Cruella, just making polite conversation in the middle of the night on the edge of a forest in wherever Pennsylvania. “Or going there to visit?”
“I work there,” she said.
“I do, too,” I said. “I’m an actuary.” I’d just read a thriller where someone said that was the profession you should choose if you didn’t want to talk about what you did. No one thinks an actuary is interesting. “How about you?”