“No . . . no . . .” moans Mr. Dorian, but Roald is already barreling down the carriage. “There’s nothing to be done.”
“Is there something wrong with the portrait?” Will asks, stricken.
“Not the portrait,” Mr. Dorian says, wincing. “The canvas.”
“What?” Maren asks.
Mr. Dorian shakes his head, his eyes rolling back. His lips are bluish. He mutters something Will can’t understand, then grimaces and sighs: “The trickster, tricked. . . .”
Several times his body twitches, and then is still.
“Is he dead?” Maren asks.
Will touches Mr. Dorian’s cold wrist, tries to find a pulse, can’t.
“His heart gave out,” Will says.
“I don’t understand,” she whispers.
“The canvas,” Will says, understanding Mr. Dorian’s last words. “There was nothing special about it. He was wrong. He got tricked.”
The sound of a huge explosion reaches him at the same moment the carriage shudders—so violently that Will thinks the car has been knocked from the tracks. It tilts as the left wheels leave the steel. Then it crashes back level.
* * *
Will climbs the ladder and crests the roof. He sees the funeral car up ahead and can tell, just by the gap, that the Boundless has been severed. The locomotive is slowly pulling its tender and the funeral car away from the rest of the cars. The back of Van Horne’s carriage is disfigured from the blast, paint scoured off, the decorative plumes mangled. On the roof Brogan and Mackie are moving forward in the direction of the locomotive.
“How did they do it?” Maren gasps, hauling herself onto the roof beside Will.
“Nitroglycerine,” he says.
He is trying to judge the widening gap between the maintenance car they’re on and the funeral car. If Brogan has explosives, who knows what he means to do. His father is on that locomotive.
Urgent whistle blasts pierce the mountain air, the alarm to bring the train to a halt. Will can only hope that there are enough good brakemen left on the severed part of the train to slow it down—for it’s headless now, and there are surely steep turns and trestles up ahead.
Brogan and Mackie have jumped across to the bunk car where the firemen and engineers sleep when off shift. And beyond that rises the back of the massive tender, heavy with coal and water. To cross over top would be impossible. But along the right side runs a narrow catwalk to allow the crew to pass between the locomotive and their bunk car.
Will starts to run forward, hunched over.
“Will!” Maren shouts behind him. “What are you doing?”
“I need to get across!” Will hollers back at her. “My father!”
He reaches the front of the maintenance car. The gap to the funeral carriage is more than fifteen feet now, and growing. He knows he can never make that jump.
“Can you get me across?” he asks Maren, who has run after him.
She looks ahead. Will sees a long stretch of straight track. Without a word she takes her spool of wire and starts to swiftly unwind it across the gap. She hooks the grappling hook around a ladder rung at the back of the disfigured funeral car, and latches her end to the rooftop. The Boundless is connected once more, briefly, by tightrope.
“We’re at fifteen feet now,” she tells him. “There’s thirty feet in the spool. We don’t have much time. You’re going to have to walk with me. You’ll need to trust me, Will. Can you do that?”
“Yes. You can do this, right?”
“I’ve carried an anvil. I can manage you. Go. I need to be behind you.”
His will falters a moment.
“Go!” she says. “Just walk and don’t stop. Don’t look down. I’ll do the rest.”
He takes his first step, and then another, and he’s about to teeter off when he feels Maren’s hands, one on his waist, another on his opposite shoulder, guiding him. Instantly, amazingly, he’s steadied. He forces himself to keep going, looking only at his destination—the shuddering back of the funeral car. It takes concentration, but more than that, surrender.
“Don’t fight me,” she whispers.
He wasn’t aware he was. He tries to breathe.
“You’re doing well,” she whispers into his ear.
Their destination looks just as far away as it did when they began, but he knows the gap between the cars must be growing, their tightrope line paying out, foot by foot.
“Will, I need you to go a little faster,” she says in his ear. “Just a little. Good. . . .”
