“Oh, yeah, I can see why you get so much splatter,” Patrick said, examining the plow blade fixed to the front of the train. “This design is all wrong. You must get enough blood sprayed up there to cover the whole damn windshield.”
“We do,” Horace admitted with a sigh. “And not just blood. Brain matter, bone fragments, pieces of internal organs. Got a whole lung stuck up there one time.”
“Yeah, I’m not surprised,” Patrick nodded, running a hand over the plow. “Looks like the weight is right, and the steel is solid, I bet those bodies shit both ways on impact if you get up to 70.” He looked to Horace for confirmation. The conductor nodded proudly. “It’s good construction, but the angle is the main problem. The proximity to the engine is an issue too. See, if you had the right v-plow instead of this straight plow, and it came out another eight feet or so, the bodies would slip right off to either side, and most of the gore would be outside the windshield radius by the time the engine arrived.”
Horace tugged at one corner of his mustache. “Huh. Guess you’re right. The other big problem is heavier materials in the tracks. Dump trucks, water towers, things of that sort. We lose a lot of time stopping the train and moving those obstacles by hand. Hard as hell to see ‘em in the fog, too, we’ve had more than a few close calls.”
“I bet.” Patrick rubbed his chin, wishing, not for the first time, that he was capable of growing a full beard worthy of stroking. “You know,” he said slowly, “you could rig up a system that pushed the plow forward when you wanted to crash through something bigger. A dump truck would still derail it, but it could handle something between that and a human body. It’d be like a high-velocity battering ram. Add that force to the initial force the moving train gives the plow in a resting position, and you could blow your way through all kinds of barriers.”
“You could design that?”
Patrick drummed his fingers against his chin, so as to appear deep in thought. “I suppose I could...”
“...But you’d need to be compensated,” the conductor finished. Actually, Patrick was just fishing for a complimentary plea of desperation, something along the lines of, But we need you, you’re obviously a brilliant engineer, we can’t do it without you! But hey, yeah, compensation was good. Much better than a compliment.
“Yes,” he said, “I could probably design something for the right amount of compensation.”
“Two bottles of red wine and a sack of rice?”
“How about three bottles of red wine, a sack full of canned chili, two bladed weapons, and a corkscrew?”
“Two bottles, six cans of food, one blunt weapon, and a bent nail.”
“A bent nail?”
“Closest thing we got to a corkscrew.”
“Hmm.” Patrick tossed the offer around in his head. “Three bottles, five cans of food, one bladed weapon, and hell, I’ll take the nail.” He stuck out his hand. Horace considered the offer, then grasped it.
“Deal.”
•
Lindsay was frustrated in pretty much every way imaginable. The Red Caps wouldn’t allow her to cross the bridge into the Loop, where she could plainly see dozens of people milling about. “Let me over there!” she screamed, shaking one of the Caps by his lapels. “I need to interview those people!” But the Red Cap just looked at her as if she were speaking an alien language and brushed her aside. Lindsay huffed.
This trip just wasn’t panning out. She was more prisoner than passenger on Horace’s train, and she had quietly borne the brunt of the crew’s collective rudeness because she knew Chicago would be worth it. Surely there would be survivors swarming the “Second City.” With over four hours to pounce on a few subjects and ask her questions, she’d be halfway to her Pulitzer by the time they pulled back out of the station. If there still was a Pulitzer. But there had to be a Pulitzer. There were still journalists left in this world, and that meant there was journalism, even if there were no more live wires to send the stories around the world. M-Day provided an extraordinary opportunity for a hungry news hound like herself because not only was it the single most destructive and globally-affective event in the history of the human race, but if the rumors were true, 99% of her competition had been wiped out, including, she presumed, that smug bitch Tillie from Bloomberg, who’d scooped her on the Peruvian copper mine emergency story and snagged the goddamn Livingston Award. Publicly, of course, Tillie’s passing due to inhalation of the Flying Monkey chemical was personally devastating, as well as a grave loss to the journalistic community. Off the record, she was glad the slut was gone. That was her Livingston Award, goddammit.
