by George Wier
“You’re gonna gather...intel.”
“Right!”
I looked around the compartment, and watched the a small, sleepy Texas town going by outside the window. “Look, Perry, the whole telephone communication thing may prove problematic anyway. You see, this is an ancient steam passenger train.”
“So?”
“I don’t think they have an outlet for charging my phone on here.”
“Huh. Well that sucks.”
“Why don’t you do yourself a big favor and go home. I’ve got this.”
“That’s what you think. I’m in this Bill. I was in it the minute I had to sneak over to your place to put a note in your mail slot.”
I rubbed my temple and rolled my eyes, which was sort of pathetic in that no one was there to see me do it.
“Okay, Perry,” I said “You do what you think is best.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The way I had it figured, there had to be some fallout somewhere along the line for a train hitting a pickup truck on a railroad track and casting it aside like it was so much scrap. I looked back out the doorway to see a line of headlights coming up behind us no more than a mile back. That would be the bad guys.
“Who are those guys?” I said to myself.
I turned and looked ahead to see that the roadway was beginning to diverge from the tracks to the northeast. This made me laugh. Travel by train is a completely different technology from the automobile, and we ran on different and utterly incompatible roadways.
I thought about it some more, then took a careful look at my phone. I still had a seventy-nine percent charge. I don’t use the thing all that much, truth be told. While I still had it—no matter who might be listening in—I decided I had better use it.
I made a call. He answered on the first ring.
“Kinsey.”
“Pat. It’s Bill.”
“All quiet here. What’s up?”
“Some guys are trying to tail us on. They had a little trap set for us.”
“What kind of trap?”
“A pickup on the railroad track. They thought we would stop, but we didn’t.”
“Holy guacamole! That must have been a sight.”
“It was. The pickup has to be in pieces along—I think it’s highway 95, somewhere north of Taylor. Maybe it was Granger or Holland or something. Anyway, when they realized we weren’t going to stop, they started shooting. Uh, don’t tell Julie. Or the kids.”
“I might tell Jess.”
“No. Don’t tell her either. She’s there, I’m here. You won’t believe who is running interference for me out there on the highways.”
“Who, pray tell. Is it Sterling?”
“No. Haven’t seen him lately. He’s busy with his own crap. It’s Perry Reilly.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Told ya.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Pat, I think I need two things. I think we’ll need some kind of escort when we come into Temple. Cops or state troopers around the tracks when we stop and switch over. At least, I believe there’s a switch we have to stop for there, but I’ll clarify where and call you back.”
“Sure,” he said. “What else?”
“I’ve got an itchy feeling about this. I don’t think it has anything to do with me. It must be the governor’s body.”
“The body? Why would anybody want his body?”
“I don’t know. Science experiment, maybe? Secret society ritual? Who knows.”
“Ha. It’s probably something stupid.”
“Yeah. Look, I don’t have a way to charge this phone on here. Old steam train, and all that. So I’ll be limiting my calls for when they’re needed, and I’ll keep it short. You have Perry’s number?”
“I think I do. That guy is a...he’s a...I don’t know what he is.”
“He’s a nut, but he means well. And maybe he’ll be able to help us both. He thinks his phone is bugged.”
“Sounds like Perry.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, I’ll go now. Once we get out to points west, my cell phone reception may be spotty at best, anyway.”
“Duly noted. Okay, watch your back.”
“Yeah. Caio.”
I hung up and decided to head aft.
I was balked by the next car back. It had to be the refrigeration car. There was no way through it, but a ladder led up and over it. Looking first up at the passing night sky, and then down at the blur of darkness just past my feet, I decided that discretion was the better part of valor and changed my mind. Instead, I went back forward.
Back through both passenger cars, then through the coal car and onto the engine, I ran into JoJo coming back.
“Where you going?” she asked me.
“I need to talk to Charlie.”
“He’s busy. Did you know that truck we hit broke our bell and put a dent in our whistle?”
“So they drew first blood.”
“Damn right they did. I don’t know how I’m gonna fix it. It’s not just a welding job, you know.”
“I’m sorry, JoJo. Who’s in back of the train?”
“We’ve got Frank Cobb back there. Why?”
“I want to talk to him. Let him know to watch his back.” I turned and pointed to show the line of vehicles moving away from us as the highway diverged from the tracks. “Those are the guys who set up the trap and were shooting at us.”
“What do they want, do you think?”
“I don’t know. It’s either something about Sawyer’s body, or it’s about me, although I can’t think who might be after me.”
“I can warn Frank over the radio.” JoJo reached into her pocket—she wore one of those light blue pinstripe jumpsuits the railroaders used to wear in years gone by; she probably made it herself somewhere along the line out of a pattern—and pulled out a handheld walkie-talkie, a big one. She keyed the mic. “Frank, watch our six, will ya? Those four cars and trucks headed to the north away from us were the ones that set up the trap with the truck. Over.”
“Be damned,” the voice said. “Over.”
“Yep. They were shooting at us. Over.”
“Uh. They shot me in the hand. Over.”
“Why didn’t you say anything before? Over.”
