Bob had showed Lilly a few rudimentary things about operating the train, and now she frantically searches her memory for the proper sequence of ignition switches to be punched and dials to be turned and gauges to be checked and valves to be opened. After a series of aborted attempts, she manages to kick the big diesel power plant to life, and the chassis trembles, and the smoke and the low gurgle fill the night air outside the narrow window ports, the stars visible through the fractured panes of safety glass.
A moment later, the gears engage, a canopy of smoke shoots up, and the engine drags the car out of the yard and into the night.
* * *
By the time they reach Walnut Creek, Lilly has pushed the iron monster up past thirty-five miles an hour. Norma keeps a death grip on the vertical rail, tense and silent as she peers out the window at the passing wreckage of Highway 422, the blur of the treetops, and the vast ceiling of stars broken only by the twisting column of exhaust that swirls up from the engine and dissipates in the ether. Lilly gazes out the rearview mirror.
Behind them, the horses rear and convulse on the flatcar with each bump. The track is untested, cleared only months earlier, and Lilly can feel every flaw in her solar plexus, every vibration in her bones.
Next to her, Norma’s voice suddenly penetrates her thoughts. “Tell me again!” the woman shouts above the wind and rumbling of the turbine. “What happens when we get to the part of the track that’s unfinished?”
Lilly nods. “The plan is to use the horses from that point on.”
Norma stares out the window. “Can I ask you another stupid question?”
“If you don’t mind a stupid answer.”
“Why not just use horses from the start?”
Lilly shrugs. “Take us twice as long to go half as far.” She nods at the passing landscape. “It’s tough going out there, Norma, even for four-wheelers, all the shit in our way, wrecks and swarms and God knows what else. They got a major head start on us, I’ll grant you that, but we’ll gain on them, believe me. We’ll find them.”
Norma nods, looking unconvinced.
Lilly can hear the muffled voices of Jinx and the others behind the firewall door. They’re hunkering down now back there in the darkness of the passenger bay, avoiding the wind. Once a cabin featuring first-class seating for genteel business travelers, the enclosure is a squalid cell of discarded fuel cans, detritus, and spent shell casings rolling around like pinballs.
Turning back to the windshield, and the rushing blur of steel rails flowing under them, Lilly puts all thoughts of suicide missions, failure, and death out of her mind.
* * *
On most train engines built in the twentieth century, a long iron lever sprouts up from the corrugated floor in front of the control console—a greasy remnant of the days when safety regulation required that engineers manually engage the throttle at all times. “The dead man’s stick” is designed to shut down the engine immediately if that manual pressure is released for any reason—especially if that reason is a sudden heart attack or aneurysm that drops the engineer to the floor.
Now Lilly turns to Norma. “Do me a favor, will ya? Take the stick for a second.”
Norma reluctantly grasps the spring-loaded handle, her lips pursing with nerves. “Got it!”
Lilly finds her rucksack on the floor, digs in it for the radio and her binoculars. She pulls the items out, sets the radio on a ledge, raises the field glasses to her eyes, and peers through the windshield at the dark horizon line barely visible beyond the magnesium-white cone of light from the train’s headlamp. She can see the occasional silhouette of a ragged figure emerging from the forest on either side of the train, lumbering toward the light and noise, and then brushing up against the makeshift fence, giving Lilly a momentary feeling of accomplishment. The barrier is holding for the time being. Everything seems to be in working order.
At this point, however, it’s far too dark for Lilly to notice the smoke on the horizon.
The noxious corkscrew of haze curls up into the black heavens less than two miles away, rising off the treetops, unseen at first, a stain against the vast abyss of the night sky. A trace odor of burning rubber registers just for an instant in Lilly’s brain but she passes it off as an unfamiliar by-product of the engine getting too hot. Or maybe the train’s burning oil. They’re still too far off from the smoke for Lilly to recognize the source.
They close the distance, the train maintaining a speed of forty miles an hour now, the undercarriage sounding like a drum roll announcing some imminent change in their fortunes. Lilly stares at that black stain against the sky. Orange light crackles within it, flickering up across its underbelly in veins of luminous color. Is a storm brewing?
