The next part had been a little trickier. By disconnecting the rails, Billy separated the bond wire that constantly carried a low power signal current that was used primarily to let the railroad companies know the exact location of their trains. But the bond wire also allowed crews to detect any trouble along the line on which they were traveling. The current, disrupted by his work, would signal the engineer that there had been a break in the line, making him stop the train prior to reaching the damaged rail. The problem was solved by running a wire between the rails, bypassing the broken cable, and disabling the electrical sensors, so the engineer would not receive the red-light warning indicating there was trouble ahead.
“Come on, Billy!” Ray glanced nervously down the track toward Hyder.
Finally satisfied that he’d prepared everything properly, Billy folded the SP Trainline magazine and placed the issue into the back waistband of his grimy jeans. “Shit! I almost forgot!” He hurried to the edge of the ravine where he picked up several copies of the letter. He smiled again at his Sons of Gestapo signature, then scattered the epistle strategically around the area. Billy didn’t know where the train would land and he wanted to make sure the letter was found.
Ignoring Ray’s pleas to get away, Billy stood for a moment staring up the track. He slipped a fat, neatly rolled joint out of his shirt pocket, and moistened the paper with his saliva. He struck a match, cupped the flame in his hand to shield the tiny blaze from the desert wind, and lit the end. Billy inhaled, filled his lungs, and listened to the pop of burning seeds. He held his breath, enjoyed the acrid smoke, then exhaled. After another toke, he checked the luminous green dial on his watch.
Then he saw a spark of light in the distance.
“Come on, Ray! Let’s get up to where we can see the show.” He pinched off the end of the joint and tucked the rest into his shirt pocket.
The boys hurried away, moving north over the rocky ground. Though Billy could normally outrun Ray easily, he still suffered from wounds inflicted by the dog and his tangle with the cholla, so he quickly fell behind. Still, both boys crested what was the nearest of several basalt mountains in plenty of time.
Most of the two hundred and forty-eight passengers on the Sunset Limited were asleep when David Flowers—weaving slightly as the sleeper car rattled along at fifty miles-per-hour—moved along the passageway en route to the bathroom. At the end of the car he saw Mitchell Bates, a twenty-year Amtrak veteran.
“Don’t forget to wake me up when we get to Palm Springs,” Flowers said. “Don’t wanna sleep through my stop.”
“Don’t you worry about a thing.” Bates grinned. “That’s what they pay me for.”
Two cars back, Kelly cupped her hands around her eyes and pressed tightly to the window. She could see the moonlit desert careening by, the scattered mountains black against a star-filled night sky. She let her body sway with the gentle rolling of the car, a strangely pleasant sensation, and thought about the sense of calm that surrounded her. Maybe it was because, for the first time since her father died, there were other people who cared about her. Kelly glanced over at Miranda, still engrossed in a two-month-old, dog-eared issue of Glamour Magazine. Had her mother ever had a friend?
Up in the cab, the engineer watched as the massive headlight bathed the track ahead in bright white light. He’d been on this run hundreds of times. Just ahead, was a curve that would lead the train onto a trestle that spanned one of the deeper washes between Phoenix and Los Angeles. The headlight blazed—a star shooting in the darkness—wrapping the track in light as harsh as any clear desert day.
But the damage was under the rails where no light could penetrate.
Ramm gripped the steering wheel as he headed back to his cabin. That edgy, too-much-caffeine feeling had taken hold again. Guilt assaulted him. He should be on the train protecting Kelly. And had he made a mistake in contacting the watchers? Had the move put him in play again? The community in which he’d worked for so many years was relatively small, and there was always the possibility that word had spread about the debacle in Jerusalem. By contacting the watchers, he might have put himself in jeopardy, which could also bring harm to those around him.
Ramm’s head pounded, the incipient migraine accompanied by a hazy aura. He knew his psychological state was fluctuating. How long could he stay ahead of the problem without medication? What if he blacked out again? What if he was hospitalized and people started checking on his background? Frustrated and powerless, he cursed and jammed on the breaks. The truck skidded to a stop on the soft shoulder where blacktop and dirt merged at the turnoff. He rubbed his face hard, then he looked up and peered through the windshield. Ramm blinked several times, confused.
