The Cordwainer

by Christopher Blankley

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Uncle Sam Slams the Door

  It was well towards evening before we again risked turning over the engine. It had quickly cooled down and faded out of sight in the blackness of the old railway tunnel, but what damage had been caused to the turbine's internals by overheating it, we could only guess. Nothing, however, seemed to be amiss as we returned fuel to the expansion chamber. Our escape from the army's machine gun had completely drained the small diesel tank; there'd be no more boosts of power from the large, red button on the console.

  With the flywheel again spinning, we started to steam along the dark length of the old Northern Pacific tunnel. It felt impossibly long, crawling along with the potentiometer only slightly turned. It was a silent testament to a past age of engineering greatness, that such a thing as the tunnel had once been possible. It made me feel small, despite the engineering tasks I had recently undertaken.

  That once people dug so deep and so far into the earth... It put the construction and operation of The Cordwainer into perspective. We were, in any serious evaluation, just parasites living off the labors of a past civilization. I thought of the trains that had rumbled through this darkness. Perhaps someday men would again build things like tunnels and railroads, once the problems of global overheating had been solved and the death-grip of the Concession had been loosened on the nation. But until then, we could only walk in the footsteps of those who had come before us – ride the rails they had laid down.

  The light at the end of the tunnel slowly resolved itself at the very limit of my vision. Soon we'd be out of the tunnel and into the light again, into the pass that marked the halfway point of our journey.

  The sun was setting majestically before us as we alighted the tunnel and steamed out between the steep, green slopes that climbed quickly up on both sides of tracks. Back in the daylight, we could finally assess the damage that had been done to The Cordwainer. A long snake of bullet holes ran the whole length of the port side of the train. The rear of the old station wagon caboose looked like a large animal had been chewing on the wood. One of the rear doors was completely demolished, and much of the paneling hung loose off the frame. The floor of the caboose was slick with contents of a dozen bottles of wine, shot to pieces by the machine gun. It was a devastating loss, but most of our other provisions had survived the firefight.

  We made ourselves a dinner of bread and cheese and sat on the bullet-riddled benches in the caboose to eat it. We were again safely nestled amongst the tall pines and steep hillsides of the mountains, and we let ourselves relax our guard. If it was true, that we were now fully within the domain of the Polypigs, there seemed little reason to twist ourselves into knots worrying ourselves about it. On the Northern Pacific rails, we were more than twenty miles off any normal means of cresting the mountains, and there was no reason to believe that we wouldn't sneak through the hills unnoticed by a small band of poorly equipped, desperate rebels with bigger things to worry about than the presence of one simple train.

  The U.S. Army, first and foremost, must have been high on their list of concerns. If that machine gun nest behind us had constituted the front line of the army's offensive, then they had the Polypigs bottled up in the mountains tightly indeed. I was more concerned about what army defenses there would be west of the pass that we still needed to navigate past. We had made it past the first gun emplacement with the help of our diesel injectors. But they were now empty. The next machine gun nest we encountered we'd have to pass without that extra boost of speed.

  Nothing about that excited me.

  But the army were not going to be content to just wait for us to emerge from the pass.

  Perhaps the fiction that we were carrying weapons for the Polypigs had been accepted at face value within the higher ranks of the military. Perhaps our continual existence had proven too galling for the Concession and they'd pulled in political favors to make sure we never emerged from the mountains alive. Whatever the truth, the distant drone of a plane's engine was our first ominous indication that all was not well.

  We frantically scanned the sky, climbing out onto the roof of the train. Mitty was the first to spot the black dot of an airplane approaching from the south. As it neared, we strained our eyes against the failing light to make out the shape of the airplane. Fluky was the first to call it: P-51 Mustang, its unmistakable squared wings forming a crucifix in the sky. It appeared to have something large and heavy slung from its belly, throwing off its profile. A large bomb or extended flight fuel tank, we hypothesized aloud.

  As the plane came closer, Fluky scrambled up to the front of the train to man the cockpit, as I found my spot again on a running board, almost out of sight. Mitty retrieved his Thompson from the caboose and made sure the bolt was back. What he thought we was going to do with it, I didn't know, but he took a knee on the roof of the caboose and held the weapon at his side.

  The plane crossed The Cordwainer's tracks on a perpendicular course, not fluttering its wings.

