Incident on a Railcar

The pipe-bomb in the bag the homeless-looking man had left behind in car number three wasn’t particularly large and therefore not particularly noisy. Passengers who initially heard it at first thought it was perhaps a mechanical malfunction – a broken part in the undercarriage or maybe they’d just hit a rock.

The small, cylindrical explosive, however, wasn’t alone in that bag. No, it was surrounded with and accompanied by a certain gelatinous substance - a gooey, gasoline-smelling, sticky substance that instantly was spread around the car’s interior by the tiny pipe bomb…and then instantly burst into flame.

Passengers near the bag found themselves with the hot-burning napalm adhered to random body parts. This lady here had flames sprouting from her neck. That gentleman there - the one with the raincoat - was on fire from the back of his head and his left leg.

Those who were immediately splashed with the sticky flammable were shocked into instant panic from the agony of it. Some screamed and stared helplessly at their body parts as they disintegrated away forever right in front of their eyes. Others ran mindlessly, maddened by pain, taking off up and down the aisle, jumping over chairs, banging into other people, some of whom then became splashed themselves by the napalm, which then, like a rapidly spreading epidemic, enflamed the person newly infected … in a game of unintentional fire death tag.

Those not on fire, mirroring those who were, also responded in one of two ways. Some, terrified into frozen inaction, just sat there, as though they were patiently waiting to be tagged. Others sprang into actions - some of those actions, surprisingly, had a chance to be effective.

This latter group, of activists, ran to the ends of the car and banged their bodies against the door like mating rams. Over and over they crashed themselves desperately into the doors, on each end, but the doors, designed to be locked when moving for safety, would not yield. Others tried to pry open the doors from which they’d entered, but these potential exits, too, refused to release those doomed inside.

A light came on in the driver’s panel – the light no driver ever wants to see – the emergency fire light. Tyrone Jenkins had been driving for the RTS for 15 years. Had served in the Marines for four years before that. He was trained to respond effectively in an emergency. But, right now he was crossing the bridge over the Cuyahoga River 200 feet below. There was nowhere to stop. No place to go. He sped up his train to get to the next station as quickly as he could.

Inside the car, the shock had already worn off enough for those inside to really feel the pain of their bodies burning, and they screamed and writhed in agony. A couple of the business commuting men began to try to smash the glass to escape, banging shoes and laptops and suitcases against the windows that had already endured so many insulting, clouding scratches over the years.

Finally, one of the desperate blows against the glass succeeded, and the window cracked, shattered, and collapsed inward leaving the window space completely naked to the outside. But, a predictable calamity occurred at that point – the now fast-moving car, traveling over the lake, had generated substantial wind resistance and external air pressure.

The window, now exposed to the outside air pressure, acted similarly to how a window on a plane would act if broken at altitude, only in reverse. With a powerful whoosh, a huge gust of air, carrying with it a significant increase in oxygen, burst into the fiery chamber, which reacted as an old car engine would when a four-barrel carburetor kicks in – the flames that had been isolated, when fueled with the additional oxygen, grew explosively into one enormous fireball, blowing out the remaining windows and incinerating everything inside.

By the time Tyrone expertly raced his train to the West Side Market station and slammed the train to an emergency stop, the fire in car number three had already nearly burned itself out.

It would only be a few hours before someone spotted the graffiti painted on the Cleveland Union Terminal Railway Bridge, right below the exact spot where car number three caught fire…

…the graffiti on the bridge at that point said…

…. “The Other is the Other. That is All.”