The Majestic 311

by Keith C. Blackmore

  “See anything?” Jimmy croaked and coughed water.

  Nathan shook his head.

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  That prompted Jimmy to stand and look around.

  “Hold onto your weasel for a second,” Eli groaned. “Goddammit. We just almost drowned. Give me a second. To get my strength back.”

  Jimmy nodded in weary agreement.

  “The hell was that, anyway?” Eli asked.

  No one answered him.

  “Nate,” Jimmy finally said.

  “Yeah?” Nathan asked dreamily, realizing that he’d gone into a morning daze.

  “The hell is that?”

  33

  Nathan looked and wished he hadn’t.

  The passenger car—the rear half of the passenger car—shimmered like a desert mirage. The fabricated walls faded into the background but were still there, along with the car’s pair of oil lamps. Within the center of that distorted screen of reality, however, slabs of stone materialized like rocks hauled to the surface from the deepest waters. Grainy tones of black and white gave the images a degree of depth, and a flourish of ghost gray misted a huge stone face. Nathan realized then he was looking at a mountain—an enormous wall of weather-clawed rock, wearing trees and greenery like pocket flowers on a wrinkled suit.

  But if you looked past that scene, if you focused on one point, it was enough to see that the passenger car was still back there, behind that fantasy mountain.

  Behind Nathan, the others rose from the watery floor, watching those flowing images as they played out before them.

  “The hell?” Eli Gallant said, eyes narrowed and staring.

  A drenched and equally mesmerized Gilbert stood nearby. He wiped his nose in a soaking coat sleeve and gave a mighty snort. Mackenzie lifted his hands as if completing some feat of sorcery, while Jimmy simply stood and watched, Shorty’s shotgun held by his thigh.

  “What is that?” Nathan asked and expected no answer.

  A multitude of white-tipped rocks gathered at the base of the mountain. It took Nathan a moment to realize he was looking at hats—hats with heads underneath. The hats resembled a mass of tiny, rounded pyramids. No, a mass of tiny cones. The image remained coarse and at times flickered to reveal the berths behind it, reminding the gang members that they were still aboard a train.

  The figures worked a line, and before long, arms gradually came into sight, connected to torsos that bent and straightened. It took Nathan a moment to identify them.

  “Those are…” he started.

  “Chinamen,” Jimmy finished quietly, watching the men labor over something.

  A few seconds later, the black and white masses parted. Two narrow strips of metal were laid over much thicker chunks of wood. A railroad. The beginnings of a railroad.

  “They’re laying rail?” Gilbert asked.

  “Who you think built this damn thing,” Eli Gallant muttered, still soaking wet. “Or at least most of it.”

  The Chinese men bent their backs, setting down railway ties at measured intervals and passing along sledgehammers, pickaxes, and timbers. Hundreds of men worked the railway, bent over under a pale sun—a sun that as coincidence would have it, was right over one of the distant wall lamps. Time sped forward, resulting in the ghostly men working at five times the pace. Forests were magically cleared, and hollows filled, right up to the mountain face. There were others working with the Chinese men as well. Men both black and white, though the black men appeared the worse for wear. They wore cotton shirts and pants of varying shades of gray, often with suspenders that formed an X across their backs. Groups of six or seven workers pulled up whole sections of rail and fitted them to black timbers, one after the other.

  Hundreds worked on the line, but it seemed the Chinamen had amassed closer to the mountain wall. Gray-uniformed official types came into view then, as the scope of the operations panned outward. Where the men worked over the rails, swinging sledgehammers or carrying building materials, that all became the background. In the foreground were faceless figures riding horses and gesticulating with curt chops of their hand. There were others, engineer types, set up on nearby hills, with tables filled with all manner of engineering instruments. One faceless man was bent over a telescope, while another held up a fancy pair of those new binoculars. Two more individuals were bent over their table, pointing at matters while indicating the mountain.

  “They have those binoculars,” Gilbert noticed. “Hear you can see like an eagle with a set of those.”

