Craig thought about it as leaned out the door. After a huff of exasperation, he took my good arm and hoisted me up into the cab. He sat me on the engineer’s stool and said, “It’s a four hundred mile jag to Omaha. We can do forty and fifty miles per hour in the daytime with a few exceptions. Tyree said the line was clear, and there haven’t been any storms since the last time they made the circuit. That’s ten hours if everything goes well, but we’ll have to stop for water along the way. Plus food. Stephen can spell me during the day, and someone will have to shovel coal pretty much nonstop. Tyree and the other man, Seward, are supposed to stay here and gather up more coal for the regular runs. I didn’t tell them anything.”
I thought frantically of the mileage Craig had stated. “That’s one day then. Then about three hours to get around the mountains in Omaha and onto the train there. Then how far to Sunshine?”
“Where?”
“Where you picked me and Lulu up in Colorado,” I said.
“Oh, that’s about a hundred miles out of Denver, I think, so it makes it maybe 350 or 375 miles, I don’t know. I’d have to look at the map to be more exact.”
“If the train is waiting warmed for us, that’s another day or so,” I said.
“Yes, all things considered.” Craig squared his shoulders. “But stuff does go wrong. If I had to put a time on it, I would say three days best case scenario. Worst case scenario it’s a week or two. If something breaks on one of the trains, we’ll have to jury rig it, and while I’m good at that, I’m not God.”
“The worst case scenario isn’t two weeks,” I said, “it’s anything after that woman starts to give birth.”
Craig looked at Clora, who was waddling up to the side of the train. “But we have the doctor, and Ignatius isn’t someone who strikes me as stupid. If she was having problems, he wouldn’t let her travel with us.”
I laughed, and it was as bitter as lemons. “Ignatius doesn’t have a choice any more than Clora does.”
“Just say it plainly,” Craig said. “There’s been enough deception in a time when we should all be coming together.”
“Clora will vanish. The baby won’t. We get to Sunshine, and she’s got a chance she might not have otherwise.”
Craig’s mouth opened, and he said the word I had been thinking before. “Go hurry them up,” he urged.
I let myself off the engine and watched the firefly pixies return in an arrow-shaped charge. They surrounded Clora as she laboriously pulled herself up into a car. Meka stood behind her, waiting to give a friendly push. Spring and a few others zoomed over to me, singing, “We found butterflies! Great yellow and black ones! They were delicious!”
Somewhere, somehow, I found an extra ounce of energy and hurried everyone along. When it was all said and done, it was me, Tyree, and Seward standing beside the train.
Tyree was a strong-looking man in his twenties with skin the color of burnished oak and sherry-colored eyes. He looked at me expectantly. “You’re that girl, right?”
“There’s a lot of girls around,” I said. Actually, that wasn’t true, but I didn’t want to say, “Yeah, I’m that girl.”
Seward was a man in his thirties with a tired face and blonde hair already streaked with white. His blue eyes were as tired as he looked. I didn’t know what he’d lost in the change, but it had impacted him tremendously. It was no more than the rest of us, but it showed in his countenance. “The one who talks to the new animals,” he said.
“My name is Sophie,” I said, and I wondered if one day I would forget my last name. It didn’t seem right to use it anymore. Most people these days didn’t. Only the ones who wanted to hang on to the past seemed to want to clutch their last names to their bosoms in case they were stolen away by something evil. “I did something in D.C. the other day that the commanding officer of the military took exception to, and we’re not exactly here with his express permission.”
Tyree looked alarmed. “What did you do?”
“I don’t know that McCurdy will do anything to you, but you didn’t know so I’ll ask you if you want to come with us.” Seward started to answer, but I waved him off. “I don’t know what it’s going to be like where we’re going. I’m not making promises. I know that the community that is being established in California is a fair one. We haven’t worked out all the rules, but we won’t throw someone in a cage because they won’t do something we want. We won’t clamp a hand over your mouth because you disagree with our policies. We won’t take away a person’s choices because they’re different.”
