Midnight Creek Tales

#3. The Midnight Railroad / Chapter 1

It was very strange how it all occurred. Gage couldn't recollect the most recent events, but all he did know was that he was lost on a wondering train. He wasn't the only one in the same situation, in fact, there were many like him. And all of them wanted to get to the bottom of this.

When looking out of the train's window, you could clearly see that nothing was familiar to anyone's understanding. It seemed as if they were riding through a huge endless desert, almost like an abandoned trail that people used to take back then during the frontier years.

Trains nowadays aren't the usual source of transportation, but by the scale and grand-design of this one in particular, it seemed to be rather old with some history behind it. And through cycles of ominous travel, it had years of riding encrypted into its steel.

The train was going at a moderate pace, but the noise of the roaring but silent engine struck a chill down Gage's spine.

As said before, everything was quite surreal, and Gage solely wanted to go home.

It couldn't have been possible that he had voluntarily come onto this train. Gage had never even been to a train station before in his life, let alone go on one in the middle of the night, with no apparent destination.

Questions flocked the heads of everyone in the boxcar, with all of them profoundly clueless regarding the 'to and from' whereabouts of the train, the reason why they were on, or even who was navigating!

The boxcar was locked, thus giving an unsettling feeling that everyone was secluded and cut-off from reality.

In it, however, there were more people than just Gage as mentioned before. With eleven to be exact. All were strangers to each other, and only having one thing in common. For some oddball reason, they were all here together onboard.

There were four men (including Gage), three women, one teenager, two children, and an infant.

And as they all began to receive their consciousness and surroundings, panic ensued like the Bubonic Plague.

"What kind of joke is this?" A man jeered as he looked out the window.

"There has to be a way out! Maybe we should call for help," said a beautiful woman standing in the back trying to peer out of the small dimmed window.

"That's no use! Someone would've heard us by now! We've been screaming since we've woke up and still no response!" A man interjected.

Everything escalated to a disorganized manner with kids crying for their parents, adults trying to bang on the single door and windows, and everyone reverting to the behavior of a primate! Gage couldn't even think with all the ruckus, so he put his foot down and stepped in charge.

"Everyone! Attention please!"

Everybody cocked their head towards Gage. It became silent, 'That's a relief.' He thought to himself in delight.

"Now look! I know we are all asking the same questions, and we're going to get some answers! But to do so, we need to be civilized during this or were not going to make any progress!" Gage said beginning to introduce himself.

"My name is Gareth, but most call me Gage. And since there is a good handful of us lets introduce ourselves, because we can't work together to solve this problem if we don't even know how to address each other."

So everyone went around and introduced themselves.

By the last person, Gage memorized everyone's name except for the baby's who the children nicknamed Jojo.