“Can I ask another stupid question?!” Norma hollers from her spot in front of the control console. She keeps her eyes on the horizon, the stick clutched tightly in her grip.
“Sure, go ahead,” Lilly replies, keeping the binoculars to her eyes, starting to see the strange storm-like pattern of darkness rising against the black sky.
Norma looks at her. “You know how to stop this thing, right?”
Lilly offers no reply as the train careers around a gentle curve, revealing a burning section of track about a quarter mile away.
* * *
In dry, western states, during droughts, the smallest, feeblest lightning strike can touch off infernos of biblical proportions. At first, as the train approaches the smoking length of track, it looks to Lilly almost like a natural phenomenon. At this distance, in the moonlight, the flaming railroad ties appear as glittering yellow plumes, almost pretty, like Chinese lanterns. The smoke chokes a dozen acres of the surrounding farmland—a microclimate of hazy pollution that makes Lilly’s heart start to race.
“Keep us steady,” she orders Norma, then pushes down one of the side windows, leans out into the foul-smelling wind, and peers through the binoculars at the sabotage most likely perpetrated by the kidnappers. At least a thousand feet of track roars with some kind of accelerant—lighter fluid, alcohol, gas—something to get the ancient creosote-sodden wood to go up like that. The envelope of air around the train as it approaches crackles with char and heat and menace. They are maybe a thousand feet away. At this rate, they will plunge into the fire in about twenty to thirty seconds.
Norma’s voice rises an octave. “Why in the hell are we not stopping?”
Lilly looks at the portly woman, and for a fleeting instant, all the moving parts of their situation, all the variables, all the consequences of their actions, all the potential victories and utter disasters crash up against each other and seize Lilly in a momentary and inexplicable paralysis. She freezes, stricken silent for a moment. The clock in her brain stops ticking. The invisible sweep-second hand reaches high midnight. Alarms go off.
Then, over the space of a nanosecond—the time it takes a single synapse to fire in her brain—Lilly Caul remembers saying goodbye the previous morning to ten-year-old Bethany Dupree and her little elfin six-year-old brother Lucas. Bethany had been sitting up in her bed in the darkness of her room, dressed in her trademark baggy Hello Kitty sweatshirt, rubbing sleep from her eyes. Lucas was on the opposite side of the room, peering out from his tangle of blankets. A quick kiss on the little sleep-perfumed foreheads, and a hasty goodbye, and all at once, a simple gesture on Bethany’s part, Lucas looking on, nodding, took Lilly completely by surprise. Bethany was clutching a corner of Lilly’s shirttail and wouldn’t let go. “Make sure y’all come back,” the little girl softly beseeched Lilly. “Just make sure, okay?”
Lilly snaps out of her spell. “Keep it steady, Norma, stay on course.”
“What?!—what?!”
“We’re not going to stop.”
“WHAT THE FUCK—?!”
“Just do what I say! Keep it on course, and don’t let up on the speed!”
Norma starts to object but Lilly has already pushed her way through the rear chambers of the pilothouse, kicking open the firewall door, an
d lurching through the opening into the passenger enclosure.
She ducks down to avoid hitting her head on the metal lintel, and the smell of nervous tension in the form of BO and musk instantly floods her sinuses. In the light of a single battery-powered lantern, as well as the shifting shadows and shafts of moonlight coming through the windows, she can see three figures like owls on opposing sides of the passenger car. “What’s going on?” Jinx wants to know, her hand reflexively going to the handle of her machete.
“Don’t talk, just listen!” Lilly nods at the overhead bins. “Jinx, there’s canvas—”
“Is that fire up ahead?” Tommy demands.
“LISTEN TO ME!” She points at the bins. “There’s canvas tarp up there, and wool blankets. Grab as many as you can carry out to the flatcar, and use them to keep the flames off the animals.”
Without a word, Jinx spins and starts digging the fabric out of the bins.
“Tommy and Miles, see those water canisters in the back? Grab them and bring them out there to put out any part of the train that catches.”
Miles looks at Tommy, and Tommy glances over his shoulder at the tanks.
