Chapter 17. Train is the way.
Bradley was trying to find opportunities to have a word here and there with other prisoners, but it almost never happened. Every time he got distracted, a guard would appear right in front of him and order him to get back to work. At the end of the day everybody was very tired, and when they returned to their building, they all fell asleep and slept till the next morning when everything repeated just the same way as the previous day. Bradley started to realize why nobody had raised a concern so far and tried to get others to act: there was simply no time, and when in the end of the day they were finally left to themselves, they would be simply very tired to do anything but sleep.
One day on the way to their prison, Bradley noticed the absence of John. Bradley was happy for him and hopeful that John would find a way back to them and show them how to escape. He was trying to be positive. If John found a way to sneak out, then maybe they would find it, too. Maybe, they had to escape one by one, not as a crowd, after all. The Unknowns might not notice for a while that a certain number of people were missing. And then who knows…
It was a real surprise to him when two days later John appeared at work in a role of a guard. Just like other guards, he was very diligent in keeping the work going and making sure not to talk to the prisoners. At first Bradley thought that this was John’s trick to come to help them escape in a form of a guard. Bradley could not help but become bitter as he realized that John was taking his job seriously and was, in fact, on the Unknowns’ side.
Day after day they were making parts, and it seemed to never end. Bradley’s heart sank when day by day he saw his sister and the other girls wither, but he kept thinking about a way out. He tried to keep Megan’s spirits up as much as he could. One day they were out, loading a train that was supposed to deliver parts the kids made to some other place where they were to be assembled into rides. It was a long cargo train, and it took them the entire day to load it. When the work was finally done and the train was about to leave and the guards gave the command to return back to the prison, Bradley suddenly had an idea. He grabbed Megan and ran towards the train, then under, and climbed into an open train car on the other side, helping Megan to get in. As soon as they were both in, they started hearing the calls of the guards who realized that they were missing, but they were safe, because the train departed.
Bradley was sad that he couldn’t have helped other people, but at least he and Megan could have a chance to escape. If his idea worked.
“Where are we going?” asked Megan.
“I don’t know,” responded Bradley. “It’s very possible that this train takes us to another prison place where these things are assembled, but I’m hoping that it won’t stop there.”
The train traveled all night long and arrived to its destination early morning of the next day. Bradley and Megan got out and hid under the train for the entire time it was unloading, which took almost the entire day again. Bradley was very happy for the fact that in this world they did not have to eat. At the end of the day the train was ready for departure. Because trains did not show up to their prison every day, Bradley was pretty confident that the train would not simply turn around and go back to the same place that it came from. When the train was ready to go, Bradley and Megan crawled back into the car, again not being noticed by anyone.
The train was gaining speed, faster and faster. Once in a while Bradley would stand in the car and peek out. He would see country side but not recognize any of the places they were passing. Generally, he could not tell one place from another because they all looked pretty similar. All of a sudden it became dark, and the noise from the poorly maintained tracks became so great that both Bradley and Megan fell to the floor, pressing hands against their ears. After a while, still holding hands next to his ears, Bradley stood up in the car and saw that they were in an unlit tunnel. An arrow flashed past him, and it had the word “Exit” written on it. Just at that moment the noise went away, and they only heard a rushing wind.
“Megan!” exclaimed Bradley. “Do you know where we are now? We’re in the exit tunnel! I saw the signs.”
“But trains never go into those tunnels,” murmured Megan. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure,” responded Bradley. “I see them. As a matter of fact, there is another one.”
The arrows with the sign “Exit” started appearing more and more often. Maybe the train was gaining yet more speed, or the arrows were spaced more frequently, which would not be noticed during walking but only during a fast train ride. Suddenly the tunnel ended, and Bradley was shocked to see that the train was only moving at a crawl inside an old abandoned train station. The engine was off, and Bradley could not even hear the sound of brakes, only soft whoosh of dust and light trash being pushed away. After a few minutes of thinking what to do next, Bradley decided that they should get out. The train was not going anywhere, and there was nobody outside, so presumably it would be safe to get out and explore. But as soon as they got out, they ran into another boy their age who was going along the train towards its end.
“C’mon, you scared us, who are you?” gasped Bradley.
“You scared me, too! Where did you come from?” asked the boy. “…I am James Andrews, by the way.”