And here she was, risking life and limb for the story of her career, hell, of anyone’s career, with dozens of potential interviewees just falling over themselves on the other side of the river, and she was being stonewalled by baggage handlers! Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable! She stamped her foot on the ground so hard, her kitten heel snapped off, and her ankle twisted painfully beneath her. She screamed at the top of her lungs, shaking her fists at the sky, cursing the bridge, cursing the Red Caps, cursing Nine West, and cursing whatever god that would let her life fall to shit without giving her a single fucking break. She screamed until she ran out of breath.
“Something wrong?” a voice whispered in her ear. Lindsay jumped and gasped.
“Jesus, Bloom! What the hell are you doing, sneaking up on me like that?” she asked the train’s assistant conductor, a hand pressed to her thudding chest.
“Just stretching my legs,” he said, his voice soft and level, as always. “You didn’t hear me walking?”
“Clearly,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Hey, I need to get across the river. Will you tell these bozos to let me cross?”
He stared out over the river with his flat, grey eyes. Ever expressionless, Lindsay could only guess what he was thinking. “No,” he finally said, his gaze locked on something across the way. “It’s for your own safety.”
“Bullshit. I don’t want to be safe, I want a story!”
“It’s not worth dying over.”
“Those people are playing bocce ball!” she cried, pointing to a group of middle-aged men and women gathered in an old parking lot overrun with weeds. “I don’t think they’re serial killers.”
It was meant to be hyperbole, but Bloom shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. Who knows. John Wayne Gacy was a Jaycee and volunteered at children’s hospitals.” Bloom slipped his hands in his pockets and breathed deeply of the pale yellow air. Finally, he turned to Lindsay and met her eyes. “Horace ordered them to keep you on this side of the bridge. You may not like it, but he’s responsible for you, and while you’re under his care, his word is law.”
“I am under no one’s care,” she insisted, sticking a finger in his face. She harrumphed and turned from him with a flick of her head, her short brown hair snapping behind her. She hobbled to the rail overlooking the Chicago River and waved her arms frantically at a pair of women in a rusty boat below. “Hey!” she screamed. “Hey! You, there! Where are you originally from? Did you come to Chicago before or after M-Day? Hey! You! Come on, I’m talking to you! Hey! Tell me what a typical day is like for you! Hey! Do you hear me?”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Bloom check his wristwatch. “Better wrap this interview up,” he said, with only the hint of a smile. “We pull out in thirty.”
•
Patrick plopped down in the seat next to Ben just as Horace blew the whistle for last call. “What’d I tell you, Benny Boy? Stick with me, and it’s smooth sailing.” He zoomed his hand through the air to show just how smooth their sailing could be.
“Yeah. Real smooth.” Ben finished his second energy bar and tossed the wrapper on the floor.
“Sorry about your face,” Patrick frowned. “It was for the greater good.”
Ben waved him off. “Whatever. It’s done. I mean, I owe you a swift kick to the teeth when you least expect it, but it’s done.”
“You won’t feel that way when I tell you what I just did,” he said with a grin. Ben raised an eyebrow. “I traded my services for some goods.”
Ben snorted. “And how was sex with a man?”
“No, no, no, not that. I mean my smarts.” He tapped his forehead. “The ones that live in my brain space.”
“Do tell.”
“I’m designing a battering ram for our conductor, and in return, he’s agreed to ply us with wine and food. And a nail.”
“You realize that nothing about what you’re saying is sounding one bit less sexual, right?”
Patrick sighed. He shook his head and cleared the air with his hand. “Okay, let me start over. I’m going to design a hydraulic smashing apparatus for the train, and they’re paying me three bottles of wine, some food, a bladed weapon, and a bent nail.”
