Malorie

by Josh Malerman

  “You do exactly what I say,” she says. “And you only talk to who I say you can talk to. You tell nobody where we are going or why. We are not here to make friends. We are here to get from one place to another. That is all. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Olympia says.

  “Yes,” Tom says.

  “Okay,” Malorie says. “I love you guys.”

  All images, memories, and fantasies leave Malorie’s mind at once, leaving only the infinite black of what’s to come before her.

  She slides the door open.

  She breathes in, she holds it, she breathes out.

  And the trio enters the blind train.

  THIRTEEN

  This will end in madness.

  Because it always does. When Malorie is around other people, someone makes a mistake. Someone tries something they shouldn’t. Someone believes something they shouldn’t. No two minds are alike, she knows. Not even her teens, raised as they have been in the same exact manner, having experienced the same exact series of events from when they were born to now, this minute, running for, and making, a train. Even someone who appears kindhearted might glance out a window. Even someone abrasive might never. The old constructs of good and bad have long been replaced with safe and unsafe. Are you a safe person? She thinks she is. She knows she is. At the school for the blind she was ridiculed for it. Others thought her precautions meant she thought they weren’t doing it right. Insecurities, here, even in the face of madness, the sight of a creature, not of this world, not of the old world, anyway. Long dead is the idea of the enthusiast, the go-getter, the happy man, woman, or child. Now, you either look or you do not. You either live by the fold or you do not. You either dedicate your life to the darkness, shared, at times, by rope, by hands, by voice, with those closest to you. Or you do not.

  And this, this place that smells of people, where bodies can be heard shifting in the darkness, where conversations mingle with the throbbing of the engine and the rolling of the wheels on the pre-existing tracks, this place will end in madness, too.

  Malorie only hopes they get to Mackinaw City first.

  Someone walks toward them; Malorie hears heavy steps in what feels like a hall. The teens behind her, she stops and puts her arms out, acting the part of a shield. She thinks she hears movement behind a door to her left. Sleeping cars, then. A house moving at five miles per hour on a track. This is good. Or can be. Personal space. And if they get that space and someone invades it?

  Jump.

  “Latecomers,” a man’s voice. Sounds about Malorie’s age. “But comers all the same. David told me you just made it. Welcome. Isn’t it fantastic?”

  Malorie feels the swaying of the car. Movement without moving her own legs. The first since taking a rowboat twelve years ago.

  She doesn’t speak. She isn’t sure what to say, how to respond. This isn’t the same as encountering someone in Camp Yadin, a place she called home. This also isn’t like meeting someone in the woods, with no semblance of society at hand.

  “I have a feeling you’re not going to want to do this,” the man begins. Malorie leans back, into her teens. “But you don’t have to wear your folds on the train.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Malorie says.

  “No, no. I get it,” the man says. “I didn’t mean to get us started on the wrong foot. Honestly. Don’t worry. Some people prefer to wear them the whole time. But the truth is—”

  “Who are you?”

  The man laughs. It sounds like an old-world laugh. The kind she might’ve heard at a party.

  “Dean Watts,” the man says. “The owner of this train. Though that word doesn’t have the same panache it once did, does it? How about…I’m the one who thought we ought to try using the big dead train after all.”

  Malorie imagines a person as optimistic as Tom the man once was. Would he have done something like this? Had he lived to try?

  “You’ve gotta be overwhelmed,” Dean says. “Everybody is the first time.”

  “Have you had repeat riders?”

  “Some. There’s a man who rode back and forth a dozen times. He—”

  “How many times has this train run?”

  “I’ve got an idea,” Dean says. “How about you follow me to the dining car. We sit down. I answer all your questions. Believe me, during the blind restoration of this thing, I spent enough time standing in the halls.”

  “We’d like a private car if one is available.”

  She hears Tom huff behind her. She knows he wants to meet people. She can only imagine how unfathomably cosmopolitan this man Dean’s voice and life must sound to her son.

  “We do have one,” Dean says. “Several, actually. The train is ten cars long. There’s a dining car, two storage cars, six passenger cars, and two that are more or less delivery spaces. We get almost all our orders and requests via telegram.” He goes silent a second. “Did you know the world is using telegrams again?”

  She can tell by the way he asked he knows she didn’t. Can he tell she wants to know what he’s delivering?

  “And before you ask,” he says, “we deliver all sorts of things. Furniture. Blankets. Canned goods. Even the dead. To loved ones who have gotten word of their location.”

  Malorie can’t process everything the man says. She has ten questions for each unfathomable statement he makes.

  She thought she had some grasp on the new world. Then…a knock on a cabin door has delivered her a train, a telegram, and the names of her parents.

  “Here’s the thing,” Dean says. “I want everyone who rides to be as comfortable as possible. It’s not like we’re making money here. There’s no such thing anymore. But I do care. You’ll just have to trust me that much.”

  But Malorie doesn’t want anybody telling her who she’ll have to trust.

  “A private car,” she says. “That’s all.”

  “Might I ask what you’re on board for?”