In his peripheral vision something tumbles past on his right and is gone. Moments later another shape flashes by, and this time he realizes it’s a person. He catches a glimpse of the overalls that the firemen wear.
“He’s forcing them off the train!” Will gasps.
“Don’t worry about that now!”
A third person rolls past. Will doesn’t know if they’re dead or alive. Were any of them his father? He doesn’t think so, but— He feels Maren roughly push him.
“Will!” she says. “Pay attention!”
Up ahead he sees the track begin to curve. “We’re going to bank to the right,” he gasps in alarm.
“I’ve got you. Keep walking. Just look at the end of the wire.”
The train starts to lean, and Will feels his body teeter. Maren’s hands are firm, pressing, nudging. He looks down—he can’t help himself. He’s going to fall! He’s going to be crushed between the cars!
“You’re okay, Will,” she says. “We’re straight again. You’re walking straight. And we’re almost there.”
He lifts his gaze to take in the back of the funeral car. They’re getting closer, but it still seems that for every two steps he takes, the train moves ahead one.
A shock travels through the wire. Suddenly it softens underfoot.
He’s aware of Maren, looking back over her shoulder, but he dares not do the same.
“Run!” she’s shouting. “Just run!”
And he doesn’t need to look back, because he can see it in his mind’s eye. The wire has gone as far as it can, and has snapped, and is sailing through the air behind them, falling swiftly.
He runs, Maren’s hands guiding him, her body so close that he feels like they’re one person—one person with four legs in perfect synchrony. The wire is as soft as snow beneath his feet, and they’re running uphill now as the wire sags to the tracks.
“Go! Go!” Maren shouts, and he puts on a burst of speed, accelerated by her body behind him.
He reaches out for the mangled ladder at the back of the funeral car and seizes a rung. He swings to one side to make room for Maren. Glancing back, he sees the tightrope wire dragging behind them on the tracks, sending up sparks. The rest of the Boundless seems impossibly far away.
“Not quite Niagara Falls,” he pants, “but close.”
“No one’s ever done that before,” she says with some satisfaction.
Mountains, their peaks bathed in the rising sun, tower around them, old as the planet. With Maren he runs across the roof of the funeral car and jumps to the bunk car.
“We should check inside,” he says. His father might have been off shift, but he doubts it. He would’ve wanted to be at the controls through the mountains. And if Will’s right, Brogan and Mackie cleared out the bunk car and forced the men off the train.
He hastily climbs down and sees the knob smashed apart, and the door ajar. He enters. Empty bunks, breakfast dishes shattered and food scattered on the floor.
“They definitely forced them off,” Will says.
“How many should be here?” Maren asks.
“I don’t know. They do shifts, that’s all I know. Maybe two extra firemen and an engineer.”
She nods grimly. The three people they saw tumble past the train.
Will recog
nizes his father’s jacket hanging on a peg, and the sight of it makes his throat ache. They parted on such cold terms.
“Big fellows, these firemen, aren’t they?” Maren asks. “Brogan doesn’t even have a gun.”
“He has a gun, but no bullets. But they don’t know that. And he’s good with a knife.”
“Do they have weapons up there?” Maren asks.
Will shakes his head. “Don’t know.”
Back outside, the tender rises before them like a cliff. Along the catwalk at its side there’s no sign of Brogan and Mackie. They’ve already reached the locomotive.
Single file, he and Maren edge along the narrow walkway. It starts to snow again. As they near the locomotive, the flakes are wheeling down in thick sheets, matting the metal surfaces.
Will hangs back and leans out to peer into the locomotive’s lower level. Normally a fireman would be stationed here, ready to shovel coal from the chute into the firebox—but the compartment is empty now.
He swings himself inside the open doorway, Maren close behind, and looks around. A shovel lies askew on the floor, a spill of coal beside it. He listens but can hear nothing above the titanic chugging of the pistons. Fire blazes from the open furnace. Steam hisses through the many escape valves around the boiler.
