DAY OF THE WIRELESS MORNING COMMUTE NIGHTMARE
A very true story by Dave Caswell about Dave Caswell
The transmission occurred at 8:50am on Tuesday, August 20th, a few minutes before the number 28 Metro North train out of New Haven would pull into Stamford station.
The gentle sway of the Metro North train didn’t interrupt anyone’s trance with whatever device they held in their hand. Iphone, Android, Ipad… whatever. With ear buds jammed into their hearing holes and glassy, stupid eyes, everyone swayed with the motion of the daily commute. Amidst the few book readers, Dave Caswell sat, uncomfortably leaning toward the edge of his aisle seat in attempt of escaping the ever reaching fat rolls of the man who sat in the window seat next to him. He was thumbing his way though Stephen King’s The Shining, a book when upon contemplation, he didn’t know why he hadn’t read before. His favorite genre, his favorite author, and one of said author’s most revered works. All of the reasons were there but he just hadn’t made it to this one yet. That’s not what was important though. What was important, was that he was enjoying the hell out of it at exactly 8:50am when…
The fat, window seat sitting man put his hand on Dave’s shoulder and began pushing him out of his seat and into the aisle. As he slowly started going over the tiny, and for the most part useless, arm rest, Dave glanced at Fats Windowseat and saw that his glossed over, vacant eyes weren’t fixed on either him, or the phone that was he held in his other hand, which was flashing a particularly strange set of images. Instead, Fats was fixated on something beyond Dave and as he followed his gaze he started to say, “Uh, hey, what are you…”
Hot liquid splashed all over Dave’s chest and face. It happened so fast that he didn’t have time to register what had happened before he slammed his eyes shut to prevent airborne liquid getting into them. Was that coffee? Someone just spilled coffee everywhere and FATS PUSHED ME INTO IT!
Dave wiped the coffee out of his eyes and sprang back up to a sitting position with malicious intent. He was about to get as pissed off as any passive aggressive, over polite, commuter could get (which usually consisted of apologizing no matter who was at fault) when he realized that he wasn’t covered in coffee. A middle-aged woman in a power suit was leaning over him with an umbrella handle clutched in a death grip. The other end of the umbrella was jabbed through Fats’ neck and holding him up against the window. The warm liquid covering Dave’s face and shirt was blood, frothy and thickened with cholesterol.
Dave’s usual sluggish pace was kick started by this incredibly random act of violence. He scuttled his whole body up the back of the seat until he was sitting on the edge of the head rest. The woman ripped the umbrella’s metal tip out of the quivering neck of Fats, who toppled over, a fountain of blood erupting from the wound. Still holding the rain deterring device like a spear, Powersuit Ladypants pointed the bloody umbrella tip at Dave’s face. He shrunk back, nearly toppling over the seat back and into the persons lap behind him, but the woman only pointed the umbrella at him.
She regarded him coldly for a moment, that gaze of hers fixed on him but somehow seeming to be a thousand miles away. After a moment she lowered the umbrella. The second she dropped her guard, a fist rocketed out from the mass of people behind her and collided with the back of her head. Oh thank god, Dave thought. Someone else is stepping in and doing something about this madness.
The owner of the fist was a short, chubby, Latino guy wearing a grubby reflective orange vest and wielding a construction helmet in his other hand. He followed the woman down as she collapsed the floor. Kneeling on her back, he began swinging the construction helmet down on the woman’s head. After a few hits, her head started collapsing outward like an aging Jack-o-lantern that someone accidentally sat on. It was on that day, that particular safety helmet protected no one’s head. In fact it did quite the opposite.
This was right around the time that Dave noticed that this was not a singular event. The noise of the train, which usually consisted of coughing, sneezing, and the tinny sound of people’s music playing too loud in their headphones, had now turned to a cacophony of audible anarchy. In every seat, in every vestibule, someone was being viciously attacked by another. Most everyone, attackers and victims alike, were still holding their phones or wireless devices, and like Fats’ phone, they were all flashing a series of bizarre images, symbols, and shapes at a rapid speed.
Amidst the screaming and shouting, one particular shrill screech drew Dave’s attention next. A petite blonde girl was sitting on her boyfriends lap, facing him. Her hands were jammed into his mouth and she was opening it as wide as possible. At first, Dave thought the screech was coming from the girl but it was actually coming out of the widening mouth of the boyfriend. There was a sickening snapping… or crunch (Both sort of. Like you were snapping a stalk celery) sound as his skull separated from his jaw. A geyser of crimson life juice splashed all over the girl as she cackled wildly.
The train car jerked violently to one side and Dave went ass over tea kettle into the seat in front of him. Looking out the window after righting himself in the seat, he realized that the train had accelerated to ludicrous speed. It was at that moment that fear finally washed over him. Fast and cold like a football team dumping a cooler of water over the coach. The conductor was on his goddamn phone. This fucker’s gonna derail.
