It was when pulling into tiny Nipton that it happened, an unlikely place to end it all but that's just how it is.  There's no magic or mystery on when or why it all ends suddenly, as it did years ago for a runner on Minto Island one morning when her lights went out for good when a cottonwood branch dropped from the trees above and thumped her a good one.  Or for the unfortunate campers on the Guadalupe recently when the water level rose 29 feet in one hour and disappeared them down the river in an instant.  Or the residents of New Orleans when the levy broke through.  Or like the dinosaurs when the asteroid hit.  Or like many of us closer to home will be when the Cascadia fault finally slips and strips off most of the northwest Oregon coastline, residents be damned.  When it's time to leave the stage, it's time; and you can only hope you're making a peaceful and relatively painless end to it, and on good terms with those close to you.

For the passengers on Cortisone Dreams, time was called when they were approaching Nipton, a tiny depot town in the middle of the Mojave Desert.  One minute they're blissfully racing ahead, enjoying their books or sudoku puzzles or some film streamed in on the screen in front of them, occasionally looking out the window to wave at their friends racing along right beside them: a different but just as happy crowd, many of them wearing bike jerseys  and excited about an upcoming stop where they'll hop off and give their wheels a spin.  And ahead of them are those two parallel tracks running across the Mojave Desert, finally converging at the vanishing point somewhere near the mountains ahead.

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Such an unlikely spot, but of course it always is.  One second it's laminar flow, the next it's utter chaos.  As bizarre as it is to envision now, there's a bitter standoff ahead between the forces of lightness and dark, one side wanting to round up the workers in the local diner and toss them into a new ICE box they're building out here in the middle of the desert, and the other side hurling curses and bricks at these masked, soulless, nameless fiends and insisting it's not going to be that way.

A crude barricade of railroad ties has been thrown across the easternmost of the two rails, and they've been soaked in kerosene and set ablaze and the sky ahead is filled with smoke and flames and what must certainly be a pungent, bitter odor for those with a sense of smell that can detect it or with the eyes to see it.

Suddenly there's the loud, piercing squeal of brakes being applied in a panic, but it's too late.  An instant later heads start getting bashed against the screens in front of them, there's the sound of screaming and wailing, there's the crunching of metal on metal, and then cars start getting flipped sideways and off the rails and others jackknife up into the air.  

And just like that, Cortisone Dreams' dream of riding this long rail next to his partner comes to a sudden, violent, permanent end.  In the distance, beyond the smoke and chaos, his partner on line A races on, saved from the same fate only by blind luck and soon disappears at the vanishing point, riding a monorail now.

The lucky ones walk or stagger or crawl away from it, looking desperately first for their loved ones but then doing what they can for the less fortunate ones whose stories end here.  End of the line, folks.  So it goes.