THE TRACKS

Whenever there was something racking her brain, Alyssa Mitchell walked along the train tracks. The house she lived in with her parents was on a dead-end street and the dead end was lined with trees that gave way to the tracks if you went far enough through them. It wasn’t an abandoned railroad—sometimes Alyssa would hear the train’s horn as it passed through, and other times she would even race out and watch as it galloped by. Today Alyssa sauntered along the wooden planks, looking down to ensure she stepped on each one. It was a cloudless afternoon and she’d neglected to bring her sunglasses, but at least it was quiet and she had plenty of railway left to contemplate her future in journalism.

“Hey, ’Lyss!” a voice called ahead of her. Tommy Blackburn was standing at the opening where the tracks forked, a spot where Alyssa more often than not ran into him smoking weed. He was waving when she looked up and she returned the gesture; he was just out of earshot without having to yell, so she didn’t bother to say anything. Alyssa and Tommy grew up together more or less, the two of them had lived a block away from each other their entire lives and went to all the same schools but didn’t necessarily run in the same crowds. Still, they were cordial. Tommy was relighting a half-smoked joint and had another tucked behind his ear when Alyssa caught up to him.

“What’s up, Tommy?” she asked and took a puff from the shitty disposable vape that she’d bought earlier that week.

“Oh, a little bit of this, little bit of that. You know how it is,” Tommy got the joint to light and blew smoke from his nostrils. “I see you’ve got your thinking cap on, though. You cracking a case or are we existential today?”

Alyssa sighed, “I need to break something big if I ever want to get out of this miserable town, but this town is so miserable that nothing ever goes on here. Journalism’s a dying profession and it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

“Existential, then. Want some company or is this more of a solo crisis?”

“You can come.” Alyssa looked toward where the tracks forked to the left and curved out of sight, “Have you ever gone down that way?”

“You mean the spooky path?” Tommy asked. “Uh-uh. I was out here one time right when the sun was going down and I saw a coyote wander out of the woods there. Thing stopped dead and looked me right in the eyes and ever since then, I just knew I’d never come back if I went that way.”

“Cool, me either. Let’s check it out,” Alyssa started toward the curved track. The woods looked denser that way.

“What? Did you hear what I just said?” Tommy followed regardless.

Alyssa turned to Tommy, walking backwards while she spoke and making a headline in the air with her hands, “Oh yeah, ‘Local Stoner Has Heart-to-Heart with Coyote, Learns the Nature of His Death.’ It can be my big break,” she turned back around with a snort.

“Hey, I’ve come to find that my intuition can be pretty good,” Tommy picked up his pace to walk side-by-side with Alyssa. “I used to read your blog back when you would actually update it, you know, I liked the piece you did on that mystery tunnel over on the east side. There might be a whole untapped market there,” he said.

“What, you mean like writing Creepypastas?” Alyssa asked. They rounded the bend and the tracks continued indefinitely before them. There was a building in the distance, too far away to make out.

“No, not like writing Creepypastas, it sounds stupid when you put it that way. I mean reporting on unexplained phenomena, strange goings-on, that kinda thing. Like all the mattress stores you see around town—what’s the deal with those?”

Alyssa didn’t even have to ask Tommy what he was talking about, the look she gave him said it all.

“Think about it,” he went on. “Why are there so many? I mean, there’s like 3 or 4 of them. How often are people buying mattresses? I don’t know about you, but I’ve only had two my whole life: a kid-sized one and an adult-sized one.” Tommy raised his eyebrows at Alyssa in a way that said how about that?

“I appreciate your interest, Tommy, but I don’t really see how that’ll further my career,” said Alyssa. The chorus of insects droned on around them as she tried to elaborate: “I want to write something bigger than me, something that’ll change the way we see the world, you know? Like Gary Webb, except of course he got killed…” she trailed off looking into the trees. The woods must actually have been thicker out this way because she saw deep into the dense forest but couldn’t spot the train track she usually walked along. “Hey, is it me or have we walked further than it feels like we have?” she asked.

“Oh, so now it matters what the stoner thinks,” Tommy joked while striking the lighter into his cupped hand, once again relighting the joint that kept going out. He looked up and did a quick once-over of his surroundings, “Everything looks the same to me.”

