Sully stepped over the coupling, righted the empty pot, then moved to the next one in line. Skin from his scorched palms stuck to the flywheel like bark on a flaying birch. Slag spewed down the slope.
While Jack leveled the first pot, Sully had slipped past it on the embankment side of the train. Had his timing been off by a hairbreadth, he would have been cooked by the soup from the second pot. As it was, the soles of his boots had melted through to his socks when he tiptoed over the spill, and the skin of his face was blistered by the radiant heat.
Shedding more skin, he discharged the next pot of slag, then the next, all the way down the line, working his way closer to the locomotive. As he finished each dump, he reached behind the flywheel and tugged loose a short length of neoprene tubing, disabling the pressurized brakes.
When Sully got back to the locomotive, he found Will dozing. As capable an engineer as Will—they often traded jobs to ease the boredom—he slipped the train into gear.
Will's body jerked and he opened his eyes.
"Relax, man," Sully said in a hoarse whisper, his gaze directed out the window. "I'll take her down."
Will nodded gratefully, thinking idly that Sully must be coming down with a cold. Maybe that was why he seemed so cranky all of a sudden. He glanced back along the flank of the train, intending to give his habitual wave to the dumper, but Jack was nowhere in sight. He leaned back and closed his eyes again.
When they'd gained some speed, Sully twisted a valve and gradually bled off the air brakes. Inside of a minute the train was doing twice its normal descent velocity and rapidly picking up speed.
Will opened his eyes. He looked up at Sully, whose face was still turned away, then out at the blurring nightscape. "Hey, man," he said, alarm skidding like an ice cube down the back of his neck. "You'd better slow her down."
Sully didn't respond. They had already topped thirty miles an hour, and at this rate they would easily double that speed before the track leveled out again.
Will started to get up, but Sully rounded on him and shoved him back in his seat.
Will was totally flabbergasted. "Have you gone fucking crazy?" he shouted over the deafening rumble of the train. "Slow us down!"
"She's mine, asshole," Sully said through puffy lips, and Will noticed then that his face was covered with blisters and his boots were steaming with smoke. And that was not Sully's voice. . .
But there was no time to argue or to ponder this bizarre transformation in his friend. Sully had lost his mind—that much was certain—and he was going to get them both killed if Will couldn't slow the train down. A quick glance outside told him that to jump would mean certain death. The rocky embankment sloped away at a treacherous angle on either side. His only chance was to stay with the train and pray that the brakes had enough juice to slow them down. There was a tricky spot back near the switch point, a tight curve where the train might derail at this speed. If he could make it past that, they'd be out of danger. Beyond the switch point the train would behave like a marble in a shallow bowl, rolling back and forth until friction ground it to a halt in the natural basin of the railyard.
Then Sully would have some tall explaining to do. If he was suicidal, he could fucking well do it on his own.
Working against the acceleration of the train, Will charged wildly at Sully, driving him backward into the controls. Apparently unaffected by the attack, Sully slammed a fist into Will's face, mashing the ball of his chin. Stunned, Will collapsed to the floor. Beneath his back the floorboards bucked and strained. He tried to sit up.
Then Sully was kneeling astride him, raising his fist like a bludgeon. The fist came down—and then Sully's eyes cleared. He gaped at Will like a man kicked awake from a nightmare.
"Wha-what. . . ?"
"Get off me!" Will howled. "Get off!"
Sully rolled into a corner and huddled there, taking blinking glimpses of the deadly situation he'd created.
He doesn't remember, Will thought as he lunged at the forward controls, and somehow that made this crazy situation all the more terrifying. He was totally out of it. It made him think of the first time he'd slept with Kelly, that period of temporal dislocation and the unexplained traces of their union.
Will tried the brakes. They were dead.
He shot a glance through the windshield. There was no speedometer on the train—under full power its top end was only twenty-two miles an hour—but he estimated their current speed at about fifty.
And they were coming into the curve.
"Brace yourself!" Will shouted, his voice all but swallowed in the clattering pandemonium of the train. "Brace yourself!"