Ben’s ears pricked up. “A bladed weapon? What kind of bladed weapon?”
“He didn’t specify, but I’m hoping for a broadsword,” Patrick said, crossing his fingers. “We can go all Game of Thrones on Arkansas.”
“I’ve always hated Arkansas,” Ben considered.
“We all do, Ben. We all hate Arkansas.”
Just then, they heard a sharp clomping on the metal stairs. They both turned to see a short, angry brunette storming unevenly past the posted Red Cap guard and into the car. She cursed under her breath as she peeled off her shoes and hurled them into the last row. She plopped down across the aisle, her arms folded tightly across her chest, fuming and muttering to herself, staring straight ahead and seeing nothing, except, presumably, some reddish sort of anger. She argued with herself for a full three minutes before she realized there were other people in the car.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, jumping to her feet. “Hi.”
“Hey,” said Ben. Patrick waved.
The train lurched forward, and she stumbled backward, crashing down on the hard plastic armrest and slamming to the floor in the middle of the aisle.
“Oh!” Patrick cried. He jumped up from his seat and rushed back to help her to her feet. “Are you okay?”
“As relative to what?” she demanded, brushing off her jeans and straightening her sweater.
“As compared to, say, Ben over there,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “He recently got hit in the face with a hammer.” Ben raised his middle finger. Patrick waved.
“Okay. Yeah. Better than that.” She smoothed out her clothes and shook a hand through her hair. “Let’s try this again. Hi! I’m Lindsay.”
“Patrick,” he said, shaking her hand. “And that’s Ben. He’s cranky. Are you the journalistic spirit whose presence was foretold to us?”
“You guys mind if I sit with you?”
“Not at all.” They walked back to where Ben sat with his arms crossed. Patrick plopped back down beside him, and Lindsay took the row directly in front of them, kneeling in the seat, facing them with her arms on top of the headrest. By the time they were situated, the train was pulling out of the tunnel, and watery yellow light poured into the car. With all the darkness in the station and on the platform, Patrick had forgotten it wasn’t quite nighttime yet. “And we’re on our way,” he said quietly. He learned forward and reached back to his rear pocket, felt for the slight outline of the folded piece of paper. It was still there, safe and secure. He fell back, closed his eyes, and smiled.
A speaker hidden somewhere in the ceiling crackled to life, and Horace’s voice came through in a series of pops and clicks. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, this is your conductor speaking. This is train 315, southbound Texas Eagle to Los Angeles, making scheduled station stops in Bloomington/Normal, Springfield, St. Louis, Little Rock, Texarkana, Dallas, Temple, Austin, Tucson, and Yuma. If this is your first time riding with Amtrak since M-Day, please note several changes to our policies. There will be no food or beverage service on this train. There is no luggage steward. Guests are not free to walk between cars without the expressed permission of the conductor or his assistant. You may disembark the train at our scheduled station stops; however, if you are not back in the train car when we pull away from the station, you will be left behind. We’ll give you fair warning before we pick up and move on. It may become necessary to stop the train between scheduled station stops. If this does happen during our trip, please remain in the car. There is no smoking aboard Amtrak trains. Please be sure to disembark the train at the agreed upon station. You are also free to disembark the train earlier, at your convenience, if it is convenient for you to jump from a moving train. On behalf of the Red Caps, the Assistant Conductor, and myself, thank you for riding Amtrak. Next station stop is Bloomington/Normal, Bloomington/Normal up next, approximately two hours.” The speaker fizzled into silence.
Ben snorted. “Is that really necessary? I mean, he does know it’s just us and his crew, right? He could just come back here and...you know...tell us.”