  For a moment I thought we'd been passed by. After all, the whole universe didn't revolve around us. If the army was hunting Polypigs in these hills, there was no reason to believe that the plane would have any interest in a homemade train steaming through the mountains.

  But my small glimpse of relief faded as the Mustang banked to the west once it'd passed over us. It circled in a great arc until it was parallel with the tracks we were running on, and then it proceeded to dive directly towards us.

  Fluky was in the cockpit, but there was little he could do. The potentiometer was already fully on. The Cordwainer was making a good twenty, thirty miles an hour up the grade. The P-51 Mustang had its nose pointed down towards us. Its wings began to scream from its velocity as it dived. I ducked down lower onto the running board of the train and I saw Mitty flop down face first onto the roof of the caboose, covering his head in his arms. The fighter plane pulled up out of its dive perhaps two hundred feet above us, leveling out, filling the pass with the ear-splitting roar of its engine. Once past us, it pulled up and banked to the south, then wiggled its wings and banked again to the east, circling. They were coming around again, for another pass.

  “Fluky!” I yelled as the plane was lining up on us, this time to dive at our rear. “Faster, Fluky! Faster!”

  Fluky looked back at me and threw up his hands. He turned back to the console and ineffectually pounded on the red button. There were a few puffs of black smoke mixed in with the stream of the exhaust, but The Cordwainer was gaining no speed.

  “I think he means business this time!” I yelled, climbing up off of my perch along the side of the train. I took the pistol out of my belt and made sure it was loaded. I flicked off the safety and turned to face the approaching plane, feet straddled wide on the roof of the hopper. “Fluky, do something!” I screamed back over my shoulder.

  “What the fuck you want me to do?” he screamed back. He was frantically flipping at controls, reading dials. But he was right, what could he do? This was all the speed The Cordwainer had. It wasn't like we could ever outrun a diving P-51 anyway, not even at ten times the speed we were going.

  I raised my gun and fired it importantly into the air. I didn't know what I might accomplish, but at least I was doing something. Mitty was still laying with his face hidden in the roof of the caboose. My shots startled him, and he rolled over onto his back, raising his Thompson and braced its stock against the roof he was laying on. He opened fire, throwing lead up into the sky and brass off the left side of the train.

  The Mustang was barreling down towards us. Both Mitty and I were emptying our weapons into the sky. At two hundred feet, the plane again leveled off and rushed past us with a deafening roar. This time, however, the Mustang didn't bank away once it had cleared the length of our train. It stayed level, flying over the tracks in front of us, as the mountain pass rose up quickly on either side of it. At the moment when I thought the plane was about to crash – snap its wings off against the can
yon walls – it pulled up. But the black cargo that had been slung under its belly continued straight on. It flew, like a thrown stone, in a parabolic arc until it vanished from sight deep into the mountain pass before us.

  The plane was climbing up almost vertically, frantically attempting to grab altitude. I watched in open mouthed wonder as it arced away, my handgun lolling uselessly at my side.

  Then the earth picked itself up and threw me from the train.

  The earth shattering shock of the P-51's bomb shook the mountain pass, knocking The Cordwainer off its tracks and me off of its roof. I came crashing down into the underbrush beside the rails, landing hard on my back. The world was caving in around me. Rubble was rolling down off the pass walls, raining down around me. The Cordwainer steamed off the tracks, collided with the pass wall and buckled in the middle – the hopper cars turning over onto their sides, spilling boots. In front of us, deeper into the pass, the two opposing sides of the mountains were collapsing down, sliding together, slamming closed the pass with a million tons of trees and rocks. I attempted to jump to my feet but my legs gave out from underneath me. I fell back down amongst the brambles and The Cordwainer came to rest, a mass of twisted metal, thrown on its side and back. The engine let out a pained hiss as steam escaped from a thousand tight seams that were suddenly let loose.

  I lay on my back for a moment, watching the Mustang arc in the sky. It turned its nose south again and leveled itself out, perhaps at two or three thousand feet. Its job here was done, and it was turning for home.

  I groaned and lay motionless in the brambles, afraid to move. If I looked up and saw the destruction, it would be real, but while I lay still... I could hear Fluky yelling in the distance, screaming for a fire extinguisher. There were some unintelligible screams, then the unmistakable whoosh of a chemical extinguisher. Then there was silence, punctuated randomly by a few more blasts of compressed chemicals.