“I can’t see the track we came from. It should still be clear as day through the—hey, what’s that?” Alyssa pointed at an object in the forest. A white rectangle stood out like a sore thumb among the browns and greens around it. There was a black X along the front of the object, and Alyssa started towards it. “Is that a…refrigerator?”

“That looks like a whole lot of Fuck That, Alyssa, what are you doing?” Tommy rushed to keep up with Alyssa’s quickened pace as she crunched through the leaves. Once close enough to make out more details, she saw she was right about the object in the middle of the forest being a refrigerator. Off-white and standing near an overturned tree, the single-doored fridge had two slightly rusted chains wrapped around it with a padlock securing them in the shape of an X.

“What’s this doing out here?” Alyssa reached out to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating.

“And now you’re touching the creepy murder fridge. Great.”

Alyssa ran her hand along the scaly surface of the refrigerator. Although there was no way the thing could be plugged in, she could feel its subtle vibration. They both heard the hum of a running appliance in their dead silence.

“I think it’s on,” said Alyssa. She grabbed one of the chains snugly holding the door closed and tugged on it.

“Hey, quit that! Don’t you know that Steve Miller Band song?” said Tommy, and his seemingly out-of-pocket question momentarily snapped Alyssa out of her trance. She asked him what he was talking about with a stare. “Y’know, Abra-Abracadabra…I wanna reach out and grab ya,” he hurriedly intoned. “Look, all I’m getting at is: if you reach out to dark forces, they reach back.”

“Uh-huh,” Alyssa heard what Tommy said but it didn’t quite resonate with her. “My dad’s got some bolt cutters back at the house, let’s go,” she started back toward the tracks.

“You’re not listening to me!” Tommy followed, “Curiosity killed the cat, you ever heard that one before?”

“Hey man, the only pussy I see right now is you,” Alyssa flashed Tommy a smile to show she meant no malice with her quip. “C’mon, it’ll make for a good story. I’m tapping into a market here, remember?”

Tommy tossed the filter of what used to be his joint and dropped his shoulders in defeat. He could tell by her tone and expression that she wasn’t going to let it go no matter how hard he pressed. “All right, but just because I’d never forgive myself if I left and nobody ever saw you again. If things go south,”—Tommy produced a switchblade from his back pocket and popped the blade out with a fluidity that said he practiced this move in private—“WATCHAA! The ol’ blunt splitter’s gonna be become a throat slitter real quick.”

“My hero,” she said and made it back onto the tracks. Alyssa took one last look at the refrigerator to memorize some landmarks around it—the overturned tree that looked like it was struck by lightning and a rock that looked like an egg sticking out of the ground just at the tree line—then they walked along the unfamiliar wood-and-steel path toward the curve and back the way they came.

Oddly enough, the way they came ended up being just as foreign as the way they went. So much so, in fact, that it appeared to be the exact same. When they rounded the bend Alyssa noticed right away that the fork in the train track wasn’t there and the forest on either side of them was still just as dense. The track the duo was walking on extended in a straight line ahead of them and there was a building in the distance. The same building as before? No way. It had the same general shape, but this building was closer—so close that Alyssa could make out that it looked like a place used to store unused trains. The whole thing was rubbing her the wrong way, and she felt a sense of dread creeping up her chest.

“Something doesn’t look right. Where’s the other track?” said Tommy. He already felt a lingering uneasiness from the ‘creepy murder fridge’ and was seriously hoping this was just the weed making him paranoid. But Alyssa wasn’t saying anything. “We’re still going the right way, right? We went around the curve, I mean, no way that was the wrong way. Right?” Tommy tended to ramble when he was nervous. Alyssa was zeroed in on something ahead of them, her brow furrowed. Tommy tried following her gaze but came up short and only saw trees.

“Gotta be kidding me…” Alyssa said more to herself than anything.

“What?”

“That rock,” she pointed to what Tommy failed to see a few feet away. “Halfway out of the ground at the tree line, looks like a dinosaur egg. I made a mental note of that rock so we’d know where to turn when we came back with the bolt cutters.”

“Surely that isn’t the same rock,” said Tommy, also more to himself than anything. They approached the rock with caution, like it was radioactive. Alyssa looked into the forest and was brought to a standstill by what she saw. The bottom half of a tree trunk stood upright among the other trees, its top half lying next to it.