Lilly bellows: “RIGHT NOW! DO IT!”
The two young men spring into action. They lurch toward the rear of the enclosure, each grabbing a rusty metal canister. Meanwhile, Jinx has already procured a handful of blankets, and now she slides open the hatch, revealing the windswept flatcar and jittery horses. The smell of manure and diesel blows into the bay. Bits of trash and cinders swirl up on a slipstream of wind that bullwhips through the enclosure. The young men follow Jinx outside. One after another, they each leap across the massive coupler.
Lilly pivots and howls at Norma. “Don’t let go of that stick, Norma! The faster the better! Keep it steady and don’t let go!!”
Through the narrow opening in the firewall, Lilly catches a glimpse of an alarming panorama.
Visible through the windshield, the dancing yellow radiance looms dead ahead, growing larger and larger as they bear down on it. The flames rise off the ties, flagging in the wind, licking at the sky. The flickering light illuminates the undersides of high tree limbs on either side of the tracks. Lilly can feel the heat on her face.
The train roars toward the inferno. Ten seconds. Five, four … three …
And that’s when Lilly—her irises contracting down to slits in the supernova—sees that the sabotage goes deeper, and the situation is far worse, than she originally thought.
… two …
She turns and rushes headlong toward the flatcar.
… one …
PART 2
Scorched Earth
And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man.
—Genesis 9:5–6
FIVE
The train plunges into the heart of the maelstrom, the flames and sparks leaping up and forming a radiant pipeline around the engine. The roar of the fire blends with the rumble of the turbine as glowing embers jump and swirl around the flatcar. One of the horses catches fire, and Lilly rushes across the gap to Jinx’s side, helping with a wet blanket, frantically tamping out the flaming strands of mane. The horse rears up in agony, squealing and kicking out with its fore hooves, cracking the floor of the flatcar. Other voices cry out—first Tommy, then Miles—as a tidal wave of sparks streams across the rear of the car, touching off smaller fires at the weak points, the oil spots, the duffels, the planking. Crawling on their hands and knees, shuddering at the rocking motion of the speeding train, Tommy and Miles take turns slamming wet canvas down on the flames. Meanwhile, Jinx grabs a canister and splashes water on another horse that’s caught fire. The noise is spectacular—the engine, the wind, the burning track, the screams, the banging of hooves, the wild whinnying of the animals—and it’s also distracting. Lilly doesn’t see the first flaming dead person until the thing has climbed onto the rear of the flatcar. Three more have hooked themselves onto the sides of the train as the engine hurtles through the tunnel of fire. The tattered human revenants pull themselves up onto the clattering conveyance, the flickering light shimmering in the centers of their milky eyes.
Later, Lilly will do a postmortem of the incident, trying to piece it all together in her mind—the why and how of it—and she will conclude that the perpetrators not only sabotaged the track by lighting it on fire, but also knocked down the adjacent fence, allowing the swarm into the track area for good measure. There’s no science to their actions—they had no way of knowing for sure that Lilly would choose the train as her mode of travel, or that she would even retaliate so promptly—but there’s a certain sadistic panache to these countermeasures that can’t be denied. These kidnappers are nothing if not thorough, there’s no denying that fact.
Now the dead close in from both sides of the flatcar, enrobed in sparks, throwing cinders into the wind like comet tails, their stupid arms reaching, their flesh and toxic fumes radiating off them.
Jinx is the first to fight back, her twin curved fighting blades practically materializing in her hands as she spins toward the closest one, a male in an advanced stage of decomposition, the sole of Jinx’s boot catching its midsection and sending gouts of blood and sparks into the wind-wake. The creature staggers. Twin blades slash silently, making a divot in its neck that is so deep and oozes so much blood it smokes and cackles as the fluids run down its ragged, smoldering shirt. Then Jinx makes a fist, winds up, and unleashes a powerful blow to the creature’s face.
The cranium detaches—still sputtering with flames, still smoldering—and bounces to the platform before rolling under one of the horses.
“Get down!” Lilly lets out a cry that gets everybody’s attention.