Here at the very front of the Boundless, there’s an incredible sense of propulsion. The landscape flies past on all sides, and for the first time Will can look straight ahead, to the tracks that are being devoured by the locomotive as it hurtles into the mountains.
Outside the compartment, metal stairs continue up to the second fireman platform, and then upward again to the engineer’s cab. Quietly Will heads up, snow driving at him, hard. He keeps his body close to the side, and when he’s halfway up, he peeks into the second-level compartment. It too is empty. But overhead he hears footsteps from the engineer’s cab—and shouting, though he can’t make out the words.
“They’ve got all of them up there,” he whispers to Maren.
“Someone’s coming down,” she hisses, and they both dart up inside the fireman’s compartment and press themselves to the wall. Through a small window Will catches a glimpse of two firemen, their hands raised wretchedly above their heads, descending the outside stairs. They don’t carry on to the lower level but head out along a narrow footboard that slants down against the boiler to the very front of the locomotive. Snow flies hard.
Following the two firemen comes Will’s father, his hands also raised. Behind him is Brogan, his pistol held out. He marches them into the driving snow.
Will peeks his head out the open doorway to watch them make for the pilot—a small platform atop the cowcatcher at the locomotive’s very front.
Will pulls back inside, looks frantically around the compartment for some kind of weapon. He seizes a shovel.
“Is this a plan?” Maren asks worriedly.
Before his courage fails, he steps out onto the footboard and stealthily follows Brogan, hoping the brakeman won’t turn around. Scalding heat pours from the boiler’s massive flank, and the noise of pistons and venting valves is almost blinding. Whirling snow turns the world black and white. Will tightens his grip on the shovel. Another twenty feet and he’ll be close enough. . . .
“Hop it!” Brogan bellows at his prisoners when they’ve reached the pilot. “You’re low enough you’ll likely survive with a few busted ribs.”
“There’s no bullets in the gun!” Will shouts.
“William?” his father calls out, and there’s a question in his voice.
For the first time in a long time, Will remembers his painted face and dyed hair. “Pa, it’s me!”
Brogan looks back at Will, but the gun’s still aimed at his father.
“You sure about that, boy?” he says. “You want me to test my aim on your father, do you?”
“Mr. Dorian took all the bullets out!” Will hollers.
Brogan smirks. “A man always has extra ammo.”
“He’s lying!” Will shouts, but is thinking: What if he’s telling the truth?
“Will! Get back!” his father yells.
Brogan charges up the footboard toward Will, who swings his shovel at the brakeman. He hits Brogan hard in the shoulder and knocks the gun from his hand. It clatters down the metal catwalk. But before Will can swing the shovel again, Brogan wrenches it from his grasp and slams it into his chest. The cracking pain swells to fill Will’s entire body.
“Brogan!” he hears his father bellow.
Will feels the prick of a knife point against his throat, and Brogan wheels him around in a headlock. His father, pistol in his hand, stops short.
“Let him go!” James Everett yells.
“Shoot,” Brogan pants. “It ain’t got no bullets.”
Will’s father takes aim at Brogan’s head and squeezes the trigger. Nothing.
“Now,” says Brogan, “I’ve killed already. I got no compunction about doing it again. You want your boy alive, you and your men hop it, and I’ll let him hop it after you.”
Will feels the blade press harder against his skin. He stays very still.
“Go on!” Brogan bellows. “Or I slit his throat! All of you! Go!”
There is a lull in the driving snow, and the sky opens enough to let the sun through. Will sees the mountains rising up to the right. The air trembles. A rumbling builds above the roar of the steam engine. On the distant slopes the snow puckers and begins to slide.
“Avalanche,” he gurgles against the choking hold around his throat. “Avalanche!”
His father turns his gaze to the mountain. “Brogan, let me back to the cab!”
Will can’t see Brogan’s face, but he feels the twitching tension in his body. “Stay right there, Everett! Mackie’s in the cab. He’s doing fine.”