I should have been proud of myself. I made a speech.
Peripherally, I became aware of people leaning out of the windows of the cars. Landers, Zizi, Stephen, Lulu, and Meka, among others, hung their heads out and stared at me. Prosper and Oki poked their heads out a moment later. Prosper started to ask what was happening, but Horse shooshed him. They shouldn’t have been able to hear me, but I had been speaking loudly. Especially the last part.
“What about Ranjan?” Seward asked.
“I talked to him on the boat,” I said. “He decided to stay with the Lackamoolah. I don’t know what will happen with him, but if I get a chance to tell McCurdy, I’ll tell him that Ranjan didn’t know anything about our exodus.”
Tyree’s eyes were large and round. “You know that man, McCurdy, is like an icicle. He’s been out here twice, looking in the ruins of the museums and in the old armories. He even had Ranjan take him out to an old military base on an island.” He shuddered. “They got old diseases out there. God alone knows what someone like that could do with those.”
Knowing that Maston had been considering germ warfare didn’t make me regret what I had done.
“Make up your minds,” I said. I would have glanced at my watch for effect, but I didn’t have one, and everyone knew they didn’t work anyway. “We’ve got an appointment in Colorado, and I’m not waiting for McCurdy to show up here.”
It only took Seward a moment to climb on.
Tyree shuddered again and followed. I looked around, trying to make certain we weren’t leaving anything or anybody behind.
As I climbed into the car, I heard Meka ask, “Shouldn’t that have been a speech about freedom and her face been half blue?”
Lulu cackled.
I didn’t know what was so funny.
Chapter 26
Give Time…
“Clora’s started to bleed,” Ignatius said into my ear. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I would have much rather heard that McDonald’s French fries were shooting out of my tushie, but that wasn’t going to happen.
Seven hours into the train ride from Chicago to Omaha, the sun was beginning to set. I could feel Craig letting the train go a little slower. I didn’t have to ask why. If we hit something on the track that we didn’t see because of the darkness, we wouldn’t be going anywhere fast. So contrary to every molecule in my body, the great steam locomotive began to decelerate.
One of the rail cars had some of the benches removed so that the doctor could have a place to tend to Clora. There was an air mattress that someone had liberated from a Target that hadn’t burned down. A foot pump had been used to inflate it. Someone else had provided blankets and pillows. The last time I saw her, she didn’t look uncomfortable, the way she would have been if she had been sitting on one of the narrow train seats. Some of the firefly pixies had been singing to her protruding abdomen, and she had been sipping tea while listening to them.
I hadn’t been thinking of Clora’s personal comfort. Instead, I had been thinking about getting from Point A to Point B as fast as possible.
Looking out a window, I had been watching the fallow fields. There were some that were growing with whatever had taken roots. Some looked like it was regrown with wheat and corn and things I didn’t know the name of. If we were clever, we wouldn’t starve in the future. Gideon and the others were planning for a community of hundreds. The President had been planning for thousands, but he wanted to use them just as muc
h as he wanted to provide for them. Well, more actually.
We had slowed down as we passed through Des Moines. Along the way, we saw a small group of humans tending some fields that were once baseball diamonds. There was a mix of humans and new animals who were helping. Most of the humans waved cheerfully at us, and a few of the animals did, too. It was really a different world.
“How bad is it?” I asked Ignatius.
“Bad enough. Her blood pressure is up,” he told me. It was a grim voice. I could tell that the doctor didn’t think Clora was going to make it through the actual process.
“Have you given her any of the drugs that hold labor off?”
“Not yet,” he said. “There are adverse side effects and I think we can just keep her resting and not stressed, we should be able to pull through the next forty-eight hours.”
I had been thinking about it. “I don’t want to lose them both,” I said, “but if the baby comes, the baby comes, and it’s not like you can shove it back in.”
Ignatius rolled his eyes. “I’ll do my best.” He turned away and went back toward the car where Clora was lying down.