“He does this every time we leave a major station,” Lindsay said, rolling her eyes. “But, hey, he’s a railroad man. That’s how they used to do it. Old habits die hard. I mean, look at you two. It’s hardly ever warmer than 50 degrees outside, a shaved head is insanely impractical. And your watch there. Self-winding? When’s the last time you needed to know the time? It comes in handy for Horace the Tank Engine here, granted, but really? You don’t need that. And me, I just snapped off a half-inch heel outside. Why in God’s name am I wearing heels? It’s dangerous out there, everything’s fight or flight, and I’m a reporter. I’m a writer, not a fighter.” She grinned, and Patrick could tell this wasn’t the first time she’s used that line. “I’ll take flight every time, and how far am I gonna get on a half-inch heel? Not too far. We’re all creatures of habit, all of us.”
“Or sentiment,” Patrick pointed out.
Lindsay, for whom sentiment was an afterthought at best, looked confused. “What do you mean?” Patrick held up his watch so she could inspect it more closely. It was a cheap kid’s watch, something you used to be able to buy at Wal-Mart, with a purple plastic band, clasped near the very tip through a handmade hole. A Disney princess in a flowing yellow gown curtsied on the watch face. The plastic jewel was cracked, but Lindsay could still make out the digital time. As far as she could tell, it was accurate. She looked at Patrick quizzically.
“It was my daughter’s,” he explained. “You’re right, it’s not really practical, and it breaks the hell out of Rule Number 18, but it’s a good memento. And hard to lose.” He shook his wrist; the watch held strong.
“Has it always kept the right time?”
“Ever since we bought it, a few months before M-Day. You’d be surprised how much of something you can find when you’re the only person looking for it,” he said.
“Like watch batteries.”
“Or Snack Packs,” added Ben.
Lindsay threw back her head and moaned. “Oh, God, I miss Snack Packs!”
Ben’s face soured. “Not me. They taste like chemical toilets.”
“Delicious, delicious chemical toilets,” Lindsay mused. “God. What I’d give for a Snickers stuffed inside a Twinkie dipped in a Snack Pack.”
“Rule 31,” said Patrick. “Never fantasize about food.”
“Ugh. You’re right. Now I’m depressed.” She lowered her chin onto the headrest. “Where you guys headed?”
“Disney World. By way of St. Louis.”
“Two very similar destinations,” she said sarcastically. “Why the layover, what’s in St. Louis?”
“An arch,” said Ben.
“Maybe,” Patrick pointed out.
“Maybe,” Ben agreed. “If it hasn’t keeled over.
“Busch Stadium,” Patrick said.
&n
bsp; “Budweiser.”
“Schlafly.”
“Lemp Mansion.”
“Forest Park.”
“Soulard.”
“The Hill.”
“Ooo, the Hill. Toasted ravioli.”
“Imo’s.”
“Ted Drewes.”
“Oh, dios mio, Ted Drewes!” cried Patrick.
“Rule 31,” they both sighed.
“Is it safe to assume you’re both from St. Louis?” They nodded. “Well, then, what about your families?” Lindsay asked. “Any idea if they’re, uh...“ She didn’t need to finish the sentence. Patrick shook his head.
“No. No clue. For all I know they’re living the good life, feasting on the neighbor’s cows. Or the neighbors, for that matter. Or they could be liquefied on the love seat. I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to know.”
“Are you kidding me?” Lindsay bounded up out of her seat, fiddled underneath it until she found the lever she was looking for, and spun it around so she could face the two men. “I’d want to know. I’d really want to know. You know, for closure.”
“Do you know?”
She nodded. “My parents are dead. Oh, but not from the Monkeys! They died a couple years before, in a gas leak.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Patrick said. Lindsay smiled.
“People always say that when I tell them. Isn’t that weird? There’s not a single person in the country who didn’t lose dozens of family members, friends, loved ones, co-workers, acquaintances...they all died really, really painful deaths. Everyone living in America, maybe the whole world, experienced excruciating loss on M-Day, yet everyone’s first response when they hear my parents passed away painlessly and got spared the apocalypse is, ‘I’m sorry.’”
“Old habits,” Ben muttered.
“I’ll drink to that,” said Lindsay.
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