  “You think one spyglass would be enough,” Eli scoffed. “Only an educated smartass would want to put two of them together like that.”

  “Much better than a single spyglass,” Mackenzie said. “You have two distinct images, which offer—”

  “Look,” Nathan said, quieting the discussion.

  A group of well-dressed dignitaries approached the engineers, interrupting their work. They wore black suits and black hats, their shoulders covered in what might have been white scarves. They stood around the table and seemed to be discussing something of importance. At one point, one of the dignitaries pointed at the mountain wall, and took a decidedly confrontational stance. That seemed to anger the engineers, who placed their hands on their hips and proceeded to give as good as they got.

  All the while, workers cobbled together the railway in the background. Snow eventually fell, whitening the mountain. The snow was shoveled away, the rails cleared, and the work continued. The tracks shone against the frigid landscape, the iron glistening like polished marble.

  The dignitaries were gone, but the engineers remained, fussing over a crate. One of them extracted a pair of sticks from the crate with great care.

  “Dynamite,” Jimmy Norquay whispered for them all.

  The image zoomed to the mountain base, where several two-man teams drilled holes into the ground. The machines they used were hand-operated and crude, resembling smaller versions of southern oil towers, except more complicated-looking. Once finished, the drilling crews retreated, replaced by smaller groups of men who carefully filled the holes with dynamite. Fuses were set.

  A second later, multiple blasts caused the entire picture to tremble, and that world became a dust cloud.

  “Blasting the rock,” Mackenzie explained. “First charges. They’re starting on the tunnel.”

  The workers moved in, consisting of a great number of Chinamen. They loaded rubble onto horse carts and repeated, slowly removing the blasted debris.

  “Goddamn,” Eli muttered. “What a life.”

  “And all for cents,” Jimmy added. “If that. And treated like dirt.”

  “How do you know?”

  Jimmy glanced over his shoulder. “Oh, I know.”

  The images flowed faster in a watery flutter, showing an ant’s nest of activity. Men swarmed over the blast site and with each passing second, a hole formed and deepened in the mountain.

  “Well, well,” Mackenzie whispered. “Look at that.”

  “What?” Nathan asked.

  “That. Right there. Recognize it?”

  Nathan did not.

  “I do,” Jimmy stated flatly.

  “So what is it?” Eli blurted.

  “That’s the tunnel,” Jimmy replied. “From the other side. No mistake.”

  Eli scowled and switched from the Metis man’s profile to that yawning pit of pitch.

  Time continued to rush by in a rapid replay of history. Snow melted, dark greenery blushed—or what Nathan assumed was greenery on the mountain—followed by snow again. The seasons rolled by about five or six times, seemingly in a loop, yet all the while, an army of men worked away in the shadow of the mountain, gradually burrowing into the side of that mighty rock.

  There was an almost tidal quality about the history lesson, as men surged in and out of the tunnel. The blasts continued, several times through the passing seasons. Time after time great billowy gouts of rocks and dust heaved forth from the tunnel mouth. At times,
men raced from the tunnel preceding a blast and immediately rushed inside after the explosion.

  Sometimes, men went in, and they did not come out.

  Usually, those men wore cone hats.

  And on and on it went. Men would go into the tunnel, then leave, and an explosion would follow. At times, men were carried out upon horse carts, escorted by Chinamen. Nathan wasn’t sure of what was going on, but it occurred to him that there were a lot of men dying in the construction of the tunnel. He didn’t know if they were regular folks or not, but judging by the Chinamen hauling carts with their heads lowered, he thought it was a fair assumption it was their fellow countrymen.

  “Lotta them dying,” Gilbert observed, perhaps not having blinked for several seconds.

  “Lotta them,” Mackenzie said solemnly.

  “You think they’d be more careful.”

  “I think they were as careful as they could be,” Jimmy said. “But their employers just didn’t give a shit.”

  “Because they were Chinamen?”

  “Yeah. Because they were Chinamen.”

