The Cordwainer

by Christopher Blankley

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego

  Five or six miles away from Pottersville, Fluky brought The Cordwainer to a halt. He feared another derailment if we proceeded in the dark and the stretch of track we'd so far navigated was heavily overgrown. The odds of encountering a felled tree or an uprooted section of track seemed pretty high. Fluky thought it best to proceed in the daytime, when at least we would be able to see obstacles approaching, and have more light to work out solutions to overcome them.

  The heavy brambles felt like a good spot to lay low. They provided good cover for us to layover and spend the night. It would be a long walk through the thicket in the dark for anyone trying to follow us, and we rightly concluded that we were safe for the evening staying put.

  But before any of the crew of The Cordwainer could get any sleep, there was the matter of Mitty's map to be attended to. We had left Boot Hill so unprepared, that we had never had the time to fully chart out our course over the mountains. Mitty's map was potentially as old as the tracks we were running on, but it did show the course of the old Northern Pacific Railroad in some detail – from Boot Hill all the way to the Big City – as it ran some thirty years ago.

  First along the tracks were the tri-towns of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, Boot Hill's nearest neighbors. These towns weren't on the main mega-gauge line, but were serviced by a spur line, because of the twin domes of their two nuclear reactors, Sodom and Gomorrah, which dominated the towns. These two massive structures produced much of the electricity used in the northwestern United States. In the Northern Pacific days, they had been farming communities, but now they mainly housed and supplied the workers at the nuclear facility. The Concession nuclear facility, like everything else – another series of company towns.

  How the Stephenson gauge rails navigated the tri-towns, I couldn't fathom from the map.

  From there, we'd cross a large section of open territory in the shadows of the reactors that was planted for hemp or corn. There was an old logging village on the map, called Johnson City, as the country began to gain altitude. Here, I assumed we'd start to see the tall pines that sat thick on the ground of both slopes of the mountains we planned to cross. There, high in the hills, was another settlement, an old mining town called Lode.

  Next, the tracks crested the mountains through a pass on Mitty's map that was vaguely outlined, on down the west side of the mountains, though countless small farming communities – mostly orchard towns. At the big lake east of the City, we'd turn north into suburbs and push toward the center of town. We'd meet up with mega-gauge rail again here, I knew from experience, and run in tandem the last few miles into the freight yards that dominated the south part of the City.

  Where we'd stop, where and how we'd unload our cargo, I hadn't even begun to contemplate. But the Big City still seemed so far off, at the end of such a long journey, that I didn't put the effort into worrying about it. There was a lot of wild country between here and there.

  Full of Polypigs.

  And I knew, without a doubt, that we hadn't heard the last from those Concession men.

  We folded down the table in the caboose and lay out under the pile of Mitty's dirty blankets I had scavenged from the house. I didn't get much sleep, but I rested better knowing I had the .38 Smith & Wesson within reach. Even if I only had two bullets.

  When the sun came up I opened my eyes to see Fluky already awake, eating Tom Mixx out of a billy can. He was chewing happily away and I noted that he appeared to be in good spirits. He might have even washed his face and hands – for the first time in a dozen years, I would have had to guess.

  “Mornin',” he said through a mouth full of cereal, seeing that I was awake. I looked around at the thick wall of thicket that was surrounding the caboose. I hadn't realized it was so thick, so close in, the night before – not in the dark.

  “Get any sleep?”

  “Hell, no,” Fluky said, dropping his spoon into his can and sliding in behind the seat into the old engine compartment. “Let's get this train movin'.” He leapt to his feet, climbed up and out through the sunroof and moved on all fours across the top of The Cordwainer toward the cockpit.

  We put three more miles between us and Boot Hill before Mitty woke up.

  He'd slept like a baby. He pulled himself out from under his blankets, reached around for his cigarette holder and maneuvered, bleary eyed, a cigarette into it. The first drag revived him, and he looked around puffing away as the brambles scraped by against the sides of the train.

  “Golly,” he said with a smile, climbing to his feet. “I positively forgot where I was...”

  Ah, to have the brain of a dummy.

