The Altonevers (5 page)

“
How did you
survive?”

“
I didn't even get off the
train, those are sometimes the funnest, the ones you have only to
think about what’s there and never see it. Not all places, in fact
most aren’t suitable for just anyone, but no worries that still
leaves an uncountable amount of places to be. I've been at it for a
long, long while in days, and still haven’t seen even a fraction of
a fraction of what's possibly out there.”

“
Don't you mean
years?”

“
Years are irrelevant when
you travel the rails. A few days here, a few days there, a day’s
length varies from place to place. Time is almost completely
irrelevant, but for lunch and sleep that follows anywhere you
go.”

“
Only thinking of what to
eat, eh, typical,” she laughs.

“
No, I meant when you have
an appetite is mealtime. Whenever you sleep is night, your internal
clock is all that comes to count.”

“
Travel itself has to be
tiring, like jet lag?” she asks.

“
Kinda, though it’s more
like at each stop your brain is scrambling, reconfiguring to
comprehend the sights and sensations that your own species didn’t
evolve to process, as it wasn’t your-”

“
Standard,” she cuts him
off.

“
See, your gettin’ it. So
let's say the color blue, like the sky, you know why the sky is
blue right?”

“
Yes.”

“
Anyway, what’s blue to you
or us, is not blue to another person or person thing.”

“
Right, because their eyes
are adjusted to their standard,” she says.

“
Wait, if they all have
different times and that, how does it function? how do they
schedule the arrivals?”

“
They don’t,” he laughs.
“It's chaos, they need millions of astrophysicists just to know
when one train will show up at one station, let alone the trillions
or whatever others. They just show up when they do and life goes
on. But they do have their own time, in the InterAltos system, so
they will arrive at say 73 IAT, though that could be anytime at the
actual station the train eventually arrives at” he says.

“
This is all very
confusing.”

“
It sounds confusing in
theory, but not for us. We just ride the rails, and sails, or
whatever it is at the moment, onto the next Alto. Simple stuff in
practice, a person from one Alto may be a waitress or a banker in
another, coming and going just as you do from home to work,” he
says.

“
Where are we going
now?”

“
Who knows exactly, but as
long as we're on the right path, right?”

“
Right” she agrees,
thinking she doesn't know what path she's on.

“
And what’s most
important,” he says. “Wherever you are, act like you've been there
before.”

“
Ah,” she oh's. The train
banks sharply left, showing Anna a new set of speed stretched stars
marbling her view to marvel. A sea of blurred suns, in their depths
and sizes, clusters and formations staring for long enough to she
sees larger celestial patterns forming of them. Thinking of how
much it all resembles the speckling on the train car's
floor.

On the train with them, to their left
in the middle of the car is a boy seeming no older than ten in a
tuxedo that's slightly too small, tight around his wrists and neck.
Across from a girl appearing about his age in a dress. Both having
powder blue faces and pale silver hair, with large black watery
eyes.

“
Youths of another Alto,”
Cider whispers into his coat.

“
The blue ones?”

“
Shh, yeah, they're not
always blue. Their skin takes on the sky of their
feeling.”

“
Is this the weather from
before?”

“
No, these are Terullians.
Watch, they're the weather they feel” he says as the kids exchange
grazing glances, then match eyes, excited, the boy brightens to
light red’s and yellow’s. He looks away, shyly unsure of what to
say. The girl frowns for a second then smirks, unseen by him. He
catches Anna staring, who looks away but takes to her peripheral. A
patch of clouds forms over the boys head, he doesn’t notice until
it drizzles on him, cooling his orange to a blushing pink of
embarrassment. The girl giggles loudly and glows, covering her
sunlit laugh with her hand, as her happy eyes show it like it's
shining through open windows. The boy smiles, casting a cloud over
her that spins into a hurricane and ruffles her hair, the girl
tries to speak, but stutters instead. The clouds swipe back and
forth in currents, then bridge between the two, mixing the drizzle
with the swirl into a warm sun shower.

