by J. R. Rain
“A most appealing course of action,” I say, mimicking his flair for exposition. Or trying to.
He raises his eyebrows.
“Too much?” I ask.
“Un peu.” He smiles.
Right. Dial it back a notch. I need to stop by the commode to get rid of the mint julep, but once that’s taken care of, we make our way downstairs and out onto the street. Delacroix travels light, having all his possessions close at hand in a large pack, which he carries over one shoulder. I’m not quite sure where he managed to get an entirely different (and less conspicuous) suit from, since his pack doesn’t look large enough to hold two full outfits, nor does it appear even remotely full. Well, if magic can make me tolerate sun, I’m sure it can do stuff with his clothes.
Our attempt to book passage on the next train north hits a snag when the man behind the counter informs me that the seats are all filled. Right as I’m about to sigh, he gives me a weasley smile.
“There are a few openings left, but they are premium seats. The fare is $100.”
Delacroix gasps.
Hmm. Guess that’s a shitload of cash back then. Or back, well, now. Ugh. I hate time travel. I lean on the counter and smile at the ticket seller as I pick up a scrap of paper.
“Here you are. $200,” I say while pressing the blank paper into his hand. “Two tickets please.”
Like an automaton, the man arranges our tickets and hands them over.
Delacroix gives me the side eye the whole time but doesn’t open his mouth until we walk away from the booth. “You influenced that man.”
“Perhaps.”
“That’s unethical.”
I glance at him. “Would you say extorting money for exorbitant train fare from people trying to flee war is ethical?”
“Well, no, but…” He trots to keep up with my purposeful stride.
“I rest my case, then.”
“Miss Moon?” asks Delacroix.
“Yes?” I push open a door and walk out onto a platform crowded thick with people, ‘nuts to butts’ as my dad would say. “Ugh. Is half of Richmond trying to leave?”
“I believe so.” Delacroix points back over his shoulder. “That didn’t seem terribly difficult for you. The influence part, I mean.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Did you perhaps do something to my mind as well? Is that why I couldn’t remember why I had been sitting at the edge of your bed?”
I flash my most innocent smile. “I did,” I said, and just as he’s about to protest, I suggest he forget the whole line of questioning, and believe he’s with me willingly and happily. I’m not here to mess around, not anymore, if I ever did. It is time to go home, even if that means using all my dark gifts to get there. Truth is, I’m not hurting this man. Sure, helping me went against his own moral code of helping the undead, but screw that. I’m not like the others. Not like them at all.
I draw a line, of course. I would never make a person, say, kill someone. Or hurt themselves or any others. But helping me get my butt home in time to catch the season finale of “The Voice,” well, that’s another matter altogether. And to see my kids, too, yeah, yeah. Of course, they didn’t know Mom had gone on the mother of all road trips. Hell, no one did. Hell, if I were to stay stuck here for decades, no one would notice my absence.
Anyway, after an irritating hour-long wait on the platform, we take our seats on a passenger car that verges on being overfull. I must have really goosed Delacroix, because he’s been smiling like a fool ever since our little exchange, so I have him tone it down a bit, and he does. Our ‘$100 tickets’ buy us hard wooden seats in a fairly well-appointed section. At least it’s nice for the era. It makes flying coach feel like first class, but it’s way better than walking—or riding a horse. Or sitting with the commoners, despite my happening to very much be one. Not that a horse would fancy having me near it anyway, judging by the reactions of the cows.
Oh, and this would be such a massive pain in the ass if I had to hide from the sun. There’s no Coppertone in this era. The train eventually gets underway with this huff-puffing noise that makes it sound like it’s barely able to move so many people at once. Within a few minutes, though, we’ve gotten up to a decent clip that’s probably faster than a person could run. Maybe. It has been a while since I had the mere foot speed of a mortal.