  The train rocks. It’s not going anywhere near as fast as the trains Malorie took in the old world. It feels more like she’s riding a bike. Yet, for someone who hasn’t even ridden a bike in sixteen years, the motion is alarming. She has questions. Should she ask them? It’s dangerous enough that she’s brought the teens this far. In fact, it’s downright insane. Now that’s she’s here, on board, swaying with the motion, listening to the whining wheels, facing a stranger in a hall she cannot see, a stranger who, she assumes, does not wear a fold, who looks directly at her, it’s not hard to count this as the single most unsafe thing she’s ever done.

  There is no good or bad anymore.

  Only safe or—

  “Just a car,” she says again. “That’s all.”

  Dean claps his hands together.

  “Okay. I get it. Follow me and I’ll show you the first available one.”

  “Is there one right here in this car?”

  “No,” Dean says. “We’re standing in one of the storage cars. As glamorous as you can imagine. Come this way.”

  He moves and she follows. She can feel the energy of the teens behind her as if they are bridled horses, waiting to be freed. Both, she knows, must be out of their heads with curiosity. Tom has tried, over time, to invent other modes of travel. At Camp Yadin he fashioned a wheelbarrow into something of a padded rolling chair. It strikes Malorie now that Tom’s silly invention feels safer to her than this giant, swaying machine.

  Yet Dean does sound smart. This means something to her. And while smart does not beget safe, it’s better than the alternative.

  “How can you be sure the tracks are clear?” she asks.

  She thinks she can hear Dean smile.

  Is she really on a train? Can this be?

  “I’m telling you, let’s sit down in the dining car. There are so many exciting answers for all the questions you’re asking. I mea
n, think about it…” He stops walking, and Malorie nearly bumps into him when he speaks again. “Wait. I didn’t even ask your names yet.”

  Malorie can almost feel the words crawling up the throats of her teens.

  “I’m Jill,” she says first. “And this is John and Jamie.”

  “How old are you, John?”

  “He’s twenty.”

  She thinks she hears something like a smile on Dean’s face again. He knows she’s lying. But she doesn’t care. She wants to get to a car. Close the door. Lock it.

  Sam and Mary Walsh.

  “And you, Jamie?” Dean asks.

  “She’s twenty-one,” Malorie says.

  “A great age. Any age is a good one in this world. It means you’ve survived.”

  They walk. The train sways. Malorie imagines a black landscape passing, gradations of darkness, a world she and her teens will never see.

  “Is that music?” Tom suddenly asks.

  Dean stops again.

  “You can hear that?” He goes quiet, and Malorie listens for what Tom heard. “There are three musicians on board. Playing guitars in the dining car. They do it often. I can’t believe you can hear them, John.”

  Malorie finds Tom’s wrist in the darkness and grips it. They are in the new world now, but that does not mean they are of it.

  Don’t get lazy.

  The three-word mantra has kept her and these teens alive for so long. The small but powerful phrase that separates her and has always separated her from the people who think they can defeat indefatigable circumstance.

  But despite his mom’s hand, Tom still responds.

  “It sounds good.”

  Dean laughs again. Malorie wonders if she turns red in front of him.

  “It definitely does,” Dean says. “But it’s not as cool as the fact that your ears work like they do. That, John, is phenomenal.”

  “Who keeps the tracks clear?” Malorie asks again. Her own voice sounds petty. Like she’s looking for control. “How can you be sure we aren’t going to crash?”

  Dean stops walking again, and this time Malorie does bump into him. She can tell he’s taller than she is, wider. She backs up.

  “Do you remember Buster Keaton?” he asks her. She thinks of her dad. Dad liked Buster Keaton.

  “Please, just tell me how—”

  “He made a movie called The General. Brilliant sequence where he’s clearing the tracks of falling logs. It’s so well orchestrated that you almost think it’s magic. Well, this isn’t anywhere near as funny as that, but at the head of the train, there’s a smaller, metal cart. And upon that cart is a man named Michael. And Michael makes sure nothing enormous has fallen across the tracks.”

  “Isn’t that dangerous?” Malorie asks. “What he’s doing?”

  “Of course it is. But Michael wants to do it.”

  “But he could die out there and we wouldn’t know.”

  “Jill,” Dean says. “I have answers for all these questions. Good ones. If you’d—”

  “Please. Answer them now.”

  She feels something she hasn’t felt in ages. Something like overstepping. For the first time since leaving the school for the blind, Malorie is demanding answers from someone who is helping her.

  Isn’t Dean helping her? Isn’t this train helping her reach her parents?

  “So Michael has a switchbox with him out there. The engineer—”

  “There’s an engineer?”

  “There has to be. Her name is Tanya. She’s incredible. If Tanya doesn’t receive a transmission from Michael’s box for more than ten minutes, for whatever reason, even if we discover later he only dropped it, she stops the train.”

  “Has this happened before?”

  “No.”

  “And has Michael ever found objects on the tracks? Ones you had to make stops for? To clear?”

  “Yes. Fallen trees. And once, a dead herd of elk. We think they went mad.”

  “Mad…”

  “There are stretches this train passes in which hundreds of creatures roam.”

