Episode 16: The Train

We figured it out from within the confines of our cells like this:

In another life, we had been people who did less than savory things without breaking any of the ten commandments. I had been into drugs and other such substances, and my life had sort of fallen on the wayside. Sarah had been with more guys than she could count, even after her memory came back to her, and John had been... well, as he put it, "a giant asshole."

Our redeeming factors, though, what launched us into the limbo of the train and not some mild level of hell, were the ways in which we died. We realized that that was what we all had in common; we had all died selflessly and without hesitation for someone else.

My case was the subway car. Even with my limited thought process and memory, I still could not understand what had driven me to do it, especially given the person I had been. Sarah had tried to talk herself out of a hostage situation at a bank, and had ultimately given police enough time to get to the scene to deal with the issue themselves. The process had cost her her life. John had been stabbed on his way home from the department store with his son. A homeless man who was deranged on something I had probably tried more than once tried to take the boy's hot dog, and then tried to walk away with him. When John stopped him, he got a bellyful of metal.

We all had a story, and we had all landed ourselves here. And here, I pointed out to Sarah, was a hell of a lot better than burning alive for eternity.

We somehow managed to laugh at that for awhile, until there was a slam of a door at the end of the hall. Our conversation, our laughter cut off as if by a knife, and our heartbeats quickened as the pace of the boots did. The bulb seemed to shake as the steps echoed closer and closer. I don't know if it really did.