The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  But it wasn’t true, Faye thought. The railroad was swallowing the land. The train was inevitable.

  A lot of things were inevitable that none of them ever talked about.

  (They held together like they did because to break would mean being swept back.)

  “It will come,” said Frank, his face grim.

  “Trains will be bad for business,” said Joseph.

  “It can’t crawl up mountains,” Faye said. “Dogs can.”

  Elijah said, “They told me they can bring goods from California in three days, right through the mountains.”

  Fa Liang flinched.

  Maria whistled under her breath.

  “All the land?” Faye asked.

  “They want to build through the north side,” Elijah said, “so the station will be part of River Pass.”

  Faye’s stomach sank.

  Towns battled for the railroad, because the miles between the train and the city would fill with hotels and saloons and traders. If River Pass had gotten word of this, not Elijah nor anyone else would be keeping the railroad out.

  When she looked at Frank, he was watching her, his face a mirror of her dread.

  “Have they spoken to the town?” Fa Liang asked, in the tone of a man who knew what was coming.

  “They’re seeing the mayor tomorrow,” said Elijah. “It’s River Pass, or Green River. Our land decides.”

  Joseph crossed his arms. “And what would we do?”

  Elijah shrugged. “We could travel northwest, start again. There are places that still need messages taken.”

  “You have a sweet feeling about how people will take us,” Faye said.

  “If we had that money, people might,” said Fa Liang.

  “I could have more money than Croesus,” Joseph said. “People won’t ever forget what I am.”

  (Maria looked up at him, a second too long.)

  “Then they’re small people,” Elijah said.

  “There are more small people than the other kind,” said Faye.

  Elijah looked at her, but didn’t argue. He was good-hearted, but he had eyes, and he knew how they were all received sometimes, even in River Pass.

  Elijah’s hair was going gray, and when he smiled at Faye, the corner of his mouth disappeared into the deep lines carved by the sun.

  “Then we won’t sell,” he said.

  Joseph sucked in a breath.

  Frank unclenched his fist from around his necklace; his fingers brushed Faye’s.

  Maria’s face was drawn. “What will you tell the town?”

  “That Union Pacific should look at Carson’s place, and talk to him instead.”

  He didn’t look worried enough. He looked like he was doing business, and not handling a monster whose iron teeth chewed right through men. He looked like a man who had never been in fear for his life.

  They sat for a little while in silence.

  Fa Liang left first—in a hurry, like he planned to clear out while he could.

  Faye couldn’t blame him. It was all she could do not to race the mile to the cabin, pack, and strike out north before dawn could find them.

  Frank must have known how she felt; his laced hands were pressed to his stomach.

  Joseph left, after passing close by Maria, and looking down at her with some silent conversation that closed out the rest of them. After he was gone, Maria laid her apron across the back of her chair and went upstairs, brushing her skirt like she could brush the railroad away.

  Faye and Frank stood in tandem.

  At the threshold, Elijah held out a hand without quite touching her elbow.

  (He’d never touched her, not once in three years. He was the sort who didn’t presume.)

  “It will all come out right,” Elijah said.

  He was wrong, but still, she wanted to believe him.

  She hoped the railroad men felt the same, when he tried to talk them out of it.

  In the cool dark outside, Frank said, “We’ll never see a fair day again, will we.”

  “No,” she said.

  The dark swallowed the echoes that should have been there; the words pressed in like the nights they’d spent in ditches with one blanket, whispering into the dirt to make sure the other was still breathing.

  (The Mormon school had taught them plenty by accident; they knew each other’s voices above a hundred strangers, through a hundred feet of earth.)

  There was a trail between the big house and theirs, a web worn into the earth from people going back and forth like family. Fa Liang had one from his house to theirs, to pick up Faye and head to the barn for dog racing.

  He delighted in maneuvers, pivoting full around on just one leg; Faye delighted in how fast a dog could cross terrain.

