Horror Express

by David O'Hanlon

  “It’s entirely too soon to see that kind of necrosis. It looks to be affecting the hippocampus, too.” Miss Jones used her scalpel to indicate the spreading black lesions.

  The sunken tissue was full of hollows, like a fleshy sponge. The matter collapsed under the slight pressure of her probing and oozed. Tiny pustules seeped along inflamed blood vessels that tore their way through the soft pulp of the brain like angry worms.

  “Fascinating.” Wells rubbed his chin with a gloved thumb. “We need to open up the rest of him.”

  “Indeed. Inspector, would you be so kind?” Jones pushed the pus-filled brain into Mirov’s hand and moved to the body opposite of Wells.

  Despite his advanced age, his hands danced with steadiness and grace. Jones moved like an extra appendage, sliding in behind him and opening the ribcage like luggage. The wet pop of the breaking ribs made Mirov squirm uncomfortably behind her and jostled the beam of his light. Wells failed to suppress a giggle. He stopped laughing when he peeled open the abdominal wall. The stench of septic rot rushed up from the cadaver.

  Jones inhaled deeply. “Reminds me of Jersey.”

  “You’re disturbed, my dear.” Wells fanned the air in front of him. “Even for an American.”

  Mirov dropped the brain and covered his mouth, immediately getting a whiff of the cranial fluids as he smeared them across his lips. His stomach gave up the fight instantly. He threw himself over a crate to vomit in the shadows.

  Jones’ round cheeks lifted in a toothy grin. “Are you okay, sweetie? You can always take care of the laundry, if this is too much for you.”

  “Dear, God. What’s happened in here?” Wells steadied the swaying lantern above them. “No virus does this. Nothing does this.”

  “Something does this.” Jones gripped the esophagus and ran her fingers down its length. Ribbons of torn tissue flopped away from the fleshy tube. “It’s like he swallowed razors. Why would he do this to himself?”

  “He didn’t.” Wells snapped his fingers, splattering blood from the gloved digits. “The cuts on his lips. Someone forced whatever it was down this poor man’s throat. We need to check his stomach contents.”

  Jones examined the small lacerations and nodded slowly. “Good news, Inspector. This is just a case of regular old murder. No virus to worry about.”

  Mirov, slightly greener than before, pressed himself back to his feet. “A murder, huh? Like a professor might commit after catching someone snooping through his valuable belongings?”

  Wells huffed. “Nonsense. Alex is hotheaded, but reasonable. He would have simply broken the man’s jaw, like a civilized chap. As for this being a murder, I agree. As for it being regular, I’m afraid Miss Jones is entirely wrong.”

  Jones rested her hands on her hips with a snort of displeasure.

  “Well, you are. The effusion is far too great. There’s entirely too much blood in the abdominal cavity. Almost all of it in fact, and I think I know why. Look at the liver.” Wells pointed with the scalpel.

  The brown organ was blossoming with yellow-white globs of fat. Knots of swollen scars bulged around them.

  “Yes, it’s cirrhosis.” Jones nodded. “It would have been a perfectly fine cause of death had he not been murdered first.”

  “Look closer.” The doctor pulled the liver back to give her a better view. “The hepatic artery has completely exploded. There’s no way a murderer did that.”

  “Marvelous.” Jones leaned on her knuckles. “So then, what killed this man?”

  “That is beyond me.” Wells cocked his head and stared into the back of the cargo car. “What killed that man?” He gestured with the scalpel.

  Mirov and Jones turned to stare at the empty coffin slid against the wall. Mirov made his way to the coffin and pulled a small envelope, nailed to the lid, free. It contained the local doctor’s notes for the man’s family in Regina.

  Mirov squinted at the scribbled words. “Tom Brandt, age twenty-six. Death by exposure. He froze to death, in other words. It happens a lot out here.”

  “I know what exposure is, thank you.” Wells wrinkled his nose. “Frozen. I don’t know why, but that seems important.”

  “Not just important.” Jones walked past him and rapped her knuckles on a crate. “It seems familiar.”