“Got a cloth around it. It hurts something awful, though. Over.”
Another voice intruded. It was Charlie. “Frank, you lie down back there. JoJo’s going to head your way with the first aid kit. Travis? Are you listening in? Over.”
JoJo held the talkie to me and keyed the mic.
“Yeah, I’m here on JoJo’s radio. Over.”
“We’re going to need you to spell Frank,” Charlie said. “Over.”
“What does he do?” JoJo keyed the mic for me again while I asked. “Over.”
“He’s our brakeman. Over.”
“Okay,” I said. “Over.”
“JoJo will tell you what to do. But I need her back up here in about ten minutes because we’ll be coming to the switch at Temple. We’ll have to slow down and stop. Over.”
I took the radio from JoJo and keyed the mic. “Charlie, expect some State Troopers around the time we come to the switch. I called for reinforcements. Over.”
“Good. That makes me feel better. You two get back to Frank, then I need JoJo up here. We’re losing water pressure. I think we may have a break in the waterline or something. If we can’t fix it, then this train will be coming to a permanent stop. Over.”
I handed the radio back to JoJo.
“Okay,” JoJo said. “Ten minutes. Over and out.”
*****
JoJo led the way to the back of the train, and along the way I couldn’t help thinking that I was missing something fundamental. Something so simple and stupid and so overlooked that it would shock me later on. There was nothing to do for it at the moment but stay in motion and hope that we could out-think and out-maneuver those trying to stop us.
Along the way, JoJo sto
pped, opened a cabinet in the first passenger car and extracted a med kit.
When we came to the refrigeration car, JoJo stopped again, pulled out her radio, keyed it and said, “We’re about to go over the refrigeration car. Are we clear? Over?”
Corky answered, “You’re clear. Over and out.”
Clear, I thought. What was that for? And then my stomach lurched as the answer came to me. She was checking for things like overpasses or tunnels. Things that someone walking over a car in motion had to watch for if they wanted to keep their head on their shoulders.
JoJo went up the steel ladder and I followed her. When I got to the top, she reached a hand down to me and helped me up onto the roof. The train swayed and moved more noticeably than before, and the icewater in my veins went right to my head.
“Come on. There’s no danger. Just watch your step.”
A cone of light speared out from her flashlight, and she showed me the roof of the refrigeration car in front of me. I walked past a lever and a handle for what appeared to be a closed trap door in the roof, and made a mental note. This meant that we didn’t necessarily have to stop the train to gain access to the interior of the car, wherein lay a heavy coffin with Sawyer’s body. The aft section of the car had two motors humming and whirring blades spinning beneath two sets of grills, with a narrow path between them.
“How are these powered?” I asked.
“We have cables coming back from the engine. We have to convert some of the steam to electrical power. It’s not nearly enough to keep a car loaded with vegetables frozen, but it’s enough to keep Dick—the Governor, I mean—cool. Okay, we’re here. I’ll go down first and you follow.
The light went off and JoJo disappeared down the ladder.
I took a moment while standing there, the forty-mile per hour wind at my back and tousling my hair and whipping it into my eyes, to survey the land around me. It was all flat, dark countryside, with distant lights twinkling. We had moved past most of the rainy weather and I could see a few stars overhead. Pivoting around, I could see the diffuse light of a city covering the horizon ahead of us. It had to be Temple.
JoJo’s flashlight sprang back to life, and she illuminated the top of the ladder for me.
“Come on,” she called to me. “Don’t fall, because you’re too big for me to catch.”
“Okay,” I said, then to myself, “Here goes nothing.”
Coming down a ladder is always worse than going up it. You have to turn around, put one foot down into nothing, blind, until you find the first rung, all while you grasp the upper rung on top of the car in front of you, and hope that you don’t slip. I made it and came down the ladder slowly. I supposed that JoJo had done this a thousand times, and could do it in the pitch blackness—as she just had—without even a ripple in her heart rate. It’s always those daredevils who do it every day that make the rest of us look like the cowards we are.
I made it down.
“Watch your step,” she said, and shined the light at the three feet of space between the two cars. She was standing inside the door to the caboose and held out her hand to me. I reached it, grasped, and she said, “You jump and I pull on the count of three. One.”
“Oh crap.”
“Two.”
“Three,” we said together. I jumped while she pulled with that hardened steel grip of hers and I came past her and in through the narrow doorway.
The first thing I saw was the man lying on the floor at the rear of the caboose. He had one hand up and was slapping his own face.
There was shattered glass on the floor, and a lot of equipment around that I knew not what of. Also, there was blood.
“Frank, did you pass out?” JoJo asked as she bent over him.
“Trying not to. Cold in here.”
It was so cold that I was sweating, which told me that Frank was going into shock.
“Bill,” JoJo said. “There’s are some blankets over there in the corner. Bring several. We need to cover him and get his feet elevated.”
“Yeah.” The car was interiorly illuminated with what appeared to be old-fashioned fixtures with plain bulbs. The bulbs gave off a dim, yellow light, which made for somewhat of a garish scene. I found the blankets beneath a bank of dials and brought out a stack. There was a broom behind it, so I grabbed it as well. I handed off the blankets to JoJo, lifted Frank’s legs and rolled an empty five gallon bucket under his knees while JoJo covered him with first one blanket, then another. She lifted his blood-soaked right hand and got to work on it.