“Like it was struck by lightning…” she whispered.

“Maybe we just got turned around somehow,” Tommy noticed the tree as well, except there was a distinct lack of a chain-wrapped refrigerator anywhere near it.

“The fridge is gone,” said Alyssa.

“To hell with the fridge, Alyssa, I wanna get out of here!” he was really hoping the fridge would go unmentioned but now Tommy was closer to panic than he was when Alyssa noticed the rock in the ground. He started backing up, back toward the curved train track, “I am too high for this shit right now, dude. Let’s go.”

“Yeah Tommy, I think you have the right idea,” Alyssa said and turned back, trying to mask the dread that had now lodged itself in her throat.

“I had the right idea when I said we shouldn’t go down the spooky path. Stick around, I’m full of right ideas,” Tommy took the other joint from behind his ear and started fiddling around with it in his nervous hands as they made haste back down their beaten path. There wasn’t much hope in either of their strides, though, because they both had a pretty good idea of what would happen when they rounded the bend.

Alyssa closed her eyes as the two of them crossed the threshold while Tommy resigned himself to their situation: they weren’t getting away from the tracks anytime soon. This was made clear as soon as the tracks spat them out the other side (if it can be called “the other side”) and he saw the egg-shaped rock just ahead. As close as they were to the rock, the building in the distance—which was even less distant this time and easily identifiable as an old train depot—looked to be just as close to it. There was no need to look next to the rock and check if the refrigerator was back by the lightning-struck tree because dead ahead, standing on the train track just in front of the train depot, was an all too familiar chain-clad white rectangle. Tommy exhaled deeply, something Alyssa mistook as a sigh of relief and was met with immediate distress when she opened her eyes. They stopped and looked ahead in silence and disbelief. Tommy’s mouth dried up and he did probably the worst thing for it—he lit his joint.

“We have to open it,” said Alyssa. “Do you think your knife can bust the chains?”

Tommy was a little taken aback by her insistence at first, but then realized that she was probably right. “Well, if our options are between spending eternity wandering the never-ending forest or raiding Pinhead’s munchie stash, I guess I’ll take my chances with the fridge,” he said as he studied the switch blade. “I’ve only ever used this thing to split ’rellos open. It’s worth a shot.”

Alyssa and Tommy closed the distance between them and the refrigerator. Tommy took the lead but hesitated when he raised his knife to the chains. Even though it wasn’t much taller than him, the refrigerator felt like a gigantic looming obelisk before him. There was something about it—the appliance in front of him felt sacred, almost religious. It felt wrong. Tommy looked at Alyssa and tossed the switchblade to her, “Here, I don’t wanna touch this thing.” She caught the knife and they swapped places. This was pretty much her mess anyway, and Tommy didn’t want to dirty his hands with it. Alyssa took a nervous puff from her disposable vape; she chose the wrong time to quit smoking. The refrigerator hummed idly as it watched her stick the blade into one of the rusty chain links to the top right of the padlock until it was snug in the hole. Alyssa turned it clockwise and the chain broke with little resistance and tore away from the cold storage as if the chain itself didn’t even want to be touching it, inciting a flinch from her. She exhaled a deep breath that she’d been holding inside but there was no use relaxing, she wasn’t over the hill yet. The switchblade tucked into a chain link at the top left of the padlock and Alyssa twisted her wrist just enough that it would give with only a little more pressure, then looked at Tommy. He didn’t say anything and only nodded his approval, so Alyssa gave the knife one final crank and the chain snapped, dropping the padlock and the remaining chains with an earthy thud. They both fully expected the door to swing open and flinched back a step or two in preparation, but it stayed closed and the refrigerator stayed humming. Alyssa’s gaze drifted over to the old train depot that got closer each time they’d rounded the bend, its opening like a giant eyeball watching them with anticipation of what might happen next. Tommy must’ve felt it too, because he was peering inside when Alyssa tried to exchange a look with him.

“Ready?” Alyssa stepped forward and grabbed at the door’s handle. She was a little startled to find it felt normal in her hand; she expected it to feel alien or even to reject her grip.

“It’s gonna be a body,” Tommy readied himself for a jump scare. “It’s gonna be a body, dude, I just know it’s gonna be a body.”

