The iron ore shifted beneath Sam’s weight as the container swayed with the train’s rhythm. A sudden crunch of boots on gravel shattered the night’s monotony. His fingers instinctively tightened around the frayed strap of the army duffel bag – that faithful companion salvaged from a Carlsbad dumpster, now splitting at the seams like his own worn-out existence.
Moonlight sliced through the container’s opening, illuminating the jacket sleeve hanging by its last thread. The railroad tracks stretched into darkness, twin lines of tarnished silver resembling surgical scars on the landscape. Somewhere beyond the chain-link fence, voices murmured about ‘checking the eastbound containers.’ Sam’s breath stilled. This wasn’t his first midnight evacuation from a moving steel coffin.
He rolled sideways with the practiced silence of stray cats, denim scraping against iron pellets. The duffel bag’s torn lining spilled fragments of his nomadic life: a rusted can opener, a dog-eared postcard from Spokane, the lingering chemical scent of that heroin-for-whiskey trade. His knees protested as he pressed against the container wall, but survival instincts overrode the ache. The footsteps paused. A flashlight beam licked the container’s interior, missing Sam’s hiding spot by inches.
When the search moved onward, Sam didn’t wait for confirmation. He was already moving, the duffel bag slung across his back like a shield. The fence’s razor wire glittered maliciously in the moonlight. Last week’s rain had turned the railroad gravel into treacherous marbles beneath his boots. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote’s howl mimicked the train whistle’s mournful cry – two creatures singing to the same indifferent moon.
His jacket caught first, the fabric surrendering with a tired rip. Then the duffel bag snagged, its military-grade fabric no match for industrial-grade steel. Sam didn’t look back as threads unraveled. He’d learned long ago that attachments – whether fabric or human – were liabilities in this endless game of railroad hopscotch. The stars above blurred as he tumbled onto the other side, tasting copper where he’d bitten his tongue.
Silver City’s skeletal remains loomed ahead, its boarded-up storefronts staring like empty eye sockets. The ‘Coming Soon’ banners for a railroad museum had faded into illegibility, their optimistic promises eaten by the desert wind. Sam spat blood onto the tracks and kept running. The duffel bag flapped like a wounded bird against his spine, its contents growing lighter with every stride. Somewhere behind him, the train continued its journey westward, carrying nothing but ghosts and iron ore to the sea.
The Freight Car Scare
Sam’s fingers dug into the iron ore bed as bootsteps echoed through the rail yard. The Western Union freight car smelled of rust and old tobacco, the same acrid scent that clung to his last shelter in Spokane. Moonlight sliced through the container’s open top, illuminating the split seam of his army duffel – that faithful dumpster find from Carlsbad now fraying like his chances.
A Truchon engine coughed nearby. Voices carried over the midnight hum of dormant trains. Sam rolled silently toward the container’s edge, his denim jacket snagging on ore fragments. The last intact stitch above his left elbow gave way with a whisper. He remembered Spokane’s railyard cops tearing that same sleeve during the meth bust he’d narrowly escaped. The memory hit like a phantom punch to the ribs.
Crunch. Gravel shifted twenty yards east. Sam became still as the iron beneath him. His duffel bag pressed against his chest held three precious things: the remaining heroin, a water-stained photo of Silver City’s old station, and the whiskey bottle’s broken cap from last night’s trade. The cap’s sharp edges bit into his palm as he gripped it tighter.
‘Clear this one?’ A flashlight beam licked the container’s interior wall.
Sam’s muscles coiled. The rail cops’ shadows stretched long across the gravel like the prison sentences they’d promised him in Spokane. He counted their footsteps – two pairs, maybe three. The duffel bag’s strap creaked under his grip.
Then: retreating boots. A radio crackle about checking southbound hoppers. Sam waited until the yard lights dimmed before moving. The stars above the open container wheeled like a time-lapse of all the towns he’d fled through.
He hit the ground running, duffel slapping against his hip. The chain-link fence loomed ahead, crowned with razor wire that glittered like a cruel joke. Sam swung the bag over first, the worn fabric catching on barbs. For a suspended moment, he hung between the rail yard and freedom, the duffel’s stitching popping one thread at a time.
Then the fabric tore with a sound like a stifled scream. Sam fell through the gap, landing hard on packed earth. The duffel’s guts spilled – heroin baggie tumbling into weeds, photo fluttering like a shot dove. He grabbed what he could before sprinting toward the skeletal outline of Silver City’s water tower. Behind him, the remains of his last possession flapped on the fence like a surrender flag.
Something warm trickled down his forearm. The razor wire’s kiss. Sam licked the blood away, tasting iron and diesel and the bitter truth: the bag that had carried his life across three states now decorated another fence in another dead-end town. The tracks stretched onward, but the exits kept narrowing.
The Whiskey Trade
The glass bottle felt heavier than its weight in gold. Sam’s fingers traced the peeling label of Silver City Distillery—the same label that once adorned every bar from Reno to Bakersfield. Now the ink bled like the wound on his forearm, the paper brittle as the town’s forgotten promises.