Frank’s walkie-talkie was by his head. JoJo nodded towards it, and I picked it up and slid into the back of my belt.
I watched as she unwrapped the bandage and then soaked a cotton ball in alcohol.
“Frank, this is going to hurt,” she said, “but I have to clean the wound and re-wrap it.”
Frank nodded, but there was uncertainty in his eyes. A little color had returned to his cheeks, but the light was so weird that I wasn’t sure. I thought of some of the movies I had seen where the hero has been shot or otherwise injured and kept on fighting anyway. It doesn’t work that way in the real world. The body takes an impact of any kind, and it affects the entire organism. Even in the rare case where someone is hopped up on adrenaline, there is always a corresponding low very shortly afterwards, and that low can swing so far as death. You could maybe shoot a charging elephant with a fifty-caliber bullet and not stop it, but if you hit him with a pellet gun on the end of that sensitive snout, you could kill him. All by way of saying that reality is sometimes stark and unforgiving. Frank’s eyes were like that. He was busily processing the fact that he had been shot and was injured. The fact that he was being cared for was maybe a little too much input for him. I noted JoJo’s economy of words while she worked on him, and decided to keep my lips buttoned up.
Frank winced at the pain, but when it was done he breathed regularly. Pain. That’s how you know you’re alive.
JoJo re-wrapped his hand with an Ace bandage and tied it off. She stood and beckoned me to the rear of the car, where we held a brief and whispered conversation.
“I think he’ll be all right,” she said.
“Yeah. What about the hand?”
“He won’t be able to use it for a few days. Hell, maybe weeks. And for the next few hours, I want him to lie where he is. You’re the brakeman now.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Your tools are this lantern,” she reached over to shelf and hefted an old gas lantern, “and that walkie-talkie. You know how to use them both?”
“Yep.”
“Good. I have to go forward and see what I can do, if anything, about this water pressure drop-off.”
“Good luck, JoJo,” I said.
She reached up and lifted up my chin. “You’ll do fine, Mr. Travis. Anything you need, call us on the radio.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
She turned to go, stepping daintily past Frank, then said, “If there’s any trouble, Frank keeps a twelve-gauge shotgun back of the shelf where I got the lantern. It’s loaded.”
I nodded again, and she turned and went into the night.
And there I was on the caboose of a train headed into the night with an injured old railroader in my charge, my cell phone in my pocket, a radio, lantern and shotgun close by, and nothing but questions panging off the narrow confines of my thoughts like a railroad car filled with bouncing rubber balls.
What could possibly go wrong?
CHAPTER EIGHT
Apparently anything can go wrong.
The train was slowing. Not majorly slowing, but the vibration and the rocking seemed less, and the lights passing in the night seemed to go by more slowly. I had swept most of the broken glass—all that wasn’t beneath Frank—into the corner where I had gotten the blankets, and Frank was trying to get to his feet.
“You want to help me up?” he asked. He had his left arm braced on a bar, trying to lever himself to his feet.
“I want you to
lay there,” I said.
He faltered for a moment and lay back down. “I’m gonna try again in a minute. By the way, you make a terrible nurse.”
“I do.”
“Bill? Over!” The voice over the radio JoJo’s.
I picked up the radio and keyed the mic. “Yeah? Over.”
“Get up here. I need an extra hand. Only came with two of them. Charlie’s coming back there to spell you because he can’t...”
I waited. “Can’t what? Over.”
“Never mind that. Can you come on over?” Then, uncertainly, “Over.”
“Come over where? Over.”
“Come forward until you find me. Over.”
“Can we stop saying ‘over’? It’s getting old. Over.”
“Sure. Over.”
“Okay. I’m coming...uh, over.”
There was a beat of a pause, then, “So when are you going to stop saying ‘over?’ Over.”
“Right now,” I said, and released the mic. I waited, then keyed the mic again. “I’m also leaving off the ‘out’.”
“Uh huh.”
With that done, I looked back down at Frank. “You gonna be okay there for a few minutes? Charlie’s coming back here.”
“I heard.”
I turned to go, but then heard him whisper, “Amateurs.”
“What was that?” I asked.
“Nothing. Just go.”
I opened the door onto the narrow brim beneath my feet, and for a moment began to doubt whether I was going. The problem was the blackness of the night outside the caboose. The dim lighting from inside cast my shadow onto the rear of the refrigeration car in front of me. When I stepped a little to the side, I could see the brim of the car three feet in front of me and the faintly illuminated rungs of the later, but the problem was that when I stepped back in order to prepare myself to lunge forward, the ladder vanished into the darkness.
JoJo saved me with a squawk over the radio: “Bill, there’s a light switch by the door.”
I flipped it, but at that instant it decided to burn out. The flare was brief, and I knew if from all the times I had turned on my closet light or my back porch light and the tiny filaments in the bulb of glass decided to take the opportunity to check out.