There, in the night sky before him, floating in a spectral light, was Kelly’s face. Ramm squinted, shut his eyes tight, then looked again. The ghostly image was still there, hovering before him, her troubled visage beckoning him to follow. She merged with paintings and sculptures—the mother of Jesus in all her quiet grief, the face of Mary on the shimmering white marble of Michelangelo’s St. Peter’s Pieta, on Raphael’s Madonna del Granduca, her desolate melancholy depicted by Masaccio, Veneziano, and countless other artists through time.
Ramm painfully unclenched his hands from around the steering wheel and blinked into the darkness. Then Kelly’s face disappeared, replaced by a bright light that splashed over the desert. The suddenness of the brilliant beam’s appearance caught him off guard. He tried to focus, then grabbed for the loaded Glock he kept under the front seat. But when the blazing light splashed past, followed by the steady beat of passing railcars, he relaxed.
Then, an unexpected wave of heat engulfed him, and he pushed open the cab door and stepped out, breathing deeply, trying to clear his head. The noise hit him like a blow, shattering the desert calm. Reflexively, Ramm dropped to the ground and listened to the calamitous groaning, a ghastly noise that washed over him like a rogue wave.
Kelly felt the train car rock hard to one side, then heard the screech of metal-on-metal. For a moment, she sensed a weightlessness and was lifted from her seat as if by an invisible hand. The passenger car tilted and fell sideways. Passengers, jolted awake, screamed as the desert floor roared up at them. Then, nothing but black.
22
THE CALL WENT OUT from the Sunset Limited immediately. The engineer, trained for emergencies, forced himself to remain under control as he radioed for help. In a matter of minutes, calls were relayed to Phoenix, Yuma, and Gila Bend for all emergency medical units, and to local and state police and nearby military bases for help securing the area. Within fifteen minutes, an army of police and medical personnel were en route, followed closely by a mass of reporters whose radio, television, and newspaper outlets had a policy of continually monitoring police scanners.
Up on the mountain, Billy howled. The engine had managed to cross the trestle, but eight cars behind it derailed. He watched rapt in almost orgasmic gratification. A baggage car, a dormitory car, two sleepers, a diner, a lounge car, and two coaches had jumped off the track, four plunging into the wash thirty feet below.
Billy picked up the binoculars. As he watched, screams rose from the wreck site, first just a few, but in a matter of minutes, the voices became a chorus of pain and fear. He could see someone crawling in the sand, and another man who staggered, a bone sticking out of his pants at a perverse angle. Billy scanned the area and focused on the engine. The light shone inside the car, and he could see the engineer on the phone, surprisingly calm. He refocused on the train cars in the wash where passengers and crew were now appearing from the wreckage. Some clutched their bloodied bodies and wandered aimlessly in shock. Others helped the seriously injured.
“It’s fucking great, isn’t it, Ray? Here. Take a look.” Keeping his eyes on the carnage below, Billy extended the binoculars toward Ray.
“No, thanks.” Ray turned away.
Billy glared at the boy, who was flat on his back, fat tears rolling down his cheeks.
> “What the fuck’s the matter with you?” Billy hurled the binoculars, hitting Ray in the stomach, causing him to curl into a fetal position. The boy was sobbing.
“You’re missing a kick-ass show, Ray!” Billy crawled like an insect, retrieved the binoculars, and focused again on the twisted train and broken people emerging from within.
Then, he saw something else. Just beyond the wreckage, south of the wash, headlights stood fixed in the darkness.
Jason Ramm was on his knees, immobilized by the destruction before him. Victims struggled out of the broken cars, frantic, bloodied. Some staggered, dazed. Still others screamed in fear at the sight of their own wounds or hysterically as they searched for loved ones. The chaos elicited old memories, similar scenes of confusion and panic. He remembered a Napalmed village. Burning people trying desperately to scatter in the wake of the incendiary greeting cards. A woman, clutching a charred child—tiny body smoking, features blotted by burns—holding the baby out to him as if he could transform the dead lump of flesh back into a living, breathing child.
