Jack Bunker leaned his head back against the padded headrest of the swaying Amtrak train as it chugged its way higher through the countryside of the majestic Rocky Mountains.

He kept his eyes turned to the right and focused on the colorful tapestry rolling past the passenger window, knowing all the while that a pair of piercing blue eyes was locked onto his face by the fidgeting young boy sitting across from him.

The stare-down began an hour ago, when an attractive soccer mom and her redheaded son decided to share the adjoining seat in the sightseeing car.

Bunker didn’t blame the kid. Curiosity was part of a young person’s nature, especially when confronted with a tall stranger wearing playing-card-sized bandages across both sides of his neck.

Fortunately, Bunker’s long-sleeve t-shirt covered up his chest, back, and arms, keeping his self-indulgent political statements hidden from the rest of the planet.

If Bunker had to guess, he’d estimate the inquisitive boy was around ten years old. The freckles across his cheeks and nose may have been thin, but his weight was a tad thick.

“Excuse me, Mister. What does that mean?” the kid asked, pointing at the three tattooed letters on Bunker’s knuckles. “What’s B-T-F?”

The kid’s mother—a pretty, voluptuous blonde woman in her late 20s—didn’t interject or stop the intrusion, so Bunker decided to answer the lad.

“It means Born To Fight. Something my dad used to say to me when I was about your age.”

“Did it hurt when your dad put those letters on your hand?”

“No, son. I had those letters tattooed on when I joined the Marines. I did it to honor my father’s memory after he passed away.”

“I think I want some letters, too,” the boy said, swinging his eyes up to his mother, who was seated next to him.

She didn’t answer her son, seemingly more interested in the iPad sitting on her lap. Ever since she’d sat down, her cell phone never seemed to stop chiming from yet another text message. Working her technology was keeping her too busy to notice his obvious cover-up with the bandages, or her son’s questions.

Yet, she wasn’t the only one who was distracted. Most of the other rail riders had their eyes focused on the countryside streaming past the windows at a steep incline, or had their heads buried in their portable tech, too.

Bunker wondered what the rest of the passengers would think if they knew who they were traveling with. It had been two months of off-the-radar wandering since he’d left behind his past and went in search of a new life. So far, he hadn’t found what he was looking for, but at least his jet-black hair had made a full comeback, resuming its sweeping fullness.

He’d almost forgotten what it was like to have something to comb after running bald for what seemed like forever. He planned to keep it simple by slicking it straight back, at least for now.

Next up, he needed to find a new, stress-free life that would match his simple hairstyle. He wasn’t sure where he was going when he’d got on this train, but he figured he’d know it once he arrived.

When you start a fresh journey into the unknown, it helps to allow random luck to select your path. If not, then you run the risk of letting old habits and burnt-in thought patterns influence the decision-making process. When that happens, it increases the chances of falling right back into the same swirl of discontent from which you are trying to escape.

At least, that’s what he hoped for himself by letting fate guide him to this place and time. His decision to find a new life started with an off-the-books name change and the selling of his most prized asset for cash, clothes, and a few supplies, most of which were stuffed into an army surplus duffel bag stowed in the overhead bin. He’d gone minimalist by shedding most of what made him, him. At least the old him. Hopefully, this reboot would change everything.

He had been walking the back roads mostly, though he’d caught a few rides from generous strangers who’d stopped to see if he needed any help. He didn’t have his thumb out hitchhiking, nor was he asking for help. They just stopped on their own to make sure he was okay, and that surprised him. And gave him hope for the cesspool known as society.

Two months of mostly anonymous travels had taught him a few things already. One of which was that when you immerse yourself in the reality of rural, off-the-radar living, you can actually feel the difference in the atmosphere around you. Not just with the crystal clean air entering your lungs, but in the way the air cradles your soul, allowing you to absorb a more casual, free lifestyle through the pores in your skin.

“Excuse me, sir,” the slender yet curvy woman with the plunging neckline said, finally speaking up after leaning forward and touching his forearm from across the gap between the seats. He kept his eyes in check, even though her abundance of cleavage was screaming at him to look down.

“Yes,” he said, giving her a thin smile and a quick nod. He didn’t want to have a conversation with anyone at the moment, but if he was going to become a new and improved version of himself, then it was time to engage the rest of civilization. Like any normal person would.

“Do you happen to know when we’re supposed to pull into the Denver station?” she asked.

“I’m guessing about two hours, give or take. Gonna take a while to climb some of these hills. They’re pretty steep. You can really hear the engine chugging now.

“Two hours? I don’t think my bladder is going to hold out that long.”

He wondered why she didn’t know the schedule already. Unless she relocated from another seat on the train, he assumed she’d just gotten on the train at the previous stop. Maybe she was in a hurry when she purchased the ticket and didn’t have a chance to memorize the stops. “You do realize there’s a head at the rear of the car, right? No reason to hold it.”

