This book is based on real events. Only the people, places, and events are fictionalized. The stupidity is 100% real.
The ceiling above Cynthia’s bed was completely featureless—no bumps, grooves, or other topographical features of any kind.
“Whatever happened to popcorn ceilings?” she pondered. “Those things were everywhere in the 90s. Why did everyone at one point decide that, yes, that was the design aesthetic they wanted in their homes? They were death traps for any balloon that floated up there. When did they become uncool? Did contractors go around everyone’s houses removing them? Why didn’t I notice any of this?”
She’d spent the last four hours, covers pulled to her nose, eyes wide open, staring at the flat plane directly above her head, the paranoia of three different groups of strangers surveilling her keeping her wide awake. The fact that a Y’all Qaeda mob could descend on her at any moment also didn’t help. Only when she remembered that dozens of multinational corporations were and had been spying on her for decades did she finally experience enough dystopian calm to fall asleep.
Her phone’s alarm jolted her awake seemingly moments later. Cynthia was suddenly, disturbingly cognizant of every possible camera, every microphone, every electronic window through which malicious actors could ogle at her most intimate moments. She felt violated and surrounded.
She dressed in the bathroom, packed her belongings, including the pliers and Allen wrench from a toolkit she’d forgotten under the sink, and left her apartment. She paused in the lobby to check if any shady figures in camo and bright red hats were stalking the premises. They weren’t.
Cynthia tapped her foot nervously until the Uber arrived five minutes later. Upon seeing the Rav 4 driven by Mario, the friendly Venezuelan recent arrival with a 4.9-star rating, she sprinted out the building and toward the car. She felt a sense of relief upon slipping into the back seat and shutting the door. With her computer, smartwatch, and appliances left behind, the only faithless machine she had on her person was a cellphone.
Cynthia entered the Brightline station, a three-story, upside-down glass and concrete ziggurat with a large display board proudly announcing, “No Accidents in 72 Hours!”
Cynthia opened her phone’s electronic wallet and waved a QR code at a scanner that let her into the platform. It was still early, so she was the first person to board Car 3 and settle into her window seat. A small sign in a seatback before her read, “Enjoy our free WIFI.” A lot of good that would do her. Still distrustful of her phone, she didn’t scroll social media or listen to podcasts. Instead, she just watched as people slowly filled the car and contemplated if any of them were spies.
Most were clearly not—several families, some retirees, obvious tourists. But there were three people who stood out: two men and one woman. They wore slacks and business shirts. Cynthia could swear they had nodded to each other before taking their seats at the rear, middle, and front of the car. She wondered if they’d carpooled. Jesus, they could’ve just coordinated their schedules, sent one person, and given the others a day off.
The train lurched forward as it left the station at 9 AM sharp. The seat next to her remained empty but the suspicious looking woman sat directly across the aisle. Cynthia glanced over, trying not to make eye contact. She felt more than slight pleasure upon noticing that the possible spy had her shirt tucked into her underwear.
“Must be from Santos’ office,” she mused with a smirk.
She had a full hour to kill and no idea how to do it. She looked down at her hands. What did people even do with these things before phones?
“I guess they mostly plowed fields, or threshed wheat, or spun wool, or swung swords, or prayed to be spared from the plague,” she thought. “No wonder they didn’t have time for TikTok. But they must’ve had some downtime between the cholera and the back breaking manual labor. So, what on Earth did they do with it?”
The realization struck her like a lead pipe.
“Books! They read fucking books! (At least the ones who could read.) Why in God’s name didn’t I bring an actual, physical, paperbound book?”
Because all her books were on her phone. Though bluebunny insisted she behave as she normally would, touching, much less using her phone for anything that wasn’t absolutely essential felt anathema at the moment. So, Cynthia did something very few afford themselves the luxury of doing anymore: she allowed herself to feel bored, alone with her thoughts, for an extended period of time.
At first, she relived every step over the previous month that led to her current predicament. Then she planned out any number of moves, conversations, and possible timelines that would lead to her Pulitzer. Finally, her thoughts grew muddled, her mind became blank, and she simply stared out the window while replaying the chorus to Britney Spears’ 2003 smash hit “Toxic” on repeat in her head.
A bump in the track jostled her out of the musical reverie. She checked her phone. It was 9:58. Cynthia grabbed her backpack, took great satisfaction in dropping her phone into her chair’s side pocket, and walked down the car toward the bathroom.
She locked the door behind her, leaned against the sink, and inserted the earbuds.
“Are you in the bathroom?” asked bluebunny.
“Yeah. I left my phone and everything else you mentioned behind. I have my backpack, the pliers, and the Allen wrench.”
“OK good,” said bluebunny. “There’s a small metal panel above the center of the window, about the size of a deck of cards. It has four screws at the corners. Do you see it?”
Cynthia walked to the window and located the panel.
“Yes, I do,” she answered.
“OK. Use the Allen wrench to undo the screws.”
It took a couple of tries, but Cynthia finally found the correctly sized Allen wrench. She removed all four screws, exposing three black wires.
“Done.”
“Good. Now use the pliers to cut all three wires. They’re the circuitry that lets the train’s central emergency system know if a window has been opened.”
“Am… I opening the window?” hesitated Cynthia.
“Yes. Don’t worry about it. This is all perfectly safe.”
“Ok…” she undid the screws and popped open the panel. “How do you know all this?”
