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present, and he was doing a stoic job of ignoring them.
    “I know where my place is and when its time to find a new place,” he explained sad and clear.
    “You watch yourself man,” I sighed, conceding the issue. All the while aware of Blake’s growing insecurity with the situation.
    “I need to be where I belong, with my family and my own people,” he said, showing me just how much he was hurt to be leaving.
    “Hey man, you are a bigger and better part of this town than any white jerk off around here,” Blake added.
    Jack only shook his head and picked up his own suitcase, “I wish that were true.”
    “Take care Jacinto,” I shook his hand one last time. He paused at the name, smirked, and shook his head again from side to side, then got on the train to take him away.
    “We should probably be going too,” Blake informed me, scanning the uneasy crowd again.
    “Yeah, I gotcha,” I composed myself and met his stride to go join back up with his family.
    “What was that you called him?” Blake asked, breaking the silence that had fallen over us on the walk across the parking lot out to Clint's truck.
    “Jacinto,” I answered.
    “Oh, nice,” Clint said sarcastically from the driver's side of the truck and pulled himself up and in, then started the engine.
    “Why do you call him Jacinto?” Danielle asked me.
    “Jacinto was an old Vietnamese Catholic martyr. We first met Jack through the church and heard the story one time, so the nickname stuck for a while. I haven’t called him that for years, but it seemed appropriate,” I explained to her.
    “A martyr?” she questioned.
    “I hope not,” I replied, then fell silent again, choosing to stare out the passenger window of the truck as we pulled out of the parking lot.
    The train station was on the edge of town and as it turned out, the particular train Jack was boarding was one of the last ones to be running in the state. And this was the last time it or any other would end up coming through here for a very long time to come.
    Even not knowing that fact at the time, the passengers had all seemed nervous to the point of being frantic in order to get on and secure their destination. With so much uncertainty in the air, people were clinging to the littlest slivers of anything solid with all fours.
    They must have thought that things would be different and better wherever it was that they were going. Salvation was only a train ride away to the warmer climate, or back to mom and dad’s house, or anywhere that wasn’t wherever they currently were. If there had been as many people arriving as there were departing, I would have laughed. Instead, it was an exodus. The buses would soon follow, and then there would just be those of us who were left behind to fend for ourselves; the old timers and the long timers. It would be us and the people with nowhere else to go. I knew they would be the ones that could get dangerous.
    The scene outside the train station was not all that different than inside, maybe more alarming though. Day and night in any given area in town, there seemed to be a smattering of people visible on the streets and sidewalks. I guess it goes hand in hand with rampant unemployment; people just had nothing better to do, so they stood around waiting for something.
    The ones who were bad off had their cardboard signs out, claiming hunger and needing help.  Those were the ones that were still clinging to the thought that there were other people out there that still had something extra to give. Other more realistic people were the ones that we could see scrounging through the trash piles alongside the stray and probably disease-ridden cats, looking for scraps to eat, or something to trade with for food. Recently I had started to notice a third group emerging; the zombies. These were the ones that really caught my attention because even when most people were sitting around waiting, they still seemed to have something left. The zombies had nothing