Zizi came up to my side. She carried a steaming mug of instant coffee, and her body rolled easily with the motion of the train. The coffee wasn’t as good as the kind Lulu made, but I wasn’t being picky.
“Thank you,” I said. I looked curiously at Zizi. I wasn’t surprised that she was present. I hadn’t realized she was present until I previously noticed she was one of the ones peering at me from the windows of the train. “I guess you thought about some other things besides cutting hair.”
The woman smiled genially at me. “You mean what I said about Clora?”
“Why did you come with us?” I wasn’t trying to sound accusatory, but I couldn’t understand the attraction to my side. I was suddenly the popular one, and everyone was looking to me to solve the problems. But the biggest problem I had was something I couldn’t control.
“You promised you wouldn’t tell Clora,” Zizi said, and suddenly she wasn’t so genial.
“I didn’t tell her,” I said and sipped the coffee. It needed cream and a lot more sugar. And also a Starbuck’s label, and ambiance, too. Too bad.
“But she’s—”
“Clora isn’t stupid. We watch her. The doctor’s glued to her side. He’s monitoring mommy and baby. You think she doesn’t know what’s up?”
“A little while ago, I touched her again, and I still couldn’t see her in the future,” Zizi said. Her accent was heavy and muted emotion lurked behind the words. “But this time, I couldn’t see the baby either.”
I chewed on my lower lip. I hated making changes to events. Whatever had been done, by myself, by getting on this train, by doing whatever it had been that I had done, had tipped the scales in one direction or another. I couldn’t undo it.
“However, I see the child later,” Zizi added, confusion clear in her voice.
“Okay, what does that mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s her child. It is Clora’s. She has the same red hair as her mother’s, the color of an orange. She has the same brown eyes. But she’s older. Seven, eight years old. I cannot tell. She’s happy, but I don’t understand why I can’t see her younger. It’s as if she simply appears one day from nothingness.” She spread her hands out wide, as if she hoped the gesture would solve the conundrum.
“Our gifts don’t always play us true,” I said. I had personal experience with it. I had thought about it. Life wasn’t always black and white. There were a thousand shades of gray in between the two colors, and it was constantly shifting from one to another.
“I would say it was like something blocked my vision,” Zizi said.
It reminded me that I hadn’t had a vision about Flowers’ death and the lack still bothered me.
“And you asked me why I came,” Zizi added on. “I once touched the naval man, McCurdy. You know I have to touch to see things in my head?”
“You gave McCurdy a haircut?”
“I gave many people cuts,” Zizi said. “And him, in his heart beats a sound that makes my stomach clench with utmost revulsion. I saw him looking at the ruins of the District. All that was left was the Washington Monument, and it was black with the soot of a fire. There were starving people around him and animals that hunted them. It was a cold vision of a wretched future. Good things will not be happening to him.”
Had I changed Zizi’s vision of McCurdy or caused it to become true? That was peachy. One more thing to get moody over.
“But also, I went to the Naval Observatory to give the President a haircut,” Zizi went on. “Did you know that passing through the gate of that place was like pulling yourself through a morass of sludge?”
I nodded. “For people who survived the change, the technology bubble seems to be unnatural. I haven’t talked to too many others who had been there. It wasn’t the first time. I think we aren’t meant to be there anymore.” There might have been others who had been stuck at the observatory and had been left there when the neighboring embassies began to burn. It made me sick to come to that realization.
“Did you see a vision for the President?” I asked after Zizi didn’t respond to my words.
“No, I didn’t see anything,” Zizi said. “It was like his future had vanished, as well. It’s the same as Clora’s.”
I thought about it. “It’s the bubble.”
Zizi didn’t say anything.
“The President was in the bubble. You didn’t see anything of him. You didn’t see me getting shot. Did you see anything for Lulu?”
Zizi shook her head. “It doesn’t work for everyone I touch. If it did, I’d likely be insane.”
