On hearing this, Miria murmured, “Oh no. Could that have been Mary and…?” She sounded uneasy.
As the happy couple made their way through the third-class carriage, they realized that the door of the next room ahead was standing open.
Was it the monster? The pair held their breath, gulped, and approached the door with exaggeratedly stealthy footsteps.
When they quietly peeked inside, two black suits were there. They were looking out the window and whispering to each other about something. Upon seeing them, Isaac and Miria began conversing in whispers, too.
“Aha! I bet they’re picking on that child!”
“Yes, they’re bullies!”
“As a gunman, I can’t forgive evildoers like them! Right, Miria?!”
“Yes, you’re a nice-guy outlaw!”
During a certain incident a year ago, the pair had knocked out three opponents who’d been carrying machine guns. They were uncomplicated people, and no doubt this had helped them conquer their fear of guns somewhat.
That said, at the time, they’d done it by hitting the assailants with a car.
“…And so I’ll challenge them to a duel!”
“No, you can’t! You could die!”
Naturally, Miria tried to stop him, but Isaac’s resolve was pointlessly firm.
“Even if you know you’re going to die, there are some things you’ve just got to do. That’s the samurai way!”
“Ooh, Isaac… Then I’ll duel, too!”
“How do you think they got the kid down there, anyway?”
“You’d have to walk outside the train, wouldn’t…?”
As the black suits were staring at Czes’s body and talking to each other, something struck the backs of their heads.
“Wha—ghah…koff, kaff…gyagheeeee yee! ……Hee…! …Hee…”
White powder flew around the pair, and they’d drawn in big lungfuls of it. It was the special powder Isaac and Miria always used in robberies: a blend of lime and pepper. This time, in imitation of a duel, they’d packed the powder into gloves and thrown them at the men. The black suits had inhaled it directly, and they couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see. They had no hope of firing their guns. All they wanted right now were hands to cover their faces, and so they couldn’t hold on to a weapon.
Rationally, they knew they mustn’t let go of their weapons, but they also just couldn’t take it. They fumbled the tommy guns, dropping them.
When the wind from the window dispersed the lime and they finally started to feel better, what awaited the two black suits was two outlaws, pointing their own machine guns at them.
Leveling the Chicago Typewriters, the pair delivered the most unjust line imaginable:
“We challenge you to a duel!”
“Yes, we’ll start when the coin hits the ground!”
Two individuals holding machine guns were challenging unarmed opponents to a duel.
“Miria, I don’t have any coins.”
“You’re right! Say, do you have a coin?”
Miria tried asking the black suits, but Isaac hastily canceled her request:
“Miria, no! Just try borrowing a coin from these guys! If we win, we’ll be skipping out on a loan! No gunman’s pride would allow a thing like that!”
“Oh, yes, that’s true! Let’s make a noise using something else, then!”
After giving it a little thought, Isaac spoke quietly:
“Right. In that case, the sound of this machine gun will signal the start of the duel.”
“Yes, that’s perfect!”
Realizing that these two idiots were serious, the black suits cried and apologized and begged for forgiveness.
Having shut the black suits into the neighboring third-class compartment, Isaac and Miria returned to the room.
“All right, where’s this child?”
“They were talking about something over by the window.”
“I see! I bet they hung the kid upside down…”
“Meanies!”
Isaac and Miria hastily looked out the window, then found themselves speechless. What they saw was Isaac’s friend. More accurately, it was the boy they’d just met, whom Isaac and Miria had arbitrarily decided was their friend. The small body that was caught beside the wheels, the tragically altered corpse that was missing its right arm and both legs, belonged to Czeslaw Meyer.
I swear, you never know what’s going to end up being lucky in this world. Who’d have thought my plans for when I got nabbed by the cops or the mafia would come in handy on a train like this…
As Rachel gazed at her jagged, sharpened nail, she was grateful for the good fortune of her continued survival. Sitting down on the connecting platform between the second- and third-class carriages, she looked up at the slice of sky that was visible between the cars.
After being captured by the black suits, Rachel had taken advantage of the guards’ disappearance to cut her ropes, then managed to escape by going out the window and traveling underneath the train. She’d also undone the ropes of the two others who’d been tied up there—the girl with glasses over an eyepatch and her companion—and she wondered whether they were doing all right. Unfortunately, even if Rachel was able to worry about other people, she didn’t have the wherewithal to go save them now.
“Ughk…”
Fierce pain ran through her leg. It was the wound she’d gotten from being sniped when she’d saved that mother and daughter. The bullet had torn the outside of her thigh, greatly reducing her physical capabilities. For the moment, she’d managed to stop the bleeding, but she was still in severe pain.
Unless she happened to find a doctor or something, the only thing to do was rest quietly for a little while. Rachel drew a deep breath, then opened the door from the connecting platform to enter the third-class carriage. She needed to find a room without enemies and lie down…
Her irritability was growing along with her pain, and the voice that blared out behind her was all too sudden:
“D-d-don’t move! You maggot!”
When she turned, she saw a familiar face.
A man with a little mustache and a face like a pig’s. The man who’d been in the dining car—Rachel’s sworn enemy—stood there.
