I get the door open, snatch my backpack, and stumble into the train’s corridor, but he’s right there, attached like a shadow. I slash at him with the knife again, but he dodges it and grabs me from behind, circling an arm around my neck while his other hand, the one with the broken trigger finger, takes hold of my right wrist. He twists my hand so that the knife is pointing at my chest, and he begins the slow work of bringing the blade closer and closer. I resist him the whole way, but with his arm still tight around my neck, my oxygen is dwindling.
The train rattles and screeches around a curve. Outside, I see lights from a few houses blur past. We’re picking up speed again as we head out onto what I presume is a straightaway.
The knife is just a few centimeters from my chest now. My oxygen is gone, and so is my strength. With everything I have left, I fire my left elbow back into his side where his kidney is and bring the heel of my boot onto his toes. He flinches, and for just a quarter of a second, releases the pressure on my hand and neck long enough for me to break free. I pivot around and slam the sole of my boot into his stomach. The air rushes from his lungs as his body closes up around itself.
I dash along the train’s corridor toward the front of the car and pull desperately on the lever of the door, but it’s stuck or I’m too panicked to figure out how to open it. I glance behind me and see my friend moving toward me. He’s retrieved the pistol and is aiming it at me in his outstretched left hand.
“Drop the knife,” he says.
I look down at the useless knife in my hand, and hear Yael’s words from my training: run from the knife, rush toward a gun.
On the wall next to me is a metal hatch with EMERGENCY BRAKE written on it in Czech, German, and English. I open the hatch, grip the red handle, and pull as hard as I can.
The power and speed of it shocks me. The air is filled with a terrible squeal of steel biting into steel as the wheels lock up on the tracks, and everything seems to bend forward. I’m pressed into the car’s door and see the gunman careening toward me at the same speed the train was going a moment before.
He slams into me with the force of a truck, and my knife plunges deep into his chest. Then the gunman’s body slips to the floor, his last emotion, utter surprise, painted on his face. Through the windows in the doorway between cars, I see a pair of what I assume are Czech border cops rushing toward me.
I close the slippery folding blade, slide it into my pocket, and pull the train doors open. The cool air of the Czech night hits my face and invites me into the darkness.
It’s a good meter or so to the ground, and my feet land hard in the brush. Then I’m half running, half tumbling down a hill, toward the town below me. I crash over a rotting log, and find myself on my back, facing the train. A cop stands silhouetted in the doorway, the beam from his flashlight bouncing around the weedy hillside. Then he jumps down to the ground, braces his flashlight over a drawn gun, and sweeps back and forth through the brush. I hold my breath and stay perfectly still as the beam passes just in front of me. Suddenly the light clicks off and the cop climbs back inside. Why aren’t they coming after me? Not their jurisdiction? Waiting for backup? Afraid of the dark? I have no idea, but I’ll take any opportunity I can find because it sure as hell won’t be long before the entire police force comes rushing in like floodwaters.
*
I crouch beside a garage, certain someone will hear me panting. My hands, my arms, my whole body is shaking violently, convulsing, struck by a seizure made up of at least two species of fear: fear of the cops, and fear that the murder I’ve just committed will never stop replaying itself in my mind. The blood covering my hands and clothes appears black like the ink from Hamid’s chest. When I try to wipe it off, it just spreads around like grease. How easy it had been, how casually I had reached out and pulled the emergency brake. Newton’s first law of motion had done the rest: an object in motion tends to stay in motion. My physics lesson for the day.
Then the convulsing of my limbs stops, and the steam that clouds my mind clears as cold rationality steps in once more. Evaluate the situation, form a plan, take action.
I walk as quietly as I can along the edge of a hillside where it butts up against a row of small garages and yards. I can smell a river not too far away, the polite stink of fish and rotting plant life. From here it looks like a small, drama-free town, and I can see through the back windows of tidy houses where tidy families are already in for the evening. A mother, a father, and a daughter of maybe six eat dinner at a table. A woman watches TV on a couch while the man next to her reads a book through glasses perched on the end of his nose. A trio of teenagers plays video games while the mother of one of them fusses through a stack of bills in the next room. What would they think, these tidy families, knowing a murderer still covered in her victim’s blood was passing by, watching them through their windows?
The curve of the hillside moves farther from the train tracks, and I follow it, keeping out of the street and to the little dirt alleyway behind the garages. This would be the route taken by teenagers and secret lovers, and it is thankfully dark and mostly invisible.
It doesn’t take me long to find what I’m looking for: a string of four dark houses in a row at the end of a block, the occupants either not yet home for the night or out of town. I pick the third one in the row and peer through a rear window, scanning it for signs of life. A black cat lounging on a couch, aristocratic as a queen, stares back at me with bored eyes. She yawns, rises, and walks gracefully to a row of four bowls of food set out for her on the floor.
Four bowls. It might mean her owners are away. I knock gently on the back door just in case, watching through the window to see if anyone stirs, but all remains motionless except the cat.
The blade of my knife slots into the little gap between the door and the jamb right where the lock is. I tug back on the knife’s handle and hear the wood groan. On the third pull the doorframe gives with a muffled crack.
I push the door shut behind me, and the cat, curious now, approaches and does a figure eight between my ankles. I scratch her head and have a look around. In addition to the four bowls of food, I find a pie tin of water and a pile of mail beneath the slot in the front door.
It appears two teenage boys share a room on the second floor and sleep in bunk beds. There are magazine pictures of cars and girls in bikinis and a poster of Jay Z tacked to the walls. Their closet is fruitful hunting ground. I grab a T-shirt and jeans from the younger one’s stuff and a green coat that looks like my mom’s army jacket that I left in Paris as I made my hasty escape.