“That’s why I didn’t see anything about Flowers,” I said to myself. “She was inside the bubble when Maston killed her.”
“Who is Flowers?” Zizi asked gently.
“One of the firefly pixies,” I said. “She sacrificed herself for me, for all of us.”
“God bless her,” Zizi said, drawing a pendant out of her neckline. It was a saint medal, and she kissed it with a short prayer.
“He will,” I said, believing it. “He knows what she did.”
Abruptly the train began to slow even more than it should.
I looked out the window and saw the shadows stretching out to meet each other. Night was arriving swiftly on blackened wings spread out wide to encompass the entire world.
I leaned out and looked forward. The train was on a slight enough curve to show something blocking the tracks ahead. It loomed over the tracks like a midnight monster. For a solitary moment, I thought it was some new creature come to taunt us with the error of futility.
“Go back with the others, Zizi,” I said. I pulled my sword from the scabbard that was still fastened to my back. “Tyree didn’t say anything about the tracks being blocked near Omaha. Tell everyone something is happening and to be ready for anything.”
Zizi hurried away.
I rushed through the cars and made my way to the hopper. The locomotive was almost stopped by the time I crawled around the side of the tender to the engine. Craig glanced at me from his driver’s position. Stephen was on the other side, while Tyree peered ahead into the increasing darkness.
“This wasn’t here three weeks ago,” Tyree said.
“Maybe it’s McCurdy?” Craig asked.
“Could he get here ahead of us?” I asked, not really expecting an answer.
“Depends on what he got,” Stephen answered. “Chica, he got stuff from all over. Those Stanley Steamers, the steam-powered motorcycles. Some steam-powered cannons. Yeah, cannons. There was a giant sling shot thing that shoots bowling balls. And yes, there’s a lot of bowling balls left around.”
I did mental arithmetic. I didn’t know how far it was from D.C. to Omaha, but McCurdy was smart. If someone could have made it from there to here, it might very well be the naval officer.
“But there’s those other people,” Tyree said.
&nb
sp; “What others?” Craig snapped.
“A group in Omaha who thinks the change was the apocalypse and all technology is bad,” Tyree said. He frowned in the direction of the obstruction. “We moved the place we stopped in Omaha because they threw spears at us before.”
“And you were going to mention this when?” I asked sarcastically.
“The spears just bounced off the engine,” Tyree protested. “I don’t know if they did that.” He gestured at the blockage ahead of us. Someone had towed several cars and plunked them down on the tracks. They’d managed to make a good-sized pile. As we closed in, I could see the wood that they had built a block and tackle from.
“How many people?” I asked.
“A group of ten maybe,” Tyree said. “Could be more, but I didn’t see them. It was men and women, and they talked to us about a month ago. They wanted to save us from the evils of technology. You know, since God did this to mankind. I assumed since they couldn’t save us, they decided to kill us. Or maybe they want the train to themselves. I don’t know.”
As the train completely stopped, I could see people peeking from behind the wrecked cars. Someone lit a torch. “The good news is that they don’t look like McCurdy’s troops,” I said. “The bad news is that they probably don’t want to let us pass.”
Spring and the firefly pixies joined me. They flooded into the engine compartment and zoomed around. A few of them spoke briefly to Spring, glanced at me meaningfully, and then zipped into the night heading southwest.
Craig asked, “What do we do?”
I sighed. “I go and talk to them.”
I adjusted my shirt and wished that I was wearing the one that said “Ninja Princess.” “Tyree, go back and warn the others that we’re being…what…detained?”
“Okay, but you should know that the one we talked to was kind of, uh, not someone who likes women,” Tyree said. “His name is Asher. Big guy. Snotty ‘tude.”
“Do you think he’ll kill us?” I asked.
“I would have said no,” Tyree muttered, “but you know what the change has done to some people. He was probably a clerk at a convenience store, and this is his way of trying to take over the planet.” He slithered back over the tender, making it look easy.
Mountains of Dreams Page 26