“This’ll make you forget Carlsbad?” The dealer’s voice echoed in his skull, nicotine-stained fingers pushing the heroin across a splintered picnic table. Sam remembered how the setting sun had turned the plastic baggie into a molten amber jewel. “Makes me remember tonight,” he’d replied, pressing the whiskey into the man’s palm with the solemnity of a treaty signing.
Three things never changed in this world: railroad cops would chase you, heroin would numb you, and good whiskey always carried ghosts. The bottle’s embossed logo—a steam locomotive circling a mountain—now served as the tombstone for an industry. Sam’s thumb found the exact spot where the distiller’s signature had faded, just as blood droplets splattered over the same letters in the present. Iron oxide mixed with bourbon residue, creating a rust-colored ink that wrote its own epitaph.
Flashbacks came in staccato bursts between labored breaths:
- The dealer’s mismatched eyes (one blue, one half-brown from a childhood injury)
- The way Western Union containers always smelled of damp wheat
- A newspaper blowing past their transaction, headline screaming about rail mergers
Somewhere beyond Silver City’s corpse, a coyote howled. Sam tightened his grip on the neck of the bottle—now just a broken shard—as the wind carried whispers of better days. The label detached completely, fluttering toward the tracks like a last ticket out. He watched it catch on the same razor wire that had claimed his duffel bag’s remains, the paper tearing along the dotted line where the barcode used to be.
In the margins of society, everything became currency. Today it was heroin for whiskey. Yesterday, his pocket knife for a can of beans. Tomorrow? Maybe the denim jacket would buy him twelve hours in a boxcar before the bulls came. The economy of the damned operated on barter and blood, always paying compound interest on survival.
A warm trickle reached his wrist. The wound had reopened, painting hieroglyphs down his arm that told an old story—one about men who traded pieces of themselves until nothing remained but the trades themselves. Sam pressed the label’s remnant to his skin, creating a temporary bandage that smelled of oak barrels and regret.
The bloodstain spread through the paper fibers, recreating the distillery’s logo in crimson. Somewhere, a train whistle blew. Somewhere that wasn’t here.
Rusted Tracks and Blood Trails
The wind carried the scent of oxidized metal as Sam staggered into what remained of Silver City. His boots kicked up puffs of reddish dust that settled on foreclosure notices still clinging to boarded-up windows. The papers fluttered like dying moths, their edges curled from too many sunrises.
A faded photograph slipped from his torn jacket pocket – the Silver City depot in its glory days, all polished brass and hopeful travelers beneath a clock tower that no longer told time. Now the station stood with its doors yawning open, the ticket counter home only to nesting birds and broken glass. The railroad that birthed this town had long stopped running, leaving behind scars of steel that divided the landscape like unhealed wounds.
Sam pressed a hand to his throbbing arm. The razor wire’s kiss still wept crimson, each drop hitting the dust with the finality of a clock’s tick. He leaned against a lamppost that hadn’t lit in years, its metal base etched with generations of pocketknife initials. The peeling paint of a community bulletin board caught his eye – layers of lost pet notices and church bake sales buried beneath the stark black type of bank repossessions.
As the desert wind changed direction, a corner of the topmost notice lifted. Beneath the Eclipse Bank logo, Sam caught the unmistakable shape of his own face staring back from aged newsprint. The date had faded, but the word “WANTED” remained sharp as the day they’d printed it. He didn’t need to read the charges to remember Carlsbad.
The blood trail continued westward, following the railroad ties that disappeared into the horizon. Somewhere beyond the curve of the earth, a train whistle sounded – whether memory or premonition, Sam couldn’t tell. He touched the remaining strap of his army duffel, the fabric now just another piece of debris in this town that time forgot. Silver City’s empty streets echoed with the ghosts of promises broken, just like the ones he’d made to himself.
In the distance, tumbleweeds performed their endless dance across tracks that led both nowhere and everywhere. Sam’s reflection stared back from a shattered storefront window – a cracked mosaic of a man who’d become as much a relic as the town around him. The blood kept dripping, each drop a period at the end of sentences he’d never finished writing.
The Funeral of the Duffel Bag
The razor wire bit deeper than Sam expected. Not just into the frayed denim of his jacket, but through the thick canvas of the army duffel bag – that faithful companion salvaged from a Carlsbad dumpster three winters ago. For a suspended moment, the bag hung suspended on the jagged metal teeth like a soldier caught in no man’s land, its torn fabric fluttering like the last breath of a dying man.
Then came the sickening rip as gravity won. The bag split diagonally from strap to base, spilling its meager contents onto the railroad gravel below. A rust-stained canteen, two mismatched socks, and the square of cloth with stenciled numbers that once identified some forgotten GI – they tumbled out in slow motion. Sam watched the numbered tag catch an updraft, dancing toward the parallel steel lines that stretched toward the horizon.