  Wells turned to look at her and, beside her, the crate Alex Saxton brought onboard. The crate with the perfectly preserved, frozen Neanderthal.

  “Bloody hell.”

  ***

  Boris Mirov strode through the cars, unaware of everything around him. Two dead bodies, a missing corpse, a murderer on the loose, a thief that had eluded him for almost two years hiding on the train—it was all too much for him to deal with. He debated just beating a confession out of the professor so he could get back to the case at hand. He could always shoot him before anyone challenged the details. Maybe Saxton could try to escape at the next stop. Yes, that would do nicely.

  A man turned out of the lavatory and collided with the inspector. Mirov gave him a shove and cursed him in Russian. Mirov didn’t have time to bicker with some drunkard. The other man simply bounced off the wall and continued on, whistling the national anthem as he staggered about. The inspector turned the handle to enter the next car when he noticed the slick stripe on his ash-colored sleeve. He pressed his fingers to the blood—it was still wet. He unholstered his revolver and whirled around, but the man that bumped into him was gone.

  He stalked down the corridor and nudged the lavatory door open with his toe. One of his police officers sat on the toilet with his pistol lying on the floor, next to his severed head. The walls were painted in arterial spray. Someone screamed. Over the howling winter winds and rumbling train, it sounded much further away. They kept at it—terrible, high shrieks of panic, but not from the direction the murderer had gone.

  “Why did no one scream here?” Mirov wheeled around on one of the compartments and kicked the door in.

  The brass latch shattered the wooden frame and in the flickering moonlight he saw the still bodies with their heads turned at unnatural angles. He bolted to the next car to find the source of the screams.

  A middle-aged woman stood in the corridor, shaking against the doorframe, her white dressing gown stained with urine. Mirov nervously peeked inside her cabin. A man lay dead on the floor, though he seemed much too young to be keeping her company. And much too well dressed.

  Mirov stepped into the room for a closer look. The man’s suit was split down the back. The inspector rolled the body with his foot and knelt beside it. He gave the suit a light tug, peeling it away from his torso with ease. A line of stitches from shoulder-to-shoulder, and another descending his abdomen greeted him.

  “Autopsy wounds,” Mirov’s voice was low, and as accusatory as it was questioning.

  “Is that her husband, sir?” A Dominion police officer said from the doorway.

  “No, Daniels. This is Tom Brandt, age twenty-six. Cause of death was exposure.”

  “He attacked us. Attacked my Otis,” the woman muttered. “Otis didn’t never hurt nobody. He violated my Otis. That thing, it was the devil.”

  “What are you on about, ma’am?” Officer Daniels asked.

  Her weathered hands curled into fists as she seized his collar. “It was the devil in that man and it took my Otis from me! I saw it. I saw the devil.”

  ***

  Natasha waited until the footsteps passed her before ducking into the cargo car. She needed to hurry. Not going to prison depended on the doctor playing along, and he would be looking for her soon. He was disgustingly ancient, but she couldn’t help but find his self-assurance somewhat appealing. Besides, at his age he probably wouldn’t last past her dress coming down. The wind whistled passed an open window, letting the winter’s frigid breath caress her bare skin. She was dressed for seduction, not arctic exploration, and shivered violently against the sudden chill.

  She passed the professor’s crate and peeked inside at the withering caveman. It wasn’t
as impressive as she had hoped, and certainly wasn’t worth stealing. She turned and shivered again. The porter’s dissected body laid on an ad hoc table next to a pile of his organs. Sure, she had killed before, but never because she liked it. Her occupation came with certain risks and twice she was forced to take a life to save her own. Her fingers fidgeted with the lapis stones around her wrist—there was one time she enjoyed killing. Still, it wasn’t the same as the cold, scientific mutilation laid out before her.

  She crept around the autopsy table and navigated to the porter’s workspace in the back of the car. Beneath a roughly made shelf was the gold embossed Mosler safe. Natasha pulled a wool blanket from a nearby hook and laid it down on the floor. Her fingers traced the manufacture’s brand on the black enameled steel door. She knelt on the blanket and removed the stethoscope and a piece of chalk from her clutch.