  Malorie thinks to turn around. She thinks to take the teens and walk straight out the back of the train and leap back to the tracks. They could brave the walk again. They could be back in Yadin in a few days.

  But she doesn’t want to leave. Not yet. She trusts just enough of what she hears in Dean’s voice to make her stay. So instead, she asks more questions. And it feels a little like she’s dipping a toe in the new world after all.

  “How do you know that?”

  Dean breathes deep, and Malorie braces herself for something she doesn’t want to hear.

  “Well, two ways,” he says.

  “Yeah?” Pressing.

  “Yes. One is similar to what I’m understanding about John here. We’ve had young riders who can hear much better than you or I ever will.”

  “And the other?”

  Dean spills it.

  “Passengers have gone mad. Riders who perhaps took the train for an opportunity to watch the world pass.”

  “But how?” Panic rising in her voice. “The windows are blackened, right?”

  “Of course. But—”

  “Then how?”

  “Between cars. If one really wanted to look…they could.”

  Malorie steels herself.

  “How many passengers have gone mad on this train?” she asks.

  Dean doesn’t hesitate.

  “Seven.”

  The shape of panic now. In the vicinity. So close to her.

  “And what happened to those people?”

  Dean doesn’t hesitate again.

  “Myself and David escorted them off.”

  “You tossed them off the train?” Olympia asks.

  “Yes. Without a bit of debate, I’m sorry to say.”

  Malorie likes this answer. But she’s far from feeling safe.

  “They didn’t ask to go mad,” she says.

  “I know that,” Dean says. “Believe me. I’m haunted by every one of them.”

  Malorie tries not to think of Gary. She tries to shove him as far from her mind’s eye as she can. But there he is. In a distant corner. At the far right side of the darkness.

  He waves.

  “There’re two open cars this way,” Dean says. “Come on.”

  Malorie decides, here, now, to continue. Dean didn’t try to hide the past from her. This means something.

  She can tell he walks slowly for them. She reaches both arms out, feeling the walls of the hall as it sways with the motion of the train.

  “So, like I said, this is a storage car,” he says. “This and the next. There’s a bathroom here, too.”

  Malorie thinks of what he said about transporting dead bodies. Are there caskets on the other side of this wall? Dead people swaying even as she does?

  “All sorts of stuff in there,” Dean says. “Survival stuff.”

  Malorie wants to feel good about this. Two cars full of supplies. As if they dragged the basement of the lodge at Camp Yadin with them.

  “And this,” Dean says, “is the door to the next car.”

  She hears it slide open.

  “You’re already blindfolded so I won’t tell you to close your eyes. We’ve tried dozens of ways to block off the view between cars, but either the wind takes them, the motion breaks them, or those who’ve wanted to look do so anyway. Come on.”

  Malorie feels a hand in hers. It’s not Tom. Not Olympia. She pulls back.

  “Sorry,” Dean says. “I just thought—”

  “We can manage.”

  “All right. Follow me.”

  She reaches behind her and takes Olympia’s hand. The air is cold between cars. Powerful.

  Inside the second car, Dean clos
es the door behind them.

  “More storage. Clothes for the needy, though we’re all needy now, aren’t we?”

  Malorie imagines an alternate reality with this man, one in which she would say yes, we’re all needy, and winters in Michigan are brutal, and how kind to deliver clothes, what an incredible thing you’ve started here.

  But she doesn’t want to talk any more than she has to. She wants that private room, that space. No more.

  They walk.

  “Another door,” Dean says. “Ahead is the first of the passenger cars.”

  Someone opens the door before Dean does. The person comes fast, and Dean is shoved back into Malorie.

  Malorie grips Olympia’s wrist. This is it. The moment they’re going to have to leap from the train. It’s not hard to imagine the gravel cutting into her elbows and knees just like it did when she fell off her bike, riding it for the first time. She can still see Mom crouched beside her, placing a Band-Aid on a cut.

  “Sorry,” a man says. “Bathroom.”

  He gets by Malorie and the teens clumsily, apologizing as he goes, his words breathless the way words are when someone hurries.

  “You see?” Dean says. “A bit like the old world after all.”

  He laughs, and Malorie wants to laugh, too. But she was prepared to leap from a moving train, mistaking a man in a hurry for a man gone mad.

  “Door,” Dean reminds her.

  They step through. Between cars, the motion is stronger, the wind stronger, the feeling that she’s doing something she shouldn’t be doing stronger, too.

  “Here,” Dean says once they’re through. “This room is open.”

  She hears a door slide. The sound of the wheels gets louder. A distant grating comes into focus. The outside world that much closer. As if Dean has let some of it in.

  But this is what she’s asked for. This is what she wants. The safety of privacy. Where Tom and Olympia will not be tempted to discuss anything with anybody lurking deeper on this train.

  She steps into the room.

  “It’s actually quite nice,” Dean says. “If you decide to remove your fold, you’ll find red cushions on a bench. Two twin beds. A mirror. And I’ve learned that, at this slow speed, it can sometimes feel like what a hotel once did. Do you remember those, Jill?”