Time Portals: The Time Train (an excerpt)

Three years ago, when she’d first graduated and landed the job at McKendricks, Alma had found the idea of working in San Francisco terribly exotic. The noise, bustle and colors of the vibrant metropolis was like working in a living art show. The diverse group of people who’d moved from all over the world, just to live in the city by the bay, made every co-worker, restaurant lunch or overheard conversation a virtual trip to another country. And the job itself represented the heart and soul of new methods and ideas that were building the countrys economy back to what it used to be.

But standing on the overpass, looking down on the old train tracks, Alma realized that she wasn’t really interested in business, no matter how vital a force it was in people’s lives. She’d never be able to muster the kind of passion for it that the people around her seemed to have. And she seemed to feel her creative potential drying up, when she thought about the status report she needed to finish tonight for tomorrows meeting. A lifetime, or at least forty or fifty years, of walking home from the same metro station stop every day after a work day spent in the city, stretched before her as unending as the train tracks below the overpass. Well, at least she’d found that great historical e-novel at the library last weekend. That would be something to look forward to after she got the report done.

Alma peered down through the metal screen that protected walkers on the overpass. The same train was there, that always sat on an old spur track. Other trains swooshed past on their way to and from their peninsula destinations, but the old train had, she supposed, been retired from service. And, for some reason, after three years it hadn’t been worth anybody’s while to collect it and send it on to the scrap yard, or wherever old trains went when they were past their prime. She leaned her head against the mesh and shut her eyes. She already felt past her prime, and she hadn’t even reached her thirtieth birthday.

A gust of unexpectedly frigid wind blew suddenly against the back of her bare neck. She straightened up and opened her eyes in surprise. It was only September, and she hadn’t even brought a light fleece jacket to work. Alma tucked her brief case more firmly under her arm, and began to turn away from the wall. It was at that moment, that she saw that something about the old train below had changed.

For one thing, it was moving towards her. For another, it was now brilliantly, and very strangely, colored. A loud whistle, unlike any train whistle Alma had ever heard before, suddenly split the air and as it did so, she felt herself falling through the mesh screen, straight down onto the tracks below.

Was she falling, or was she flying?