  I eventually took hold of myself, faced reality, and pulled myself up to a sitting position. The situation was far worse than I could have possibly feared. Fluky and Mitty were upright, standing on the tracks with their backs to me, looking down at the wreckage that had once been The Cordwainer. She had completely come apart, spilling her cargo and flipping onto her side. Only the caboose still sat upright, vaguely on the tracks, completely decoupled from the rest of the train. I pulled myself to my feet and looked down toward the pass. I could see nothing over two hundred yards away but dust and rubble. The pass had completely collapsed in on itself. Even if The Cordwainer had still been rail worthy – if the bomb hadn't shaken us all free of the tracks – there'd be no place to go. The path ahead was closed. We had failed. The all-consuming, gut-wrenching horror of the realization hit me. I fell back down to my knees.

  Fluky and Mitty spun around at the sound of my groans. They skipped across the empty tracks and helped me to my feet, asking after my welfare. I waved them off, again able to stand under my own power. Now I wanted to smash something. I picked up a twisted piece of metal and threw it angrily towards the impassable pass. I screamed and bellowed and kicked at the rails, cussing at the sky and at everyone and everything I could think of.

  When I calmed down, I turned to the others. Mitty was silent, still holding the extinguisher in his right hand. Fluky was bleeding from his forehead, wiping the blood out of his eyes with his filth-covered sleeve. No one had to say anything.

  Nobody bothered.

  We found two unbroken bottles of Marmont claret in the caboose and a crushed carton of McTavish that had magically not broken open. Fluky hopped up onto the side of one of the overturned hoppers and Mitty and I sat on the bullet hole ridden tailgate of the old caboose. We proceeded to get drunk as fast as we could, cutting the corks out of the bottles with a knife and chugging the wine quickly down. The McTavish tasted especially rancid as a chaser to the wine, but we gulped it down in big mouthfuls and passed the cartons around.

  The night fell quickly, without any real indication of twilight. By the time the stars came out, the three of us were having a merry old time, despite or dire situation. Miraculously, we were able to laugh at our predicament, with the help of the booze. Everything we had worked so hard for, for so long, was laying in pieces all around us. Fluky was joking, though fits of laughter, that the HTP tank would rupture next and blow us all to hell. And despite the very real possibility of that actually happening, I was laughing along with him.

  Mitty had recovered his machine gun from the wreckage. It was empty now, all its rotary magazines spent, but he let it rest across his lap as he drank his share of the whiskey. I noted, probably for the first time in ten years, that Mitty didn't have a cigarette or its holder protruding from his mouth. He chuckled that he had finally smoked the last one in his last pack. This the three of us found uncontrollably hysterical. Oh, how far up shit creek were we, if even Mitty was even out of smokes? It wasn't funny, not a bit of it, but we couldn't stop laughing.

  When the whiskey was finally gone, our mood turned more somber. Facing the facts could not be avoided: We were stranded in the mountains with very little food or water and without transportation, surrounded by hostile forces and cut off from the west by a rock slide and east by a waiting machine gun emplacement. If by some miracle the elderly tunnel behind us had survived the explosion and was still passable... We fell into silence and I looked up at the stars above me. It was another clear night, with the constellations bright in the sky.

  “What we gonna do?” Fluky said, pulling his shirt tighter in around him. The chill of the mountain night was beginning to set in.

  “Marmont must be under twenty miles back along these tracks...” Mitty pointed back toward the mouth of the tunnel, indistinguishable from the cliff face in the light.

  “The town of Taggart is perhaps twice that, that way,” I said, pointing at the rubble-clogged pass.

  “That's quite a hike.” Fluky picked up the empty carton of McTavish and shook it, holding it up over his tilted-back mouth. He got a drop or two, but that was it.

  “We can carry fifty, sixty pairs of boots on our backs,” I pointed to where the cargo of The Cordwainer had spilled out over the tracks. “We could easily turn that into two or three thousand dollars in Taggart. Along with what we made in Marmont, that's going on fifteen grand. Split three ways, that not so bad. I couldn't make that in a year working at The Shop.”

  “But then what?” Mitty asked forlornly.

  “Then what? We hop the mega-gauge to the Big City. Disappear.”

  “With five grand? That won't last long,” Fluky snorted.

