As he thought this, his consciousness was gradually dimming.
Just when his mind seemed about to give way completely, over Lua’s shoulder, he saw something rushing at them.
It was one of the many poles that stood along the tracks, a different pole from the one the rope had caught on. If nothing changed, Lua’s back was certain to smash into it.
Conductor. Is this part of your “convenient world,” too? Like hell. I’ll show you the world ain’t gonna go your way that easy—
Ladd’s eyes had been nearly closed, but he opened them wide, pouring even the energy he would have used on a fighting yell into his fist. In the midst of a hot silence, he paid out a poorly executed left straight.
…Right at the pole that was racing toward them, behind Lua.
Paying no heed to the fact that his ring finger was missing, he clenched his fist and punched the oncoming pole.
The impact surged into an explosion.
The red shadow had watched the scene, and his eyes quietly narrowed in a smile. He spoke to Chané, ahead of him:
“I don’t know about the guy, but the girl’s safe. It looks like he protected her, right to the end. And here I thought he was just scum. That’s really something, don’t you think?”
Chané couldn’t answer. She didn’t understand this man. He was far too uncanny to make an enemy of, but she really couldn’t ally herself with him, either. She gulped. Premonitions welled up in her heart, one after another: If I fight this man, I will die.
“All right.”
The man’s eyes swiveled back to her.
“I promised I’d kill whoever survived, but…we don’t know whether that guy’s dead. What do you think I should do?”
With an expression that seemed to say he’d seen through everything, Claire gazed into Chané’s eyes. Chané felt as if the terrible radiance that seemed to absorb all light was on the verge of swallowing her whole.
“Oh, just for the record, don’t think I’m a complete ogre, all right? If he hadn’t gone to save her, the rope would have come untied on its own. Really, I swear.”
As he thought about what to do next, Claire switched to an unrelated subject.
Now that the leader of the white suits who’d killed Tony was gone, he should probably go dispose of the black suits. So for the moment, it was clear that he’d have to do something about the woman in front of him.
“Ah, right. The Huey fella you were talking about… He’s important to you, personally?”
It was an abrupt question, but Chané quietly nodded.
“Is he your lover?”
She shook her head no.
“Family?”
She nodded.
“Your father?”
She nodded.
“Is Huey your group’s boss?”
She nodded.
“By the way, what do you want to do? Do you want to fight me to the death, or—”
He was about to say run away, but at a sudden thought, he substituted something else.
“—Or should I kill the guy who’s trying to kill your family? That white suit?”
At the question, Chané’s eyes widened.
“I already went and told him I’d help you out, so if I kill you or desert you now, it’ll leave a bad aftertaste. I’m a hitman. Make your choice: Hire me, or fight me to the death here. Just so you know, if you don’t kill me now, somebody might hire me to kill Huey later.”
Those words generated great conflict in Chané’s heart. She didn’t understand this man. Would it be all right to trust him? The one thing that was clear to her was that he was probably stronger than anybody. That alone was solid fact.
How much did this man know? How long had he been listening to her conversation with the white suit?
Chané’s heart wavered, but the next question disturbed it even more violently.
“Oh, right. That Huey guy… Is he actually immortal?”
( ! )
This man, too? Is he after that as well?
Why have I been hesitating? Didn’t I make up my mind long ago? Haven’t I always been the only one to protect Huey, my father? Before now, and from now on?
I mustn’t trust others. After all, others will always be outsiders, nothing more.
Kill the enemy. Kill only the enemy. I can protect Huey by myself; I’m enough. I won’t let anyone get close. Nobody dangerous, nobody, nobody.
In the end, I’m the only family Huey has—
A cold light came into Chané’s eyes.
Maybe he’d picked up on the abnormality. Claire tilted his head to the side and spoke.
“What’s the matter? That’s a scary face… Is this about that? Are you thinking…I might threaten Huey and steal his immortality?”
He was right on the money. The coldness in her eyes faltered, very slightly. Even as she curbed her agitation, the artless woman nodded, giving a response that was honest to a fault.
On seeing this, Claire smiled and cheerfully repeated his question:
“Is Huey the only family you’ve got?”
The question was similar to the one she’d been asked a moment ago, but Chané answered it honestly. She’d decided that, for now, her first priority was to find some sort of vulnerability in this man.
“I see. You think you’re the only one you can trust to protect Huey, since you’re family…and because you think that way, you can’t trust me. Right?”
That wasn’t the only reason she couldn’t trust others, but he wasn’t wrong, so she nodded.
“Still, you want to protect Huey no matter what. Right?”
She didn’t even have to think about that question. However, the instant she heard his next words, Chané’s mind went blank.
“So I had an idea: If I marry you, I’ll be Huey’s son. That’ll make him family for me, too, and in that case, problem solved.”
For a moment, she didn’t understand what he was saying. The more Chané thought about it, the more her mind overflowed with question marks and exclamation points.
Without even trying to confirm her answer, Claire kept talking nonchalantly.