He was in one of the rows where the seats faced one another. There were two bodies in the seats with him. The features of which were hardly discernible because they had been smashed to bits by whichever assailants did them in and had moved on to find their next victim. Below him, backed up against the wall of the train, was a little girl clutching a Dora The Explorer picture book to her chest. She was wailing as she watched all the horrible things unspooling around her.
There was another violent jerk as the train hit a turn at it’s ever-increasing speed. Dave knew that at any moment, they were all going off the rails on a crazy train. He got down to the floor, gathered the little girl up in his arms, and closed his eyes. There are brave men, heroic men, and then there’s Dave Caswell. A brave man looks at the sharp, bloody tip of an umbrella being pointed at him and doesn’t flinch at the thought of impending death. A heroic man will jump into a group of hysteric people who are trying to kill one another and stop them. But Dave Caswell? He’s only really good for trying to save some random little girl. And even then… he feels weird because he doesn’t want a parent to think he’s going pedo on their daughter or something.
These were some of the things Dave thought about just when the train car left the rails. Somewhere, far up ahead, the lead car (the quiet car, where passengers must govern themselves accordingly) had hit the edge of the Stamford platform. The speed of the rest of the train has caused the whole length of the train to snap like a whip. They went up, maybe thirty or forty feet in the air before they started making their descent back to the earth. In mid-air, during the weightless part of his commute, a dropped penny floated in front of Dave’s momentarily open eyes. It must be my lucky day.
Blackness. Some time passed. He didn’t know how much, but there was at least a bit. His trip back to consciousness was sherpa’d by the scream of a little girl. When he came to, it was dark and he could feel claustrophobia scratching at him from every angle. There was some heavy shit all over him. Soft and sort of wet. Ah dammit. I’m in a pile of people.
He shoved a body or two off of the little scream machine and himself. Cool air washed over him as the little girl squirmed her way out of his arms and away from the bodies. She didn’t even look back. Not even a “thank you”. Little bitch.
The car had landed on its roof and everything was upside down. Her little feet made a loud thunk with each step on the hollow roof facade. She started pawing at the exit doors. Dave wrestled another body away and found that he was only buried up to his waist in human carcasses now. That was a relief.
The little girl tried to pry the door open but being like, eight… or something… meant she had the strength of an emaciated pigmy and the door didn’t budge. She half scream, half squeaked and a huge mountain of a black guy in a hoody and a winter hat, rose from the carpet of bodies littering the roof (that was now the floor). Unlike the others, he didn’t have a phone in his hand, but the cord of white ear buds lead down and into his jacket. He spun and locked on to the little girl at the door. Dave felt panic punch him in the blood pumper and he started kicking his legs wildly like he was going swim his way out of those bodies.
Blackmountain Hugeguy tossed bodies away from him like toys and sprang up with relative ease. He stalked the length of the train car with great strides, slowly raising a broken piece of glass that he gripped in his shredded hand. The little girl froze when he grabbed her by the back of her coat with his good hand. Like a cat when grabbed by the skin on its neck, he lifted her motionless body up, turned her around, and looked her right in the eyes.
That moment seemed to last for a minute (which as far as moments are concerned, is a long time). He held her there, looking her up and down before finally making a grunt sound and dropping her . His eyes fixed on Dave next and that dead stare examined him in the same way. After a moment, grunt again and walked toward to the back of the train car. As he passed, Dave could hear a terrible squealing sound, like that of an emergency broadcast system test. It was coming from Blackmountain Hugeguy’s headphones. Dave could still hear that sound, possibly psychosomatically, long after the man had torn open the door leading to the next car, and disappeared.
While Dave was breaking free of his corpse prison cell, the girl sat on the floor and quietly sobbed (for a change). He stumbled up to the vestibule, found the safety pry bar, and pried the doors apart. Dave turned and started to say, “Well let’s get…” but before he could finish, the girl sprinted off into the train yard and yet again, never even so much as looked back.
Dave stepped out into the bright sun, which really sucked for a couple of seconds. Train derailments, in a best case scenario instance, usually end with at least a headache. Something to do with your noggin banging around inside of a tin can while it rolls at sixty miles an hour. And the sun, well the sun likes to aggravate a good five alarm headache.
There was a large, shaking boom behind him that made him forget all about his brightly shining nemesis. He turned and looked at the Stamford skyline in enough time to see a huge plume of fire rising up from the downtown area. Sirens, gunshots, and screaming filled the quiet moment that followed the boom as it rumbled away. This wasn’t just on Dave’s train. This thing with the wireless devices… it was everywhere.
After Dave had picked through a few pockets of his deceased commuter mates, he finally came away with a cigarette and lighter. He climbed to the underside (now the roof) of the train, lit his smoke, and watched the skyline burn. The Phonies (his affectionate name for the phone wielding psychos) only seemed to want to kill each other. The only thing he could do was just sit back and wait this thing out.
As he sat Indian style on the overturned train car, he cracked open his book, blew out a satisfying drag of smoke, and took a look at the bright side of the situation.
Work’s probably canceled today…
END
