June 6, 2008

We had a long old night of it last night, my friend and I. But on reflection that's not surprising.

"I'm a chef, Juz," she said. "I just don't go to a place of work where people end up dead."

Except that, on Tuesday, she did.

*

They felt the bump, first.

Collision.

Then a searing, whining, wrenching shatter of debris; a shudder of drenching matter; a sudden rush of unexpected wind; the surprise of broken, solid glass; then the thunder of brakes screaming against progression.

They are so fast, and so heavy, it takes a mile and a half to stop.

*

He smiled, apparently.

He smiled as he walked down from the grassy embankment, lay down on the railway tracks, and managed, in that brief moment, to catch the eye of the man in the driving seat.

He smiled as the 127mph hurricane of steel flew furiously over his body, instantly splintering his huge torso into pieces, splattering his life and his self as far and as wide as perhaps he'd never been before.

*

Passengers, expecting to reach Milton Keynes on Tuesday, were understandably furious.

And they couldn't understand, when three windows in one carriage and another further back had been blown out, why there was no explanation.

Nor could the passengers at Milton Keynes understand why, when the Virgin train did arrive, and arrive hours late, it was on the opposite platform, and had arrived at the exact same time as another, unmarked train, arrived at their platform, yet both travelling in the same direction.

But it was because the latter was a "masking" train.

And it's there for one reason:

To shield the untrained eye from a quarter-mile spray of blackened blood, clinging brain matter and streaking globs of off-white human fat that are still clinging to the side of an almost unstoppable metal beast that takes hundreds of passengers, yes, but not a single prisoner.

*

It was the driver's second in a month.

His sixteenth in a career.

It doesn't, said my friend, get any better, no matter how many of them you kill.

"He doesn't get used to it?"

She looked at me, horrified.

"No," she said. "No he fucking doesn't."

*

The Smiling Man was a large man, and when he lay down on the West Coast line, with that smile upon his face, his eyes fixed upon the man at the controls of the unstoppable force, he knew he was going to die.

But what he didn't know - what he won't ever know - is what happened next.

*

"It was like paint-balling, horror movie-style," she said.

His head and chest had exploded on impact, neatly spreading a cloaking patina of thick red blood right across the front of the train, interspersed with small slivers of skull and stubborn, clinging pieces of brain matter.

The rest of his chest, and indeed half of his pelvis, had with terrific speed and enormous noise, ground itself through the ferocious iron wheels and the resulting mulch was then thrown up with such unforgiving velocity that it shattered three panes of reinforced glass, behind which people sat sipping coffee, about which they felt they had paid too much.

The rest of his pelvis, and his legs, were yanked up into the blooded slipstream and thrown sidewards - into the path of the opposing To-London express, shattering more windows, splintering more bone, smearing yet more sullen ounces of dull maroon blood across windows that moments before showed empty fields and nondescript towns.

*

"He was smiling," she said, again. "Smiling at the driver."

*

She won't work on trains anymore.