Like a huge and remorseless hand, centrifugal force leaned against the inner flank of the train. Positioned over the inward wheels, Will felt their rumble cease as they parted company with the track.
We're going over!
There followed a sickening moment of what felt like free-fall; for a split second the rattling din of the train simply ceased, and all that was left was the eerie whine of the wind. In his mind's eye Will saw them going over the edge, like a runaway freight train in a Saturday afternoon western.
Kelly's face floated up in his mind, clean and beautiful, and in his extremity he cried her name.
He tensed for the impact. . .
Then the world was filled once again with the screeching Babel of friction, the tortured strain of the couplings, the bone-deep shudder of the train.
Gradually that tilting hand was withdrawn.
Will let out a triumphant whoop and scaled his way back to his feet. They were past the curve now and closing in fast on the switch point. They were still gaining speed, but the angle of the rightward track was not all that sharp. Once they blew past that they'd be fine—
The train veered left, toward the smelter.
Will swung on Sully in furious disbelief. "You didn't make the switch?!"
Sully climbed to his feet, bracing himself like a man in a falling elevator. At the sound of Will's voice, the white and confused horror in his face fell away, and he smiled.
"That's right, Bubba," he said.
Then he leapt through the open door.
"Sull-leeeeee!"
In the starlight Will caught a glimpse of his partner's body breaking apart on the rocks. Then it was gone.
Slack with horror, he stumbled to the control panel and began desperately working the levers. . . but it was pointless. The brakes were dead.
And now the smelter loomed into view.
Alternatives streaked through Will's mind like tracer bullets, all of them ending in catastrophe. Incredibly, the train was still gaining speed, and he'd already seen what would happen if he jumped.
There was only one hope, and it was a slim one.
Will threw himself into Sully's seat at the back of the cab. It was like a bus driver's seat, low and padded, bolted to the floor on a metal disk. There was a seat belt, old and frayed, and Will looped it around himself, his fingers fumbling before driving the tongue clasp home.
Seizing the armrests, he planted his boots on the floorboards and, through eyes as big as silver dollars, watched the smelter race toward him.
He prayed that the next set of pots had not yet been loaded.
* * *
The first man to spot the runaway was the transportation supervisor, Chet Spinrad. He glanced up the line and saw the yellow locomotive thundering out of the night toward him like a phantom. He couldn't believe his eyes.
"Ho-leee shitfire!"
He hauled out his walkie-talkie, thumbed the talk button, and jerked the mouthpiece to his chin. "Hey, Bernie!" he shouted, aware that his voice was scaling up the ladder into unintelligibility but unable to stop it. "Hey, Bernie, you readin'?"
Bernie was the slag skimmer; it was his job to load the pots. "Yeah, Chet. I'm here. Whatcha squawkin' abou—"
Bernie's voice was eaten by the roar of the train. It screeched past Chet not ten feet from where he was standing, tossing up cinders, rock
ing like an all-night disco. Chet caught a glimpse of the cab's interior, but he could see no one aboard.
"Get your ass out of the loading bay!" Chet bellowed when the train had passed. "There's a runaway comin', and it's movin' like a bat out of hell!" He began to sprint toward the smelter, his scuffed white hard hat jouncing on his head.
"Y'don't need to tell me twice," Bernie sent back. Then his voice got chewed up in static.
On board the train, Will braced himself. He had thought he might lose some of his speed on the flat, but it hadn't worked out that way. He was highballing now, sailing on air, and a terrible exhilaration suffused him. As he rounded the last bend before the loading bay he opened his mouth and screamed, a low curdling hoot that pitched upward into the shriek of a startled chimpanzee.
He closed his eyes—
And when he opened them again the smelter was gone and Kelly was there on the windshield, like a film projected on a movie screen. She had her back to him, and she was naked, her long hair loose, her head rolling erotically on the glistening shelf of her shoulders. This bizarre mind-camera panned down her back, and Will saw that she was not alone. There was a man beneath her, and she was riding him. He had time to think that the mind was a remarkable thing, throwing up such twisted images in this moment that was probably his last. Then the camera zoomed in on her partner's face. It was emaciated and pale—and it was looking straight at him, its yellow smile openly triumphant.
