by R. L. King
Letting out a contented sigh, I leaned back and licked my fingers. “This isn’t half bad,” I told Kurt. “I don’t know what you guys have planned for me once we get to Tahoe, but this would be pretty sweet all on its own.” I looked around. “Have you seen Al? I haven’t seen him in a while.”
“Not sure. I think he was in the bar a while back, but I lost track.”
“I should go hunt him up. You know, say thanks.” Carefully I rose, making sure my balance was solid before moving. By themselves, both the buzz and the train’s click-clacking, swaying motion wouldn’t have been enough to concern me, but taking them together it was better to be safe than sorry. Knowing my friends, taking a face-plant into the floor would definitely get immortalized in at least a couple of photos I’d never live down. They’d probably end up as centerpieces at the wedding reception.
I stepped out onto the platform between the two cars and paused a moment, enjoying the blast of fresh, cold air. This train was old-fashioned enough that it didn’t have a closed vestibule between the cars, though it did have a full-height railing on either side of the walkway to separate the passengers from the outside world. I imagined it had probably been lower in the old days, but in today’s lawsuit-happy society, they couldn’t have some sloshed party-goer trip and fall over the edge or try to climb on the roof.
I watched the dark trees rolling by, then looked up at the stars. Out here, with nearly no artificial light, they looked amazing. I realized it had been a long time since I’d seen them, and I missed the feeling of being outdoors away from civilization. I made a mental note to see if Amber wanted to go camping one of these days.
When I entered the bar car a couple minutes later, I immediately spotted Al. He was sitting at one of the small tables near the bar, Guinness in hand, talking to Stan Lopez. He raised his glass as I approached. “Well, here’s the man of the hour. Having a good time re-connecting with your old mates?”
“Oh, yeah.” I stopped at their table, but didn’t sit. “This is fantastic, Al. I don’t know where you found this train, but everybody seems like they’re having a blast.”
“Just wait till we get to Tahoe,” Stan said. He raised what looked like a tequila in his left hand. “You’ll have a weekend to remember, from what I’m hearing.”
“You know, Amber’s gonna kill me if you guys wear me out before the wedding,” I said, chuckling.
“No—she’ll kill me,” Al said. “And don’t worry—I have no intention of facing your bride’s wrath.” He leaned back in his chair, relaxed. “Wrestling one bear in my life is quite enough, thanks.”
“Anyway,” I said, suddenly realizing that I’d been drinking quite a lot of beer in the last couple hours, “I should probably go make some room.”
Stone hooked a thumb toward the rear of the bar car. “Loo’s back there.”
The train’s bathroom, as I suspected, wasn’t much bigger than the one on a plane. It had the same old-fashioned décor as the rest of the place, but there was barely room enough for me to fit. I hoped Connor wouldn’t have to use the facilities during the trip, or we might have to pry him out with a crowbar.
I quickly did my business and zipped up, wondering how much longer the trip would go and when we’d arrive in Tahoe. My few minutes in the cold wind outside had taken the edge off my buzz, but I planned to be good and drunk by the time we arrived. By my reckoning, I still had plenty of time to do that. I glanced at my watch, idly wondering what Amber was doing right about now. I thought giving her a quick call, but didn’t. We’d have plenty of time to talk when I got back.
The lights went out, casting the tiny bathroom into pitch-darkness.
“What the hell?” I muttered, startled, but quickly calmed. Oh. Right. The bulb must have blown. The bathroom only had a single light above the tiny mirror, and no windows. I finished washing my hands, dried them on my jeans, and fumbled for the catch on the door.
Outside it was pitch dark too.
Okay, this was even weirder.
“Hey!” I called. “Al? Stan? You there? What’s going on?”
No answer. Maybe they’d gone off to try to find the fuse box. Did trains even have fuse boxes?
“Al?” I called, more loudly. “Stan?” They’d been right there. The lights had only gone out a few seconds ago. They couldn’t have gotten far away.