“No! No! Not now!” Ramm beat his fists on the rocky ground, hoping the pain might prevent him from succumbing to the madness. He shook his head, tried to clear the burnt baby away. The woman and her dead infant were replaced by the twisted wreckage of the Sunset Limited.
He rose and sprinted across the narrow expanse of desert, calculating where Kelly might be. He scanned the wreck site as he ran, eliminated the baggage car and the sleepers. Ramm focused so intently on the girl’s whereabouts, he didn’t see the twisted roots. His foot caught, and he sprawled to the hard-packed desert floor. Ramm’s right hand slammed into a jagged quartz boulder, slicing his palm, separating the flesh as cleanly as a surgeon’s scalpel. He breathed heavily and stared at the wound. The free-flowing blood and the pain centered him.
Ramm raised himself slowly, then stood motionless. Forgetting the injury, he surveyed the scene below with cold detachment.
He ran again, but now his pace was measured, even. Entering the wash, he encountered the broken bodies of the injured, but ignored their anguished cries, and swept callously past them, obsessed with his quest to locate the girl. The first car he approached lay completely on its side. Two men struggled as they lifted an elderly, heavyset woman up through a door. Ramm hoisted himself onto a spot just below a row of blown-out windows and began systematically working his way down the outside of the car. He peered into the darkened interior at intervals of five feet. Dull emergency lights flickered, illuminating the injured and those administering aid.
Kelly was not among them. Ramm searched the second car and, again, did not find the girl. The third car hung precariously, rear wheels still touching the track while the front end perched atop another car that lay sideways in the wash. Ramm jumped up, grabbing the top of the car, ignoring the pain in his ripped right hand, and pulled himself onto the roof. But the pitch made holding on difficult. Flipping his legs around, he eased them over the side that faced up at a forty-five-degree angle. He felt for the lip of the window, but his foot touched solid glass. Ramm thrust his knee into the pane several times, but the window wouldn’t give, so he edged his way down to the next one. The second window had blown out, allowing him a place to perch. He let go of the roof, grabbed the top side of the window frame, and slid inside the car.
Emergency lights sputtered on and off. A man, sixtyish and balding, blood running from a grotesquely broken nose, reached out for help. Ramm ignored him, crawled over the tilted seats, and methodically scanned each victim. He passed a woman in her mid-twenties, unconscious, with a compound fracture of the right leg. A teenage boy, arms wrapped tightly around his ribcage, mumbled in a foreign language Ramm recognized as Finnish.
“Sir, could you give me a hand here?” a middle-aged woman in a running suit asked. “I’m a nurse and this man …”
Ramm ignored her and moved down the aisle without a word.
He saw Miranda first. Even in the murky half-light her brilliant red shirt was hard to miss. Crumpled on her side, sprawled up against the bottom of the seats, bleeding from a head injury, she bore no resemblance to the lamia who had stroked the back of his hand less than half-an-hour earlier. Ramm scanned the area around Miranda, finding nothing. He continued on to the next seat, and the next, but Kelly wasn’t there. Had she been out of her seat when the train derailed?
Then he saw her. The girl’s small frame was bunched up behind her mother, hidden in the darkness by the dark blue sweatshirt. Hauling Miranda out of the way—showing no concern for any injuries she might have sustained—he cautiously examined Kelly. Her breathing was steady. He felt no obvious broken bones. A large contusion swelled on the left side of her head where she had probably been thrown into the window.
He lifted her in his arms, startled by the weight of her body. Moving steadily, but slowly over the seats, Ramm made his way to the end of the car, stepping over prostrate bodies and scattered luggage. At the door, he placed Kelly on the upturned side of a seat and lifted himself through the opening. Then, he leaned down through the doorway, and pulled her up by the arms.
A bulky teenager with short-cropped black hair and a goatee watched Ramm from below and came to help. Together, they eased Kelly off the front end of the dangling car, onto the side of the one below, and finally down into the uneven sand of the wash.