"She's mine now, asshole," the image said in an echo of Sully's words, and Will heard them not in the cab but in his head.
"Forever."
And in that instant Will knew it was him. It was the quad, and somehow he had made this happen. As if to confirm this awareness, the mind-camera pulled back, and Will saw his decrepit body, saw Kelly's lovely rump riding up and down on the ropy stump of his penis.
Forever, Will heard him say again.
Then the image vanished and the smelter was there. The train stormed into the narrow loading bay at eighty-three miles an hour. Braked and bolstered, the next eight slag pots stood directly in its path.
And they were full.
The locomotive's blunt metal snout struck the coupling bar of the first railcar, the impact ramming the line of pots twenty feet farther down the track. Slag sloshed out in fiery combers, splattering the tracks and the steel-beamed ceiling, causing flashfires all up and down the platform. Still screaming, Will shot forward to the limits of his seat belt. In the instant of collision he believed it would hold, and he enjoyed a fleeting moment of hope—
Then the worn fabric gave with a dry farting sound, and he was bursting through the windshield. He struck it head first, and the shower of glass turned to stars in the tunnel of his vision. Semiconscious, he flipped once in the air and landed on his back by the tracks. There was pain and steely thunder, and he felt like a bug in a rolling barrel—but he was alive. The ground was beneath him and he was raw with pain and he thought, Ha! You didn't get me you crazy cunt quad. You didn't get me!!
The world stopped reeling, and Will sat up. He'd been thrown about eighteen feet. Something knifed him in the side—busted ribs—and his neck creaked unstably as he swiveled it around to look.
The train was still moving, the empty pots piling up one on top of the next, the entire row twisting from back to front.
If he didn't get up and get moving, he'd be crushed.
He scrambled to his feet, aware that his left leg was broken but no longer feeling the pain. In hobbled strides he started away. Men were appearing on the opposite side of the tracks, rushing toward him to help. He threw out his arms to them.
But suddenly they were shrinking back, their white eyes darting from Will to a point above and behind him.
A pocket of scalding air struck Will Chatam from behind—and then he knew why the men had backed away.
The whine of sprung gears filled the narrow aisle, muting the thunder of the train. Will lurched forward, his mind white with panic, managing barely a step before the first meteorites of slag sizzled through the back of his work coat. The pain, exquisite beyond the capacity of his mind to comprehend it, cranked the white of his panic to a blinding, sun-blasted chromium.
There was no thought.
No time.
The lip of a curling wave of slag struck Will Chatam in the back of the neck and seemed to freeze him there. He opened his mouth to scream, and a column of liquid fire boiled out. His eyes fixed for a blank instant on the unbelieving eyes of Hector Witty, a crane operator who had rushed out to witness the commotion. At the Ledo later that night Hector would tell a spellbound circle of listeners that those eyes had glowed hellfire red before running like half-congealed egg white down the doomed trainman's cheeks. It was as if, before erupting in a grisly lava burst, his skull had filled up with slag.
A split second later Will Chatam was gone, a toppling pillar of fire.
THIRTY-SIX
The candles had burned themselves down to stubs, and now Kelly snuffed them out, the act somehow doubling her worry. Will was an hour late. Not a long time in ordinary terms, and there were at least a dozen harmless explanations for his tardiness. Maybe his relief had been late, or there had been some trouble with the train. Will often complained about the antique equipment they were forced to work with. Or maybe he'd had a problem with his truck.
But it was unlike him not to call or to have someone at the smelter do it for him. And tonight was to have been a special night. It was the first day of the March break, and Kelly had promised him a late candlelit dinner. She'd even drawn them a hot bath, as Will had done on the night she accepted his proposal. He had said he'd be home on time even if it meant skipping his last run.