For almost two hours, the Virginia countryside rolls by… then we slow down. About sixty miles northwest of Richmond, we get stuck at the Gordonsville Station for several more hours where we wind up having to get off the Virginia Central RR and transfer onto the Orange & Alexandria RR. Things are a giant Charlie Foxtrot—otherwise known as a clusterfuck—because as it turns out, Delacroix and I literally caught the last train to Clarksville. The passengers are mostly Union refugees making a dash for Washington, DC—or Washington City, as everybody calls it in this time—before the actual shooting war breaks out.
Most of the O&A employees have quit, probably heading north to join the Confederate Army. So part of our wait is due to the lack of anybody to, like, actually run the train. Rumors float around the crowd of discontented and worried people saying with both armies amassing in our path, we’re not going to be allowed to leave the station at all. According to the waiter-carriers—African American women in long white dresses and straw sombreros who bring trays of food and drink, hoisting them up to our carriage windows—half the conductors and porters have deserted, along with the first engineering crew.
After hours of waiting, the station manager finally arrives with replacement workers he’s found among local retired railroad men; amazingly, the steam whistle blows, and we chug out of the little white frame station at about ten o’clock at night with a big white bedsheet flying from the smokestack as a flag of truce. I give Delacroix another mental prod to keep him at my side and loyal, then decide to try sending myself forward in time to skip the boredom.
And by that, I mean sleeping.
Between the rattling of the train, the hard wooden seats, and the embarrassingly loud grumbling of my tummy, I can’t fall asleep. No real surprise there for a creature of the night. Plus the press of sweaty bodies around us keeps reminding me how much blood is oh-so-close by for easy taking.
Alas, I’m on the Moon diet, so human blood’s right out. I’m trying to cut down on megalomaniacal evil.
To make matters worse, back in 1862, I’m like a total dude-magnet. You’d think none of the men on my car had ever seen a lady before the way they keep approaching me every time I open my eyes again to “make sure I was comfortable” and offer me pastilles or torpedo bottles of Horsford’s Acid Phosphate “to settle your innards for the journey.” Nothing says romance like “settling your innards.” Men from every time period are idiots, apparently. Naturally, this doesn’t exactly make me popular with the other women on the train. Go figure.
Bad as we have it, it’s worse for the African American passengers. A contingent of “freemen and freewomen” have left Northern Virginia for hopeful safety in the North. They’ve been relegated to the windowless and unventilated baggage car at the rear of the train (only about half of the trains I’ve seen so far have had a caboose; the ones I did see were mostly shanties on flatcars) where they made seats out of their luggage. The sweltering night in late July has to be torture to the living. It also doesn’t help that the train is creeping along at a pace I could outrun on foot, even in this stupid dress. Worse, we’re grinding to a stop every ten minutes or so.
The first I really know of a problem happens about three in the morning sometime after we’d passed through Bristoe Station, after long hours of staring at the ceiling and listening to people bitch and moan about everything from the heat to the slowness to gout. The train diverts off onto a railroad siding and comes to a stop.
Grumbling and murmuring gets louder among the passengers. Well over an hour after we stop moving, a rumpled and exhausted-looking older conductor limps on a cane into our car. “I’m sorry, folks. We’ve been ordered off
the main line by direction of the Army. We’re to wait here until they give the all-clear.”
Furious passengers mob him in seconds.
A man in a grey suit shakes his head. “What in tarnation is going on now?”
“Why are we stopping—again?” hollers a rotund guy with a giant white mustache.
“Can’t you see there are women and children in distress, fellow?” yells a thin fortyish man with a fancy walking stick, while brandishing it at the conductor. “I say, this is an outrage!”
I nearly add, “What in the Sam Hill is going on?” but someone beats me to it. Yeah, I need to get home. Stat.
Once the furor dies down enough for him to speak, the poor guy raises both hands. “There are troops blocking the line. They told us it was for our own safety—said there was shooting ahead, and they’ve been using the lines to move reinforcements in from the Manassas Gap.”