  The dogs were too useful, she thought. River Pass had to get messages across the mountains. The town might not care for them, but they’d stand up for the dogs.

  You always wanted Elijah to be right; she’d even wanted to believe him when he said this could be home.

  Faye and Frank had come to Elijah’s by accident.

  They’d escaped from the Mormon school in winter—light snow before a blizzard, when they’d be harder to follow—and struck out for home.

  They made it.

  Fa Liang found them while he was testing Dog 2; they were both nearly asleep, he said later, and frozen through.

  She knew how to look for shelter, how to keep away from the worst of the wind. She knew how to find them enough to survive on—they’d lasted weeks that way. But she’d forgotten how many it takes to keep warm in a cold that deep. (For that you need a family.)

  There hadn’t been time to fetch help—snow was coming, and it would have been too late.

  So Fa Liang had draped them over the dog and taken them straight to the house.

  “You’re welcome here,” Elijah had said that first night. “Consider this place your home.”

  “It is,” said Frank.

  Faye set her jaw and waited for Elijah to strike, to tell them to get out.

  But he only said, “Fair enough,” and looked at Faye, the closest anyone had come to apologizing for anything.

  “We’ll see,” Faye said, and Elijah smiled.

  Frank loved the idea of a service too useful to run out of town, and he and Joseph struck up pretty well, and he treated the place like it really was home.

  Faye was waiting for a sign to move. It hadn’t yet come, that was all.

  If she got fond of the dogs, it was just from being there so long; if 2 was her favorite, no one faulted her.

  Dog 2 was safer than the prototype; Faye’s only burn was a thin line across one wrist, where her arm had hung too close to the shell, and Frank’s just a smudge burned into his stomach, where he laced his hands, sometimes.

  When the railroad wants land the owner’s unwilling to sell, it sends a man like Michael Grant to file with the clerk’s office a finding that upon inspection, those acres, a gift from the United States, are being mismanaged.

  Grant is tall and clean-shaven and has a new coat, and everyone gets friendly with a man who has money to burn.

  Before long, he admits who he is. He says, “Shame about that Pike homestead. Seems we’ll be moving on to Green River.”

  Word spreads—they’re close, held back by so little, it wouldn’t take any work at all, the railway will pay Elijah a king’s ransom, who does he think he is to cut the town out of its chance.

  A town beside a railway town never makes it. It’s the train, or nothing, everyone knows.

  (Michael Grant might have said this himself, to Harper at the general store, who speaks to everyone and never quite remembers the words aren’t his.)

  When the railroad wants to make sure, they call the residents “unsavories,” and remind God-fearing folk what happens if that kind are allowed to stay long.

  It’s easy work. Most people never forget their little fears.

  Elijah, Maria, and Frank took the wagon to River Pass a few days later—d
ry goods, oil for the dogs.

  They came back too early.

  Faye saw the line of Frank’s shoulders, and knew something terrible had happened.

  She swung down from the dog, locked the engine off.

  Elijah was white as a ghost.

  They weren’t speaking.

  “Joseph,” she called, “Fa Liang. Trouble.”

  Fa Liang came from the barn, and Joseph from the smithy, and watched them.

  “We should run,” said Fa Liang, so quiet only Faye could hear.

  (She agreed. The town knew about the train. There was no good news anymore.)

  In the yard, the horses were specked with foam and breathing like they’d run for their lives.

  Elijah took Maria’s hand. Someone’s hand was shaking.

  Neither of them looked at Joseph.

  “We’ve agreed it’s wise to marry,” Elijah said.

  They went to church early Saturday, before parishioners were awake to object.

  They were without Frank, who didn’t like the idea of home being empty, and Joseph, who didn’t like the idea.

  As it turned out, neither she nor Fa Liang were legal enough to sign the witness line, so they had to wake Susannah Pell.