Kelly went to the kitchen window and looked out. Nothing. The hill was dark, no sign of Will's truck in the turnaround. She could see Chainsaw out there, snoozing on the stoop, but that was all.
As she turned away, a flicker of light caught her eye and she swung back. . . but it was only a distant streetlight, the illusion of movement created by the wind in the trees.
Kelly's worry turned abruptly to fear. The simple explanations fell away like dressings from a terrible wound, and she was suddenly certain that Will was hurt. Or worse.
Gooseflesh pebbled her skin as she hurried to the kitchen phone. She was wearing the mink-colored teddy Will liked so much, and now she felt naked, stupidly vulnerable and exposed. She paged through her personal directory to S, followed her finger to "smelter," then placed a hand on the phone.
It rang, and Kelly's hand flinched away. A cold sweat stood out on her arms, and her heart broke into a lurching stride that thundered in her ears. She giggled at her own raw nerves. Then she snared the receiver.
"Will?"
"No, ma'am. This is Chet Spinrad. I work with Will out here at Nickel Ridge. I got your number from his mom—"
"Is he all right?"
For a moment there was no response, and Kelly thought she might scream. Then: "There's been an accident, Miss. A terrible accident. I thought you might've heard about it already on the news. I—"
"Is he all right?"
"I'm sorry, Miss Wheeler," Spinrad said, "but Will Chatam is dead. It was a runaway train. He got caught in the slag."
Kelly looked up from the phone, her entire being screaming out a furious denial. Her gaze settled on the window—and suddenly there were headlights at the top of the hill, starting down, and a triumphant laugh escaped her, an abrupt barking sound that hurt her throat. Sick fucking joke! she wanted to holler into the phone, but relief left her mute and she slammed down the handset instead.
Kelly ran to the window. It was a Blue Line cab, and now she had her explanation. Will's truck had refused to start—he'd commented only recently that he was going to have to drop a new starter into it—and he'd grabbed a cab home. He was climbing out now, paying his fare; she could see his hunched silhouette in the porch light. She didn't know who the crackpot on the phone was, but she hoped someone kicked his lying ass.
Kelly waited until Will had started up the walk, then darted to the door. When she swung it open, swooning with relief, she found Sam Gardner standing there, blushing at her state of attire and yet solemn, so dreadfully solemn.
"I heard about it on the news," Sam said. Chainsaw was nuzzling his gloved hand. "I'm sorry, Kelly. More than you can know." He touched Kelly's arm. "Can I come in? I've got some things I need to tell you."
Kelly fainted.
The first clear message to reach Kelly's brain was that she'd had a terrible dream. She'd dozed off in Will's lap and dreamed that he'd been killed in an accident at work. Crazy. She could feel the firmness of his leg beneath her head, the gentle stroke of his fingers in her hair.
The next thing that registered was pain. She had a walloping headache that radiated outward from a single throbbing focus at the back of her head.
She opened her eyes and looked up at Sam, and for a mad instant her brain tried to rearrange his features into Will's.
Then she remembered.
"Oh," Kelly said and sat up too fast, adding a new percussion instrument to the furious ensemble in her head. She lifted a hand to the back of her skull. There was a tender, spongy knot back there. It felt as if it stuck out a mile.
"You bumped your head on the floor," Sam said. "I carried you in here." They were on the living room couch.
"Is it true?" Kelly whispered, the pieces of the evening's puzzle lumping cruelly together in her mind.
Sam nodded.
And then Kelly was in his arms, clutching him, the depth of her grief filling him with a ghastly emptiness. More than anything he wanted this girl in his arms. He could admit that now, after all these years. There was nothing more to lose. He wanted this gift in his arms. . . but not like this. Never like this.
Kelly buried her face in his neck and bawled, there was no other word for it. She bawled and shuddered and soaked his collar. Sam held her, soothing her as best he could. After a while, once the worst of the tempest had passed, she lay like a rag doll in his arms. It was like holding a beautiful child.
Captain Quad Page 31