“Troops? Belonging to which army?” asks the man ahead of me, the one who’d been plying me with carbonated drinks all evening. He’s dressed like a natty dude from an old-fashioned musical. Even I heard the rumor that a huge Federal army under General McDowell had left Washington City intending to restore order and rescue us.
“The Army of the Shenandoah,” the conductor says, and a groan rises up from the passengers.
Ugh. I hang my head. Great. We’ve been cut off behind a Confederate army—as opposed to McDowell’s Army of Northeastern Virginia only a few miles away.
“So we’re in the hands of the rebels after all?” bellows the almost-spherical Monopoly guy with the white ’stache. “The ‘Little Napoleon.’”
The lady across the aisle from me faints. Two men rush to her aid and fan her. This seems a bit dramatic to me, considering we’ve been “in the rebels’ hands” pretty much ever since this whole mess had started.
“Where exactly are we?” asks someone else.
“Manassas Junction, ma’am.”
I’d forgotten most of what I’d learned in school about American history, but something about Manassas Junction doesn’t sound good to me…
On and off for the rest of the night, the puffing and rumbling of other trains go by in the dark, followed by the tramping of thousands of feet somewhere to the northwest. Every now and then, a rattling and jingling that makes me picture the Budweiser wagon erupts in the distance, and just as the sun comes up, a noise like echoing thunder rolls in from the same direction.
Heavy artillery. Followed by a lot more firecracker popping sounds. Guns, thousands of them.
Out of the blue, I remember where I’d heard the name Manassas: the first major battle of the Civil War—and I’m stuck right in the middle of it…
My life.
I barely have time to think shit before my body picks that moment to shut down for the morning.
Chapter Five
When I come to, I realize we are stranded a short distance outside a Confederate camp called Fort Pickens.
The soldiers had dug up earthworks like river levees on either side of the tracks, mounted with what looked like cannon muzzles, though my sharp vampiric vision tells me they are faking most of them with painted black logs. In one direction, the train depot towers overhead like a giant grain silo in a cluster of grimy buildings. On the other, spread what had been the fields and fruit orchards of a big plantation has been reduced to the muddy military camp of Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard, the so-called “Little Napoleon.”
Of course, none of this mattered to me since my only goal is to reach New York with Delacroix so I can get my undead ass home. Everyone else on the train has their own places to go. Mine just happens to be in the future.
Anyway, the day passes in a blur of “hurry up and wait” mode, like all those years ago—or technically a hundred and fifty years still far off in the future I guess—when I’d received my Federal Law Enforcement Training in Brunswick, Georgia.
After hours of skull-smashing boredom, the rest of the passengers are as dazed and hungry as I am. No one even asks about lunch. By two o’clock, the sun beating down makes it hot as balls inside the carriage, so no one offers any protest when the conductors evacuate us outside “for our own safety.” The roar of battle has grown louder and louder by the minute. Stray musket bullets occasionally whiz by from the direction of the hills surrounding the Bull Run Creek, and several had struck the side of our railroad car. From far away, it sounds like a big football crowd attacking each other with cap pistols and bottle rockets. The famous “rebel yell” echoes out of the distance like the yipping and howling of wolves. The sound reminds me of Kingsley.
I put on my sunglasses against the dazzling glare. And yes, such a thing does exist back then… or back now—damn time travel. Of course, people here call them “shooting glasses.” I’d found them in a little French import shop near the harbor in New Orleans. Oval lenses smoked an amber color make me look like Yoko Ono. At least, I think they do, since I’m not on speaking terms with mirrors.
Clouds of gunpowder-grey smoke billow above the trees, drifting lazily riverward before thickening into a smoggy haze.
“What in the name of the good Lord above is that?” gasps the fainting lady while tugging at my sleeve and pointing up at the sky over the battlefield. An object with the general shape of a light bulb hovers there catching the afternoon sun with a near-blinding glare of glittering silver.