In an extremely unpleasant twist, the mustachioed man held a rifle.
“Huh, what’re you…? A girl?”
The man’s eyes held a vague contempt, but he kept the gun’s muzzle fixed on Rachel.
Although there was no way she could have known, the rifle the mustachioed man held had belonged to the white suits. The pervert Chané had killed had been carrying it; the man with the little mustache had gotten the gun from the man’s corpse, which had been lying in front of a janitor’s closet. Chané hadn’t bothered to take the guns from all the people she’d defeated. As a result, this one was now in the mustachioed man’s hands.
“Huhn! You must be with those white suits. Admit it! Oh, I know: Everyone walking around bold as brass on this train, in this situation, is a scoundrel!”
Saying something that was, in a way, correct, the man with the little mustache edged closer to the stowaway.
After being bounced from the dining car by Isaac, Jon, and the others, he’d wandered around in abject terror. Then, just when his reason had almost reached its limit, he’d gotten his hands on a weapon. It was likely that his basic personality had a lot to do with it as well, but warped thoughts had begun to eat away at him. He’d become obsessed with the idea that he had to kill somebody—somebody who was trying to kill him. He’d been lurking in the car for a while now, searching for someone he thought he’d be able to do in. He’d let the terrifying man in white and the brown-skinned giant pass right by, and the woman in white had run off before he could call to her.
Now he’d finally found a sacrifice to appease his heart. Even if he understood that Rachel wasn’t one of the white suits, at this point, it was probably impossible for him to simply lower his gun.
“I know. My ideas have never been
wrong before. Look what a success I’ve made of my life, based on that conviction. There’s no way in Hades I’m going to let scum like you end that for me now!”
Growing sad, Rachel looked up into empty space.
Talk about irony. I finally get an excuse to deck this guy, and he has a gun… And I’ve got a fresh wound in my leg.
Under the circumstances, she couldn’t afford to make the man angry, but even so, she had to say something sarcastic.
“You’ve never been wrong? You mean that accident wasn’t a mistake?”
“…?”
“The train accident. Ten years ago. You’re telling me that was scheduled? You ignored the technicians’ advice, and when the thing actually happened, it was all the technicians’ fault? Are you saying that’s right? Stuff like that? Is that really, truly what you think?”
At those words, the lunacy in the mustachioed man’s eyes faded. What appeared in its place was a rational, clear intent to kill.
“You. How do you know about that? Who are you?”
Ordinarily, if he’d been confronted with the facts like this, he would probably have been able to call it nonsense and leave it alone. One person kicking up a fuss now wouldn’t be enough to bring the facts to light. However, under these circumstances, where nobody was able to make calm decisions, the comment had been far too dangerous.
“To think you’d drag out my—or rather our—disgrace at this late date! I don’t know who you are, but you really must be one of the white suits’ friends. I’ll tell them you were, at any rate.”
Slowly, the barrel of the rifle turned to point between Rachel’s eyes.
In the midst of that hopeless situation, for some reason, there was a sad smile on her face.
“You know, this may actually have been payback. Payback for having stolen all those rides, for constantly stomping all over the railway’s pride.”
“Stealing rides? Hunh. Scum does tend to accumulate slippery crimes.”
“So at least now, at the very end, I’d like to die at the hands of the train. To be killed by somebody who gives everything in his work to the rails, as a proxy for the train itself—”
“Huh? Are you begging for your life? Either way, I work with trains, so I’ve got more than enough right to—”
As the man with the little mustache said this, he steadied his aim, slowly placing his finger on the trigger.
However, ignoring the mustachioed man’s words and actions, Rachel yelled fiercely:
“So hurry, hurry up and kill me! Before this whiskered pig can do it! Kill me! Kill me! Red monster—no—Conductor!”
The man with the little mustache didn’t understand what her words meant, and for a moment, his trigger finger hesitated.
The next instant, both the man’s shoulders began to creak, setting up a terrific noise. At the same time, pain of a kind he’d never experienced slammed directly into his brain. Even without seeing his shoulders, he understood what was happening: Somebody had grabbed them from behind. When, screaming from the pain, he managed to turn his eyes to his own shoulder, he saw fingers, sunk impossibly deep into his flesh.
The reaction made him drop the gun in spite of himself. If things had gone just a little wrong, with momentum like that, it wouldn’t have been at all odd for him to pull the trigger. However, luckily for Rachel, the rifle fell to the floor without spitting fire.
“Gawah… Gwaaaah, AAAaaah, ubugh!”
The sensation that assailed him seemed to have gone beyond pain and turned into nausea. Tears streamed from the mustachioed man’s eyes, and something like gastric fluid was beginning to dribble from his mouth and nose.
Then, with a dull noise, both his shoulders jolted and slumped. The sheer strength of the grip had forcibly dislocated the joints.
“!”
Unable even to scream, the man with the little mustache lost consciousness instantly. The way he passed out made him look almost like an electrical appliance with a blown fuse, and it wouldn’t have been strange for a bystander to have heard a click.