  “It’s no trouble,” she said, when Elijah apologized. “I wondered if you were in love, you had that look about you. And it’s good to see this for you, what with Grant telling people—”

  The father cleared his throat; she said, “Congratulations,” set down the pen, stepped back.

  Elijah glanced at Faye, then Maria, her hand in his, standing like a soldier in a black dress.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  With someone of the right temper, you could work in quiet for a long time. It was the thing Faye liked best about Western Fleet; it was the reason she’d been able to stay here as long as they had.

  But they told stories, in the barn mending dogs by lamplight, or on the porch in summer, when it was too hot to be in the barn any longer.

  Joseph had his Freedmen’s Bureau schoolbook, so well-read the binding had gone, and he recited from memory.

  “Awful lot about forgiveness,” Faye said once.

  “It’s all forgiveness,” Joseph said. “Mercy.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Frank.

  (Maria lent Joseph her Bible; he’d handed it back, said, “I’d just as soon not.”

  No one questioned.)

  Fa Liang told them about dragons and giants and the bird that tried to fill up the ocean. Once or twice he stopped halfway, saying, “My brother told it better,” going quiet after.

  He’d left the Central Pacific because he’d lost his brother to a blast, clearing rock for the rails.

  Faye wanted to wrap her hand around Frank’s wrist, like when they were little, every time she thought about it.

  Maria sang in a sweet soprano that floated when it was cheerful, and settled on their skin if it was sad.

  She didn’t often seem sad, save on long nights where there was nothing left but to look at the sky and be mournful. Then she sang, voice trembling, eyes on the stars.

  Faye and Frank never offered anything. The few stories they knew they held like secrets, like they’d need them someday, when it was time to move on.

  “Bury me not, on the lone prairie,” Elijah sang sometimes, when the others had fallen silent, his arms behind his head, face turned to the moon.

  Faye tried not to look at him; when he sang it, her shoulders ached from not looking at anything.

  After the wedding, they rode home in silence. Elijah looked older now that the worst was coming true. Maria looked determined not to let home fall to pieces.

  It wouldn’t, if the law held, Faye thought. It was hard to be sure; the laws changed so easily when people’s hates built up against you.

  They came back too late for supper, which Faye thought was for the best; when she met Frank in the yard, she could see Joseph already headed to his cabin, as if he’d waited to see them coming before he lost his heart for it.

  “This won’t be enough,” Frank said, when he met her.

  Faye said, “Let’s go home.”

  They lay awake a long time, each looking at the other sometimes as if checking their worries in a mirror, until at last they slid into sleep.

  (They didn’t have the same worries; it was the only way they’d ever been different.

  Frank touched her wrist whenever they reached their cabin, as if he was afraid she’d keep going.)

  The boy from River Pass rode Dog 3 back to Western Fleet near midnight, six hours ahead of schedule.

  Then he shouted them awake about the fire.

  At the first scream, Faye and Frank were pulling on boots; you ended up a light sleeper, after as much running as they’d done.

  They ran, breathing in time—they’d done this, too—and reached the yard ahead of Joseph and Fa Liang.

  The barn was a tower of orange and smoke and a horrifying crackle as the heat started to do its work on the dogs.

  For a moment they faltered.

  Then Maria shouted, “Right, move,” and they jerked into action like a spell had broken.

  Frank ran for the water pump. Joseph dragged the hose from the horse barn, and as they attached it, Maria was enlisting the boy from River Pass (Tom, maybe, Faye couldn’t think) and the boy from the Express in a bucket chain from the kitchen.

  As soon as the doorway was damp, Fa Liang and Elijah and Faye used the wood-chopping stump to break through and run for the dogs.

  Fa Liang and Elijah grabbed the two closest to the doors. Dog 5 was crushed under a beam, but Dog 2, parked farthest back, was still whole, and glowing underneath a canopy of fire.

  “It’s not worth it!” Fa Liang was already shouting, and Elijah called, “Faye! It’s a goner, leave it!”