Alyssa pulled the handle and the door swung open weightlessly, freeing the fur-covered body that was stuffed inside and it hit the train track with a wet slap.

“FUCK!” Alyssa jumped backwards and shoved her forearm under her nose, already smelling the blood and not wanting to smell much else. The refrigerator’s hum grew louder with its door opened. Tommy turned around and gagged. Flies came swooping in from wherever it is they lie in wait and buzzed around the dead coyote. Its head was turned 180 degrees, its eyes open and white. It had no tail, only a bloody stump where it should’ve been, and its fur was matted with blood around spots on its limbs and torso where the skin was broken with exposed muscle and in some places bone. However this animal was killed, it didn’t go down without a fight. “Well Tommy, I think we found your coyote,” said Alyssa. Tommy still had his back turned, frantically trying to relight his joint. He turned around after several flicks of his lighter had begun to get drowned out by the ever-increasing hum of the refrigerator, the joint’s cherry finally burning.

“That is so not funny,” he said and stopped to listen. “Hey, is it me or is does that thing keep getting louder?” Tommy saw the coyote’s nose twitch and he jumped back, “Did you just see that! It fuckin’ smelled me!”

“Calm down, dude, it’s dead as hell,” Alyssa tried to reassure, but she was abruptly cut off by a crack! Both of their heads snapped downwards to the coyote, whose head was turning back into place. Its head twitched to the side and its legs started bending and unbending like one does when they wake up with a limb still asleep. With each twitch of the head, they heard its neck snap and crackle, then finally pop when it was facing a direction that gave it normal mobility, its snout resting on the metal of the tracks. All the while, the refrigerator’s hum continued to grow. The coyote stood up on its tired legs and faced its head forward, toward the train depot, its nose working double time to compensate for the blindness of its milky eyes. All kinds of new scents presented themselves to the coyote—but one in particular caught its attention and it turned its face to Tommy with one long drag of its nose, somehow managing to make direct eye contact with him. Tommy let the joint fall from his mouth and anxiously pointed to his own chest. Who? Me?

A growl started to build from deep in the canine’s belly and just as it reached its lips, Alyssa buried the switchblade’s 9 inches into the center of the zombie dog’s head. She was not very intent on finding out what this beast was capable of. The coyote’s angry growl quickly turned into a pained whimper and it lost interest in Tommy, beginning a panicked walk to the train depot. The refrigerator’s hum dimmed with every step the coyote took away from them.

“It’s going to lick its wounds,” said Alyssa.

“Let it. It can keep the knife too,” Tommy had never been so relieved in his life.

“Look over there,” Alyssa pointed into the train depot where the coyote turned a corner and was swallowed by darkness. On the other end of the large building was an opening that led out to more train tracks—train tracks that joined in a Y formation and became one.

“Oh, you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me, man,” Tommy complained.

“It’s the only way,” said Alyssa and she pointed back toward the curved track they tried rounding thrice over, “I’m not taking my chances back over there.” She was right and Tommy knew it. They were both scared, but they started toward the old train depot in spite of it. Leaving the refrigerator behind them was a good feeling, but the threat of a potential coyote attack was a new level of anxiety that neither of them had woken up expecting to experience that day. The train depot appeared darker from the outside than it was when they walked through the opening—where they expected pitch darkness, it was actually decently illuminated inside. Neither Alyssa nor Tommy bothered to take in their surroundings for fear they would see the coyote lying in wait, but their peripherals provided them more than enough to know where they were going. Wasting no time whatsoever and intent on not giving the monster they loosed the opportunity to strike, they powerwalked the length of the musty old train depot to the other side, each of them breaking out into a run by the time they were at the opposite opening. Once back into the sunlight, neither of them stopped their sprint until they’d reached the opening of the fork and were back on their trusted track. Alyssa looked back while catching her breath and only saw the other track curving out of sight, content to see the train depot somehow was no longer there.

Alyssa Mitchell and Tommy Blackburn walked down the train track together in silence. What was there to say? They walked through the trees to the opening that lead back to the dead end that ran along the end of their blocks, then only exchanged a look before going their separate ways back home. Although they’d gone through something clearly bigger than them, neither was very interested in trying to understand just what that something was. Not right now, anyway, and every time Alyssa heard a coyote howling at night, it served as a reminder that there are stories out there, the only question was how far she was willing to go to find them.