Still no answer.
“Is anybody here?” I didn’t have a flashlight, and had no idea where one might be stored. Maybe behind the bar? It was so dark, even through the windows, that my eyes weren’t adjusting at all. Hands out in front of me, I shuffled forward, trying not to trip over any of the tables or chairs.
As suddenly as they’d gone out, the lights came back up.
I jumped, startled, blinking as the sudden brightness hurt my eyes. “What…the fuck?”
4
Al was still there, and so was Stan, right where I’d left them. Except Stan was slumped over the table, his drink knocked over and dripping onto the floor. Al was sprawled back in his chair, his head against the window, his eyes closed.
“No…” What had happened? Immediately I spun around, looking for threats, but nothing else in the car was moving.
I hurried to the table and checked Al first. Up closer, I could see his chest was still rising and falling with his regular breathing, and his color looked fine. Stan, too. They both looked like they’d both suddenly dropped off into a deep sleep.
I shook Al’s shoulder. “Al! Wake up, man. Something’s wrong.”
He mumbled something barely audible, but didn’t move.
I shook Stan. “Come on, you guys. Wake up! Something’s up and we need to figure it out.”
Stan didn’t even mumble.
I set his glass upright and looked around the car again. Still nothing moving. Even the bartender was gone. I looked behind the bar, expecting to see him on the floor, but he was nowhere to be found. Maybe he’d gone forward, trying to deal with whatever had happened.
I hated to leave Al and Stan alone, but I had to figure out what was up. Now I wished I’d brought my gun with me, but who brings a gun to a bachelor party? At least I didn’t feel drunk anymore. Whatever was going on had done a great job of burning off my buzz.
I opened the door and crossed the vestibule toward the dining car. It was still as dark as ever outside, and this time I didn’t pause to savor the fresh air. Something was going on, and I needed to figure out what it was. Maybe the other guys would have some idea what had happened.
As soon as I pushed through the door to the dining car, I stopped. “Holy shit…”
There were six more guys in here, and all of them looked as deeply asleep as Al and Stan had. They sat at their tables, slumped over or leaned back, half-eaten baskets of wings and half-finished glasses of beer or liquor in front of them. Up above, a TV droned on playing basketball highlights.
This was bad.
I shook a couple of them, calling their names. When they didn’t respond I yelled louder, shaking Shane so hard he slipped out of his chair and fell to the floor. He didn’t wake, but he also didn’t appear to be in any distress. Like everybody else around here, he seemed like he’d just gone to sleep, like most people do when they’d had too much to drink.
Wait.
Had there been something in the booze?
I snatched up one of the half-empty glasses and sniffed it, but couldn’t detect anything. That didn’t mean anything, of course—there were plenty of odorless, tasteless things you could slip into somebody’s drink—but I’d been drinking as much as everybody else. Why wasn’t I affected?
I continued forward, checking the other two cars, and found exactly what I’d expected: the rest of the guys sprawled out in their seats or on the floor. Everybody was breathing fine, looking one hundred percent healthy except for the fact that none of them responded to my increasingly freaked-out efforts to wake them. I tried hardest with Blum, figuring if I could get him awake maybe he’d have the best chance—aside from Al—
of helping me figure out what the hell was going on.
Finally, when nothing worked, I strode forward and banged my fist on the door leading to the engine. Was the engineer sleeping too? Were we hurtling down a track toward Tahoe with nobody driving the train? That thought came accompanied by a crawling feeling in the pit of my stomach. What if some other train was heading toward us on the same track and somebody needed to pull a switch to divert one of them? Did that even happen? The sad truth was, I really didn’t know much about trains and their operation. I’d been much more into hot-rods and motorcycles as a kid.
My heart thudded harder as I pounded more loudly on the door. “Hey! Engineer! Are you in there? Something’s wrong out here!”