Bradley and Megan introduced themselves.
“We were on the train,” Bradley explained. He looked around for a place to hide in case guards or other Unknowns showed up, but the train lights did not shine very far so he could not see well.
“Do you suppose IT worked?” James inquired.
“What worked?” Bradley and Megan asked simultaneously.
“The EXIT,” responded James. “Do you know where we are?”
Bradley and Megan shrugged their shoulders.
“I assume we’re back home. In America. Question is – where, but I think it worked. It HAD to work. I did very thorough calculations. I convinced them to hire me as the driver of this train on purpose, this particular shift and this particular rout, you know…”
“Wow, that’s impressive!” exclaimed Bradley. “How long have you spent performing all these calculations?”
“It took me quite a bit of time. But, you know, I had to do it. Did not want to be stuck there forever… Just like you, I assume. …How did you guess that you had to get on the train?”
“We didn’t. We were desperate to get out, and one day we were loading a train, and I thought it was better to get on the train than continue the way we did…”
“Oh,” James sounded disappointed. “Anyway, we should go now. We have to find the way home.”
The train produced just enough light that the kids could look around. In the end of the platform they could recognize piles of rock generated by breaking off of the pieces of the wall. Behind the train there was the tunnel, from which they just emerged, and no way out. It was so dark that they could not see anything without a flashlight. It was just their luck that James had one in the pocket of his pants. They shone it on the wall at the other end of the platform and saw the same piles of broken wall. They hoped to see some stairs leading up to the ground level in either end of the platform, or possibly in the middle, but there were none.
“Are you sure we are in America? Looks like it could be a tunnel in the World of the Unknowns,” Megan said.
“I told you, we have to be,” James responded impatiently. “The question is – where. According to what I’ve been reading, we have to be somewhere in the south… One of the former slave states.”
“You seem to know a whole lot,” said Bradley. “Where did you learn all of this?”
“From the textbooks I had,” responded James. “Didn’t you have any?”
“We did, and I started to study them, but then we got to prison and I didn’t have time…”
“But you could have kept thinking about what you have learned and do mental exercises. This is how I developed my ideas. Anyway, this is not important right now. The book that I read made it sound like the Unknowns start
ed to use free labor from Earth more than one hundred fifty years ago. There were references to getting slaves from America during the time when slavery was established in the Southern states. In fact, when slave owners lost slaves and thought that they’d run away, in reality they were taken by the Unknowns. They used trains back then as a common means of transportation, but now since the technology became pretty much obsolete on Earth, they had to develop these other null-transportation based structures that would transport you to their world as soon as you get in.”
“You are smart!” exclaimed Megan, admiration in her voice.
Bradley had to admit that everything James was saying sounded logical. He was very hopeful that James could also figure out how to get out of this station. But Bradley felt very competitive when he heard that James could develop so many ideas from the books, while he, Bradley, didn’t. He said, “Hold on, we don’t even know if this whole thing is correct. Maybe we are still in the world of the Unknowns.”
Bradley felt also a little bit uneasy about James’s name. He was pretty sure he heard it before, but at the same time he was confident he saw James first time in his life.
“The only way to convince you that we are back in America is to get out of here. One proof that we are no longer the land of the Unknowns would be to see a person who is older or younger than us.”
“Have you figured that out, too, why everybody is of the same age there?” Megan asked with curiosity.
James explained, “It appears that they had some kind of time stop at some point, and everything froze…Not quite sure why they are all kids, though.”
But James did not finish. He was interrupted by the sound of the departing train, and Bradley saw that the train started to roll back into the tunnel, from the direction that it came, all by itself.
“Are you sure there were no Unknowns on it?” Bradley asked. “Not that it matters anyway. If we are indeed in America, let them go back to their world on their own.”
Since the train departed, the only source of light the kids had was James’s flashlight. They started walking along the wall on the opposite side from the rails when Megan spotted a place where a part of the wall broke off and exposed an entrance to another tunnel. Bradley again started suspecting that they were, in fact, still in the World of the Unknowns, experiencing more of their tricks, but all of a sudden he felt a familiar but long forgotten feeling in his stomach.
“You know what?!” he exclaimed in excitement. “I think James is right! We are in America! I’m HUNGRY!!!”
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