“All right, now we’ve got three options instead of two: Either fight me to the death here, or hire me for a job and put me on your team even though you don’t trust me, or marry me and we’ll protect Huey together. Those three. Do you understand?”
She really didn’t. What in the world was this man thinking?
She couldn’t understand, she couldn’t understand. This man, strength and personality included, was different from any human Chané had ever encountered before. Or no, maybe he really was a monster, not a human.
“Frankly, I wouldn’t have minded just going with the ‘marry me’ and ‘fight to the death’ options, but that would have seemed like a threat, and I thought it would be kind of unmanly. Besides, if I did something like that, my brother Keith might actually disown me.”
Chané stood, unsteadily, but she had absolutely no idea what she should do next.
She simply listened to what Claire was saying with a dazed expression.
“Oh, are you maybe thinking you wouldn’t want a loveless marriage? Don’t worry about that. I’ll love you. Or I could let that Huey fella adopt me, if you’d like that better. In that case, we’d be siblings. Whether you’d be my big sister or my little sister depends on your age, I guess.”
Even as she thought that that wasn’t the problem here, Chané was still at a loss over how to respond. Right now, her top priority was carrying out Huey’s rescue operation. However, this man would get in the way. That said, she probably… No, she definitely couldn’t win against him.
Before Chané’s brain could completely process everything, Claire abruptly put his face right up close to hers.
“Well, you can take the marriage thing as a joke if you want, but let me just go on the record as saying that I’m serious.”
Then he looked right into Chané’s eyes. It was as if deep holes had opened up in his eyes, and demons wer
e beckoning to her soul from their depths.
A strange sensation ran down Chané’s spine, but she couldn’t resist. Right now, all she could do was listen to what Claire said.
“Unlike your comrades, I won’t sell you out.”
He spoke quietly, ever so quietly.
“I’d never need to, see. Tough guys, people who are stronger than anyone, never betray their comrades. There’s just no sense in it. And I’m strong. Understand?”
Even with the roar of the wheels and the wind that surrounded the train, those words rang powerfully in Chané’s ears.
“I also won’t steal the secret of Huey’s immortality, the way you’re worried about. If he says he’ll give it to me, sure, I’ll take it, but I won’t grab it away from him. I don’t need to.”
Then he said the words he’d said several times in the past few minutes:
“Even without the power of immortality, there’s no way I’m gonna die. Because I believe I won’t. So you just stay quiet and believe in me.”
His eyes still radiated a deadly light, but somehow…he seemed to be smiling.
“Believe that I’m a man who’ll never die.”
After listening to him speak for a while, Chané seemed to have resolved to give him some sort of response.
Just as she began to move her head, a sharp shock ran through her. A red hole opened in her shoulder, and her body lurched violently.
“What?”
At that moment, Claire heard a gunshot.
A sniper, huh? Fun.
After making sure that Chané’s wound wasn’t life-threatening, he turned in the direction of the gunshot.
At this distance, he was close enough to see. After assuring himself of this, Claire decided to get rid of the sniper first.
“We’ll hit a river soon. If you don’t want the police to catch you, jump off there. Carve your response into the roof for me, all right? It looks like the other black suits are going to kill you, anyway, and you don’t need to stick with the train any longer, do you?”
With that, he trained his eyes on the finger of the distant sniper. In his heart, he believed that he could see. The egotism that controlled the world poured all of Claire’s nerves into his eyesight, and a clear view of Spike’s finger opened up before him. The job of conductor required good eyes in the first place, but since he also sniped on occasion, both his jobs called for perfect eyesight. In order to obtain it, he’d worked hard at lots of different things, but in the end, it had also been tidied away as “talent.”
“You’ve got eyes like mine. You don’t know what to turn your emotions on, so you just store them up inside yourself. Eyes like that.”
He smiled awkwardly.
“The only thing in this world I can’t do anything about is my dumb, boneheaded self.”
For that reason, Claire took the murderous intent generated by tragedy and various absurdities and turned it all on himself. He lived with all the killing intent his eyes radiated sealed away inside himself.
“Well, at any rate, you nicked my ear. Even if it was an accident,” he told Chané. “I’m the center of the world, and you left proof that you exist on me. So you try coming over to the side that dreams—to the side that controls the world… You’re welcome here.”
Rubbing the wound that had been inflicted on him through the wall, he turned toward the front of the train, getting ready to launch himself into an all-out sprint.
“If you want to, you can throw a knife at my back. I’ll dodge it.”
With those last words, the man began to run across the roof at extraordinary speed, and before long, he disappeared over the side of the train.
After she’d watched the small shadow advance, avoiding Spike’s bullets as it went, Chané brooded about something for a short while. Then she nodded as though she’d made up her mind.
Taking out a small knife that had been secured to her leg, she began using it to carve words.
On the roof of the train, she wrote her answer to the red monster.
Then, when she saw that the train was over the river, Chané quietly leaped into the air.
The train’s top secret cargo: the large quantity of explosives Czes had prepared…as well as Jacuzzi and his friends, who’d boarded the train to get it.