“I did a quick search. There’s a whole subreddit dedicated to this stuff.”
Cynthia froze just before cutting the wires.
“That…doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence,” she hesitated.
“Don’t think too hard, just do,” insisted bluebunny.
Cynthia shrugged and did as she was told.
“Now, there are two red handles on either side of the window,” instructed bluebunny. “Pull them both down at the same time. That’ll remove the window, which you can then set on the floor.”
Cynthia wrenched the handles down and almost fell backward when the unexpectedly heavy window frame came loose. She regained her footing and gingerly placed the frame down by the toilet. A humid rush of air filled the bathroom. The clanging wheels on the tracks were much louder. Houses separated by a low concrete wall streamed by.
“Did you do it?” asked bluebunny.
“Yeah,” replied Cynthia. “Now what?”
“Great. The train is about to approach a turn at which point it’s going to slow down to 10 miles an hour. That’s when you’re going to jump out.”
Cynthia’s eyes widened to saucers. Without a word to bluebunny, she leaned out the hole in the side of the car. The wind whipped her hair as sparks flew off the tracks and onto an endless gravel embankment streaming by at what Cynthia surmised was an entirely absurd speed. She pulled her torso back into the train.
Cynthia froze. Her jaw tensed, her feet rooted to the bathroom floor while every muscle in her body tightened into a single, enormous knot.
“Cynthia?” asked bluebunny. “Did you hear me?”
“Uh, fuck no,” she retorted blankly. “Absafuckinglutely not.”
“What do you mean? This is the only way to shake those guys.”
“I am not jumping out a fucking train. Nope. Nuh-uh. Not doing it.”
“You’ll be fine!” insisted bluebunny. “I’ll let you know exactly when to do it. There are no traffic cameras, ATMs, or anything else in the vicinity that could record you. I calculated the whole thing out. I even put down some mattresses exactly where you’re going to land.”
“That is the craziest thing I have ever heard!” said Cynthia, gripping the sink for stability. “There’s no way it’ll work!”
“It will work! You have to trust me!”
“Trust you!?” demanded Cynthia, straightening her back and whispering angrily into the mirror. “I have no idea who you are! You’re just the voice of Steven Hawking insisting half a dozen spies are after me for some reason! I don’t know if any of that is true! You could be making it all up! You could be a serial killer for all I know, and maybe your favorite way of murdering people is by convincing them to jump out of moving trains!”
bluebunny paused.
“That would be the dumbest possible way to kill someone.”
“Yeah, maybe!” admitted Cynthia. “But it makes more sense than jumping out of a train on just your word!”
“Look, we don’t have much time,” insisted bluebunny. “The train’s already making its turn. It’s really quite slow. You have exactly 55 seconds before you have to jump or else you’ll be stuck under the thumb of those goons and their bosses forever.”
Cynthia peeked back out the window. The train seemed to be moving far faster than what any rational person would call “quite slow.” Up ahead, she saw a small pile of mattresses looming larger.
She gave a very unhappy yelp.
“You have 30 seconds!” warned bluebunny.
Cynthia vacillated, pacing quickly between the open window and bathroom door.
“20 seconds!”
“Arggghhhh!” she cried, gripping the windowsill.
“10 seconds!”
“OK, OK, OK, OK!” she exclaimed, hopping from one foot to the other and preparing to jump.
“Five seconds! Get ready!”
Cynthia squatted down—still holding the windowsill—tensed her entire body, and mentally prepared to fling herself through the hole in the wall at a stranger’s behest when the entire train lurched to a stop, sending her rolling on the bathroom floor and slamming against the wall.
“What the hell happened?” demanded Cynthia as she got to her feet. The train stood stock still.
“Hold up, hold up,” replied bluebunny. “I’m patching into their comms.”
Half a minute of silence passed by.
“It looks like the train hit a school bus,” said bluebunny.
“What! That’s terrible!” cried Cynthia, bringing her hands to her mouth in shock.
“OK, no, it seems like the cow catcher worked. The kids are fine.”
“Oh, thank God,” she exclaimed, dropping her arms. “Brightline’s going to have to reset that accident display.”
“What?”
“Never mind. This is pretty convenient.”
“Yeah,” agreed bluebunny. “So much for all your fucking whinging.”
“Hey! You’d do the same if our roles were reversed!”
“I bet you a million bucks I wouldn’t.”
“Whatever!” exclaimed Cynthia as she hoisted herself through the hole. She rolled outside, carefully held onto the bottom of the windowsill, let her arms fully extend, dropped the last three feet onto the gravel, and fell right on her ass.
“Ugh,” she moaned. Cynthia got to her feet and patted the dust off her jeans.
“What a day! And it’s not even noon!”
She looked around.
“What do I do now?”
“See that street right ahead of you? Walk down it and make your first right.”
Cynthia entered a neighborhood of stocky single-family homes, made her first right, and stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. A rooster clucked about in the median.
“And now?” she demanded.
The door of a large silver van next to her slid open from which Monica practically jumped onto Cynthia.
“You did it, you crazy bitch!” she exclaimed, laughing.
Cynthia screamed in surprise and hugged the woman.
“bluebunny?” asked Cynthia in shock.
“Who fucking else?” replied Monica with a chuckle.
“I’m so glad you’re a woman!” cried Cynthia once the surprise had worn out. “Where do we go now?”
“Oh, I know just the place,” said Monica with a mischievous grin.