“Why, that’s one o’ them new-fangled observation balloons, Mrs. McHenry,” says the soda-pop drinking gent, who pretty much has the shape of a bottle himself. “I heard President Lincoln was assigning them to all our armies, so we can scout out the enemy from the air. That’s why we’re going to win this fracas—superior modern technology.”
“But won’t the rebels just shoot it out of the sky?” asks the woman.
This idea seems to occur to the balloonist, too. No sooner had the question been asked, than the balloon drifts back off to the north and eventually disappears.
“We’re witnessing history being made before our very eyes, friends,” says another of the men, one who’d earlier told me he worked in sales of ladies’ sundries. “Johnny Reb will soon be in full-fledged retreat, and all this secession talk will be settled by sundown. It’s just a crying shame we don’t have a picnic hamper to watch it with.”
Actually, we’re witnessing bloodshed—and I can smell it without being able to see it.
Throughout all of this, passenger and livestock trains continue to pull up to the junction, and butternut-clad troops jump off the cars and rush to the battle. Crews then wait to collect a slow but steady stream of walking wounded arriving from the direction of the camp.
Of course, the scent of all that blood is driving Elizabeth crazy. She’s prodding me to go “succor” the wounded. I’m sure she couldn’t care less if these men live or die, but she wants to tempt me with human blood. I guess she figures if I’m around it enough I might lose control of myself and chow down.
It’s pretty tough when both the devil and the angel on your shoulders are urging you to do the same thing. What am I supposed to do, ignore the limping and bleeding soldiers, some of whom are covered in powder burns and obviously shell-shocked? Hell, most of them are just boys, little older than Tammy and Anthony. How could I not lift a finger to help them?
It’s obvious the train is going nowhere while this battle rages—and, by the way, it never did go anywhere, at least not until Federal forces recaptured the train yards many months later. In this case, most of the passengers traveled by coach to Arlington a few days after the battle, where they took ferries across the river to Washington City in exchange for Virginia civilians trapped behind Union lines.
Meanwhile, I’m feeling farther than ever from my goal of New York City. Elizabeth knows me too well for my own good, and after her needling at my motherly instincts, I find myself on autopilot walking over to the encampment, once I give Delacroix a mental prod to stay put.
And it all starts with a single involuntary step toward a wounded yo
ung man perched on the ledge of a dusty cattle car.
“Yesss, Sssamantha. You know you’re doing the right thing…”
Maybe I already salivated. Or maybe some hunger that burned in my eyes even through my shades spook him, because he trembles and flinches away from me, trying to hide his leg.
“Don’t worry, Private—I’m a trained nurse,” I say. Okay, that’s not strictly speaking true, but I figure anybody who’d completed a modern CPR and first aid course counts basically as a medical expert in the world of 1862. And before I’d left New Orleans, I’d assisted Lalie’s husband, Dr. James Bell, numerous times; in fact, I’d been the one to explain to him that infection was caused by the microscopic bacteria he referred to as “animalcules.”
“The doc says it’s just a flesh wound, ma’am. He sent all us walking wounded over to here so’s we can go back to Richmond on the train. He says there’s hospitals there’ll take us in.”
He had a Southern accent so broad and country, I have to work hard to understand him. Just like most wars, it seems, the farm boys serve in the ranks and do most of the dying while the wealthy city types and landowners buy themselves officers’ commissions and fancy uniforms.
As he speaks, a scattered line of other boys in butternut hobble up the railroad embankment, some using their muskets for crutches. A few have blood-soaked slings binding wounded arms or shoulders; others have crude bandages wrapped around their heads. Half will likely be dead from gangrene before they ever reach Richmond. I need iodine and plenty of it.
And even though it’s almost physically painful to tear myself away from so much sweet-smelling blood (some of it even left a sticky, glistening scarlet trail in the grass, for Chrissake), I realize I could do nothing here without some kind of medical supplies, and they seem to be in rather short supply.
I could, of course, change them all into vampires. Except that an army of the undead would turn the tide of the Civil War, and we can’t have that.
