“You’re a liar,”

“I’ve told you, I’m not a-”

“Ignore him, just tell the story,”

Three boys sat in a dark middle school classroom, the designated space for the Green Valley Middle School paranormal club. They were waiting on the president of the club and the only other member, who was as floaty and distant as any good ghost should be. One boy, Rally, was not satisfied with Barry’s de-escalation and shifted in his seat.

“I’ve told you already, you don’t have to understand it all, just enough to get back,”

Maybe it was a bit unbelievable, but Rally didn’t have a home, he lived on trains. Not passenger ones, but in rusty, graffiti-covered freight trains. Train track routes were complicated, Rally knew that. As some advertising would say, it was the lifeblood of the nation, an impossible to understand network of veins and rails. But Rally’s world wasn’t that big, all he had to do was go to school and a few other places.

“’s fine man,” Ben said. It was a rare occurrence for Barry to be here, most of the time he was with the baseball team, but once in a while he would accompany Rally and his twin brother to their club. That twin being Kade, who by some stroke of irony was way more similar to Rally than his own twin brother. It could’ve been the way they both moved, or the inflection in their voices. Kade joked Rally was his ‘replacement.’

“Yeah, this is bound to be good,” said Kade.

The story began at the parts Rally left out. How after school, he could catch a ride on a train to a small arcade a few towns over. How in those arcades he would offer to get tokens for young children for their money, and how he would never return to them. How he’d bring leftover tokens to the train racks to watch trains speed over them, fusing them to the metal. How he wasn’t the only one who lived on trains. How there was a man who liked to live in the same areas Rally did who was not his brother, yet was like his brother. He knew too much about Rally, and Rally knew just about nothing about him. He didn’t even know his name.

Rally liked to stay in rail yards at night. The slow back and forth of the trains transferring freight lulled him to sleep, even if there was a chance of being discovered, or even waking up in an entirely new state. He’d climb up and throw himself into an open train car like a piece of trash into a deep ditch. A few days ago, at the crack of dawn, Rally was woken up by a loud bang on metal. Standing on the other side of the car was the man who was not his brother. Despite what Rally didn’t know, the man knew how he kept stolen money. In his half-asleep state, Rally saw the dark figure of the man in his oversized coat and oversized boots and panicked. He scrambled and flung himself at the wall to climb out as fast as he could. Dazed, he ran from half monster, half long dreaded lecture on morals. Who was he to be so righteous? When they both lived in a dumpster on wheels. Rally ran for the trees.

Getting closer to the tree line, Rally spotted a path into the woods. Jumping over a small ditch, he found himself on a simple trail. As he went further, he found he had to step over rows of old rails and rotten rail ties. He imagined the forest slowly inching forward, consuming the rail yard until every track was unusable and abandoned. He also found there were also old tags written along the rails, some sign of human activity.

Eventually, he found a regular path. He really had no reason to, but Rally kept walking down the trail. With each step he whispered a lyric to some stupid kid song he heard forever ago.

“Pepsi Cola went to town, Coca Cola shot him down.”

Rally didn’t wake up quite right and neither had the world quite yet. A fine mist hung low to the ground, and there was an uncomfortable chill for so early in the season.

“Doctor Pepper fixed him up, now we all drink Seven Up,”

There was no chirping of birds, or whirring of insects, only an ugly scrape when Rally’s sneakers landed wrong.

“I’m a nut, I’m a nut, I’m craaaaazyy,”

Rally happened to turn his head. To his side, he could see a hidden path, one not often traveled. The only way he could even tell it was there was from how the grass dipped down slightly. On a whim, he turned and followed the hint of a trail. Overhead there were two fallen trees that, from Rally’s perspective, looked like a massive gate.

“Gate one. Gate two,” Rally pointed at each one, as if chanting a spell. The path led to more rows of rails, walking straight down the middle of one Rally reached an anomaly. Stark white bones were laid out cleanly on a small concrete platform without a hint of age or connective tissue. The ribs were neat in their cage and longer limb bones splayed out. Rally couldn’t recognize the animal. The skull had been smashed open.

It was off-putting, but normal enough, just the remains of some carcass dragged there by some animal. Yet, the ground began to shake. There was no rattling of wheels, there was no deafening horn audible from ten miles away, there were no blinding lights, there was no thousand-ton metal monster barreling towards him, gnashing maw all consuming. Rally’s feet were as stuck to the ground as those tokens he put down were to the rails. The ground still shook.

The story ended at the parts Rally left out. How he tore out of the trees and back to the rail yard. How the man who was not his brother held onto his shaking shoulders until they didn’t shake anymore. How he might’ve cried, but only a little.

“Huh? That’s it? There wasn’t even a ghost,”

“Dunno, sure sounded like something was going on, but I don’t get it, not really,”

“I told you, you don’t have to understand, you just gotta know how get back,”