When one of those friends—the big brown-skinned guy named Donny—saw that they’d come to the river, their designated spot, he began to throw the boxes packed with explosives down off the railroad bridge. The river was deep, and the crates’ seals and packing materials were perfect. After all, if a splash like that was enough to detonate them, they wouldn’t be usable in the first place. Jacuzzi’s group were simple people, and based on this simple thought, Donny pitched box after box of explosives off the train, with no hesitation whatsoever.
Just when he’d nearly thrown them all, Donny saw something weird. He thought he’d seen a woman in a black dress jump from above the cargo door. In other words, from the roof of the train.
“Aah? Woman? …Nahhh, no way. Just imagination.”
Donny didn’t give it much thought. He just kept concentrating on throwing boxes.
Nice and Nick, two of the cargo robbers, had managed to escape thanks to Rachel. When they set off warning explosions in the first-class cars, the crew members in the locomotive finally began to notice that something was wrong.
“Hey… What was that?! That blast, just now!”
“The train sorta swayed a bit.”
The engineers were a pair of elderly brothers. They were hard of hearing, and their ears hadn’t picked up on the earlier gunshots. But, as one would expect, the noise of Nice’s warning explosions got through to them.
Bomb blasts roared out one after another.
“Step outside and take a little look-see, wouldja?”
“Me? Goldarnit…”
Just as the younger brother was preparing to go out, they heard a voice from beyond the door.
“Gramps, it’s me.”
It was the voice of someone they both knew: the young conductor. His face was the polar opposite of the one he’d shown Ladd and the others a short while ago: It was his conductor’s face, and his eyes were gentle.
“Oh, is that Claire? Did you come all the way over the tender to get here?”
“What’re you doin’ here? What the heck were those explosions? Should we maybe stop the train?”
Even as they spoke, the explosions continued.
“No, Gramps. It’s the other way around: Whatever you do, please don’t stop the train.”
“Huh? Whaddaya mean?”
After pulling Spike off, Claire had come to check on the engine room, just in case, and then the explosions had begun. He thanked himself for this good fortune.
With those explosions, the signal from the conductors’ room wouldn’t do any good. If this kept up, they’d stop the train immediately. Consequently, on the other side of the door, Claire decided to do a little acting.
“It’s train robbers. They’re coming after us on horseback right now and firing!”
“They’re what?!”
“Where are they?!”
“It looks like they’re staying under cover as they move! You can’t really tell from here, but we’ll be crossing a river soon, remember? Once we’re over that bridge, they won’t chase us… So don’t worry, and keep the train moving.”
He didn’t know what the explosions really were, either, but for now, he made something up.
He couldn’t let them stop the train here.
“Hnnnrrrgh, roger that! We’ll run ’er at full speed. Just leave it to us!”
“What’re you gonna do, huh?”
“It doesn’t look like there are any injuries among the passengers yet, so I’ll get them evacuated.”
“I see. You be careful, you hear?”
“Thank you, sir. I’m off, then.”
Without letting the old men see his face once, Claire put the locomotive behind him.
What he’d really wanted
to say was Thank you for all you’ve done for me up till now, but under the circumstances, there was no help for it. He said a silent good-bye to these friends, whom he might never see again.
Even if the world does revolve around me, there are lots of people I’ll always be indebted to. Dammit, if we’re late getting to New York now, I’ll never be able to look the Gandor brothers in the face again.
And so the train sped on.
There was no telling what sort of path Isaac and Miria had wandered, but they were currently puttering around in the third-class carriage.
“Hmm, I’m not seeing them… No white-suited fellas, and no Rail Tracer.”
“Yes, they vanished! It’s just like a mystery!”
Because they’d passed in front of the respective rooms while Jacuzzi held one black suit captive and Ladd was torturing another, in the end, Isaac and Miria hadn’t encountered any darkly dressed trouble.
“Say, Isaac? You’re sure it’s okay not to check the freight room?”
“It’s fine. The monster eats people gradually, starting from the back of the train. That means it won’t be in a freight room that’s farther back than the one that had the dead body in it!”
“But then why did you check the conductors’ room so carefully?”
“Heh-heh-heh. They say the culprit always returns to the scene of the crime, you know.”
“Wow, that’s amazing! Isaac, you’re just like Holmes!”
Rattling off examples of incoherent reasoning, they went deeper into the third-class car.
Along the way, they checked each of the rooms carefully. There were people tied up in each compartment, so they undid their ropes for them as they went.
“Oh, thank you so much! What on earth is going on?!”
The passengers they rescued all said the same thing, and each time, Isaac gave them the same answer:
“They’re fighting some sort of gun battle, and a monster’s walking around eating people.”
Those words earned him terribly odd looks, but nobody made any attempt to go outside.
Something had occurred to them. For a while, in a nearby room, they’d heard a child’s horrible screams. Then they’d heard a sound like breaking glass, and the noises had stopped entirely. Whether it was a monster or black-suited robbers, nobody felt like casually going outside.
1931 The Grand Punk Railroad: Express Page 12