  That didn’t sit well on Gilbert’s conscience. “I might be a lot of things, and had a lot of things done to me, but none of them involved any Chinamen folk.”

  “Nor me,” Nathan admitted, feeling more than a few embers of anger at how damned… disposable those poor bastards were to the railway people.

  Then, as before, a huge surge of workers marched triple-time into the tunnel, on what seemed to be a summer day. Hundreds of cone-wearing individuals that went inside the tunnel… just before a mighty expulsion of dust was coughed back out. Then the stream of images went into a frenzy.

  Men rushed to the tunnel mouth. Some figures staggered from it. Chinamen helped their companions out, men with broken arms or legs or head wounds that blackened their featureless faces. More activity around the tunnel, and the arrival of a train itself, and several more workers. The train stayed just outside of the tunnel mouth, but the workers all disappeared inside. All the while, the dignitaries and engineers watched on a nearby hill, waving and pointing at each other.

  “The hell was all that about?” Eli wanted to know.

  “Cave-in,” Mackenzie said. “Or something of the like. Maybe some unstable dynamite going off.”

  “Killed all them poor bastards?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  Eli didn’t say a word after that. As hard a case he was, he clearly didn’t like what he just saw. None of them did.

  “Sent them to their deaths,” Jimmy said. “Those sonsabitches.”

  “I’ve heard stories,” Nathan said. “Of cruel things. Being done along the line.”

  “You just saw one of the cruelest,” Mackenzie said. “Sending workers into an unstable cave. Like Jimmy said, they were sent to their deaths. Most all Chinamen.”

  “Good chance it was all Chinamen,” Jimmy said.

  “Why?” Gilbert asked.

  “Because there were plenty of them, I figure. And the suits just didn’t give a shit.”

  That stark assessment stunned the others.

  “Sonsabitches,” Gilbert finally whispered with heat. “And they call us criminals.”

  “All right,” Eli said. “So what does any of that—”

  The seasons blurred ahead again, where the previous mess of the cave-in (or whatever mishap had killed so many hard-working people) and a small stage decorated with ribbons was being constructed a ways back from a cleaned-up tunnel mouth. Workers wearing suspenders and overalls hammered away at the stage, while others buzzed nearby. Chairs were set up facing the tracks.

  Then it was night.

  A clear night, with a full moon in all its glory. A solitary figure, wearing heavy robes and with his hair tied back in a long ponytail, walked up to the tunnel mouth. Words were spoken, harsh words, filled with emotion. Filled with vengeance. Nathan didn’t understand the language, but he understood fury, and the individual facing the tunnel was practically bursting with it.

  “The hell’s he doing?” Eli asked in a dead tone.

  Nathan traded looks with Mackenzie and Jimmy Norquay.

  The figure raised his arms to those brilliant heavens and marched into the tunnel mouth, where the blackness swallowed him up without a sound. Then he was gone, without any sign of having existed in the first place.

  “So?” Eli asked with a shrug.

  “Shut up, Eli,” Nathan warned. “This is important.”

  “What’s so damn important about watching a bunch of poor bastards being worked to death?”

  Nathan silenced him with a look.

  Night turned to day in that surreal sequence of events. Well-dressed people appeared and crowded into those seats, while many more filled the space before the decorated stage. Suited individuals stood upon that platform and waved their hands at the tracks.

  A second later, in a dreamy locomotion, a train, a long train, rumbled along those shining tracks much to the adoration of the assemble crowds.

  That iron horse rumbled right into the tunnel mouth, vanishing within its dark, dark depths, and all the while a chill of horror flared up and along Nathan’s every nerve. He expected an explosion. A cave-in. Perhaps even the mountain itself collapsing upon the doomed train.

  What he saw, however, was the caboose, filled with a handful of people waving handkerchiefs back at the audience. Just before they winked out of sight within the tunnel.

  “Never to be seen again,” Mackenzie marveled in quiet awe. “Never again.”