“This’ll carry everything you own and then some,” the drifter in Spokane had said when trading the bag for half a bottle of Four Roses. “Hell, might just carry your whole damn life.” The memory arrived unbidden as Sam picked at the remaining shreds of canvas still hooked on the wire. The bag that once held three changes of clothes, a Coleman stove, and his grandfather’s pocket watch now barely retained enough structure to be called a container. Just like Silver City’s abandoned train depot – all skeleton, no soul.
Blood dripped from his forearm onto the railroad ties, each drop absorbed by the sun-baked wood with disturbing immediacy. The duffel’s final act of service became apparent as Sam examined the gash on his arm – the thick canvas had taken the worst of the wire’s fury, sparing his flesh from deeper damage. He pressed the wound against the remains of his jacket sleeve, watching as the wind carried fragments of military-green fabric down the track.
In the distance, a train whistle sounded – not the shrill blast of a approaching locomotive, but the fading echo of something already passing through. The sound mingled with the metallic tang of blood in Sam’s mouth and the alkaline dust coating his throat. He spat onto the gravel, watching the crimson saliva disappear between the stones.
Something about the way those fabric scraps fluttered eastward caught his attention. Not floating aimlessly like the foreclosure notices papering Silver City’s dead storefronts, but moving with purpose toward some destination he couldn’t see. The duffel bag’s remains seemed to be following the iron rails like they knew where they were going, which was more than Sam could say for himself.
He considered gathering the larger fragments – old habits of preservation died hard on the road – but stopped when his fingers brushed the torn edge where the shoulder strap had been. The frayed threads reminded him of hospital sutures he’d picked out too early in some county medical ward. Some things weren’t meant to be repaired.
The whistle sounded again, fainter now. Sam left the last remnants of the bag clinging to the razor wire like some strange battlefield pennant and stepped over the bloodstained gravel toward the tracks. His shadow stretched long before him, its outline blurred where the torn jacket flapped in the desert wind. Ahead, the railroad divided around a rusted switch mechanism – one line polished faintly by occasional use, the other disappearing beneath a carpet of invasive cheatgrass.
For the first time in years, Sam found himself making a choice rather than following the path of least resistance. He bent to pick up the duffel bag’s strap – the only intact piece remaining – and wrapped it twice around his bleeding forearm before knotting it tight. The coarse canvas bit into his skin with familiar discomfort, an old friend’s harsh embrace.
When he stood, the wind changed direction, carrying the scent of creosote and distant rain. Somewhere beyond the curve of the earth, a train was running. Somewhere behind him, a tattered piece of military surplus fluttered on a fence. And for the first time since leaving Carlsbad, Sam walked toward something instead of away.
The wind howled through the barbed wire fence, carrying with it the last remnants of Sam’s past. His denim jacket, now more threads than fabric, fluttered like a tattered flag of surrender against the rusted metal spikes. Each gust seemed to whisper the same question – was this an ending, or just another pause in the endless cycle?
A trail of crimson droplets marked Sam’s path, winding toward the railroad fork like some macabre breadcrumb trail. The blood still seeped from where the razor wire had bitten deep, mixing with the iron-rich dust of Silver City’s abandoned tracks. In the distance, a train whistle sounded – whether real or imagined, even Sam couldn’t tell anymore.
The duffel bag’s remains lay scattered across fifty feet of scrubland, its military-grade fabric no match for industrial fencing. A single strip of canvas still clung to the barbs, the faded service number barely visible: RA1086. The numbers meant nothing now, just like the promises they’d once represented. Somewhere near Tucson, an Army surplus clerk had sworn this bag would last a lifetime. Neither of them had specified whose lifetime.
Sam’s knees hit the gravel where the tracks diverged. To the left, the rails gleamed with recent maintenance. To the right, nature had already begun reclaiming the steel, bindweed strangling the ties. The blood trail didn’t hesitate, following the overgrown path as if drawn by some invisible force.
High above, turkey vultures circled in the thermal currents. Their shadows crisscrossed the foreclosure notices still taped to telephone poles, the bank logos bleached pale by the sun. One flyer tore loose, dancing across the bloodied stones before catching on Sam’s boot. He didn’t need to look – he’d seen enough Eclipse Bank notices to last three lifetimes.
The whistle sounded again, closer now. Sam’s head snapped up, his cracked lips parting. For the first time in years, something besides whiskey stirred in his chest. Maybe it was hope. Maybe just dehydration.
He never heard the approaching footsteps. The last thing Sam saw was his own reflection in a pair of mirrored sunglasses – not railroad security, not even law enforcement. Just another scavenger drawn by the scent of blood and opportunity.
The wind lifted the jacket from the fence as the struggle began, carrying it eastward toward the working tracks. By dawn, it would be twenty miles away, snagged on a passing freight car’s ladder. The blood trail would wash away in the next rain. The duffel fragments would become nesting material for pack rats.
And somewhere down the line, another man would wake in another shipping container, clutching another army surplus bag, listening for the crunch of approaching boots. The tracks stretched on forever in both directions, but the destinations never changed.
Final Image: The camera pulls back from the fork in the tracks, the focus softening until blood and rust and steel blur into a single reddish smear. The whistle becomes indistinguishable from the wind. Fade to black.