  Frank, outside, was screaming, “FAYE!”

  She stumbled, but didn’t stop. They needed as many dogs as they could save.

  They weren’t mounts, now. They were weapons.

  She shrank back from the walls as the heat rolled out, but she reached Dog 2 at last.

  As she grabbed for a canvas, as she spat on her palms and turned the key until smoke rose between her fingers, as she threw the drape over and rode out with her back blistering, she never heard the sound of the fire.

  She only heard Frank, screaming her name over a hundred other voices.

  Elijah pulled her from the rider’s seat, the canvas around her like a shroud.

  But Frank was the one who carried her up the stairs of the big house, who cut Faye’s shirt off her back—she bit down on something and screamed, hoped Maria put a belt in her mouth and she hadn’t severed her tongue.

  “Did the dog make it?” she asked later, when she was in a tub, and Maria was making something with mortar and pestle, and Frank was rinsing her with cool water.

  Frank snorted, said thickly, “You would worry about that now.”

  Even in pain, she knew that wasn’t fair; dimly she thought, I’ve always forgiven you, when you worried about what you loved.

  “Not as bad as it could be,” said Maria, bandaging her ribs. “It might blister, but we were quick, and your skin is thick there.”

  Faye never thought she’d thank the Mormon school for those scars.

  Her hand was another story—there was a diamond key mark burned into her palm, as deep as Frank’s. Some things were past healing.

  “It’s all right,” Marie said. “The wound is clean, it will be no trouble. I’ve brought you some clean things.”

  “Whose?”

  “A wife has ways,” Maria said, with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

  But she was right—a clean wound hurt less, once the shock wore off. After Marie helped her into Elijah’s clothes, Faye was calm enough to say, “Let’s go down.”

  “Good,” said Marie, fastening Faye’s belt. “They’re waiting.”

  Frank was at the door, and he walked so close Faye thought it was a good thing she had
n’t burned her shoulder.

  The others stood as she came in—even Tom, green with fright.

  “I’m all right,” she said as they took their seats. (Maria sat next to Joseph.) “How are the dogs?”

  “Fine,” said Fa Liang. “Dog Two got out all right. He just needs mending.”

  “We have to fight,” Frank said. “The next time some coward from the city or the railroad comes here, we send him back dead on his horse.”

  “It can’t have been someone from town!” Tom cut in.

  “The tracks led that way,” said Joseph.

  Tom blanched. “But—” he started, then fell silent as something occurred to him he chose not to voice.

  “Go home, Tom,” said Maria. “If anyone asks what happened, you tell them someone set the barn on fire, and not a word else. Safer.”

  After a little silence where no one spoke in his favor, he pulled on his gloves and stood.

  “It wasn’t the town,” he said, but this time it was half a question.

  “The railroad put him up to it, whoever he was,” said Maria, when they were alone.

  “I need to talk to the mayor,” Elijah said.

  “No,” said Faye.

  They all glanced at her.

  “She’s right,” said Frank. “No point.”

  “The mayor probably set it,” said Maria.

  “It does us no good to start fighting without asking for peace,” Elijah said.

  “That’s all we ever asked!” Frank said. “And see how they treat us the second we stand up.” He propped two stiff fingers on the table. “Who here ever had understanding from that kind?”

  No one raised a hand.

  Elijah got an odd, quiet expression.

  He said, “Not every man’s army, Frank. Not even railroad men. Many folk are kinder.”

  Frank sat back in his chair.

  “Strange thing I’ve run across,” Frank said, “since Faye and I were given to the school—knowing how many of them want us dead, and expect forgiveness.”

  Elijah got the expression of a man for whom some things he’d never thought about were falling into place.

  “Well,” he said at last, “then it’s a vote.”

  He plucked five singed chips of bark from the hearth. He passed one to each of them.

  Then he stood back empty-handed.

  “Burned, we fight. Clear, we look for help.”