  The audience in that mystical mirage grew agitated then, as if something unseen was greatly upsetting. Horse riders arrived on scene, plunging into the tunnel, bearing torches and oil lamps. People crowded the tunnel mouth, obstructing it, until railway men pushed them back. The horsemen rode deep inside the cavern’s depths, their light sources held high in the deepening dark.

  “Never again,” Gilbert repeated.

  “So, what?” Eli said. “The train disappeared because, what? All those men died working on the tracks?”

  “Maybe something like that,” Mackenzie supposed. “But we’re missing something.”

  “That man who went inside the tunnel,” Nathan said.

  Mackenzie nodded.

  “Christ Almighty,” Eli whispered.

  “Who was he?” Nathan asked. “What did he do?”

  “And was he responsible for all of this?” Mackenzie asked.

  Eli shook his head. “You shitheads really surprise me. To think one man did all this.”

  “Well—” Nathan started.

  But Eli cut him off. “Well, nothing. All I saw there was a bunch of Chinamen, black men, and whites working to an early grave on a railway. And one bastard walks into the tunnel at night and gets you all thinking of shit? I mean…”

  He trailed off, staring ahead. “Now what?” he finished.

  Nathan and the others looked. That ghostly retelling of history was diminishing, collapsing in on itself, and rebuilding the windows, walls, and berths around them once again. When it reached half its size, the whole picture faded away like heat shimmers off a desert just before sunset. The train rattled along, and it was night outside the windows.

  Nathan didn’t really want to look outside, for fear of what he might see.

  The frightening smack of steel colliding with steel rooted the gang to the floor.

  “Now—” What? Nathan was about to say, when the section where they’d just escaped crimpled inwards. An unseen pressure popped nails and bolts free with alarming force, while the lamps practically jumped off the wall.

  There was a second’s peace, then a growing yowl of collapsing metal.

  “Run!” Mackenzie roared.

  They did, stampeding up the aisles, every step a hard splash in ankle-deep water. The door at the far end was only a five-second run away. Five seconds. Even with his soaked clothing, it was a feat of strength to pound out those last few yards. All the while, a scree-scraw yowling of the train losing something important clawed at t
heir ears and urged them to move faster.

  “RUN!” Eli Gallant barked.

  They ran. Powered by pure flight reflex, fearing for their lives.

  Mackenzie reached the passenger train door first. He hauled it open to reveal a black screen and plunged through without a second thought, promptly vanishing. Jimmy was next, charging through without pause.

  Nathan glanced over his shoulder and felt his blood crystalize in his veins so fast, his breath hitched in his throat.

  Behind the frantic faces of Gilbert and Eli, the train was collapsing from the rear onwards, straight up the aisle, in a rush of exploding windows and wooden berths. It became an accordion squeezing out multiple notes of destruction. Cushions went up and over like soft planks. Light fixtures fell to the floor. Overhead compartments dropped and were shoved ahead with a rising tidal wave of debris as whatever the train had hit drove everything backward.

  Nathan checked on where he was running—and leaped straight through the waiting portal.

  34

  They stood in a room.

  An ordinary bedroom one might see upstairs in a hotel—or a saloon. A double bed was the centerpiece, and a thick, handsome quilt with frilly patterns covered it. A pair of lit oil lamps rested upon twin end tables, as well as porcelain wash basins that glowed under the light. A wardrobe against one wall had dark designs etched into the surface, and a mirror was set into the door. A pleasant smell of wood smoke drifted throughout, while water pattered from winter clothing onto a floor cleanly swept.

  Mackenzie and Jimmy greeted Nathan with wide, questioning eyes just as Gilbert slammed into Nathan from behind, sending both men onto the bed with a thump and creak of timbers. Pillows flew onto the floor, and Nathan immediately shoved Gilbert away from him.

  “Sorry,” Gilbert drew out, but he was smiling, hitching up that unhealthy beard of his, while that mole rose high on his cheek and twitched with a life of its own.

  “The hell you two think you are?” Eli Gallant puffed. “Down in Kansas?”