Free Apocalypse Weird: Genesis (The White Dragon Book 1) by Stefan Bolz Page A

railroad. She had grown up with the sound of the train, had always heard it from a distance as it slowly approached and passed through the neighborhoods. She and her friends would wave and watch for anyone to wave back.
    This one was too fast, its approach too quick. The trains slowed down significantly when going through densely populated areas. This one hadn’t. Kasey stopped the car. Even though she was about twenty feet away from the tracks, it felt much too close for comfort. The sound of the approaching train was suddenly more terrifying than anything she’d experienced today.
    It came toward her like a wave, an unearthly sound quadrupling in volume each second it approached. “Oh God,” she whispered when she remembered the switch point a quarter mile down the road. Very soon after the Little East Neck overpass, the rail split. One went straight. The other curved to the right and toward Farmingdale.
    The train passed her. This wasn’t a commercial train. The typical dud-dud, dud-dud, as the boxcars passed was missing. This was a passenger train. When the last car flew by, Kasey found herself slowly releasing her breath. The noise faded. The switch point was most likely set to continue straight. She relaxed and started the car.
    The shrieking sound reached her approximately two seconds later. It was the sound of steel grinding on steel, as the wheels of the train cars couldn’t counteract the centrifugal force of the curve and the train began to derail.
    There were eerie screams buried in the massive echoing crashing sounds. Their distance didn’t lessen their impact on Kasey. She sat there in utter shock, trying to stop her hands from shaking. She screamed, mostly to drown out the chaos. But Kasey couldn’t stop the low vibration in her diaphragm that accompanied the cars crashing into each other and into the warehouses past the tracks.
    “Drive,” she said to herself. “Drive!”
    She started the car and drove forward. She wanted to push the gas pedal down all the way and escape the sounds and the darkness that was all around her, but she knew she had to drive slowly. She also knew that she had to drive not away from but toward the still-derailing train, at least for a while, until she hit Little East Neck Road.
    In front of her, a green fireball shot up into the sky. A millisecond later, an explosion rattled the car. She heard windows break in the nearby houses and people scream for help in utter panic.
    She thought about stopping the car to see if the people inside needed help. But she didn’t want to leave the Jeep and possibly risk not finding her way back to it. She decided that she needed to try to get to Jack first. So she drove on, fully aware that in doing so, she abandoned people who might be in dire need of help.
    “Drive,” she whispered. “Just drive.”
    She saw the flames ahead as light green tongues against a dark background. It helped her see the shapes in front of her better, like dark shadows of things before the sun. She found Little East Neck Road and turned right, leaving the fire to her left. She passed what she thought was Silver Gym. She recognized it by the row of parked cars.
    Dunkin’ Donuts was next on her right where Farmingdale Road intersected. If she missed that, she would’ve gone too far west and would have to backtrack later on. She drove into the intersection, keeping to the right and steering the Jeep into what she thought was the continuation of the same road she was on. She passed a few streets on the right until she hit Sawyer again — the road her apartment was on.
    “Drive!” she told herself, even though this couldn’t stop the image of her mother from appearing in her mind. For a moment, she thought about going back to the apartment to see if there was anything she could use. She was getting thirsty, and even though she wasn’t hungry at the moment, she hadn’t eaten since last night and low blood sugar always made her nauseated. She decided against it