  “It's what we got. There ain't any good options here.”

  “If we returned to Marmont,” Mitty continued. “Perhaps Mitchell would let us stay.”

  “And what?” I asked. “Wait around for the Concession to figure out what happened to us? Wait for the goons in the black Cadillacs to come searching for us? Head back to Shadrach? Boot Hill? No, there isn't anything for us back that way but a jail cell. That way,” I pointed at the rubble. “In the Big City, we got a fighting chance – maybe no one will be able to find us. I still have friends, I know people in town. We'd have a shot.”

  “Then what? Change our names?” Fluky asked. “And lose our chits? Ain't gonna be another Class A for you, you understand, not unless your name is Andy Rice. And if you use that name, they're gonna find you, just as easy as if you were back in Boot Hill. Least back there we got family. Friends. We might make a go of it.”

  “That's insane! You want to go to jail?” I almost yelled.

  “No, but in Boot Hill-”

  There was a sound in the darkness that made Fluky come up short. We all stopped to listen. We had been making a whole hell of a lot of noise. First laughing and carrying on, then arguing at full volume. Our voices must have echoed for miles in the hills. Mitty raised his empty sub machine gun and Fluky reached into his belt for his automatic. I slowly reached down and picked up the first heavy item that I touched with my hand: A se
ction of one of the crossbars. There was another rustle amongst the trees and we all simultaneously rose to our feet.

  “Who's there?” Fluky yelled out, his pistol drawn. I took a few steps toward the tree line and raised up my iron bar. Suddenly, an anger rolled over me. If there were soldiers in these hills, come to check on their handiwork, then I wanted a piece of them – for everything they'd cost me. I was wildly unconcerned with the danger, oblivious to the fact they were probably well armed. I wanted blood. I stepped closer to the tree line, desperately looking for a head to cave in.

  “Come on, you sons-of-bitches!” I yelled. “You think you can fuck with us, huh?”

  I glared into the blackness, threatening the trees.

  “We're not here to fuck with anyone,” a voice said, very close, in the darkness.

  I think I leapt three feet back, tripping on a rail and landing on my ass. Fluky brought his gun up, but before he could react, behind him, a young girl materialized out of the darkness. She had a revolver in her hand and she pushed it against Fluky left ear. Mitty came around with his Thompson, but something cracked him square in the face, sending him reeling. He hit the ground next to me on the tracks, his nose bleeding.

  Out of the tree line a small figure stepped – taller than a child but not big enough to be an adult. The gleam of a gun barrel proceeded it and drew my attention. The figure walked with a strange gait, dropping down onto the tracks with pained stiltedness.

  “Looks like you boys have had a hard day.” The figure walked along the tracks, moving awkwardly, and showed itself to be a small, middle-aged woman whose limbs seemed just barely under her control. The small carbine she held, however, wavered very little as she moved towards us, keeping us covered. “Seems like someone went to a lot of trouble to put your little train there out of commission.”

  “I-I-” I stammered.

  “I was up there,” she said, pointing up into the darkness with an arm that seemed incapable of raising above her shoulder. “Saw the whole goddamn thing. You folks are just lucky that pilot didn't decided to drop that three hundred pounder right on top of you. Wouldn't have been a shoelace left of the whole kit and caboodle.”

  “What? Shoelace?” I pulled myself up to a sitting position. The woman with the carbine was looking past me at the wreckage of The Cordwainer. The man who had hit Mitty in the face came out of the darkness with a short club in his hand, watching us intently. The young girl with the revolver to Fluky's ear hadn't moved. Wisely, Fluky hadn't moved either.

  “You're those Boot Hill Boys, aren't you?” The woman asked, looking down at me. “From the radio. What'd you call it? The Cordwainer?”

  “Yes, yes...”

  “Radio said you were running us guns. That would have been nice. I don't see any guns in there thought, just a bunch of boots. That a shame, a mighty big shame. We could have used a train load of guns.” The large man with the short club picked up Mitty's Thompson and tossed it to the woman. She caught it with her free hand and looked it over. “Well, here's one at least.”

  “And another,” The young girl said, taking Fluky's automatic out of his hand.

  “Running guns?” I looked up at the woman and squinted, the wheels in my brains starting to turn.

  “That's right,” The woman said, reading my expression, looking down at me with a smile. “We're the Polypigs.”