Jenkins had always said that baloney wasn’t a good foundation for a railway system. The sausages couldn’t stand up to the pressure of the tracks, it didn’t burn hot enough to be good fuel, and obviously they couldn’t serve that kind of thing to the passengers. Vince ignored him, and signed the deal anyway, confirming the transfer of five hundred tons of baloney into the Jiang-Costa Rail Company’s storehouses, and the transfer of five million dollars out of their coffers.
When the ungodly monstrosity known as JCR 53, quickly dubbed “The Meat Train,” was put on the tracks, Jenkins still maintained that this was a terrible idea. Passengers lined up on the platform as usual, checking watches, balancing screaming babies and dragging around luggage. The Chicago to New York train was late, as each of the watch-checkers noted with judgement. They turned as one to check the station clock, winding their watches in unison. The clock confirmed their suspicions of tardiness.
The finely tuned ears of the baby-balancers, conditioned to note even the beginnings of a scream or tummy rumble from a mile away, heard a sound from around the bend. Something was moving down the tracks, but it did not seem to make the familiar sound of metal on metal that a train would normally produce as it braked before a station. It was a similarly familiar sound, though not one that they had ever expected to hear here. It was the sound of meat grilling.
When it came around the corner, most of the passengers did not see it immediately. Conditioned train riders, they faced directly towards the tracks as they waited for the train to pull up in front of them. The children had yet to adopt this tradition, so they were the first to witness it, though what exactly they witnessed was a bit difficult for them to understand. A tube of baloney, severed into connected parts like a chain of sausages, was mounted on a set of hardened sausage skin wheels. To the sides of the wheels, flaps of meat had been lowered against the wheels and the tracks as brakes. The sound of the flaps grilling from the friction grew louder as the Meat Train approached, as did the smell. At the front of the train, steam puffed from the top of the sausage engine. The first car appeared to be half gone, the upper half of the sausage simply missing. This open view revealed the inside to be mostly hollow, a thick wall of meat surrounding an open interior. Clambering around on top of the car, a group of workers dug into the remaining meat with shovels, scooping it up and carrying it into the engine car in chunks.
The train pulled up to the platform with a long, drawn-out squelch. The sizzling of the brake pads maintained a steady timbre as ropes of intestine pulled them upwards and off the wheels. The meaty car doors opened. Vince stepped out of the engine car, holding a bullhorn to his mouth. He was a small wiry man with short thick black hair sticking straight up. A limp mustache was plastered across his upper lip and his eyes shone brightly in a mildly unsettling manner. He wore a three-piece suit with long coattails.
“Greetings, passengers!” Vince’s voice reverberated down the platform. The passengers in question paid him no mind, transfixed by the food fiend before them.
“Please refrain from sitting in the forward car, as it is currently being harvested for fuel,” Vince continued. “Those of you going to Indianapolis, if you could sit in the second car so that we can begin burning it once you get off that would be wonderful. Those of you going to Columbus, third car, Pittsburgh, fourth. You can figure it out.”
The passengers didn’t move.
“Let’s move people, come on, we’ve got a schedule to keep.”
The gawking passengers were shoved out of the way by the luggage-draggers, eager to acquire spacious seats for their precious belongings. The others followed soon after, logic and gag reflex overcome by the commuter instinct to get on first.
As the passengers boarded, Jenkins leaned out of the engine car, sweat soaking through the bandana he had tied around his face. Jenkins was a tall heavyset man. He wore a brown cap over his curly black hair. A pair of work pants held up with suspenders and an oil-stained white shirt with the sleeves rolled up almost to the shoulders completed his outfit. His eyebrows were a bit high, giving him a constant look of worry or surprise.
“Vnse, ve bn lking at duh ful lies—” Jenkins mumbled.
“Jenkins,” Vince said, “I told you, I can’t hear anything you say through that thing. Get over it and take it off already."
Jenkins groaned and pulled down the bandana. He gagged as the smell of the train hit his nostrils again.
“Vince, I’ve been looking at the fuel supplies,” he said. “If my math is right, we’re going to run out of train before we hit Philly, much less New York.”
Vince raised an eyebrow. “That’s not what you said this morning.”
“I know what I said this morning, but while I may be a ferroequinologist, I am by no means a carnologist. I didn’t expect the meat to burn well, but the efficiency is below my lowest estimates.”
“Can we sell the meat we’ve already burned along the way for extra funds?”
Jenkins shook his head. “It’s burnt to a crisp by the time we’ve used it. You asked me to design an engine, not an oven. What would you use the money for anyway?”
“To buy more meat,” Vince said.
“I don’t think that more meat is the solution to our problem. Besides, we wouldn’t even be able to get our hands on it. Meat and supplies are hard to find this far west. I still don’t even know how you managed to get this much meat in the first place, much less why you’re wasting it on something like this.”
Vince looked off towards the horizon. “Jenkins, I have a dream.”
Jenkins ducked back into the engine cab.
“My dream may seem odd to some,” Vince continued, paying no mind to his lack of audience. “But if I wish to cross this country in a large baloney-based horror, a horrible melding of flesh and machine based on an ill-advised purchase I may or may not have made while I was drunk, is that not the most perfect example of the American dream?”
“Hey meathead,” Jenkins called from the engine car. “Get in here, the engine’s heating up and we need to get moving.”
Vince entered the car and the train began moving once again, pulling out from the station as it truly began its journey.