“Yeah, I know. But have you seen it? It’s a unisex bathroom and it’s disgusting. No offense, but you men can’t seem to ever hit what you aim at. Especially my ex-husband. He was the worst. I swear he did it on purpose, just to push my buttons.”

Bunker nodded. She was right. Most of the men on the planet were pigs, and on so many levels. The least of which was spraying the seat when taking a leak.

If she only knew the kind of men Bunker used to run with, then she’d truly understand what constituted an asshole and a disgusting bathroom. The shitter at his last job was biblical. Talk about ripe.

When a series of memory flashes from his past decided to dance front and center in his mind, he couldn’t help but offer up a smirk.

The woman’s eyes lit up with energy after she leaned her head back. “Just once, I’d like to walk into a shared bathroom and not have to bring a stack of wipes and can of Lysol with me. I mean seriously, is that too much to ask?”

He wanted to verbally agree with her, but before he could think of something clever to say, the overhead lights in the car blinked out and the train began to slow. The only light in the train car was the sunlight beaming in through the windows

“That’s weird,” she said, flashing a look of confusion. The woman fiddled with the iPad screen, then checked her cell phone. “How could both of them be dead?”

“Mine too, Mommy,” the boy added, holding up his videogame unit in front of her eyes.

When the kid turned it around, Jack realized it wasn’t a game after all. It was an educational system with a blank screen in the center and a series of raised, multiple choice buttons across the bottom. The stamped metal nameplate at the top said Frankie’s Science Lab.

Bunker turned his eyes from the kid’s device and ran a quick visual survey of the passengers with electronics in his vicinity. Each of them looked to be either confused or concerned.

He heard a smattering of “what the hell?”, “stupid battery”, and “this cell phone never works right” comments, plus a few other, more colorful phrases that the young boy across from him should not have heard.

The locomotive continued to slow until it came to a complete stop, thanks to the steep incline and the pull of gravity.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” a portly man with a bad comb-over job said from Bunker’s left, throwing up his hands in disgust. His wrinkled pinstripe suit and loose-fitting tie screamed businessman heading home to Denver. “My wife is going to be pissed. She hates it when I make her wait at the terminal.”

“I wonder if they stopped for something on the tracks, sis,” an elderly woman said. She was sitting with a woman who looked like her twin. Both of them were in their 80s and sporting scarves, sweaters, saggy skin, and liver-spotted cheeks.

The woman’s sister spun her head and said, “I don’t think so, Dolores. Why would the power be out?”

“Don’t you remember, Dottie? That’s what happened last year on our Alaskan cruise when the engines quit.”

“Yes, I remember. Their generators went down when the engine stopped.”

Bunker stood up in a flash and stepped into the center aisle. Something was nagging at him to head to the engine room and see what was happening.

“Where are you going?” the blonde woman asked, still seated.

He wasn’t sure why she was asking since it wasn’t any of her business, but he decided not to be rude. “I gotta go check on something.”

“Can I go with him, Mommy?”

“No, Jeffrey. Little boys don’t go off with men they don’t know. Remember what I told you about stranger danger?”

“Yeah, but I wanna go see, Mom.”

“No honey, it’s best if you stay here with me. Where it’s safe.”

“Geez, ever since you kicked Dad out, I never get to do anything fun.”

Bunker was about to turn for the exit, but something caught his eye outside. High in the sky and banking left was a commercial airliner. He could see the entire spread of its mighty wingspan, soaring like a metal eagle in search of prey.

It was moving slower than expected and dropping in altitude. The turn looked to be controlled, but the speed of its descent was much too fast. The hairs on the back of his neck started to tingle. Something was wrong. He could feel it.

He checked, but didn’t see any sign of smoke trailing behind it. Nor was there any indication of a mid-air collision in the sky around it.

While the stark white plane continued its steep turn, he ran a quick trajectory check of its course. A second later he realized it was headed straight for them, on an apparent intercept vector with the train.

“Get down!” he shouted to the passengers in the car. “Get down, now!”

Heads turned and a few people flinched, but nobody took his advice.

Bunker pointed out the window. “There’s a plane headed right for us!”

The blonde and the friendly boy he was sitting with whipped their heads around and looked out the window. The woman screamed but never took her eyes from airplane headed right for them.

Bunker grabbed her with one hand and the kid with the other, pulling them both to the deck. He covered their bodies and then looked around at the other passengers.

Many of them were now on the floor as well, covering their heads with their hands. A few were still in their seats, their minds unable to reconcile what their eyes were reporting. Some passengers were screaming hysterically, while others looked frozen in time and unable to move.

He waited for the roar of the jetliner’s engines to reach his ears, but it never came. Instead, a massive explosion rang out as the floor beneath them began to shake violently. It felt like an earthquake and the ground tremors were intensifying.

The thunderous sound of twisting metal dwarfed the passengers’ cries and screams, leading him to believe a massive fireball was headed their way next. Soon they’d all be sprayed with jet fuel, burning alive in a metal coffin built for fifty.

When the windows shattered, he sucked in a breath and held it, figuring he’d just taken his last breath.