She has her gun in both hands, a full magazine, when she starts squeezing off pin-point blasts, careful not to hit a horse, each shot catching the incoming dead square between the eyes. One shot practically takes a female’s face clean off, leaving behind a slimy mask of gristle and marrow that shimmers in the moonlight before the wind blows the creature off the flatcar. Another blast opens the top of a flaming walker’s skull, the fountain of black fluids extinguishing the sparks and flames chewing up the front of its filthy dungarees. A third shot misses a large male, going high over its head. The thing turns and lunges at Miles, each of its outstretched arms flagging flames in the wind, sending fountains of sparks up into the draft.
Through it all, in the darkness of the pilothouse, Norma Sutters keeps an iron grip on the dead man’s stick. She manages to hold the train at a steady forty miles an hour—fast enough to keep the fire from immolating them and hard enough to cast aside most of the walking dead with the makeshift cow catcher. Lilly keeps catching glimpses out of the corner of her eyes of moving cadavers appearing ghost-like in the cone of light from their headlamp, only to be catapulted into the air by the barbed-wire skid. Some of them disintegrate, limbs torn asunder in great gusts of rancid tissues and old blood swirling up into the back drafts. Others go down and are sliced in two by the speeding steel wheels keening along the ancient iron. Before long, a steady stream of blood and fluids begins crashing up against the bulwark of the rumbling engine with the throb of waves hitting a rocky shore. The mist washes across the flatcar, drenching the horses, slathering all who now cling to its slimy platform with gelatinous spoor.
Lilly finishes off the last of the uninvited passengers with a well-placed blast, penetrating the forehead of a middle-aged male in ragged mechanics overalls.
The biter staggers backward for a moment, slamming into a horse. The animal rears up, its eyes bugging wide like marbles in the flickering spark-light, causing the other horses to stir and snort and bob their heads frantically, stretching the guidelines holding them in place to their breaking point. One of the animals kicks out violently with its rear haunches, ramming the terminated walker with the force of twin wrecking balls. The hooves cave in the dead man’s skull and send the mutilated remains skidding off the back of the car and into win
dy oblivion.
Almost without anyone noticing, the train has passed over the burning section of track, and now it speeds through the cold night, spontaneously blowing out most of the remaining sections that had caught fire. Miles and Tommy slap canvas down on a few oil spots still flagging sparks, while Jinx tosses water on a horsetail still smoldering.
Literally within seconds the chaos has subsided, the horses have settled, and the train has passed over the worst of the fire, the rumbling engine still steady at forty-some miles an hour, the flatcar covered in a coating of gore. Lilly glances over her shoulder and sees the inferno receding into the distance behind them, a fireball of yellow light scraping the clouds, a dying sun shrinking back into the blackness of space and time.
* * *
For the longest moment, as the train speeds away from the fire, Lilly just stands there on the windy surface of that flatcar, bracing herself against a horse’s saddle, glancing from person to person, all of them expressionless, speechless. She shoves her gun back in its holster.
The train rumbles on, passing another mile marker closer to Fulton County.
Miles and Tommy crouch by the rear of the flatcar, wedged between two horses, still breathless from the plunge through the fire. Jinx holds on to a guide rope, stricken silent, gazing back over her shoulder at the pinprick of brilliant yellow light shrinking behind them into a tiny spot deep within the void of the night.
Lilly starts to holler something into the wind when the sound of Norma’s voice pierces the slipstream.
“Y’ALL OKAY BACK THERE? WHAT IN THE WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS IS GOING ON?!”
Lilly shakes her head and lets out a wry, edgy chuckle despite her adrenaline-fueled nerves. The others stare and begin to laugh. The release of tension is immediate, and it passes from person to person like a punch line. Miles lets out a hilarious stoner’s guffaw, laughing so hard his tears well up and then instantly dry in the wind. Tommy giggles. Jinx begins to laugh at the absurdity of the laughter, finding it so inappropriate she can’t help but join in. Soon, the four of them are all chortling at the awkwardness of the situation, the surreal quality of what they’re trying to do. And this goes on for another long beat until Lilly says, “Okay everybody, let’s calm down and take a deep breath.”
Search and Destroy Page 5