  “An 1892 Mosler. How quaint.” Concealed by the shadows, she smiled softly at the safe. “For what Old Man Edison is paying, this should’ve been a much harder job.”

  Listening intently, she heard the fence fall into a gate and wrote the number on the door in chalk. She wiggled the combination dial back and forth to narrow down the number, scratched out her first and wrote down the correct one. Her fingers moved minutely. Small, soft, twitches found the next gate and then the third. She marked the numbers and then worked backwards to find the order of the discs. Inside of ten minutes, the fence fell into place with a sharp snap. She eased the door open and found the velvet bag in the sickly chartreuse color. She slid the contents out into her gloved hand.

  Marion Petrovski’s super metal would change the world. She had been there when he unveiled it and had seen the demonstrations. The metallic bars were bizarre in every way. They were the size of gold bricks, but each was a third of the weight. Their color was a ruddy puce with specks of magnesium shimmering unnaturally in the dim light. The metal was nigh-indestructible, much like the ego of its discoverer. Too bad it wouldn’t be Marion’s name on the patents.

  Thomas Edison’s pull was too strong in America, and his mines in Ontario would present all the necessary paperwork to back up his “discovery” of the new material. She wondered how much Petrovski would offer to keep that from happening. Then she remembered what became of the last person that crossed the old man. She was better off sticking to the deal. Edison was not to be trifled with, and her body was much more seductive in one piece.

  A spear of light shot through the room and a shadow fluttered over her. She tucked the bars into their bag and stood up slowly. Goosebumps crawled up her tanned skin. This was going to turn out badly, she could just feel it. Some phantasmal dread twisted in her stomach. She peeked between the porter’s shelves and didn’t see anyone, but the door was standing open. Natasha gingerly crept around the racks for a better look into the cargo car.

  She slipped her hand into the purse for the Browning M1900. Her fingers caressed the checkered, wooden grips as she took a comforting hold around the pistol and drew it.

  The breath crawled across the back of her neck.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” the voice whispered behind her.

  Natasha squeezed the trigger, firing blindly under her arm at whoever it was, before turning. She brought the pistol up and prepared to fire again.

  The man looked bemusedly at the oozing hole in the middle of his nightshirt. “That was a bit excessive, don’t you think?”

  His milky eyes stared at her blankly and then started to take on a new color. He snapped an icy hand around her throat and wrenched the gun from her grip as she fired another round into his cheek. Those horrible eyes glazed over with a swirling vermillion fog that glowed in the darkened car.

  Natasha tried to scream through the vicelike grip on her windpipe.

  “Why were you here? What was Monte hiding in there that you needed so badly?”

  The pressure in her head grew with the glow of his eyes. His words continued, though his mouth never moved and she felt them echoing louder every time the questions repeated. Her eardrums popped, then the blood vessels inside them. She couldn’t speak, but she told him everything he wanted to know anyhow.

  She managed a squeal when her eyes started bleeding.

  Chapter Nine

  “What in the sweet hell was that? You heard it, didn’t you?” Miss Jones leaned closer to the door to better hear.

  Wells dried his hands over the sink, which was stained pink with Monte’s internal fluids. “What could you possibly have heard? We’ve just been there. It was probably something falling over. It’s not exactly a proper operating room.”

  “So, you did hear it?” Jones twisted to him. “That was a gunshot. There! That was another! Something is happening in that boxcar.”

  “Probably that policeman we heard passing earlier. He must’ve returned to the car. Undoubtedly, he’s the one doing the shooting.” He stared at his shoes. The caliber was much too small to be Mirov’s revolver and Wells knew it.

  “James Henry Wells, I have never known you to be a coward.”

  “I prefer to think of it as selective heroism. Did I tell you about the time I was impaled by a Zulu spear?”

  “Yes, you show me the scar every time you’re drunk. Barely even a flesh wound, if you ask me.”