  We didn't break clear of the brambles until well after noon, out onto the open plains that surround the tri-towns. The dual domes of the nuclear reactors loomed large in the distance, only slightly dwarfed by the mountains behind them. The smoke from the chimneys of The Shop were barely visible on the horizon behind us. By dark we would be within walking distance of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.

  The track had been fair to very good so far and we'd had no more derailments. We paused once, before breaking out of the thicket, to move a fallen tree off the tracks. Fluky had been manning the cockpit all morning, and after I'd eaten a little lunch of cold canned beans, I'd climbed up to the front of The Cordwainer to relieve him.

  “We'll be into the tri-towns before long,” he said, as he gave up the engineer's chair to me.

  “I think we should hold up outside in the scrub and roll through after dark,” I said, looking at the gauges.

  “Tricky... If we derail in town...”

  “Better than rolling down Main Street on a Tuesday afternoon,” I countered.

  “Yeah, I guess,” Fluky said as he vanished back towards the caboose to get his lunch.

  We settled on my plan. As The Cordwainer got closer to the tri-towns and the twin domes of the reactors grew to fill the sky, we realized that the old Stephenson gauge rails really did cut right through the center of the most southerly town – Shadrach. I had joked about rolling down Main Street, but from the cover of a group of trees on the end of town it looked like that was exactly what we were going to have to do. The rails joined up with a second set of rails, perhaps for a trolley car, and ran down a wide street east to west through the community. I could make out the bulk of Shadrach's Concession Store facing onto that street.

  There was nothing we could do about it. The rails ran where the rails ran, even if that meant right through the center of town. We'd wait for dark. At least we could do that.

  We watched trolley cars come and go as the evening approached, returning people from work at the reactors. Shadrach appeared to exist in the same sort of rigid chit social structure as Boot Hill. Some trolleys were obviously bound for wealthier neighborhoods, full of shirt-and-tie-wearing accountants and foremen. Other trolleys rolled by with blue-shirted workers in hardhats, taking a different spur, perhaps to Meshach or Abednego.

  As the evening rolled on, a crowd of people began to gather on the streets. The sun set and the crowd didn't seem to disperse. It was hard to tell what was going on from our vantage point more than a mile away, but the street we were preparing to travel down appeared to be a busy one. By seven in the evening there was no sign that the crowd on the street was dispersing. It was mind-boggling. Did no one have work in the morning? Was there nothing on the radio to listen to?

  By nine o'clock, Fluky came up to the cockpit and stuck his head in.

  “We're just gonna have to roll on down in there,” he said.

  “It looks mighty busy,” I said, squinting. “Maybe in a hour...”

  “We can't sit here forever. Eventually, we're bound to be discovered. Best we have a full head of steam when it happens.”

  I bit my lip.

  I waited another fifteen minutes, but the crowd seemed to be thickening. Whatever was happening, people were lining the street now, both sides. It was in
tolerable. We couldn't go back and we couldn't go forward. We'd lost almost half a day sitting in that grove of trees. Fluky was right, if we got caught sitting still we'd be in trouble. The Concession, undoubtedly, had a map too. They could see as well as we could where the tracks of the old Northern Pacific lay. There was no great secret to be kept now we were underway. If the Concession caught us... well, they would catch us. Whatever was going on in Shadrach it was none of my concern.

  Little did we know that what was happening in Shadrach was all about us.

  The town was gathering along the length of that street to watch The Cordwainer roll through. Word had gone ahead about our departure, and people had started to coalesce, after work, to watch us pass through town.

  With no sight that the crowd in Shadrach was going to disperse, I opened the valve to the expansion chamber, got a good head of steam going and turned up the potentiometer, moving the whole rig slowly forward. We rolled boldly into town up the center of the street, at no more than five miles an hour. As we approached, I began to realize how large the crowds on each side were. Hundreds of people, it must have been the whole town. Old men and women, young children, blue-shirted workers still wearing their helmets. They all stood silently as The Cordwainer rolled down the center of their street.

  It was eerily quiet as we split down the center of the crowd. I sat in the cockpit with my hand on the gun, watching the crowd for any signs of reaction. But there were none. They didn't seem to be there to stop us, they didn't seem to be there to cheer us, they simply watched as we passed with their wide, cold stares. No one made a motion, no one made a sound. There was just the sound of The Cordwainer's flywheel spinning.

