Page 158 of Unruly

Figure this shit out.

It had been dark for a half hour now. Given his watch and phone were both ruined, he didn’t have a clue about the time. He figured maybe nine at night, or something like that. At this point, he wasn’t even sure where he was, as it had been a while since he came out to a main road where he could read a damn sign.

A rumbling beneath Cross made him place his hands to the metal tracks. The vibrating only got more intense until he heard a horn blare further down the tracks. Quickly, he jumped up and ducked down into the ditch beside the rails. Thirty seconds later, a CN train came into view. It was long enough that it had three different engines pulling to give it power.

None of that really mattered to Cross.

Down the tracks, something had caught his eye.

Blinking green.

He knew that meant either a switch in tracks, or a crossing was coming up for the train.

Main roads.

Cross climbed up out of the ditch as the back end of the train came around. He wasn’t sure how his cold hands worked, but they managed to grab hold of the railing on the stairs of the last railway car. Not a caboose, like people might assume. A flatbed that probably carried cargo containers or something of the sort.

He didn’t intend to stay on the train very long, so he didn’t go higher onto the flatbed than the stairs. Leaning to the side, he looked as far as he could to see what was coming up. The train wasn’t moving particularly fast, but it was enough.

Cross saw what he was waiting for …

One, two, three.

He jumped from the back of the flatbed car, and assumed he would land in another ditch full of wet, dead grass and overgrowth.

Nope.

His knees hit gravel. His palms dragged across sharp rocks in an attempt to keep his face from going right into the ground.

Pain coursed through his nervous system, but Cross didn’t have the fucking time or give a damn to sit there and cry about it. Pushing up to his feet, he stared at the large, circular lights overtop his head marked by a huge black X. Pulsing red back and forth, the crossing lights stopped once the train was a half of a mile down the tracks further.

Cross looked down the main road one way.

A sharp turn, a fuck lot of trees, an older house with rows of chopped wood outside. By the looks of the beat up truck in the driveway and the light in the windows, someone was home there. Down in that same direction, there were no other houses.

A small lake, with houses on the other side of it sat just east of the house.

Shit.

Nothing.

Basically.

Cross looked the other way, and froze.

All the houses.

Or a few scattered ones, anyway.

And just above the crest of the small hill leading up from the train tracks?

A fucking store.

It didn’t look like very damn much, as far as that went. It was pretty clear he was still in a very rural area. Trees for miles.

The store in question was half a business, and half a home. The home was the upper level, and by the looks of it, the bottom was all for the store.

Every single thing that was bad and stupid would be Cross walking into that business, and making his presence known. After all, he’d just spent a night in the woods, and was working on his second. He looked like hell. He felt like it, too.