“You need to stop the train!” Will’s father waves his arm at Mackie up in the cab. “Stop!”
To Will it doesn’t feel like they’re slowing much. The locomotive rounds a bend, and up ahead, five hundred yards, snow spills across the tracks and then down into a deep river gorge, spray rising as from a waterfall.
Now Will hears the shriek of the brakes, and the train slows faster—but not fast enough. They’re in the snow now, deeper and deeper, the cowcatcher sending torrents of ice back at them. Dead ahead Will can see a looming wall of snow.
And then he’s in the air, half stunned by the concussion that stopped the train in its tracks and yanked him off his feet. He has spun free of Brogan, everything white. He curls to protect himself, for he doesn’t know how or where he’ll land, but he hopes it’s soft.
* * *
No one sees this.
At the back of the Zirkus Dante cars, Goliath paces his cage. The Boundless has finally been brought to a standstill in the driving snow. The sasquatch’s nostrils flare, again and again as he breathes in a scent that is acutely familiar. It provokes in him a frenzy of restlessness. He wails up at the narrow vents. He thumps his fists against the reinforced walls.
He crouches, crushing handfuls of straw in his fists. Then he stands tall, ears straining at the faraway cry. Goliath bellows again, and when he hears a return call, it’s closer.
He whirls about in his cage, thrashing against the bars, throwing himself so hard against the wall that the wood creaks.
Something thuds atop the roof of his car, and he stops and looks overhead. A second thump, then a third. Dark shapes move past outside the vents. Powerful hands thrust inside and begin to rip the wall apart. Goliath sets up a wail of jubilation as, plank by jagged plank, his view opens up: sky, mountains, and the high forests whose smell he recognized as home.
* * *
Snow is packed up Will’s nostrils. He thrashes about, not knowing how long he was unconscious, or which way is up. He fights his way toward the light. His head breaks the surface. Gasping, he realizes that the s
now isn’t moving. The avalanche is over, but just. A low layer of mist still hangs over the ground. The stillness is remarkable—it feels like a force, squeezing against him. Gone is the clackety motion of the train that had come to feel natural to him over the past days. Wind shushes against his eardrums, and he hears a trill of birdsong and the distant rumble of water.
He looks about for his father, for Maren, Brogan—they too must have been thrown off the locomotive when it collided with the wall of snow.
“Help! William!”
“Pa!” Will paddles his way atop the snow, in the direction of the call—in the direction of the gorge. He remembers the snow spilling over the edge like a waterfall.
Carefully he slides down the slope, and spots his father clinging to a shrub at the edge of the precipice.
“I’m coming!” Will says. “Hold tight!”
He swims as close as he dares. “Grab hold of me!”
“You’ll need to hold something first,” his father says, “or you’ll get dragged over!”
Will looks around. There’s a tree behind him, but it’s too far for him to reach.
“We’ll just have to manage it,” he says.
From the slopes comes a sound that Will first heard three years ago in these same mountains. An animal call unlike any other. It begins as a low, mournful hoot, and builds in intensity and pitch to a terrifying shriek. The voice is joined by another, and another, until it’s a ghostly chorus, wafting through the snow-curtained pines.
“Will! Wait!” Maren swims toward him, caked in snow.
She grabs hold of the tree and stretches out to Will. They lock hands. Now Will can reach his father.
“Good,” his father grunts as he takes hold. Will pulls. Maren holds him tightly. James Everett scrambles and kicks, trying to get himself up over the edge. With a lurch he makes it, and they all scramble into the safety of the tree’s branches.
“You’re all right?” Will asks his father. There’s some blood matted around his ears, but he seems otherwise unharmed.
“I’m fine. You, too?”
“Yes.”
James Everett wipes snow off his shoulders and chest. Some papers rustle in the large pocket of his overalls, and he pulls them out and carefully brushes off the melting snow. Will catches a glimpse of the hand-sewn sketchbook he gave his father three years ago.
The Boundless Page 24