“
Sit next to her will you,
your flooding the damn train. Hooligans!” shouts a grouchy suit in
priceless loafers from behind a penny paper. The boy, emboldened,
gets up and walks with his head through the clouds to sit next to
the girl. Sliding closer as they smile and glow a golden red
radiating through the interior and windows while dancing like light
through a shallow pond. Then beaming and amplifying, erasing the
train and its inhabitants with each brightening
fluctuation.

“
What's
happening?”

“
This is normal, we’re
transitioning to the next station.”

“
This is how it
happens?”

“
It's different every
time,” he says, shrugging. The two, and the things around them
return fairly quickly to their proper shapes. Their physical senses
resurface over the seconds after. The wheels screech and shriek as
the amber rail becomes the scratched steel of another
Alto.

“
We're getting off
here.”

“
Where's here?”

“
I don't know
yet.”

“
We're lost?”

“
Usually, but that’s a
state of mind, I think so anyway.”

“
Are we lost or
not?”

“
No worries, I know the
way. Were just making a quick stop.”

“
Why‘re we getting off
here?”

“
It's just a place, and
it's night time. To me anyway, you’re not tired? we should find a
place to rest.”

“
Don't get any idea's,” she
says.

“
Not until you spread
them,” he answers.

A throbbing sensation
emanates from well within Anna's chest as they enter the station.
Her bones are reverberating through her vertebrae, her skin is
sliding over pulsating flesh. Seeing resonance in primary colors as
her sight, in strobes of flashes that grow to overlap and form into
vague shapes. At first seen as though she'd just woken up, then
slowly becoming defined and refined into a lucid physical
realism.
The waaaaaa-ing in her ears
lowers to a bearable hum as the wheels screech then shriek,
spraying molten metal in coming to a complete stop. Just as they
and the trains interior becomes recognizable to her senses, and
rendered to definitive shapes, the doors slid open to the station.
She’s unsure, anxious of what she'll see , or be, in this Alto.
Again in the grips of gravity, she stands from sleeping limbs,
shedding vertigo with each step off the train.
Merging into the morning swarms of coffee clad fists and
clean shaven faces. All with frightened eyes, awoken for
responsibility, are echoing the moonlit morning sunrise under a
band of crowding thunderclouds. She follows him, weaving in and out
of their flocks of peacoats while jostling through the in rushing
tide of shoulders and briefcases. He grabs for her hand, but gets
her sleeve, and tugs her through the clicking of heels and
shuffling of shoes.

“
Keep your head down
through the crowd,” he says and she does. The sense of being
smothered by the slaloms of shoulders reminds her of swimming,
though actually drowning in racing thoughts of a new place. A new
play at life, a new plain, a new picture to live.

“
Where to?”

“
The path to anywhere,
everywhere and often nowhere in particular, your perception of it I
guess,” he says, then noticing the grimly grimacing faces floating
against the currents of the crowd. They start waving quartz and
brass badges, and shouting inaudibly while quickening their
approach toward the two. Pushing themselves through the strap
hangers swarming to their daily graves.

“
Why so rough?” she says
“are they after us?”

“
We've got to get out of
here.”

“
We just got here,” she
says, counting three in pursuit, a fourth swipes at her head,
missing. Instead getting tangled with a pedestrian and falling
under the sleepily stampeding feet of the crowd. Giving Anna a look
of worry before being swept from sight. A gust of wind wipes a
newspaper stand into the air clouds of spreading sheets blot out
the sky with the morning's stories. A page of the InterAlto
timeless, a main InterAlto rag, shows a glimpse of a picture in
passing. Of a face and a passage and large letters reading “Wanted”
“alive or not so much, either way two thousand gallons silver”
“Apples ‘Cider’ Cider of the notorious juice box gang.” The face in
the picture is holding an expressionless gaze, unsettling her soul
and contradicting the boyish charm of the man leading her to
supposed safety.