  “It was quite worse at the time, I assure you. That’s exactly the sort of thing that happens when one rushes into danger. It’s foolishness, and foolishness is a luxury of the young. Wise men know when to act their age. Besides, I’ve skipped dinner and I need to take my medication.”

  “Laudanum doesn’t count as a medication when you take it recreationally.”

  “I’ll have you know it’s for my anxiety.”

  Jones put her fists on her hips and glared. “You don’t take anything seriously enough to have anxiety, James.”

  “By God, the tincture must be working then.”

  Jones shook her head and stared him down, gritting her teeth.

  “Fine, you damnable harpy. I will go and see what is going on. You can wait here, so that I may gloat when I prove it was nothing but the inspector shooting Alex’s mummy or something equally unworthy of investigation.”

  Jones waved for him to hurry as he opened the door to the adjoining luggage car. If he hadn’t insisted that they stop to wash up in the larger lavatory, they would have been back to their compartments. Her with a book and him with a feisty redhead.

  “A damned dreadful way to spend my evening this is.”

  Suitcases, duffel bags, gunnysacks, and tied pillow cases lined the walls of the car on crude shelves. They seemed to isolate the car from the noise outside. He barely noticed the sound of the wheels chugging along the rails or the winter winds. The floor was open and far more spacious than a passenger car but had fewer lights… all of which flickered sporadically overhead. The effect made it just as claustrophobic as the rest of the train. He made his way to the opposite end of the car and opened the door. In the vestibule, the whistling wind picked up again.

  A shadow fluttered past the door’s window. Wells jumped and took a step back, but never let his eyes waver. His heart was pounding in his ears. Still, he pressed his face to the portal and tried to see who was moving about. The electrical lights were out, only slats of silver lanced through the small windows to provide illumination. He moved his hand to the shaft of his walking stick, gripping it like a fencer’s foil.

  “Surely, there’s nothing to worry about. Just the policeman.” He stepped into the car and let the cane lead the way.

  Wells knelt slightly and paused. Something was ahead of him, but there was something else creeping to his left. The primal part of his brain warned him against both. A shiver racked his body as a bitter breeze blew through the nearest window. He distinctly remembered closing it after he packed up the iceman. All six of them were open now.

  Wells inched forward and noticed the tangle of auburn hair spilled out around the blood-streaked face. He lowered himself more, dropping to his belly, and cra
wled to Natasha. His fingers searched her neck for a pulse he knew wasn’t there. The blood vessels in her eyes had exploded violently, turning them into burst grapes. The little Browning pistol lay near her feet and Wells crawled to it gingerly.

  A steady ticking drew closer, became clearer—it was wet and dripping. Someone whistled in the darkness. Not just a sharp call, but a tune. It was a little off key, but through its twisted notes the tone of “O’ Canada” was clear. The musician was much too jolly to be in a room full of dead bodies.

  Wells snatched the pistol from the floorboards and rose faster than his body was accustomed to. He tried not to curse his decrepit knees and hips as they popped from the exertion. His heart raced faster, and spots swirled and flared like fireflies in his vision. Someone darted by and he fired a shot in their direction. The bullet snapped harmlessly against a heavy crate.

  “Does everyone now greet strangers so viciously?” a voice asked from the shadows.

  A hand seized the pistol and stripped it from Wells’ hand. It clattered across the floor and disappeared. The doctor swung his cane and almost fell over as he missed completely. The shaft clacked across the top of the safe and he righted himself, tightening his grip for another go of it.

  “You are much too slow, Doctor.”

  Wells wheeled around and saw the man, dressed for bed and missing a large chunk of his face. The ragged wound trickled below the glowing, red eyes. Another bullet hole trickled as calmly from his chest. Both should’ve been gushing fountains.

  “I’m not that slow.” Wells stroked the man across the cheek with the cane.

  “You are frail and old, much more so that I would prefer. However, I hear you are quite brilliant. You will serve me well. For a time.”

  The man batted the walking stick away and grabbed Wells’ collar. His eyes glowed brighter as he pressed the doctor against a crate and drew closer.

  “I will break your body first, if you make me. Surrender, doctor.”