Ramm paused, brushed the hair out of Kelly’s face, and recalled the sky vision.
“We better get someone to help her.” The boy pointed at Kelly’s bulging belly. “I heard a woman say she was a nurse and—”
Before the boy had a chance to finish, Ramm scooped her up, and sprinted off into the darkness. He’d gone about fifty yards when the single sheet of typed paper caused him to stop and look. Resting undamaged on the ground, away from the rest of the litter of the wreckage, the overly large, dark signature caught his attention. Ramm knelt to read it, still cradling the unconscious girl in his arms.
A few minutes later, breathing hard from the exertion of the run, Ramm set Kelly gently on the front seat of the truck and brushed the blue-black hair from her inanimate face. He froze, unable to look away. His heart rate slowed. He was engulfed by an overwhelming sense of calm. Tears tracked down his dusty cheeks. He couldn’t take her back. She was the answer.
Ramm closed the door, then walked around the front of the pick-up, but he stopped, a prickling sensation crawling up his spine. Someone was watching. He strode deliberately to the driver side door and got in, then Ramm reached behind the seat for the binoculars and methodically scanned the area.
He found what he was looking for on one of the mountains rising above the chaos of the wreck site. The boy, with his own set of binoculars, was watching him. The kid with the swastika, the one who’d attacked Kelly and carved up Dog. Now the signature on the letter made sense. He struggled with the realization that the boy had seen him carry Kelly out of the wash, had watched him place the girl in the truck.
Ramm had a problem.
23
RAMM KICKED THE DOOR open, and moved swiftly through the cabin and into the bedroom. He placed Kelly on the bed, checking her a second time for injuries. The bruise above her left eye, swollen and red, appeared to be the only damage she’d sustained.
After covering her with a quilt, he pulled the worn oak rocker to the side of the bed and sat. Ramm considered his options. He should get Kelly to a doctor, but then they’d know where she was. They’d take her from him. Discomfited by the thought, Ramm worked the rocker hard, as he tried to figure out what to do. He ran a hand over the top of his scalp, then leaned forward, cupping his face in both hands, and placed his elbows on the edge of the bed. Where was the man who made only logical, calculated moves? He’d always been sharply decisive.
Kelly mumbled something, but did not wake. Ramm stared at the girl and studied her face. A quiet descended, calming him. His thoughts slowed. Clarity returned.
In a matter of minutes, he was dressed in gray and black camouflage. A black
wool cap covered his head. Black face paint darkened all but his eyes, which reflected a ghostly blue. He strapped the eight-inch, bone-handled steel blade—one side smooth and lethally sharp, the other serrated with quarter-inch teeth—to his thigh. He laced on heavy, black, all-terrain boots, then pulled on thin black leather gloves that enveloped his hands like a second skin. He carried no identification.
Ramm walked to the bed and looked down at the sleeping girl. Her face was peaceful, her ink-colored hair strewn across the pillow. He checked her pulse, pressing two fingers against her slender wrist. The beat was strong and even. As he turned to go, Ramm caught his own reflection in the mirror above the dresser. The doppelganger staring back was who he really was. He would never escape that man. He felt a familiar thrill surge through him. Reaching down, he caressed the smooth bone handle of the knife, an old friend. Perhaps he really didn’t want to change.
The dog whined, thumping her tail on the polished pine floor. “No, Dog. Stay!” he whispered, motioning to the animal to lie at the foot of the bed. Then Ramm eased the door closed silently behind him and slipped away.
The bit slid easily into the Appaloosa’s mouth. He decided against the saddle, since he might have to set her loose. After leading the horse out of the corral, he grasped hold of her mane and hoisted himself onto the animal’s back. Ramm kicked her sharply in the ribs, sending them both hurtling toward the ridge that would lead them back to the Sunset Limited.
Two passengers lifted a body out of the train, gently laying the victim on the soft sand of the wash. An Amtrak employee came over to help.
“Mitch! Oh my God, Mitchell Bates.” He removed his cap.
“Is that man dead?” a woman shrieked from nearby.
A Light in the Desert Page 8