The two spill from the morning swarm
into the streets of a four story sleepy village the size of a small
city. They flee to the side streets, tucking into the nearest alley
way. At six hours to this Alto’s noon the two reach the saloon of
an out of the way hotel. Entering the lobby just as a fat charcoal
suited balding business man inhales something squidish thing from a
large soup cauldron between his knees. Breathing heaving grunts
with each chomp of his slurping shark mouth. A Slender blonde sits
opposite the feasting fat man, looking meagerly fed. Starved for a
father's love as a youth, who then starves herself for the idyll
affections of hideous strangers with money.

“
We need to rest,” Cider
says to the stork faced lobby girl standing behind a cedar desk,
before a wall of door keys, and beneath a black hat that slightly
too big for her small head.

“
Some rest will be some
money,” squawks the clerk with bended neck, squinting to
Anna.

“
Is this place
open?”

“
Yeah hun, the
money.”

“
How much?” Anna
asks.

“
Don't worry about it, I
got a thing.”

“
For two rooms.”

“
We have only one left,”
the clerk says.

“
With two beds?” Anna asks.
Cider digs through his pockets for a wallet, then his wallet for a
stack of cards, then the cards for a blue one or a green
one.

“
Here ya go,” he says
handing her a green one.

“
No.”

“
Okay, this
one.”

“
It's a different name
sir.”

“
So, charge an extra
hundred or who cares.”

Cla cling! the register pops and
chings closed.

“
Third floor, somewhere,”
the clerk drones pointing away, just away.

“
Thank you,” Anna
says.

“
Go away sir,” the clerk
says sternly, then smirks and lets out a daffy laugh. The two walk
across the lobby's wooden floor, a room resembling a large bar. The
fat man is splashing his meal onto the starving blonde sitting next
to him. The call button dings and lights up as Anna yawns toward
her reflection in the polished and scratched brass elevator doors.
Their room is at the end of a hall with red and gray checkered
floor tiles and agitating blue lights highlighting scuffed beige
paint and water stained walls

“
This is it,” he says,
putting the key into its hole and jiggling it without
result.

“
Number nine-three,” she
says. The door opens to a dingy feeling room with teal paint
peeling off the ceiling. Sparsely furnished by only a mirrored
dresser, and a table, and rocking chair at an open window as
furniture. Wrought with the smell of mildew and a feel of
melancholy that they'd have to accept to be ever comfortable in.
She collapses fully clothed on the bed, and rolls herself in its
sheets. Not even getting the sneakers off her throbbing tired feet
before she falls fast asleep a minute before sunrise with the moon
standing bright in the sky.

Anna yawns awake in the comfort of an
empty room and an empty bed, sliding her sneakers off her
feet.

“
Did we?” she asks, though
is answered only by the ceiling fan creaking and lazily the wafting
the air, sounding like the ticking of an uneven clock.

“
How will I get home?” she
whispers her first wakeful thought. Then again reliving how she got
to be in the bed she’s been laying alone in for the last few hours.
Bathed in sunlight ebbing through the dancing dust that fills the
room. A smoke yellowed curtain wavers in the window she's been
sitting at from sun up to sundown for the last several days.
Prowling her view for the pedestrians passing in their daily
habits, finding it much different from her standard. Thinking of it
as a quiet river town, though having not left the room since she's
been here. Knowing nothing of anything but what she can see through
her caged bird’s eye view from a fourth story window.
When asked about the wanted picture in the papers
he told her he’s wanted for the minor violation of unlawful
InterAlto transit, akin to hopping a turnstile, and that she is
wanted as well. Telling her that to leave one's own Alto when it
and she is supposed to have been washed out is a crime to nature,
and the laws are after her for it. Unable to mount an argument
against what she doesn’t fully understand, she settles for the
explanation, thinking it was likely why they tried to snatch
her.