No response. The door said No Admittance – Authorized Personnel Only, but the hell with that. I grabbed the knob and rattled it.
Of course it was locked. It was also substantial, made of metal, and didn’t look like I’d have much chance of kicking it in. It might come to that, but not yet.
I spotted a panel next to the door and yanked it open to reveal a handset. I nearly dropped it as I pulled it out, but when I put it to my ear the line was dead. Even after rattling the hook several times, nothing came through. Not even static.
Then I remembered my own phone. If I couldn’t stop the train myself, maybe I could alert somebody in the outside world about the problem. I pulled it out and hit the button.
The reassuring light came on, but at the top was a flat line where the bars should be, along with those two little words everybody hates: No Service.
Fuck. I didn’t know how far out in the middle of nowhere between San Francisco and Tahoe we were, but apparently it was far enough that the cell towers didn’t reach out this far.
Okay, no help from the outside world.
I pounded on the engine door again, louder this time, putting all my considerable frustration into it this time. “Damn it, open up!” I yelled. “Something’s wrong out here! You gotta stop the train!”
“Hey, keep it down, dude…” mumbled a slurred voice from somewhere behind me. “Tryin’a sleep back here.”
I spun around. At first I didn’t see anything, but then I spotted movement near the back of the car. Connor Harte was stirring.
“Connor!” I made it to the back of the car in a couple of long strides and grabbed his shoulders. “Oh, man, I’m glad to hear your voice!”
He blinked a few times and rubbed his face, looking up at me with suspicion. “What the hell, Jase? You’re marrying my sister. And you’re not my type anyway.”
Before I could reply, he got a look around at the rest of the guys sprawled in their seats. “Wait. What’s going on? Why’s everybody asleep?”
“You were asleep,” I told him. I gave him a suspicious once-over. “You feeling okay?”
“Uh…” He yawned. “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Not woozy? Like maybe you were drugged?”
“Drugged?” He looked at me like I was crazy. “What’s wrong with you, man? Maybe a little buzzed, but that’s it. What’s going on?”
“That’s what I’m tryin’ to figure out. Come on.” I grabbed his arm and hauled him out of the seat. “Let’s see if we can wake the rest of these guys up.”
“Jase, I think maybe you should sit down for a few minutes. It sounds like you had too many—”
I ignored him, moving to Dave, one of my old high-school buddies, who lay with his head back and his mouth wide open, snoring softly. I shook him hard. “Dave! Dude! Wake up!”
Dave didn’t budge. Neither did the other two guys at his table. I let out a long, frustrated breath. “What the hell is going on?”
Connor looked more awake now, and more nervous. “You tried calling somebody?”
“Yeah, first thing. Phone’s dead.”
He verified that his was too, then looked around. “And nobody else is awake? Did you go to sleep?”
“No. I was in the bathroom taking a piss. The lights went out, then came up again. When I came back out less than a minute later, this had happened. And the bartender’s disappeared.”
His eyes narrowed. “Disappeared?”
“Yeah. He wasn’t behind the bar. I figured I’d find him up here looking for help if he was still awake, but no sign of him.”
Connor’s expression hardened. “You think he’s behind this? Like, he messed with everybody and then got off the train somehow?”
“How would he do that, though? There’s no way off. And we definitely didn’t stop. I would have noticed that. Unless he found a way to jump or there’s a secret hatch somewhere, he’s still here.”
I nodded toward the door. “Come on—let’s go back to the bar. If anything weird’s going on, I want to see if we can wake Al up. He might make weird shit worse, but he’s also the best guy I know at dealing with it once it’s here.”
It was still pitch dark outside as we made our way back through the cars to the bar. In fact, it seemed darker than usual—I couldn’t even make out the trees going by, and the stars seemed to have disappeared too.
“Something’s wrong,” I said. “I mean, more wrong than just everybody dropping off to sleep at the same time.”
“I think you’re right.” There was a strange edge in Connor’s voice. “Something doesn’t smell right.”