  We rolled to the far end of the street without incident. I looked back to see the faces of the crowd still silently watching us steam off out of town. Fluky and Mitty were sitting on the roof of the caboose, looking back also. I turned up the amperage, and let The Cordwainer pick up speed; the silent faces and the lights of Shadrach receding behind us.

  I left the cockpit and shimmied back along the running boards.

  “Did you see that?” I said to Fluky when I was on the hood of the caboose.

  “Pretty freaky, huh?” he agreed.

  “...Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...” Mitty began to quote.

  “Yeah, no shit,” Fluky nodded.

  “Guess word's gotten out about our little trip.”

  “Hell, we is celebrities!” Fluky laughed.

  “Or outlaws,” Mitty corrected.

  “Ain't they about the same thing?”

  “I...” I began, but stopped. There was a noise. For a second I thought something was wrong with the engine, but then I realized it was off to the side. The train bumped, like it did when it crossed over a road that intersected the track, and just for a second I caught a glimpse of headlights on the perpendicular road. “Shit!” I screamed and tried to climb to my feet, but fell on my ass. Fluky leapt like a small animal from the caboose onto of the rear-most freight car. He vanished into the darkness, heading up toward the cockpit.

  I pulled out my gun.

  In the darkness behind us, a car swerved madly off the road the tracks had intersected. They pulled out onto the tracks. It was a black car, low and chromed. It tilted, balancing on the two rails for a second, then slid off and straddled them – one wheel inside and one outside tracks. Its engine roared and it began to gain ground of us, headlights illuminating Mitty and me on top of the station wagon caboose. I was about to panic, raise my gun, when Fluky reached the cockpit and punched his fist into the large red button on the panel. The Cordwainer lurched forward, suddenly accelerating with a burst of power. I fell forward, flat on my face on the roof of the caboose. I was vaguely aware of Mitty vanishing down through the sun roof. I struggled to regain my feet.

  We were moving fast now, the night beside the train rushing by, but the black car behind us was keeping pace. In fact, it was slowly gaining ground as, below me, Mitty began to throw things out of the back of the caboose. He was cursing, I could hear, but I couldn't make out what. An empty can of beans, then a wrench came flying out and bounced off the hood of the black car. It was getting closer, its engine screaming loud.

  I pulled myself up to my knees and leveled the revolver. I took aim between the pair of headlights and pulled the trigger. My gun made a small, wheezing noise and then popped. Not a bang, a pop. I looked at it in my hand in disbelief. Just my luck!

  I was well lit up by the headlights of the pursuing car. Someone inside leaned out the passenger window and fired off a shot from his own gun before I had a chance to take a second shot. Something stung me bitterly in the right temple. My head snapped back.

  My God, I've been shot! But there was no time to think much about it. I was sliding sideways off the roof of the caboose. If I hadn't flailed out with my arms at the very last second, and miraculously caught onto a running board as I fell, I'd have vanished into the darkness.

  The engine of the black car behind me roared.

  I was hanging by my fingernails from the running board of a speeding train. My head was splitting in pain. I looked back to see that the black car was almost completely on top of The Cordwainer. A black-suited man was pulling himself out of the passenger side window with a gun in his hand and up onto the hood. Reflexively, I raised my pistol and again pulled the trigger. I wasn't aiming. This time the gun went bang.

  The bullet must have hit dead center in the middle of the black car's chromium grill. The engine began to billow steam. The man hanging on to the hood vanished into the cloud as the engine struggled to keep pace with The Cordwainer. It began to lag. As the distance between the train and the car grew, I could hear the engine of the black car beginning to falter. First a hiccup in its earsplitting roar, then a cough. Its headlights began to shrink back into the night as Mitty appeared at the window of the caboose to grab my arm. The engine of the black car gave out a single, painful, mechanical, angry yell, then braked suddenly behind us, throwing the Concession goon riding on the hood head first onto the tracks.

  Mitty pulled me up and into the caboose, where I collapsed out over a bench, my head bleeding freely. I hadn't been shot, at least not directly – the Concession goon's bullet had ricocheted. But the throbbing in my head told me I had been.

  I passed out there, on the back seat of the caboose with the Smith & Wesson still in my hand, Mitty blowing concerned smoke down into my face.