His body fell, hitting the floor face-first. A man stood beside it.
The conductor, bathed in the bright-red blood of his victims, was looking down at the mustachioed man, quietly.
Lowly conductors like us have it rough because of guys like this.
After successfully duping the engineers, Claire returned to the rear cars; looking through a window in the dining car revealed the passengers tying up surviving black suits. A glance at the corridor showed several white suits trussed up the same way. Apparently, while Claire’s attention had been elsewhere, the situation had begun to resolve itself.
At any rate, he didn’t think there had been any deaths among the regular passengers.
In order to check on that, Claire made his way back to the conductors’ room one more time. But along the way he’d spotted a suspicious whiskered fat guy with a rifle and the ride-stealing girl from a little while ago.
At first, he’d watched the scene unfold from the shadows of the connecting platform, but he’d found himself getting angrier and angrier at Mr. Whiskers, so he’d decided to help the ride-stealing girl. He seemed to have made it just in the nick of time, right before the trigger was pulled. Whistling at his own excellent timing, Claire thought about what to do with the mustachioed man.
I guess I’ll drop him off the train. He’ll survive if he’s lucky.
Casually thinking something horrendous, Claire approached, intending to pick up the man’s body.
Behind him, a voice that managed to be commanding even as it shook called to him:
“No… Hold it!”
The masculine-sounding words had been delivered in a soprano voice. He turned. The ride-stealing girl stood there, holding the rifle at the ready.
“Get away from that man! Don’t kill him!”
On hearing what she said, Claire’s shoulders slumped, mystified.
“This is the guy who was about to kill you… And relax; I’m not going to do anything to you.”
Does this woman have a personality like mine, maybe? Is she positive she can’t die? If so, I can understand this contradiction, why she’d try to save her own enemy. That thought abruptly came into Claire’s head, but from the look of the woman’s face, that wasn’t it: She’d broken out in a cold sweat.
“You’re a weird one. First you tell me to kill you, then you tell me not to kill some other guy…”
“Not just him. Don’t kill anybody else on this train! No more! If you’re going to kill, then kill me and let that be the end of it!”
The woman in coveralls spoke vehemently. With a frown, Claire asked her a question:
“Why? Why would you go that far?”
Claire looked into Rachel’s eyes. His own still held that inhuman light—and while they did scare Rachel, she answered him without flinching.
“My dad was a railroad technician. He loved trains, and so do I; we’re crazy about them! We probably like them a lot more than we like people!”
Is her dad the technician she was talking to this whiskered pig about?
Claire thought this, but he didn’t say it; he just took in her words, quietly.
“And so, so, so, so! Don’t sully it! Don’t sully the pride of the people who built this train, or the pride of the train! Don’t stain this train, or the rails, or the people, with anyone else’s blood!”
Before she knew it, Rachel had begun to cry. Claire watched her, silently, but before long, he spoke softly.
“‘Don’t sully its pride,’ huh? I never thought I’d hear that from a fare-dodger.”
“Yeah, you’re right. That means we’re guilty of the same crime.”
At her words, Claire’s mouth warped hugely. Entertained and delighted, he turned his back on the ride-stealing girl.
“Murder and ride-stealing are the same, huh? Wow. You really are a strange one, lady.”
At that point, finally, Rachel realized it, too: The man in front of her, the one she’d thought
was a monster, was human, not so very different from herself. She really should have picked up on it when she managed to have an ordinary conversation with him, but her heart hadn’t had anything like that kind of leeway. Now, because he had smiled, she’d finally managed to regain that slight composure.
“Unbelievable. For a while now, you’ve just kept giving me reminders… That I’m a conductor, I mean.”
Muttering quietly, Claire put a hand into his coat and drew out a little scrap of paper. More than half of it was stained red.
“It’s a ticket. Take it. Your name isn’t on the passenger list, but tell ’em the conductor must have made a mistake, and stick to your guns. Nobody’s going to object. Oh, and keep quiet about my being the conductor, all right?”
Letting the scrap of paper flutter to the floor, he began to walk away, deeper into the car.
“You’re a pretty amazing lady, too, you know that? If I hadn’t met the girl with the knives, I might have fallen for you instead. Well, if it’s meant to happen, we’ll probably meet again.”
As he said something incomprehensible, his back got farther and farther from Rachel.
“H-hang on a minute.”
“Don’t worry. It looks like I won’t have to kill anybody else. The only people I killed were black suits and white suits. I haven’t laid a finger on the passengers. That would have been putting the cart before the horse.”
“Liar! You—just a little while ago, that kid—”
When she’d gotten that far, Rachel realized something. If she remembered right, that boy had been tied…just under this car.
The moment she stopped speaking, Claire spoke as if he’d remembered, too.
“Ah! Right, that’s right. I forgot. No, his situation’s a bit complicated. Agh, what a pain; just ask the guy in person, would you?”
“What are you talking about?! That kid’s long d…”
Ignoring Rachel’s words, Claire pulled open a nearby door. It was the door of the room where he’d tortured Czes a short while earlier. And what he saw inside was—
1931 The Grand Punk Railroad: Express Page 13