“What are you talking about?”
He paused on the platform between the dining car and the bar. “Just what I said. Something’s off. I don’t smell the trees, or the dirt, or even the oil from the train.”
That wasn’t good. Like Amber, Connor wasn’t a full shifter—he couldn’t change into an actual bear—but he had a lot better senses than a vanilla human’s. I peered around next to him, squinting, trying to spot any sign of the scenery rolling by, but I couldn’t see a damn thing. All I was sure of was that the train was still rolling. I could feel the clack-clack of the wheels on the track and the swaying of the cars, and out here the cold air still bit into me as it rushed by.
I pushed past Connor and shoved open the door to the bar car, intent on doing whatever I could to get Al awake. If anybody could help me figure this out, it was him.
Before I could get to Al, though, I stopped.
The slim, red-haired bartender was back.
He stood behind the bar, rag in hand, in his usual lounging pose, and looked as awake and Connor and I did.
More so, in fact. He looked utterly relaxed.
And he was smiling.
5
“What the hell—” I started.
Connor pushed past me. “Hey—I thought you said he was gone.”
“He was gone!”
So far, the bartender hadn’t moved. He watched us with the smug amusement of the one guy in the room who had any idea what was going on, and I didn’t like that smile.
I strode over to the bar and got in his face. “You! What the hell is going on here? Where have you been? Why is everybody asleep?” My blood chilled when it occurred to me that if anybody could mess up a train full of guys having a party, it was the dude providing the drinks. “Did you do this?”
His smile widened. He didn’t seem at all nervous, even though I must have looked like I was about to grab a handful of his shirt. He took a step back and shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe.”
Connor came up next to me, looking as pissed as I was sure I did. “What the fuck, man? Did you put all these people to sleep?”
“What if I did?” He seemed annoyingly calm for a man who had two big angry guys up in his business.
I did reach out for him then, snaking my arm out to grab him by the shirt and pull him in.
Except it didn’t work.
I’m not sure exactly what he did—I couldn’t follow it—but somehow he leaned back and I missed him by less than an inch. Never once did that smile waver.
“Now, now,” he admonished, putting the rag down and leaning against the back of the bar. “You’re never going to find out what’s going on if you do that.”
&
nbsp; To my right, Connor’s face was growing red. Amber had told me all three of her brothers were almost always mellow, but if you riled them up their explosive tempers were legendary. “You better tell us right fucking now or I’m gonna break your skinny ass in half.” He too took a swipe at the guy, this time with both arms, going for a classic bear hug.
The bartender chuckled and once again did that weird leaning motion, avoiding Connor’s grasp by inches. “If you want to waste your time on that, be my guest. I don’t care either way. But trust me, you really shouldn’t. You have more important things to do.”
“What things?” I glanced around the car again. Al and Stan were still asleep, and I didn’t think they’d moved since I’d checked them last. “What did you do to my friends?”
“Oh, they’re fine. I just…got them out of the way for a while. The game’s no fun if you’ve got too many people tripping over each other.” He studied Connor. “You, though—you’re not supposed to be awake.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Just what I said. I’ve been watching all of you.” His gaze switched to me. He had bright green eyes, so bright they had to be contacts. “It’s pretty clear that you’re the party boy here. I always look for the man of the hour to play with.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I glanced back at Al again, but he still hadn’t moved. Was this guy crazy? Had a nutcase managed to talk his way into this bartender gig so he could mess with a bunch of people on a train? Stranger things had happened, even in the mundane world. There were a lot of loons out there, and some of them were dangerous.
The bartender chuckled. “Bachelor party. Those are always amusing. Usually the guest of honor is so sloshed by the time I start the fun that he hasn’t got a prayer of figuring things out. But you still seem pretty lucid. That’s good, because I’ve added a few new tricks this time. And of course it looks like you’ll have help, since something about your friend here doesn’t play well with my sleeping potions.”
