The train slowly climbed the tracks through the cold mountain pass, its wheels giving a shrill metal squeal of protest against the rails every so often. It was dark, the moon sharing only a thumbnail of its light with the scraggy pines, and reflecting weakly off the crusty gray patches of old snow. The train was a motley affair of box cars, oil containers, box cars in flat cars, and empty flat cars. The flat cars basically looked like a box car that had the top half removed. The bottom of the flat car was open to the ground except for a foot and a half of floor on the sides and about five to six feet of floor on either end. On one of these flat cars in that five to six foot section three forms sat huddled under a blanket in the leeward side peering out at the dimly lit countryside. 

The young man looked past his monkey boots at the hole in the bottom of the car. He watched as the wooden cross ties seemed to be going by slower and slower as the train struggled uphill. “Man, this is creepy how slow we are going when we are out here in the middle of freakin’ nowhere.” he said.

He was nineteen years old, a little above average height, a little below average weight, with a shaved blond head. His face would have been one of those corn-fed farm boy faces if it wasn’t for the septum horseshoe in his nose, the eyebrow piercing, the ring in his lip, and the shadows under his eyes. He wore some torn blue jeans with thermals underneath and a hoody with a leather jacket over that and he still hugged himself in the icy air. 

The small girl to his left was shivering, pulling the blanket up to cover her nose, leaving only her big brown eyes visible between the top of the blanket and the bangs of her dyed black hair. She pulled the hood of her seventies style jacket up over her head. It was black and had a red and yellow stripe which ran around the jacket at chest level. Dark brown corduroys ended at a pair of slightly battered Doc Marten Mary Jane’s. She was twenty one. She looked at the shadowy mountains rearing up at the sides of the flatcar with the fog and mist rolling down through the sparse trees toward the train. “I wouldn’t say that it’s creepy James, it’s actually kinda beautiful out here.” she said with her soft Marilyn Monroeish voice.